Our latest read in a classics book club I’m in is The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett. I laughed so hard when a character named Miriam left her thug boyfriend with these words.
 
“I don’t like crooks, and even if I did, I wouldn’t like crooks that are stool-pigeons, and if I liked crooks that are stool-pigeons, I still wouldn’t like you.”

A physical therapist told her patient with MS that it’s better to walk one block without a cane than a mile with a cane. In fact, she said, get rid of the cane.  
 
I think about my canes. Nostalgia is my crutch when I’m low. It’s my wistful, trusty prop that makes past love shine even when it mostly stormed.
 
And cake thick with butter cream frosting and crushed peanuts.
 
Nostalgia I can probably discard. Cake I keep.

"The earliest evidence of human art is 40,000 years old. The earliest evidence of human agriculture, by contrast, is only 10,000 years old. Which means that somewhere in our collective evolutionary story, we decided it was way more important to make attractive, superfluous items than it was to learn how to regularly feed ourselves."
 
From Big Magic. Elizabeth Gilbert
 

My left ear feels like a bedsore, a raw cup of flesh that attends every sound. I hear a bead of sweat land just before the pin drops. I hear the last echo in a canyon when you shout. I hear infinity.
 
It’s a little like achieving 10/10 vision. Seeing so well spawns excruciating headaches and thought is impossible.
 
Hearing infinity doesn’t hurt that much. And I think I can think ok. I’m actually relieved because deafness runs in my family.
 
But it can be distracting. When I wear dangly silver earrings, I can hear clearly through walls of walls, maybe even through lead. I can hear your girlfriend’s heartbeat when I walk past your house.

Someone told me that she always buys new books. “Library books breed germs, you know,” she said. I guess she thought the occasional brown fingerprints could be poop and yellow blobs could be boogers. But I didn’t press for details because she wasn’t the type to tolerate questions of a sanitary nature.  
 
She reminded me of my mom who insisted on reading the newspaper first for the same reason. She said a fresh newspaper was the cleanest item in the world. At the time, I wondered if this obsession might shave minutes off of her hour-long handwashing routine.
 
I considered their arguments. And that new books keep our precious bookstores afloat.
 
But it’s just too lonely for me to read a fresh book. I love to find a daintily folded corner especially in poetry volume. Or nearly invisible pencil marks -- a check or an underline, a rare exclamation mark. Someone is helping me see magic! Someone traveled this road before me.
 
I’m not alone.