When I was a boy, everybody urged me to get plenty of sunshine, so I got plenty of sunshine for a long time. One day while I was 1)absorbing July sun as fast as I could, a doctor asked what I thought I was doing.
“Getting plenty of sunshine,” I said.
“Are you mad?“ he replied.
No, I was not mad, just slow to catch up with my life’s 2)revisions. Getting plenty of sunshine had been declared dangerous while I was out to lunch. I revised my store of knowledge. Now I get only small 3)droppers of sunshine 4)extracted from the half hour just before sunset.
When I was old enough to notice that girls were pleasantly different from boys, my mother told me the fact of life. “You must always treat a woman like a lady,” she said. So for a long time I went through life treating women like ladies.
One day while I was helping a woman into her coat, another woman asked me what I thought I was doing.
“Treating a woman like a lady,” I said.
“Are you mad?” she replied.
No, I was not mad, but my 5)interrogator was furious. I had been out to lunch during one of life’s revisions and missed the announcement that it was 6)swinish to treat a woman like a lady. I discarded another piece of my childhood education. Now I treat women like 7)ticking bombs.
When I was 17 and for many years afterward, I admired Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt as the ideal couple. One evening I had an 8)encounter with a ticking bomb, and 9)contemplated behaving like a fool, but rejected the 10)impulse because we weren’t married.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked as I 11)fled. I told her that someday I wanted to be half of a couple as ideal as Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.
“Are you mad?” she replied.
No, not mad. I had been out to lunch during another of life’s revisions and, so had missed the 12)disclosure that Eleanor didn’t get along well with Franklin and that Franklin fooled around when she was out of town. Another part of my youthful education went to the 13)dump.
Perhaps it was not age that defeated me, though. Maybe it was fatigue caused by the constant trips to the dump to discard everything I’d learned in the first half of my life. Life seemed to be an educator’s 14)practical joke in which you spent the first half learning and the second half learning that everything you learned in the first half was wrong.
