Workers Grounded by Deep Cats

...or learning to read at age 56

Has your mind ever wandered? Mine, too. Mine wandered out of my body. Highlights included: Watching people’s mouths move while they seemed to be speaking backwards and upside down in Urdu or Aramaic. I couldn’t comprehend their words and they couldn’t comprehend mine.

There were a few other problems, too. Like I couldn’t read. It’s hard to read when letters rearrange themselves within words. “Bananas” becomes “sananab,” while “We hold these truths to be self-evident” becomes “tnedive fles eb otshturt eseht dloh eW.”

I also mixed up what things actually said with what I thought they said. For example, I read or thought I read, “Workers Grounded by Deep Cats,” which really said “Workers Grounded by Deep Cuts.” Next I saw or thought I saw, “Sorry, we couldn’t find your life, which really said, Sorry, we couldn’t find your file.”

But thankfully, with the patient care of no one at all, I did relearn to read. If I hadn’t, I would have missed 31,000,000 remedies to fix my brain. These include biofeedback, Sudoku, Prevagen, protein shakes, cold water plunging, powerhouse mushrooms, leafy greens, gratitude, plus getting out of town.

I learned some of this from New York Magazine, which was a client when I had a baby, and even before I had the baby or knew I would have her. In fact, it was the last freelance job I did before she arrived, and was due the same day she was. She waited three more days. No client would ever do that.