| Follow My Fingers With Your Eyes
by Adam Possner
Follow my fingers with your eyes
Index and middle, side by side
To and fro, watch them fly
Follow my fingers with your eyes
Follow my fingers with your eyes
Not your head, just your eyes
Up and down, side to side
Follow my fingers with your eyes
Follow my fingers with your eyes
A test for nerves 3 thru 6 minus 5
I need to stare, please don't be shy
Follow my fingers with your eyes
Follow my fingers with your eyes
There it is, the telltale sign
On the left, yours not mine
Follow my fingers with your eyes
Follow my fingers with your eyes
Like a cross, a holy rite
You had a stroke, I cannot lie
Follow my fingers with your eyes.
"Follow My Fingers With Your Eyes" by Adam Possner, MD. © Adam Possner. Reprinted with permission of the author. It's the birthday of novelist and columnist John Gould (books by this author), born in Brighton, Massachusetts (1908). Gould and his wife settled in Lisbon Falls, Maine, on the farm where his great-grandfather had homesteaded. In the 1960s Gould was working as the editor of the Lisbon Enterprise and one day the local high school called him up and said they were sending over a student who had gotten in trouble; the student was supposed to be the editor of the school paper, but he was so bored by the job that he had written and published a satirical version called The Village Vomit, mocking all his teachers. As punishment the school ordered him to go work at the Enterprise and find out what real newspaper work was like. The first day Gould taught the young man how to shape up his writing and get rid of unnecessary words. The student later said: "Gould said something else that was interesting on the day I turned in my first two pieces: write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out." That high schooler was Stephen King. King wrote later, "This editor was the man who taught me everything I know about writing in 10 minutes." In 1942 Gould wrote his first weekly column for The Christian Science Monitor and he continued that column for more than 60 years until his death in 2003. He wrote about baseball, nighttime sleigh rides, fly fishing, a 100-year-old woman riding on a fire truck for the first time, his mother's homeland of Prince Edward Island, molasses cookies, and how you should never forget to tell your bees if there has been a birth, wedding, or death in your family. One of his earliest books, Farmer Takes a Wife (1945), was a big best-seller. He went on to write 30 books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Fastest Hound Dog in the State of Maine (1953) and Tales from Rhapsody Home; Or, What They Don't Tell You about Senior Living (2000). He said, "Writing a good essay isn't that easy. You can't do it with a pointing stick. I try to make a point obliquely, adroitly, and whenever possible, with humor. It must always be a surprise. The surprise is what makes people laugh." It's the birthday of novelist Doris Lessing (books by this author), born in Kermanshah in what is now Iran (1919). Her father had lost a leg in the British army and was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia. When Lessing was five years old she moved to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where her father was convinced he would strike it rich farming maize. In fact the family never made much money. Lessing said: "I was brought up in what was virtually a mud hut, thatched. This kind of house has been built always, everywhere where there are reeds or grass, suitable mud, poles for walls — Saxon England, for example. The one I was brought up in had four rooms, one beside another, and it was full of books. Not only did my parents take books from England to Africa, but my mother ordered books by post from England for her children. Books arrived in great brown paper parcels, and they were the joy of my young life. A mud hut, but full of books." Lessing's mother sent her to an all-girls convent school in the capital city, but she dropped out after one year and never went back to school. Instead she continued to read everything she could. She left home to work as a nursemaid, then a telephone operator. She was married at age 19, had two children, divorced, married a second time, had another child, and divorced again. When she was 30 years old she moved to London. She said, "I felt as if my real life was beginning when I at last arrived in war-torn, grubby, cold England. And of course, it was. Since then, I have written, that has been my life." A year after she moved to London, she published her first novel, The Grass is Singing (1950), set in the Rhodesia of her youth. She wrote more than 40 books, including the novels Martha Quest (1952), The Golden Notebook (1962), Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), The Good Terrorist (1985), and Alfred and Emily (2008). In 2007, she won the Nobel Prize in literature. The Golden Notebook was proclaimed a feminist manifesto and the bible of the women's movement. Doris Lessing said: “A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away. A critic looks at the finished product and ignores the rush of a river that went into the writing, which has nothing to do with the kind of temperate thoughts you have about it. If you can imagine the sheer bloody pleasure of having an idea and taking it! It's one of the great pleasures in my life." Today is the birthday of Hungarian photojournalist Robert Capa (1913). He was born Endre Ernö Friedmann in Budapest. He originally wanted to become a writer but he happened to get a photography job in Berlin as a young man, and he fell in love with the lens. He took the name "Robert Capa" from his boyhood nickname, Cápa, which means "shark." He covered five wars in his brief life: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and the First Indochina War. He famously said, "If your picture isn't good enough, you're not close enough," and he lived up to this maxim on his assignments. On D-Day he swam ashore with the second assault wave on Omaha Beach and took more than a hundred photographs; a lab error resulted in the loss of all but eight of them. In 1947 he traveled into the Soviet Union with his friend John Steinbeck and the two of them produced a book called A Russian Journal (1948). In 1954 he accepted an assignment from Life to cover the First Indochina War. He began the last day of his life optimistically: "This is going to be a beautiful story," he said. "I will be on my good behavior today. I will not insult my colleagues, and I will not once mention the excellence of my work." Later that day, he left the French regiment with which he was traveling to walk ahead so he could photograph the advance. He went over a hill and out of sight, where he stepped on a landmine and was killed. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® | 