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Born and Bred in Naples


I sat there all alone in a spartan little room, waiting for the doctor to come and tell me that I do not see very well.  But, of course, that is why I came to the little room in the first place.  First, they sat me down before one of those Put-your-chin-here-and-look-at-the-little-light-machines, and they took pictures that look like those you see here, although there were a lot more of them.  In the little room, in what surely was a chair rejected from a discount dental supply store, I stared at two rows of my eyeball.  "My eyeball," I thought, "looks like an abacus."  Maybe your eyesight is keen enough to see the wire.

 There is a doctor at the University of Minnesota who has trained several interns by using my right eyeball.  What scares me is that those interns are loose in the world, now, doing unto others what they first saw undone to me.  

 I am not sure that my eyeball is really that color.  A very nice woman with a weapon designed to enhance the moisture content of Smithfield hams had loaded me with something that she said would do startling things to my fluids--should I live long enough to notice them--but that "it was all right; not to worry!"

 I have seen pictures of the inside of my eyeball before.  They looked like craters that had been blasted free from plant growth by a meteor.  Once, during an operation, I described for the doctor the instrument that he was using to scrape a film from my eyeball craters, and how it was moving, and he said something about being able to see my jaw moving; to lie still.  

 "Follow the little light!", the nice woman had said.  She had no idea that someone had set off a fireworks display inside my eyeball, triggered by the machine she had said I should rest my chin on.  "Blink!", she said.  "No," she insisted, "just blink once or twice!"  She apparently could not see that the laser she had aimed at me caused the Fourth of July Grand Finale to go off inside my eyeball.  

 Then they sent me home wearing sunglasses as big as dustpans.  Even so, they did not work.  And people kept honking their car horns!  Especially at the traffic light.  People are so impatient!  

 At home, I explained to Mari that one of the craters in my eye was emitting steam and lava, but that the doctor thought that the right mix of medicinal epoxies would take care of the problem.  "Four drops of this, and one of that," he had said, "every day!"  And, "Seek shelter if you feel the earth rise and the ground shake!"

 I will wager that retinal specialists said the same thing at Pompei.  

"Doctor," I asked as I was donning my dustpans, "were you by any chance trained in Italy?"

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