Evolutionary Report Card

The evolutionary process is like one of those underachiever kids who comes home with a patchy report card: opposable thumb = A plus; vermiform appendix = E minus.

There’s a theory that says life is DNA’s way of replicating itself; our bodies are merely vehicles. If true, this would explain why evolution gets away with all kinds of substandard materials and shoddy workmanship. We only have to survive to breeding age. Once we’ve been fruitful and multiplied, we become a drain on the ecology, and as far as DNA is concerned, the sooner we’re broken down and recycled into our component molecules, the better.  

As support for this theory, let’s take a look at the digestive tract: a system designed by a committee of Rube Goldbergs.  

We’ll start with the above-mentioned appendix, a totally useless organ that occasionally swells into a softball-sized sack of pus and explodes. (This happened to me when I was eight years old. Fortunately, I was on the operating table when it exploded, and the surgeons managed to mop up most of the pus before it killed me.) How did that one get past the design committee?

Rube #1: Hey guys? We got a piece left over here.

Rube #2: What does it say on the label?

Rube #1: (reading from tag) Caution – may explode.

Rube #3: Just tuck it into the intestines. It’s a mess down there anyway.

Or what about the way we digest proteins?

Rube#1:  We can break proteins down with hydrochloric acid.

Rube #2: Won’t that eat through the stomach lining?

Rube #1: Well, we could neutralize it with sodium bicarbonate, but that’ll produce a lot of gas.

Rube #3:  No problem. Just shove it down into the intestines. It’s a mess down there anyway.

And don’t even get me started on teeth. (Oops, apparently it’s too late. I’m started.) The number of design flaws in teeth is staggering. They grow in tightly-packed clusters making it impossible to prevent food from getting stuck between them, which rots and leads to cavities. They are embedded in gums that recede over time, creating more pockets to collect rotting food. They are coated in a thin layer of dentine that wears away after only twenty or thirty years of normal use, exposing sensitive nerves. Why do teeth even have nerves? The entire structure is so flimsy it can be cracked or broken by an event as innocuous as biting down on a seed. And to top it all off, the roots abscess painfully. 

I know these things because I have experienced every one of them. Over the course of my lifetime, I have dumped a small fortune into my mouth on fillings, root canals, extractions, crowns, gum surgery, plaque removal and antibiotics; not including the tooth brushes, toothpaste, mouthwash, toothpicks and dental floss which did little to mitigate the necessity for all that extreme dentistry.

Perhaps I’m sensitive about my teeth today because the one tooth left in my mouth with a live root abscessed last week. When the antibiotics have reduced the swelling, I’ll be back in the dentist’s chair four more times over the next two months, while he carves off the existing crown, takes half a dozen before-and-after x-rays, canals the root and re-crowns the tooth, hiking my lifetime dental budget over the $50,000 mark and my annual radiation exposure past the limit recommended by Health Canada.

What makes teeth even more annoying is that evolution has already produced several superior alternatives.

Beaks, for example, are made of keratin, which is immune to cavities. Birds don’t get receding beaklines, and they never need a beak canal because beaks don’t have roots. An additional advantage of beaks is that romantic comedies would end with a satisfying click instead of that gross, wet, sucky sound we’re subjected to now.

An even more elegant system is that employed by spiders, who inject their food with digestive juices before ingestion, then suck up nutrients like a milkshake. Not only does this remove the need for teeth, it also transfers production of nasty gasses to a process outside the body.

By far the best solution, in my opinion, is photosynthesis, which eliminates not only teeth, but the entire digestive tract and its smelly byproducts. Photosynthesis would also put an end to racial discrimination, since we’d all be green. On the downside, scatoloical commentary would be reduced to bumper stickers with slogans like “CO₂ happens”.

Sorry, evolution, but I can’t grade you higher than an overall C minus in Human Digestive Studies. Not your best work.

Tail Envy

As a life-long pessimist, I’ve never understood optimists; people so inured to disappointment they are delighted when the waiter at the restaurant of life hands them half a glass. My world, in contrast, is a giddy carrousel of delightful improvements. I assume the waiter will forget my order entirely and am constantly amazed at the number of times he remembers my favorite dessert.

Take the Giveaway Caper for example. Last March, my publisher offered twenty ARC’s in a free giveaway on Goodreads.com. I told myself no one would bother to put their name in the hat. Hundreds of people did. “Okay,” I told myself, “you were wrong about that, but no one is going to like it.” I steeled myself for one-star reviews.  Wrong again. So far everyone who reviewed it, has liked it, even the people who received ARC’s with thirty to fifty missing pages.  Now a world-class pessimist might be able to come up with some way to turn this into  harbinger of forthcoming tragedy, but I’m a common garden variety pessimist and had no choice but to be thrilled.

The one downside to pessimism is blindsiding.  I am so accustomed to a world of pleasant surprises that when something isn’t demonstrably better than I imagined it would be, it has the impact of a full-blown catastrophe.

Last week, for example, I received a parcel from the publisher containing a copy of Sisters of the Sari from the first print run. I pulled it out of the package, expecting to see my name misspelled on the cover or some other printing disaster. It looked just fine, but I didn’t experience the familiar sense of surprised relief that normally accompanies the dissipation of groundless fears.  Instead, I felt vaguely panicked, as though I’d forgotten something.

It was lunchtime, so I made myself a turkey sandwich and ate it while I searched for the elusive memory. The harder I searched, the weirder I felt. I actually checked the expiry date on the mayonnaise jar to see if I’d accidentally inundated my intestines with some virulent strain of salmonella. Finally, I remembered the last few typo’s I’d found in the copy of the ARC I’d received at the beginning of the year. “They probably didn’t have time to fix them,” I muttered, and dug through the pile of papers on the desk to find the ARC, which I compared to the final edition. All the typo’s had been fixed.  

As I sat on my couch, holding the two books, it came to me - they didn’t feel the same. The ARC was just a tad heavier, the colors on its cover a smidgen more saturated, the pages a fraction whiter.  If I were an optimist, I probably wouldn’t even have noticed the difference. But I’m a pessimist. I’ve spent sixty years perfecting the art of imagining worst case scenarios. When reality isn’t an obvious improvement over my expectations, I teeter at the edge of a chasm of overlooked possibilities, terrified by the thought there might be something even worse. Eventually I figured out the two books were just printed by different processes and my tummy settled down, although it took almost a day for the sense of impending doom to fully dissipate.

The  A. A. Milne character I most resemble is droop-tailed Eeyore. But the one I wish I could be is exuberant, spring-tailed Tigger, bounding through life un-plagued by senseless worries and improbable premonitions. Sure, I’d fall into more of life’s potholes, but I’d have that amazing tail to propel me back out.

New Hope for Old Fogies

My beginners' hand bell choir is learning to play THE ROSE. We don’t have enough players for this piece, so Friend Wen (who isn’t even close to a beginner and technically doesn’t qualify for our group but we tolerate her because she makes us sound half decent) has to play a whack of bells and chimes at the low-note end of the bell table.

Until last week, in the spaces when I didn’t have notes to play myself, I watched her floating up and down the table in a complex choreography of  hands and feet, suppressing envy by telling myself I was a writer, not a musician, and didn’t aspire to that level of expertise. It was hard enough for me to play two notes, forget the twelve or so at Wen’s station.

Then, I made an interesting discovery during my enforced period of visual impairment. While most of my life got harder without glasses, hand bell playing got easier. I could see all the little notes and squiggles and dots on the sheet music without bending over and squinting. I could actually read ahead. My once-beloved G and A bells suddenly seemed boring and pathetic. So this week, when Wen and I arrived at the church an hour before practice began, some previously unexpressed element of hubris took over my psyche. I decided to push my bell-velope and have a go at playing her part of THE ROSE.

I wasn’t wildly successful. If you had been there, which fortunately for you, you weren’t, you would not have recognized the tune and might have assumed you were listening to some avant-garde composition for funerals. But the point is, after several false starts, I managed to play all the notes in the right order without dropping any bells on the floor or, much worse, clashing them together when I changed hands. (Clashing bells together in Wen’s presence is a very bad thing to do, resulting in a lecture on how easy it is to crack the casings accompanied by an estimate of the replacement costs for the bells clashed, which, at the big bell end of the table, would put a serious dent in my merlot budget for the rest of the year.)

I just finished reading The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, M. D. It’s about neuroplasticity, the human brain’s ability to modify its pathways and grow new ones when faced with challenging situations. In it, there are remarkable case histories: stroke victims who recovered speech or the use of their limbs, OCD sufferers who rewired the pathways of their neuroses. By far the most interesting chapter for me was the one about extremely elderly people who remain intellectually acute by constantly pushing past their mental horizons.

I’ve always been afraid of senility. Mr. Rassmussen, my eighty-year-old neighbor in Holland, was senile. He banged things in his attic late at night. Black smoke occasionally wafted out from his kitchen window. He frequently forgot his house number, even though he’d lived there for over forty years. Sometimes, he’d knock on my door to tell me excited stories accompanied by airplane sound effects and the shooting of an imaginary rifle, apparently unaware that I didn’t speak enough Dutch to have a clue what he was talking about. He wasn’t an unhappy man, but a constantly confused one, and in honesty, something of a danger to himself and those around him. When he died of a stroke, I was as relieved as I was sad.

After reading Dr. Doidge’s book, I am no longer afraid of senility. Learning to play hand bells has probably added months of acuity to my long-term mental forecast. Next week, I intend to add another month or so by moving to the other end of the bell table and seeing what I can do with those dinky little dingers up there.

I never went to university. For most of my life I considered lack of formal learning to be a handicap. Now I’m glad I saved it for my twilight decades. Imagine how many more years of sanity I’ll enjoy if I finally get myself an education. I’ve always wanted to be an archeologist.

What Doesn’t Kill You

My glasses broke last week. The left arm snapped clean off, leaving me with a lorgnette.

I’ve worn glasses all my adult life. Without them, the world three feet in front of my nose devolves into fuzzy blobs, which is a problem because I’m five feet tall and without glasses the ground is two feet out of visual range. I dug my backup pair out of the sock drawer, but they were an old prescription, the slight focal improvement they offered more than offset by the blinding headache they generated. Time to pay that long-postponed visit to the optician.

I waited for the bus in a foul mood, holding my broken glasses to my eyes with one hand and the post of the bus stop with the other to maintain balance as gusts of wind threw grit into my face and attempted to shove me off the sidewalk. It was an amazing wind, from the south, warm and violent.  When the bus came, I climbed aboard and fell into to the first available seat. Around me, everyone discussed the tornados that had devastated the southern states the day before, or compared power outages in their neighborhoods, or  exclaimed as we passed  toppled  trees and blown-over benches.

We came to a stop in an open area by the river. A tiny woman, ninety pounds tops, stepped off the bus but didn’t immediately make it to the ground. She hung in the air for at least a second, her weight insufficient to overcome the lift of the wind.  At the sight of her, suspended two feet above the ground, I relived a memory.

Years ago, when my clothes were still sized in single digits, I had a similar experience while working as a deckhand on a package freighter. We’d sailed into a November storm in the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. The boat rolled at the best of times and the waves were just far enough apart to lift the bow and slam it back into the water with juddering force. This combination of pitch and roll had everyone on the boat hanging over a bucket regurgitating lunch – except me.   

I don’t know what it’s like in today’s merchant marine, but back then, sailors still had some superstitious resistance to having women on board. I’d taken a lot of flak from my crew mates and perhaps that was why, when I noticed the latch on the forward paint locker wasn’t properly dogged down, I decided, in a moment of absolute insanity, to flaunt my stronger stomach by going forward to dog the latch before the hatch flew open and paint cans spilled all over the deck.

I made it about half the length of the ship, hand-over-handing along the rail.  Then a gust of wind hit me at the exact instant I switched hands, just as the deck pitched down and rolled out from under me. For the longest moments of my life, I hung over the water, convinced I was about to find out whether the old adage of lives flashing before eyes was true. But the wind held me up until the return roll brought the deck under my feet again. I grabbed the railing and pulled myself back to crew quarters.

Like me, the tiny woman landed safely on the ground, re-igniting the overwhelming relief I’d experienced when my feet finally touched down.

There were power outages all over town. The only optician still open, out at the mall, was beyond my price range. I didn’t get new glasses.

Normally, the frustration of wasting an entire day being bashed around town by the wind, holding up my glasses like some dorky eighteenth century opera aficionado, would have darkened my mood to the verge of violence. But the endorphins generated while reliving my narrow escape from a watery grave turned the experience into a glorious quest, a wonderful adventure battling the demon wind.

They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.  I don’t know if that’s true, but it sure as heck can improve a crappy day.