Solitary Adventures

I have been reading a ton of books lately. It has gotten to the point where I am almost sick of reading, which sounds almost impossible. I am not sick of reading, I am sick of finding good and interesting things to read. I could re-read all of my favorite old books, which I am starting to do. The other day I re-read The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver. "The other day?" you think. Yes, I read the book in a little over twenty four hours. It was really good. Again. I think I last read it in the 1990's. It is worth a re-read.

Before the surgery, I read three books and one article that all had one thing in common: they were describing solo adventures of middle aged people. I didn't seek out this theme, yet it greatly resonates with where I am now. My family and friends are around during my ACL injury, surgery and recovery, but I am going through this more or less alone.

• Raising the Barre by Lauren Kessler
• The Martian by Andy Weir
• Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson
• "Holding the T: My Life in Squash" by Tad Friend in the New Yorker

In Raising the Barre: Big Dreams, False Starts & My Midlife Quest to Dance the Nutcracker, Lauren Kessler decides she wants to dance in the Nutcracker, even though she has kids in college. She is a major Nutcracker fan, and gets the director of the Eugene Ballet Company to agree to let her have a part. She danced as a child, but not really since then. The main theme is about being a beginner in middle age. I loved this book since I harbor the same fantasy. I saw it three times at Third Place Books but couldn't bring myself to buy it right away. Once I got it, I blasted through it.

In The Martian, Mark Watney is stranded on Mars and had to figure out how to survive. The NASA folks on earth and the team en route back to earth need to figure out how to get back to Mars to save him. "Duct tape is the best stuff in the universe. It should be worshipped."

In "Holding the T," Tad Friend talks about his hobby of playing competitive squash and how he copes as he ages. It is really funny. "[Squash] looks like tennis at triple speed, and feels like heroin without the needles and the nodding off and the vomiting afterward, except when you vomit afterward."

In Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson plans to return to his native US, but first he goes on a tour of England where he had lived for the previous twenty years. It is a travel book, and Bryson travels alone. I love Bill Bryson, but this is not my favorite of his books, like A Walk in the Woods, 1927, or The Adventures of the Thunderbolt Kid. It is one of his first books, so I will cut him some slack. He still is uber funny, and I would crack up in the YMCA on the stationary bike, tears running down my face from laughter. That is an awesome feeling. As the book wore on, I was tired of reading about people being alone. He really needed a side-kick or friend. You could tell as he continued his journey that was was getting lonely. Thank god he got Katz to go with him in A Walk in the Woods. Maybe his wife said his books needed another character, but "please don't let it be me."

It was on accident that I picked up all of these books and articles of solitary adventures and I read them all in a row. I was kind of depressed at the end in a way, maybe because I read Bryson last and most people who travel travel with others. And yet, life sometimes is about solitary adventures, even if we don't want to have them. Watney didn't want to be stranded on Mars. Others we choose: Lauren Kessler made a huge effort to have something like two minutes on stage. Tad Friend spent his whole life playing squash, and now it was changing after he turned fifty.

My solitary adventure is more like Mark Watney's: I didn't choose it, but I have to make the best of what has been thrown my way. I kind of wish this all could have been easily fixed with duct tape, but alacks and alas, here I am, doing hundreds of leg lifts a day just so I can get back to walking with a normal gait.