Things That Worry Me Which Probably Shouldn't

I'm concerned that I may forget how to read.*
   I'm not talking about being on the wrong end of a lucky punch and getting a traumatic brain injury, I'm not talking about some sort of slow-creeping dementia, I'm worried that one morning I'm going to wake up from a perfectly peaceful sleep, no different than I was eight hours before, except I won't know what those squiggles on paper mean any more.
   'That's crazy, Don,' you might say. 'Nobody just forgets how to read.'
   To which I respond 'oh yeah?' and 'sez who?'
   People forget stuff all the time, that's why there's such a thing as Lost and Found at the Wal Mart. People lose sunglasses, shoes, their wallets, even prosthetic limbs, believe it or not. Nobody's immune, we all do it. I forgot my truck keys in the refrigerator once. So it's not a stretch to consider that you might just 'misplace' a learned skill like reading.
   It would be so embarrassing, and I don't embarrass easily. I don't want to wake up, realize I forgot how to read, and then have to explain to people what was going on. No, I'm not a veteran, no, I wasn't in a car crash. I just forgot, okay? Back off, and tell me which of these is rat poison and which is flour.
   On the plus side, not knowing how to read would force me to cut down on my Internet time. Maybe I'd become a sculptor or something.


*     Unlike some of my other worries I know where this one comes from. Years back, when I worked for the government, I went on a trip to Japan. I flew international from Hawaii, landed in Fukuoka, and then had to go to the domestic side of the airport to fly from Fukuoka to Okinawa. When I passed that threshold I looked around at the riot of signs and pictures and magazines and realized I had absolutely no idea what anything said. In Japan I was functionally illiterate. Couldn't read a single thing, and there was no way I could fake it, like I could in Europe.
   I was completely freaked out for about five minutes, sincerely concerned for my own well-being, until I realized that there was no way I was going to learn Japanese before I got on the plane. I chilled out and just went with the flow.