Tuesday, May 13, '03--
3:54 p.m.-

      Social Problems class, taught by a tedious PhD man let out nine minutes ago, but I was not there to relish the release. Mid-morning I took a break from my student assistant job sticking "Best Seller" labels and Tattle Tapes into new library books. A gorgeous day made reckless students responsively giddy, so I joined in the fun and played hooky too. Only a week of school remains and my papers and projects have been turned in for critical review.

      Two weeks ago I checked the lights on the trailer. They glowed and left/right turn signals blinked their job properly. Today they didn't, until I rousted EZ out of the back of the car and spent a half-hour removing interior trim and pronging rear-end electrical nests with a tester, which for no good reason explicable lit. I plugged the connectors together and the trailer lights lit. So, whatever. Maybe it's required that I first turn on the car's ignition before presuming a failure has occurred in the wiring.

      New tires on the trailer carried the boat bouncing over the paper mill tracks and I remembered from last year's first trip how it feels, expecting God to laugh out loud and break something vital and send oncoming motorists swerving and neighborhood children screaming away from a teetery free-wheeling boat. The car has been running fine since being repaired after God laughed out loud and broke its timing belt while delivering me home three weeks ago with a fluffed load of laundry. (I'd recently wondered if the timing belt had ever been replaced and planned to hire it done some day soon.)

      Had a hell of a time getting through the wild rice meadows. By tradition winter had eliminated all familiar landmarks, so the vague wide watery plane could not reveal its underwater contours. Contrary to a best guess where the narrow short-cut channel should've been, it wasn't. The bottom was soft mud though, so the prop didn't get dented, but propeller-pounded mud tends to swirl and create opaque clouds so a frustrated man in shallow water can't see his vague way toward deeper clear water fifty yards further east. (Using all the best swear words truly does help.)

      Sonbeam's Secret Channel was still mostly unchanged, though the gatekeeper trees have slumped closer to the water and a thick waterlogged log blocked our path crosswise. So we skirted right through high water, through branches, screeching and howling like the Titanic sinking. EZ crouched and shuddered as leafy twigs brushed over her back.

      I motored us up onto the bank. EZ ran to a high bluff and, without slowing, dove a jackknife into the river.

      Sunscreen. I brought it along, as critically prudent people do in these times of the sun's dangerous temperament to burn skin cancer onto fair people's faces. I was disinclined to apply it and retard my intake of vitamin D.

      The new Reader's Digest shows (on the cover) a menacingly empty beach chair on a sun-bright sandy beach, alerting me to a deadly threat. I sat down on the toilet and opened to page 140 to find out what trendy new alert I was facing.

      An airbrushed woman--eyes shut against bright blaring sun--is smiling the sort of happiness one feels after a successful bowel movement, holding her teeth bear to the sun's bleaching action. Her breast implants, in pink halters, are abundant but I don't care about that as much as the sub-text which--insinuating I might not be getting enough--asks, "are you getting enough?"

      I flip the page and read on. Sunscreen is implicated as hazardous. Vitamin D (a scarce healing ingredient) is frightfully absent from our bodies and the world is approaching an "unrecognized epidemic." Rickets is rampant. Responsible mothers are giving their kids Rickets, a bone-bending infirmity caused by a paucity of vitamin D. Its gross debilitating inconveniences are seeping from dark basement drains and through manholes in Manhattan, infecting pedestrians, spiraling young children's' bones to unparalleled degrees--crippling degrees--and darling toddlers with peanut butter lips are blamelessly staggering through suburban backyards under heavy loads of sunscreen with Tiny Tim limps.

      Vitamin D is essential!

      Vitamin D makes healthy bodies grow twelve ways. Dairy farmers dose each glass of milk with synthetic Vitamin D. (Naturally, cows don't sell it themselves.) Children who drink milk are safe. Those who don't--those who drink beer for breakfast--are doomed to repay maternal sin by limping on the soccer field and gimping easy goal shots that even Coach and screaming mothers could've kicked between three-year-old Brittany's knees.

      (Though I have not finished reading the article, soccer would clearly benefit from crippled legs kicking the ball into the net.)

      I knew that sunlight gave me vitamin D. But I never really thought about how, assuming it anyhow radiated vitamin D molecules down onto my skin, which absorbed them, then poured vitamin D atoms into the mix of my many other vitamins, making everything work together and get along.

      The sun is the answer. But, according to Reader's Digest, a man standing naked all the live long day in Boston's Harvard Square, in December, (it's what RD said, for argument's sake, okay?) would not absorb enough Vitamin D sun for his internal apparatus to produce adequate Vitamin D. This is Reader's Digest's argument. I'm only relating what their writers report.

      Human skin converts sunlight to Vitamin D. This is not debatable. It is Truth, okay? Just trust me. But sunscreen plugs the pores and impedes that synthesis. The sun's vitamin rays can't penetrate coated skin, where it's supposed to react with a body's chemistry and release Vitamin D.

      That's why we have so much trouble with children these days.

      So, I brought along sunscreen, then reneged on my motive. I don't want to be crippled, but I don't want skin cancer either. EZ has had cancer, but is still dancing enough on the front deck to tell me that she's not concerned. My cancer, growing but still hidden somewhere inside, will be enriched twelve ways if I apply too little SPF-30. But if I put on too much sunscreen I'll go home with 90-degree limbs and customers at work will deride my stride.

      What should I do?

      Determined to succeed growing sunflowers along the office corridors, I've been nurturing--in three-inch peat pots on a shelf in my south-facing bedroom window--a brood of store-bought Northrup King Premier California Greystripe sunflower seeds. (The fine print on the back of the packet warns: "Protected Variety - Seeds cannot be grown for propagation or sale.")

      A hardware co-manager told me that ordinary sunflower seeds, sold in fifty-pound sacks for birdseed, are factory-sterilized and not capable of germinating. Seeking any explanation of why last year's plantings failed to sprout, I'll accept that as reason enough. Though that doesn't explain why every year we had giant volunteer sunflowers growing ten feet high under the bird feeder when I lived at home with the wife. But that was ten years ago and, since then, sunflower producers have learned how to perform hysterectomies on each seed.

      I brought along three spindly ten-inch tall sunflowers in their pots; planted one near EZ's future gravesite and eight other out-of-the-packet seeds in sunny spots.

      The sun is hot this time of year, slightly more than a month from the summer solstice. Shade is not yet available anywhere outside and the bare-naked woods offer no refuge. But who wants it on a seventy-degree day in May when the promises of summer sprouting are springing from every branch and winter's grip holding us indoors is gone?

      We exited the channel and headed upriver, riding atop deeper and deeper water, higher and faster than I've seen it in two decades. We had to bend over passing under the bridge. The meanders are underwater, silver currents smoothing through woods, passing through close-together trees, shortening the trip for canoeists, if there were any. It's really nothing but water, with the illusion of land only because of the forest.

      Grand Sandbanks was still there, though, wanting to plant sunflowers at the campsite, we continued past. Glitter Beach and the campsite was totally flooded and reflected sparkling sun. So, back to the sandbanks. No beach to slide onto. I shoved into a backwater slot and dropped the anchor behind a clump of grass, wagged a finger at the boat and commanded it to "stay," then climbed the ravine and dug the remaining two sunflower peat pots into the ground near the lip of the cliff and planted a lineup of new seeds into slits in the ground. Deer are abundant these days and years. Two ran away from my shouts. I am pessimistic about the future for my babies. A corral of chicken wire around each planting would keep chickens out, bunnies too, but I have opted-out of that option. Deer, being taller than bunnies and chickens, could easily eat over a twenty-four inch fence and I can't afford some six feet high. Besides, deer are known to jump tall garden fences to get at the goods and they'd crush my tiny plants. And I see few chickens out here.