"If cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all." -Oscar Wilde

I'm laughing rereading Fine Just the Way It Is by Pulitzer Prize-winner author Annie Proulx. It's a book of marvelous short stories set in Wyoming. Her stories are hard as flint and stunning. I have all of her books. Proulx wrote The Shipping News and "Brokeback Mountain."

In this story (see headline), Bonita Lister thinks about her husband:

"Verl Lister was burden enough. He could not run the ranch alone and they often had to ask their neighbors to throw together and help out. Of course it was because he had been wild in his youth, had rodeoed hard, a bareback rider who suffered falls, hyperextensions and breaks that had bloomed into arthritis and aches as he aged. A trampling had broken his pelvis and legs so that now he walked with the slinking crouch of a bagpipe player.

"She could not fault him for ancient injuries, and remembered him as the straight-backed, curly-headed man with beautiful eyes sitting on his horse, back straight as a metal fence post. But a man, she thought, was supposed to endure pain silently, cowboy up and not bitch about it all day long. She, too, had arthritis in her left knee, but suffered in silence."

I laughed thinking of foolish guys who refused ear protection around extremely loud noises, thinking it was pantywaist. Of course now they're near-deaf. A pilot I met lost 50% of his hearing from walking between the plane and airport near screaming jet engines.

Near-deaf guys who don't wear hearing aids are no fun. I refuse to spend my life shouting and repeating myself. Plus they miss my witty asides and smart-ass comments.