Far from an old wives' tale is the axiom "You are What You Pull out of the Magazine Rack in the Doctor's Waiting Room." As soon as I was able to cognitively assemble four-color printed photographs my tiny little fingers would grab ahold of the latest National Geographic before imagination would grab ahold of me. To hell with Highlights; neither the subtle educollusion nor the vapid morality plays drew me in. I knew Goofus would pull himself together after marriage and that Gallant, the eternally good-hearted sonovabitch, would graduate from West Point with honors and Eisenhower his way into the White House. Okay, Goofus put his shoes on before his socks and pants and then was rude to his cousin. It happens. He'll learn to hold the door for people when he starts dating. Let him sort it out.
Every other magazine bored me stiff. I don't care for sports, nor celebrities, nor women's fashion trifles. I do have one distinct memory of gawking at pictures of three bikini-clad women squirming about on rock formations jutting out of some typically constructed tropical paradise. I must have been about four or five and with my mother at the dermatologist's. I knew there was something indicative about the arrangement - Mommy, why is her top as see-through as your panty hose? - but alas, eight years too young for acute globular inveiglement, couldn't quite put it all together. I also couldn't quite stop gawking until it was my mother's turn to see the doctor.
Every other wait, it was National Geographic.
I've learned that sleeping is just about the only task I can accomplish perfectly when in a stressful environment. Reading a magazine in the timeframe of less than twenty minutes in the transient door-open-door-close-who-are-they-calling-now waiting room just isn't possible; nervous, I pay too much attention to the offices' rhythm. Sure, I find a story from the contents page and soak up some of the 16-point font splashes: Dazzling in beds of turquoise, sapphire and aquamarine from a sea older than every empire put together, Costa Rica's Isla del Coco is the crown jewel of the Americas. A few seconds later, my mind wanders to focus elsewhere. In this case, National Geographic's staple, more plentiful on its pages than brittle, antagonistic knee-slappers for balding, thirtysomething chauvinists in a double-issue of Maxim:
Pictures. Pretty pictures.
Nobody likes to read about how enjoyable the Cuban life is under the tragically misunderstood Fidel Castro. But then, who on the National Geographic readership bell curve picks it up for specific sociological contents? Back to me: I was a kid, I was trying desperately to concentrate on a magazine. So I got stuck on photographs, and photographs of what every normal child who hasn't got the faintest interest in soft-socialist gobbledygook enjoys.
Dinosaurs. Sea creatures. Mummies - lots of them. Ancient habitations brought into the modern age. Stars and planets, grand unifying theories for the universe. Inserts and pullouts, graphics and illustrated charts. All in National Geographic, waiting for me whenever I found myself waiting for the doctor.
I still go straight for it. I do manage to keep my eyes moving left to right and down columns in order to digest letters, set in patterns meant to convey serial expressions of printed thought a little better, too. Last month, at my opthamologist's, I picked up my favorite waiting room magazine - in fact, the eye doctor's office is the best, as he's got a nice stack of random National Geographics from the past seven years (spooky to read the geopolitical musings, especially one right before September 11th). I was reading about the Big Bang when, perhaps not coincidentally, I confronted the fact that I've never owned a subscription.
Now, here's where I would be expected to narrate a compelling internal dialogue about my financial and literary decisions over the years. But the epiphanic moment didn't happen that way. It was more like "Why the hell don't I own this magazine now that I hold a steady job?"
So I bought a subscription. My first issues (two! March and April together) came in the mail today. And with a wink, God nudged National Geographic's editor to make a testament to what brought me to the publication in the first place:
Awwwesome! I promise to read the article, too.