THEY SAY that the man whom the movie Rain Man was based on knew 12,000 books by heart. Lawrence Kim Peek of Utah read a book within an hour, the left pages with his left eye, the right pages with the other. He was not autistic, as the movie suggests, but he was born with an oversized head and a brain disorder.
I am missing one eye and therefore cannot read with two eyes separately, much less simultaneously. But I do read, in preparation for my upcoming presidency, focusing on mostly useless knowledge. I love impractical facts, especially about presidents. John Kennedy had two secretaries, with the nicknames Fiddle and Faddle. Once when Jackie walked past their desk with a visitor, she told him, “And these two are sleeping with my husband.”
Eisenhower regularly walked across the Oval Office parquet in his spiked golf shoes, leaving hundreds of holes in the wood. Lyndon Johnson had a special showerhead from Texas installed in the upstairs bathroom. It had so much Texas-strength water power that when his successor Nixon went into the shower on his first night as president, he yelped and jumped out from under it.
President Taft weighed 330 pounds and was given a special bathtub in the White House, so large that it could fit four grown men. His predecessor Theodore Roosevelt did bouts of boxing, for his fitness, was knocked out by an army captain, and forever lost the sight in his left eye. And James Garfield, for whom that orange cartoon cat is named, was ambidextrous. He could write two letters at the same time, in two different languages if necessary.
I CAN’T. I’m more like Rain Man’s Kim Peek. The only reason why he memorized 12,000 books, and not more, was because the library in his hometown didn’t carry more books. I read my books on a Kindle. Paper books I tend to rip to shreds with my nails, unintentionally. My Kindle holds a maximum of 35,000 books of roughly 250 pages on average. That’s my limitation, my restriction. I cannot quote from more than nine million pages.
The voters will have to live with that.
* VanderBus left home at the age of six weeks and went hunting for a city bus in Maine. He caught the bus. It cost him one eye, but he won a standing ovation from everyone who watched him do it. VanderBus, since then mayor of Bicker Hollow, is running for president of the United States.
