Deconstructing Dylan by Lesley Choyce Read Free Book Online Page B

the site referred to as “significant turmoil.” I reckoned my mom fell into the latter category. I would definitely have to keep an eye on her.
    The site pointed out that most all species retained their reproductive capacity through their entire lives. Humans were the exception. “Might there be an evolutionary explanation for menopause?” it queried.
    No answer was provided, leaving me to ponder why evolution had singled out humans for this. But then we were an oddity. My research into menopause took me on a side trip, typical of my net searches, into the area of what was referred to as “reproductive rights.” The author on this net site, sexhistory.com, pointed out how bizarre it was that Western men and women for centuries had been searching for the perfect means of birth control, and almost at the exact point in history when such birth control was widely available, researchers and drug companies were shifting their focus to fertility. There were millions to be made in helping couples figure out how to have kids instead of selling them contraceptives that prevented children.
    It was kind of bizarre if you thought about it. Of course, there was a lot about the adult world that did not make sense to me. Much about human nature that seemed incredibly odd. In some ways, I preferred the study of bugs. I flicked off the net and turned back to my favourite text, Frank Lutz’s
Field Book of Insects
. “Young insects may be said to grow by leaps and bounds, not gradually. A soft shell-like skin that will not stretch largely covers them. All the flesh is inside of this shell, and when the quantity of this flesh gets too large, the shell splits, the insect emerges, swells out, and its new skin in turn hardens. The process is repeated several times before adult life is reached.” Now that makes perfectly good sense to me. It’s a shame that we humans were cheated out of this ability.
    This got me thinking that it would be kind of cool if kids did go through such a process. It would make school much more interesting if, say, in the middle of third period calculus Miles Vanderhague began to moult as his inner “quantity of flesh” became too great. You’d be sitting there and hear this crack and, whoops, here comes the new Miles, possibly an improved version now looking entirely different with a better personality and more compassion for people who were a bit off the norm. Evolution had truly cheated us of such opportunity.
    I shared Professor Lutz’s understated admiration of everything about insects. “In man,” he states, “theblood is sent to the lungs for a load of oxygen, which it then carries to the tissues. Insects do things more directly: air is conducted to all parts of the body by means of a system of tubes called trachea.” In other words, insects don’t breathe through their mouths or noses. They can breathe all over their bodies. Brilliant. Lutz also reminded me that “There is no brain, strictly speaking.” Although he did not state it outright, I again perceived a kind of aloof admiration for the design of bugs, the implication being that they “think” with their entire being. If our brain is severely damaged, our nonfunctioning brain might destroy the rest of the body and we would die. An insect could be damaged in any number of ways and still the body control/thinking process could continue.
    It’s not that I truly wanted to wake up one morning like Gregor in Franz Kafka’s famous “Metamorphosis” story. I was stuck with being human and would make the most of it.
    I had heard my mother heading to her bedroom and then the door opening. After about twenty minutes of further reading, I went to check up on her to make sure she was okay. She was in bed, asleep, snoring loudly. (My parents had argued about this. My dad claimed she snored. She said he was lying. He wondered why anyone would lie about snoring. She