I am reading Don Quixote by Cervantes. It is quite a hoot. But, it is not an easy read. It’s like reading a foreign language. As a matter of fact, it is a foreign language: Spanish. Old Spanish translated into English. If you squint your eyes and hold your nose just right, you can almost tease out the meaning. It turns out the Don is quite insane—crazy as 9 loons, as they say. He is always tilting at windmills and at every Inn he passes by on the road he thinks it is a Castle holding a damsel in distress who needs rescuing since he is a knight errant of the “ill-favored face” and that his quest is to follow that dream. Halfway through the book he meets another band of wanderers who spin quite a tale of their own about a cat named Anselmo and his friend Lothario whom he entreats to test his wife’s fidelity. What could go wrong? Sancho Panza rides along with the Don on his ass for companionship and to provide comic relief.

When I was a young man working as a factotum at the rubber factory in Rubbertown, one of my co-workers used to refer to me as, “That Don Quixote-looking motherfucker!”

“Why do you call me that, Ernie?” I asked.

“Because you wear a beard, and you sort of look like him, and you are always tilting at windmills.”

I took it as a compliment.