jumpingfish

I sat down at the computer the other day and read this article at the BBC about a study recently published in Science. According to the article,

[…] a nationwide survey recently found that some people think too much about life.

These people have poorer memories, and they may also be depressed.

When I read that, I thought about my life, and I thought my forgetfulness?. I sat back and thought about thinking about those things. And I thought about thinking about thinking about those things.

Then I read that quote in the article again. And I thought I’m so toast.

The August heat was brutal—not on us, we can always sit in the shade and drink iced tea or retreat to the house, but brutal on the garden.

As we dug in the dirt last weekend, preparing for fall, we looked in horror at the parched, dry dirt just below the surface that we had been so dutifully watering. It was a veritable Sahara Desert, I tell you. Clearly the soaker hose didn’t soak as much as we thought it had.

So on Saturday we cast our dollars to the wind and bought Submatic pipe and fittings and filters and valves and constructed a drip irrigation system for out two most-abused square foot garden beds.

We sat in the heat and cut the pipe and pushed the reluctant parts together. We cut up pieces of an old scrounged hose to connect one bed to the next. And in the full southern sun of afternoon, we installed the emitters, turned on the water and watched as the first drips dripped.

We stood beside the beds covered in dirt and sweat, smiling and congratulating ourselves, wondering silently how it could have possibly taken us so long.

And today?

Today we’ve had torrential rains as what’s left of Hurricane Hermine passes west of us, swinging her great counter-clockwise spinning arms overhead. Since last night to this very moment, it has been a deluge with more water falling from the sky in the course of 12 hours than we had all summer long.

I guess we’ll test out the drip irrigation system later.

“That’ll be $3.46,” the girl behind the counter said.

I pulled out a ten and then said, “Wait, I’ve got some change.”

I looked at the coins in my hand: just a bunch of quarters and pennies.

“Well, at least here’s the penny,” I said, and handed her $10.01.

She didn’t flinch, which was a good sign. She just took the money and pushed some buttons on the cash register, and the cash drawer popped open.

There was some fiddling with bills. She got a five and some ones and then put some ones back and then put them all back and got out a small pad of paper and started scribbling. Then she mumbled something as she pulled out some coins.

Clearly, she was trying to figure out how to make change for my $10.01.

I swear I didn’t think it’d be hard. You don’t have to do math these days to run a register. Heck, you don’t even enter numbers, you just push little buttons for the burgers and the fries and the drinks. I figured the machine would tell her what to do. But the machine evidently didn’t tell her what to do, and her scribbling had evidently been an attempt at subtraction: 10.01 – 3.46.

Fortunately, there was no line behind me.

“Hey, how do I do this?” she asked the guy at the register next to her. She told him what I had done, and he stared in blank silence looking at her cash drawer.

I leaned forward.

“How much was my bill?” I asked.

She looked up.

“My bill was $3.46. I gave you $10.01. The penny makes my bill $3.45. So just give my change for $3.45 from $10.”

It didn’t help.

“$6.55,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s it,” the guy next to her said, nodding his head and quickly returning to his register.

She gave me $6.55, and I stepped back and eagerly waited for my burger and fries.

We’ve been watching the sky lately, gazing into the night with our eyes angled upward.

It’s been a pretty good show. Venus shining brightly in the western sky just after the sun goes down. Saturn and Mars in conjunction above her to the right and left, respectively. And for a while even Mercury lower on the horizon, barely twinkling in the rosy post-sunset glow.

I haven’t seen Mercury for a week or so, but a few days ago, as people around the world began their celebrations of Ramadan, a thin crescent Moon began to appear, gliding along her zodiacal path, making her presence known more and more with each passing night.

And last night, we went out to watch the Perseids. We took the dog and two chairs and sat out in the soccer fields behind the school and looked up at the heavens.

We’re not in the country, here. The light from downtown Austin bounced off thin wisps of haze, blotting out all but the brightest stars. And there were bright pink lamp posts not too far away along the highway and in the parking lots and around the track and by the bank. So the sky gazing was … sub-optimal.

Still, we saw one long streak that made us gasp. So we came home happy.

And we went out again tonight. It wasn’t in our plans, but the dog was telling us it was time. And so although we didn’t take the chairs this time, we hung around out there, lying out there in the middle of the soccer fields on the scratchy grass ignoring the distant lamp posts and the glowing wisps of almost-cloud. We hung around as the dog grew impatient and prodded us to go. We hung around and watched the sky.

I counted four. Trudy counted two. The dog counted none. And we all came home happy again.

We had just ordered breakfast at the Euro-bistro on the corner near the hotel, and we were trying to figure out how to get down to Vieux Montréal. A family sitting next to us suggested that we take a look at their map of the bus and metro system. It was the #129 bus that we wanted, but there were also some metro options.

We decided to take the metro.

So we retraced a bit of our walk from the night before, pausing once at a bench to let Dad’s knees recoup. And when we descended into the metro station, I walked up to the information booth and asked for a map in the best French I could muster.

“Est-ce que vous avez une carte?” I asked, carte being the word I know for map. Frankly, it was the first complete French sentence I had uttered since we got to Montreal, and I was feeling proud (in a lame kind of way).

The woman couldn’t hear me and motioned for me to ask again, which I did. But she didn’t understand and pointed to the microphone. I repeated myself again, leaning into the mic. She looked at me as if I were from Mars.

“Une carte, avez vous une carte … um … une carte du système?” And I waved my hands around the station to indicate what I meant by système, having pulled the word from English.

Again a look as if I were from Mars. She reached for some piece of paper that was clearly not what I was looking for. And then I saw the maps in a box behind her, a stack of neatly folded maps just like the one we had looked at earlier.

“Est-ce que vous avez … un … map?” I asked, pointing at the maps, desperate for the map, no longer caring if I used French or English.

She rolled her eyes and reached for a map and slid it under the glass.

“Merci beaucoup,” I said.

I looked down at the map. On the cover page it said, Plan du réseau, which explained everything. I didn’t want une carte, I wanted un plan. So much for my first French sentence.