jumpingfish

Have you seen the sky lately? Just after sunset with nary a cloud in the sky? As the soccer teams practice under bright white lights? With the western horizon still glowing pink and the east turning dark blue? Before the stars come out, with Venus sinking in the west and Jupiter rising in the east?

Have you seen it? You should.

Have you heard the owls in the trees? Late at night, long after the neighborhood is asleep? With cool air coming in thru the window. The hu-hu-hooting in the trees. One calling and then another responding, thinking that no one else is around to know?

Have you heard it? You should.

Have you been up late finishing that presentation for tomorrow? Finishing around midnight (well before you thought you would)? Thinking it was finally time to go to sleep, because there’s a long drive ahead in the morning? Realizing the your borrowed laptop (to replace your dropped, broken one) won’t fit the external monitor connector that you have? Realizing that you won’t be able to hook up to the projector? That you don’t know if you’ll be able to present your 8.5 x 11 colored, glossy slides after all?

Have you been up late doing that? Well, you shouldn’t.

We ran into Chris at Kerbey Lane. He was waiting for his friend Sam. We were waiting for a plate of hummus and tabouleh.

While Chris waited, we invited him to join us at our table. We talked about our jobs and the economy and the neighborhood and about wildflowers and butterflies and the elementary school.

When Sam arrived he walked up to the table, and Chris introduced us. We shook hands.

“I lived on your street street two years ago,” Sam said. “How long have you lived in Westcreek?”

Trudy and I looked at each other with looks of surprise that quickly turned to mutual shame.

“Ten years,” Trudy said.

We didn’t recognize him. Not his name. Not his face. Not his description of his dogs. We recognized nothing.

We sit in our yard on our bench for all the world to see on every sunny day. Every weekend we dig in the dirt and trim our trees and woody shrubs and water our wildflowers from rain barrels that sit at the front corners of our house. We are outside all the time. We shamelessly wave to anyone who walks or jogs or rides or drives by.

But we didn’t know Sam. ?We recognized absolutely nothing about this man who had lived at most a dozen houses down from us for years.

Suburbia.

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.