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Cheese for His Birthday

Fri, 1 Oct 2010, 10:15 AM (-06:00)

Cheese. We sent him cheese for his twentieth birthday. Cheese made in Texas. The fair and industrious Trudy handled all the details and packed it in an insulated box, cooled down and shipped by a FedEx friend who knows how to do things like this.

He’s far away at school. And he likes cheese. And … you know … college students are always hungry. So we thought it would be the perfect thing to send. But we needed to let him know we sent it, so that he would pick it up while it was still cool.

Trudy called him. And texted him. And called. And emailed. And texted again. I called. And emailed. … crickets.

Then I called again, late one night from a hotel room in Orlando, thinking I’d give him one more try.

“Hi Dad,” he said in a hurried voice. “Sorry I haven’t been returning your calls. It’s been crazy busy today, and I’m in a meeting right now. Can I call you back?”

“Sure,” I said. And I picked up a book and got in bed and waited. And waited. And decided to turn the light off and just wake up when he called. But the call never came, and I woke up the next morning and packed to go home.

While I was waiting at the airport we finally connected, and he explained what he’d been up to and what was keeping him so busy and how he’d gone to get the package the day before but forgot his ID and how it was the end of the day so he’d have to get it tomorrow.

“Ok, but get it tomorrow or it might spoil,” I said. “Do you want me to tell you what it is?”

“No, it can be a surprise.”

So the next day he picked up the cheese from the mail room. He said it was still cool when he opened the package and that he had put it in a refrigerator.

That was last week.

Two days ago, we talked to him on the phone. He talked about his classes. And a lecture he’d gone to. And about his co-op board retreat. And about the birthday party his friends threw for him. He talked so fast about so many things that our faces were sore from smiling after being on the phone for an hour.

“And have you had any of the cheese?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I really need to have some.”

Right.

Bob’s One Picture

Thu, 30 Sep 2010, 08:37 PM (-06:00)

“For those of you who like pictures,” Bob said, “I’m sorry to say that this is the only one in my presentation. This subject doesn’t lend itself to images.”

And with that he went to his next slide.

It was black and white with word-packed bullets at various levels of indentation. Dense. Impossible to grasp. The kind of slide that makes you sit back and ignore what’s going on in front of you, because the speaker is saying one thing but the words seem to say something else, and it would be too hard to parse all that text, and you’d miss what the guy was saying, so what the heck, you lean back in your chair, and your mind begins to wander.

Then Jim raised his hand.

“Could you go back to your previous slide?”

Jim asked some question about something that caught his attention. And Bob answered. Then someone else asked a question. ?And there were others. And suggestions about unexplored issues. And what-ifs. And discussions about hidden assumptions. And…

And then time was up. All Bob’s time had been taken up by that one slide—by that one slide that had that one picture.

Yet the subject didn’t lend itself to images.

Orlando

Thu, 30 Sep 2010, 08:19 PM (-06:00)

The hotel was attached to a mall, which I must admit was convenient, since the extra space in my suitcase turned out to be due to my failure to pack pants. And it was convenient, because there was an Apple store there where I could take my dropped, broken laptop (only to have the genius at the bar tell me that it was beyond redemption).

One night we went walking thru the mall. Wandering like zombies among automaton shoppers with cell phones glued to their ears and with shopping bags full of all kinds of stuff. Stuff that no doubt no one can live without. It was evening, and we were stuck somewhere out in the suburbian sprawl of Orlando with acres of parking lot around us making a walk outside out of the question. And so we went walking up one hall and around down another. And at the end I went to my room and collapsed into numb oblivion.

The next evening after the workshop was finished for the day, we drove to Disney Downtown. I had forgotten that I had vowed never to go there again the last time we were stuck in this place. And I remembered too late. We walked in the piped-in music along artificial streets beside an artificial lake with artificial stores selling … artificial stuff that no doubt no one can live without. We walked amid wandering zombies having their vacations of their lives. (“Oh look dear, ducks. Let’s take a picture of the kids with the ducks at Disney.”) And at the end I went to my room and collapsed into numb oblivion.

I was stuck in this bizarro world of the future, except that it wasn’t the future and no one around me seemed to think it the slightest strange.

I stand here looking in the mirror. Is there something wrong with me?

Have You?

Wed, 29 Sep 2010, 08:35 PM (-06:00)

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.

Celestial Bodies

Sat, 25 Sep 2010, 12:04 AM (-06:00)

Jupiter has been rising with the full harvest moon lately while Venus sets with the sun. The rain has been falling. The gound is wonderfully soft to walk upon.

The grass has been growing. And the Zexmenia. And the Russian Sage. And the Wright’s Skullcap. And the Oak trees. And… And ants are herding aphids on our blooming Cow Pen Daisies.

“You like being out here because it’s so different from what you do,” Alex said.

I guess so. Come over here. Let me show you next spring’s Spiderwort that just came up this week.

Suburbia

Sat, 18 Sep 2010, 09:06 PM (-06:00)

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.

Facial Recognition

Sat, 18 Sep 2010, 08:50 PM (-06:00)

I needed a badge to get into the room where the class was being taught. My current one wouldn’t get me past the stainless steel doors that lead to the control center.

So I went into the badging office and walked up to the counter, announcing myself and spelling my last name.

Julia was dealing with the paperwork. She was looking down, fingering thru a pile of papers, clearly hoping that my forms had already been sent in.

“Ah. Here you are,” she said, pulling my papers from the middle of the pile.

She took a black marker and wrote Friday’s date in big characters on a yellow piece of paper and slipped it into a plastic sleeve. And as she handed it to me, she looked at me for the first time.

Her face changed from one of politeness to recognition. She squinted and smiled and pointed at me.

“You’ve … you’ve been … you used to be here,” she said.

How could she possibly remember me after more than ten years?

“That was a long time ago,” I said. “Your memory’s a lot better than mine!”

Thinking Too Much

Sat, 18 Sep 2010, 01:38 PM (-06:00)

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.

Reading Our Books

Tue, 7 Sep 2010, 07:00 PM (-06:00)

It was the end of the day.

The fair and industrious Trudy was sitting in the green recliner with her feet up. She was reading a book. I was sitting in the beige recliner reading my book. Periodically she would chuckle and sometimes laugh out loud.

I turned to watch her. She was smiling and chortling and wiggling in her feet, focusing so intently that she didn’t catch me spying.

After a while, I returned to my book. The centuries-old civilization was falling apart, their great libraries burned, their society fractured, their future crumbling before their eyes. As I read the final chapters, the grim story got worse.

The family was breaking. The goons were ascendant. The village was razed to the ground, the villagers killed by soldiers told to leave no trace of the place on the map. And little Yazid was killed by the captain on his horse as the boy invited the man to the family compound.

As I closed the cover, I had tears streaming down my cheeks.

I need to change the things I read. I want something to chuckle at.

Water, Water Everywhere

Tue, 7 Sep 2010, 05:05 PM (-06:00)

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.