jumpingfish

At the airport, they asked me if I had any liquids or food.

“Two apples,” I said. “I have two Honeycrisps in my backpack.”

They told me to take out the apples and put them in a tray, which I did.

The thing of it is, I forgot this.

I realized my mistake once I had passed thru security and was waiting for my bags to follow. Once it was too late (or perhaps unwise) to shout, Wait. I forgot the apples in my suitcase!

But forgotten them I had, and I stood there watching the TSA agent staring at his screen, clearly examining the image of my suitcase with great focus.

Then he pushed a button, and my blue suitcase emerged from the scanner. He looked over at me looking sheepishly back at him. He neither frowned nor smiled. That was just that.

October is apple season in Michigan. Those Honeycrisps must not have been the only ones.

“Do you see what he’s doing?” Jenny asked Burt. She pointed at me standing by the window.

That’s where the fruit were — by the window. And I was standing there taking advantage of a few idle moments to take the stickers off the bananas (because I’m all about using idle moments efficiently).

“Do you see him?” she asked again. He looked over at me silently. “He does it, too!”

Evidently my cousin prefers his bananas without stickers, also. I suspect we have our own reasons. But whatever they are, these particular stickers on these particular bananas were particularly obnoxious. There was a sticker on every single one, and none of them came off easily.

So I was a sitting duck standing at the window, because I wasn’t making much progress, and my explanations about not wanting the stickers in my compost pile back home didn’t seem to get much traction with Jenny.

“He does it, too,” she said again, almost muttering.

Burt just smiled.

There are so many things to talk about. Good things. Bad things. Things. We should work our way back into this gently. So let’s just talk about last night.

We stood in the dark under a nearly full moon, the dogs and I. There was someone running on the middle school track in the distance. And behind us, the guys playing soccer in the dim light of the elementary school track were still at it, their booming music barely audible now.

I looked down at the dogs, my headlamp shining on the grass in front of me as I tilted my head. There was some kind of visual trickery going on, because it looked as if there was fog about my feet. I looked again.

And now, as my brain filtered out the idea of fog, the grass seemed to be playing depth tricks. Some kind of hologram-like shimmering of the longish blades of grass alternately seeming to be very deep and then shallow. My brain couldn’t lock on to whatever it was that was playing this trick — kinda like when a printed page in front of you briefly seems three-dimensional, and then all the sudden your brain fixes on the flatness of it, and the depth snaps out of existence. Except this depth didn’t snap. It just kept flipping between near and far, shallow and deep. So I looked closer.

This was some kind of wild grass, with stalks with triple seedheaded inflorescences. I don’t know my grasses. I don’t even know the parts of the grass plants. I just throw big words around as if I know what I’m talking about. But as I looked at these … inflorescences, there were tiny, bright orange lights at the tip of each seedhead. 

What? I’m thinking to myself. I look again.

Yep. Tiny, bright orange lights. Unmistakeable, even though their brightness blinks out after my light shines on them for a second.

What!? I bend over to look more closely. And now I see it.

When each tiny, bright orange light blinks out, a moth ascends from the tip of the seedhead. The moths are watching me.

There’s another tiny, bright light. And there’s another moth flying off. We look around us (because you know the dogs are all about inspecting nature close-up). There is a host, a legion, a fluttering fury of moths rising up all around us. 

They swirl about us as we begin to make our way back home, each foot step disturbing a new wave of them, their tiny lights blinking out just as they take off.

…And there you have it. Last night.

From the other side of the river, the heron said, “It was the best of times.” From its newfound vantage point, the pan fish said, “It was the worst of times.” And the water, well it just kept on flowing downstream.

1. The Shoe Store

I bought a new pair of shoes, yesterday. It was a strange experience.

When we walked into the place, the smell of leather was wonderful. Unlike our previous forays into three (count ‘em, three) old-guard departments stores, this place felt genuine. They were selling shoes, period. Ok, I think there were some other leather things, but this was just a shoe store. They didn’t try to be anything else. As a marketing strategy, it worked.

For example, here we were standing near a shelf at the front of the store. Trudy looked at some boots and said to me, “Wow. I would marry you if you wore these!” (It was primarily due to the influence of the fair and industrious Trudy that we were on this quest in the first place. I can tell you with some conviction that marrying her was the best decision of my life, and somehow I managed to score that without those boots.)

Ok. So this was a place that even we could enjoy. But still, it was a bit strange… 

2. The Shoe Store Process

I found a pair I liked.

“May I try these in 10 1/2?” I asked.

The woman tapped on a hand-held (Honeywell) device.

I walked off to look at other shoes. When I turned around, she was still there. I was puzzled, but I gave her more time. 

She just stood there. Perhaps they were out of my size. Maybe she was just giving me some space before she told me.

“Are you out of my size?” 

“Oh no,” she said. “They’re coming.”

They’re coming. That’s odd, I was thinking to myself. And at that very moment a door opened in the back of the store. A man emerged holding a box. He walked up with an odd smile on his face. He handed the box to the woman and returned to the back.

The shoes weren’t quite right, so I asked for a different pair. The subsequent process was the same: the woman went nowhere; some time elapsed; the man again emerged with a box. 

This time, he was closer to me. So I reached out for the box.

But he didn’t want to hand them to me. I could see it in his eyes. There was panic hidden behind his smiling facade. He looked at me, then at her, back at me. Finally he reached around me and handed the box to her.

3. How It Appeared

I get it. There are laces to be laced, stuffing to be unstuffed. Don’t trouble the customer with trivialities. I get that.

But here’s the thing of it. We were the only ones there, and I was the only customer.

In addition to the saleswoman and this young, silent shoe-transporter who evidently spends most of his working hours hidden in the bowels of the stock shelfs, there was a manager/salesman in the store, too. One customer and a standard store process that requires three people to service him.

The manager spent much of his time at the cash register, typing away at the keyboard, singing along with the hip, piped-in music. The woman was tethered to a handheld cash register satellite. And there was this silent drone-of-a-man who retrieved and delivered boxes from an area in the back.

I pictured the area behind that door as a vast, dark array of shelves stretching out in all directions. I pictured him stepping onto a platform as soon as he received a get-this-box summons, being whisked off to the box’s coordinates and transported back, stepping off the platform and walking out into the full light of the salesroom, box in hand.

The shoe store felt strange, but I ended up buying the shoes.

… Maybe I need to get out a little more.