jumpingfish

We thought the backpack belonged to the two women across the Taco Deli picnic table from us. They had said yes when I asked if it was theirs. I must have misunderstood. It turned out to belong to Marco who walked up a few minutes later, clearly drunk and apparently homeless.

“I’m not sure I’d want to sit next to this white trash,” he mumbled as he sat down with his back to us. Awkward but it was clear he was referring to himself. He started talking to a woman with a dog. And at one point he started singing Frank Zappa lines that I sometimes sing. Going to Montana soon. Gonna raise me up some dental floss. Raisin’ it up; waxin’ it down.

The woman walked away, so he turned to us. Mumbling and cussing, his eyes peering out from behind squinting eyelids, he spoke loudly in language not well suited for the nearby girl scouts waiting for their post-hike tacos.

He had a huge scab over his right eye and a horrific scrape on his arm. But he wasn’t obnoxious if you could get past his choice of words. So we chatted for a while. Because… well we were sitting there, and we wanted to finish our tacos

Marco talked with obvious regret about the days of his youth, about dropping out of high school, about living with his step mother and step sisters in Spain, about moving to Albuquerque, about how he liked Austin better, about getting beat up when he recently got off a bus. Sometimes he would start speaking in Spanish. When I replied in Spanish, it was quickly evident that I was out of my league, so I kept quiet when he started speaking French. And after he was talking for a while, he paused and looked at me.

“I’ll give you twenty dollars if you let me sleep on your couch.”

He didn’t wait for an answer. 

“No. I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t,” he said. “The nominative I would not let the accusative me sleep on the genitive my’s couch.”

What a loss.

It’s a fine thing, that Oak tree sapling poking up out of the pot from the acorn we poked into the dirt in the pot under the mulch in the fall. A fine thing, that spring-green finery, ever optimistic under blue skies and under chicken wire to keep the squirrels at bay.

And it’s a fine thing, those wild onions blooming in the back, their white blossoms upon their green stalks. A fine thing, that they come back this time every year, ever optimistic under blue skies even though you don’t want them growing in your butterfly garden where the later flowers belong.

And it was a fine thing, you and me at the park in the afternoon. A fine thing sitting there under blue skies in the unusual heat of the day. Sitting there the four of us at the picnic table, the dogs sniffing the air, the creek burbling at the bottom of the canyon, and the two of us with smiles on our faces listening in silence.

“Do you get bored with that?” I asked.

“No!” You laughed.

A fine thing.

The sky was blue. The sun was high in the sky. And these were the smiles of my brother’s daughters.

We made New Year’s cards this year that had a cover with the image of the sun sitting on the horizon. We left if up to the viewer to derive a meaning — something like Ben Franklin’s observation about George Washington’s chair.

If I know the fair and industrious Trudy well, her preferred interpretation might differ from mine. Which is fine; that was after all the design’s purpose. But I’ll leave you with a less unambiguous version of mine:

source: Gustavo Viselner
hat tip: The [inestimable] Weekly Sift

They stood there looking at the blackboard, craning their necks, staring at the equations and the calculations and the trajectories. The white men in their white shirts and skinny early 60s ties and the colored computer Katherine Goble Johnson.

They puzzled over math they didn’t know — elliptical to parabolic trajectories. And then her eyes went wide.

“Euler’s method,” she whispered and ran off to get a book.

“Euler’s method? That’s ancient!” one of the others said.

And… well you’ll just have to see the movie (or read the book).