Skip to main content

Perpetual Motion

It was a most remarkable phone call!  


The pleasant young woman next to us, between flights in Denver, held a long, animated, conversation with herself.  It had to have been with herself:  she never stopped talking long enough for anyone else to have said anything.  


She laughed.  She gestured, corrected herself, and went into great detail, endless detail, fascinating detail.  


She did not need replies to prompt her, so I tried to imaging what she might be talking about, endlessly, without pause, without hesitation.  Maybe, I thought, she is describing every detail of every meal she has eaten since October.  Maybe she had a job interview as a tour guide for a ferris wheel, and is telling her mother just how it went.  


She was asian, and an asian man eventually arrived and sat at her right.  He was occupied with carefully and precisely demolishing the largest sandwich I have ever seen.  He brutally tore it into halves before he set about on his mission to avoid starvation in 2012.  


It was not evident whether they were together, or not.  Only their similarities in age, and my foolish assumptions about race might have made it seem so.  When she finally stood up, without missing a word, and walked away, and his subsequent peer in her direction suggested anything, but what it suggested might have been only that she was very attractive, and he knew that.  


"Wouldn't it be awful if they allowed cell phone usage on the planes?", Mari asked.  "Imagine two hours of people talking to themselves, non-stop!"


I don't know whether she boarded our flight.  Just as I had not understood a word of what she said in what sounded to my tenderized ears like an asian language, I never actually saw either her or the sandwich king get on a plane.  The only clue I had, again, was what seemed to be a shimmering vibration of the roof of the concourse as we flew by on take-off, but that could have been just an earthquake caused by fracking for natural gas.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more