While a Rabbi and a Priest Slept

 From The Sunday Muse: 

A moon and crow walk into a bar.

“What is this?  Some kind of joke?” asks the bartender.

He is grumpy.

“No,” says the crow. “We’re serious.”

“Too serious,” says the barkeep, “if you ask me.”

“I’d like a starry sky, then,” says the moon. 

“And a puddle of rainwater for my friend.” 

A Bit of a Detour, and Some Flash Fiction

 So, my weekly attempt at flash fiction here failed because blogger.com wouldn't allow me to upload the necessary graphic to make the fiction work. I resorted/reverted to my Wordpress account--just this once--because I wrote the damn thing and I want it out there. 

Find it here:  https://blogarahmah.wordpress.com/2021/05/27/carpe-diem/

Edit: Working now. Here is an unrelated picture to prove it. 

A picture of some outbuildings belonging to an
estate once occupied by George Caleb Bingham,
Independence, Missouri

The Tea Party

                 Again, this is in response to the post: Flash Fiction for the Purposeful Practitioner:2021 Week #20--some flash fiction inspired by the picture of the week:

         The two bicycles seemed to appear out of nowhere. At first, as I approached the house, it sat empty, the yard neglected and bare and the windows dark as always, but as I passed, I saw the bikes and the lush landscaping and curtains fluttering behind the windows as if from light breezes from within. Two more steps, and I saw a black and white cat sitting in the window. 

        Mrs. Hudspeth had a black and white cat like that before she died. I know because on my morning walks it would trot out to greet me by the path and look up at me until I stopped and petted its head. I knew Mrs. Hudspeth had put it outside because her two old friends, Mrs. M______ and Mrs. R_______ were over for tea, and Mrs. R________ was allergic. 

        This cat, the one in the window, only looked at me curiously, and as I looked back, it shimmered and vanished. A trick of the light, I thought, but at that I turned, because of the sound—the squeaky, scraping sound of old bicycle gears and the light crunching of narrow tires on gravel.  I looked, and the bicycles were gone. 

Time, Memory, and Humidity (which it is, and not the heat)

     A couple of Tuesday . . . OK, yes, it's Tuesday . . . a couple of Tuesday morning observations. First, and you've heard this from me before, the "dew point," which is that temperature where, with the amount of moisture in the air, dew will form. You could think of it as a sort of saturation point. Right now the dew point here is 62, the temperature 63. 99% humidity, thank you very much. 

    I'm reading a book about time, written by the physicist Sean Carroll. It seems as though there is something called "the arrow of time." It just means that in physics, strictly, purely speaking, there is nothing to address the fact that the past is any different than the future. There is space-time, and one way to think about things is to say that at this moment, the past, present and future all exist. That doesn't sound too exciting, except that it may enable the idea that the future is all preset and no matter what we do, it's going to happen just that way.  Or has happened, or exists at this moment just this way. 

    Oh yeah, there is entropy, which necessitates past and future being different. 

    My head now hurts. 

    Finally, people are talking about the Covid-19 isolation, that year, 2020, and how now it's over and we're all trying to figure out what to think of it. Like everything else, nowadays, with all the media telling us what is real/not-real, unless you actually got Covid, it was just an idea, and we all acted on that idea.  Just like everything else. Now we've got a new idea, and as we move on, we will start to create the memory of 2020. It will be interesting to see just how many ways it was. Which all sounds very irreverent and for that I apologize. Things DO happen, for real, even though, not as much as we like to think. Life is sort of like a soap opera, where something happens only once every ten episodes or so, and the rest of the time people just talk about it. 

An Afternoon at the Beach

This is in response to the post: Flash Fiction for the Purposeful Practitioner:2021 Week #19--some flash fiction inspired by the picture of the week: 

So, I seldom do these, but here goes: 

 

The woman rose from her table and stood, as if posing for me, letting me see the curves of her body and the golden skin of her back and shoulders. Leaving her books and sunglasses behind, she walked across the beach towards the waves that lapped at the white sand. She waded into the water and then swam from the shore. 

I watched her, admiring the grace and strength of her strokes as she receded toward the horizon. She became smaller and smaller until, finally, she was gone. I sat down at her table, shaded from the afternoon sun. 

An hour passed, then two. I picked up her books and read them, sharing with her their words, as if I might understand what they said to her.  When it became too dark to see, I set them back down and I rose and left, going the other way, toward the land. 

Have a good one!   -Roy

The Arrow of Time

         It happens often enough. I decide to watch something on TV that is actually edifying and educational, get half-way through it and run out of I.Q. This never happens while watching Taxi reruns, during which I identify perhaps a bit too strongly with Reverend Jim. 

        But I digress. 

        Recently I started watching some segments of a TV show called The Great Courses.  These are lectures about various things hosted by high-powered, qualified people in various fields. Previously, I watched a few on the Black Death--the plague in the 14th Century world--as it seemed relevant to our own 21st Century pandemic, but it got rather scholarly, not to say boring. But, yeah, less and less relevant, seemed to me. One take-away, though: probably if that particular plague returned, it would be less of an issue due to modern medicine, not to mention the fact that it sort of depended on humans cohabiting with rats, which--I hope, at least--is not so common nowadays.

        On to the "arrow of time." As the imminently qualified Dr. Sean Carroll tried to explain to me during the first few episodes of "The Great Courses--Mysteries of Physics--Time," physics treats time as a component of "spacetime," and it seems as though the past, present and future all exist. This, opposed to the idea that the past does not exist anymore, and the future does not exist yet. Maybe?  Nothing in physics demands that the past is not the same as the future. Instead, there is an "arrow of time," where entropy increases all the time and the universe moves forward in the way that we have come to think it does. 

        Intriguing, yes. Comprehensible, no. I don't think I'm going to try to finish the series, (especially as Amazon Prime is charging me $2 per 30 minute episode,) but I leave with a little more understanding of just how ignorant I am, which is something I've always found tends to keep me out of trouble, to some degree, even though, of course, as always, there's nothing wrong with thinking you know something as long as you don't act on it. 

Dental Entropy

         I am in a good mood because yesterday I had two teeth pulled and a temporary bridge spanning 6 teeth installed, a procedure I had been dreading for about a month now, and it all went without a hitch. So far, anyway. 

        When I was about 8 years old, I was living on Sierra Ct., in Palo Alto. I was at home, and was supposed to be licking and installing S&H Green stamps into their books, but I tired of that pretty quickly and went outside to play on my skate board. You recall that “back in the day,” a skateboard was not a sophisticated semi-flexible platform with low-rolling-resistance resin wheels and needle bearing trucks. It was as the name implied, a board with a skate nailed to it. And we were the ones, or thereabouts, who helped put a man on the moon.  Who knew? 

        I was using my skate board as a kind of sled—I had one knee on it and was pushing myself along with the free foot, both hands on a wooden cross bar nailed to the front, like low handlebars. I encountered an overly large gap in the sidewalk and the skateboard stopped abruptly but my head (and the rest of my body) continued on, arcing downward until my face hit the sidewalk. More precisely, my two front teeth, both of which broke off about half-way to the gum line. 

        Later that same day, my mother came home from work and, as I remember with crystal clarity, I was lying on the couch eating a banana as she entered the living room, and I showed her what happened to my teeth. Her reaction was violently dramatic, with lots of anger directed at me. 

        I felt horrible. It was, after all, my fault. Plus, it happened because I was shirking my duties concerning the Green Stamps. My punishment seemed to be that once root canals were performed on each front tooth (think: Theodoric of York style 1958 dentistry) each tooth was capped with a stainless steel crown. Both of them. I don’t recall being ridiculed for this, but I didn’t like it. 

        Over the years I had—a guess—maybe five sets of crowns installed on these poor broken front teeth. I always had dreams where my front teeth fell out, and I would wake from them in a very real panic, checking with my tongue and fingers that they were actually still there. 

        A few years back, the root tip of one of them became irreversibly infected and that tooth got pulled. Yesterday, for the same reason, the other one got pulled. 

        It actually feels like a relief. A 62 year-long saga has finally ended. I know this sounds ridiculous, but it’s the way I feel. I expected to feel depressed about having no front teeth, but, no. It’s fine. Good riddance. I now owe the universe one less thing! 

Wealth

        I was wondering why we have made a celebrity out of Bill Gates (his impending divorce being somehow deserving of headlines across the media board) because he has accumulated so much money that once belonged to all of us. 

        No, this is not a Socialism endorsement at all, but more like an observation about human behavior. I think it has something to do with the fact that all televangelists and most financial advisors wear more gold and jewelry during a single day than I have in total, or why defeated ex-president Trump's one-time success seemed to be so connected to the public perception of his wealth and power. (Something about which he was all too aware, and which he carefully cultivated.)