Category Archives: Prose

rain

July 4, 2014 6:45 AM , Leave a Comment ,

The storm comes on.  Steadily approaching the house.  I wait with anticipation.   You can tell when it’s going to be a good one.  Taste it in the air.  Rain, a good hard rain, has an earthy sharp smell.  I don’t need anything more than a whiff of that scent to know that it’s coming.

A steady patter at first.  The best storms build up slowly but surely over time.  I remember one Summer on the Outer banks of North Carolina.  A hurricane was coming in.  A near miss on the clean side of the storm.  Just a little category 1 so I knew I didn’t have much to worry.  I sat in a reclining couch with a glass of ice tea in the glass covered front porch of my grandparents house and just watched the storm roll in from the Atlantic over the next 3 hours.  Watched the waves rise out by the dock and the rain come down in sheets.  Somehow it was soothing watching it all.

The storm intensifies.  Distant thunder.  The old kids trick of counting between the lightning flash and the thunder. 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3 miss….  The next time I barely finish 2 Mississippi before the rumble.  Getting closer.  I see in my mind’s eye a Spring afternoon in New Mexico on top of a mountain with the rest of my scouting friends.  In the distance we could see the lightning strikes of a storm hit the ground.  We could track the storm’s progress as the lightning strikes got closer and closer.  We knew we had to hurry down off this bald mountain and find cover before it arrived.

The storm has arrived.  Lightning in its full glory with thunder accompanying it immediately.  The lights flicker on and off nervously.  Finally as a particularly close bolt lands they go totally off.  Lightning itself is purple when it’s up close.  Driving the back roads between College Station and Houston one Saturday morning.  Miles from anywhere.  No choice but to keep driving.  Literally no one around to ask for help or shelter.  Ahead of me a tree next to the road gets hit.  Less than twenty feet away.  My eyes are saturated by the brightness of the lightning bolt.  A purple after glow dances across my field of vision and I have to struggle to stay on the road.  Wonderstruck by how vivid it was. I don’t even remember the boom of the thunder.

The storm abates.  Somewhat sad to see something so mighty patter out into a measly drizzle.  So tame now compared to what it was moments ago.  Walking cross the polo fields of A&M trying to get home.  No car, no ride, no other way to get home but walk in the storm.  The driving rain lashing at my face stings.  It’s pitch black out.  The only light coming from the lightning.  In the distance the lightning makes all sorts of crazy patterns as it dances in the skies.  Thunder making everything shake.  Every inch of me soaked in rain.  Nothing for it but to put my head down and walk on.  As I get to my apartment complex the rain suddenly stops, the skies open up and a small shaft of sun comes through the clouds.  I have to stop and laugh.  All that drama for nothing.  If I’d waited half an hour I could have been dry right now.

 

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”                                      – Macbeth

 

Posted in: home, life in general, outdoors, prose, thought

The numbers of life

February 22, 2014 6:59 AM , 2 Comments ,

Have you ever read a book or a poem or listened to a song or looked at a painting and thought to yourself how perfect it is?  Have you ever looked at a landscape and pondered that it somehow resonates with you somewhere deep inside just because it is the way it is?

I don’t mean that these things are just pleasant to contemplate but that the way that these things are put together (whatever it is) are for lack of another word, perfect?

Well things like the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio do exist in nature and it seems many natural phenomena and living things use these ratios.  Life seems to be able to express itself using math in various wonderful ways.

But I want to focus more on human arts.  The way that you are sometimes reading a book and you read a passage and you stare at a sentence and marvel at the way it is put together.  Every word carefully chosen, the structure just right.  When you finish reading it the result is poetic or even melodic to your mind.  Any change, any word substitution would ruin it and the result would seem off-balance.

I remember a sci-fi show years ago where an alien civilization came into contact with humans and were amazed at our music as they had no such concept of their own.  They were a culture totally devoted to math.  They valued the music not for the song contents but for the mathematical expression of the musical notes.  To them this was a new way to appreciate numbers.

I sometimes wonder that if we were to express novels, or poems in some mathematical fashion that well written works would come out as well written and beautifully complex mathematical equations that balanced out.

Perhaps then maybe we too can be expressed as mathematical equations.  Maybe if we were able to express our lives in terms of numbers and equations we could clearly see what was unbalanced or wrong and take steps to correct it.  Would it be that easy?  Would we even be happy if we knew how to do this?  Or would we continue to live life as we have previously done so because to us the equation seems perfect no matter what the numbers say.

Posted in: art, prose, science, thought

The barren landscape

January 1, 2014 12:01 AM , 1 Comment ,

I stand on a desolate windswept shore.  Life hasn’t had a chance to change or alter this place.  As I look from horizon to horizon I see nothing but a dull grey panorama.  Not even the sky looks that much different as it matches the land in color and somber attitude.  Behind me the sea is dark and unwelcoming.  I cannot go back.

I take a step and I alter this land permanently, my feet scratching the ground and sending up a small cloud of dust.  The alteration having a ripple effect as I move across this alien expanse.

Little mounds of dust piling up, then dunes and hills.  Seeds borne on the wind settling into the new shelters for life and setting up shop.  Green sprouting as my heavy thread continues changing the topography.

A panoply of colors as flowers bloom.  The din of noise as bees and other insects are drawn to the new life.  Birds chirp in the branches of the leafy tall trees that have recently taken root.  Foxes, rabbits, and other animals shyly watching me from the dark undergrowth.

I continue down what appears to be a country lane and top a hill to see a shining city in the horizon.

Life has come to this alien world and it is due to my efforts and my imagination.  My personality, my ideas, my spirit will populate this place.

We have to remember this when we think of the future.  This new year that is coming up, it is our barren landscape.  Or perhaps it’s a blank canvas calling for us to fill it.  However you choose to think of it, please remember that you are the architect of your future and yours will be the decision and the responsibility as to how it turns out.

Make it the future that you want it to be.

Posted in: life in general, motivation, prose

spare change

December 24, 2013 8:47 AM , 2 Comments ,

 

3 coins

3 coins

I will always rummage round my change and look for pre-1962 quarters.  This was the last year that quarters were made from silver.  Apart from being ridiculously valuable right now ($19.42 per ounce today 12/23/13) these coins have seen a lot of history.

I look at these quarters and try to imagine what they’ve seen, what they’ve gone through to wind up in my pocket.  I think of all the owners through the years and the various transactions that they’ve taken part in.

Could you imagine the future that lay ahead of you when you were struck bright and shiny one day in 1944?

Did you get used by some G.I. to call his parents and tell them that he was on the way home from the war?

How many times did you lay in a coin drawer at some supermarket and were served up as change to some shopper that didn’t even take a second look at you?

Were you carried surreptitiously in the night by a parent and slipped under a pillow in exchange for a child’s tooth?

How many months did you lie in a dark piggy bank waiting to be released by a child for some special purchase?

Were you part of a day’s panhandling and get used to buy a bottle of cheap rotgut liquor by some beggar?

Who lost you in a snow bank one cold blustery December morning and didn’t bother to retrieve you?  Who picked you out of the gutter the next Spring?

Have you traveled the world and seen many distant lands or just been happy to travel the highways and byways of America?

Have you passed through my hands before and I just haven’t noticed?

Posted in: prose