Saturday, March 14, 2026

Are These Steep Steps? I Don't Want To Trip

 

              Back in grade school one of the kids asked “Am I a bird?”  I said  “No.”  Then he asked, “Well, am I a plane?”  Again, I said   “No.”  And then he said,  “I guess  I AM SUPERMAN!”  And I responded, “ Nope!  You’re just so weird.  You make no gain.  You can’t fly, like a plane or not.  You certainly are not plain.  You ate even my supper, man!”  And then he told me, “You are not the Man Of Steel!  You are the Man Who Steals!”

              Talking to him made me feel that He Is not just literally lost in His Words, but He Is  Literaturely Losing (not loosening) His Mind!

              A few weeks later that kid left me a handwritten note on my desk.  In the hallway, I walked up to him, and asked, “Are you telling me that you are a sailor, one of those Popeyes?  Or maybe, do think that you Pop Eyes?  I sure don’t think you wrote ‘Pope Yes’!”

              He thought he was a Graviton.  He said his friends were Graviphotons.  He called me a Dilaton.  I wished he were a Sterile Neutrino.

              That reminded me of, going to school with all these Fermions, Quarks, Leptons, Bosons, Hadrons, Baryons, Mesons, Calorons, Merons and Sphalerons.  That stuff caused me to start growing plants back  in our grade school’s sand lot, and that got me interested in bicycling out of town, first to look at the farms, then to see the farmers, then to watch the lambs, and eventually to talk to a farmer so I could ask him to teach me how to keep things growing.

              Farming on one side.  Learning what made up the world I use every day.  And school on the other side.  Learning how things were built of the world I use every day, and what we think or understand, or try to us how existence was built of that we need, use, and are.  Nucleus (control center), Mitochondria (energy), Ribosomes (protein synthesis), ER (transport/synthesis), Golgi Apparatus (packaging), Lysosomes (waste breakdown), Cytoskeleton (support), Chloroplasts (plants, photosynthesis), Vacuoles (storage), and Centrioles, plus components like the Cell Membrane, Cytoplasm, Nucleolus, Vesicles, Peroxisomes, Cilia/Flagella, Nuclear Membrane, Chromosomes, and all of those Cell Walls.

              One summer vacation my family went to the ocean.  We brought along rods and reels.  We carried out lunches when we were out on our boat.  I also tried to swim.  I could get myself down to the bottom and look at what was looking back at me.  I also ate jellies and I ate fish.  I liked that but then that jellyfish tried to eat me.

              I survived.  I did not mind.  In fact, I enjoyed living through all this.  Then we went home.  Beginning to Feel my Life and starting to Feel Other Lives  led me to catching pets; frogs, snakes, turtles, racoons; and that got me to listen to my science teachers first about biology and then about chemistry, both to grow better pets and fenced in back yard areas, and mathematics.

              I studied Biology hard in middle school.  In the lab I tried so hard that I made a merger of a Goat and a Cow.  I got it to grow an I grew so proud of my ‘Coat’.

              Life was then and Life is now.  There are many Lives.  We may not even know what is Alive.  We learn.  Man has always learned.  Man is not the only one who learns.  We don’t understand ourselves, thoroughly, so how can any of us understand it all.  There was a squirrel that kept coming by my parents’ house when I was a kid.  He would run up our back door steps.  I thought he was dropping off eaten nuts shells by our door to put them out of his way.  But after a year and a half I touched one of what he dropped off and I felt and saw that they were not  just nut shells.  They were nuts, they seemed solid and all there.  At first, I lifted one up.  I looked at it and I saw it was a full, uneaten nut.  I looked at the rest of the pile and saw they were all full nuts.  And my world is full but I am not meaning that we are all ‘full nuts.’  In the past I would come out each day and sweep up what I thought were shells, and put them in a bag which I threw out in our garbage.  Now I put them in a bag and brought them to school.  I explored them with my teacher.  After a couple weeks, I opened up one and ate it.  It tasted good.  I did not feel ill over the next few days so I ate more.  I liked the taste so much that I ate them all, regularly.

              That squirrel sure was around my house a lot.  Once, when I was playing in the back yard, a racoon came by.  That squirrel scared him away.  Later, I saw a skunk approaching and the squirrel fought with him too!  I thought the squirrel was protecting himself.  But one day, when I was walking down the sidewalk, to school, I saw, in someone’s back yard my many time seen squirrel.  I watched and shared things enough that I could tell him apart from other squirrels.  Sometimes, away from home, I saw that he did not notice me.  And it surprised me when a possum came up to him.  I was afraid, at first for him, and then for the possum too because that possum was alive too.  I thought they would fight.  They did not.  Later on, other times, when I saw the squirrel and he did not see me, I saw him with dogs and cats and other animals.  They did not fight.  Some petted each other.  Some shared foods.  I saw him down the street playing with racoons.  I learned, by watching and playing with and observing him, I finally realized that he was protecting me.  He was feeding me.  He was keeping a constant, caring eye on me.  It came into my mind that, for him, I was his pet.  I was his pet that he would feed, and protect, and keep warm.  Doing life around him got me to realize we were, are, and will be equals.  We are both living together and caring about each other.  We, man, animals, breathe and breathing and artery flowing life are all around.  This is more than the door steps, the house, the neighborhood, the village.  This is the whole world.  This is the solar system.  This is the universe and beyond.

              Helped by all this, and my neighbors, and the kids at school, and those people, places, and things I came across, I acted like ‘just a human’ when I grew up and had to work to support myself.  I did not point out that the squirrels and racoons and even the fish and snakes and even the worms and ants, some come up to me to squawk or rub against me, or to just walk by me, or some of them, but not a large amount, will screech at me and scratch at me, just like my fellow neighbors, my fellow workmen, my fellow bosses and people I interview with.

              I am not a Client Losing Account Polka.  Life is in a swirl.  I like Life. I hope the rest of the World likes Life.  Life may exist in a lot of places.  Not just on This World.  We hopefully notice Life, but we do not know what Life really is.  We are Dancing Away.  We feel we are in a Polka.  I feel  that I am A Polka Dot.




                                                              I liked writing this                                                                                                                                          I hope you liked reading this                                                                                                                          I hope you like reading some of THESE

No comments:

Post a Comment