This is my son Nick--an abbreviated version--& a leaf--a concretized version.I'm sitting at a coffee & tea shop, drinking green tea. There's a little girl, attire echoing the pink & gray of the above photo, in chair limbo. Is she getting up or down? One knee rests on the seat of said chair. Her other leg is outstretched, pink & gray sneaker suspended a few inches from the floor. Up? Or down? In the nonce, there is neither. What is the half-life of her indecision? Like Schrodinger's famous cat, in the box with its radioactive companion, unless I tell you what she did, she is suspended there forever, a still unravish'd bride of quietness, a foster-child of silence and slow time. (I know, I've gone from the cat box to Keats. What is the probability of that? The half-life?)
Now time for the confession. The half-life of her indecision--& indeed her entire trip to the coffee shop with mother & grandmother, none of the 3 smiling--was less than the time for me to compose the paragraph about it. Before I'd posed the first question, she'd pulled that second knee up to rest beside its companion. By the time I'd thought of adding Keats, they were gone, unsmiling, half-lifed. C'est la vie/2.
Okay, so I've played with words & emailed until I'm starvicating. The green tea is not cutting it. There's a restaurant that has the best ribs just a ways up the road, so that's where I'm going.
Blog alternative:
123. Mix some poetry & physics. Or biology & stamp-collecting. Or ? & ?.
