My Best Friend

28th of June. It's my birthday. lt's the day I reaffirn my status as a 24-year-old.

I'm alone.

A neighbourhood bar. 3 friends. Alright, 1 friend and 2 aquaintances. And an aquiantace of an aquaintance. But we can still drink beers and be polite and pretend that we care.

Two beers and a shot later our patience is wearing thin. Let's get the check, let's shake hands.

Start the engine. Stop the engine. Open the door.

What's that sound? Feet shuffling on the wooden floor. A snort turns into a bark. A small golden object hurtles towards me.

She licks me, she loves me. She's my best friend. Ever.

Dog.

Ten Things

Looking out through an open window.
Wearing flip-flops to walk the dog.
Chipmunks everywhere. And I mean everywhere.
Eating dinner on the patio.
Sunglasses at 8pm.
White wine, not red.
Ice in the coffee.
The sound of cicadas at dusk.
Grass under your toes.

And ice cream in the car with the windows rolled down.


That's what summer is all about.

Curtis

When I got into the waiting taxi, the driver was talking on his cellphone. I listened to him murmuring into his handset and I hazarded a guess. "Is that your girlfriend?". He put her on speakerphone and passed the conversational baton to her. "Are you my girlfriend?"

A pause. Then an amused voice spoke up from the palm of his hand "I guess I am."

That settled, I suggested to Curtis (that was the driver's name) that we pass through a McDonalds drivethrough. I was hungry and there's nothing like Maccers after drinks at 2am. He let me buy him a fizzy orange soda. With the ice thus broken, I indulged my curiosity.

He said it was his first day driving a taxi since his return. Return from where?, I asked. From away, he said. Away where?, I probed. My hunch was right. He had just got out of prison.

How he got into prison was quite a tale. He had been driving an NFL player who was with the Bengals. He'd been doing it for a while and thought they had become friends. Until the day they got hit by a car. Curtis got hurt and missed an appointment with a probation officer (so clearly he'd been in trouble before). For missing the meeting he had to go to jail. His NFL buddy turned out to be no friend and no help.

While in jail, Curtis' girlfriend told him that she had delivered their baby. And that the baby was now his problem. So when he came out, he had to take charge of the child as well as two other children from two other relationships.

And so here he was, driving a taxi through Cincinnati early in the morning, telling his story to a complete stranger.

How much of what he'd told me was true, I wondered. And what were the things that he had left out?

Howdy, Neighbour!

I touched a piece of the moon yesterday and I am unashamedly giddy about it. I was at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, home of the space shuttles. There, on display and available for visitors to touch, is a square inch of rock that's been brought back from the moon.

There's something staggering about touching an object that's come from another world nearly half a million kilometers away. And something sobering about knowing what went into bringing it back. The moon rock is displayed a few meters away from a Saturn V rocket, which was the sort of rocket used for lunar missions. The moon rock is a few centimeters long and weighs a few hundred grams. The rocket is 110 meters long and weighs over 3,000 tons. That means it's about as big as a 35-storey building. It took the efforts of tens of thousands of men and women to build. And it claimed at least three lives.

Astronaut Eugene Cernan stepped off the moon's surface in 1972. He didn't know it then, but he was about to become 'the last man on the moon'. He still holds that unfortunate title, nearly forty years later.

A lot happened in those forty years. Wars were fought. Smallpox was eliminated. Our world became digital. And uncomfortably warmer. But nothing, simply nothing, came close to firing our imaginations like the grainy images of men in white spacesuits clumsily bouncing off a desolate lunar landscape. I touched a fragment of that landscape yesterday. I could not feel more pleased, or more privileged.

Second Innings

Yeah, it's my second winter in Boston. You can tell by the fact that I now speak Farenheit. It's such a relief that I can do that now. It's been excruciating to have to mentally convert from degrees F to degrees C, just to decide whether I should feel icy cold or totally frigid.

But I still resent the Farenheit scale for being inexplicably difficult. It was originally designed so that the temperature of the human body would be 96 degrees. Not 100 degrees, but 96. Then, in an "improvement", the scale was modified so that the difference between the melting and boiling points of water would be 180 degrees. Not 200 degrees, but 180. Oh, and of course the freezing point of water is 32 degrees. Not 30 degrees, but 32. It is a travesty of common sense that the scale still survives.

Clearly it takes more than 2 winters to learn to speak in ounces. That's partly because of the number of ounces that exist. There's the avoirdupois ounce, the troy ounce, and the Maria Theresa ounce, each of which is a different measure equivalent to between 28 and 31 grams. Then there's the Dutch ounce which, with characteristic Dutch obtuseness, is 100 grams. And then, just to really make things enjoyable, there's the fluid ounce which is not even a measure of weight. So when I go shopping for food, it's always a matter of conjecture as to whether I will buy enough to feed a family of 3 or an entire clan of Indians.

I miss the sheltered, metric world in which I grew up. It was a simpler time, when men were men, women were strangers, and it was a cold day if you could stand in the sun without breaking into a sweat.

Interestingly, according to the 2006 CIA World Factbook as quoted in Wikipedia, i.e. according to an obviously incontrovertible source, there are only 3 countries which do not use the metric system as their standard for measures. One of them is the US. The second is Liberia. The third is Myanmar.

Make of that what you will.

Punching My Card

It's almost obvious what makes a person begin a blog: an irresistible and sometimes ill-advised urge to express. Lately I've been more interested in what makes a blogger stop posting. I'd like to figure out what happened to me.

As "A regular reader" commented, I seem to be on an indefinite sabbatical. I do, don't I? Except that a sabbatical is meant to be time taken off for rest, or for learning. I'm afraid in the past few months I've rested little and learned less. And, much as it disappoints me to admit it, I've not thought anything interesting enough to motivate me to write.

It's a potent combination of circumstances. I've had too much to do at work, as much again to do at home, and too little inspiration in either place. That combination ensured I would stay away from my keyboard. Perhaps it was inevitable that I would enter such a phase sooner or later.

I can only hope it is a phase, and not a permanent condition. Keep watching this space, and you'll find out.

Back In Time

When you're trudging up a mountain at four thousand meters, when you take deep gasping breaths to suck in as much oxygen as you can find at high altitude, when the sun seems to bake the skin on your neck even as the wind chills the sweat running down your back, you need some intense motivation to keep on going.

Especially when you know that after crossing this first mountain pass you will break for lunch and then climb another pass later that same afternoon.

It's hard work. But no one said that hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu would be easy. It's a labour of four days and three nights. At times you wonder why you're putting yourself through this trial. You've trudged up and down mountainsides for tens of kilometers. You've put up with an abundance of mosquitoes and a lack of personal hygiene. You've experienced burning heat and freezing cold and all points in between.

It starts to feel worthwhile when you catch your breath and look around. The Andes rear up proudly in every direction. Up close they are covered in brush and spotted with the occasional llama. Further away they stand tall and black, glorious in their simplicity. And in the distance rise the benevolent snowy heights of La Veronica and Salcantay, looking down from six thousand meters.

And then you encounter remnants of the Inca empire and you realize you are making memories that will last a lifetime. Like the time when you explored a small Inca outpost shaped like a giant ceremonial knife. Or when you gazed in awe at a staircase plunging down for hundreds upon hundreds of meters. The excitement is building up now, and it comes to a crescendo on the final morning, as you crest the path that leads to the Sun Gate.

Then, as you top this final rise you are greeted with a sight that takes your breath away. For a few brief, shining minutes the dawning sun shines full onto a magical city in the near distance. It sits like a proud jewel on top of a smaller mountain below you. Then, with astonishing rapidity, the city is cloaked in a rising mist of clouds.

You're tired, you're exhilarated, you're hungry, you're wide-eyed, you want to stand up and jump, you want to sit down and stare, you look around at fellow hikers and grin your mutual congratulations, you stare straight ahead at the mountaintop jewel and pretend you're the only person on earth.

You take a picture. You eat a chocolate bar. You take a very deep breath.

This is why you came.