kicking along the curb

What the Mexicans, and most Spanish cultures, as I understand, do is stack up maiden names so that I, for example, would be Kenneth Janovsky-Schadt, actually Kenneth Something-Something-Something-Janovsky-Schadt, those Somethings going back to whenever they started giving out last names. In actual practice you have to cut it off somewhere or you’ll never get done signing your name on your Target receipt and bringing home that new microwave.

I’ll leave it to you to research Gus.

I’ve never heard about this elsewhere. Whatever happens on Earth happens here, folks on Mars don’t know about it for nine minutes later, but it still happens on Earth. England surrendered to the US somewhere in the East but Andy Jackson didn’t find out a week or so after he defeated the British in New Orleans but the surrender didn’t happen elsewhere. I don’t know where this elsewhere comes from.

There is Schrodinger's cat, and wouldn’t you think if somebody was going to invent a famous thought experiment, they would changer their name to something easy to spell, like Gus? And wouldn’t you think they would avoid harming a cuddly creature like a cat? Anyway that’s where the cat is in a sealed container with a vial of poison gas which might or might not be broken and the cat would might be dead or alive, and it wouldn’t be just that we wouldn’t know, but it actually wouldn’t be either, until we open the container. In a sense, nothing exists until it is observed, which settles that question about the tree falling in the forest, but is pretty vague about who or what is an observer.

Big hoopla about Nik. All the preparation was cool, and all the lights shining at night, and the mob of folks on the sidewalk. All cool. I watched it from the big tv in our meeting room and it was not so cool, mainly because it was all hoopla, and interviewing boring people, one of the worst of whom was a tv evangelist who has somehow jumped on Nik’s bandwagon, and then the total time on the tightrope was less than ten minutes, and he didn’t do any stunts up there, and he didn’t slip just a bit to make the crowd gasp, you might have just watched a kid trying not to step on a crack on the way to school, or me walking down to Walgreens for a six pack of PBR.

You know talking about that crack in the sidewalk suddenly took me back in time to when I was a little kid and closer to the sidewalk and paid attention to these things. OK, there was the street, then there was a little area between the street and the curb where the asphalt ran out and it was cement, and it was called the gutter, and one of the great things about growing up in Gage Park in the 50s was that in the fall people would rake their leaves into the area and set them on fire. How cool. Sometimes if there was a big pile of leaves and the burners had kids there would be a marshmallow roast. And the sweet smell would drift across the neighborhood all fall long. How cool.

And speaking of cool, if you were maybe twelve years old, and therefore deemed responsible, you could take a, oh what were they called, a garbage can made of like chicken wire where the family tossed all their burnable garbage, out to the alley and set it on fire. And you even had some kind of metal stick you could poke it with. How very very cool.

Anyway, after the curb, there was a little width of cement, maybe a foot between the parkway and the curb, where I guess you could walk to the car door without stepping on the lawn. If you wanted to do a really good job on shoveling the sidewalk, like if you were getting paid, you might shovel that too, but if you were doing it under duress from your parents you probably wouldn’t bother.

Then there was that mysterious parkway, it really belonged to the city, but you were expected to keep it up, seemed like some great injustice.

Then there was the sidewalk, the cool thing about the sidewalk was that it would have these stamps in it, like from the guys who paved it, and some of them were so worn away that it was a puzzlement figuring out what they said, pretty cool.

And then there was strange area that not everybody had. After the sidewalk there was a little dip down, maybe an inch or two, and then there was another curb in front of the front lawn. That little curb was something you would try to walk on, on the way back from school, which is what made me think of tightrope walking.

But that area between the front lawn curb and the sidewalk, maybe eight inches wide, which was lined with cement where worms would go to drown after a rain, and maybe if you were a real little kid you would try to save them, but when you got older you would squash them, what was it for? What was it called?

I was going to go on with a discussion of bravery. Is it really a virtue? Where is the dividing line between timidity and wise prudence? Seems we have a penchant for calling anybody we don’t like a coward, even if what they did might have been very brave, though evil. So what’s with that?

But the talk of sidewalks has taken up all my time today