It's hot, and going to get hotter. Yesterday when Mikayla and I were out, the temperature sign at the Kemah City Hall said 99 degrees at 4pm. And today seems like it will be as hot. Tomorrow there's a chance for rain, and I'll believe that when I see it, though this is the anniversary of Tropical Storm Allison, which caused as much damage through flooding as any hurricane. Already two named storms this year before hurricane season even started on June 1st. As I said before, going to be a long hot summer, I believe. We've been running the air conditioning on and off since April, mostly on through the month of May. We keep it set pretty high but it does seem to run a lot lately. The birds sure are enjoying the water bowl, this morning mostly blue jays and an occasional cardinal. I saw a couple of grackles in the grass this morning, I know they live in the area but we seldom see any. They make the weirdest calls, electronic sounding, you'd think they were mechanical birds. I notice the cane has sprouted up again, a nice little fence like line of white shoots. You just have to admire something that persistent!
This morning a friend called from Vermont, he's back home from a trip to New Jersey and he told me about a poem that made him smile. So, I looked it up, a poem about numbers, and the easy companionship of math in our lives, well, easy for some . . .
Numbers
I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancers dressed as swans.
I like the domesticity of addition—
add two cups of milk and stir—
the sense of plenty: six plums
on the ground, three more
falling from the tree.
And multiplication's school
of fish times fish,
whose silver bodies breed
beneath the shadow
of a boat.
Even subtraction is never loss,
just addition somewhere else:
five sparrows take away two,
the two in someone else's
garden now.
There's an amplitude to long division,
as it opens Chinese take-out
box by paper box,
inside every folded cookie
a new fortune.
And I never fail to be surprised
by the gift of an odd remainder,
footloose at the end:
forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,
with three remaining.
Three boys beyond their mothers' call,
two Italians off to the sea,
one sock that isn't anywhere you look.
Mary Cornish
This poem has a host of ordinary observations that seem to just remind me of things that make me smile: eight dancers dressed as swans brings to mind a scene in Funny Girl where they are doing swan lake, and Barbra Streisand comes down on wires and says, "Whatdaya gonna do, shoot the swans, these lovelies?", the nightly making of dinner, some days harder than others, and so very . . . nightly <smile>, or the sparrows that come and go in the trees here with their little chatter and lively bounces, fish caught when we were young, and Dawm always caught the most, the fortune cookie Donna got that only said, "Soon, in good company", the most enigmatic fortune ever told, and, of course, the perpetual odd remainder, the one sock that isn't anywhere you look, that's got to be so ordinary by now no one is even surprised anymore when you get to the end of folding a basket of clothes and you have that perennial odd sock. We always talk about tiny black holes that suck them up and spew them out into someone else's universe and there they also marvel at how one sock turns up over and over.
I like that poem and all its little connections that make me even feel friendly to math, a real accomplishment since I have a problem with numbers, not the concepts of math, just the directionality and placement of the actual numbers, which are tricky things that never seem to be in the place they are meant to go.
The clouds have been building up at the horizon, looking like whipped cream almost thick enough to stand on. They look pretty fair-weather to me, and not likely to produce any rain, but if they keep piling up, who knows? At the moment, it's hot and humid and summer, with the sound of jets and lawnmowers and cicadas.
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