why my kitten knows more than you do (and maybe my crazy parents do too)

         Well, there it is, a mewling shadow with oddly bright and dark eyes, clinging and scrambling up the split live oak in the backyard. Two years have gone by since the Craigslist Kitten Catastrophe (see "Drivers, Kittens, and Thieves: Our Modern Life"), and my parents finally decided to get another kitten. Or, as they tell it, they accidentally happened upon one. I think their mutual developing craziness helps them to forget bad things ever happened. It makes their aging quite endearing, if a bit frightening sometimes.

         Example: the parents have never been big on finishing projects. They're "project-starters," they would tell you, not "project finishers." Sometimes things come up and money or time or family keep us from finishing, says the dad. We have a lot of maintenance, from the mom. And it's true -- two acres in NorCal is no national park, but it's no walk in the park either. Still, I'm pretty sure maintenance means starting fewer projects as much as it means finishing fewer projects. And with at least 100 people showing up to my dad's birthday party in less than two weeks, I've made a mental list of things they intend to finish "sometime" or "soon":

         At least one room in the house is recently remodeled and unfurnished; one shed in the pasture still needs doors and windows (these have been missing so long the plywood covering the holes has warped fully inward, providing a splendid view of the garden through the north-facing wall); another shed in the backyard is still only half-completed and could run up to three tokens at lower-class county fairs, a maze of broken and uninstalled cabinets, bookcases, table-saws, and sawed up tables stacked up inside; a third shed on the other side of the creek is almost fully concealed by blackberry brambles that might serve equally well as bullwhips of spiky death.

         There is a retaining wall of concrete blocks next to the house, upon which sits a broken tractor and all its broken parts, decorated Deliverance-chic with cracked five-gallon buckets, sheet metal, picnic tables, and enough Rubbermaid trash cans to service Fenway Park. (A carport is supposed to grace the foundations of the wall at some point. The tractor was purchased some 4 years ago since which time it has never moved). The first layer of another wall takes up most of the parking space in front of the house -- which makes the parking of six cars an effort in creativity. Six cars, you know, for the two drivers that live here year round -- not including the two they just recently got rid of (sadly, in one case I was the buyer . . .).

         All of this strikes my parents as normal. They are wonderful people for it, really. And the fact that they accidentally have more cars than Usher (or, for the older folks, Liberace), more unfinished business than Edmond Dantes (or, for the younger folks, Bruce Wayne), and (for the second time in three years) a kitten -- this is probably as much a sign of their kindness as their craziness.

         But I digress, and as I'm thinking all this, little black kitten has clambered over 7 feet into the oak tree, choosing to stare down at me from a particularly claw-attracting patch of moss. He has fallen partway down the trunk on several occasions now, head- and tail-first, and once I was sure I would have to explain to my mother that her new kitten was no longer . . . again. I'm sure I could find someone into kitten taxidermy on Craigslist. Fortunately for my mother's psyche, the kitten's developing claws are sharp and his balance good -- and it appears he is determined to show this particular tree exactly how intimidating it is to him.

         Strangely, I know the kitten is going to come down before he looks around and checks the area, before he stops licking his back and stands back up, even before he reaches the green kitten-velcro mossy patch at all. I know he could make his way up the whole tree without trouble, though it is easily 40 feet tall. I know he is physically capable of scrambling down as well, despite his size and youth: I know how the subtle twisting branches and gnarled bark of the oak are so suitable for climbing. I know he probably wants to sit atop the very highest branch and survey his land; he is, after all, going to be king. I know the attraction of the height as a place to see and a place to be seen. He could be the kitten that did it, and all the people of the world would climb their ladders in order to wonder at his unparalleled cuteness, point out his bravery, and offer to help him down. I know and he knows, though surely in different ways.

         But I also know he won't do it, and he doesn't. He skids clumsily groundward from one velcro patch to another, bounding past me in my reverie to chase the brown and crunchy leaf which scuffled past him in the afternoon breeze. The green ones can wait, I suppose, until he's bigger or brighter or less suspicious of the fallen ones. The tall ones will fall eventually too, though he can't possibly know that and he probably does. There are new leaves to chase and new trees to begin climbing. The world is filled with things a kitten knows and doesn't know. Why would he miss out on all that for the sake of a single tree?

         So I guess, in a weird way, the hundreds of incomplete projects around my parents' house may not be inspired by laziness as much as eagerness -- as much as wonder. Maybe their foolishness is actually wisdom, something they've always known even though they don't. Maybe I don't know it either.

         I think I've got too many things to do to figure that out.

         Oh, and this is Tuba. Or, if you're my dad, Tarmac. He's pretty smart, and undeniably cute. He does not like being photographed. He also has fleas.

my u-haul the universe

          It first struck me somewhere in eastern Oklahoma, I think, careening down a hill in my 5-ton, 14ft. U-Haul rental truck. In the past 16 hours, I'd driven through hundreds of towns, each with its own infinite set of possibilities, every sign an invitation and every face a reminder that I could be anywhere. Anywhere at all. And there I was, driving 2100 miles to a giant city in the middle of the desert. And here I am.

          To be fair, I've never lived in the plains states and I never really intend to: Oklahoma, at least, is by no means without it's own personality, and it has its fair share of hills to break up the monotony (how else could I have been careening?). But the westward drive on I-40 left me with a vast sense of dislocation. The swollen greens of Missouri blended through Oklahoma into the patched openness of northern Texas, which subtly and suddenly became New Mexico desert all the same – and there I was in the middle, my ability to see out the window forever impeded only by the sloping curvature of the earth. The space itself was an open invitation to everything and nothing all at once, potential and entropy crashing together where the last green-brown blur met the sky.

          Maybe it was the week at Math Camp, but I couldn't help thinking of Zeno in that moment that he first considered his paradox. Imagine: the man stands at one end of a room staring across the infinite expanse of infinitesimal spaces set before him, unable to register the wall before him so bewildered is he by the inch and half inch and millionth of and inch and a millionth of that millionth right before his toes. He cannot help but quail at the task before him: the infinitude of motion closes in on him, the expanse ever approaching him in these millionths of millionths, some kind of inexorable localized eschaton trumpeting the banality of every possible step. He is paralyzed by the task. Which millionth of a millionth of a millionth might he dare to cross?

          In an instant, the world spins away in that green-brown blur – the walls and floor, his hands, those feet. And Zeno, a man who has never heard of canvas, finds himself twisting through some kind of monster scene, the bastard child of Van Gogh and Dadaism. His mind a swirling, darkening, stationary monument to the rigor of Greek logic, he has beaten Descartes and Sartre to the punch. He cannot know the impossible distances his blood has traveled, the countless electrons shivering with anticipation in his own fading body. How could he eat a peach?

          And in one further cosmologically shattering motion, his right foot comes into perspective, swinging confidently across such infinite space, the room bursts back into existence, and first half, then all of his body crosses this immense mass of space. As step follows step, he does what he cannot, and his mind is restored to an order that his logic could not define. Reaching the opposite side of the room, he begins to write.

          And, strangely, here I still am – me and my new city in the middle of the desert, walls and roads and sand beyond. I have taken Zeno's step inductively and crossed that room, marked the blur and walked into it. I have crossed these 2100 million millionths, and the horizon has become a solid thing – faces here and signs as well.

          There's good news, too: the blur is ever returning and the curvature of possibilities themselves ineluctable. I do believe I will enjoy taking more steps, making these infinite millionths of anywheres into somewheres to behold.