April 6-13, 2014
Notes on Florida – Part the Second
Castle’s
nephew may think Florida is “ugly." (See Notes − Part the First). And he may not. What we say doesn’t always
match what we think. This is true whether we say little or a lot. Neff is quiet
− I like him for that; mid-twenties, a bit awkward; he’s always looking around,
looking at, looking for. Watching
him, I wonder what he sees and what he makes of it.
What does he make of his Uncle Bob’s interest in − or mania for − critters, which has meant we’ll spend a second day in the Everglades National Park, looking for more alligators and crocodiles, more manatees and moose, more ospreys and anhingas, more wild pigs and an invisible panther?[1]
What does he make of his Uncle Bob’s interest in − or mania for − critters, which has meant we’ll spend a second day in the Everglades National Park, looking for more alligators and crocodiles, more manatees and moose, more ospreys and anhingas, more wild pigs and an invisible panther?[1]
At breakfast this morning, the two of us − Neff and I; Castle doesn't eat breakfast − were with a very quiet Indian couple, about my age. And Neff motioned
with a shrug to a man coming in to take up a table next to us. Apparently, he'd seen the man before. "Watch what's coming," the shrug said, part of what the shrug said.
The man stood beside the table for
close to a minute, still yet troubled: burly, almost brutish, short- and tight-limbed,
grizzled hair cut almost to his scalp, dough-faced. The woman he was waiting
for arrived − taller than he, lanky and blonde, her long face full of angles. They
spoke in German. He sat down; she went to the breakfast bar, brought back two expanded
polystyrene foam bowls of canned fruit cocktail.
Then her daughter came in, same long hair,
long frame, long face, red-headed son/grandson on her hip. Then his son, same
burly, short-limbed build, same dough face, joined the table. But the “son”
and the “daughter” were clearly husband and wife; either he had married the image
of his mother, or she had married the image of her father. Or . . . what − brother had
married sister? (The grandson did have
an Appalachian/Hapsburg look about him.) But that was highly, highly unlikely; still, it was impossible to know without
asking, and Castle wasn’t there to ask as he almost surely would have,
interrupted in his cracked German, “Sie
ist Ihre Tochter, oder?”
Families are impenetrable mysteries to those outside them. And asking really does no good; they are unlikely to tell the truth about themselves. It isn’t necessarily willful deception; they don't know the truth about themselves. Families are impenetrable mysteries to those inside them.
In American
(salt water) crocodiles, the sex of the hatchling is determined neither by his mother or her father but by the outside
temperature when he or she was inside the egg.[2]
The mother crocodile, then, has no interest in that, the sex of her
offspring. (The father crocodile has no interest in the offspring at all. He's at work.) But she at least watches them hatch. She doesn't, however, turn them over to check; she pushes them into the water, and she leaves. No
crocodile law insures that brothers and sisters do not marry eight years later
when they’re grown.
A handful of propositions about truth (depending on how many fingers you have):
- Finger prints. Not only are no two fingerprints the same, no one fingerprint is the same twice. That is, its image changes every time the fingerprint is taken.
- Coincidences are as more powerful than equations as Superman is more powerful than a locomotive.
- Superman is a fictional character, created by two Cleveland, Ohio high school students in 1933.
- If everything is connected to everything else, but one thing is not, how many other things can be connected to everything else? (The answer to this question is not found in the back of the book.)
- What we call truth is, then, like a colloidal suspension . . . or, even more, like potato salad.
a
(bicbw)
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