children of all ages: I have arrived. I am now one year old.
The occasion was marked in the traditional fashion, with a sumptuous feast of cakes and delicacies attended by all the beloved friends and family who have helped me to reach this milestone. There was much rejoicing.
Also, there was much booty. My cousin Evan, marking his 2nd year on this our fair mother Earth, was celebrating by my side and the two of us, hearty compatriots, arm-in-arm, through great vigor and an extraordinary collaborative effort were able to blaze a trail through the dense forest of presents that filled the house from floorboard to beam, the generous expression of abundant affection made concrete and lovingly enveloped in festive wrappers, which were ripped asunder with great gusto and much boisterous laughter. The mamas helped, too.
My Manny, peculiar obsessive that he is, made a gift to me of the novel,
God Bless You Mr. Rosewater. It seems that the author Kurt Vonnegut and
I share a birthday, and, as the late Mr. Vonnegut is my Manny's favorite
writer, he considered this parallel quite a portentous dollop of serendipity.
I thanked him for the book, but did express some minor disappointment
at its complete lack of illustrations. He then promised to next year
give to me a copy of Breakfast of Champions.
He then said to me, "Well, now you've come full circle, Simon. The planet has completed its circuit around the sun and you have arrived back at the same point where you started."
I replied, "In some sense that's true, relative to our sun we are in an equivalent position, but overall we're hardly at the same point where we were one year ago."
He blinked at me, and seemed confused.
"Look," I said, "imagine that I am a point of light, and that all my motions are drawn onto the darkness of space like a pen filled with silver ink draws on a black page. At the most intimate scale we can follow my daily motions across the surface of this planet: being brought home from the hospital after my birth, crawling across the carpet, travels with the mamas, yours and my little walks around the neighborhood. Are you with me so far?"
He nodded.
"Good. Now, the analogy with the ink on the page breaks down pretty quickly, firstly because the surface of the Earth is not flat like the page, it is rounded, so we're dealing with motion in three spatial dimensions, not two. Secondly, the surface of the Earth is not our canvas, but space itself is, and we know that while we move across the surface of the Earth, at the same time the Earth itself is moving through space, in several different directions at once.
"Say you and I walk up to the European grocery around the corner, to peruse
the curious Russian chocolates and the comely Russian cashiers there. Our
motion across the planet surface would resemble the shape of the letter 'C'.
But at the same time that we're walking the Earth is rotating too, at this
latitude maybe at about 600 miles per hour, so that 'C' is stretched and bent. Also, while the Earth is rotating on its axis it's also orbiting the sun at more than 33,000 miles per hour, so that line tracing the course of our progress is ever more drastically stretched and distorted.
"Now you might think that in the course of one year the map of my progress would describe hundreds of ringlets (366 to be precise, remember, this is a leap year), artifacts of the planet's daily rotation throughout its revolution, completing a circle around our sun that arrives back at its initial starting point. You might think this, but you would be wrong, because as the earth revolves around its sun, our solar system, the sun and its planets, are revolving in an outer spiral arm around the center of this, our milky way galaxy, and at the same time that galaxy is locked in its own secret and curious motions. The circle is broken, and it becomes something more complex, a coil.
"Even standing still we find ourselves moving through space in a multitude of contrasting directions, at cumulative speeds near inconceivable, and that hypothetical evidence of our progress, that point of light etching its brilliant map on the inky void, describes not a straight line, not a curved line, not a circle, but an intricate visual melody, a pattern of loops and arcs and whorls mirroring and reproducing themselves at all scales, cosmic and microscopic, like some filigreed fractal finial, a tapered luminous spring stretched and twisted and twirled, and wherever we are at any instant, even at our most solitary and still, we are at a place and a moment which we will never return to again, as we continue turning on wheels within wheels, within wheels, spiraling out into ever-expanding empty space..."
He gave me a long, silent look, and then asked, "What do
you think you'd like to be when you grow up, Simon?"
I thought for a moment, then replied, "I think I'd like to be a crazy upright bass player in a band with at least half a dozen bare-shouldered, marimba-playing cuties ... but there's still plenty of time for me to change my mind." He nodded, and seemed satisfied with this answer.
My question now is for everyone reading this blog. You've had some time
to get to know me across the past year, learn some of my talents and my
weaknesses, my preferences and my dislikes, what do YOU think I will
eventually be when I grow up? I'd be curious to hear some honest thoughts
from other perspectives, so don't be shy about chiming in. You can leave
your notions in the comments section at the end of this post. Right now
I think I'd like to go have some more cake...
