“Dutch Treat!” she said, as we walked out of the art festival.  Sure, yeah…I buy her a pair of diamond earrings last week and this week she won’t pay for my chicken noodle soup.  Isn’t that always the way with her?   We were passing some children playing jump rope under a flowering plum tree and she was babbling on about rubber bands or something.  When I first met her I thought she had bats in the belfry…her erratic behavior and the way she’d jump from subject to subject made me wonder if her head was screwed on straight.  One minute she’d be talking about tigers, the next she’d be telling me about how much she owes on her income tax…but to her they were interconnected.  Tigers reminded her of cereal, cereal reminded her of serial numbers, serial numbers reminded her of the computer she bought to balance her books for the bead store she  opened last year…the store reminded her of the taxes she owed.  My mind is still swimming from her jump from talking about bagels to the improper use of the  prefix  “ir” some people use before regardless.  But she grows on you, ya know?  You start knowing what she’s going to jump to before she gets there.  “Dutch Treat, sure.,” I respond…but she’d already started on about pinwheels.

I have a secret knowledge of back roads.  I don’t need a map to get me from here to there, the cartography  is hardwired in my brain.    I avoid the highway , opting for more scenic routes.  Crossing the invisible partition as I cross from county to county I lose myself in the   trees, the pastures, the fields of green…power lines my only connection to the real world.  .   I let my imagination run away with me ...  I picture myself getting an autograph from Paul McCartney or I play my favorite game “Can I Spot an Ax-Wielding Serial Killer in the Woods?”…or I drift back to my childhood, when Friday evening was reserved for roasting marshmallows  and catching fireflies.  Night drives pose a slight dilemma…. With nothing to look out at my  CD player is my salvation.  I often catch my mirror image in the rearview mouthing along to “Walk Like an Egyptian” making sure to look to the left and then the right just as Susanna Hoffs did in the video.   


 

I do not know the meaning of the word “Pluralism”.  That is not to say that I haven’t looked it up.  I looked in the dictionary and even “googled” the word.  I saw definitions, sure…but nothing was able to make me understand what the word meant.  It makes me think I have a retention problem instead of an attention problem.  For instance, my entire life, from the onset of my personhood   to my 33rd year, I have not been able to understand mathematics.       My brain looks at a math problem, allows it to ricochet in my head for a bit, looks at something else and loses what it just processed.  None of the information was retained.  In school I would be shown a math problem and get it wrong two minutes later.   History wasn’t any easier, do you think I could tell you who invented the printing press?  It’s not that I didn’t learn, I took world history twice!  I once joined a choral society, which was OK as long as I was allowed sheet music but the one time I couldn’t have the lyrics in front of me I flopped.  I don’t even remember how to read music!  I couldn’t tell an E sharp from an ink spot.   The memory retention problem is even worse now that I’m into photography.  I know that there is a way to expose a shot without creating too much shadow, I know that I’ve read about it several different times….but hand me a camera and point me towards a brightly lit person and I will almost always end up with a shot so dark that all of the humanity is taken out of the subject and they end up looking like a shadow demon.