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It's All Relative, Really

I woke to a morning coming down easy, just the way Lionel Richie said it would be. But it wasn't Lionel who woke me, it was Stevie Wonder singing "Overjoyed" on Spotify. I was happy to be up and about and happy to start my daily constitutional before the paying guests arrived. 


I entered the kitchen singing along with Stevie, "
... though I doubt that they do, my dreams do come true." I walked to the French window and I threw back the curtains with a flourish. 

The morning sunlight sparkled on the dew-laden lawn like a sky full of stars. Or if you doubt it, then believe me when I say that it did move me to the brink of writing poetry. I confess that even though I haven't written verse since becoming a member of Poets Annonymous, I still sometimes consider it.

Mourning doves lined the fence row. Crows argued over a few tasty morsels. Rabbits frolicked in the grass. And squirrels busied themselves on the fenceposts. 

It may not have been a perfect utopia but it was a reasonable facsimile and close enough to be getting on with.

The squirrel's behavior interested me strangely. I recognized the two pint-sized delinquents as Twizzler and Ziggy. They seemed to be laughing, playing goosey, and pointing my way if it can be called pointing when done by a squirrel.

Then, out of the corner of my eye, I realized, pointing or not, that I was not the object of interest. It was Mutter climbing the lanai screen. Again!

There he was hanging in space as it were, staring directly into my eyes with a look that said, "Uh oh, what do I do now?" It didn't require an Einstein to realize that Mutter had been entertaining his two young nephews, probably accepting a dare to climb the screen and allow me to catch him in the act. Typical of their shenanigans.

Now that he'd been caught, he seemed unsure of his next move. As usual, he hadn't thought it through. As soon as our eyes locked, he panicked. He was conflicted about whether to climb up to the roof or jump to the ground.  

In the meantime, Twizzler and Ziggy were enjoying Mutter's distress immensely. Did I say they were enjoying it? I should have said they were overjoyed. Twizzler got such a kick out of it that he fell off the fence.

Meanwhile, Mutter had regained his land legs just in time to see Twizzler laugh himself off the fence. The scales fell from Mutter's eyes and he saw all clearly. It was turning out to be a big day for falling.

Mutter raced across the lawn and up the fence with such intensity, that it left no doubt about his lack of appreciation for the practical joke. He laid into Twizzler like an all-in wrestler and in a split second the younger squirrel was scampering across the fence rail with Mutter inches behind him.

Ziggy seemed to think it was a game of catch-me-if-you-can and he began chasing Mutter. The three of them raced across the top of the fence, then turned the corner and continued to the garden gate. Down the face of the fence they flew and then across a section of lawn that brought them back to where it all started.

They continued to chase each other along that three-fold path. As I watched, it slowly dawned on me that from my vantage point, they were traversing all three dimensions that make up physical reality.  

As I watched their antics, the four of us were, in effect, proving over and over again, Einstein's theory of special relativity.

At this point, you may be asking yourself, 'Has Genome finally come unglued? What the heck does Einstein have to do with this post?'

You're justified in asking those questions, of course. But all I can say in reply is that these mindful quantum moments don't come along every day and when they do, I like to take advantage of them.

For some reason, and I don't know why, but for some reason the ranygazoo in my backyard this morning reminded me of a Carroll Bryant quote. I'd like to paraphrase it here: 

"Some of us make things happen. Some of us watch things happen. And then some of us wonder, What the hell just happened?"