Chasing Life (4)
Obsequious
It’s uncanny, mysterious and intriguing — the frequency at which my path crosses his now. I’m curious and inquisitive. I want to learn everything he’s been sent to teach me. I’ve lessons to unearth.
Mara and I set out on a different course yesterday. We parked, walked the short gravel entrance to the main path and hung a left instead of a right. A chill hung in the late morning air, offering an invitation to brave the tall grasses and dense tree acreage. Biting insects were huddling to keep warm in the bushes. Mara had no need for a cooling dip in the marsh waters. A change in season allows for different sights and sniffs, new adventures.
As fate would have it, on our return trip, we came tennis shoes and paws to hiking shoes and impish grin. Our new friend was just starting his morning intervals.
“Mind a little company,” I asked.
“Nah, c’mon,” he said.
At first, we discussed obvious, small talk, topics — weather and biting insects. Conversation flowed to all different kinds of nature topics.
“I was surprised to learn that it takes five generations for Monarchs to migrate from Mexico,” he said.
“I didn’t know that! Tell me more. Where did you learn about it?” I asked.
“Read it in the newspaper,” he replied.
“I saw you at the library last week. You were talking with the librarian so I didn’t interrupt. Do you go there often?”
“Oh yeah. I don’t subscribe to any papers. They do it for me,” he snickered.
I went on to tell him about the time my son and I watched the transformation of egg to caterpillar, caterpillar to chrysalis, and chrysalis to Monarch butterfly. We’d made a home for a milkweed plant and the tiny egg in a glass jar — to observe, I explained.
Our conversation roamed in new directions. We talked about sixteen year old boys and a local high school science teacher who owns one of the largest butterfly collections in the United States.
“Did you work in education?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, nodding his head.
“A science teacher?” I pressed lightly.
“Nah,” he said with a chuckle. “What do you do?” He must have forgotten our previous discussion. Great! I’d have another chance at this one.
“I’m a wanna-be writer — I mean, I’m a writer,” I said emphatically.
Widening his eyes, he stopped and looked directly at me. “You’re a writer!”
He pulled a small three by five wire bound note pad out of the breast pocket of his plaid flannel shirt. He began flipping through the blue lined pages. When he found the one he was looking for, he showed it to me. “You ever heard that word?” he asked, as I read his neatly printed vocabulary word and its definition.
obsequious: ADJECTIVE
obedient or attentive to an excessive or servile degree: “they were served by obsequious waiters”
“There will be a test the next time we meet,” he teased.
“I’ll try to commit it to memory,” I said, while repeating the definition in my head.
“Nah!” he said. “Nobody ever uses words like that! Just the English.”
As we walked on, he pointed out the sound of a woodchuck (I would have thought it was a bird!), a variety of flowers, and told me a story about dominate pairs of geese —and how one pair ends up in charge of more goslings than they birthed. There was something about migration to Hudson Bay and overwintering at the marsh. The information is muddled because while he told me, Mara was eating discarded fish bait. My attention was divided.
He began another story about watching two subdivisions being constructed in Houston. He mentioned all of the cement poured in an area that had been drained. “The houses were all quickly framed— like they were a model made of matchsticks — ,” he stopped mid-sentence, mid-story. “You and the dog go on without me.”
I wanted him to finish the story, but sensed he was finished with our conversation for one day. Mara and I kept our pace and he fell behind.
Recently, somebody else had spoken to me of Houston. He’d said so many of our human problems are of our own making. He too, referenced all of the concrete in Houston.
On the solitary walk back to the parking lot, I thought about Houston and the hurricane. It interested me that two people had mentioned man’s use of concrete in forming the city.
Einstein said: We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
I’m thankful that people keep entering my life — encouraging me to think, differently.
The next time I meet my mysterious friend(still don’t know his name), I’ll tell him I’ve decided to be less obsequious to my past knowledge, choosing curiosity instead.
