Memory

Long ago I used to sail at the drop of a hat. I had a friend, Bob, a retired engineer who lived in a house on the lake. Probably 40 years my senior, but sailing can erase such differences. He had a bigger boat, a Venture 24 I think, much easier to sail than the little 420 I hiked out on. So when we were both out alone on frigid winter days, I'd leave my boat at his dock and we'd schmooze on his Venture.

I had (still have) another friend, Marco, an Italian grad student from a peach-growing family near Bologna. Soon enough he was sailing too, and the 3 of us would coalesce on Bob's Venture. Marco was doing a thesis on how the quantity of light that fell on individual branches of a given peachtree affected the peaches. He was making these little thumb-joint-sized boxes from scratch with photo-sensitive cells that generated a tiny, but measureable, amount of electricity. And the guinea-pig trees had these boxes fastened to their branches, and the electrical data went into something with a memory, and it was all more than I related to as a young architect. One afternoon I was driving Bob's Venture while he and Marco discussed the photo-boxlets, and how they could be finessed to provide the same quality information from each one, and all that sorta stuff. We glissando'd on the water for an hour like that. I was happy to manage the boat, saying nothing, while they thought big and little about the thesis. Setting aside epiphanies about my family, this was arguably the most-human moment I can remember from my life thus far.

The mundane can be crazy heavenly.