short stories, part whatever and more Oct. skies

Steve of Shadows and Light wrote that the parakeets that come to his bird feeder are molting, losing old feathers and growing new ones, as all birds do. It made me think of trees which also ‘molt’, losing old leaves and growing new ones. And then of humans who do not molt though hair and skin cells are constantly shed and replaced. Which got me to thinking about hair and how long an individual hair lives since some women who have never cut their hair from birth have extremely long hair. So I looked it up. A human hair lives and grows on average 2 - 7 years before the resting phase and finally shedding and can reach a maximum length of 3’ - 6’ or about half as long as the person is tall depending on the individual, genetics, breakage, and relative health of the hair. There are exceptions of course as there are in all things, some women have/had hair down to their ankles which must be a nightmare to wash.

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Last Friday was Paisleigh’s 4th birthday and her party was Saturday afternoon. The child has a playground in her backyard. For her 2nd birthday she got a full size trampoline, 3rd birthday a bouncy castle and a play set that consists of a strap anchored between trees with a swing, hoops, ladder, and some other stuff I can’t recall descending from it. This birthday she got a treehouse with two slides (fast and slow), a climbing wall (about 5’ at a slant), and a zip line. At 4 Paisleigh already knows the proper response to any present she opens whether she fully understands what it is or not. She gasps with delight. Unless it’s the third gift of clothes clothes, oh, another shirt though she did like the new jacket that is so heavy it might get cold enough this winter for her wear it a day or two.

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If you’ve been reading me for a while you may remember the dust up with the then new neighbor, the gun nut with his chickens who would shoot at stray and neighbors' dogs who came into his yard chasing his chickens, chickens he made no effort to contain and let go into neighboring yards. One day he shot at the neighbor's dog in its own yard because it had been in his yard and the bullet whizzed by that neighbor. Big confrontation and the chicken man finally put a fence around the property. Well he died of a heart attack about five years ago, the chickens all finally died or were killed by other critters. Last year the widow got more chickens and although the property is still fenced there is a low spot where three or four of them get out under the fence every day and they strut around in the ditch and in other neighbor’s yards and she makes no effort to prevent it. I’ve chased them out of my yard. Second part of this, another neighbor who generally has a big dog or two who are well behaved and stay in their yard, had surgery on his neck that didn’t go as well as hoped and is undergoing PT in Sugar Land during the week so no one is home and the scraggly male big dog and two puppies there currently are roamers. Yesterday they knocked over my neighbor on the east side’s trash can and spread trash around and this morning when that neighbor was mowing his yard the dog trotted down the street with something big and brown in it’s mouth followed by the two puppies. I hollered at my neighbor, what did he have in his mouth? A chicken. Life in the country.

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Another interesting article from Nautilus…an interview with author Kieran Fox, a neuroscientist, of a book about Albert Einstein, I Am A Part Of Infinity, The Spiritual Journey Of Albert Einstein, and worth the read. A few quotes from the interview/book:  

“Reading Kant, I began to suspect everything I was taught,” Einstein said. “I no longer believed in the known God of the Bible, but rather in the mysterious God expressed in nature.”

“Not long after, in his early 20s, while Einstein was putting together the ideas that would revolutionize the physics of space, time, and matter…he kept exploring this other conception of the divine. He read the philosophical reflections of Arthur Schopenhauer, who saw that the radical religious ideas of thinkers…that nature and God are somehow One—mirrored similar notions in the oldest sacred Indian scriptures.” 

“At age 51…he explained his own contact with the divine. “I will call it the cosmic religious sense.”” and nine years later “Life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution or destiny; only being.” 

“How can this cosmic religious experience be communicated man to man, if it cannot lead to a definite conception of God or to a theology? It seems to me that the most important function of art and of science is to arouse and keep alive this feeling in those who are receptive.” 

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More October skies, 7th - 12th.