A Hole In A Leaf

Can you eat your favorite dessert every day, three to five times a day for weeks, and still call it your favorite dessert? Won't it have lost its special place in your diet? I used to crave watermelon and strawberries, but after stuffing myself with those delicious red fruits, I lost the appetite for those delectable delights.

The same goes for anything, right? We lose our sensitivity to the nuances that tingle our tongue and tickle our flesh.

Maybe.

Today, my wife is off from work and my mother in-law is fretting over the outfits to pack into her suitcase for an overnight stay with her granddaughter.

Meanwhile, I stand in this suburban oasis, watching caterpillars make Swiss cheese out of redbud leaves, and listen to my stomach growl with hunger.

I'm just a guy. I have simple needs. I look at the sampler menu of the buffet of life and want to try every morsel at least once. In this Escherian world, some of the food on the buffet wants to sample me, too. Not today.

Today, I am a monk, an aesthete, who is starving himself, fasting, as it were, in order to appreciate dessert next week. I am a tree seeking nourishment from the sun, finding itself lacking, where photosynthesis won't take place in the holes left by ravished larvae.

Last night, I enjoyed watching some of my students/customers find the joy in logic - creating flowcharts, pseudocode and Python code that works. In other words, I watched their brains in action related to ever-increasing specialization within our civilization. As I know, I don't celebrate action simply for action's sake, where a lot of our so-called civilized progress takes place (busy-bodies doing busy-ness), but when a person discovers his or her own logic/calculation capabilities, I figuratively jump with joy, like having a small course of exotic cheeses, grapes and crackers in a ten-course meal that included truffles and culminated in a dessert never before seen or tasted, whose recipe was destroyed by the chef because too much of its beauty will crush hearts and flatten empires.

The next few days I will meditate upon my dim memories, thoughts that rejuvenate themselves and slowly disintegrate at the same time. Call it living in the past, if you will. Hopefully, I can remember the story of the bazooka man from my first job as a fast-food cook when I was 16.

I'll wait until next week for more dessert. So can she.