What do you want to be?
A human, maybe?
Not a tutelary? Or a doodem?
My doctor assures me we are all mammals. I don't think I need to be some other mammal than I already am. On the other hand, a bird — if it is the right bird — might be a step up in terms of intelligence.
On a per ounce basis.
Well, yes, but aren't totemic and mythic birds typically rather larger than the wild examples? So a definite step up, I think.
Oh look: It must be Christmas again.
What? No, not for months …
But the traffic signals are red and green!
They're always red and green.
At the same time?
Oh. That must be because we are in stop and go traffic here.
We are now, only because the signal switched to red. We'll stop and later we'll go. But in between — that's when we had red and green together.
Well, red light plus green light makes what color?
Yellow light.
Exactly. And what color signal do you expect to see between "go" and "stop"?
Ah, yes. So the signals are working properly.
But not as expected.
I am beginning to understand your interest in stepping up your intelligence.
Most people — no, I don't know that. Most wishes for avianistic attributes that I have heard — is that sufficiently cautious a statement? — focus on the flying. "Wouldn't you like to fly like a bird?"
Bird or superman, perhaps bat, but not like an airplane. People want to move their arms.
Even if they are not arms.
Exactly.
So, yes, I would like to fly like a bird.
Do two likes make a dislike? You know, the way two wrongs make a right?
Two wrongs don't make a right. Three lefts make a right.
And two likes make …
… a discourse particle.
A what?
A discourse particle.
Umm, okay, so, you know, I mean, like speech disfluency?
Yes.
I like linguistics. I just prefer to keep it at arm's length.
You prefer to keep everything at arm's length.
No, no. That's not true. My dog …
… is the exception …
… but not the only one. There are my cats.
Something inanimate.
Okay, my bicycle. My gatorade. My brush hook.
Your brush hook?
Sure. I like to keep a tight grip on my brush hook and move my arms. It's a little bit like the flying we were talking about.
Your brush hook.
Yes. Not exactly like flying, but moving the arms and causing an effect.
The effect being …?
Keeping the thorny brush at arm's length.
Ah. You do this often, do you?
Several times a year. Not often enough to keep the invasive multiflora rose at bay, although I still have hope.
Hope for eradication or for control?
Only control. Elimination would be nice but it would require coordinated success across multiple properties. Even if we could succeed in that, the result would really only be control on a larger scale. I have no hope for elimination across the continent.
You wax prolix.
A topic on which I have something to say.
Control?
Control, elimination, eradication. "Infestations and infections: Their Management and Social Metaphors". Could be the title of a book.
You always were something of a control freak.
Always? You knew me as a child?
I've heard your stories about yourself.
From which you know only my perceptions of myself which may not fully match who I was at the time.
You control your perceptions.
And how I share them.
You live a very simple and transparent life.
Like a window which always faces south.
I would have said north.
It depends which side of the window you stand on.
Maybe you are transparent like a lens.
You mean I make things more clear?
I mean you magnify some of what is truly there but take the focus away from other parts of your life.
Other parts of what truly exists cosmically.
You can only know your own experience.
My life is the lens, or the window, a transparent view into everything. Or some part of everything.
So, then, a self-effacing control freak.
Speaking of windows, there is the Minahan-McCormick Building.
Where?
Right there where the parking ramp is.
I'm pretty sure that is a parking ramp.
Well, it is now. But seen through my lens it is still the Minahan-McCormick Building.
And it has windows?
Oh, indeed, yes. In particular there are the windows on one of the upper stories (I forget which) identifying the offices of Dr. Kuhs: "Physician and Surgeon" in gold letters. They represent my becoming aware that the windows you see on the outside of a building can be identified with the windows you find on the inside after riding up the elevator, walking down the hall, and passing through doorways into what seems from that point of view to be the innermost room.
But which is in a broader view an outside office.
Precisely.
I take it that this story arises from your childhood.
Older than three and a half years but before Dr. Kuhs left his practice here for advanced training.
What kind of advanced training?
Psychiatry, I think it was. My lens of a life couldn't yet focus clearly on that sort of detail but I remember my mother commenting that perhaps it was a good thing. He was our doctor but my mother said he often didn't do much. As a patient, she said, you would go to see him and he would talk to you and you'd feel better.
That's what she said?
It is not an exact quote. I was too young to think I might want to tell this story in the twenty-first century.
Before psychiatry, though, he was a "physician and surgeon".
Yes. That means he was equally happy to prescribe a drug or to cut you open. Cutting and prescribing had separate histories.
Did he do either of those for you?
Actually, yes. Dr. Kuhs prescribed a number of foul tasting concoctions for my childhood illnesses. (They might well have been antibiotics.) He also removed my tonsils following the common practice of the times. I remember the occasion but not the surgeon. I know Dr. Kuhs did the surgery because I can remember that he originally was unavailable and so referred me to Dr. W.W. Ford, our family's Eye, Ear, Nose, and Throat specialist. Dr. Ford was curiously ahead of his time and declined to excise a normal body part notwithstanding that it might sometimes become infected. But later Dr. Kuhs recommended in favor of cutting.
Are you saying that surgery follows its own fashions?
Certainly. When I was young it was the fashion for surgeons to remake bodies by removing parts the surgeons thought were vestigal or unnecessary.
A medical degree places you half a step above God.
Or a step above evolution. Some of these doctors were religious and believed firmly that God had appointed them to make these corrections. That's my impression anyway. I was young at the time.
I usually think of fashion in terms of superfluous things like clothes or paint color, not life-critical behaviors. But, when you think of it, there was the fashion in medicine of bleeding the patients to death.
Or dosing them with arsenic and mercury.
Because that's what we do for syphilis.
I know someone who bought a new home — a condominium apartment to replace an oversized house. He bought new furniture.
Because that's what we do.
Yes, but that's not the story. The story is about the store not delivering the furniture as promised. Telephone calls did not suffice to arouse the requisite zeal so this person travelled in person to the store, sought out the manager, and explained in some detail the level of service expected.
And that was …?
That was for the store to physically deliver the furniture to the house at the time promised.
Which seems on the surface to be an entirely reasonable expectation.
That is what this person thought. But the store manager said, "That's not what we do here."
Inaction as the fashion of the day.
So it can be customary to perform the wrong action or to forego the right action but what is always fashionable is to follow the custom rather than to address the real need of a real person.
Aren't you setting the bar rather high? A rational response to the actual reality seems effortful.
Hence the need for a customary response. It would be irrational to analyze and formulate a fully rational response to every situation.
When income tax time comes around I take my tax records to the same tax guy as last year.
Because that's what you do. But you know that you could find a different tax guy if your reality had changed.
When the traffic signal is red I stop because that's what we do — and a good thing I don't have to figure it out each time.
But if the signal is both red and green you stop because stopping is safer than continuing through the intersection. That's a more rational and considered response.
Until the situation is better understood.
Now that you understand I will depart.
Because where we have arrived is your house …
… and it is customary for me to stop here and to send you off to your own abode …
… for the nonce.