Life's Rich Pageant - I

I was walking with my daughter down my little suburban town's little suburban main street, and we passed a coffee shop with a couple of tables outside on the sidewalk. At one of the tables sat two women, both of whom were nicely dressed, and for whatever reason had an air of "middle-class security" around them. As we walked past I overheard one of the women said to the other, "...and now I have to protect my daughter, 'cause he's beating the crap out of me, and I don't know what he'll do next..." By that point we'd walked passed and their conversation was drowned out by distance and traffic.

I hadn't tried to eavesdrop, but because she'd spoken in a matter-of-fact tone at a normal volume I couldn't help but hear her very clearly.

Last Friday, I walked up Eighth Avenue to Penn Station having just left a dinner with friends in Greenwich Village/Chelsea. The sidewalk was crowded, as it will be in that neighborhood on a Friday night, but then for a moment the crowd cleared and all I saw were two young people facing each other, a few feet apart, about fifteen feet in front of me. They were well-dressed, looking as if they'd just been at a party or a family dinner. As I got closer I realized that the young man was yelling - screaming, really - at the young woman, gesticulating in the air between them with his hands cupped and upturned, as if begging. Though I couldn't make out what he was saying, he was clearly very angry.

The young woman just stood there, staring at him, saying nothing; when I went to pass them by, I looked directly at her and saw that she was weeping uncontrollably. Her jaw hung slack and she seemed - well, she seemed "defeated." I'll never know what the young man was yelling about; but the young woman clearly sensed that she would never be able to make him understand...if she'd been trying to talk to him, to make him hear her side, by then she'd given up. The look on her face was one of utter loneliness and defeat.

Life's rich pageant plays on and on.

Absolute Zero

The coldest place in the universe
Isn’t a point of interstellar space
Just to the right of Antares.
It’s a physics lab in Helsinki, Finland

The electrons sit quietly
Indecisive and uncertain
Waiting to be observed
No motion, no spin, no interactions

No strong force, no weak
Gravity has no rainbow
No up, no down, no charm
The center holds, but only from ennui

Is the color of cold
A shade of deepest blue?
One of the hues of hydrogen?
Or simply the absence of red?