I always like to go over to Heather's house and have Sunday dinner with her family. I typically leave my office on campus just as the sun is setting over the dorms to the west, and watch the sunset before I get into my car.
It's important to do more than glance at the sunset. You can't take it all in in a single quick flash of perceptions; the colors are too deep and the clouds are too complex for you to really see it all. I sometimes think the cruelest trick that fate and evolution have played on us is to give us minds that can appreciate the beauty of an entire broad panorama and then saddle us with foveal vision that narrows our perceptions like an extreme close-up on a camcorder. It's good when you're not so rushed to get from wherever you are to wherever you're going that you have a chance to just stop and appreciate the sunset.
The shadows lengthen, the horizon turns gold and then red, and the streetlights come on, and the cars driving by on the campus access road turn their lights on, and you can see the long thin golden slash across the sky that the contrails of a plane will make when illuminated at a shallow angle. I think I appreciate it more when there are jetliners going over; you can see the effect people have had on the sky, and you can see that it's simultaneously very striking and very insignificant; we matter, but we're only a part of a much larger picture.
It's a myth, however, that you have to stand there all afternoon gawking like an idiot. There's nothing worse than some fool who thinks he's communing with nature, getting more and more bored staring at the sunset until he gives up on the whole nature thing and proceeds to deforest Brazil.
Just look as long as there is something you feel like seeing.
Then I hop in the car and feel my fingertips go numb from the cold as I roll off campus. I fight the traffic on Maple road and trek on and on past the Chinese takeout place and the Mighty Taco and the video store, and past the restaurant where that girl I used to know worked, and past the hospital where my advisor's son was born and past the place where my friend had his engagement party, and I start to feel kind of sad because it's the end of the day and it's getting dark and everything looks kind of cold and I feel lonely. Everybody else is running around getting engaged, getting married, having kids. What am I doing?
I sometimes say that Heather lives out in the boonies; it's almost jarring how, once you pass Transit Road to the east of Buffalo, everything seems to just end. There are no gas stations and no video stores and no taco stands; just long unbroken expanses of windswept prairie plains, dotted with residential subdivisions filled with houses you can't afford on your graduate stipend.
I ring the doorbell and Max the dog comes running over barking insanely. Heather and Kate see who it is and they say, ``HI DAN!'' and their faces light up in big cherubic smiles. It gives me this instant little jolt of happiness, and it took me a long time to figure out that it's because it's like when I was a little kid and I'd come home from first grade. My little brother, who was like one or two at the time, would be standing there in his crib in the living room, and he'd see me come in the door and he'd grab onto the bars and jump up and down and yell "Haa Daa! Haa Daaa!" which is how you say "HI DAN!" when you're one or two or something. And I'd feel like the proudest, strongest, best big brother in the world. It's a good feeling. One you don't get much once your brother goes to college and becomes six feet tall and a yard wide and plays lacrosse.
So every time they come running to the door to greet me for a moment I get to feel like a big brother again, and it's late fall of 1975 and the world is full of boundless possibilities.
Meanwhile Kate's ex-boyfriend had been `stalking' her, as she put it. Which probably meant he was following her around school, ineffectually bugging her for dates, and essentially acting like a lovesick puppy. Kate hates that, as well as she hated the way this other guy had been writing her weird love letters with ardently misplaced passion.
Both of them seemed thoroughly tired of men, men, men, and the bouquet of roses was just an unwanted symbolic reminder of that. Their mom had made it worse because she'd seen this ostentatious bouquet of expensive flowers and had done what you do with expensive ostentatious things when you live in the suburbs; you take care of them and display them.
She'd put them in a big crystal vase on the kitchen table, which meant that wherever you stood in the kitchen the roses were looming there to remind you of how some lame guy was making your life miserable.
I have to digress at this point and explain something; in the middle of last summer I happened upon a posting on the newsgroup rec.toys.lego which had a subject line that said, "Aaarrr!!! Pirate Legos for sale!" (I bet you didn't know that's how Aaarrr!!! was spelled, did you?) It's the Standard Pirate Growl that they do just before drinking rum or skewering someone with a cutlass or shelling a hitherto-recalcitrant shore installation into more-compliant rubble.
Now, drinking and swearing and swordplay are not the acts of a sensitive, weak-kneed milquetoast. You yell "Aaarrr!!" when you're full of piss and vinegar and shouting into the teeth of a howling gale of adversity!
So when Heather's sister came into the kitchen wielding her hairbrush like a cutlass, I thought it was perfectly natural. She snarled at this one wilted rose drooping from one side of the bouquet. Swinging her hairbrush around in a quick choppy stroke, Kate went WHACK! and the rose flew across the kitchen turning end over end until it SMACKED into the wall somewhere in the living room and fell behind the couch.
Then she turned with an evil glare in her eye. Grabbing one of the roses by the stem, she yelled, ``AAaaarrrrrrr!!!'' and bit the head of it in half. We all collapsed in giggles, stunned by her violent demolition of propriety, and relieved at the way she had banished the unhealthy lovesick pall that had been hanging over the kitchen.
Then Kate, not wanting to chew, spat rose petals all over the linoleum.
