Skip to main content

Soulmates

 


I was rather alone. I had just travelled across the country to eastern Idaho to go to college. I had been given a partial track scholarship, so I knew the track coach (sort of), but I knew no one else in the city. My parents had helped me move into an apartment and had left to return to the Oregon Coast. I was alone. But I had my music. My recently acquired Pat Benatar album kept me company. Pat, And Tom Petty, and Pink Floyd, they were all my friends and helped me while away the time and made me forget that I was alone. Soon I would start attending classes, start getting together with my fellow track team members, and start my part-time job in the cafeteria, but until then, the hours were empty.

I had scarcely been there a day, my stereo blasting away, when I heard a knock at the door. It was a pretty, dark-haired woman with a kind smile. She explained that she lived directly upstairs and the previous tenants had been known to play their music at all hours of the night, and could I keep it down after 9:00, because she worked at the campus Post Office early every day. I told her that would not be a problem. She asked me what classes I was taking. When I said one of them was General Ecology, she said I could borrow her text book from last year.

As it turned out, I could not use her textbook, as the professor said we had to use the new edition. But it gave me an excuse to return her book to her. When you meet someone, you never know if there will be a connection or not. I found this girl attractive, but then, I found a lot of girls attractive. That did not mean I would ever talk to them again. Relationships may or may not take.  Something must have connected with this one. She invited me to go mushroom hunting with her. I did not know a thing about hunting mushrooms, but I went with her. Why wouldn’t I? As you have probably guessed by now, a connection was made. She eventually became my wife, and we have been married over forty years.

I don’t really believe in soulmates in the classical sense, that there are people we are fated to be with. What brought my wife and I together was luck. If my parents had found a notice for a different apartment or if I had not been playing my music that day, or any one of a hundred random events had been different, we would not have met. So, I believe we make our own soulmates.

Star Liner

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Empathy

  Websters defines Empathy as: “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.” Empathy is what makes us human, though lord knows there are many humans who don’t seem to have any. A person without empathy is like a caveman, only concerned for himself. Selfish. It is a lack of community and by extension, a lack of the need for civilization. The person who lacks empathy can have a bit of community, but only with others exactly like himself. It seems like societies go through cycles of empathy and less empathy. Sometimes a single event can change the course of society. Prior to America’s involvement in WWII, the general feeling in America was not very empathetic. We had our own problems. We were still dealing with the lingering effects of the Great Depression, and had been for years. That kind of stress makes it hard to think of others. Hitler was slashing through Europe. He and his fol...
1 comment
Read more

All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu

My first experience with cyberpunk as a genre of science fiction was Neuromancer by William Gibson. Neuromancer was one of the early works that defined the cyberpunk genre. It was insanely influential. It won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award. But for me, it just did not resonate. I had a hard time visualizing the concepts. It left a bad taste in my mouth for cyberpunk. I mostly avoided the genre. Then a couple of years ago I read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson which is cyberpunk (although some people say it is a parody of cyberpunk). Whatever, I liked it. I recently picked up All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu and it immediately became apparent to me that this was cyberpunk. Julia Z is the main character, and I think this is going to be the start of a series following her. She is a hacker (hence cyberpunk). She has got herself in trouble and so she lives on the margins, barely making it. Then a lawyer asks her for her help. His wife has been kidnapped. The ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Polar Bears and Entropy

  Extinction is a normal part of the evolution of life on our planet. You and I and all individual organisms eventually die. That is the way of things. Entropy happens. Entropy is a word from the third law of thermodynamics that basically means: things fall apart. The natural tendency is for things to become less orderly as time goes on: things break down, things erode, things rust, things wear out. Entropy is a measurement of how fast that is happening in any given system. Individual death is a natural outcome of entropy.   But an extinction is where all the members of a species are no longer living. Millions of species have gone extinct over the lifetime of our planet. There are natural background extinctions that happen continually. But sometimes there are events that trigger mass extinctions, where vast masses of species go extinct all at once (all at once in geologic terms, which might mean over the course of hundreds of years). There have been 5 mass extinctions over ...
Post a Comment
Read more