The Dinner Partners

We arrived before they did.  About an hour before.   They were coming from Brooklyn and it turns out that there is almost no way to get from Brooklyn to the Bronx.  Even the best maps of the two areas show that Brooklyn and the Bronx are only connected in the strictest sense of the word.  The maps are nearly useless and our normally flawless GPS system seemed close to a nervous breakdown, constantly "recalculating" because we or it had failed to notice the amazing number of hidden exits that suddenly jump out at you on Pelham Parkway or another place called Shore Road.   Nonetheless, even with heavy traffic, we made it to City Island in an hour and a half.

When we finally hit City Island Avenue, the island's one true boulevard, both our cell phones had messages from the woman of the couple informing us that they had gotten lost somewhere near Astoria, Queens!   This is so much in the wrong direction that I have actually used an exclamation point there, something I've made it a rule not to do.  But as far as I can tell, there is no route from Astoria to the Bronx.  Not one the average map reader can find.

Finally, however,  Tom and Connie did arrive at the restaurant.  The restaurant we had picked out with the extra hour we had. Looked like a nice place.  Right on the water.  The only problem was that it was obvious the couple had been fighting, and from the tone of it,  for the entire two and a half hour trip.

"I'm not in a good mood," Connie whispered to my wife in a voice I could hear.

The greeter told us when we arrived that there'd be about a twenty minute wait for a table. Tom wanted a glass of water.

"I need a glass of water," he said, with some force.

"We'll have a table in five minutes," Connie said,   "Why don't you wait till then."

Tom straightened up. "If it was you," he snarled in a tone of voice my wife and I had never heard or seen from him before. "If it was you, you know damn well you'd throw a shit fit if you didn't get exactly what you wanted the very instant you asked for it, no matter how insignificant the issue."

"Get away from me," Connie snapped.

After that exchange, Tom and Connie barely acknowledged each other's existence for the next hour and twenty minutes, while we ordered, ate the thawed out fish, got the check and left for the parking lot.

I was in the car and ready to head for home while Tom was still in the rest room.   He arrived back at the front of the restaurant,  just seconds before I pulled away, thrilled to be leaving the whole empty evening behind.

After about ten minutes, my wife broke the silence.

"I'm depressed," she said.   But it wasn't dinner that was depressing her.

"Why don't we go for a walk?" I asked.

"In Astoria?  At ten at night?"  She said.

"You've got a point there," I said.  

The Cult of The South Sea Islanders

The following is adapted from Richard Feynman's famous Caltech commencement speech to the class of 1974.  I have always loved this as an object lesson.   I fooled around with the language a little bit, but most of Feynman's words are intact.  Still, on the chance that I have made the thing worse, in deference to Feynman, I am not using quotation marks.


In the South Seas there are people who follow a quasi religious practice known now as the cargo cult. During the second world war these people saw airplanes land, carrying lots of wonderful cargo, western goods that the Islanders had never seen before and naturally they wanted the same thing to continue when the planes had gone.  And one day, the planes were indeed gone.


So they decided to take fate into their own hands and made long, straight pathways scratched out in the dirt, pathways meant to serve as runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, just like landing lights and to make a wooden hut for a control tower and to put a man inside the hut, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas. And there they waited for the planes to land. 


They are doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks much the way it  looked before.  But something is missing.  This is called "cargo cult science", because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing the key point and, of course, no planes will ever land.