I notice while looking at his driver's permit that Mr. Hunter's hair was tightly braided across his 19 year old head. Another guy exiting their car is talking on an i phone. "Yo my bro. Busy now. My hommie can't talk. He be doing his driving business."
Do people really talk like that anymore? Hommie?? Many years ago I would hear my oldest daughter Ceci say something to me like "How's it going Home slice?" and I translated "home slice" to mean "big, warm and definitely white father of mine." Of course home slice could not have existed without there first being a slang term like hommie.
I had always thought slang and fashions started in the far out California regions and migrated our way after two or three years, stick around for a few and then die a merciful death. Yet after yesterday's hommie I see another young man get out of his car, the waist of his pants well below his plaid butt and he walks over to the mall with one hand over his crotch holding up his otherwise unstylish pants. "Is Grand Rapids stuck in a time warp" I wondered.
When Mr. Hunter is finished with his test I give him the certificate that shows he passed and then list the other documents he will need to take to the DOT. "You should also bring something to show that you are a resident of Michigan. "Do you have a State of Michigan ID?" I ask. He responds "No, but will a prison ID work?" Ah ha, that helps. Time stops for those in prison. Some semblance of order has returned to my mind.
I need that because I've been engrossed with a book about developments in the world of physics during the last century that was very cheap from Amazon and was downloaded to my Kindle. Every once in a while I find myself waking up in my easy chair, shooting my hand up in the air and yelling "PRESENT!" before I realize that, no, I am not really stuck in a long and inescapable high school science class. This is Kalamazoo, circa 2013, and no one will punish me if I just get up walk around to clear my head after reading 20 pages describing branes, extra dimensions and vibrating strings.
There is good news and bad news in all of this. The bad news is that I have no idea how to begin doing a calculation to prove that strong forces and weak forces, gravitons and photons, bosons and booggers (my contribution to physics, shortened to boogs and referenced for calculations as Bs), strings and membranes or black holes and dark matter can exist across multiple extra dimensions. The good news is that I don't have to purchase large art pads to fill with scratchings and spend 20 years doing so before I remark after a moment of brilliant insight, "Nope, that didn't work either".
In the end, as Einstein showed us, it's all about time. As I get older time goes much faster. I look at the world around me and realize that somehow I've merged into another dimension. The ripples in the fabric of my environment caused by what I do are part of something much bigger and unseen anyway. Jackie and I went last night to see the movie LES MISERABLES and now I've given up talking and just sing whatever I have to communicate. Who knew that the universe is composed of strings that vibrate praise to it's Creator.
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