Dancing by the Numbers

Eddie felt like nobody really loved him except for what he could do. Eddie could make the numbers dance.

Not just the taxes, or the books, or the warehouses, or the boxes, or the contents in the boxes, or the routes, or the credits, or the debits, or the interest, or the payroll, or the benefits, or the payoffs, or the kickbacks. The numbers!

He could make them perform ballet. He could make them waltz, cha cha, foxtrot, tango, two step, or break dance. He could make them dance slowly, quickly, blindingly fast, or a constantly changing rhythm. You could pick any dance, any speed, any set of numbers, and Eddie made them dance.

Eddie felt like no one understood.

 

They found Eddie face down in the river, a small bullet hole at the base of his skull.

Rumors said it was the mob. Or the feds. Or the union. Or one of several foreign governments. Or one of any number of corporations. But Eddie was dead. The numbers danced no more.

Perhaps someone understood too well.

 

To Eddie's surprise and delight, he found himself in a better world.

He felt loved. And he could see everything dance- quarks, protons, atoms, molecules, the grass and flowers, animals he'd never believed in, people, angels, creatures he'd never heard of or imagined, the very light around him, and a loving Father. Even the numbers danced. They'd dance for Eddie if he told them to, but he enjoyed just watching them dance on their own. Sometimes he danced with them.

At last he knew someone understood.

 

Edwina played with her food as usual. She looked distant and troubled. She was just five, but like her deceased father she was brilliant and precocious. Edward spoke.

"Edwina, you look perturbed, Is something wrong?"

"Papa, we went to Daddy's grave today," she said. "His marker said 'He made the numbers dance'."

"And you want to know what that means?"

"No, Papa. I want to make the numbers dance, too."

Edward looked at her plate, at the carefully sculpted four sided rice pyramid, the perfect cubes of meat, the four squares of green peas three on a side with a solitary pea exactly in the middle of those squares. As she prodded the peas with her fork, the squares rotated and revolved slowly around the pea in the middle.

"How many peas do you have, Edwina?"

Her eyes flicked to the peas for an instant. "Thirty seven, Papa. That's easy."

Edward smiled. "You will make the numbers dance, baby."

She didn't understand yet.

But she would.

Tumbleweeds on my Mind

Regardless of the temperature it's technically winter. All over the western plains of Texas, tumbleweeds have dried up, put their travelin' shoes on, and hitchhiked with the breeze. In high winds the weeds stampede en masse; they make lemmings look like severely introverted loners.

I grew up on the northeastern edge of El Paso with nothing over our back wall but desert. The winter winds inevitably headed west and invariably left an interlocked tumbleweed ramp many feet deep against the cinder block wall running the length of the neighborhood. The first calm weekend day, Dad and a bunch of other neighborhood men would drive to the end of the neighborhood, head into the desert behind the mass of weeds, park the cars a ways off, and spread out along the line of tumbleweeds.

After stuffing a newspaper or two into some of the weeds, each man would hold a lighter or match ready. On signal, each would light their section of tumbleweeds. A spouse or child would be in each back yard with a hose and shovel, just in case. The flames would leap 10-20 feet in the air; the whole conflagration lasted maybe a minute. Fast and furious, that's how they burn.

As a kid, it was exciting, always over much too fast. I suspect for the adults, it lasted a lot longer. Who wants to be party to setting the desert on fire and maybe burning half of El Paso? But of there was a problem, I never knew about it. Five minutes later, the fine ash was cool enough to walk through. After the first light breeze, it was gone, spread across the city too thinly to notice. But it's burned deeply into my mind.

Last month Sharon and I finally took our long overdue, first Vacation Out West together. A small tumbleweed named Dusty stuck a thumb out as we pulled over for a photo shoot, and Sharon brought him home. He seems content to just hang out, with no trace of the usual wanderlust. So far I've avoided mentioning fire around him. He seems sensitive.

Notice Dusty's color. He's a chameleon, blending into the desert to avoid predators-- mainly off-road pickup trucks and disgruntled homeowners with fire. It doesn't always work, which I suspect is why he's happy to be an indoor recluse. A brown recluse, but we are not afraid.

Thanks to Annie Hoffman Fentz for sharing the video and asking the questions that inspired this.