The other day, someone asked my sweetheart, “Who’s the most interesting person you ever met?” It took him a long time to answer. Finally, he looked over at me and said, “Buckminster Fuller?”
I hiked up my shoulders. It seemed to me that my opinion was of no value whatsoever. That was a question he and only he could answer. I was not asked the same question, but an answer came to me right away, anyway.
When I was 9 years old and living in Texas, I was out walking one day when I came upon an older man wearing a straw hat, sitting in a circle under the shade of a tree with bunch of kids. He was holding a deck of cards (dirty hands, dirty cards, I noted happily) and his audience was enraptured.
I had set out that morning with a Mason jar in order to capture a horny toad for the purpose of having a close up view. Their faces interested me, especially. They looked crabby. Or maybe I was wrong, maybe they looked wise. I intended to find out. After I was through inspecting the horny toad, I was going to set it free, and I imagined it running home (What did a horny toad HOME look like?, yet another burning question) and saying, “She didn’t kill me! She didn’t kill me!”
Anyway, I came upon that circle of kids and that older man and I walked slowly over.
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