Ed
By dennisortez
- 404 reads
Maybe the fact that he was a pothead is enough alone to show Ed’s appreciation for the natural world. Without Mother Nature, there’d be no bud, and even if the psychedelic chemicals in weed are altered in the labs nowadays it wouldn’t mean anything if she hadn’t also gifted us those beautiful brown tobacco leaves to roll it in. If that’s not enough though then maybe the garden of golden-green starfruit in his backyard can prove it, or the litter of puppies on his front porch, or the blind parrot he cared for on his back porch, or the ranch of horses his brother owned that he would visit often. Maybe he just had a soft spot for animals. I remember once I asked him some question about evolution I had heard at school and he went off on a tangent about how humans creating pugs was incredibly fucked up- apparently their cuteness comes at the cost of respiratory problems directly correlated with their body structure. But the man did often show his interest in outer space. He spent a good amount of time listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson and Elon Musk podcasts and he’d watch what I considered to be some of the most boring space documentaries. Rather than watch a movie like Alien the way most teens were doing he was instead watching old recordings from the Mars Rover. On one night where I was at Ed’s house till 4 in the morning Ed broke out the bong and took me on a ride in his golf cart. And after a scenic tour of his nice and safe Republican neighborhood, he stopped in the middle of the road and I asked him if he knew any cool space facts which of course he did. And maybe what he told me then and there isn’t as eye-opening to anybody else as it was to me —truth be told you might’ve heard at least half of the things he said in a middle school science class if you paid enough attention (but I sure as hell didn’t). In any case, there’s no chance it’d be the same coming from anybody but Ed and maybe Neil Armstrong. Words flowed out of him like poetry as he told me the secrets of the stars. And from stars, he went to galaxies and from galaxies to planets, and from planets to life and then to the beginning. And usually cosmological thinking will have a bittersweet effect on people that can be found in their tone of voice, but this wasn’t in Ed. Putting his and the rest of humanity’s existence into a perspective a lot less significant than what the early Christians and philosophers believed, if anything, made him see everything around him with an even higher value. He spoke with so much respect for nature. Like to him, the simple act of being alive, or a tree giving fruit, or of a mountain still standing was all just as impressive as the first trillionth of a second where the universe began.
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Hi, welcome to ABC Tales. I
Hi, welcome to ABC Tales. I enjoyed this. The rhythm works really well, and the reader is caught up in both Ed's passion for the world and the narrator's wonder in what he has to say. In fact I wanted to know more about what Ed had to say, what exactly it was that had caught the narrator's imagination. You've created two characters who engage the reader and raise lots of questions. Looking forward to reading more!
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