backyard

The strong smell of fresh earth became noticeable in the dark night air. Ebi was digging again, and all of us began to pay her more attention and admonish her to stop with a sing-song “Ebi, uh-uh!” It was only once that were too distracted by our own jokes and word plays and humorously strange logical fallacies that we had missed it when the greyhound started digging again. Ebi had quite the number of small excavations started around the backyard, but one pit in particular was big enough that her front half disappeared into it. When we called out the “uh-uh!” with just the right melodic notes, she would know we meant it and stop for a second to turn, bending almost in half to look over at us all seated around the patio table. Most of the time she did stop what she was doing and some of the times she considered carefully whether to start again on the next hole she passed on the way back to the patio and her bed.

The jokes continued. Well, they weren’t really jokes. Our nutty logic ran on while we sampled two different kinds of dates and three different kinds of chocolate chips. There was a single bowl of mixed nuts on the table too; almonds, peanuts, and cashews. There was a real difference between the two types of dates, something that we hadn’t realized before. The chocolate chips, while all different, were also all kind of the same even though one of them was sugar free. The nuts needed more salt.

We retold our earlier conversation about chitin, chitons, and chitons to a bewildered friend that had stopped by to borrow a baking dish, and we laughed and re-laughter about it all. Our friend was just confused and we tried to reconstruct how we got there to begin with. Our friend said “you guys sure covered a lot of ground today,” and though she was remarking on our south bay tour from Morgan Hill to Santana Row and Valley Fair and then on to Whole Foods and the Bass Pro Shop, I think she was also talking about our limitlessly zany conversational leaps.

We paired crossbreeding savannah cats with house cats to Superman because they can jump unusually high, and the fact that the more generations that are again crossed with domestic cats, the smaller the next generation becomes, with fleas which also jump very high for their size. We tested the leaps against facts; savannah cats are known for their swimming, so jumping high is a necessary capability for catching flying fish! Are there flying fish on the savannah?

A lot of it had to do with rhymes, or echoes as one word begs for another and anything that we reach for injects more chaos and new entropy into the conversation. That entropy, oddly, drives the engine of our engagement; the ridiculousness of it all was loudly entertaining.

Ebi had snuck out into the yard again, in the darkness, and had tentatively started digging again. “Uh-uh, Ebi! Uh-uh!”

jg