A Grapefruit Universe

Yesterday, my little brother called me from Texas to tell me that he was walking through a grove of grapefruit trees. I imagined the sun shining down on his broad shoulders as he carefully selected a warm, ripe grapefruit from the ground; around him, light cheerful breezes bumped gently into heads of grass, and rustled the leaves of these glorious trees...


I live in New England; we don't have grapefruit trees. We have a bit of snow, though. He sent me a picture:

When he called, I was sitting in front of my computer, working. In front of a screen. As I am doing right now. All my time is spent in front of screens. Working. Writing. Communicating.

When he hung up, I wrote a poem:

i told Dave i want to be a hermit

 a hermit in outer space

  where there are no screens

just stars and stuff

and the bits that make up the sky, the dark, grapefruit trees

   and stuff

i want to be a space hermit

As you can see, I am not good at poetry. That is why I write in sentences. But I am a little jealous of my brother, strolling through a grove of grapefruit trees and picking up the fresh fruit, peeling back the skin, biting into the tangy, bitter, juicy bits of starlight before laying down in the gently swaying grasses to nap under a canopy of blue heavens and surrounded by the sweet scent of spring...

If I were a space hermit, I'd have a houseboat floating in the giant space ocean moored to an Earth-like island with a grove of sweet, ripe moons--some crimson red with swirls of lavender blue, dilly dilly, or sparkling green and cerulean blue and antique white that dallied in the blossoming dawn. I'd have a fossil museum in my living room, with bones as large as Mount Everest glistening in a heap near the swirling asteroid zephyrs that whirl and spin a path through a wilderness of stars. 

But if you came to look for me, I'd be hard to find; I'd be too busy painting the tiny motes of dust that drift through the starlight streaming through my stained-glass curtains, or surfing on the massive and rolling gravitational waves that soar through the darkness of space and time and crash against planets and stars and the sands of time... and there would be no screens, just everything.

Call Me When I Can Hang My Laundry By The Giant Space Ocean

I love New England. These are my reasons:

Reason #1: There is always weather. Always. Rain, fog, sleet, snow, hail, sunshine, wind, weird cloud formations, hurricanes--everything. And I love weather. In fact, this morning I walked out the door at 4:36am, and got slammed in the face by a sheet of water--wind and water at the same time! Fantastic.

Reason #2: The ocean. The ocean is everywhere. It doesn't just stay in the giant crater where it lives. It sneaks up through cracks in the sidewalk to tickle your bellybutton, it leaps over the pier and sneaks into your socks, and it has this way of latching on to the air and grabbing you from behind in a damp, salty hug. You can taste it in the fog, you can smell it in the air, and if you're feeling ambitious, you can stick your feet in it.

Reason #3: It's gorgeous. The sky is gorgeous. The ocean is gorgeous. The mountains are gorgeous. The snow is gorgeous. The hills are gorgeous. The countryside is gorgeous. Magnificent, wonderful, glorious, majestic, resplendent, astonishing, splendid, formidable, awesome, breathtaking, transcendent, pulchritudinous, imposing, etc. And you can drive over the ocean!

Reason #4: Pictures like these.

You may have noticed that all of my reasons have to do with water. Contrary to popular belief, I am not a fish. I am, however, made up of 70% water. It's likely that you are too.

The coolest thing about water is probably the giant space ocean. If I were a few million times larger than I am and could live on the edge of that space ocean, watching a billion stars set over a glittering cloud of water vapor so big it could supply 140 trillion Earth-sized planets with oceans and oceans of water, my life would probably be perfect. I might even sell everything I own and buy a space ocean houseboat so I can hang my laundry out to dry by the light of a few galaxies.

That said, if you happen to invent a "make something a million times larger" machine that is shaped like a houseboat, with an "anti-asphyxiation" button and a stick shift that goes 1-2-3-4-speed of light, call me first.