Page 36 - WTP Vol. XIII #1

Physics: A Meditation
Villard de Honnecourt, a French architect, wanted to use the perpetual-motion machine he designed to power “an angel whose finger turns always toward the sun.”
Time surprise me. I wanted the miracle of another walker. I
Time is the interval over which change occurs. It is motion with memory.
Brownian Movement
In 1977, teaching English near Buffalo, I had the choice of spending Friday night in the high school gym with hundreds of stranded students or walking home through what the weatherman was calling “the blizzard of the century.” I lived less than a mile away. Even given the wind and snow, I figured twenty min- utes would get me home.
The first three blocks were exhilarating. I was out of school early; there was the prospect, for a storm this size, of additional snow days the following week, and the walk felt like an adventure as the snow, whipped by gusts that seemed to live up to the weatherman’s report of fifty miles per hour, stayed more or less at my back. Nobody else was outside. No cars passed along the main street, and then, when I turned the corner, the blizzard became Novocain. A few minutes of walking almost directly into the wind and all the superficial parts of me felt prepped for painless sur- gery. An urgent voice began to insist I keep moving.
I wanted to be home, not about to turn back to what would surely be an entire weekend with high school- ers, living in the gym with a mob of bored students. By then I was half way home, head down, squinting as if there was a difference between the sidewalk and the street for walking. I started wishing for a car to
told myself ten minutes, just don’t miss the turn, and this foolishness would be finished. New York wasn’t some Jack London snowbound deathtrap. I started counting my steps, figuring fewer than one thousand would have me just outside the door.
When the snow intensified and the wind seemed even stronger, I guessed I’d walked into the intersection where I needed to turn directly into the gale. I lifted my gloved hands in front of my face, hunched over, and said 324 to myself, then 325, 326, floundering now into the tiny steps of a toddler at the beach. I dreamed my way to 1000, putting up framework with those footsteps, erecting four walls and a roof, in- stalling a furnace for the heat that would flow evenly through every room. And then, mouthing 1001, I knew I’d zigzagged nowhere but the blank deep drifts in the street where the houses, sparse in good weath- er, had become nonexistent in bad.
Freeze held its pillow over my legs. Five hundred more steps would have me inside, I explained to my- self. I chose to angle left. There were other houses;
I didn’t need my wife and children. Another five hundred steps and I could live anywhere indoors. Surely, I’d reach a porch that the drifts hadn’t erased. Surely, some family would open a side door and gather, astonished, in the hallway, to see who they’d saved, who’d returned, prodigal, from the swine of that storm.
Boyle’s Law
It was ninety degrees, at least, in the house when my family walked in after visiting my parents for Thanks- giving weekend. I knew at once that the heating unit was broken, its gauge stuck at a low temperature
that insisted the house needed more steam. I thought of the white-bearded fat man in overalls who had claimed to fix it the day before we left. He’d shocked himself while he showed me there wasn’t enough current running to keep a fly from buzzing. “How the hell that happen?” he asked, as if I had installed a joy buzzer inside our electric furnace.
“Is that Santa Claus?” my youngest son, three months into kindergarten, asked after the electrician had slammed the door of his truck and driven away.
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gAry FinCKe