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Physics (continued from preceding page) Coriolis Force
I said goodbye to all of the clipped-from-my-year- book classmates as if they might have moved south, choosing another hemisphere so that they might twist backwards, slide the other way until we might see each other again, a sort of heaven rounding the planet from the opposite side.
Inertia
During my senior year in that high school, every night was filled with a dream of sex. I woke to a groin-buzz while high school deflated. That winter, on what was, so far, my life’s coldest morning, Gus Brickner, The Human Polar Bear, lowered himself into the Monongahela River. He swam and smiled. Featured on the television news, he walked out of the water, bare-chested and dripping, beside a thermom- eter that registered eighteen below. Gus Brickner was immediately wrapped and warmed, but the weather- man shivered and joked until I turned him off and walked to the school bus stop, hearing snow squeak under the Converse All-Stars that I wore every day, no matter what.
The bus driver, already loaded, motioned for me to hurry, but I kept my pace. He waved and honked, and after I slowed down to a shuffle, he hissed the door shut and drove. Thinking how that school bus might slide off the highway and plunge through river ice, I watched, from a distance, for faces at the windows and saw nobody. Shivering, I hurried back to my house and remembered how I’d recently learned that the Ice Age had driven glaciers right to within a mile or two from where I lived. How they had receded without reaching the spot where, an hour south of me, Gus Brickner must have been stunned when he emerged from the river. How experts had verified the limits of those glaciers by examining the sides of pits dug in the earth like the craters for the start of the missile silos in America or Russia. Or Cuba’s photo- graphed holes, unfilled just before that winter began.
Optics
In love with the light described by the near-dead, my mother, her health failing, rallied her faltering faith. She became fascinated by women who had returned from what they claimed was heaven’s gate, especially a woman whose heart had stopped for nearly three minutes, who used words like “incredible,” “glorious,” and “fantastic.”
“Isn’t that something?” my mother said, pointing out how the woman insisted the light she’d seen had been the “wondrous grace of God.” My mother
Twenty-five years had gone by since graduation. The invitation to my high school reunion said, “silver an- niversary,” a title that made me uneasy with myself, still breathing hard from the five minutes I’d spent helping the mailman lurch loose from the late winter snow that had been plowed against my mail box. I’d slipped twice while pushing, both times caught by the heavy snow that bordered the mail truck’s deep ruts.
Three months later, after I had answered the page of questions included with the invitation and the re- union was only days away, I received a book full of half-page autobiographies by my classmates that began with Lyle An..., a surgeon who was living in Harrisburg and had a green belt and a son in dia- pers. He was followed by Susan Ar..., whom I didn’t remember. All she did was complain that work-
ing full time kept her from doing anything else.
Et cetera, I thought, skipping to my own spin on twenty-five years, then flipping to the back cover and the photograph taken when three hundred of
us had posed before graduation from a high school near Pittsburgh. I searched among those young faces while I thought of another book I’d been reading that explained how each member of my class had spun maybe one step to the side since we’d written our stories and mailed them.
Listen, that book said, because you live north of the equator, you slip a tiny bit eastward through each moment you move. On your street, it’s seven hundred miles an hour that the world is spinning, and, un- corrected, you could eventually slide to your town’s river and splash, Icarus of the physics book. I tried
to understand. When I walked a mile to the univer- sity where I taught, I thought of correcting for the quarter inch of slide, allowing for slippage. It seemed so improbable a natural law that I resorted to think- ing of ice, the way my shoes fishtailed in snow, their movement nevertheless predictable if I could remem- ber the equations full of foot pounds and speed. And when I gave that up, snow months away, I thought
of my older son’s first day of baseball, how I bought him a fat, red, plastic bat, saying, “Here now, try this,” guiding my pitches to where I anticipated the bat’s wild arc might pass, believing I knew the strange physics of small children.
Inside that reunion’s back cover, I discovered pic- tures of the early dead from our graduating class. Following that, another list, no photographs: some- one whose wife had died, someone with a daughter killed, a few more spinning from terrible luck, and
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