Blog #8. "Is" | kathryn1985's Blog

As has been the ritual for three decades, mom and dad exchanged Valentine's Day gifts, cute cards with sly and/or erotic  notes (Karla and I surreptitiously found the stash as young teens), and had dinner at a nice place while enjoying each other's company. If it had been the weekend the pair would have spent a night or two at nearby Glencairn Inn even though they have been empty-nesters for several years.

I provided the gift for dad, an art class necklace made from several stands with dark and silvery glass beads and embellishments. Mom's gift to dad was boxed and wrapped with attention, he was told that it was "special" and reminded him that this was the 30th Valentine's Day since he asked her to marry him.

He immediately guessed correctly.  "It's a chocolate cream cheese brownie isn't it?"

Thirty years ago on that date my mom drove more than an hour and waited in line at Geiger's Bakery and Orchards in Westfield, N.J., a popular location around the holidays and a significant user of butter. She then drove more than an hour home and waited in a  darkened university parking lot where my dad, an untenured teacher, was leading an evening class. She parked right by his car and he was thrilled by the unexpected visit and the delicious morsel.

There are hints that the dessert was something more but my sister and I have never pried loose that information.

Geiger's has long closed and it's unclear if the exact treat was ever duplicated with my parents or discussed but dad instantly knew. I simply write off the unexplained phenomena as a conjoining orbit of electrons, synapse spillover or something only a wizard could explain.

In what may be a very loose connection, I was sorting books in a box in the garage this morning and came across Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot."  In the book cover photo the namesake is unextraordinary. The blue dot hardly stands out in the picture taken by the space probe "Voyager" as it hurdled past Jupiter on its way years later out of the solar system.

The blue dot is of course earth and the point is not only how insignificant and of little consequence our planet is even in the tiniest part of our galaxy let alone the Cosmos but how much promise and potential is "out there."

I realized just today that Dr. Sagan is wrong. Certainly in the perspective of the Cosmos earth isn't even a speck of sand on the galaxy's beaches.

In my universe, though, where my mind can leap between thoughts and memories faster than Voyager, the simple love shared by my parents crosses all boundaries and borders, the dynamic laws of physics, is of enormous importance to me and who I am and is fundamental and the fundamental difference of all humanity compared to everything else.