Day 28

Yesterday sure didn't feel much like Sunday. I guess retirement sort of does in the special quality of 'the weekend' and especially the dose of pre workweek anxiety I used to feel on Sunday evening. Now it's just a day.

K returned from Florida today and I drove over to DCA to meet her plane at noon. It's kind of nice to go to the airport and not have to stand in line, take off my shoes, and have my belongings poked and prodded by the TSA. I got a cup of coffee and sat and read my new Kindle book, _A Short History of Progress_ by Ronald Wright. OK, I still have multiple books in progress but this is one of the joys of having my time be my own - I can read what I feel like when I feel like. Heaven. This book, which I've read before, is a great dose of reality about the current human condition, where we came from and where we are headed.

After retrieving K's bags and driving home, she took a nap and I took a walk to the National Mall to find a quiet bench for a little afternoon reading. I found the perfect spot in the rose garden beside the Smithsonian Castle. Despite wanting privacy I kept having to interact with people. I had a delightful conversation with one gentleman from Holland who wanted to see my Kindle and lamented that he couldn't buy one in Holland. He can get the Sony digital reader but it doesn't have the ease of ordering books and having them be delivered immediately by wireless. Later K told me that one of the friends she spent the weekend with is in talks with Amazon to use the Kindle in place of textbooks for the multiple public schools she is responsible for. It seems the economics of textbooks is such that a $300 electronic reader makes sense rather than print physical books, pay for shipping them and then replace them in a couple of years after normal wear and tear. Who would have imagined?

Walking home I noticed that going up Capitol Hill I was bending forward so severely that all I was seeing was the interesting aggregate in the sidewalks (pictured above left). Exciting, no? OK, no. But that's the reality of that part of my daily walk.

I spent the later part of the evening reading about Buddhism and Taoism on the net (why? because I want to and have the time) while waiting for Obama to be on David Letterman. Turns out the reading was more interesting and rewarding than the Pres's appearance. When I was a lot younger most of the people I knew were reading both Buddhist and Taoist texts and at least voicing agreement with the philosophies behind those beliefs. Many of us had an unreasonable optimism about the future because of all the meditative and altruistic pressure we felt around us. Funny how all of that seemed to dissolve during the early part of the Reagan years.

I first got interested in Buddhism when I was in High School and read Keroak's _The Dharma Bums_ (very puzzling to someone with no frame of reference for Eastern non God centered religions) and then got hooked on Eastern religions generally when I read Erwin Schrodenger's _What Is Life?_, a meditation by the Noble Prize winning quantum physicist about the cosmological implications of Hinduism. I have never forgotten his pivotal phrase, "Physical theory, in its present state, strongly suggests the indestructibility of mind by time." This was most impressive to me because it seemed so unreasonable. And I thought, how strongly must this guy want to be immortal to grasp and hold to something this weak? But isn't that where all organized religions want people to be? Desperate to hold on to what they know. Fearful to lose it.