Some people need to talk—a lot. Some people prefer to listen. A match of these two is fortunate. I have already described how Dad talks and tells his stories and expounds upon religion and history and morality and family and the contents of the encyclopedia, and how I am more of a listener who at 60 is weary of listening. Gloria, however is another talker. She cares for Dad several mornings a month, and the conversations begins rapid fire the moment she calls "Good morning!" from the top stair. When Gloria talks, Dad listens. When Dad talks, Gloria listens. Yet, somehow, they both seem to talk continuously. Today I caught snippets about Gloria's sick cat and how the dry cat food and wet cat food each affect the cat's weight and health and energy and general demeanor, and how the cat is slowly getting better with good cat food and care. Dad took his turn about the cosmic character of the universe with its gravity and dark matter and fusion and electromagnetic energy and relativity physics vis a vis quantum physics. Both are vaguely sympathetic to what the other is saying, but mostly they each appreciate being able to talk and being listened to. Did you know that a mere 20 years ago, the consensus among cosmologists and xenobiologists was the impossibility of intelligent life anywhere in the universe but on our Goldilocks Zone earth, but that today, with the James Webb telescope's discoveries, the consensus has shifted to the statistical impossibility that intelligent life does not thrive among the trillions of habitable planets orbiting in the trillions of solar systems orbiting in the trillions of galaxies or our vast universe. Her cat prefers the wet food. We will never know because even light takes one hundred thousand light years to travel to us. The vet's treatments are helping. Time for your shower, Nelson. I returned from my ten-mile Jordan River paddle long after Gloria had gone for the day. The olive-brown water ran at a 15-year high and swept us pleasantly downriver. The toughest stretch of the paddle was the half-mile portage through head-high thistles with mean mean thorns and willowy willows and sage brush, so aromatic, daisy-chain carrying our kayaks single-file to where we could cross the private hydroelectric dam that also splits the river into two enormous irrigation canals, the river itself suddenly shrinking by two-thirds. Weary and blistered and scratched upon arrival home, Dad called out with his usual cheer: "Roger! Welcome home!" followed by "Sit down and tell us all about it. The people. The river. The wildlife." And so I told them about the thistles and dams and slow high olive-brown water, and the people, and the birds: the Clark's grebes, cormorants, pelicans, belted kingfishers, Bullock's orioles, avocets, ibis, phalaropes, terns, stilts, Canada geese, mallard ducks. I did not tell them how I was so eager in the twilight to show my friend Stephen a beaver and saw one in the shadows and called to Stephen "There! Beaver!" only to have the beaver sprout wings and take flight. "I think that's a duck," he dead panned. "A duck-beaver."
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