Idea I Had After Seeing A Book Title

First Woman, Detective

Eve called her family in for dinner, but only Adam and Cain showed up. “Where’s Abel?” she asked. Adam and Cain looked at each other. “I don’t know,” said Cain. “He was with his sheep last I saw,” said Adam.

Eve went looking for Abel. She saw the crows circling over the field and went to look. There was Abel, face down, his blood drying in the sun. Near his body was a rock with blood and hair on it. She leaned over to look at it and then at her son’s head. She touched him and he felt cold. He was not asleep. Abel is dead, she thought, this is the first one. We will die, just like the Lord said.

She walked slowly back home. “Abel is dead. His head is dented by a stone. Someone has killed him.” She looked at her husband and son. “Did you kill Abel, Adam?” Adam looked stunned. “No!” he said, “why should I?” Eve turned to Cain, “Did you kill Abel, Cain?” Cain licked his lips and then burst out, “Why do you accuse me, Mom?” “I’m only asking, Cain,” said Eve patiently. “Why do you take Dad’s word for it?” he challenged. “Just answer the question, my son,” she said. “You always liked him best!” Cain accused. “Did you kill him?” Cain stared for a moment and then looked away. 

“Is this about the offerings to the Lord again?” asked Eve. “He never accepts my offerings!” cried Cain. “It’s always lamb, lamb, lamb!” Adam put his hand on Cain’s shoulder, but he shook it off. “Of course he accepts your offering,” he said. “Not with favor,” sneered Cain. “How can you tell?” asked Adam, who hadn’t bothered to offer anything since leaving the Garden.

“We’re getting off the point,” said Eve. “Someone has killed Abel and there are only three of us. I didn’t do it. Adam says he didn’t do it. Cain, did you kill your brother?” Cain lowered his head. “Yes, Mom. I lured him to the field and struck him down. I did it in anger.” Adam rolled his eyes. “Oh, boy – we’re in trouble now.”  “Why?” asked Cain. “There’s no one to tell.” “The Lord already knows!” exclaimed Adam. “He knows everything! But first He’ll pretend He doesn’t and will ask you and what are you going to say?”

“Look,” said Cain, “if we all just keep calm and say nothing, no one will find out and no one will get hurt.” He dragged his toe in the dust. “It’s not like there is anyone else.”

“Dinner’s getting cold,” said Eve. “We’ll discuss this later, young man.”

“Why am I always the one getting in trouble?” grumbled Cain.

Eve was sad, but at the same time she was oddly satisfied. I have solved a mystery, she thought. And she wished there were more.

“Who’s watching the sheep?” asked Adam.

“Oh, shit,” said Eve.

Where Did That Watch Come From?

This has annoyed me for ages.
If there is a watch, there must be a watchmaker. Yeah, okay. Therefore, if there is life on planet Earth ...
No, no. Let me stop you there. You skipped something.
Where did the watchmaker learn to make the watch? Where did she get the parts? Did she imagine it all by herself? How did she know time should be divided up the way the watch divides it?
Do people really think that inventions spring fully-formed from the forehead of some really smart person (or a god)? Everything we have, that we make, is based on technology that has come before. Everything we make has evolved. And it took a long, long time to get from one idea (Time - Hey, when's the best time to plant some crops?) to another (Ooooo, digital watch!), but often the latter stages start coming fast and furious. Sometimes technology gets stuck in a rut for a while until someone figures out some nuance to get it going again. [Cold fusion? Helloooo.]
But the fact remains that a watch developed out of hundreds, maybe even thousands of years of cutting time into pieces. And one of the prerequisites was the need for cutting time into pieces.
Let there be light! There was Dawn with her rosy fingers, noon when the sun was at its apex, and tobacco-stained Dusk. As the seasons changed, daytime and nighttime would duke it out and become longer for one and shorter for the other and then go back. The hours of the day were not uniform throughout the year. What good was a timepiece that divided the day into regular intervals? Who would care? Where was the need? (Apparently, there was a need to limit politicians from talking too long, but a water clock worked for that.)
What sort of technology goes into a watch? Let's imagine one of those cool. old-fashioned fob watches. Very basic. You wind it up, and it ticks. First of all, it's made of metal. You need to be able to extract metal from ore and shape it. Oh, wait. You need fire first. You need to control that fire. It probably needs to get pretty darn hot to melt metal. Well, we're at the Bronze Age now. No problem. Some folks worked that out for us.
What about that winding? Someone has to invent a spring. Alternatively, someone has to discover the properties of the pendulum. What about gears? Where did that idea even come from? Someone has to find a way to make all this much smaller, more accurate, and also attractive.
Thousands contributed to the making of a watch.
In 1972 I bought a watch in Switzerland, because that's what you did. And now I don't even wear one. I have a phone that is my watch, my camera, and a total time-sucker.  The watch has evolved right before my very eyes.
So, just because I didn't see life on this planet evolve and can't explain exactly how it happened, doesn't mean life didn't evolve. It took an amount of time and slow change that I would have difficulty fathoming because it is just so vast. At the same time (haha), the technology of a simple watch is something I could not replicate. I couldn't even begin to know how to smelt ore. I leave that up to the experts. And I leave all the steps up to the experts as it seems the human race has a hive mind with everyone running around being expert in their own thing and contributing to society as a whole. Sort of the way every part of our body performs a different job and shares the results to make us live.
I can see the parallels. Or do I mean paradigm? Let me check my phone. Siri might know.

The Old Lady in the Mirror

Yesterday I caught sight of myself in the mirror at work. It was accidental. I have not quite perfected my mother’s trick of just looking at the hair, or whatever it was she wanted to check, and ignoring the wrinkles and wattle. The gestalt hit me. I’ve gotten old. For a brief handful of seconds I caught myself thinking, What have I done with my life? Why did I put off living?

Then I suddenly remembered that I did not put off living. I put off settling down. What needs to happen is to go over my early life and remember that I did what I damn well pleased for over 20 years. I am not waiting to retire so I can do things. I’ve done them, begad.

After college, I worked at low paying jobs and played around with theatre. I was in a musical with Garry Moore. My then boyfriend (sort of affectionately known as The Wicked Step-Ex-Boyfriend) had talked about moving in together and I moved 800 miles away leaving instructions with my parents to not divulge my whereabouts. We are both much happier. He has his home and his partner and I have mine. Our years together (on and off or at a distance) were filled with adventure, if not happiness.

I moved to Manhattan to break into theatre. First, I freaked out and went to Cambridge, MA for a while, staying in someone’s dorm room. A friend found a foothold in Manhattan and I joined him, where I went to auditions, hung out in piano bars, did odd jobs in corporate libraries, advertising companies, and at HBO. At HBO I ended up in an office overlooking Bryant Park and the NY Public Library. I watched the lights come on the Empire State Building (which I tended to call the Statue of Liberty because I’m easily confused by monuments) each night from my office window. I worked for a literary agent and for some famous authors.

Eventually I moved on to Boston, where I did six shows in two years as opposed to no shows in three in Manhattan. I worked as a paralegal and took classes in cartooning, tapdance, cooking, and ancient Greek. I might still be there if I hadn’t fallen and broken my kneecap. Then again, someone had to go back south and look after our parents, or as I called them My Parents and my sister called them The Parents. I started back into theatre and slowly wound down into a full-time permanent job with a house of my own, thinking I had the rest of my life all worked out. All that slipped away when I found someone that actually wanted to marry me. And after I got over bursting into tears every time I heard the “M” word, I finally settled down.

None of the above really exposes the warp and woof of what went on: getting so drunk that I lost track of how I got from one end of Manhattan to the other, parading as a female impersonator on Christopher Street, meeting other actors with interesting abilities such as silverware impersonations (loved the shrimp fork!), having my glasses broken during a fight on the Boston T, trying to train a cat to be tossed in the air for a show (didn’t work out so he was just carried on stage briefly), portraying the Token Tapdancing Lesbian in a gay musical only to have my roommate find out about it later … All good fun.

But settling down has not, really, stopped me from doing whatever I damn well please. It just seems that with age, what I damn well please involves more napping. And jigsaw puzzles online.