Working Retail

How do you know if a story is true?

I used to work as a student kitchen worker at Morrill Hall cafeteria on the campus of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

I had many friends, some that worked there and many who wouldn't.

Occasionally, university professors would eat at the cafeteria.

Or we assumed they were professors.

A few times, just as my shift was ending, an older gentleman would come in and buy a cookie and glass of milk.

He didn't stand out.  He wasn't one of the eccentric retired professors who haunted cafeterias with their stories of past school administrations and genius students who went crazy and were never heard from again.

He was just an ordinary looking man of his age, wearing a tweed jacket, button-down shirt, nondescript pants (probably darkly stained cotton or polyester) and penny loafer shoes.

I had forgotten about the man until I recently saw the movie, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," with some friends (for one of my friends' birthday).

Amazing how an old-fashioned good-vs-evil movie will trigger memories of forgotten days.

Anyway, as I was wiping down a table, the old man spoke in a foreign language.

"Excuse me?"

"I said, 'Do you speak suomi?'"

"Sorry?"

"Finnish.  Do you speak Finnish, I mean?"

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Well, then, do you have a minute to hear something interesting?"

"In Finnish?"

"No.  I will translate for you."

I thought about the summer that Mikko had spent with my family and shared old children's tales.  Was this man going to tell me, a grownup college student, a kid's story?

"Okay.  But I've got to finish these tables."

"Then I will come back another time, perhaps?"

"Maybe that would be better."

"Are you still performing on stage?"

"What?"

"Are you taking any drama classes?"

"No.  Why?"

"That's too bad.  We have more to discuss than I first thought."

I kept cleaning the table as the man stood up and walked away.

I saw him a few months later.  After hearing his stories, my life took a shortcut through a world totally absent of fraternities, sororities and hand-built computers.

My life hasn't been the same since.

I'm not crazy.  This is not a fairy tale.  Why am I saying that?

Because the man proved to me we are not alone.

My stories about the Book of the Future and other familiar tricks of the fortunetelling trade are just practice, sleight-of-hand devices the man taught me to use, putting into play the information an old woman gave me in the trinkets she shared.

The E-Brain was just a ruse.

The truth is, as I've said, deeper than states of energy, far beyond our limited imagination and Neanderthal techno playtoys.

I don't want to be here talking about the next phase of our existence but the heat wave outside forces me inside and away from large heat-generating appliances like TVs and microwave ovens.

The fact is I want to be the greatest leader who ever existed but instead I was picked to wonder, to ask questions, to show possibilities that are impossible today so we might point our 7B-strong efforts toward making them possible.

There is no "they" or "them."  There is only us, in many forms, forms we cannot see because we cannot see.

The LHC and the wrestling ring are one.

Let me explain...