What's Strange

Sometimes, people out of context are startling.  Like the former teacher you run into at the pharmacy counter or someone you taught years ago who suddenly lives across the street.  It's strange, we think, the ways our lives intersect.

Just yesterday, I discovered that one of my oldest friends (the kind whose parents were friends of my parents) and I descend from the first folks of Newburyport, Massachusetts.  Our 17th century ancestors knew each other.  Now that's really strange.

It's strange that right now as I write this, a rover is on Mars that we sent there and that folks here on this planet are sending it signals that will make it rove, but not now since it can't respond immediately, and it's even more strange that photographs captured by the Hubble show stars being born that died eons before we ever saw their birth.  Now that's more than strange.

Why am I thinking about what's strange?  Because I saw something that I misunderstood when I saw it the first time and when I saw it the second time, but when I saw it as a photograph on my screen, I think I understood it.  To wit: I thought I saw a snake carcass with a lizard still caught in its jaw.  Duh.  A snake carcass, all right, but with its former skin.

What's also strange is that I happened to be there when two vultures silently alit on a branch and then silently dropped to the ground.  One saw me and lifted -- not so much flew as floated -- across the beach; the other, hungrier perhaps, beaked something up from the ground, the something and the bird too far away from me to decipher.  I tried sneaking, but this vulture too was spooked by my strangeness and flew off, leaving me to walk on and find what they were eating.

Note, please, that when I returned from my tour of the lake, more than an hour later, what's missing from the deadly scene.  And isn't it strange that even then I didn't realize what I was seeing?

And isn't it strange to think how much we are all missing every day?  Because of limited knowledge (a little knowledge is a dangerous thing) or because of bias or because of limited vision -- visual or intellectual, or just because?

Now that is strange.