Thursday, December 04, 2003

Lesson One: Shut Mouth

So I’m strolling around with my mom and kel and my sister and my mom’s old friend from childhood, near my office, looking for a place for lunch.  It’s a saturday and things are quiet but we decide to check the dim sum place in a nearby food court.  It’s in a space I really like, so I start describing it to everybody.  I wind up telling my mom’s old friend (who lives in town and is very well-off but I have no idea what she ever did for a living) all about the layout of this food court, how the space works, how there’s a waterfall fountain that drops water 70 feet from a fixture way up near the skylights through plain open space to a catchbasin in the middle of the floor, an almost mystical ever-refreshing source of sound and visual stimulation… and mom’s friend listens patiently and then tells me that the water falls as it does because it has oil in it to make the droplets bigger and the splash smaller, and she designed it herself 20 years ago along with the rest of the building. 

I didn’t talk anymore for almost 20 seconds.  That’s close to the record.