Mama looked at me this morning after beginning a book called Why Does The World Exist by a guy named Jim Holt and she asked, “Loulou—are you really there or are you just something I think I’m seeing?”
Well, that threw me, and I pondered that all morning until the next one came, one she has been tossing around since the age of fourteen when stars in the night sky inspired some thinking about why they are there and why she was there and why anything is wherever it is at all—”Can you really have something from nothing, and if nothing is all there was, how did something happen?”
At this point, I wanted to play the string game (haha, I guess you could call it my String Theory) and then have breakfast so I took her mind off all of this questioning by being especially cute by attacking the bed covers and beating them with my back feet until I wore myself out and leapt off the bed toward the food dish downstairs.
But don’t get me wrong; after breakfast I really gave some brain power to all of those questions, hoping she would read a little more to me this evening so that I might get a grip on just what was around before there was something but I’m pretty sure Mr. Holt hasn’t really touched on that one yet and pretty much just wants to ask the questions and get us all thinking in new ways even if the answers don’t pop immediately into our little pea brains!
You know that guy, Einstein, the one who said that e=mc squared, which to me meant that excellence equals my cat squared but I know it means something else—anyway, that guy—well, Mr. Holt says that maybe after four or five Einsteins in the future, each one thinking and thinking and thinking about this nothingness and somethingness, then there might possibly, just maybe, with luck, be an answer to these puzzling questions and perhaps at that point we’ll all say, “Ah, hah, so THAT was it! Obviously!”
But I don’t think so.
Mama loves to puzzle over all of these things and although it looks as if she’s doing a lot of other stuff daily including taking care of me and papa and making sure we are happy campers, she’s ruminating (another word I love—I ruminate in the garden, or maybe I’m mixing that up with rummaging or ruining; whatever…) on the something and nothing of life or rather before life in her subconscious, that’s for sure.
I know she is because when she puts my dinner dish down in front of me and it has sliced lemons in it and she starts to squeeze my cat food over the salad, she’s on another planet. She’s out there in the before wandering around looking for whatever isn’t and I have to myow loudly to bring her back to earth.
Hey, she’ll be finished with this book next week and we can get back to normal.
Until then, I think I’ll go stretch out this evening on the patio and check out Orion or Venus or maybe even (excuse the expression) the Dog Star…
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