Harriet wished she could do something about sea turtles. That was the kind of woman she was. The line at the grocery store didn't bother her, but the lack of sea turtles did. She was standing beside the latest copy of L.A. Expose thinking about whether they couldn't put embargos on countries who didn't protect sea turtle nesting grounds.
She heard there were only a hundred mating pairs of Kemp's Ridley sea turtles left in the world. She imagined them; slow, their shells worn and marred, hauling themselves onto a sandy Mexican beach in the middle of the night, a male and a female turtle. She imagined them going up together, as a pair. Old. Worn out in a way the rest of the world was just beginning to show.
The woman two in front of her was trying to pay by check. It was always a woman who tried to pay by check. Did men even use checks? Maybe men were more likely to pay with a wad of cash. She had known a man who got his rent money when he paid for groceries, asking for $600 cash back. He never went to the bank.
The woman directly in front of her looked back, and Harriet moved her eyes down the the racks of gum.
She felt like if people would just put a little bit of effort into caring more about the environment, her own life would be better. She felt like maybe the woman in front of her wouldn't wear so much make-up if she were more in touch with the Earth. That, Harriet thought, would improve her life in itself. There were children the next row over who were whining. It was horrible. They wanted candy. If they spent less time in front of the television, Harriet thought, they wouldn't be so tempted by candy. They'd have seen fewer commercials. Kids should spend as much time outdoors as possible.
It was chilly in the store. The air was cooled but unmoving somehow. She could smell the ground beef she picked up. Should she be able to smell that? Through the packaging? Should she take it back? She pulled her cart behind her as she came up to the belt, sliding the plastic divider behind the other woman's jumbo box of diapers.
There was a couple behind her. She kept catching them in her field of view as she loaded her bananas, yogurts, boxes of cereal and cans of soup onto the belt. They were impatient. Not with her; just impatient. The pimply young man kept starting new sentences that began with "Well I'm gonna go--" get the car started, exchange the bag of chips for a less smashed one, cash a check. The woman kept cutting him short. "Jesus," she said twice. "It's almost seven."
Harriet was deciding that the couple should use the opportunity of being in line at the grocery store to practice patience (which should surely improve their relationship too) when she noticed that her six-pack of cola was being bagged by a teenager who was lifting it up with her fingers between the cans, by the webbing of plastic that Harriet had somehow been oblivious to but now knew must be there.
"Wait!" she blurted, but no one noticed in the clinking and thumping evening bustle. She froze as she watched the colas go into the plastic bag. She felt, absurdly, like she was watching it in slow motion. The young bagger put her blue corn chips in on top. The cola was buried. Harriet felt a lump congeal in her abdomen. Those plastic things killed thousands of animals a year! Weren't they outlawed? She hadn't seen one in years. She had to do something.
"That's it?" the cashier was asking.
Harriet turned back to the cashier, open-mouthed. She was about to ask if it was possible to un-scan items when she saw the poster by the cashier's head; the little pull-off cards allowing shoppers to donate one, five or ten dollars to hunger relief. She ripped off the biggest one and handed it over.
The cashier smiled.
Harriet would cut up the plastic webbing when she got home.
Monday, June 26, 2006
Friday, June 23, 2006
The day Mini-teki came to Fruholm
For the 50th annual Mini-teki tournament, they emptied the streets of Fruholm, Denmark. In fact, they emptied the buildings too. The entire town was made into a ghost town. They were calling it Major-teki, as if they were inventing a new game. But the game was the same.
A bit like life itself, the game had survived in popularity so long by creating the most complex situations from the simplest rules. With each piece captured by one player, the conditions changed for the others, always according to the rules. The game was no more random than chess. But the depth of its rules, or "genes," would have made the game hell to play with wooden pieces on a board, without a chip to do the calculations. But Mini-teki was perfect for Fruholm; or perhaps Fruholm was perfect for Mini-teki.
The town of Fruholm never had a traffic jam. Not one. The town was not the ant colony the century had made out of most urban concentrations; its tiny cars lacked the sensors that let cars in America or Britain or Japan confer with overhead cams to make decisions about which streets were to best take during rush hour. These cars made no decisions at all. They were every one a slave to Fruholm Traffic Control.
That was the finest but not the only centralization of Fruholm's business. Every pedestrian crossing on the blind, narrow European streets was handled by the Traffic Control as well. Fibers laid in the road changed color when it was safe for pedestrians to cross; red swaths turned to green ones whenever the cars were diverted around that stretch of street. To an aircar hovering above, the town on a busy day already appeared like nothing so much as a giant game board.
But there was one final cap to that delightful symmetry. The cars that peppered Fruholm's streets were not privately owned; they were held and maintained by the city, nearly every one a silver subcompact handy for running errands and visiting friends. Anyone could swipe his card by the door, disengage the car from the charging post and rent it for as long as it took to return to another charger. The cars were shiny and immaculate. (The citizens were, of course, Danes.) The cars were also identical; but in a fit of practical whimsy, the planners had installed a bright plastic LED box on the top of each one, rather like the signature of a taxi cab. What colors and patterns the box displayed could be chosen by the driver, allowing townsfolk with imperfect memories to find their car again in the cinema parking lot. They might program a car with their names, with patterns, with pictograms of turtles and cats.
The display could also be chosen by Traffic Control. This made a handy way to alert police in the rare instance a wanted notable used his card to rent a car; this day, however, as the cars were remotely disengaged from their posts, each wore on its roof a cap of solid red, blue, yellow or green. The streets were silent. The citizens of Fruholm were at the houses of friends or enjoying the free lunch at the soccer stadium two towns over. On the stadium's giant screen was the view from one of the aircars stationed above the town: the town's organically laid streets curved and looped about each other, the intersections blinking red and green as the crosswalks were tested, the colors reversed now to indicate whether or not game pieces, rather than people, could pass.
It was a perfect day; overcast, but not raining, allowing the LED boxes and the road strips to stand out through the gloom. It was almost noon. In a booth at the top of the stadium, the four contestants waited.
A bit like life itself, the game had survived in popularity so long by creating the most complex situations from the simplest rules. With each piece captured by one player, the conditions changed for the others, always according to the rules. The game was no more random than chess. But the depth of its rules, or "genes," would have made the game hell to play with wooden pieces on a board, without a chip to do the calculations. But Mini-teki was perfect for Fruholm; or perhaps Fruholm was perfect for Mini-teki.
The town of Fruholm never had a traffic jam. Not one. The town was not the ant colony the century had made out of most urban concentrations; its tiny cars lacked the sensors that let cars in America or Britain or Japan confer with overhead cams to make decisions about which streets were to best take during rush hour. These cars made no decisions at all. They were every one a slave to Fruholm Traffic Control.
That was the finest but not the only centralization of Fruholm's business. Every pedestrian crossing on the blind, narrow European streets was handled by the Traffic Control as well. Fibers laid in the road changed color when it was safe for pedestrians to cross; red swaths turned to green ones whenever the cars were diverted around that stretch of street. To an aircar hovering above, the town on a busy day already appeared like nothing so much as a giant game board.
But there was one final cap to that delightful symmetry. The cars that peppered Fruholm's streets were not privately owned; they were held and maintained by the city, nearly every one a silver subcompact handy for running errands and visiting friends. Anyone could swipe his card by the door, disengage the car from the charging post and rent it for as long as it took to return to another charger. The cars were shiny and immaculate. (The citizens were, of course, Danes.) The cars were also identical; but in a fit of practical whimsy, the planners had installed a bright plastic LED box on the top of each one, rather like the signature of a taxi cab. What colors and patterns the box displayed could be chosen by the driver, allowing townsfolk with imperfect memories to find their car again in the cinema parking lot. They might program a car with their names, with patterns, with pictograms of turtles and cats.
The display could also be chosen by Traffic Control. This made a handy way to alert police in the rare instance a wanted notable used his card to rent a car; this day, however, as the cars were remotely disengaged from their posts, each wore on its roof a cap of solid red, blue, yellow or green. The streets were silent. The citizens of Fruholm were at the houses of friends or enjoying the free lunch at the soccer stadium two towns over. On the stadium's giant screen was the view from one of the aircars stationed above the town: the town's organically laid streets curved and looped about each other, the intersections blinking red and green as the crosswalks were tested, the colors reversed now to indicate whether or not game pieces, rather than people, could pass.
It was a perfect day; overcast, but not raining, allowing the LED boxes and the road strips to stand out through the gloom. It was almost noon. In a booth at the top of the stadium, the four contestants waited.
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