Exponential

He is holding two bags of cat food. I am holding chocolate and olive oil. With him, small talk is non-existent. He is a zany character from a class I took two years ago, earnest gaze colored like the gray at his temples.

"You've probably heard this story," he says, "it's used a lot and its about math." Seconds earlier he had been explaining nodes, algorithms, and how they caused his computer to crash. It must have been on his mind, as he had launched into the story with limited how-do-you-dos.

This was standard fare for our random run-ins. Our most recent conversation happened this autumn as I was going for band-aids at the grocery store. Whilst peeling beets I had cut myself. As you can imagine, the resulting pigments were something to see, and it showed on my hands. He had considered my make-shift bandages of paper towel and tape. "Being both a pessimist and a hypochondriac, I usually carry band-aids," he had said, grinning as he was wont to do.

Now, months later, we stand in the grocery store. On the way over from campus that evening I strolled through a thin layer of snow and falling flakes, peaceful as a satellite floating through the stars. I was hard at work on my current endeavor, which has something to do with awareness of the current moment. It is often a very unfamiliar task, not unlike computer algorithms.

To this end I stopped in the middle of the footbridge. It is a fragment of the old Higgins Bridge. I imagined women in bustled skirts and men with canes and long-tailed jackets sauntering home from a night at the theater. Overhead arched the steel bracings. With snow clinging to them they were the perfect contrast of black and white, a latticework of yin and yang climbing toward the half moon.

"The story goes, that a man did a brave deed for a king, and as a reward the king offered him anything he asked," my zany friend explains. The man asked for a chessboard worth of rice, filled so that each square had double the rice grains as the square before, starting with just two grains. Happily, the king agreed.

"But, by the sixty-fourth square the kingdom was bankrupt," he cheerfully concludes, "it seems like such a small thing at first... and that's why my computer crashed."

Another tangential tale ensued before we went on our separate ways. I returned to the dark outdoors. The snow pillowed on the ground but left the sidewalks dry. As I walked I fell even more in love with life, as snowfall has a way of making me do. It seems each day is a square on the chessboard, each day another vivacity, tranquility, opportunity, always increasing to the power of our own capacity. Except on this board there is no sixty-four limit. The bountiful, beautiful blue skies of life only grow, and our consciousness is the broke king trying to make sense of this splendid mess.