Lauren, pictured here with her ball (and again here, just short of falling into the water-canal-river-ravine), is very, very smart. She is, in fact, one of the smartest people I know. But she is perhaps too smart, because in favor of all of this intelligence, there has been a severe common-sense sacrifice. Sometimes.
We’ve been friends for something like 15 years. Which, at 30, is half of my life. (See, Lauren, I can count too.) Half of my life is a long time.
Lauren can calculate fringe (you know, the amount of $ for extra stuff that an employee costs for things like insurance, other benefits, etc.) for a program she is developing in her head. For like 20 people at a time. She can answer most of the questions at Pub Quiz that I can’t. (To be honest, I can’t answer any but the music questions, and those are really a toss-up as well most of the time.) She tells me when I’m being a moron. She calls me hansey pants.
She can hardly do math, except for the fringe thing. Even with a calculator. She mis-reads excited and loud for “screaming.” And she occasionally does things like play with her ball in the semi-dark on our evening walk. Note on the right how dark it is… hard to see a tennis ball in this kind of light, never mind a blue racketball.
But on she went, merrily bouncing her ball.
Until she almost lost it into the water-canal-river-ravine (I don’t know what the hell it actually is, it’s the water that runs down the middle of Pleasant Valley Parkway.)
And she almost fell in. Or, the ball almost did, and she went toddling after it, resolute not to lose it. How fun it would have been to explain to her parents that she had cracked her skull open on the concrete trying to save her ball.
Good judgement is perhaps underrated in our little world.
