There Are Anthills In Africa That Can Be Seen From

outer space.

The pay phone is history. The ants are a little bit larger than the period at the end of this sentence. Goldbrickers wonder where they’re going with such purpose but feel no need to step on them. What would that accomplish. Vague longings like waves tugging on your toes. How the phone booth has lasted this long no one can say. It may be the last. I don’t count myself among the idlers on the street. No longer is there a phone book in which one can confirm that her name is listed. Only a chain. The glass building seems a miniature of something larger. A tower of Babel that didn’t pan out. Why say beeline? Bees stray in every direction in search of nectar. Ants spend their lives tracing the possible shortest way to get from Point A to Point B, carrying ideas that weigh more than they do. This is the great discovery that the ants, some at least, make at the end of their expeditions.

To Robert Heinlein. May He Always Pop Up When

Needed.

Call the one looking west, Clarence. And the figure in the east-facing porthole, Louise. North, Johann, or John as he preferred. Looking south is Helga. Meet my grandparents. They arrived on boats and lived in sod houses. They and their descendants farmed the unforgiving prairie around Ogallala, Nebraska, a town that’s now famous for its water tower, which high school kids painted to resemble a flying saucer. They had to be high on something, puns the Indian in the Exxon travel center. Not Apache. From Delhi. I buy jerky and bottled water drawn from a spring in the Sierra Madre of California. My ancestors recede in the rearview mirror. They look less and less like what they were: aliens. They’d take off again, but the landing gear has sunk too deeply into the ground. An interstate highway’s been built. They have children, although they seldom stay. They like it here.