November 27, 2012
The bell rings for the end of 6th period. I pack up my backpack and head
out into the stream of students making their way through the puddles of
rainwater standing between them and their parents' cars.
Tanner walks up behind me, "Hey Andy, what's up?"
"Just going to track. Are you coming?"
"No, I have to go meet my dad," he complains.
"Hey Tanner," Tanner's friend says, walking up to us in direction we're going, "did you say you did a full three-sixty skating yesterday?"
"You mean a whole two pi?" I ask.
He laughs, "Yeah, a whole two pi."
Tanner introduces us, "Bodie, this is Andy, Andy: Bodie. Andy's a nice kid, but he says weird things sometimes."
At track practice we run Garcon, a five-mile loop going up Garden Street and down Constance. On the way up we always get barked at by a big, white, fluffy dog that jumps up on his little sandstone wall. Eric pet the rude guy's head once, but nobody has been tempted to imitate him since. After practice my friend Jared takes me home, and when we get there we notice the sunset. It is a yellow-orange sunset made up of hundreds of small, flat clouds covering a quarter of the sky over the ocean. The orange is even visible reflected from the rainclouds over the mountains in the east.
I power my way through my AP World notes, eager to go to the Westmont library again. Last week I had gone there and read an article in November issue of Scientific American about the evolution of penguins. They originated over 65 million years ago during the time of the dinosaurs in the lost subcontinent of Zealandia. All that remains of Zealandia since it was submerged in the Pacific Ocean is the island country of New Zealand. In fact, one of the authors of the article I read discovered the oldest penguin fossil known to man in a sandstone cliff of New Zealand.
I finish my homework just in time for dinner, after which Mom and I watch the first episode of the 4th season of The West Wing. When we're done I go outside and run in the dark to the library. On the way I pass Mr. Chapman walking home from work.
"Hi Mr. Chapman," I pant, running up to him.
"Hello Andy, where are you off to?" he asks.
I start jogging away, "I'm going to the library to read Scientific American!"
"You're a cool kid, Andy," I hear him say.
After looking through all the second and ground floor bookshelves for T1.S5, I give up and ask Tyler, a math major who works in the library a lot. To my excitement, he tells me to go look in the basement for them. The basement is full of metal shelves full of reference books without any space to walk between the shelves to get a book. You have to turn a crank on the shelf on the end to move it a couple feet along a track, opening a gap wide enough to walk through. If the last person there left the gap between the A and C books, I get to move five different shelves to reach the books with a call number that starts with T. The Scientific American magazines all the way back from 2000 were in two bound copies and five different magazine holders. I pulled down the third to last magazine holder and found an issue with an interesting cover picture. It was the April 2008 issue, and the cover article was about how plant life would be different on different planets. The first half of the article gave a description of how photosynthesis on Earth worked, and then it went on to talk about the changes in the process that would be necessary for plants to survive on a a planet orbiting a hotter or colder sun.
Around 10:00 I finish the article, write down a few notes, and head home. Only a few wisps of clouds still remain in the night sky, so I walk the whole way with my head looking up at the stars. The moon is almost full, and it lights up the ground, casting crisp shadows of the leaves and tree trunks on the pale concrete. I reach the end of the gravel path leading to our front door, and I look up at the moon one last time before I go inside. It is directly overhead in the sky and a thin, transparent cloud is passing in front of it. The details of the moon are still visible as it shines through, and it is surrounded by a halo of white light. Circling the light is a fully circular rainbow, starting with violet on the inside, then indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red on the outside.
I knock on Ruth's door, "Hey Ruth, come see this," I whisper.
"What is it?" she groans.
"A moon rainbow!"
