Crashing Through by Robert Kurson

Author:Robert Kurson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588366252
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

Now that Carson and Wyndham had shown May every object inside the house, they set out to show him the rest of the world outside. They suggested a walk through the schoolyard and to University Mall, a scenic route—and one that led to Fluffy’s, their favorite doughnut shop. The family put on jackets and thanked Ori Jean for starting dinner.

May was just a step out the back gate when the kids asked if he could see some flowers. He bent low toward the yellowish shape and put his hands on it. He was astonished to see what his hands could never tell him: that a so-called yellow flower had several different yellows in it, each growing richer as it neared the middle, with specks of green along the way and a purple center—and yet people simply called it a yellow flower.

The boys raced ahead to find more things to show their dad. Though seven and five years old, they were virtually the same size. May easily distinguished the two by the color of the clothes they were wearing, and by Wyndham’s white-blond hair.

The school playground made May talk. He knew the area perfectly from a thousand of these walks, so when he looked for the bathrooms he saw a building with two bright doors exactly where he expected it to be.

“There’s the bathrooms!”

He knew the concrete picnic tables to be off to the right about thirty steps. He looked in that direction and saw gray circles and rectangles.

“There’s the picnic tables!”

That meant the swing set was the next thing to the right. May called that one right, too. But he stopped cold when he came to a patch of grass that looked to be a darker green than the rest of the grass around it. He thought about it for several seconds—did grass grow in different hues of green on the same field? Was this another thing that no one talked about? Then he remembered that shade was supposed to make things darker, so the dark grass he was seeing must be in the shade.

Soon the family had crossed the schoolyard and made it onto Linden Lane. May could see a dark horizontal line on the sidewalk every few steps, and when he dragged his foot across it he knew that line to be the crack in the sidewalk. He determined that the crack appeared darker not because it was a different color of cement but because the sun wasn’t reaching it in the same way it reached the rest of the sidewalk…which meant it, too, was a shadow. He saw the same darkening cement when reaching intersections, and he realized that curbs must also appear a different color because of shadows, not because they were painted a different color. And he thought, “I’m going to have to remember all this business about shadows.”

Around the block, May headed for the low-hanging tree branch his kids always warned him about. Before they could utter a word, he ducked under it without breaking his stride.

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