The Genius of Little Things

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

FIRST EDITION, January 2013

Copyright (c) 2012 by Larry Buhl

All rights reserved

Cover design by Damonza

Interior layout:
www.formatting4U.com

www.larrybuhlbooks.com

Printed in the United States of America

An original publication of Beso Books

For the castaways

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ALSO BY LARRY

ONE

August 26. Class journal number one is a list of dumb things people say:

·
        
Smile, it’s not so bad. Maybe it is that bad. And why are they imposing their good mood on someone else? Today, the woman who registered me for classes, and my biology II teacher, told me to smile. Both times, I thought I already was smiling.

·
        
How are you? People want me to answer “fine.” They don’t care if the pollen count is high and my sinuses are inflamed. I informed my case manager of those issues at my phone check-in last week. He responded as he usually does: “Awesome, awesome!”

·
        
Are we having fun yet? If you have to ask…

·
        
Let go and let God. Let God do
what
? Vagueness is irksome.

·
        
God bless you. When people sneeze, I respond with “
Gesundheit
,” unless they don’t cover their mouths, in which case I retreat quickly. In one of my seventh grade extra credit history papers, I wrote that
gesundheit
was originally used to prevent the sneezer from being invaded by evil spirits. In the future, I may respond this way to mess with superstitious sneezers. I will say, in a cryptic voice, “This is how it begins.”

**

It was getting late. I had spent too long on my class journal and had made no progress on my Caltech admissions essays. I was applying through early admissions, a process that was like choosing only one bride when the bride has the option of rejecting you. One might ask, “Why not skip early admissions and apply during the regular deadline?” The answer was to set a course for my future as early as possible. Knowing where I would be attending college by December 15th, rather than March, or later, would eliminate months of uncertainty. I had enough uncertainty in the Foster-go-Round, AKA Nevada Department of Child and Family Services, and earlier, with my biological mother, or BiMo.

I should not bring up my BiMo again, nor will I delve into the circumstances surrounding her death.

But I’ll offer this advice. People with severe allergies to shellfish and eggs should not leave their EpiPen at home when they go to a Thai restaurant and request something with shellfish and eggs. If they ignore this advice, when they experience the inevitable anaphylaxis, they should not leave the restaurant and stagger along an empty sidewalk until they collapse. As the saying goes, if I can save one life, it’s worth it.

The first Caltech essay prompt—
Tell us anything you think we should know about you
—was maddeningly ambiguous. My efforts contained gems like my opening paragraph.

The gazelle, when separated from the herd, is in a precarious situation. However, should he survive, he will grow stronger and wiser for the next onslaught. I am that gazelle, surviving and growing.

You are that admissions committee, laughing and hurling.

I concentrated on the second essay prompt.
Communities we are born into, those we make, and those we fall into by accident, influence us and shape us. Describe a defining community in your life and what it means to you.

Even though many of my extra credit essays over the years turned out all right, I’m not much of a writer. Composing an essay about cyclonic separation, for example, was a breeze—and I don’t think this was a pun, intended or otherwise—compared to summing up my life experience while trying to sound upbeat about the whole thing.

Humans have much to learn from honeybees. Their society is a well-run machine, not unlike the most effective human communities. The ongoing colony collapse disorder that is now devastating bee colonies shows the limits of sociability. It is theorized that, because the bees know they are sick, they fly off together in a mass die-off. Living together. Dying together. This is why I want to call Caltech home.

I had a brain fart. This is not a medical term. It means that I couldn’t think clearly, temporarily. I required the assistance of Cap’n Crunch. I always disliked how products bastardized the spelling of real words. However, that didn’t stop me from consuming something that would have more accurately been called
Captain Crunch
, or
Crunchy Sugary Cereal
Squares
. Whatever. Product naming was not the contribution I would make to society.

In the pantry, affixed to my cereal box, was a yellow post-it note.
This has a lot of sugar.
I left the note on the box. I had been considering better cereal choices, even though good nutrition was always more expensive. Now that someone I hardly knew was pestering me to eat healthier, I wanted to keep consuming crap.

Walking back from the kitchen, I briefly peeked into my FoFa’s office. FoFa is a term I use for foster father. It is shorter than foster father, although I realize I have used many words to explain this. FoHo means foster home. FoPa means foster parent. FoMo is foster mother.

Anyway, his real name was Carl.

Carl worked as a part-time professor of computer science at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. He alluded to previously owning some kind of technology business in California. That, and the fact he liked cars and old clocks, and had traveled extensively, were all I knew about him.

Carl hunched over a desk covered with tiny, saw-like pieces of metal, an old rotor, screws, bezels, and glass. On the far wall were display shelves containing several dozen ancient clocks in various states of disrepair. I lingered a nanosecond too long. He looked up and raised his glasses. “There’s Carl, getting his clock cleaned again,” he said.

I wanted to respond, but nothing came to mind. It was odd hearing someone speak of himself in the third person. Later that night, I learned that
cleaning
someone’s clock
was a euphemism for giving that person a beating. In the past, I was often perplexed by euphemisms and other clever English phrases. My teacher for tenth grade English told us to “avoid clichés like the plague.” She thought that was witty, but I didn’t get it, until someone explained that
like
the plague
was a cliché and that my teacher had made some kind of double cliché. Lately I have reached a cease-fire in my battle with metaphors, similes, and other figures of speech so they are no longer albatrosses around my neck.

Carl was cleaning a clock, literally, but not
getting
it cleaned. I didn’t challenge him on this distinction. I didn’t ask him about his clocks, and I didn’t expect him to go into detail about the difficulty of replacing rotors. But he did. I listened.

One thing did impress me. Carl said he liked old clocks because they were well engineered and that modern electronics were built to be disposable. I kept an overstuffed Box o’ Crap under my bed because I hated throwing things away, so I appreciated Carl’s point about hanging on to things, long before he stopped making it.