We had a bad storm last night.  Kids-and-wife-safe-in-the-basement-dumb-ass-father-standing-in-the-(exterior)-doorway-trying-to-see-if-the-garden-was-okay-kind-of-storm.  Like a couple of tomato plants and some beans are worth taking a bolt of lightning for.  Maybe.  Now that I think about it.  Anyway, the hail whacked things up a bit, but everything survived.

Standing there this morning hitching up tomato vines and re-tying this and that, I thought about plants.  From the minute the seed is in the ground, they know their purpose, and they move without interruption to fulfill it. Well, they don’t know it, actually, they aren’t, so far as we know sentient; but they accomplish one specific thing.  Against various negative influences – bugs, weather, bad gardeners – they, more often than not, sprout, grow, flower, fruit and seed. Hail whacks them down, they wait patiently for the sun so they know which way is up and then get back to growing.

A strange looking woman at a bus stop can interrupt my simple trip to the grocery store and cause a loss of focus sufficient to render me incapable of remembering to buy aluminum foil.

Since we learned to make fire, we have been, on the whole, completely distracted.