The Unmuddled Mathematician

I’m Travelling with Several Women (in the same skin)

By Chris Coray, The Unmuddled Mathematician 

 

We are travelling.  It is our annual March escape-the-Bear-Lake-mud excursion (I don’t know if there is any mud this year).  It is a pretty big trip, with week-long visits to see my mom, a second week in California, and then 3 weeks in Mexico.  One of my wives, whom I’ll call Bobbie1, does all the planning and preparation. She organizes the stopping points, airplanes, car routes, luggage, clothing, and schedule.  It is a lot of work. Suitcases begin appearing several weeks in advance.  The house is all cleaned.  All I have to do is load the car, turn the water off, and show up.  Bobbie1 has got it so organized that suitcases are packed based on stopping points, so that the car itself is never completely emptied, just the suitcases needed at a particular stopping point.  I am spoiled. 

We almost always leave early in the morning.  But Bobbie1 doesn’t show up.  Instead, my companion is Bobbie2, who is not apparently related to Bobbie1.  Bobbie2 begins the trip with a nap before we hit the canyon going to Logan.  She sleeps the sleep of the non-walking dead the whole way to the first stopping point, in this case St. George, where we visit friends.  She estimates the travel time at 45 minutes.  The only time she gives evidence of being alive is when she has a dream that I have gone to sleep and we are going off the road.  She will jerk awake and reach for the steering wheel, eventually asking if I am sleeping.  You have to be on your toes for this event because sometimes her hand actually reaches the wheel.  Were I in fact asleep we would already be dead.  Then she goes soundly back to sleep. 

At each stopping point she becomes the life of the party (Bobbie1), until we begin to travel again.  From St. George to my mom’s house is 600 miles, or about an hour of Bobbie1’s life as she experiences it.  Except she has planned (as in rigorously) a stop at the outlet stores in Las Vegas.  It is a ritual that must be observed.  And it is, then onward we go, me driving, Bobbie2 with the sandman in charge.  I think a hearse carrying its traditional cargo has more companionship for the driver than I get (and no reaching for the steering wheel).

When we get to a place where the sun has really warmed the air and shines brightly, Bobbie2 becomes a lizard, lying on a rock unless there is a pool in which case she lives in it.  Yesterday she asked me, and I am not making this up, if there was any chance that water from the pool was by osmosis getting through her skin and into body.  She felt that was happening. Bobbie2 does not do a lot of deep thinking but she does get well earned rest.  Yesterday I watched her approach an elevator needed to get to the 4^th floor.  She stopped and just stared at the door, clearly waiting for the elevator to arrive.  She was not waiting for me to do anything.  I asked if she had some kind of magic power to summon the elevator without touching a button.  This is Bobbie2 in full operational (or not) mode. 

 I’ve tried to figure out what, if any, external influences change Wonder Woman into a slug.  The best I can come up with is morning.  She does not do mornings.  She is nearly nocturnal in her daily life (like the Muddled Male), working late into the evenings (when she was young it could be all night) but then having to pay the piper in the morning.  And the sleeping in the car is a habit she picked up as a colicky baby and her dad would drive her around to make her go to sleep. 

I live the flip side of her schedule.  When my feet hit the floor that is the best I’ll feel all day.  Please excuse me while I go wring out the water from Bobbie2.  If there were any to do this it would be a little tough.  However, I do wish you could all experience a pool in the bright sun from which you looked out at the ocean and watched huge numbers of whales playing about 200 yards away.  They are spectacular.