This Month's Story

It happened years ago when I was a college undergraduate. I was on the staff of the school’s engineering magazine (I was majoring in Geological Engineering) and one of my tasks was to sell subscriptions.

I knew one big source of subscribers was the faculty and late one fall afternoon, subscription pad in hand, I started walking the halls of one of the campus’s older office buildings looking for subscribers.

I had had some luck on the first floor of the building, when, on the second floor I came across an old classroom, its door slightly ajar. With an aggressiveness fueled by my earlier success, I pushed the door open and stepped inside.

It was empty.

Well, at first glance, the large room was empty; there were not even chairs for students. Except for the muted sounds of traffic coming from the campus boulevard outside the closed windows, the room had an all pervading quiet. Its tall windows slanted rays of afternoon light onto the wooden floors of the room, each ray filled with its quorum of dust motes and silence.

Then I realized there was somebody sitting in a chair by a small desk on the other end of the long room. He was staring at the blackboards that must have been left there when the room had been used as a classroom. He was motionless and appeared to be staring at calculus notations and vector drawings scrawled in white chalk on the several blackboards’ surfaces.

In the several seconds I stood at the door, he didn’t move.

The room was still, quiet.

Finally I made a noise, scuffed my foot on the floor or something. He looked away from his study of the blackboards, startled. Not startled, really, more like returning from some other place than where we were.

I quickly walked over to him, explaining as I went, who I was. When I got close enough, I whipped out a last semester copy of the magazine. It had a wonderful four-color cover. I had been responsible for that cover and I was quite proud of it. To be honestly frank, it did look quite elegant.

He nodded vaguely as I went on with my spiel and finally interrupted to ask me how much was a subscription.

I told him and, getting up, he went over to the paper strewn desk and found a checkbook. He quickly filled in the needed blanks and turning, handed me the check. I gave him a receipt, thanked him and started the long way back to the door.

When I got there, I stopped and looked back.

He was back in the chair, already gone, staring at the blackboards. The rays of light had the room to themselves again and the hush that had only temporarily been displaced had returned.

I was amazed; what could the man be doing sitting all alone in that room?

To me, it seemed unbelievably strange. I stood for a few seconds more and shrugged and left the room. The important thing to me was to sell more subscriptions. The mystery of the man in the empty classroom was soon forgotten.

Remember I was very young.

It would be many years before I found the answer to my question as to what he was doing.

I was the leader of a complex ocean experiment in the Mediterranean Sea. As chief scientist, my days were filled with logistical trivia associated with leading such a complex experiment and the many scientists and countries involved.

My days were filled with budget meetings and endless letters to be sent out, oversea phone calls were the norm (these were the days before e-mail).

At night, however, it was different.

At night, I was alone in my small apartment, and, after a quick TV dinner, I would sit at my dining table and whirl the core problems of the experiment out from the recesses of my mind.

They would emerge in full bloom, pushing, crowding one another, flooding the room; the walls around me would disappear, the quiet would end, filled with an almost bedlam of ideas, thoughts, approaches.

There were basic ocean science problems to what we were doing and all of the complex work that I addressed in the limitless spaces of my small apartment had at it’s purpose the solution of those basic problems. Each evening, I would sit there and let all of the ideas and their problems surge forward and fill every nook and cranny of the space about me.

On the table in front of me, a yellow, blue lined legal pad would fill with notes and drawings. Many hours later, I would go to bed, ready for the next day, still filled with what I must still do and how I would approach those parts of the complex puzzles that seemed unsolvable.

This went on for months.

In fact, since this was my first experiment leading a large group of scientists whose main purpose was solving a precise set of basic scientific problems, the mannerisms I learned then would set the stage for the way I would work the more and more complex experiments that followed.

The small apartment was held the answers to the days problems and ultimately to the success of the experiment.

It took five years.

Early one evening, as I scribbled some notation on one more yellow pad, the doorbell rang.

I looked at the door blankly, startled.

Then it rang again.

When I managed to get up and open the door, I found it was a neighbor I had seen before in the apartment complex.

He had his daughter with him.

I stared at them vaguely for a long moment. Finally, I stared down at the young girl that had started to talk the moment I had opened the door.

As she prattled on and on in a sales pitch she had evidently learned by rote, a flash of an old, very dim memory came back to me.

It was of the man sitting in the ‘empty’ classroom.

After all these years I understood.

I stopped the girl, told her to wait for a moment and went back to my bedroom where I kept my checkbook.

When I returned and, after stopping at my dining table to write a check, returned to the apartment door and handed the small girl a check.

She smiled, quickly wrote a receipt and the two of them walked away.

I closed the door and looked down at the receipt.

She had sold me a box of Girl Scout cookies.