28 shades

I was walking my dog around the neighbourhood park one early evening, when a little girl at a soccer (futbol) practice there, she must have been eight or nine, noticed us and remarked, "Your dog has a beautiful colour". His fur has more than one colour, the colours and markings of a yellow Labrador Retriever, which he is not being a mutt, that is to say streaks of white, orange, shades of light brown, beige, certainly, not yellow, a couple of dark brown spots on his ears and a pink nose.

The next afternoon, I was walking with a friend from work to the train station, and we were talking. Or rather, I was walking as fast as I could, and he was riding his bicycle as slowly as he could. We were looking at the massive, seven story concrete parking structure that's just opened near the station. Some local politician had called it The Tower of Torture. It was recently painted beige, one of the eight beige colours that had been considered and argued over by committees and people's representatives. The chosen colour is called "Death Valley" and it beat out "Destiny" and, believe it or not "Pearl Harbor". (The Tower of Torture remains an eyesore on the landscape, whether it's beige, or concrete gray.)

My friend, who's red headed, while I'm silver headed, wasn't surprised when I told him I had learned there were eight shades of beige paint. "Oh, yes," he said, "and there are twenty shades of white, I discovered when we were painting our house." He then told me that I wouldn't believe how the brightest white paint was made. "They make it," he said, "by adding a little bit of black to it."

OK, that's something for someone who has studied color theory to figure out. We said goodbye, he headed for his green bus which starts its route at the station, his bicycle to hang on a rack in front, I for the silver train where bicycles, if any, ride inside the passenger cars. The train car I entered was almost empty, this is the end, suburban station, there were three lone women seated, all of them dressed in black (of course), and three bicyclists, sitting near the exit doors with their bikes, all three of them wearing those bright reflective, yellowish green nylon jackets that make them clearly visible on the road. I was, as usual, colour mismatched myself.

The train soon started out for the green hills that about now are starting to turn shades of yellow, beige, brown, the colours, coincidentally, of my dog's fur.

7 doors

To reach my office cubicle from the ground floor gym, I exit through the gym's back door in the weight room, turn right and walk a short corridor behind the daycare center, climb a flight of stairs, step past the round, windowed wall of the corporate data center, then across the second floor bridge between the buildings, past a double row of cubicles into a center hallway, turn right to approach another stairway, and climb one more flight, turn left to walk north then west, passing the printer area, all the way to the outermost corner of the third floor, right next to a small open lounge by the tall windows overlooking the vast company parking lot, a sparsely occupied modern office park beyond it, and a 3,849 foot mountain in the distance. The hike takes no more than a minute or two -- I'll have to clock it with a stopwatch sometime -- probably less time than if I walked across the courtyard to the back entrance of my building and took one of the three elevators up; and the only people I ever and infrequently encounter during this daily walk are an office mailroom worker pushing her cart, or a building maintenance man, or a computer engineer emerging from the data center, which is called a 'lights out center', that is to say, not staffed, and to complete this journey I have to open seven doors, which slam loudly behind me all by themselves, breaking the perfect silence of these colorless, odorless corridors and stairwells straight out of some 1960s Michelangelo Antonioni film.

Communication secrets

"Most guys hate talking and I don’t blame them because talking leads to communication and once you communicate, you’re going to start feeling things, and from there it’s a slippery slope because you’re going to start experiencing life so I try to avoid it."

William H. Macy, actor