I had an insignificant small office
with a window at the rearmost section of the building where I could see an
undeveloped spruce tree
growing from a secret patch of
grass protected from the eighteen-wheeler trucks arriving at the shipping dock
just twenty feet away.
Outside my door, an open lab, where
quality assurance underneath my diligent direction happened.
Christmas, San Diego John, a
quality inspector I had hired, just recently returned from California, who
missed the West Coast desperately
and had returned east only for his
wife's desire to be back home with family, had gifted me a thistle-feeder,
which I hung upon that tree.
As winter turned to spring I
watched the goldfinch flocks begin to turn in color, from a drab and almost
gray-like green to brilliant yellow.
I had never seen this spectacle
before. It's almost twenty years from that occasion. John had left his family
soon thereafter,
moving back to San Diego, and I
heard he had a heart attack and died. In time I got a transfer to Materials
and then I was promoted to a bigger
office with much more responsibility and then, in time, let go.
But it's the transformation of
those small goldfinches that provide this story all its lovely
lack of any allocated quality of all
material effect or meaning. I have to thank my great unknowable for that.
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