Sunday, July 16, 2006  Sunday Scribblings #16: "With Baggage"
(That poster has nothing to do with my post; I just like it!)
This Sunday Scribble was inspired by something I wrote recently
about travelers to the first alien planet opened to travelers. I
wondered, what would they bring?  Darklis and Maximoff rarely
argued anymore. Their colleagues said they had exhausted all
possible topics of controversy when they were newlyweds and
could be heard late into the night, night after night, at
whatever wigwam, yurt, or igloo was their home for the season.
Darklis had a contralto voice and Maximoff was a bass, so their
passionate discussions had never been shrill, just a low
background noise the other scientists grew accustomed to, like
crickets or swamp frogs in the night. They had talked about
everything. Djinn, mummies, Krakatoa, the Upanishads and the
Shahnameh, the virtues of boomslang venom versus cone snails,
the crushing force of an eagle owl’s talons, the death rites of
Zoroastrians, and the proper pronun