In the midst of dark times of economic distress, incomprehensible news, and unusual weather, I am pleased to report that at least one force remains undeniably reliable. I refer, of course, to gravity.
My experience suggests that gravity is working just fine out there, utterly unaffected by the worldwide economic crisis, the war in Iraq, or climate change. I base this conclusion on a series of unintentional experiments involving an office full of books, a rickety library book cart, and an uneven flagstone path.
The path leads from Point A (my current office, soon to be my former office) to Point B (my new office). These points are not particularly far apart as the crow flies; in fact, it is possible to look out the window of my new office and see the window of my soon-to-be-old office. However, I have not been able to interest any flying crows in moving my pile of books between these two points, and since the campus has not yet installed a teleporter, I'm moving them manually.
I thought the rolling library cart would make the process easier: I can simply take books off the shelf in one office, put them on the cart in the same order in which I want them to appear on the shelf in the new office, and roll them over there and unload them directly onto the new shelves. No boxes, no need to re-sort books, no dollies...piece of cake.
The problem is that the best path between Point A and Point B runs out the door, across uneven flagstone pavement, down a little slope and up a steeper slope, into the library, up an elevator, and around the corner to the new office.
Do you have any idea what happens to a neatly-arranged row of books on a rolling cart when the cart rolls over uneven flagstones? They vibrate, jump, and shift out of place. And then what happens when the cart needs to go up or downhill while moving over uneven flagstones? You guessed it: gravity takes over. The books shift toward the downhill side, the entire row bulging outward until one slippery book jumps off the cart and the rest quickly follow.
Yesterday I transported two loads of books in this manner, trying to keep the cart straight on the slopes so the books wouldn't bulge out so much, but I soon realized that this was a two-person job. This morning my daughter helped me take a few more loads over and it worked much more smoothly. We'll take one or two more loads over and then we'll be done, but not before confirming, for those who might have been worried, that in a world of uncertainty there is still one force on which we can all rely.
Gravity: it's everywhere you want to be.
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