Okay then

I went last night down to my new job. I'm going to spend some of my time down there when I'm not at the church secretary job which I'm leaving. (I'm going to use the word "down" when referring to the location of my new job, since it is located south of here near Redwood City. It's not in the town itself so much as it is across the freeway and down along the bay. The actual location is in a smattering of office parks planted along bayfront sloughs.) I got there about 5:15 and got to work trying to download and install the company's products on the computer they gave me -- an anonymous PC running Windows 2000 Professional.

I'm lucky enough to have a low-traffic, window cube. Perhaps the window cubes are slightly looked down on; the geekiest guys have interior cubes where they won't be distracted by views of the parking lot or the building opposite. Right around twilight I glanced out the window and got a real optical illusion. Because the fog was rolling in and the sky had become grey, and because I knew the building was near water, when I looked out the window I thought I was looking at a stretch of water with woods beyond it. After several seconds, this pastoral view resolved into nothing more than another building in the office park. I had mistaken the grey of the concrete facade of the building for water reflecting the grey sky, and the green band of tinted windows for a forest. When I realized what I had really been looking at, I was disoriented, then I looked down to the left, beyond the other building, and saw real water, with a marina across the slough, not a forest. There's no forest by the bayside.

Perhaps my mind was harking back to the world of my teenage years, when we lived in a subdivision on a lake, with woods across the lake. I spend a lot of time telling how hellish that area was, but I always leave out the factor that preserved my sanity, which is that the suburb was, at that time, on the edge of development, and there were plenty of overgrown pastures and dense woods to wander in, and bayous and lakes in which to canoe. In fact, most of the woods have been preserved in a nature preserve, remarkable as it is to think that governments in Texas would preserve anything.