A Beautiful Mind
Two nights ago I went to Anaheim with my parents to have dinner with one of my dad's business associate from Oregon. The associate's family was visiting California because they wanted to spend a few days at Disneyland. Besides my shock at how much Disneyland has changed during the past 10 years, (okay so I haven't been there for awhile) I was more taken aback by my dad's colleague.
For lack of a better word, the man I met was a genius. What made him even more unique was that he was affable, sincere, and down to earth. I have met my fair share of professors and individuals who are very intelligent and quite mentally endowed, but their heads and egos ended up being so big they would plunder the earth of sunlight when they stepped outdoors.
Back to my dad's business partner, I had trouble keeping up with his stories. Not only was he a reknown physicist, he was also involved with Hewlett Packard (he actually was a close friend of Mr. Bill Hewlett himself) and Boeing early in the 1950 and 1960's, tinkering with various computer-related topics, which back then was as familiar to the world as privacy is to a Jehovah's witness. I also heard about other global adventures, one detailing how he and a group of American physicists went to Japan to help solve the problem of inconsistent times the trains there were experiencing.
I was not expecting my dad's associate to hold so much knowledge and zest for science and health. Even simple chatting with him numbed my mind because he seemed to know so much about everything and anything in life. I found myself nodding and saying "uh huh" like I knew exactly what he was talking about so often, I felt like my mind had reverted back into it's primitive state... not a state of bullshit mind you, but one resembling a typical caveman's extensive vocabulary, "uh-huh."
As my parents and I left the restaurant, my dad told me in Japanese "Kareha daibu motterune, atamani." Roughly translated it means, "That guy has a fairly good brain, huh." Dayamn, if the Japanese have a way of using humility in their conversation, that was one exemplary instance. My mind was still recovering from the overload of information and interesting comments it was ambushed with earlier as I drove back to my house. It is amazing how much potential the human brain has. If only all of us had the extra synapses my dad's colleague exuberated, the world would be such a different place.
