I took a bag of recycling out the other day to my bin by the side of the house, and noticed a fairly impressive patch of mushrooms that had sprung up.
I came back in and told Mark about it, and that he should come look at them.*
So he came out and looked at them and said, “Really? That’s it? You grew up in the country and you think those are impressive mushrooms?”
“Well, yeah,” I said, a little puzzled. I mean, sure, there’s more spectacular mushrooms in the world, and these weren’t purple or anything, but… “I mean, they just sprung up overnight. I thought they were kinda cool.” I gestured at them again.
“Oh!” he said, raising his gaze up a bit. “THOSE mushrooms!”
Turns out he’d looked down at his feet and seen:
Which were this far from THE mushrooms:
We laughed, and he urged me to take pictures of them, so we could show people, as a great object lesson in focus and perception. Framing. Perspective. Forest-versus-trees. However you want to look at it, Mark was so entirely focused on the first mushrooms he saw, he couldn’t look past them to see the really impressive ones. (And for what it’s worth, I never even noticed the small ones till he pointed them out.)
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Speaking of Mark, he has gone back to Seattle this evening, alas. But I shall see him again next week for Thanksgiving. Meanwhile, there is plenty to do here, including helping a friend go through some medical stuff over the next few days. Oh and all the things that have been neglected around the house…you could write novels in the dust around here. Assuming you had time to write novels, of course.
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*He’s a big fan of mushrooms.
