COMMUNAL
Walks with Richard

Richard from #7 came over a few days after we moved here and asked us if we wanted to go on a walk with him. We were eating and tired right then so we said maybe another time. Richard sort of snorted, dismissed us with a drop of his hand, and stomped off toward Belfair State Park.

The next time Richard asked me I was in the middle of a chirpy pilates video. Eager not to disappoint I answered the door right away, asked him to wait a second while I ran upstairs and put on some pants and away we went. We talked over what he calls the “dismal science” (economics) as we slowly ambled down the road. Turns out that Richard, who is a fierce supporter of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of salvation by free markets and invisible hands, blames the Chinese for selling off $700 billion of American treasury bonds in 2007 in a mad scramble to buy up oil companies and the like and dominate the world system. He thinks our currency will soon be worthless. Richard is a MIT physicist who worked most of his life at Boeing – the big employer around the Sound before Bill Gates invented Microsoft and after the big trees were all cut up and shipped out. He walks for his health and to see the birds, the shifting alluvial deltas at the end of Mission Creek, and the quiet ponds which reflect the big clouds. We talk of salmon, and floods, and boy scout sing-a-longs in the Olympics in the 1950s.

Since his retirement Richard has been receiving visions which have given him the answers to all the major problems which Einstein and Hawkings couldn’t solve: things to do with quantum mechanics, string theory and the like. He’s writing up these new theses and submitting them to refereed journals. So far, like most physics papers, none have been published. A surprise storm rained on us the last time we walked, and we got pretty wet. Richard gave me a high-five when we got back.