“Unlike their more graceful cousins, the primitive frogs kept their back legs straight out after they jumped. So they don’t land on their feet. Instead, they do an ungainly belly flop, and then struggle to get to their feet and jump again.”

So it seems that there is more to it, then. If I think about it more, I can imagine that perhaps the neuro-muscular necessities are not linearly action-based… perhaps even that the ability (vision, musculature, nerve endings) to land is layered atop the ability to leap (think, more powerful legs that can push are likely to be able to cushion an impact); and/or that the ability to leap has a distinct survival advantage over the ability to land (on its own) and would be selected for, and assembled in that evolution-type way, prior to any landing gear.

Interesting in its own right; but it brings to mind a personal experience which I am now forced to re-evaluate:

Several years ago, on my first ski trip, Iryna took control and began to instruct me, for our first trip down the mountain. On our way to the lift, we covered balance, shuffling, and even how to ascend the hill with that sideways ski-crawl. Being a relative neophyte, I absorbed and didn’t think much beyond what she was teaching.

It wasn’t until we were coming close to the top of the mountain– while still on the lift — that I realized I didn’t really know how to ‘stop’. That is, I had no clue how to brake, decelerate, prevent forward motion, etc. I mentioned this to Iryna, and she tried to describe how it was done, but I was lost, and the top was approaching too fast. Sadly, when we got there, I was gently pushed into a sliding carom-shot into the poor child in front of me (he wasn’t proficient either, but that’s no reason to send a 200+ pound bearded man on a collision-course with him). I clipped him from behind, vainly trying to throw myself sideways but only succeeding in nailing him in the back of the legs and sending us into a tangled knot, directly in the path of skiers exiting the lift.

The awkward manifestation isn’t quite the point, however. Rather, I think now that Iryna was unwittingly (or not so unwittingly– she’s a very clever girl) recapitulating ontogeny by arming me with mobility before any type of deceleration, and much like the above-mentioned frogs I chose a type of belly-flop as my only recourse to stopping.

(Via Scientific American.)

The dais is flanked on both sides by 90’s style LCD projectors casting a zoomed-in view of a flag waving in ultra-slow-motion, making it sort of undulate behind white, drop-shadowed text that reads “Celebrate Citizenship” and other such happy bites. The large but mismodulated speakers pipe out tinny but quite identifiable patriotic songs– i can hear “God Bless America” on repeat, midrange jacked up high to float over the dull bass roar of the crowd of citizens-to-be.

I notice that most everyone has a rather large entourage with them. One man, rather than an entourage, seems to be wearing an American Flag cape. Actually, it appears to be a beach towel, brand-spanking & colorfully new, stars and stripes and all, draped over his shoulders. From this distance, I can just make out that he has tucked it into his polo-shirt-collar. I admire this, grinning so much the kid next to me stares at me with huge brown eyes.

I have told this story in the past, to at least a few people: I used to drive by the San Diego Civic Center and see the plastic letters on the backlit sign spelling out ‘Naturalization Ceremony’. It always gave me a deep conceptual kick to imagine a dense, half-sweaty, cheap-cologne-and-perfume-and-cigarette musk-ed crowd, standing, hands raised, and forswearing allegiance to foreign potentates in unison.

I see Iryshka walking, off to my right, looking tall and elegant in the legs, flowing a little (a benefit of the wide flare of her stylish pants) — & looking more than a little ‘cute mouse’-y in the head & shoulders region as her nerves make her head bow and her brain swim a little, I am sure. Part of that worry must be the Russian preoccupation with paperwork, and part of it assuredly is my wife’s willingness to give herself over to worry as a sort of primal, driving, state-of-mind (I think she gives in because the nature of worry produces a repeating cycle of thoughts, forcing her to check and re-check and re-re-check (ad infinitum) and so she comes out the other side with everything– INS paperwork, for example– in order). She’s sitting now, her head still bent low, sunk a little between a flat topped Pacific Rim type and a balding man whose skin is the color of my morning coffee. I am hoping she feels a little calmer now that she’s passed through, successfully, the first gauntlet of officers stamping paperwork on collapsible tables.

There are a huge number of people here, more than I expected. I am a little surprised and how unremarkable, in total, the ethnic mixture is. I mean, it *is* mixed, with veils and burkas and dyed cotton wraps and silk shirts open over 6 inches to the chest revealing gold crosses in wiry tangles of black chest hair. There are hooked nose, snub Bjork noses, skin the wondrous color of shiny coal, skin the color of soft beach sand, skin the color of Baltic mists. I see large white beards, low cut cleavage, tight skirts, crumpled old suits, pot bellies, skeletal wrists, and a gaggle of small US flags poking out of peoples’ breast pockets. It is mixed, it’s just that this seems to be the normal street melange of San Diego anyway. I am saying, it looks pretty business-as-usual for a stroll through downtown. Not, let’s admit, Prospect Street in La Jolla, or on most of the beaches north of OB, but surely when we’re trolling for Ethiopian food down on El Cajon Boulevard.

It is difficult to locate Iryna again, as the seats all around her fill up. I do find her, but her two flanking gentlemen have disappeared for the moment, so it took a little extra.

Well, that was all I was able to scribble in the notebook. I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed the ceremony, most particularly when they went through the 98 or so “host” countries and had the soon-to-be-former-citizens stand, to the applause of their families, friends, and others who shared their origins.

The deep rumbling oath was all that I had dreamed it would be, and I knew that when it was over, Iryna would turn and blow me a kiss– and she did not disappoint. My lovely new citixen (which is my typo, which i will keep, since it calls to mind a hybrid citizen-vixen). I went outside to buy her a coffee (well, we were both quite exhausted [another story]) and handed her her first caffeinated beverage as a full fledged honored-and-responsible, child of the United States. It wasn’t too great, this coffee, but then — few symbols are magnificent in their own right. It’s the idea that counts :)

So, my most crazy, out-of-body-and-mind, arc-of-a-falling-star, without-reservation-but-with-abandon, congratulations and love to my wife, Iryna Clark, who I love in ways I never thought I might, and ways I never knew I could, and who confirms every day that I made the best choice of a terrestrial lifetime when I married her. Welcome to the USA! Live Free or Die!