The Verdant Lawn and the Library

 The word verdant seems exactly the word to apply to the grassy lawn of the park, which is actually a thing green of green grass, somewhat yellowed this time of year, that surrounds the pond. The pond itself is brilliant blue reflecting the sky above. A heron comes to the pond as park of its territory. It often arrives in the morning. The green of the grass around seems gorgeous and inviting. It is like the golf courses around here. They look like little bits of curated Eden against the brown dirt and rocks. The border is always abrupt. The mountains in the background look like the desert floor, but thrust against the sky, as close up as I remember the Colorado Front Range foothills, when one is a mile away.

The green of the grass is a very different hue that the green of the desert. The desert here is very green---the Sonora is a living desert, as they say--but the green of the desert is dull sunwashed green, like the color of World War II Army uniforms. 

You can't see the verdant lawn as one comes into the park from the north, because it is on the sloped lawn leading down to the sunken pond. One approaches on the path, seeing the pond and the green grass as one approaches. A little bit of Eden. Civilized.

As one approaches the ramada that sits on the southwest corner of the path around the lake, one sees the latest addition to the park, which arrived only last month. It is one of those little library boxes, brilliant red like a London phone booth in miniature, mounted on a metal post painted in glossy black. Civilization.

I walk past the library each day on my way to the ramada to study physics. I always inspect the library, to see what comes and goes. There is nothing in the box I would probably read. I recognize some of the popular authors. All the books are ffiction, I think, on the top shelf. Novels. The bottom shelf is all kids books.

Proceding on the ramada, I bring out my copy of Itzykson and Zuber's Quantum Field Theory, the Dover reprint I bought that smells of liquid laundry detergent, and  with its cover now well worn backwards.  I've got almost the whole second level of the table of contents memorized now using my method. I realize I said the concrete pad under the ramada was rectangular. Of course it is not. It is rectangular on three sides, but along the side it connects to the graveling walking path, it is actually the arc of a circle, such that the pad flares outward there, instead of being rectangular. I use the creases in the concrete to memorize chapters. Where the inset reaches the edge of the pavement I assign a chapter and put the title there. I memorize them by pointing at the intersections at the edge of the pad.  I assign the subsections as places nearby. I've gotten to four subsections in each chapter. Most of the thirteen chapters are now complete in my memorization.  Only a few of the chapters have five subsections, and these I am still working on.  Only one chapter has six subsections. By this I know the authors gave this chapter special attention.