It was a sunny day full of life, with a cheerful spring sky, bustling streets and singing birds, the aroma of flowers drifting through the air in fragrant waves, carried by a slight breeze that made the otherwise too hot temperature just right for a nice, long, and relaxing walk. In every sense that day was what you would imagine if you were asked to describe the perfect time for being outside and getting some fresh air after a season of rain with the smells of decaying leaves and a long, hard winter full of snow and depressing thoughts. In all ways, it seemed like the best day to be out of the four-walled cramped prisons some people call houses, in the airy and light-filled streets. For the seventy- or eighty-year-old grandmother, however, that day turned out to be, as she put it, "the strangest day of my life".
The morning of that day, the old babushka was slowly hobbling down the cobbled 19th century street leading to the city park, pausing at short intervals to clutch her crooked back, each time grimacing in pain as if she were slowly being tortured. She was dressed in an old-fashioned way, with a long gray fifties dress that brushed the ground, her hair done up in a tight bun. Her piercing, evilly glinting silver eyes analyzed and carefully cataloged the people around her, finding fault with every observed detail. Her teeth were clenched, only sometimes loosening to mutter about each next flaw with a certain cruel and self-fulfilling satisfaction.
After reaching her destination – a small black gazebo in the middle on the park –, she frowned in disgust at the stupid and brainless pigeons perched on its roof, correctly thinking about how their unstoppable breeding harms society. She then sighed so loudly that a few pigeons startled and flew away.
Shooing the rest off, she sat down on the comfortable creaky wooden chair, putting her wrinkled hands on the table. After uttering a sequence of beautiful, french-sounding curse words to rid the recently vacated place of the lingering pigeon aura, she opened up her ancient purse.
Her lips turned down in aversion to the modest amount of currency in her possession, and she very suddenly felt the need to express herself. After an additional period of captivating and melodious swearing in the foreign language, this old grandmother withdrew a few folded pieces of paper, a scratchy well-used fountain pen, and unfolded this ensemble, ecstaticly preparing for the task ahead of her.
The next three or four hours went by quickly, with her having produced a few large pages of long and tedious-seeming math equations, all the while doing all of the arithmetic calculations by hand. Of course, there were no mistakes, she wasn’t that foolish.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
If a perplexed observer were to now inquire as to why this sophisticated and sharp-tongued lady didn't use a standard calculator to count the many square roots, natural logarithms, and other advanced mathematical functions showing up in her work, she would have sternly, although with a tinge of sadness, fixed her eyes on him. After a few seconds of her guilt-inducing gaze, she would have seriously told him that calculators are deceitful and that she can reliably[as she was older and more experienced] inform him that, in general, you must not trust anyone but yourself and your family[of which she had none] in this cruel and unforgiving world.
She would continue this very logical thought process, saying that calculators are definitely "too new", so thus untrustworthy and not tested by time, as she herself was. If any protests would have been voiced, she would have ruthlessly dismantled the doubter’s culture, education and raising, emerging victorious.
If she had been disturbed in this way, things for our old lady might have gone differently, but alas it did not happen : our grandmother went on with her tedious and seemingly pointless mathematical equations without interruptions, her head somewhere in an abstract artificial mathematical reality, untroubled, untouched, and undisturbed("the three U's"), just as she liked it.
Her head literally, I swear it, being in the clouds, she didn’t notice what was happening around her. But what a terror awaited her when she finished her work!
After completing the series of abstract calculations, our slightly insane senior mathematician stood up, grimacing for the n-th time with loathing for her pain, and looked up from her papers.
The park around her had turned into a blue void, with only the sun and sky visible. No trees, no humans, no birds, no stupid pigeons! Nothing. Her breathing accelerated as she started frantically looking around, searching for even the slightest signs of life. Gasping, she realized it was as if she were standing on a cloud!
She realized in horror that she could see a small city below her with ant-like cars on its driveways. It was hard to understand from where she could even begin documenting the violations of basic physics that surrounded her. Where was the lightning, for example? Why wasn’t it cold? Why could she see so far?
“Why do I do this?”, she muttered, closing her eyes with one hand. All this shock was too much for our dearest protagonist, so she elegantly fell backwards in a dead faint.
She woke up in her bed, not remembering the trip from the gazebo back to her home. This bizarre incident was forever imprinted in her memory, even though, of course, she never spoke about it, and ever since then, she always payed more attention to her surroundings, as should you.