As Good As It Gets (A Ghost Story)

Sunday morning we were in the park as usual to practice martial arts.  It was a hot day, so we searched out a patch of shade.  One of us stepped in some dog poop on the way and tracked it around a bit before discovering it on her shoe.  She retreated to clean off her shoe and we went on with practice.  However, our drills kept drifting toward where the poop had been tracked on the pavement.  I took one of my extra sticks – we were doing Filipino martial arts, with rattan sticks – and set it just outside the poopy patch area as a marker.  If someone didn’t see the poopy patch before stepping into it, they’d at least stumble on the stick and know to stop.  Then we moved 15 feet away to another good patch of shade.

She of the poopy shoe was in the sun on the other side of the basketball court, a good 40 feet away, wiping her shoes in the grass.  The rest of us were about to start back in on the partner drill we had just been doing when I realized that the stick I had set down to mark the patch of poo five yards away was now directly behind my partner; he would likely stumble on it if he stepped back.

“Wait a second!” I said, puzzled.  “How did that get there?”  He glanced back at it.  “It must have rolled over from where you set it down.”  “That makes sense,” I agreed, “but I think it was ghosts.”  “Well, that would be logical,” he conceded as I picked the stick up and moved it out of the way.

I was only half unserious.  While rolling was the obvious explanation, the change in position occurred a mite too quickly for it to be a satisfactory explanation.  Also, the terminal position of the stick seemed a bit off .  If something rolls you expect it to finish in a position parallel to the one it began in, etc. etc. – something was wrong about everything.

Fortunately, I can test how sticks roll on that bit of pavement next Sunday.