Butterfly

This post reflect a personal interest of mine that I am sure annoys others.

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Turn of Phrase

At lunch I sit with Ray at the plastic picnic table kept in the break room. Ray remarks on the stylized, plastic beams of wood that make the table and support his egg salad sandwich on rye. "A picnic table inside? Who would have thought that made any sense."
I run a finger down the beam closest to me and orbit around the etched swirls of an imaginary knot in the wood. "Yeah. Why not just a regular table, you know?"
Ray pulls back from his seat and hold his arms above his shoulders. "Exactly! It shouldn't exist, but here it is! Like a Klein bottle!"
I start to choke on my corn chips and have to roll the ball of food down with the very back of my throat. Ray always throws down obscure little references like that. He spends too much time at his desk combing the Web. I give him the usual polite not while looking around the break room. No one else there and the hallways leading here is free of footfalls. I look down at my lap avoiding Ray's inquisitve glance where looks off into the horizon apperaing disinterested and find a soda bottle on the floor. I pluck it off the ground. "Hey," I say holding up to eye level. "Speaking of bottles." I pivot away from the table and pull my arm back to toss the container into the trash. I want a nice gentle toss so I can just lob it in there when Ray screams, "Wait! No!"
I drop the bottle and twirl back to face him. "Jesus! What? What?"
"You were going to throw that in the trash, but the recycling bin is right there." Ray points over his shoulder to the scuffed blue bin by the humming soda machine. He extends his arm out. "Give it here and I will drop it in there for you. You don't want to start a butterfly effect."
I hand the bottle to him and Ray gives me the same look. We stick to lunch.
After work, I rummage through the set of encyclopedias I got at the last Friends of the Library book sale and find an entry for butterfly effect. I read the words aloud, "A small variation in a dynamic system that causes large changes in it over the long run." I imagine Ray being concerned for the janitor and fearing that the weight of that one extra bottle would break the man's back, hence denying his family funds for food and the office the sort of maintenance needed for day to day operations.
The next day I have lunch with Ray and plan to ask him to explain himself. No need to impress me with eloquent turns of phrase that only physics professors understand. Ray and I work for a box company and we're friends. No need for trebuchets, string theory, exocets, or gravity hills. I just want lunch. Before I pressure Ray I ask him how it's going.
He drops his sandwich on the wax paper he brought it in. It is egg salad again. "Not too good. Between work and play I feel like I'm on the event horizon."