Good Omens.

• Author: Clinton, Kate
• Position: Unplugged - Viewpoint essay

Poplar trees lined the street where I grew up in upstate New York. They were tall, pliant, full-leaved, and on windy summer nights, their dry, susurrant racket kept me wide awake in my little seersucker pajamas. In those pre-kindergarten days, I formulated my theory of wind. After close observation, I postulated that wind started with the slight inexplicable movement of one single giddy leaf. The displaced air caused adjacent leaves to rustle and before you knew it, you had a breeze, a zephyr--wind.

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Sadly, a nun in an early kindergarten science unit debunked my theory. The wind was caused by the Holy Spirit.

In President Obama's somber Inaugural Address he urged us, his fellow citizens, to give up childish things. Try as I might, I have not been able to shake off my early childhood scientific methodology. In the blue morning light, with visions of my 01(k) dancing in my head, I wonder where exactly was that subprime mortgage written that tripped the financial firestorm that soured the bundled derivatives that caused the finance industry to crumble and eventually take down Iceland? Was it a split-level in a new subdivision in Orange County? A second home up in Hudson?

In our apartment, we have a bloated behemoth of a Sony television that is fourteen years old. Several additional black boxes perch precariously on top, late adaptations to new cable services. The silver universal remote is grungy despite my best Windex efforts. A few months back, after some snarky comments from a friend about our low-defness, we caught the flat-panel TV fever and went to Circuit City.

Since I do not speak TV technology as a second language, we brought detailed specs from an already flat-paneled friend whose secular bible is Consumer Reports. But as thirty screens simulcast Big Brother at us, we got overwhelmed. We left the store. We did not buy a flat-panel TV, but I wonder if it was the beefy young man in sneakers and hockey jersey explaining Blu-ray to his girlfriend who started the wind shear that bought down the whole house of credit cards? Did our...