Jack Emerson by Michael Brent Jones
Chapter 13
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I went to the diner again and had a chance to chat with Beth.
“How have your visits with Jack been going?” Beth asked.
“Great! I’ve been learning so much.”
“About what?” she asked.
“Everything.”
“If we were talking about anyone besides Jack Emerson, I would think that you were just being vague.”
“I never knew how independent from each other knowing about someone, knowing someone, and caring about someone can be. I feel with Jack, they are all increasing, but not overlapping, and I find that I care about him much more than I know about him.”
“Sometimes we try and show people we care, by showing how much about them we know. I think the only way to know more about a person, is to truly care about them. Then not only will we know things about them, but about us as friends as well. How our heart molds to another, is the truest way to know someone.”
“Wow, you and Jack,” I replied shaking my head. “Always so deep.”
She laughed, “Yeah, I blame my grandparents for that. They would never let my mom or Jack, get away with ‘shabby answers,’ as they would call them.”
“So Jack isn’t just some kind of genius?”
“You obviously haven’t used the word genius in front of Jack.”
“I have, and I got the whole spiel. But I don’t really know how else to describe him.”
“Curious.”
“But he doesn’t just want to know things; he does know tons of things.”
“Curiosity is the curse and the mark of genius; it is a monster that grows inside of us, as much as we feed it of course. Every person is a genius, some merely starved in different ways.”
“So in what way would you say Jack has starved his curiosity?”
“I think he would say he should believe more in God, but I don’t know, you’d have to ask him.”
“I will.”
“Did he give you a puzzle last visit?”
“…yeah.”
“So you haven’t figured it out yet then?”
“Nope.”
“Which one did he give you?”
“The one about a sequence of letters starting with ‘O’.”
“Oh yeah, that one’s good. You want the answer?”
“Sure.”
“N and T are the next letters; the sequence is the first letters from one, two, three, four, five and so on.”
“It would be something like that.”
Jack’s tricky, and he never runs out of puzzles.
“Because if he ever ran out, he would just start making them up, like he makes up stories.”
“Stories about what?”
“A girl and a little freckled red headed boy. Did he used to have red hair?”
“No. That’s interesting. Are you writing down the stories as he tells them?”
“Not for my class, but yeah. I’ll give you a copy once I type it all up.”
“Thanks, that would be nice.”
“No problem.”
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