Short Story: Bicycling with Einstein

Ms. Susan Mars is from East Texas. A spongy brunette with drawn-on eyebrows, a certified life coach, and an expert in Asian belief and practices.

Mars is one the richest women in the world; a distant heir to the Mars fortune, living in a large home, surrounded by porcelain teacups and wall hangings purchased from on-line catalogs.

Susan invites her circle of friends and a number of followers to weekly meditations and trainings at her home. She is set most apart from other dilettantes and mendicants by her uncanny ability to read people’s faces. She had “an eye for people”, and she always told the truth. She could not help it. Eccentric? Yes. Odd? Yes. Interesting and influential? Yes. If someone greeted her in the street, and said “How nice to see you,” she might ask them “Why?”

Many years earlier, Susan was with her father at a business meeting in New Jersey. There, while riding a bicycle to explore the quiet town, she came up alongside an older gentleman riding a bicycle. It was Albert Einstein. He greeted her, bashfully, and asked if she would like to ride along with him through the Princeton streets. They chatted as they rode for a while, and Einstein asked if he could leave Susan with a riddle. He told her the riddle and they rode a few more blocks. She gave her answer: “The German owns the fish.” Einstein was flabbergasted. He believed that only a two percent of people in the world could solve the riddle, and young Susan had solved it in minutes, in her head, with no pencil and paper. She was able to hold the components of the riddle in her head as she pedaled along.

Susan related this story to her friends and followers. They already believed she had certain abilities and a great intellect, but were puzzled by her love of garish knickknacks and décor in her home. They were too polite to ask, but she confessed it forced her to be humble and to put trappings aside as she concentrated on her involvement in the spiritual and in truth. This pronouncement drew her students closer, as you may expect, but it made many others nervous. They were afraid of this rich lady that drew her eyebrows on. She perceived too much, and she only told the truth. There were influential people that knew her and felt that straight trees should be cut first.