The Occasional Story

Chapter II

George Packard, retired schoolteacher, had been born and raised in the American tradition, but had long since disentangled or disengaged himself from all the standard conventions that most people seemed compelled to obey. Born in Chicago to a well-to-do, but very dysfunctional/alcoholic family, he had come out to California forty years earlier. He had never married. Packard was what used to be called a confirmed bachelor. He wasn’t gay. He had had plenty of women. It just turned out that he had never “settled down”. For whatever reason he had never met the woman of his dreams. It just had never happened.

He still lived alone in the same co-op apartment he had purchased twenty-two years earlier. It was conveniently located, being what they called “Beverly Hills adjacent”, and it was an easy bus ride to Los Angeles High School, where he taught biology and general science for over twenty five years. Now that he was retired, Packard felt that perhaps he should move. But where to? He was comfortable as he was.

Packard returned to his ruminations.

“What is it,” he considered, “that when squared, when multiplied by itself, creates the golden section, phi? Specifically, this square root of phi, whatever it is or isn’t in the physical world, when squared yields a phi proportion between the two other entities created – possibly even non-geometric, non-physical entities? Such would be the nature of the square root of phi.”

Packard, though, always returned to quantities: lengths of line, areas and volumes. However, the proportions underlying the transcendental numbers and the relationships between them would hold true in any dimension or realm, wouldn’t they? Packard paused.

“Why must I always make things so complicated for myself? So far-fetched?”

“Poor George Packard,” he muttered to himself.