“What do you mean? Like if a tree falls and there's no ear to hear it, does it still make a sound?”
“Yeah. Exactly. Am I really here if there's no one to see and remember? No one to care that it's me?”
“I don't know. You're taxing my brain after too many drinks. Here. Look. If you push your finger in the sand, like this,” I demonstrated, “you don't just move the grains of sand you push. You move sand all around. See?”
“Yeah.” He watched my finger as I did it again.
“You can't know which ones either. You change things up close and farther away whether you like it or not. A guy like you—a guy who rolls out on a fire truck when there's an accident on the highway—you've got to be changing things you'll never even know about. Touching lives you can't imagine.”
Z. A. Maxfield