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“About fi ve,” answered my grandma, whose memory was chaotic when discus-
sions were about age. Actually, she stopped counting my years when I was
5 years old.
“He is a genius,” exclaimed the thin old man, and all guests repeated in chorus:
“Genius!” From this moment on I was the little genius for all guests from our village
Loam Pit. When their bill was about three crowns and several hellers, they paid fi ve
crowns and they left me more than one crown tip and I was the best tipped waiter in
the county side.
My fate is to be the headwaiter, I wrote at the end of the essay.
Our high school teacher was beautiful with a perfect makeup. All of my friends
fell in love with her and the more we recognized our hopelessness, the cheekier we
were. She asked me: “Where did you read about the economist Usurero? Never
heard about him.”
“He is well known among professionals in theory of economy,” I was lying. I
would never admit that I derived this imaginary name from the Middle English word
usurer that means a lender of money at huge, unlawfully high interest rates. Knowing
that the Latin usura means loan, I invented the Italian family name of Usurero by
adding an “o” to the end of usurer. I also remembered from history that after Italians
started banking, the somewhat dirty term bankruptcy stemming from Italian banco
rotto meaning broken bench became a common word. In those times, bankers illus-
trated their ability and readiness for making loans by sitting on a box-banco contain-
ing available cash. They rotated the big box up and down to demonstrate the sad
situation whenever cash was no longer available for more loans. While I was writing
my essay at the high school, I decided to improvise the name of the economist as
well as his well-known professional recognition.
I was pleased when she responded, “Strange name. But you wrote the essay
well.”
After that, everybody at school started to call me pingl , a Czech vulgar expres-
sion for a trainee waiter.
It took me more than 10 years to recognize that my nonrealistic quotation of an
imaginary Usurero was correct but in a different way than deriving my fate from my
pub expertise. My imaginary Usurero predicted correctly that my lifetime fate
would be related to the name of the village where my granny owned the pub. With
that name being Loam Pit, my fate was not only linked up with loam but with all
soils. Although I started my university study in civil engineering, division of water
management, after I recognized what an important role soil plays in the hydrologic
circle, I decided to shift my studies into the direction of soil hydrology and soil
physics. It happened during the period when many basic equations of water fl ow in
soils were formulated, and on many occasions, I felt like I was living in a scientifi c
thriller as I watched all sorts of mathematical magic being performed by my slightly
older colleagues. Because I wished to be a similar magician, soils and water together
with their governing physical laws attracted my attention for the rest of my life. This
is also why I decided to share my experience with lay readers in telling them about
the really magical role of soil in all life forms on our planet Earth. My longtime and
best friend Don Nielsen is not only accompanying me, he has often a leading role.
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