Sewitch Etcetera Corporation

[This is a guest piece from Serra Sewitch-Posey, reprinted from her Substack channel with permission. Copyright 2025 Serra Sewitch-Posey.]

A local artist I admire did a post about a good friend of hers who just died. He was not an old man. But he was suddenly and inexplicably riddled with tumors. She shared a video of him strutting and dancing down the sidewalk toward the camera, lavender shirt and white jeans, wild curly hair and beard--totally expressive and free, moving with unselfconscious joy. 

   I find his Instagram account and see pictures of his cool, weird sculptural art; him smiling with his smiling wife; both of them wearing bike helmets. There are videos of him making experimental music with keyboards and xylophones,then playing a thick purple carrot carved into a flute-like instrument. There's a photo of his baby looking up sweetly and holding one of her feet. So many pictures of unexplainable, flamboyant images, bits of the world that he found beautiful. 

   I find his wife's account and there's all this sweetness. Him and his kid, holding hands and walking silly down the street. Him swinging the kid around in a milk crate.

   One photo that stops my heart for a moment was of him and his child hugging, the kid's face hidden and dad's face tragic, eyes closed in pain and love. Trying to hold on and knowing he can't hold on forever...he knows he has so little time left. 

   Then there's his wife's updates on his health, with an image of their hands holding tight on the hospital bed. 

   He was a real person. 

   I mean, a real person. Apparently, really living. He seems like someone who couldn't stop himself from creating, couldn't fail to emit love and brilliance, had to move wildly and weirdly. Maybe he somehow knew a long time ago that his time would be cut short. 

   He will be missed and mourned by so many.

   Even, somehow, by me. 

Of all the burning questions that might consume one’s days and sleepless nights, there is one that has followed me throughout my life and travels, across the globe. And this one appears as inscrutable as the question of how to incorporate gravity into the Standard Model of sub-atomic physics. As many other perplexing phenomena in our daily reality, this one presents itself as deceptively simple. Please examine the photograph below.

This is a marble strip separating the hallway from the hotel room at the room’s entrance. I have seen this marble threshold in many different hotels, in different cities and countries. I’ve seen it in very inexpensive hotels where the flooring is otherwise linoleum. It can also appear at the doorway into the bathroom, either in addition to the front door or instead.

I have postulated that the bathroom door presence provides a small barrier to water from the bathroom floor seeping into the bedroom area. But that doesn’t explain the marble threshold at the room’s entrance. The marble threshold doesn’t appear in other buildings or private residences that I’ve visited, such as condominiums, office buildings, public structures, apartments and homes.

I have resisted asking ChatGPT. I don’t know why I’m hesitant to go to the obvious solution for solving this mystery. Maybe I value human knowledge more highly because I know how difficult it is for people to acquire knowledge and skill, taking years to develop for the most challenging areas of human learning. A “large language model” didn’t sweat over exams, repeat practices endlessly and sacrifice sleep to advance in their chosen field of endeavor.

So if any of you have personal knowledge, gained through effort and dedication, about this mystery, I would love to hear from you.