Our mother died on August 7, 2010, quite a while ago now. Our father had already died way back in 1978. Last Monday, I noticed the date, thought it was probably their wedding anniversary, and then thought, “Oh, Mom will be sad today.” Then I thought, “No, she’s dead too.” Everybody does this, deaths never […]
I have some unfinished business with an article I wrote. It was about grief, and it got a lot of questions and comments and though I’ve answered some already, I need to answer one more. The answer turns out to need a science metaphor. Science, which goes about its orderly business of sorting out the […]
I like to run this post on Memorial Day; it first ran May 28, 2012. When I think about soldiers and Memorial Day, I think about Uncle Bundy, I’m not sure why — maybe because he stood so straight, not because he ever talked about the war, which he didn’t. Probably, though, it’s because of […]
Consistent with my policy of running posts that take me, virtually anyway, out of the pandemic present to somewhere or sometime that’s interesting and wide-angle, I offer you the Chesapeake Bay: born in violence, growing up geologically and then sociologically, and now hitting the present with utter tomfoolery. And revelation. This first ran March 31, […]
I’m sorry, I wrote this article about the biology of grief and I left things out. Which yes, articles always leave things out, they have to. But this particular omission bugged the readers and also bugged me: it was the length of time grief should take. The article said that after 6 to 12 months […]
The flowers that bloom in the spring tra la. I love them faintingly, I gaze at them, hands folded reverently, such dears they are, oh my darlings, my minor bulbs! Minor bulbs are not the same as spring ephemerals — really their name — like spring beauties, dog-tooth violets, may apples, shooting stars, and Dutchman’s […]
We begin, as we so often do, with a tweet. Jonathan McDowell @planet4589: Interesting that the NROL-44 patch description makes explicit reference to FVEY, the ‘Five Eyes’ spy alliance of US/UK/Aus/Can/NZ. Brief explainer: Jonathan McDowell is a certified Harvard x-ray astronomer who also keeps an eye on satellites in space. NROL stands for National Reconnaissance […]
I’ve reached the stage of pandemic isolation, anxiety, hope, despair, faith, exhaustion, general twitchiness and sheer endurance — as have we all — where a nice alternate reality might help. I don’t mean a fantasy. I mean a reality that exists somewhere else — but no, that won’t work, the pandemic is everywhere. So I […]