Helen: Well, Cameron! Hello! Here we are again! I’m so glad we’re back two years after the original 100-days-in-a-dress post, because (a) I didn’t know what to write about for Monday and it was probably going to be something depressing about my dad dying (b) I am so obsessed with everyday, year-round wool clothing now. Ask me questions!
Cameron: I am so glad to be here again talking about dresses! But I also do not think it is depressing (at least not for me) to read the lovely things you have been writing about both of your parents.
Why are you obsessed with wool? Does this mean I can tell an inappropriate sheep joke? I also have some funny sheep-related placemats.
Helen: I certainly hope we get a sheep joke! And placemats. To catch our readers up, two years ago I did the thing where you wear this company’s wool dress for 100 days in a row (yes, you can wash it) and at the end they give you a $100 gift certificate to buy more stuff from them.
At the time of our conversation, I owned one dress and one pair of sweatpants that I had bought with the $100 reward.
Ask me how many pieces of clothing I have from that company now.
Cameron: Helen, how many pieces of clothing do you have from that company now? (And can you do all of my interviews with me and tell me what to ask people?)
Helen: It’s an embarrassing number and I don’t want to say. Let’s just say I thought it was maybe 6-8 and I counted and it was a lot more.
But here’s the thing: wool is amazing. This particular wool is so soft and it does not get stinky. IT DOES NOT GET STINKY.
The kids aren’t doing this any more. I miss it. I still have random people asking me about the kid arrangements, so apparently other people miss it too. But kids grow, that’s what they do; they move on. In this case, they’ve moved on to jumping rope, blowing conch shells, and digging bunkers — like “where’s the pickaxe, Mom?” I’m still convinced they’re repeating stages in evolution. This first ran July 10, 2020.
I walk out my front door after dinner to check on the night, and before breakfast to check on the day. And every now and then, on the porch table, or the porch floor, or the front sidewalk is an arrangement — rocks, berries, plants of some sort. They’re not put there at random, they’re definitely arranged, each rock or plant or berry chosen according to some criterion (pretty color, shiny, whatever was handy) and put down next to another rock or plant according to another criterion (circles, lines, rows, whatever looked nice). I started taking pictures of them.
She was in the narrow shed, on a high shelf, in a cardboard box advertising Dole fresh cut salads on the side. In black Sharpie on top, the word “Judi” in my stepdad’s scrawl gave away the actual contents.
“It’s time to get Mom out of the storage facility,” I told him during a recent visit to Santa Fe. Previously, Mom’s ashes were displayed in his kitchen in a fancy green-flowered ceramic urn (which was once owned by Madeline Albright, a gift from a foreign visitor, apparently, that she wasn’t allowed to keep). But when he moved in with a new partner, it just seemed wrong to have his deceased wife on display, no matter how grand the container. Thus, the urn went into the cardboard box (packed inside a purple velvet case first—we’re not barbarians!) in the shed.
When I say “shed” I mean, yep, one of those storage units you pay monthly for, to stash old bikes and broken stereos and golf clubs and other stuff you’ll probably give or throw away later (or your kids will). Mom shared the unit with some dusty boxes of files and mementos, wooden slats from a shelving unit, a huge frame. Some other stuff was stacked in there; nothing of major consequence. Too, there was an old empty Coke can on the floor in the corner and some mouse droppings here and there. It was an A1 storage place, if you’re wondering.
Once unlocked, the accordion door to Unit 91 made a horrible shrieking sound when we pulled it up. We got the box of Mom down and brought her with us in the car. The urn held not just mom but the ashes of three pets (including her very favorite black-and-gray tiger cat, April, and weimaraner Gretel). Plus, my grandmother, it turns out! Back at the condo, in the kitchen, we lifted the urn out and unscrewed the top just to see what we were working with. No surprise, it was a series of nondescript plastic bags of ash. One wasn’t sealed quite well enough to keep from spewing just a little gray stuff from the top when we moved it around. That was weird.
The plan was to take that bag of Mom and her pets and her mother either up the mountain to among the stands of aspen trees, or over to the Botanical Gardens. Mom died in 2006 and it was long past time to spread her ashes somewhere pretty. She loved Santa Fe in all its Santa Fe glory and probably would have liked to be scattered in the main square (near where the Native Americans sell jewelry) or inside one of her favorite shops, perhaps in a dressing room. (For the record, before she was cremated, we tucked her CHICOS customer card into the coffin with her.)
But those were both terrible ideas. Especially that second one. And the Botanic Gardens, well, people might not want us doing it there, where they walk and inhale a lot. So out of town, up where the wild things grow, it would be.
Would I feel unmoored once her ashes were in the wind? Would it matter that she wasn’t all in one place, and that I didn’t have a special spot to visit in a cemetery where I’d feel her presence? I wasn’t sure. I certainly didn’t THINK so. I’m of the “back to the Earth” mindset when it comes to death. I don’t like the idea of burial, unless you intend to be unboxed tree and worm food. I’m a bit claustrophobic myself. So, this should feel good and right, to let Mom out of her confines to fly free under the Santa Fe sun.
I don’t know in what exactly, but something is happening out there, gears and orbits turning, disparate points meeting, then moving apart. We’re bound in ways unexplained by simple principles of causality. That is my belief.
My youngest turned 18 last week as comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS passed at its closest to Earth, which didn’t mean much to me. The night was cloudy and I shrugged off the viewing because cake and candles were on hand.
At dawn the next day, the two of us set off on a road trip from Colorado to California, camping in wide open desert as we crossed Utah and Nevada. Near the border of the two states, we drove onto the dusty hardpack of a dried up Pleistocene lakebed where we disgorged camping chairs, an ice chest, and sleep gear. This could have been another planet, and without a living thing to be seen we pondered whether it was the moon or Mercury. A near-full moon was up by sunset, a ‘supermoon’ on its closest approach to Earth, though I lose track of superlatives as events seem to grow bigger and more auspicious all the time. As dark set in, it was far from dark. Moon milk filled this ancient basin. We pressed our bare feet into soft, pale sediment, wandering this way an that, pulled by the gravity of the flat middle of nowhere.
I’d forgotten about the comet or which part of the sky I was supposed to be paying attention to when I spotted its long misty tail above where the sun had set. I shouted to my kid, who was strolling a few hundred feet away. The view clarified by the second and by the time we came together, this cosmic event was clear to our eyes. We were fly-by’s witnessing each other. Considering that it likely came from Oort Cloud at the outer limits of our solar system and would not be back for 80,000 years, if it ever comes back at all, the passing of this comet felt like a rare moment of eye contact, strangers from far away crossing for an instant. It felt meaningful.
On the morning my friend Kristina died, I listened and re-listened to the last voice mail she left me. I needed to hear her voice, and the mundaneness of her 35 second message was comforting. She was sorry she’d missed my call. She’d been out for a walk. She was planning a bike ride tomorrow but would call me again before that. She really wanted to connect.
I am notoriously terrible about clearing out my voice mails. I can’t bear to erase them. I have a habit of keeping at least one at all times from the people I love most. The content of the message isn’t important. It’s that I can hear their voice, catch them in the midst of ordinary life, before they are dead. I’ve learned that you never know when someone will be dead.
I once heard a story about a phone booth in Japan where people who lost friends and family in the 2011 tsunami and earthquake go to talk to their lost loved ones. I would use a phone booth like that.
I still occasionally listen to the voice mail I saved from my friend Mona before she died several years ago. I have heard her say that she’s just returned from Tai Chi class dozens of times. In the months after she died, I also texted her more than once. Sometimes I would forget, if only for a split second, that she was dead and feel compelled to follow through on my impulse to tell her something on my mind. Other times, I just needed to pretend for a moment that she wasn’t really gone.
When I got the news that Kristina had died, I had just placed a letter to her in my mailbox. A few days earlier, a loved one had sent a message out saying that Kristina was turning inward and it was now best to send wishes and love by mail rather than text or phone. This was my second note to her in the previous two weeks, and I’m not sure if she ever read the first. After I received the news that she had passed, I stood on the front porch and stared at the little red flag raised on my mailbox at the end of the driveway. I could not make myself go retrieve the letter.
This post first appeared in 2013. My dancing shoes no longer have heels, but at least fairy tales are timeless.
One of the ornaments that lives in a box in the attic has a fairy wearing a blue gown on it; she’s sitting on a crescent moon. This picture has a quote below it: “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairytales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairytales.” It’s attributed to Albert Einstein.
I’m not sure in what context Einstein said this, if he did at all. (The one source I could track down was as advice that Einstein may have given to a mother who wanted her child to be a scientist: “First, give him fairy tales; second, give him fairy tales, and third, give him fairy tales!”) And I have tried to give my children fairy tales—last year, for Christmas, I bought them a fairy tale book nearly as big as home plate with gorgeous illustrations.
But the truth is I never read it to them. I have it on my desk so I can read it myself. There are several other books that have migrated into my office, too: Tales from Old Ireland, Fireside Stories, Grimms’ Tales for Young and Old.
Many of these books have stories with similar characters and familiar-seeming plots. People have long been trying to trace the origins of some of these stories. And last week, one researcher reported a new way of doing this: phylogenetic analysis.
Other approaches that look at fairytales’ origins have classified them by where they’re from and when they likely appeared, looking at a few key commonalities between the stories. But fairytales disperse and evolve in a very similar way to species, according to study author Jamie Tehrani. Something so rooted in oral tradition leaves behind a spotty fossil record, and it’s not clear what traits of this mythical beast we call a story are inherited from the oldest known source.
Tehrani built a phylogenetic tree for a group of tales featuring predators masquerading as someone we know—stories like “Little Red Riding Hood” and “The Wolf and the Kids“, which involves a wolf who appears at the door, in disguise, and eats up the brothers and sisters inside the house. By looking at 58 variations of these tales, and 72 plot and character variables—are there many children or just one? What kind of an animal is Grandmother? How does she disguise herself?—Tehrani found, among other things, that Red Riding Hood tales thought to originate in East Asia actually have elements of both of these story types, suggesting that these tales may have come from elsewhere and were then adapted by storytellers in places like Japan, China, and Korea.
It seems like other evolutions of fairytales are happening, too, with morals and lessons being injected into versions aimed at kids. But the ones I remember keeping me up at night and keep me reading again have little of this: instead, they hint at life’s unpredictability (you might be killed if your last sibling was born a girl), that there are things you can’t stop even if you stay far away from the woods (your stepmother might want to eat your heart), and also that there are untold wonders that await (you could dance all night until your shoes fell apart.)
Fairy tales do come true: tattered dancing shoes.
“Once we orient fairy tales toward children,” writes Harvard folklore expert Maria Tatar in a recent review, “we forget that they were engineered for entertainment, less invested in sending messages than in producing shock effects so powerful that to this day we feel compelled to talk about them, reinvent them and pass them on.”
And after reading about the books she describes, I ordered one. Maybe this time, I should just admit it: Fairy Tale Comics is just for me.
On a salmon walk last week, a friend and I encountered this battered, spawned-out chinook in the final hours of his life: his milt spent, flesh ragged and necrotic, preparing to relax into the embrace of death. We watched him swirl aimlessly in this pool for half an hour, in awe of the vibrant spirit that brought this sacred being many miles to this pool — now leaking from him, his mission fulfilled and journey concluded, preparing to fertilize the forest with his matter.
Bear with me on this, please and thank you, I’m trying to think something through.
Amy Maxmen, colleague and notable public health writer, was telling me about a medical researcher who runs big studies on vaccines and who says that vaccines work, they don’t hurt you, they’re good, and Amy quoted him saying he can recite all the studies that say so. But he doesn’t recite studies when he’s talking to his patients, he told her; he just says to them, “I and everybody I know in public health vaccinates their children.” That’s the most convincing thing he can say, he said.
Well yes. I’d be convinced too. I’m a science writer and part of my job (as it is Amy’s) is to assess the reliability of studies and sources — no reliability, not science, I don’t write about them. But the researcher who says he vaccinates his own children? If I hadn’t been convinced before, I am now.
How odd. Why should I be convinced by this researcher, no matter how eminent and reliable; he’s just one person, it’s just someone’s personal testimony, an anecdote? Even though he’s looping in his colleagues, the evidence is still anecdotal. I can list you all the reasons doctors and lawyers and general scientists including this medical researcher plus the average thinking person distrust the anecdotal, and they’re all right. What’s true for you might not be true for me; statisically, it’s nonsense; you might be gullible or a congenital liar or remember wrongly or just mistaken; and so on, far into the night. So why am I and the researcher’s patients saying that if we trust this one person and he tells us he’s seen/heard/done this, then we’re convinced. Right back to the question: why?
