When, awake one day, the air feels different.
Warmer, maybe, dirt wicking up through snow.
And blood from some coyote kill
tunneling down on the sharpness of its departing heat.
A few nights ago, my golden retriever puppy did a weird thing on the kitchen chair. I was standing at the counter island, where I always stand, and my daughter was in her chair across from me. Sunshine tried to climb on the chair next to my daughter, but then she kind of stopped halfway. She rested her torso and her front legs on the seat and let her hind legs dangle. It was weird. It wasn’t typical behavior.
I looked at her face. She looked morose.
Continue readingThere is a hyper-intelligent mammal in the oceans with whom we might communicate if only we were a more empathetic and patient species. This is the unspoken assumption behind most coverage I see of dolphins. But since 2013, when I read the book reviewed below, I view those ideas in a completely different light. One wonders what other animal could accidentally have been made the subject of that fiction.
When John Lilly first suggested dolphins were super-intelligent, the context was clearer. The neurophysiologist was injecting his dolphins with LSD, masturbating them to encourage cooperation and hanging out with Timothy Leary. Before understanding that dolphins were conscious breathers, Lilly accidentally asphyxiated his subjects by fully anaesthetizing them for brain studies, but as they died they made a lot of strange sounds. He slowed down the recordings and – woah, man – the dolphins were totally trying to talk human.
Dolphin researchers at the time joked that – far from the living, breathing marine mammals they worked with – Lilly had conjured a sort of floating hobbit, peacefully civilizing the ocean Shire. The thing is, my generation never even held these notions up to the scrutiny of the adult mind. Extraordinary assertions, after all, require extraordinary evidence. In Are Dolphins Really Smart?, Justin Gregg patiently hauls away the entrenched myth for an honest assessment of what science is, and isn’t, telling us. The book is set to hit the Christmas-shopping shelves, but here’s a sneak peek of his important findings.
“I’m not going to do a damn thing to help you,” the old man said, glaring at me across the boat with bloodshot eyes. “I’ve been usurped.”
I stared back, speechless. We were moving fast downriver toward a churning brown rapid that could swallow our boat whole. Bob was refusing to help me tie up our raft on shore next to the other boats on our river trip. “Not helping” meant leaving the rest of the boats behind and running the rapid alone.
I had only spent a few minutes with Bob, an 80-year-old oarsman. I’d been hired to replace him halfway through a commercial river trip on the Grand Canyon, because — due to age and infirmity — he could no longer handle rowing a 22-foot-long raft carrying baggage and food, and I could. I understood why he didn’t like me. But it was already clear to me that one way or another, I was going to have to kick Bob out of my boat.
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I got my primary tip on writing postcards from Garrison Keillor, an essay of his I read at least a decade and a half ago: Don’t try to write a letter. (This was in an era when many people, including me, still wrote letters.) Write a little scene. Paint a word picture for the recipient.
Writing a scene feels like showing off how good a writer you are, but I do avoid trying to squeeze a letter (“How are you? I’m fine. I’m in Hawaii. It’s nice!”) into the 60-word space. Mostly I try to be amusing.
My second postcard-writing tip came from my parents. On a visit to Romania in 1998 I commented, on a postcard, on something about Bucharest – the smell, I think? – and they alarmedly told me about a Peace Corps volunteer they heard of, in the 60s, who wrote something uncomplimentary about his host country on a postcard home and created a minor international incident.
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I have been trying to write more letters, the kind that have an envelope and a stamp and go into that white box with the little flag at the end of our driveway. It’s a work in progress, I’m still at a ratio of about 579 emails and texts to one letter. So this weekend, when I went away with a friend to a “digital detox zone” I thought, hooray! Time to work on that!
I brought a happy little set of notecards and my favorite pens and got to work. It was fun. I liked practicing my actual handwriting. I liked thinking of the person receiving it. I liked the satisfaction of sliding the card into the envelope. And then: “Gah!”
“Why are you laughing?” my friend asked.
Because I had tried to lick the envelope and it didn’t work. It didn’t work because I had licked the tab that you are supposed to pull off which already has adhesive underneath. I didn’t learn, either. I did this with every letter I wrote.
“Why do we lick envelopes, anyway?” my friend said. “It’s kind of gross if you think about it.” I didn’t know. So of course, now that I am back in the digital intoxication zone, I will tell you what I have now learned through my freewheeling internet bender on envelope-licking.
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Q: I’m so sorry to hear about your stepmom. How are you?
A: Oh, thanks. I’m fine. I’ll be ok.
A: I’m managing, I guess.
A: Yeah, it has been hard. It was so sudden.
A: I’m . . . I don’t know. I’m coping, I guess. I have a bunch of mints in my pocket from the funeral home. The name of the home is printed on the wrapper. I’ve been pondering how that kind of marketing might benefit the business. Would you like one?
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On Monday I found myself unexpectedly caring for a pre-schooler all day. It seems there is a holiday in America known as President’s Day. We didn’t have it in Mexico and the last time I remember noticing it was as kid when it was attached to something called “ski week.” Yay, no school!
What is the point of this holiday? Why would we want to honor these morons? Most presidents have been nothing but trouble. What, James Buchanan and George W Bush need a special day? It’s like having a holiday called Children’s Day between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Every day is children’s day, kid.
Freelancers cannot afford to celebrate such silly holidays and I have ignored it all my adult life until I found myself in the parking lot of a pre-school realizing that there were no teachers. No school. Yay.
So, after a full day of sword fights and museums and generally throwing my child around, I was thrilled to be invited to a potluck President’s Day dinner (no doubt commemorating the time that Taft went back for a third helping and realized there was no more food, so everyone chipped in to top him off).
Managing a frenetic child alongside appetizers and wine while having pleasant conversations is surprisingly easier than doing it alone. As I discussed the finer points of the future of journalism while holding a child by one leg who was wildly swinging a lightsaber, I heard an interesting comment.
“We don’t need National Geographic anymore. I get the same information and sense of adventure from blogs.”
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