GRANDMOTHER? Really? and Subsequent Thoughts

By: | October 11, 2017

Last week I had a couple of snakebit days, the kind that are my fault entirely – like leaving (almost) the house with no makeup and no shoes.  On one of these days I took a package to an UPS store, found out I would pay $50 to send a $50 present, decided what the hell I could go with it, and took out my little wallet with my credit cards to pay.  Then the UPS guy said he’d mismeasured the package and I’d have to pay $90.  And I thought long and hard before I realized how dumb I was to even think about it at all.  So I said thank you anyway but no, and picked up my package and left.  And didn’t realize I’d left my wallet there until the next day.

So I called the store and the guy said, “Yes, it’s here, I was trying to reach you but couldn’t.”  I thought about that too:  in that wallet were several credit cards, a bank card, all my insurance cards, my driver’s license, and therefore my credit card numbers with identifiers, birth date, social security number, hair color, weight, height — everything about me but a phone number.  I.e., life in the modern age is weird.  So I went back to the UPS store and identified myself by name and the same UPS guy as yesterday said, “Here you go,” and handed me the wallet with everything intact though in different order because he had to look through it.  “Listen,” I said, “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.  Thank you so much.”  “You’re welcome,” he said.  Then I had thought #3:  this guy had done me an enormous favor, given me back my whole identity, and taken some time and effort to do it.  So I said, “You’re such a good guy to have tried to reach me and to keep all these cards for me.  Not everyone would have done that.”

“No problem,” he said.  “I just thought, ‘what would I want somebody to do for my grandmother?’ and that’s what I did.”  Thought #4:  his grandmother?  His GRANDMOTHER?  Oh really come on now.  I don’t look like anybody’s grandmother.  Do I look like a grandmother?  Do I look like one of those old ladies who, back in my youth, I would have pitied for their lost bounce and beauty?  Am I an old lady?

Thought #5:  I maybe should stop thinking about myself for a little minute and look at the UPS guy and by golly, he’s of an age where I could indeed have been his grandmother.  So I say, “Well, thank you again,” and he says again, “It’s how I’d want someone to treat my grandmother.”  I remember that some of my best friends are grandmothers. Continue reading →

Stop Being Shocked Please

By: | October 10, 2017

Last week, I saw a lot of shocked men. They were shocked about the Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment allegations. They were shocked that fellow liberal men in journalism were colluding with Nazi Milo Yiannopoulos to trash women. They were shocked that there was yet another case of sexual harassment and abuse in science.

You know who wasn’t shocked? Women. We looked at each other and went, “yep, sounds about right.” We traded stories. We, collectively, our whisper networks in our various fields, we knew about Harvey, we knew about Sunderland and Lyons, we knew about Marchant. And if we didn’t know them personally, we knew someone like them, someone who pulled the same tactics. They are all so exhaustingly familiar.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: Finding My Moorings

By: | October 9, 2017

When I was four or five years old, my parents took me on the Bluenose ferry, which traveled a narrow stretch of the Atlantic between Maine and Nova Scotia. I was enthralled at first, taking in the warm sun, the brisk wind, the sparkle on each wave as it rose. But that lasted only until my dad and I descended to the dark lower deck where passengers parked their cars. I couldn’t see the sky anymore, and my brain clunked into panic mode as the floor heaved and rolled beneath me. I felt as if my stomach contents might eject any second.

I was so young that I can’t remember if I actually threw up that day. Even so, my Bluenose journey profoundly affected my relationship with boats. For years, I dreaded ocean-going vessels as Orwell’s Winston Smith dreaded rats. Certain associations—the smell of diesel, the rolling horizon, the stained orange life jackets—are still enough to provoke a sense of unmooring that’s as psychological as it is physical. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | October 7, 2017

October 2-6, 2017

The People of LWON start off the week with a letter to The Modern Talking website. The site vanished around the same time. Coincidence?

It’s still fire season, and Jenny is the Lorax, she speaks for the trees. We don’t tend to think of a body count when plants are the victims, but if we did, the number would be tragically high.

Richard reduxes a post about the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory; three of the founders won the Nobel Prize this week. Discovering gravitational waves was what they’d designed LIGO to do; if gravitational waves were out there, this latest iteration of LIGO’s instruments, which had just come on-line, would find them. 

A tree grows in Brooklyn (and lots of other places), but many people wish it didn’t. Michelle writes about the successful, hated, beloved Ailanthus. As the trees matured, their human neighbors discovered a problem: they stink. In summer, when Ailanthus are flowering, their smell—likened to rancid peanuts, gym socks, or semen—can be overpowering.

I have trouble identifying a friend in a motorcycle helmet—and learn that I’ll likely never be hired for Scotland Yard’s team of super recognizers.

See you next week!

*

Top photo of an Ailanthus canopy by Flickr user Magnus Hagdorn. Creative Commons.

 

The Girl in the Motorcycle Helmet

By: | October 6, 2017

I was walking up the street the other day when a woman cruised by me on a motorcycle, slowed down and pulled over. Some quick calculations went through my mind: she’s wearing yoga pants because she’s a Pilates teacher, I only have one girlfriend in town who rides a motorcycle regularly, she’s about the right height, those are the kind of shoes she would wear, she’s stopping to talk to me.

I stopped too, knowing that it must be my friend. Still, when she flipped back her visor, I squinted at the rider’s eyes, the only part of her face that I could see. Even though I knew I was right, something told me I was terribly, terribly wrong. Who was this person under the helmet? Continue reading →

A Tree Persists in Brooklyn

By: | October 5, 2017

The first pages of children’s classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn describe eleven-year-old Francie Nolan sitting on her Brooklyn fire escape, daydreaming that she lives in a tree. For Francie, it wasn’t hard to imagine; tree limbs curled gracefully around the fire escape, shading her from the summer sun with umbrellas of pointed leaves.

The tree that sheltered Francie, writes author Betty Smith, was the kind that people sometimes called the tree of heaven, but it usually grew in prosaic places like abandoned lots and garbage heaps. It grew out of cement sidewalks and brick walls, and at the turn of the last century, when the book takes place, it grew only in the city’s tenement districts. “That was the kind of tree it was,” Smith writes. “It liked poor people.”

It wasn’t always so. In the 1820s, the tree of heaven—Ailanthus altissima—was a pricey, sought-after Chinese import to the United States, promoted as a quick cure for urban ills. City reformers argued that trees beautified the streets, cleaned the air, raised property values, and cooled an increasingly crowded populace, and the insect-resistant Ailanthus, which can grow ten feet in a season, was welcomed at New York’s best addresses. Continue reading →

Redux: On Getting From “Wow!” to “[yawn]”: Yes!!!

By: | October 4, 2017

Yesterday the Royal Swedish Academy announced that the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics would recognize the discovery of gravitational waves; the recipients would be Barry Barish, Kip Thorne, and Rainer Weiss, three of the visionaries who shepherded the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) through four decades of technological and bureaucratic innovations. (Another founder of the project, Ronald Drever, died earlier this year and was therefore ineligible for the Prize.) LWON has twice published essays based on discussions with the new Nobel laureates. The first, in December 2014, explained the physics behind the black hole in Interstellar, a movie that Thorne helped conceive and produce. The second post, republished below, addresses the LIGO experiment itself; the post originally appeared in June 2016.
Black_Swan_bgA few weeks ago I was talking to one of the founders of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), the collaboration that last September made the first detection of gravitational waves. Even if you’re not science-savvy, you will almost certainly recall the worldwide breathless news coverage following the February announcement of that detection. Now Rainer Weiss, MIT professor emeritus, had further news. He told me that the LIGO collaboration would soon announce another detection of a gravitational-wave-producing event.

Exciting!

For now.

Continue reading →

Speaking of the Trees

By: | October 3, 2017

The fires, the fires. When I started writing this some weeks back there were 137 of them torching forests across the American West. There are many fewer now—thank firefighters and weather—but so far they’ve consumed some 8.5 million acres of trees, some of them old growth, many of them on parkland filled with wildlife. British Columbia, too, has seen more fire destruction in recent months than anyone alive can recall. While massive hurricanes and flood waters and devastating earthquakes have steered our collective empathy to the south, parts of the Northwest smolder on.

Appropriately, we mourn for the people who have died or are still suffering from all of these disasters. Their agony isn’t abated by clear skies. Some of us also ache for the animals, those killed but maybe even more so those left behind in the chaos, confused and terrified.

And then there are the trees. Up north fires gobbled up huge swaths of them in no time; down south, winds ripped individuals out by the roots or snapped their spines and flung their limbs. We don’t tend to think of a body count when plants are the victims, but if we did, the number would be tragically high.

Continue reading →