Guest Post: The Baby Equinox and Charles Darwin

By: | July 10, 2017

On this year’s summer solstice, the longest day, my daughter is about to reach her own personal equinox. She has lived outside of me for nine and a half months, almost as long as she spent swimming in my belly. The milestone means she now belongs to the world more than to me. In a way, it’s also a shift in season.

In her early months my daughter acted like a displaced citizen of my body. She preferred to nap with her ear against my sternum, hearing my heart. But now she squirms and dives to escape my arms. She waves incessantly at strangers. The world has her full attention.

Like a small scientist, she studies her environment. She likes to test gravity by pulling up on the coffee table and then plopping back down. When she’s crawling and hits her head on something, she pauses and then gently does it again, on purpose, feeling the edges where her own body meets the outside. I am studying her, too, to see what rules she has learned about the universe. Does she understand what she sees in a mirror? Why is peekaboo so unfailingly funny?

Charles Darwin also turned a scientist’s eye on one of his baby sons. In 1877 he published “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant” in Scientific American, based on a diary he’d kept 37 years earlier. Darwin had 10 children and, he noted, “excellent opportunities for close observation” of these creatures. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | July 8, 2017

July 3-7, 2017

Legendary artifact collector Forrest Fenn has hidden a bronze chest in the wilds. More than one treasure hunter has died looking for it, but Craig has seen its contents with his own eyes.

“Where’s my jetpack?” is the ubiquitous complaint of disillusioned mid-century science fiction fans. “It’s right here,” says DARPA, “But it’s kind of dumb.”

Since when is not being good at something a reason to stop doing it, asks Helen. Drawing helps her get better at seeing, and the effort itself is gratifying.

When you pour grease down the sink, you’re letting the giant sewer fatbergs win, says Jennifer. So just stop it.

Michelle has rediscovered Madeleine L’Engle’s classic A Wrinkle in Time with her daughter. It still holds up, and the message remains the same—snuggle in and listen.

 

Redux: Tesser Well

By: | July 7, 2017

When I first published this post, my daughter was six. Now, she’s eight-going-on-nine, and halfway through the Harry Potter series. But on dark and stormy nights, winter or summer, she still feels the pull of A Wrinkle in Time—and I do, too.

______

It was a dark and stormy night.

In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind. Behind the trees clouds scudded frantically across the sky. Every few moments the moon ripped through them, creating wraithlike shadows that raced along the ground.

The house shook.

Wrapped in her quilt, Meg shook.

______

The opening lines of the children’s classic A Wrinkle in Time are never all that far from my mind. As a kid, I loved the book so much that given the chance, I would have crawled inside it and stayed. And this time of year—especially at night, when the wind is blowing and branches are scratching across the windows—I often think of Madeleine L’Engle’s archly purple curtain-raiser and its creepy, cozy promise.

Snuggle in, it says, and listen.

A Wrinkle in Time influenced me more than any single book should have. I didn’t so much as identify with its main character—nerdy, stubborn, flawed Meg—as gradually grow to resemble her. Calvin, Meg’s nascent love interest, was probably my first crush. (Well, it was either Calvin or MacGyver. Which explains a lot.) Madeleine L’Engle and her characters encouraged my appreciation for science and scientists—and my tendency to wander off, unsupervised, to other planets.

A Wrinkle in Time has always had its detractors, young readers who find it boring, or unbelievable, or annoying. But many more boys and girls dive in deep, as I did, and remember it as adults with a kind of desperate fondness.

Continue reading →

Down the Drain (or, Monster Beneath the Streets)

By: | July 6, 2017

People, please don’t pour any more grease down the sink. Really, is it so hard to tilt the fry pan and dribble the stuff with its meaty little chunks into an empty container and freeze it so you can throw it away? Or pour it over the dog food? Because let me tell you what happens when we all dump sticky stuff down the drain, night after night, meal after meal.

Fatbergs. Fatbergs happen.

I hadn’t heard of a fatberg until a recent BBC report led me to read up on the subject. The term—which sounds almost elegant with a British accent, as most words do—was unknown to me, but intriguing. My initial thoughts: Must be a very fleshy lower-body part or else a very unfortunate Jewish last name. One or the other.

But it turns out a fatberg—the word used by Thames Water in London and others across the ocean—is a monster that lives in the sewer, a sort of Jabba the Hut spreading out under city streets and clogging up the works.

Fatbergs are congealed fat, mostly. But like concrete that’s roughed up with rebar for strength, a fatberg is wormed through with other materials, like hair, and used toilet paper, and baby wipes (lots of baby wipes), and tampons, and pretty much every other disgusting non-biodegradable thing we humans flush or rinse away each day. It’s a gooey, reeking mass that turns a sewer system into a stopped up intestinal tract, coated and clogged by people’s bad decisions.

Now and then city officials have to wrestle one of these things out of the ground, with power washers and shovels. I hope those people get paid well. Sometimes they find extra-weird stuff stuck in the goo. A ‘berg in Belfast housed a Christmas tree and a live kitten. Another juicy fatberg was reportedly nourishing a family of frogs.

Continue reading →

Redux: Drawing What I See

By: | July 5, 2017

My 2014 foray into drawing – which you can read about below – ended like the others. I got frustrated by my limited skills and gave up. Then in January 2016 I got sick of giving up on stuff I’m not very good at and started drawing every day. You can see the fruits of my labors on Instagram, and read what I wrote after a year of dailyish drawing here. Read on to find out some of the things I liked about drawing in May of 2014. 

artLast year I started drawing again after about a 16-year break. I say “again” like I ever really drew in the first place—really, I took a few classes, produced a few things that bore some resemblance to the thing they’d been based on, and quit.

Then, one day toward the tail of last winter, I was walking down a street in northern Sweden. I was spending three months in a tiny town and going slowly crazy.

I spotted a store that sold art supplies. It occurred to me that maybe drawing was what my brain needed to keep it from constantly refreshing the social networking sites. And I’d been so careful with money for so long that having a legitimate reason to shop for something that wasn’t food seemed exciting. I picked out a set of pencils (with sharpener and eraser) and a sketchpad. Continue reading →

Death in the Line of Treasure Hunting

By: | July 3, 2017

A treasure hunter recently died near the Rio Grande in New Mexico. His body turned up in the backcountry after he was reported missing. This is the second death of a treasure hunter looking for an ornate bronze chest said to be hidden somewhere between Santa Fe and Canada by multi-millionaire artifact collector Forrest Fenn. The chest is filled with what Fenn estimates to be $2 million in gold coins, nuggets, and small pre-Columbian artifacts. With clues limited to a poem Fenn wrote, and a geographic specificity of 5,000 feet in elevation, it’s a wonder more have not died in the last couple of years in search of it.

A few years before he announced the treasure hunt in 2010, I saw this chest with my own eyes. I was interviewing Fenn in his Santa Fe home about his collection of pre-Columbian artifacts. He led me into a vault with a thick steel door where he showed me a dazzling array of ancient materials. On a work table was this 22-pound chest of Romanesque design, something you could lift with two hands. It brimmed with gold artifacts and coins. He told me of his plans to hide it and spark a hunt, saying that the chest alone is worth $24,000. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | July 1, 2017

June 26-29, 2017

Ann turns a line in the earth into a geologic haiku, feeling her way along the remains of a coastline 200 million years old. On one side of this line lies an “unholy cat’s breakfast of hard metamorphic rocks” and to the other is “boring clay and mud and sand that took a couple hundred million years to wash off the mountains and build into the coastal plain.” From her office in a converted sail cloth mill, part of a string of mills once powered by the waterfalls coming down this “Fall Line,” she ponders the coincidence of geography, rivers, and human enterprise.

Instead of Night at the Museum, Helen brings us Night on the Mall. She comes in on the heels of National Pollinator Week to regale us with bat facts (female bats copulate in fall and hold the sperm till spring to become pregnant!). Following a bat specialist onto the National Mall, she enters a surprising forested underworld where none of the famous landmarks are visible, just bat habitat.

Cassandra scares the bejesus out of us as she passes through an airlock into a lab working on the bird flu virus at the University of Wisconsin’s Influenza Research Institute. She writes, “The lab had been thoroughly disinfected, but my scalp tingled with the knowledge of the viruses that had been thriving there.” The lab had been used to enhance the “pathogenicity or transmissibility” of the virus to see how bad it could really get. It is a place of dark and scary research.

A montage of advice comes from LWON writers who shared inspiring writing quotes they keep on hand to see them through their work, from Richard’s shut the fuck up and write to Helen’s You can survive. In fact, you can thrive. Just get a little shameless, and a little creative…words sent to her when she was laid off and faced the doubt of being a freelancer.

Richard tops off the week at LWON with a remembrance of an illness requiring his hospitalization, and the eloquent realization that “Medicine as we know it…is only about a hundred years old.” Meaning his health, his life, was in the hands of what is still a lot of guesswork. Neither science, nor art, he concludes modern medicine is performance art.