Tin Ear

By: | September 7, 2020

It is me again, trying to learn more about birds. I am trying with my shore birds, I am trying with my old field guides and my new Merlin ID app. And so, when I heard about a class to better identify bird song, I thought I should add one more tool to my feathery toolbox.

The instructor is so enthusiastic, so positive, so sure that anyone can learn bird calls. In many of the lectures, she talks about the birding mistakes and mishaps that she or others have made. I feel related to, I feel welcome. Still, I’m not much further than when I started.

I think my problem began with the robin. The American robin was given as an example of an ambassador bird, a bird that would help you pick out other birds in the thrush family. You could pick any bird you wanted, of course, but since I do know what robins look like, I figured I’d start there.  

Call it the red breast phenomenon (or be more accurate and call it the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon)—now I see robins everywhere. They are picking through leaves under the elm tree, tucking themselves into berry bushes, landing on the grass at the park. But they are silent, these robins. I think they’re being quiet just to taunt me.   

The only calls that I can recognize are the screechy ones. The ones I already know. The seagull.  The crow. The scrub jay. The squeaky wheels of the bird world. OK, maybe I know two more: the morning dove’s coo, and the catch-all call of the mockingbird, which is a recent, pandemic addition to the repertoire. None of these are the charming ambassador birds that I’m supposed to be learning, the ones that will let you into the secrets of the wren family, the sweet, sunny call of the warbler.

I am listening more. The mix of calls I hear sounds like chaos to me, making me think that all of the ambassadors have pulled out of their embassies and left behind a clamor of birds without a country. And then yesterday morning, my husband and I were standing outside when a great blue heron flew overhead. And then, a second one flew by. We whooped and waved at our neighbors down the street, who were pointing upward, too. We’ve never seen one wide-winged heron soar above our street, let alone two.  One of them made a creaky call that sounded like a sore-throated dog’s bark. Maybe an ambassador doesn’t have to have a voice like honey. Maybe  it just needs to remind you to return to the country of attention.

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Image by Andy Blackledge via Flickr/Creative Commons license

Pandemic Art (on Zoom)

By: | September 4, 2020
A collage of a city with a bunny in the background

On Saturday, I met up with two friends and made art.

Now, in this era, “met up with” means “on Zoom.” But “made art” means “made art.” And it’s art that wouldn’t have happened without the pandemic.

The two friends are Joanna and Harshita, two of my oldest friends. We’ve known each other since we were 11 and 12 years old, and after getting various degrees in other places, we’re all back and living within a few miles of the houses where we grew up. Over the last few years, while I’ve been discovering my artistic side, Joanna and Harshita have been around for it. Joanna and I meet up sometimes for a bit of plein air drawing, and Harshita and I have taken classes together with a local artist.

In early April, Joanna suggested the three of us get together (on Zoom) and do some art. This was early on, when we thought this isolation was maybe just going to be a few weeks or, when I was feeling pessimistic, until early summer. Joanna works in the museum field and has led a lot of arts and crafts, so she volunteered to find us an activity. Remember back in spring, when everyone was sharing ways to amuse yourself when you’re stuck at home? A museum educator at the National Gallery in London filmed a video with instructions on a collage activity inside her home.

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It’s Roasted Tomato Season, Motherfuckers

By: | August 31, 2020

With apologies to Colin Nissan.

I don’t know about you, but I have been waiting all year to wrap my hands around some tasty, tender tomatoes and arrange them in colorful patterns on my kitchen counter. 

That shit is going to look like the embodiment of late summer. I’m dusting off my harvesting baskets and steel bowls, jamming them with juicy, just-off-the-vine tomatoes of every color. 

When my guests come over, it’s like, BLAMMO! Check out my overflowing bounty of luscious, juicy tomatoes, assholes. Guess what season it is — fucking harvest season! There’s a feeling of ripeness in the air and my house is full of tender fucking tomatoes.

And you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to throw some multi-colored tomatoes into a roasting pan, and I’m going to drizzle them with some genuine California olive oil and then I’m going to slow-roast them until their scrumptious flavors have bubbled up into a taste explosion. 

And when people come over and smell the aroma of roasting tomatoes in my kitchen, they’re going to be like, “Aren’t those tomatoes smelling up your house?” And I’m going to spread another perfected roasted purple Cherokee onto a slice of homemade sourdough and quietly reply, “It’s harvest season, fuckfaces. You’re either ready to reap this tasty bounty or you’re not.”

Roasting purple, yellow, orange and red tomatoes sounds like a pretty fitting way to ring in the season. There is no more ideal food than a perfectly roasted tomato, and I am going to roast tomatoes until there are no more tomatoes to roast.

Why? Because it’s not that long stretch when the garden is growing but nothing is ripe, and it’s not spring or winter or the post-frost fall yet. Grab a calendar and pull your fucking heads out of your asses; it’s harvest season, fuckers.

For now, all I plan to do is to throw on a t-shirt, some light overalls and a floppy fucking hat and kneel down in my garden and keep picking this near-endless stream of ripe tomatoes for the next six weeks, or until the first frost. The first skunk that tries to sneak in and steal my ripe tomatoes is going to get his stinky ass bitch-slapped all the way back to the long days of early summer, when the plants are green but so are the tomatoes. 

Welcome to harvest season, fuckheads!

Today’s parody post is based on this McSweeney’s classic by Colin Nissan.

Once a Wolf

By: | August 28, 2020

Back in January of 2014, I wrote a guest post for LWON about a morning with a dog and here it is again, only slightly fixed up. 

A neighbor dog and I walk up a snow-crusted hill together. Glossy black lab mad for sticks and balls, he hasn’t forgotten how to travel with a human in the woods. He ranges forward and back, and side to side, sniffing and sussing the hilly thickets.

Not every day is it a mountain lion, or a bear pawing the ground. Most days I see only piñons and juniper trees, maybe a jay flying by, or a deer staring back at me. High mesas in Western Colorado each have their own daily surprises. Today is the dog.

I am not used to traveling with a domestic animal, unless you count my kids who also clobber the ground and run from side to side. I’d just moved with my family into a house tucked into a geographic platform extending above the North fork of the Gunnison River. The morning’s walk is unfamiliar, these hills new to me. Having a dog tickles an old sensation in my head, going somewhere new with an animal at your side.

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It ain’t what you see it’s the way that you see it

By: | August 26, 2020

I’ve been working lately to get a handle on where awe fits into our lives, especially the intersection of awe and science. In my journeys, I met someone who sheds light on the awe appeal of science fiction and how it has changed over the history of filmmaking.

Michael Backes worked in Hollywood for decades. He’s done everything from co-writing screenplays with Michael Crichton to consulting on the science in the Spider Man franchise, to advising on the logic of Iron Man’s suit. He has worked with Steven Spielberg, Tom Clancy, and James Cameron, and he co-founded the American Film Institute’s Digital Media Studies program. Over time, he has seen the progression of audience expectations.

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Motherhood: A postscript

By: | August 24, 2020

Eight years ago, I wrote a post about my struggle to decide whether to have a child. Now I have two. The latest addition, who is almost eight months old, is a determined, wiggly, often screaming bundle of chub. He is wonderful. He is awful. He defies description. This is a letter I wrote in 2015 to that previous version of myself, the one who had no babies. I wanted to help her understand what she’s in for. I should have read this again before arrival of number two, because it turns out you forget.

Motherhood doesn’t begin like you think it will. There isn’t any rhythmic breathing or sweating or straining. No pain or pushing. No labor at all. Instead it begins with a scalpel. A doctor obscured by a blue surgical drape mutters, “baby out,” and another says “well, hello there!” And then comes the wail, both terrifying and awesome. Suddenly you are responsible for the survival of seven pounds of fragile flesh and bone. You marvel at her helplessness. She has all the parts, but none of them work well. Except her vocal cords. At first, the nurses (bless them!) are always there. They show you how to feed her. They change the baby and bathe her. They swaddle her just so. They give you pain pills, the strong ones.

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Just Keep Swimming

By: | August 21, 2020

The slow stretch of river where I like to swim gleamed copper yesterday morning, reflecting sunlight tinted red by wildfire smoke. I sat and drank my coffee as the sun rose, watching the silhouette of a hummingbird zip across the dun-colored sky. 

Four mergansers cruised across the pond then dove underwater, leaving barely a ripple behind them. “Must be nice to be a boat, a plane, and a submarine,” a friend who’d stopped to watch the ducks said. We chatted for a minute about loss and transition, about the hundreds of too-close-to-home wildfires in California and the triple digit heatwave fueling them. “I came here to swim,” I told him. “That’s how I’m dealing with this.”

The water in the river stays cold all summer, stored in an upstream reservoir. When the weather gets hot, dam operators release more water to generate power for air conditioners. This week, as you’ve probably heard, temperatures vaulted past historic records, and the demand for power threatened to overwhelm the state’s electricity system, prompting rolling blackouts. To keep our energy bill down and preserve my sanity I’ve been attempting to remain in a state of near-hypothermia, starting each day with a cold morning swim.

This morning I stood at the water’s edge for several minutes, debating whether to go all the way in. The water was cold enough to make my foot bones ache, and I dreaded the brain-freeze that would come when I submerged my head. 

Then a hot, hair dryer-like wind blew up the canyon. I caught the scent of late-August blackberries, so ripe now they’ll fall apart in your fingers as you pick them, and of evening primroses, a fragrant, pale yellow flower that opens at sunset and closes at dawn. The chorus of birds got louder; I set my stopwatch and dove in.

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