My father, Jim Fields, died unexpectedly in November at age 81, of a stroke. Last week I wrote a eulogy for his memorial service on Saturday. It was hard. I’m a writer, and goldarn it I wanted it to be the best eulogy ever written. (I’m confident that I did not achieve that, but it’s certainly the best eulogy I’ve ever written.) Here‘s a lightly edited version, if you’d like to learn a little about my father.
My dad loved being outside. Hiking was one of his favorite things and it’s actually how my parents met. It was the beginning of the summer of 1961, and it was going to be my mom’s second summer at the YMCA camp in Estes Park, Colorado. She was standing in the Boulder bus station talking to some of the other college kids about hiking—all the hiking she’d done the summer before, all the hiking she was going to do this summer. And there was this guy standing nearby, and listening, and getting closer and closer…
That was my dad. They hiked a lot that summer and then the next summer, and now here we are.
The last time he and I hiked in Rocky Mountain National Park together was in the summer of 2019. He and I walked up Flattop, one of the mountains that they climbed several times in those summers, and kept on going up the next mountain over, Hallett. The picture above is from the top of Hallett.
When we got to the top, he said, and I quote: “Ha-haaa!! Oh, man. Oh boy oh boy oh boy. This is where we get to eat our lunch.” I know that because I took a video. In the video, you can hear me breathing hard from the climb. He was 77 at the time and still in better shape than me. Obviously. My dad was always in better shape than me, until the day he died.
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If you could record your dreams, would you ever be able to stop watching?
That’s a central plot point in Until the End of the World, Wim Wenders’ three- to five-hour arthouse flop/work of staggering genius (depending on which cut you watch) from 1991. He threw cyberpunk, detective noir, and road movie into a blender with a civilisational apocalypse. It cost him $20 million to make and did not earn it back. Love it or hate it, this movie is canon, in part because it was prescient about the technological future to the point of being oracular.
In the near future as he imagined it, a scientist has invented a machine that lets you re-watch your dreams – including all the dreams you never knew you had (most of them become irretrievable within minutes of waking up). People become instantly bewitched by the technology, some sliding into “a disease of images” in a way that is immediately legible from 2020s discourse on phone and social media addiction. They’re simply unable to tear themselves away from the beautiful, narcissistic universe this technology has opened for them, and are no longer able to engage with reality. “How many times must I have dreamed this?” one character mumbles reverently, lost in the grainy footage of her childhood memories.
Wenders got a startling number of things right about the technological future. Ubiquitous wireless devices, search engines, voice-to-text, an early version of Google maps and retinal prostheses; the characters in the film are saturated in tech.
And now Will Heaven has written in MIT Technology Review about a company that has been able to reconstruct lost childhood memories using generative AI. The dream camera is nigh.
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Last night I took a crowded elevator to the hundredth floor of a skyscraper in Manhattan. Not rattled or shaken, we were propelled to the top in 52 seconds, like being beamed up.
Doors opened and we all poured into a high-windowed space looking onto the electric-white boroughs of New York City. A revolving door turned us onto an outdoor viewing platform where hundreds gushed and posed at angled glass barriers tipped away from the building where one can lean over the edge more than a thousand feet above the ground. The Empire State Building with its colored spindle was not diminutive, but it didn’t reach our height, emerging like the tip of an awl from a crystalline sea. You can see it in the picture above, the spire in red.
The last time I was this high up in a piece of architecture was the late 90s in a bar on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower. I came with a friend on a winter night and I recall the elevator taking minutes, rocking as it went, opening partway where we had to get out and switch to another elevator to continue the ride. That was the technology of the time, the only way to be taken up this kind of swaying height. We handed coats to the woman at the coatroom and walked into the bar, which was aptly called Windows on the World.
The nocturnal city at the end of the 20th century raged around us, more light coming from outside than from the soft bar fixtures. We got our drinks and walked together out of the dark pit, climbing up a few short steps to the main floor and its museum of windows. You could tell tourists from the bar crawlers. Tourists, like us, bought drinks because we had to, and walked to the windows with glasses in hand, not taking a sip, staring 106 floors straight down. The view went down to the tips of our shoes, no visual buffer where windows met the tight-weave carpet, and it felt like you were stepping off the edge. This was a peculiar sensation considering what happened a few years later when Windows on the World, fully staffed, crashed to the ground and all were lost. Our mouths opened slightly as if not believing what we were seeing, as if the bar crawlers had gone blind talking and laughing as if they weren’t suspended in the sky. Their voices drained away as we looked down on this transparent glass fish of a city, every tiny bone wired and glowing.
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We attended our first childbirth preparation course last week, Pete and I. It was 2.5 hours long, on Zoom, and would have made an excellent drinking game (drink every time you hear the word blood! Or mucus!) had I been drinking. Instead, we just watched it in bed on my laptop, passing a block of cheddar cheese back and forth while Pete drank enough whiskey for both of us.
The instructor (Linda? Laurie?) flipped through slides on the various Signs of Labor and Stages of Pregnancy at a brisk clip. All the titles were capitalized, like biblical plagues or Liam Neeson films: The Breaking of the Bag of Waters, Bloody Show, Effacement. In an irritating grammatical quirk that I’ve noticed in a lot of health practitioners lately, she never referred to an infant as “the infant,” or “the baby,” but just Baby. (It doesn’t take much to irritate me, lately.)
I couldn’t help thinking of last week’s eclipse as they showed the “vivid animation” of a dilating cervix. As it vividly reached 10 centimeters, I turned to Pete and yelled, “Totality!” Other than that, there were only two other parts of the class I cared to reflect on afterwards: First, when the instructor pushed a doll through a knitted uterus to simulate contractions, and second, when she brought out a (real?) human pelvis and demonstrated how the doll might try to fit through it.
Bouncing gently on her birthing ball, Linda/Laurie manipulated the pelvic bones so they flexed apart and came back together around the doll head — like the Jaws of Life, I thought, or just Jaws. Watching the absurdly large-looking doll corkscrew its way through the birth canal made me think of scientists, past and present, who have observed the same thing and tried to figure out in what universe this makes any sense. In particular, I thought of the obstetric dilemma hypothesis — a long-accepted explanation for why human mothers have evolved to push their infants through such a narrow gap.
The hypothesis was first articulated in a 1960 issue of Scientific American, by a physical anthropologist named Sherwood Washburn. He argued that humans evolved narrower pelvises in the process of becoming bipedal, but that this poses a “dilemma” for women because it conflicts with the other evolutionarily advantageous adaptation of larger infant brains. Washburn concluded that females had been stuck with a painful compromise between walking upright efficiently, which a narrower pelvis enabled, and their babies’ growing heads.
Few challenged this hypothesis until the 2000s, when a handful of anthropologists, mostly women, started to ask whether having a narrow pelvis was really as important to efficient bipedal locomotion as Washburn had made it out to be. Through biomechanical studies, they found that having a broader pelvis and wider hips actually reduces the amount of energy a person spends walking or running, especially when someone is carrying a burden like a pregnant belly or a nursing infant. In addition, they found so much variation in the size and shape of the pelvis in women around the world that the notion that female locomotion is somehow inherently at odds with reproduction has started to unravel.
Although the obstetric dilemma is still widely accepted, it’s now just one of several competing hypotheses for why childbirth is difficult for humans, compared to other species. Other explanations have to do with the invention of agriculture, which may have led to women with smaller pelvises and bigger babies, as well as more recent increases in obesity and malnutrition.
For my own part, aside from trying to master pelvic floor exercises (that’s when my unborn child does a double back layout with a half twist on my bladder, yes?) I hadn’t really thought much about pelvises before, my own or others. But after watching our instructor heft one around, making the ilium, ischium, and pubis subtly expand and contract like wings, I finally understand why Georgia O’Keefe spent so much time painting them. Looked at one way, the pelvis is a cage, a maze, a trap. But from another angle — look, a window.
Did you see the stars come out during the eclipse? Did the colors change in a Magic Hour kind of way? Did darkness fall without long shadows, and do you miss the experience already? I’m here to tell you there’s another way to see that, and you get Tom Hiddleston in with the bargain.
Growing up, I would watch nature programs with my father. If the film crew got really fancy, they might include an infrared camera shot of an oasis at night. Blurry animal shapes hunkered down next to the water, lifting their snouts warily in search of lions. It was a thrilling glimpse into a hidden world.
Now, with low-light cameras, it is possible to see nocturnal animals in action with full detail and color—drawing only on starlight and moonbeams—and I’m realizing how much of the world’s fauna I’ve never really met before. The show I’ve been watching is Earth at Night in Color (Apple TV+).
I recommend in particular the Tarsier episode. If you’ve only seen still images of this Indonesian primate, you are in for a real treat when you see how they move. From the way they park their babies on high branches, to the full sizeways head swivel they use to gauge distance before they leap, to the sound they make when they eat a cricket, I was in love by the end of the episode.
Hiddleston does a decent David Attenborough impression, and each episode closes with a techie, behind-the-scenes segment. The gadgetry of the filmmaking reminds you how hard this all is—especially lugging gigantic low-light lenses that were originally built for star-gazing while dealing with whatever challenge comes with the remote terrain.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been moved by a nature show. I hope you feel it too.
I don’t know why this came out in “verse,” but here it is. I’m no poet, but I had fun regardless. And if you read it right, it really does scan!
Upon my feeder yesterday
A cowbird male did land,
Brown-headed with his body coal
At first glance not too grand.
But then I took the time to learn
The story of his kind,
I peered more closely, read some facts
That truly changed my mind.
Named for chasing cattle herds
To nab bugs in their wake,
They thrive in meadows, grass, and fields
‘cross these United States.
A male’s song’s like a water drop
A female’s more a chatter,
Both voices seem to do the job
When something is the matter.
It seems that in this species
Evolution had her druthers:
The mama doesn’t build a nest
‘stead lays her eggs in others’.
This obligate brood parasite
Her bets she sure does hedge,
Lets others spend their energy
to get her chicks to fledge.
Sounds rude perhaps, but gotta like
this winning strategy,
of passing on one’s DNA
in total secrecy.
Its name suggests a dullish bird
With colors bland as grime,
Females, true, aren’t vibrant birds
But males are sublime.
As sunshine hits one's feathers and
The light upon them plays,
They burst with plums and glossy blues
As if they’re dipped in glaze.
His head's a little nugget
as of creamy choc-o-late,
He holds himself with confidence
that draws him mates, I'll bet.
Mine looked at me, then looked away
That seemed to be the trend,
But when finally he held my gaze
I felt I'd made a friend.
I’ve come to love these common birds
I’m hit by Cupid’s arrow!
What's next to get a second chance?
That boring little sparrow.
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Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash
Eclipse The earth moved to follow his smile, but she stood aside, let the planet pass. Her signs were subtler: quivers of little stars, the sucking dark depths of the ocean. Young women turned their faces to him like flowers, hoping for a laugh, an accidental touch, and men labored hard to prove their worth to him. She spun silently in the night. The weight of the world stood between them. But every so often, in the emptiness of space, when another kind of gravity pulled them together, he’d lay his golden head on her shadowed breast and sob.
*
Eclipse drawing by me (2024).