The Last Word On Nothing

I’m not sure why I’m interested in what people change their minds about – maybe because I’m at the age where a person looks back and wonders what the hell that was all about. Like, a person of a certain age tries to find the through-lines of life and sees how many of them just turn around and head off in the opposite direction. Is this the process of maturation? is it just response to new information? I’m not sure about people who don’t sometimes completely 100% change their minds. Do such people even exist? Anyway, I asked my colleagues on LWON for examples of U-turns.

KATE: I used to feel embarrassed about being from New Jersey. Whenever a new person asked me where I grew up, I said, Oh, you know. Around. Sometimes I said Ocean. This was true in both the broadest sense–we never lived too far from the Atlantic—and literally, as I went to high school in Ocean Township. It also served to obscure what I considered the mortifying truth.

Those who have never been to New Jersey may believe the state is crowded, greasy, belligerent, the scowling little brother of New York. They might expect the people there to be loud, tacky, caught up in organized crime, gym-tan-laundry, acrylic nails, hoop earrings, cannoli, bagels, hair spray. And they’d be right. My classmates could easily have joined the cast of Jersey Shore. Our region didn’t have a county fair; it had an Italian-American festival. Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi were local gods. So yes, this is New Jersey. But it isn’t all of it.

It took moving far away for me to realize that New Jersey is weird. Our state monster has cloven hooves and bat wings and flapped straight up and out the chimney the moment he was born. New Jersey is the only U.S. state with no official song, because a composer named Red Mascara (yes, really) was so annoying in his quest to get his piece selected that the state government banned the entire concept of a state song altogether. The state canine is the seeing eye dog. New Jersey is diverse and full of culture. You can get a stack of chocolate-chip pancakes or a cup of matzoh-ball soup or both at 2 a.m. if you want to. My people are not restrained, complex, or elegant. We are blunt and earthy and dazzlingly accessorized. We are wave-pounded, salt-crusted, and heavy on the bass. We fight for what we care about. We bring the best desserts.

ANN:  I was in my 30s before I realized that people actually did live in cities.  I was raised in the country and at the time lived in the country.  Like, country: gravel driveways that reverted to dirt, dark skies at night, well water, no neighbors in sight.  I would sit on the front porch and see fields and mountains and clouds and God.  I’d visit Baltimore, houses crammed next to each other, grey air, orange skies at night, and wonder how people could stand it.  After I moved there, even a couple years in, I was still feeling I couldn’t get a deep breath, I could see no distance at all, I couldn’t stretch my arms out on either side without hitting something.  Constrained, is what I felt.

And now, decades in, no sense of constraint, I think I got used to the lack of horizons.  In fact, I don’t think I could live in the country. The difference is that out my windows, something is always going on —  of course birds and squirrels on missions, fox sightings, hawks on the tops of trees.  But mostly it’s the neighbors who, because I live on a court and along a walking street, are always in sight.  One neighbor slowly walks her tiny dog; another neighbor crosses the street to his truck and stops to look up at a noisy low airplane; another one wheels my garbage bin back to the house and yells “Hey;” people stand in small groups and discuss stuff; a neighbor when asked says “Oh I’m fine, just fine, you know? FINE.” 

A couple days ago I was on the porch and a group of 7-to-10 year olds came yelling up the sidewalk that they’d found a robin’s egg, a WHOLE egg, not broken, it had a little crack in it which it got when it fell out of the nest or maybe an insect was boring into it, but they couldn’t find the nest ANYWHERE and they looked EVERYWHERE, and what should they do? what should they do? They’d wrapped the egg in a towel and put it in a box but maybe the mother robin would smell their touch, and how would they know if the baby bird was still alive in there and one of them read on the internet that if an egg didn’t hatch for 2 months it wasn’t going to.  These sentences had no breath between them and were in sequential voices, like a fugue.  I said, “Ask Courtney to google it.”  And they wheeled like a flock of birds and raced off yelling for Courtney.  

What is there besides people anyway? Why would I live anywhere else?

JENNY: Here’s the story of my flip-flop on Brussels sprouts (BS): My mom (bless her heart) used to stink up the kitchen boiling the things down to mush and then she’d plop them on our plates, sans seasoning, and expect us to gag one or two down before leaving the table. (There was literal gagging. I was a bit extra when it came to food dislikes.) Sometimes, I’d drop a sad sprout into my milk glass and try to get away with leaving a few sips (and that horrid thing that might as well have been a testicle) in the bottom…though that rarely worked and milk-saturated BS it turns out is no better than the veggie by itself. My hatred extended to asparagus, which my mom similarly ruined and distributed: A limp, thready stalk landed on my plate and I’d have to force down a few bites of the grass-flavored thing, tears flowing, before being allowed to escape outside to bikes and Cheetos and friends.

Then came adulthood, when I learned that cooking these veggies in other ways, even just cooking them less, and adding a swirl of olive oil or balsamic vinegar (for example) and a sprinkle of Parmesan cheese or chunky salt made them not just edible but yummy, and that especially the little outer leaves of BS, when roasted to a crunch, were far better than any potato chip or popcorn snack, no contest. So, the dreaded veggies of my childhood are now some of my favorite greens. (I have a kale story as well, but I’ll save it for another riveting post.) I’m betting other Gen-Xers reading this have a similar tale? Didn’t 1970s/early ‘80s moms boil everything to death?

EMILY: When I was a kid, one of my looming terrors was a proposed dam that, if it had been built, would have flooded the river canyon where we lived. At some point I got the idea that because they build dams, engineers were bad guys: obtuse and insensitive, their heads full of concrete and rebar and a stupid determination to just build stuff for the sake of building stuff. Never mind that they made lots of things I liked and needed.

I’m embarrassed to admit I carried this prejudice into my early twenties, when I went to the Hopkins’ science writing program that Ann led for many years. So there I was, clueless, on the campus of one of the world’s top environmental engineering programs, with Ann as my mentor.

I told Ann I didn’t like engineers. She said, “Yes, you do,” or something equally no-nonsense. And she was right: I audited a hydrology course in the engineering school, and even though I barely understood the equations the professor was scribbling on the chalkboard – in my notebook I just labeled it “swirly stuff” – I also knew that here was everything I loved in mathematical form: Eddies and currents, meanders, the birth of new sandbars during floods.

So I made friends with a few engineering students, mostly women, and watched their careers branch off in fascinating directions. And years later, when an engineer asked me out, I said yes. Now that we’re married, I realize I wasn’t entirely wrong in my original judgment: Engineers can be very obtuse. Pete, to my mind, is often fairly oblivious to what I think he thinks of as just annoyingly  “squishy” stuff – plants, bugs, critters, biology in general, and how the things humans build affects them.  But – and I see it when we are on the river together – when it comes to swirly stuff he is remarkably adept. As an engineer (and one who, it turns out, despises dams) he is in his element: powerful waves, swirling vortexes. He gets it. 

CHRISTIE: While visiting my parents over the weekend, I asked them Ann’s question.*

Mom couldn’t think of anything she’d changed her mind about (Moms are always right). Dad, on the other hand didn’t hesitate. “I changed my mind about galaxies,” he said.

Dad is an amateur astronomer who has made a point of seeking out various objects in the night sky, Messier objects, for instance. But he’d never been very interested in looking for galaxies, which he says “tend to be indistinct, like a white blip. We call them lint.” Who wants to look for smudges of lint through a telescope?

But then, because Dad is an eternally open-minded, curious person, he went ahead and tried something. There are several ways that you can look for galaxies. You can use one of those fancy telescopes that allow you to plug in the coordinates of the object you’re looking for and it will take you right to it. Or, you can use a technique called “star hopping.” 

It turns out, Dad really enjoys star hopping. It’s pretty much just what it sounds like. You find a star that you can easily locate, and you use it to navigate to the next object until you make your way to your desired target. As Stephen Tonkin writes at Sky at Night Magazine, “The brighter stars form recognisable patterns – constellations, asterisms, and even simple geometric shapes – and we can use those patterns as ‘jumping off’ points to less obvious and fainter regions or objects of interest.”

What makes star hopping fun, Dad says, is that it can lead you to the unexpected. “When you star hop you always run into interesting things.” You can stumble onto things you didn’t know you were looking for, like colored stars, interesting star patterns or maybe a nebula. 

And in this way, I think Dad’s tale is little story that tells the bigger story of what it’s like to change your mind. You hold what you know, but keep your mind open to see where that takes you. He still thinks galaxies look like smudges through the scope, but he’s discovered that finding them can be fun, which means he’s decided they’re worth looking for, after all. 

Meanwhile, Mom realized that she was wrong about not having changed her mind about anything. She told me she changed her mind about red wine, which she never liked until she tried my husband’s Colorado reds. She’d always liked white wine, but now she likes red wine too. Once again, trying something with an open mind changed everything.

*What I’m calling Ann’s question came from a discussion that Ann and I had had on her front porch earlier this month. I highly recommend visiting Ann on her porch to discuss things. If you’re lucky, some of her neighbor kids might stop by to adore Ann while you’re there.

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Photos via Wikimedia Commons: Jersey girl, actually East Berlin girl but the spirit’s similar – Adam Jones, Ph.D; groups discussion, actually in Urumqi but the spirit’s similar – Radosław Botev; Brussels sprouts – Robert Kerton; turbulent water – Michael Gäbler; field of galaxies-like-lint – Hubble Space Telescope/ESA & NASA