One of my fears, when I moved back home from DC to my minuscule hometown in a sparsely populated region of California, was that I’d lose what I consider an important modern survival skill: the ability to wait in line politely, or as the British put it, to queue. There were ample opportunities to queue […]
Miscellaneous
This post first ran in October 2019. Here’s hoping for the glorious return of school talent shows in 2021-22. About a year ago, I attended a high school talent show. It was over two hours long. The multipurpose room smelled of old pizza and pubescent sweat. The folding metal chairs made me squirm uncomfortably in my seat, as did […]
Just before the turn of the new year, E.O. Wilson and Tom Lovejoy, two of the world’s most celebrated biologists, passed away within a day of each other. That they left the world together felt fitting, given the extraordinary interplay between their work. It was Wilson, after all, who, in a series of mad, ingenious […]
I received the unusual gift this season of a stuffed mountain lion. On any other day I’d politely turn it down, but it was a thing to contend with and now it is perched in the den, a Christmas gift with its clawed catcher’s mitt of a right forepaw extended for a swipe. The pose […]
One of the first things I did when my family moved to our house a few years ago was buy a decent bird feeder. I filled it with seed and hung it from an eave on the porch, and less than a minute later a couple of black-capped chickadees flitted over to investigate. Before long […]
Up here in Seattle we have reached the Dark Wet season, which always leaves me grasping for any glimmer of hope or joy. I have always liked the idea of keeping a gratitude journal, but the few times I’ve tried it, I end up fixating on the same lovely things in my life, like friends […]
This originally appeared in 2015. There’s a popular myth about Dutch last names that goes like this: When Napoleon occupied the Netherlands and instituted a family name registry, only the upper classes had such names already in use. A significant subset took the opportunity to protest foreign rule by registering under silly names like “Born […]
(An unauthorized continuation of “Things We Like”) Scattered along the deep ravines and canyons where I live are trees called ghost, or sometimes grey, pines. The trees are scraggly and uncharismatic. “Scarcely in any sense a beautiful tree,” Willis Jepson, one of California’s early botanists, wrote of them in 1901, they give “no comfort of […]
