It is crushing to see my dad in the nursing home. Life is so small there, the food so terrible, the residents so…out of sorts. One woman continually calls for help—a tiny voice in some faraway room, ignored for crying wolf; one man walks the halls with glazed eyes and drool dripping down his chin. Another guy slumps in a wheel chair, hand working himself under a blanket. It’s a hard place to make friends.
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Dateline: mid-January, 2020. Location: Baltimore, MD. Meterological conditions: first snow of the season, 1 inch max.
Early that evening, rumor apparently came of an imminent invasion. So the local militia began work on fortifications. They packed cold-certified plastic cubes with snow, then pushed the cubes of snow out and stacked them without reference to engineering principles. By now, most of the yard had been picked clean of snow. Fortifications were left unfinished because light was failing and the militia had to go home to bed.
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I found this ill-cared-for painting from 1976, when I was nine, of a spaceship either taking off or landing on a barren world.
This was before Star Wars, but I was well-steeped in forbidden worlds and Star Trek. I dreamed of alien planets, their skies red or green, their landscapes sere and wind-torn. I stared for long hours into books with artist representations of unknown moons or galaxies setting on the horizon. How could you not resist the night sky and what could be?
In 1976, my single mother, an artist who worked as a secretary on the side, took a summer with me to live in a cabin in eastern Arizona. She put up her easel in tall-grass fields and painted green mountains and aging barns, wood graying and peeling apart, as I sat on the ground dabbing brushes in oil paints, rendering other worlds on canvases she gave me. You’d think there’d be enough here on Earth for a budding naturalist who gathered rocks, pinecones, and bones all summer, but when I painted, my eyes turned upward, above the whispering canopies of ponderosa pines, over the rolling mountains.
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This post originally appeared Feb. 13, 2018
It starts quietly enough. At around 9:30 a.m., I strap snowshoes to my feet and part ways with some friends bound for a backcountry ski. While they skin over a nearby saddle, my dog Taiga and I shuff our way into the stream of snowshoers along the boundary of the Mt, Baker Ski Area, headed for Artist Point. It’s not a long hike, nor an extreme one, but the hordes jostle and slip like drunks. One guy slides on his side in slow motion down the steep hill, parallel to the trail, unsure how to get his snowshoes back under him.
“You could dig in your ski pole to self arrest,” I suggest gently. “I am!” he exclaims, continuing to slide past, his poles dragging unused across the slope.
Maybe he’s overwhelmed, I muse, continuing on.
“What happens all winter; the wind driving snow; clouds, wind, and mountains repeating—this is what always happens here,” the poet Gary Snyder wrote of this place one long-gone August, looking towards the edifice of Mount Shuksan from his post at the Crater Mountain Fire Lookout. Today, though, is the first truly sunny day of the year.
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“It’s so cute,” said Pete, watching our new robot vacuum cleaner gently ram the kitchen table. After gradually inching past the obstacle, the robot moved haphazardly around the room, missing the most obvious specks of dirt. Pete swept some of the dirt into a neat line in front of the robot, cooing encouragement.
I could see how the robot, a generous gift from Pete’s parents, was an improvement on our traditional vacuum cleaner. I hate vacuum cleaners — they’re icky to clean out and smell of burnt lint. I almost never use one since we don’t have carpet, just hardwood floors. But I couldn’t see how the robot vacuum was an improvement on that most elegant of household cleaning tools, the broom.
With their polished wooden handles and witchy straw bristles, brooms embody not only sexy design but my favorite form of procrastination. Along with baking, listening to audiobooks, and putting things in an online shopping cart and not buying them, I find that sweeping is an excellent way to avoid writing.
I felt supplanted. Like Cinderella’s evil stepsister, I resented the robot’s cheery jingle. I even watched with perverse satisfaction as the robot bumped over a cardboard box and got trapped inside. Like Lucifer the cat in Disney’s Cinderella, I deliberately walked the floor in muddy running shoes, giving the robot more work to do.
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On September 4, 2014, LWON welcomed a new occasional contributor, Bad Science Poet. (Motto: “It’s not the science that’s bad—it’s the poetry!”™) The initial post (below) as well as subsequent contributions survive online. To this day, LWON hasn’t disavowed them.
MAYBE, MAYBE NOT
Is that uncertainty I see?
Its position known to only me?
Is that uncertainty I hear?
Echoing (or not) from ear to ear?
Said Heisenberg, “Yes.”
Niels Bohr said, “One guess.”
And Einstein? “A mess, I fear.”
Who doesn’t love nominative determinism? The idea that your name plays a significant role in shaping your career or even your destiny is irresistible, especially with a steady supply of examples so copious you could trip over them, and even some science to support the idea. But it got me wondering – what if your name isn’t exactly inspirational? Can you opt out of allowing your life’s purpose to be writ by the accident of your birth?
There are so many examples of nominative determinism that news outlets are contractually obligated to run a roundup every couple of years (The Guardian did one on its occurrence in sports, inspired no doubt by record-holding sprinter Usain Bolt, which also revealed the delightfully-named Marina Stepnova, a hurdler). My alma mater New Scientist – credited with inventing the term but not the phenomenon, which appears to originate with Plato – identified among others the psychiatrist Dr. Couch, the optometrist Hugh Seymour, and Dr. Snowman, who wrote a book about the north pole. Things only got funnier when science got properly involved, trying to establish whether and to what extent we succumb to the siren song of our own names.
My favourite of these investigations, “Nominative determinism in hospital medicine: Can our surnames influence our choice of career, and even specialty?” was written by co-authors C. Limb, R. Limb, C. Limb, and D. Limb. (Affiliations: C. Limb is a doctor at East Surrey Hospital, R. Limb is a med student at the University of Nottingham, C. Limb is a general practitioner in Wakefield, and D. Limb is a consultant orthopaedic surgeon.) Their conclusion: “The frequency of names relevant to medicine and to subspecialties was much greater than that expected by chance.” (But then, they would say that.) Things went a bit too far when the Debbie Downers at the BMJ found a link between men called Brady and their chances of developing bradycardia.
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So, on Monday I went away to get some writing done. I was at a cheap AirBnB 10 minutes from my house. It’s the first week in January, and although I’m one of those people who doesn’t believe in New Year’s resolutions, I wanted some time at the beginning of the year to see where I was on some various projects. And to work on my calendars.
(In one self-help universe that categorizes people by how they respond to expectations, this feeling about New Year’s resolutions is the classic sign of a “Rebel”. I can hear the peals of laughter echoing down the years from any of my high school friends who might be reading this. The people who might have watched me “sneak” out of the house through the side door, lock it carefully behind me, and make sure I would still be home by midnight.)
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