Number the Days

By: | January 13, 2021

Last January I wrote a post about how much I loved my calendars. All of my calendars. You see, I had several. And I had so many plans. And you know what happened to those plans. Here they are again, looking so shiny and hopeful.

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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.

Oh, I love new calendars. The year has so much promise! All those empty squares! I actually have four calendars. One is a big Ansel Adams that goes in the kitchen—I get the same one every year—with big things like birthdays and days off and trips. Then I have my phone and a daybook, which both have appointments and interviews and when I’m supposed to pick up and drop off different kids to different activities.  I like the phone because my husband and I can both see what’s going on; I like the paper calendar because it helps me see the week as a whole and writing down each entry by hand helps me remember. And then (then!) I have another, more substantial-looking inspirational sort of calendar where I try to write in the things I want to focus on most—writing, surfing, yoga, adventures. Cheesy, I know, but I can tell I’m getting off track when I stop writing in it.

At least these calendars all have the same number of days. If I’d been filling out calendars in 1752,  I would have lost eleven whole days. (Other problems: There would be no Ansel Adams calendar. There definitely wouldn’t be the one that said things like, “Put self-care on your schedule this week, and treat it like any other important appointment” either. And the daybook, which is decorated with the phases of the moon and lists Celtic holidays like Imbolc and Samhain, might have meant that I filled most of my days with escaping witch hunts.) That’s the year that Britain and all its colonies switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. They needed to lose these days to catch up.

I can lose a day without any official mandate. And it seems like I’m losing more of them every year, the calendar pages shuffling by at time-lapse speed. Last year, Duke engineering professor Adrian Bejan described the reason why he thought time seems to speed up as we get older in the European Review. He attributes this acceleration to the slow down in our mental processing time. As we get older, our brains can’t take in and integrate as many images as quickly as we once did; because we’re getting fewer images during the same amount of time, it affects how we perceive the time. [Last year when I posted this, brave reader Sara O’Donnell recommended the word zenosyne, the sense that time appears to be moving faster and faster, particularly as we get older.]

“People are often amazed at how much they remember from days that seemed to last forever in their youth,” said Bejan in a 2019 press release. “It’s not that their experiences were much deeper or more meaningful, it’s just that they were being processed in rapid fire.”

Maybe I like my calendars because they pin the time down to something I can see. They make it seem measurable, perhaps something that I could even control. But looking back at my last year’s calendars, I saw those weeks where I forgot to write anything at all. Were those days faster or slower, more or less of what I hoped they would be? Was I really off track, or was I just living?

Still, I couldn’t help myself.  The sun was rising out the window of the studio—the only marker of time I would need on a day where I could truly do whatever I wanted. But first, I opened my calendar and began to write.

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Last year, my wall calendar became a series of scratch outs along with everyone else’s. First one trip, then another. Every missed birthday, every rescheduled dentist appointment, every cancelled summer camp and new first day of in-person school. Without these markers, the days did seem to slow down, to expand, so that by the end of a pandemic day it felt like I’d lived a year of Mondays.

These are small things. There are many people whose calendars have stopped moving forward all together. At least I can still flip the pages. Still, I waited until January 2 this year to buy a new one.

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Image by Linelle Photography under Flickr/Creative Commons license.

I Am the Eggdog

By: | January 11, 2021

This time last year Elise and I were bellied up to a bar (remember those?) in Montana, talking about what childless dog-owning couples generally talk about: our pet. We’d owned Kit — or had she owned us? — for a year and change at that point, and we’d taught her the basics: to sit, to stay, to shake, to tweet angrily at Lindsey Graham. As the bartender, a flannel-clad woman who looked like she could kill an elk with a glance, refilled our Cold Smokes, we roped her into the conversation. “What should we teach our dog next?” I asked.

She poured off some foam and considered. Then she said: “To hunt.”

Alas, we said, Kit wasn’t exactly the hunting type. A squat thirty-pound amalgam of terrier, pug, and gerbil, she loves nothing more than couches and cuddles, ideally savored at the same time. Although she’s an exuberant chaser of squirrels, the only time she succeeded in capturing a rodent — a hapless mole — she merely gummed the poor thing like a sucking candy and spat it out unharmed. She’s more of an ornamental dog, we explained, as frivolously entertaining as a Christmas tree. 

No more, however, can we dismiss Kit as a maladroit vanity pet. We recently discovered, to our astonishment, that she has a single and singular Talent. Forthwith, the saga of Eggdog.

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COVID-19 Stole My Father. Then It Gave Him Back.

By: | January 8, 2021

An explosive inflammatory response called a cytokine storm damages the blood-brain barrier. This may allow inflammatory cells and molecules—and possibly viral particles—to enter the brain. Patients may develop seizures, confusion, coma or encephalopathy (a brain abnormality that leads to altered mental states or behaviors). (Here.)

Back in April, as the pandemic was just revving up, my dad tested positive for COVID-19. Ninety years old, in a nursing home, a diabetic with kidney and heart issues, he was a prime target with a grim outlook. (His partner had died a few weeks before, negative for the virus but with many of its hallmark symptoms.) Unexpectedly, the virus barely grazed his lungs but ravaged his brain. It turns out, of course, there are many manifestations of this thing, in many combinations. This was his.

Over a handful of days our man of literature and panagrams was groping for basic words, cogency just out of reach. “I don’t know what to say,” he’d finally say, having stalked his intention like a hunter only to watch it bolt into the tall grass.

He called me incessantly at first, at any hour, asking the same questions again and again. More worrisome was when he stopped calling—he lost the mental capacity to dial—and then stopped answering the phone, the ringing no longer meaningful. His audiobooks sat untouched: He couldn’t follow the stories and seemed uninterested in trying, and anyway he had no idea how to turn on the machine that plays them. Soon, he lost control of bodily functions, and he seemed unashamed that others had to clean up after him. He stopped walking. Already a wisp of a man, he lost weight. Already nearly blind, his mind’s eye, too, went dark.

How frightening to lose your mind and bodily controls in rapid succession, but imagine doing so as masked figures in rustling paper gowns float in and out of your sliver of vision, their voices muffled, their words nonsensical. For him there was no leaving the room, no exercise, no showers–just this absurd, terrifying theater. “It’s the infection,” I’d tell him when the nurse would put the phone to his ear–hoping I could calm him. “It’s messing with your brain, but you’ll be thinking straight again soon.”

I promised it was a temporary prison. I hoped I wasn’t lying. I wasn’t sure.

He fought it, hard. He dug deep, groping for the reset switch, searching for order. He knew who I was, who my brother was, to a point: He couldn’t wrap his head around the idea that we were his children or that he’d been married to our mother. The family tree loomed in unreadable script. He craved schedules and routines and was frantic when no one seemed to be following them (even when they were). His panic grew as his thoughts ran in tighter circles.

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Snapshot: Petals

By: | January 6, 2021

The petal business started years ago, when I was shaking off the petals of an over-blown peony and some little kid ran under them and got petals all over and reacted like Christmas morning, surprise and crazy joy. Kids seem to love showers of petals.

The current batch of neighborhood kids also likes just the petals themselves and uses them in arrangements. So now I shake off the petals on the lawn and the kids collect them for their own purposes.

But this time, instead of arranging the petals, they threw them all over my porch. Why did this do this? What went through their little heads? I don’t know. They’ve been in a deconstructivist mood lately, making arrangements then disassembling them — “disassembling” as in RUD, rapid unplanned disassembly, which is what rocket scientists say when a rocket lifts off then blows itself all to hell.

For instance, this is what remains of an arrangement with rocks, petals, and berries. These days, the kids are not arranging or they’re arranging only to disarrange. Is that bad? Maybe as Jessa says, it’s the emergence of a new school; maybe it’s RPD, rapid planned disassembly, the disconcerting preliminary to a new order? God I hope so, we need all the intentional orderliness we can get.

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Photos: the last two unimpressive ones by me; the first impressive one by my brother, Carl Finkbeiner.

Why to Love Winter

By: | January 4, 2021

Given the choice, I wouldn’t be a bear, though it’s tempting to skip this dark season and live off my fat. Far below the metabolic plane of sleep, my body would be as cold as death to the touch. Parts of the brain that dart about in REM sleep are turned off, brain functions reduced to heartbeat and breathing. There are no dreams down here, and you wake only to stir yourself to keep your kidneys from failing. Otherwise, you pass through winter without notice.

I tell you though, I’d miss four in the morning lying in bed with my eyes wide open, sky out the window seeded with stars as icicles crack the eaves. That’s something I want to be awake for.

I have a friend who hates winter. He loves the outdoors, romping with his wife and son every weekend, but when I say the word, he asks me not to say it again. In the middle of summer, he already feels winter spreading toward him like cold, black ink. Some people just don’t do well with it. I camped with him in the high desert a few Februaries ago, and snow skittered across us all night long. I woke around midnight and shined my headlamp around, barely seeing his sleeping bag through flurries of dry, hard flakes. In the morning, huddled around his cookstove with fingerless gloves, he said, “This sucks.”

I’ve always loved winter, anxious for it to come. Maybe it’s my attention span. Around the third month of every season, I’m ready for a change. The thing with winter, it lasts closer to four months at my Colorado latitude. Come February 1, I’ll be done with it. 

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Knot Person

By: | January 1, 2021

This post originally appeared on October 5, 2020. It felt especially prescient as this clusterfuck of a year ends. May we all untangle the knots of ourselves and find ways to rise into a new and better 2021.

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Snapshot: River

By: | December 30, 2020

Thank goodness for ravines that are inconvenient to build on. This one cuts through the suburbs near my parents’ house. You can hear the Beltway from the spot where I took this picture, but the deer wander by anyway, and the squirrels, and the occasional human.

Photo: Helen Fields

Automatic subscription

By: | December 28, 2020

This spring, after weeks of quarantine, my husband was probably already sick of me when I started reading about cicadas. As I ventured further into a Wikipedia wormhole, I shared with him the most interesting tidbits. “Did you know there are multiple broods?” I asked, as he played a game on his phone on the couch next to me. Thirty minutes later and 200 facts later, he’d moved into another room, but I was still shouting things like, “oh my god, there’s a guy who plays clarinet solos with cicadas as the accompaniment!” Finally, he came back into the living room to tell me: “I’m sorry, but I would like to unsubscribe from Cicada Facts.”

More recently, an editor of mine recalled at a meeting that when I was working on a story about COVID’s effect on lottery sales, I messaged her Lotto Facts on Slack. (According to a 2019 report from Oregon Lotto, over $7 million went unclaimed that fiscal year!) And while she didn’t seem to mind it (I’m sorry, Emily!), I felt a little mortified that this is apparently just what I do to the people in my life.

So, fine readers of LWON, you, too, will now be subjected to Jane Facts™, brought to you by looking through some of my recent Google searches. Some of these things you might already know; most are only mildly interesting, at best, but I hope there’s at least one new thing here that sparks excitement.

  • Pitcher plants have evolved independently at least 6 times! Pitcher plants at lower altitudes apparently are good at catching ants, but pitcher plants in more mountainous areas have evolved away from that since ants are less plentiful at higher altitudes. And some pitcher plants are basically little toilets for shrews!
  • After a lifetime of being asked to use a number 2 pencil, I never knew there was a whole grading scale for pencil graphite. There’s the number scale that runs from 2 through 9, which indicates the hardness of the writing core, but outside the U.S., pencil makers often use letters to designate qualities, like “H” for hard or “B” for black. This chart from pencils.com is wonderfully maddening and reminds me of British climbing grades, which also makes no sense.
  • At the same time jazz was becoming popular in the U.S., Japanese musicians were developing their own version of jazz, as were Filipino musicians. Since transpacific luxury cruises often employed orchestras, there was a whole network of folks traveling between the continents and influencing one another. There’s a great NPR interview with historian E. Taylor Atkins on this, if you want to learn more, and here’s a fun YouTube playlist.
  • Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller’s teacher, also had a visual impairment. Every time I’ve read anything about Sullivan, it’s been in the context of Keller, and that fact has somehow escaped me until now. Sullivan attended all of Keller’s courses at Radcliffe and helped her study, and as far as I can tell, Keller received a degree for her work there but Sullivan never did, which seems incredibly unfair.
  • The one social media app I’ve enjoyed throughout the pandemic is TikTok. For some reason, it’s been showing me a lot of videos from Australia and I’ve only now just discovered that kangaroos are extremely jacked and kind of horrifying? By Googling something like “why are kangaroos so muscular” I came across a video of a kangaroo named Roger crushing metal. While reading his Wikipedia page, I was struck by how if you removed all mention of him being a kangaroo, it could be a believable entry about a human named Roger, especially these closing lines: Upon hearing of Roger’s death, Australian singer Natalie Imbruglia said “He always brought a smile to my face. Such a proud strong boy”, and Tourism Australia called him a “true icon”. The cause of death was reported as “old age”.
  • My neighborhood’s Little Free Libraries have been a veritable treasure trove lately. Not only did I score an issue of Martha Stewart Living from 1994, but I also found an entire Centennial Spotlight issue dedicated to the Titanic. Did you know there was a handwritten manuscript from Joseph Conrad that went down with the ship? And that there were two kids who were on the ship because they were essentially kidnapped by their dad? And that the Titanic actually stopped in Cherbourg, France, and Queenstown, Ireland, before beginning its voyage across the Atlantic? (According to this magazine, seven people got off in Ireland and I imagine they spent the rest of their lives telling stories about how they narrowly avoided disaster.)