Strikeout

By: | August 13, 2019
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Late summer makes me think of thunderstorms, baseball and Steve. This post first appeared in 2014.

Last weekend there was an unseasonable lightning storm on the coast. Not here (thank goodness, for our dog’s sake), but farther south. More than 1,400 strikes touched down across the region, with 13 people reporting injuries in Los Angeles County alone. A golfer was hit on Catalina Island, 22 miles from Los Angeles. One young man died after being struck in the water in Venice Beach.

Some people thought the boom of thunder was an earthquake. You see, people don’t usually think of lightning at the beach in the summer around here.

Inland, sure: a study looking at lightning flashes in Southern California found the mountains and the high deserts draw extensive summertime lightning, particularly in the afternoon and early evening, at the peak of the day’s heat. Over coastal waters lightning is more common in the winter, before dawn, coming in with a cold winter storm.

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This week

By: | August 12, 2019

This week (and to be honest, part of last), what with August being August, we’re running the posts we’ve liked best. Maybe we have criteria by which we choose, possibly not. We hope you like them.

Love City

By: | August 12, 2019

For every story that makes it to print, there are scads that die in the reporting trenches. This is one of those stories. It originally ran in October 2013.

In 2001, I moved to Bolivia to become a Peace Corps volunteer and fell deeply in love with the country. In 2010, I returned. I wanted to visit friends and family, but, like any intrepid freelancer, I also hoped to do some reporting. Although Bolivia has been landlocked since it lost its coastline to Chile more than 130 years ago, the country still maintains a navy. This is their motto: “The sea belongs to us by right, recovering it is a duty.” I find this sentiment simultaneously ridiculous and sort of commendable. So why not do a story on Bolivia’s navy, I thought. (Well, lots of reasons. But I didn’t let details deter me.)

The first order of business was making contact. I found a Web page for the navy, but it seemed to be broken. And all other attempts to arrange an interview ahead of time failed. So I developed a two-part backup plan. 1. Fly to Bolivia. 2. Call the navy. And that’s exactly what I did. With help from the hostel desk clerk, I called naval headquarters. “Come on over,” said the man on the phone. So I hopped in a cab and went.

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Gesundheit

By: | August 8, 2019

shutterstock_194185637.jpg (1000×667)These thoughts on sneezing first ran back in October 2015, and I loved the responses. Feel free to share more examples of achoo styles from friends and family!

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When we were kids, my brother was the sneezer of all sneezers. There was never just one, or even two or three. It was always 17. No lie. Each sneeze began with this strange little sucking in of air, a pause, and then from his bent body and contorted face flew ah-YESH-ah!

Seventeen times. He was very consistent. (He says he’s now down to seven.)

By sneeze number two, tissues were required—and employed, if time permitted, in between explosions.

My husband, meanwhile, sneezes so loudly and with such force that I can’t help but shriek. I beg for a warning but never get one. Even the second and third ones rattle me. They cause our old Jindo dog to drop belly-flat to the floor in fear. John is a big guy, with big lungs, who doesn’t hold back. So he sneezes larger than most.

Sneezes are like fingerprints—we each have our own. But the physiology of a sneeze is the same for all of us. The trigger is usually dust or some other irritant trapped in the mucous lining of the upper respiratory tract. Cranial nerve endings fire off a message to the brainstem telling the lungs to take a deep breath. Your eyes and vocal cords close, then air explodes forth from the mouth and nose at upwards of 90 miles per hour.

There’s no way to look cool while sneezing.

Scientists call sneezing sternutation. Some of us sternutate (no, I’m not sure you can use it as a verb) when we look at the sun—called photic sneezing (I do that). A sneeze may build as we tweeze a hair from the eyebrow or nose (been there). Others achoo during an orgasm, apparently (so far, nope). Those responses—and others—are a bit of a mystery, but faulty wiring in the brain is likely to blame.

Do sneezes match personalities? A lot of loud (may I say obnoxious?) people are, after all, giant sneezers, and we all have that friend who really holds back, letting squeak out just a tiny, high-pitched choo at the very end. My mother did that, at least for sneeze number one. Any follow-up sneezes had force, and the same phonetic as (though less drama than) my brother’s: ah-YESH-ah. They were much like her, a seemingly polite and gentle woman who might without warning start a whipped-cream fight at the dinner table or make a joke about “taking the bull by the balls.” In a church.

From a very unscientific poll (thanks, Facebook) I learned that allergy sneezes tend to be harder to control than other types, many people sneeze in twos, and sneezing politely into the arm is far from universal. (Australians and Indians, according to friends, aren’t germ-phobic like we Americans; they share sneeze product widely. Sometimes right in your face.) A pregnant friend has decided that letting it all out is better for the fetus than holding back. Who knows if that’s true.

My friends seem to like sneezing. Here’s how some of them do it:

Often its loud-knock-the-china-off-the-wall sneezes…and out of the blue. Scares the bejeezus out of the mister.

Mouth sneeze, not through the nose. One sneeze, rarely multiples. All out. [A useful tidbit: Ear doctor taught me to suppress post-surgical sneezing (so as to avoid jostling delicate ossicular chain reconstruction) by snorting forcefully out through my nose, alternating with panting hard out through my mouth. Works pretty well.]

Face in elbow and let ‘er fly. Sleeve stops the splash damage and muffles the sound.

Definitely through the mouth. No hand gyrations or exciting body movements. Volume is excessive.

Once sneezed very delicately and got such an amazed and positive response that I now actually out of habit sneeze that way. It is about the only time I ever get called, “cute”.

My sneeze? Like my mom, I might go minimal at first but then I transition to a fuller more satisfying outburst. Why hold back? There’s obviously something in there that wants out. If needed, though, I can sneeze almost imperceptibly, with no product whatsoever. I’m pretty proud of that.

Meanwhile, the appropriate response to a sneeze depends on where in the world that sneeze happens. According to a fine list on Wikipedia, in most countries, a witness offers up God’s blessings or wishes you good health or long life. (We were a “bless you” family, although the German “gesundheit” was also acceptable.) Mongolians ask God to forgive the sneezer, and the Igbo apologize to or for the person. In China and Japan, it is customary just to ignore the whole thing.

But my favorite reply wonderfully states the obvious. If you speak the Australian language Ritharrngu, you might say after someone’s wet blast, “klas bin gurruwan.” It means: “You have released nose water.”

They don’t say “You have released nose water in my face.”

I guess that would be rude.

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Possible future polls: Tissue or Kleenex? Whose dad still carries a handkerchief—and has he ever found a pocket booger? Does your sneeze match your love life? Stay tuned.

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Photo: Shutterstock

I Know What the Fox Says

By: | August 7, 2019
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I haven’t heard the foxes for a good year now. The woods is still there but the owners sold it to a buyer who promised to cut down only the middle of it, you know how buyers promise things. No trees have been cut down yet but a lot of people have been tramping through the woods, measuring and discussing. Maybe the foxes got tired of the people, maybe they know what’s coming; but in any case, they probably got up and left. Not everything ends well.

This first ran September 8, 2016.

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Across the street are two houses with two small yards, connected so they look like one, shaded by trees, one of which has a rope looped in it. The little kids come out of both houses, run through the shade into the dapple-spots of sunlight, disappear back into the shade, grab the rope and swing, climb up into the tree and perch like little panthers. Sometimes they sing. And one twilight, running into and out of the light, what they sang was “What does the fox say?”

The song was popular a few years ago but I’d never listened to it.  I went inside and googled it.  It’s an unsettlingly weird song by a Norwegian — what is it with those far northerners and their pale skins and light eyes and strange stories? The song is about a guy who knows that dogs say woof and elephants say toot but doesn’t know what the fox says; so a bunch of people dressed in animal costumes dancing in a woods tell him what the fox says, which is, among other things, Ring-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding! Wa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pow! Joff-tchoff-tchoffo-tchoffo-tchoff! You get the idea, they’re making it up, they don’t know what the fox says either.  These sounds, coming out of the dark from kids in trees across the street, Fraka-kaka-kaka-kaka-kow!, were also unsettlingly weird.

I didn’t used to know what the fox said either. And that’s odd because I grew up on a small farm set in fields, backing on to woods. That’s prime fox territory. We kept chickens, and foxes would get into the chicken house and kill them. I knew it was foxes because my mother said so. But I never heard a fox.

So decades later, hundreds of miles away, in a city, I woke up one night hearing an unholy scream. It didn’t sound human, it didn’t even sound animal.  I looked out the window and saw a large fox, long tail held out behind, walking slowly down the street, stopping every now and then to lift its head and scream. You have to hear that sound to believe it. It sounded like it came from a time before animals.

That was years ago; the fox lived in a woods behind the houses across the street. I now recognize the sound — it’s been called a vixen scream. Foxes live maybe five years, says Google, so that any foxes I hear now are probably its children. The neighbors keep track of them; on summer mornings they say, “Did you hear the fox last night?” For weeks they talked about one large one that limped; I never saw it.  After a while no one saw a limping fox again so either the fox died or it stopped limping.

One night this summer, a neighbor and I were sitting on the porch as it got dark, talking about this and that.  I was in the middle of saying something when she froze and nodded toward the street. There, walking down the middle, through the pools of street lights, was a fox and two cubs, maybe adolescents, all three sticking together.  They might be heading toward the creek at the bottom of the street. They walked out of the dark, into the street lights, appearing, disappearing, reappearing, the way the little kids across the street moved in and out of the light. They slipped under cars, walked back into the street.  Then they walked off into the dark, not saying a word, not saying any of the things that foxes say.

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Photo by Oliver Truckle, via Flickr

10,000 Hours of Midlife Crisis

By: | August 6, 2019

It’s been said and often quoted that 10,000 hours of doing anything will make you a master. Never mind the squishy definition of mastery that makes it apocryphal, I believe it.

When the term mastery is used, I figure it’s not that you’ve risen flawlessly to becoming a great chef or engineer, but that you’ve managed to corral dysfunctions enough to let your functional side shine through. This might lead to becoming that great chef or engineer. You’ve mastered crawling out of the trash compactor of life and made something of it. Congratulations.

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Farewell David Corcoran, Dearest of Editors

By: | August 5, 2019

One of the finest editors I’ve ever known has died, and I’m heartbroken. 

David Corcoran was my first editor at the New York Times, but over the 12 years that I knew him he also became an advocate and a friend.

David was kind and supportive like a good dad. His tenor let me know that he trusted my judgement, and his confidence spilled over to me as I set out to report a story. His edits were always gentle and affirming. He never failed to leave a story better than it was before, and he always worked in service of the story, not his own ego. I’ve never met an editor with a more adept touch. I can’t ever recall getting an edit back from him that didn’t make me happy. Ask any writer — that’s a very rare thing! 

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