Tomato Tomato

By: | March 29, 2023

Last week I read a delightful story about seed catalogs that made me remember this 2012 post. And my seed catalogs! Somewhere along the way, I must have gotten off the catalog lists because not a single one has arrived this winter to help me dream of spring. (Where did I go wrong?!) For now, I will enjoy the volunteer tomatoes that still appear years after my original tomato obsession.

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I can’t remember why the seed catalogs started showing up, but once they did, I was a goner. If you haven’t ever gotten one, imagine full color photo spreads of produce, like the striped Tigger Melon and and the orange-red lusciousness of the French pumpkin Rouge Vif d’Etampes. I suppose the names don’t have quite the ring of “Miss September,” but compared to some centerfold beauty, these fruits and vegetables are much more alluring — maybe because some September, a new variety might appear in my own garden, one that I could give any name I wanted.

This is how I ended up with at least six different varieties of tomato seeds last year. I’m not quite sure what it is about tomatoes. Even before I had a real garden, I’d buy the plants every year. They always seemed so hopeful, appearing in the nursery in winter, when you can’t even imagine that by fall you’ll be saying ridiculous things like, “Caprese salad, again? I don’t think I can do it.”

Somewhere along the lines, I realized there were more options out there then the plants we could find at our local nursery.  I knew I had to grow from seed once I learned that there was a variety named after the writer Michael Pollan. I could even figure out how to crossbreed my own tomatoes (and wondered what I’d call a Black & Brown Boar crossed with a Pink Berkeley Tie-Dye–oh, the possibilities!).

So there I found myself, one morning last winter, in front of a tray of dirt with seeds and Sharpies and labels in hand.

As I planted, I got to thinking about Gregor Mendel and his pea experiments. I’d first learned about them in high school, when the charts showing tall and dwarf pea plants, yellow and green peas, made it all seem so easy. But with seeds in hand, I started to buckle under the logistics. To do anything, first these seeds would have to grow.

Even if they did, I’d then have to do some tricky tweezer work (I read a bit about crossing tomatoes here). Then the tomatoes would have to grow, produce seeds. I’d have to save the seeds, grow the first generation the next winter, and do it all over again. If I was lucky, I’d start seeing crazy new phenotypes two summers from now.

That’s what Brad Gates does. At Wild Boar Farms (the California farm where I bought many of my seeds), he grows and tends thousands of plants each year, always keeping an eye out for novel tomatoes. (Brad’s Black Heart was a result of a random mutation that he spotted).

Gates used to ship some of his seeds off to the Southern Hemisphere, so he could grow two generations of tomatoes and try to speed through the breeding process. But he was never sure what was happening with his tomatoes, if someone was choosing exactly what he would.

Even though I’ll never know exactly what Mendel was thinking every day, when he went out to tend his peas (although Robin Marantz Henig’s A Monk and Two Peas gave me a good idea), but I did ask Gates.  When it comes to growing tomatoes, he said, “the fun part is all the Christmas presents I get to open every year,” he said, Whether it’s new flavors, textures, shapes, and sizes—“there are hundreds of surprises.”

And as my tomatoes began to grow, I started to get it. Every day, I watched my little plants unfold. Maybe it’s crazy that I had to set up hundreds of seeds to finally take the time to watch something grow. My curiosity about my future tomatoes grew each day—but at the same time, so did my patience.

What happened next shouldn’t really have surprised someone who once required a hazmat team to descend on her freshman chemistry lab (mercury spill from carelessly placed thermometer). When I set the starts out for hardening, a spring windstorm set all the labels flying. Then friends started to pick up some of my extra seedlings (I couldn’t fit all 144 in our raised beds). By the time I planted, I had a vague idea of which one was which, but then old tomatillos grew up among them and everything became a tangled mass of vine. Even the seeds I tried to save once the season was done got thrown out by accident.

Winter is here again, and so are my seed catalogs. I don’t think I will discover anything that hasn’t already been grown, and it’s unlikely that I will create a variety that will someday lure gardeners from between the pages of a seed catalog. But I do have a new respect for genetics, and for farmers. And I’ve certainly learned one thing already: Michael Pollan is delicious.

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Photo credits: Thamizhpparithi Maari, Goldlocki, Wikimedia Commons

“I Want People to Know That They’re Not Alone”: A Solastalgic Conversation with Paul Bogard

By: | March 27, 2023

In 2005, the Australian ecophilosopher Glenn Albrecht coined a word that, in four mellifluous syllables, perfectly encapsulated the Anthropocene’s discontents: solastalgia, the emotion you experience when an environment you’ve long loved is catastrophically altered. Solastalgia, as Albrecht put it, is “a form of homesickness one experiences without leaving home” — it’s what you feel when your ancestral lands are ravaged by coal mining, your homestead torched by megafire, or the only planet you’ll ever inhabit warped by climate change. In testament to its resonance, solastalgia — whose etymological roots twine with solace, nostalgia, desolation, and pain — has since become the subject of countless academic articles, the thematic backdrop for video games, and the inspiration for Estonian concertos. “Solastalgia,” Albrecht wrote in 2019, “has now well and truly entered popular culture.”

Albrecht’s all-too-apt neologism is also muse for a new essay collection, Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World, published last month by University of Virginia Press. The anthology — conceived, curated, and edited by the author Paul Bogard — features meditations by thirty-four writers, among them luminaries such as Kathleen Dean Moore, Scott Russell Sanders, and Meera Subramanian; Albrecht himself penned the foreword. (Although very far from a luminary, I have a piece in there, too, about a certain architecturally inclined rodent that I just can’t seem to quit.) “All of (these essays), in their own ways, engage the pain, grief, and sorrow inherent in the concept of solastalgia,” Bogard writes in the book’s introduction. “And all of them also have at least a hint — and often much more — of the possibility in this emotion.”

For the Last Word on Nothing, I chatted with Bogard about the power of Albrecht’s coinage, the perils of parenthood in the Anthropocene, and his forays into solastalgic rock-and-roll. 

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The Problem with Good People

By: | March 24, 2023

Profiling someone who is widely and wildly admired is harder than it ought to be. The word, hagiography, is not a compliment. What’s wrong with an objective profile of someone who’s practically a saint? I still don’t know.

These two people here have since died and the world is less shiny for their not being in it. This first ran March 1, 2017.

Writing about people who are a normal mixture of good and bad is already hard.  Writing about good people is close to impossible.

I wrote a profile once about a doctor who was just plain good.  He wasn’t a do-gooder – “I’m not a missionary,” he’d say; he was just a man who needed to make sick people well so he needed to get to the bottom of what made them sick and what would make them well.  He listened, he watched, his manners were exquisite, he said what was on his mind, he was kind, he was absolutely relentless, he didn’t attract or like attention.

By “good,” I don’t mean faultless.  He’d have said his biggest fault was his competitiveness, but I spent a lot of time watching him deal with people and the only thing he was hell-bent on competing with and beating the daylights out of was disease.  We were collaborators – he was the doctor, I was the writer – and I’d have said his biggest fault was not getting his chapters to me within four years of the deadline.  Other people got mad at him for similar reasons but nobody stayed mad.  He’s a good man, period.  He is good and he does good.  And when I wrote the perfectly truthful and representative profile of him, the editor sent it back saying it was a valentine, I needed to make him more human.

Why is that?  This doctor I was profiling is famous not only for his work but also for his goodness; everybody says so.  Why couldn’t I report that?

I don’t know the answer to that.  I understand thoroughly that people who are better than us (me) making us (me) feel inadequate and generally worthless.  And I understand the universal reaction to feeling worthless is not, “By golly, I better start being worthwhile!”   And I do know that I read the lives of saints only to see what idiots they were.  St. Francis was born rich and rebelled against his father’s life; and when he was an adolescent, he went into a public square in front of his father and his father’s friends and took off all his clothes.  I’m pretty sure I’m meant to read that gesture as a saintly rejection of greed and the self-aggrandizement that often accompanies riches.  I’m pretty sure if I were in that square, I’d have thought he was a little jerk sanctimoniously embarrassing his father in front of his father’s friends.  My point is, I understand my editor not believing my report of a good man.

This weekend I ran into a woman — she told me something she’d done on her 95th birthday but didn’t mention it had been a while back — whom I run into now and then at restaurants, parties, funerals.  She wears bright colors and outspoken jewelry; she piles her hair on top of her head and holds it in place with a barrette.  When someone talks, she pays attention; she asks questions; she’s curious about other people.

I know only a few things about her.  She came from serious money, married more of it, raised her kids, and loved staying at home; but she worried that her kids were getting too dependent on her so she did something that no married woman in her family or social circle had done: she went to work.  She began by screening families who wanted to adopt babies, not all of whom were orphans, and she did that for ten years.  Then she saw an ad from a local research hospital offering to train housewives to become psychotherapists.  She applied, was trained, and spent the next 40-plus years working with people who wanted help with their sexuality – including homosexuality, transexuality, and men whose sexuality was affected by the onset of feminism.  She was part of the 1970s civil rights movement, marched on Washington, helped integrate a local public park.  She got certified and married two gay men.  She set up nonprofits that offer free legal service for LGBT people, that help adoptive families, that mentor new teachers.  She talks in her gravelly old-lady voice about these causes with passion but she never says what she does for them. Like the doctor, she’s just plain good, everybody says so.

The world is full of the normally-good; good doctors and good therapists and good philanthropists aren’t news.  I hope I am myself normally-good.  But these two particular people are different somehow. They’re completely unself-conscious.  They deflect attention.  They seem to do good because that’s what they have to do; they need to do good things so they do. They’re more like artists who have to paint or compose or write because they don’t know any other way of getting through life.  Their lives seem not so much admirable as beautiful. They’re luminous. If I believed in holiness, I’d wonder if they were holy.

I still haven’t answered the question about why such good people are so hard to write about and that’s because I still don’t know the answer. I just want to record their presence.

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UPDATE:  the splendid Friend of LWON, Nell Greenfieldboyce, found a profile of a good person, Mr Rogers.  It’s by a writer named Tom Junod and for my money, over-eggs the pudding a bit but jeez, the pudding is good.  It does the close-to-impossible.

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Photo by Andrea Mann, via Flickr

Science Poem: Same Lobster, Different Death

By: | March 22, 2023
A royal blue lobster resting underwater on a craggy, algae-slimed rock.
I like to think that if I was a lobster, I’d be a blue one.

A long time ago I wrote a poem about change: how necessary it is, and how excruciating it can be. How it comes on its own timeline, whether we want it or not.

Writing the first draft of this poem took years, and, appropriately, the poem has never stopped evolving. There will likely never be a finished version of this poem, only the last version that happened to be written. And yet—having spent more than a decade swimming in the waters of transformation with/as this lobster, having witnessed again and again the miracle of expansion and ascendance, of growth, or moving forward—I am still startled, when the next round of changes begin. I am still afraid. In those moments, it is a comfort to return to the lobster, to endure, and survive, this next death together.

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Star Party

By: | March 20, 2023

One cold night a couple of weeks ago, my family and I bundled up to bike out to a park in one of Seattle’s northern suburbs. We have a routine for such trips after all these years. First we layer, and then we bedeck our bikes with lights: front lights, back lights, hub lights, even flashing holiday lights sometimes. High-vis is key; as my wife says, “Trust no car.”

We were headed to a Star Party. I had never heard of a Star Party until my wife told me about it. “It’s basically a bunch of people set up big telescopes in a field and you go look at stars,” she said. She’s good at finding out about these sorts of things—gatherings you had to be In The Know about, but quirky ones.  

To try anything that depends on clear nights in the dead of the western Washington winter is to tempt fate, but the weather gods were feeling charitable. When we pedaled into the park, we could see the shadow of a man and a large telescope on the dark side of the public restrooms. He was drinking something steaming from a travel mug, and appeared to be alone.

It was a party, all right.

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Science +/vs Religion

By: | March 17, 2023

I originally wrote this on October 3, 2012, and I’ve long since lost track of this young man. I hope he and his brother have sorted out their battle about science and religion by now but I sort of doubt they have. And in any case, this same battle is now showing up in different form in the bones of our country, in the media and social media, and it’s getting in the way of brothers and sisters everywhere. Which is dumb because what’s most obvious about these two brothers is their love.

I’m generally anxious though I doubt that I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, or at least when I went to trustable-looking websites and read their lists of symptoms and took their little tests, I didn’t quite fit or pass.  But sometimes I get scared and jumpy and fretful and hyper-alert and shaky; I stop thinking clearly; I’m preoccupied by whatever it is that will  happen or might happen or could conceivably happen.  I really, really don’t like the feeling that I care, I’m invested, I’m involved, and that things go wrong and I’m not remotely in control. Actually I think I just have a heightened case of the human condition.

One day, with an anxiety like a low-lying fog, I was listening to a young man talk about his work, his interests, and his brother.  His work is to write software, to write code, which as I understand it, is a matter of breaking a problem into its smallest possible units and ordering them, line by line, so a computer can makes sense of the commands; it sounds like an analytical, orderly kind of job.  His interests are in science, all kinds.  “Did you hear about the Encode project?” he said.  “It was so interesting.” I wondered if what he liked was the genome ordering, line by line, the workings of the body and the evolution of the species.  I thought, not for the first time, what a comfort to an anxious mind is the world of science.

Then the young man told me about his brother.  They’d been brought up hyper-religious, creationist, home-schooled, and when the young man was a teenager, he began slowly to break away from his family’s beliefs and in the process, he said, his interest in the world grew.  And now he and his brother argue.  “God created the world in seven days.”  “Then how can the layers in ice cores show ages of hundreds of thousands of years?”  “God created layers in ice cores old.”  Same for the chicken and egg problem:  the chicken came first, God had created it full grown.  The young man is distressed about his brother and doesn’t like to let the disagreement lie.

But back when the young man was first breaking away from his family’s ways, he had noticed his brother was also following his interests in worldly things — art, music, coding — and he wondered whether his brother might follow him further.

Then one day, through a miscommunication, the young man thought his brother had died.  He believed it had happened, that he now lived in a world without his brother.  And when he found that his brother was still alive and then saw him in person, he became, he said, “very intense.”  His brother became very intense too, he said, and they were emotional with each other.  I picture awkward young men who maybe didn’t normally touch each other hugging and hugging and crying for a while.

But after that the differences between the brothers grew, the young man said, and his brother gave up worldly interests.  They have to avoid talking about religion; in fact, they have to stop talking about anything of substance at all, the young man said, because when the answer is always God, the conversation stops cold.  “To be still talking, you must love each other very much,” I said.  “Oh yes, we do,” he said.  “Why do you think he became so religious?” I said.  “Because of that time I thought he was dead,” he said.

Apparently the brother started thinking about how he should spend the life he now knew was limited.  He concluded that he should invest only in lasting things and that bringing other people to God saves them from hell and does permanent good.  Religion orders life line by line too, I thought.   Meanwhile, the young man continued, he too had started thinking about how to spend a limited life, only he concluded that he didn’t know enough about the world.  So he started reading, he said, reading everything, reading through the night, reading to the point where his work suffered, reading because he’d wasted his young life not devouring information.

So, we’re all gonna die and we’re not in control.  Anxiety sounds like a reasonable reaction.  But order and meaning help, so we choose  God, we choose human understanding, we balance God and science.  I’m not going to say that science and God both reduce to the need for order as a relief from anxiety.  But yes, maybe, to some extent, I’m saying that.   Anyway, I’m personally not cut out for faith in God, and when life gets explicit about its non-negotiable conditions, I prefer human understanding and science.  I can’t say that I blame the brother though.

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Photo credits:  Yaisog Bonegnasher; mhobl

The Case For Ignoring All Online Advice

By: | March 15, 2023
advice key on a computer keyboard
Don’t do it.

I try not to use social media, but I can’t bring myself to quit entirely. Despite the evil it has wrought, Facebook remains a good way to keep tabs on friends I otherwise don’t see or connect with often, or at all. I decided a while ago that these sweet updates were worth the otherwise sad price of admission. (Twitter is another story; I am off the hellsite for now, but I may eat my words when I have a book to promote.)

So I do check Facebook, more often than I should, and I certainly check Instagram more often than I should. (You can follow my public account here.) On Facebook, I remain a member of many groups, including ones specific to local writers, science writers, writers, writers who are parents, parents who are researchers, and so on. The algorithm shows me posts from these groups on occasion, and they have begun to feel really familiar lately — which is not the work of the algorithm, I think, but because I know exactly what they are going to say.

Every time I’m tempted to post something, whether it’s an issue I’m trying to solve with my kids or my instant reaction after a new episode of the Mandalorian, I ask myself what I will gain from the exchange. I made this handy flow chart:

Will I learn something helpful? Maybe. Will the interaction be negative? It’s the Internet, so, you know. Will this negative interaction ultimately piss me off? Likely. Will it therefore be a waste of my time? Yes.
Here are a few examples I made up that illustrate my point.

Post No. 1

Group Member
My spirited child is 6 and has been so defiant lately. I snapped the other night when she poured water in my slippers and demanded Cheetos with pickles for dinner — hey, I’m human! — but I feel like I’m failing her. Any advice? Please be gentle.

Replies

User1
Hugs, mama. You’re not alone.

User2
Apologize to her tomorrow and redirect. It’s our job to offer food, it’s their job to decide how much to eat.

User3
At this age, self regulation is still developing. You’re asking too much of a six-year-old. Don’t buy Cheetos if you don’t want her to eat them for dinner. What did you expect?

User4
Cheetos contain Red No. 40, so you should first douse them in acid and then throw them in the garbage. I noticed my son acted a lot less wild when we eliminated all dyes and fragrances from our home. But I do have my hair highlighted every four weeks, a six-hour process during which my au pair watches my children.

User5
Have you tried essential oils?

User6
Give her Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and see what happens next time! LOL
(three members reacted with laughing emoji)

Post No. 2


Group Member
Hi lovely writers,
Does anyone have a good source who can speak to this hyper-specific question on one polypeptide somethingorother that reacts to the thingamajig in those with post-COVID sequelae? I’d prefer a woman or POC, obviously. I’m on deadline and no one is getting back to me!

Replies
Eighteen hyper-specific helpful responses with source names and locations

Original poster
I love this group!

Post No. 3

Group Member
When are we all going to talk about how Bo-Katan is a terrorist? She was a member of Death Watch. It’s just a matter of time before she betrays Din Djarin and tries to get the Darksaber back. So why are they making us believe she’s friendly and honestly trying to help? Come on, Filoni!

Replies

User1
I ship Bo and Din!! Check out my fanfic on ao3 just uploaded

User2
Children of the Watch is the same as Death Watch, right, just with a different name? When will we get a Satine flashback?

User3
Uh, why is Bo-Katan still so young when Obi-Wan is old AF by this point in the timeline??*

User4
The sequel era sucks, bring back Tarkin and Thrawn!

You get the idea. You have a question and you’re tempted to post it on an online forum? Don’t. There is no point. You can play out the entire scenario in your head and know exactly the types of responses you’ll receive. Save yourself the hassle and imagine what everyone will say, and make a decision that is yours alone. That’s what you’ll do anyway — it’s what we all do — but you will save yourself the headache of being Extremely Online in 2023.

This advice is good. I know it is being published in an online forum on which we invite comments, but this is different, because it is good advice. Trust me. Just, you know, do what I said, and I promise you’ll feel better.

You’re not alone. You’re doing a great job.

Hugs.

*I would genuinely like an explanation for this

—

Image credit: Flickr user Survey Hacks cc-by-2.0

How the Pandemic Turned Working Moms into Mommy Pig

By: | March 13, 2023

I first published this post in April, 2020. Today things are better, but not fixed. We have childcare, but it feels precarious. There are snow days and teacher training days and holidays and sick days. So Many Sick Days. On Mondays, public school ends at 1:45pm. ONE FORTY-FIVE! And there are still too many things to do and far too little time.

My daughter has a well-loved copy of Richard Scarry’s book, What Do People Do All Day? The book, first published in 1968, shows all the workers in Busytown at their various jobs. Kids love it. Adults love it. Four and a quarter stars on Goodreads.

But 1968 was a long time ago, a different era. And that might help explain why there’s a chapter titled “Mother’s work is never done.” Mommy Pig gets up, cooks breakfast, gets groceries, washes dishes, mops the floor, cleans the house, makes lunch, does laundry, and fends off a too-aggressive brush salesman. And here’s how it ends: Mommy makes dinner. Daddy Pig eats too much and breaks the kids’ bunk bed. And the kids HAVE TO SLEEP WITH MOMMY. “What would we ever do if we didn’t have mommies to do things for us all day — and sometimes all night?” Scarry writes.

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