Death Barged In

By: | February 25, 2014

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Pia’s birthday was last week. I didn’t call her or send a card or bake a cake. Such efforts would have fallen on deaf ears, because she died six years ago in January.

Pia was the older sister I’d never had, and she’d welcomed me into her life with apricots and a warm pot of tea. A magnet on her refrigerator door read “sister-in-laws by chance, friends by choice” and I always thought that it referred to us. We were prone to wonky discussions about drinking water and the fate of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. She was finishing a PhD in environmental engineering when cancer intruded on her best-laid plans.

On Christmas, 2007, I flew to California to care for her as she lay dying of cancer. She needed so much and the things I could do felt so small—help her out of bed, place slippers on her swollen feet, prepare fresh dressings for her wound and listen when she felt like talking. Inside, she was still the same person I’d always known, but her body was fading into a ghost of her former self. Nothing could prepare me for the devastation of watching someone I love slowly, painfully, disappear. Months of therapy helped me accept that I did the best I could, but I will never feel that I did enough. Continue reading →

Train of Thought

By: | February 24, 2014

If you’re interested in writingSCENERY, and you’ve been on the internet in the last few days, you may have seen that Amtrak granted a pilot writers’ residency to a New York writer, who took the Lakeshore Limited to Chicago and back, working away in her 3’6” by 6’8” sleeper cabin. And since then, other writers have been weighing in, many with hopes of sign up for the next installment.

What follows is not an application, but an exploration: I’ve only ever been in coach, and if I got a free sleeper berth, I’d want to take my kids. (Or just sleep, uninterrupted.) But I’m fascinated by what makes trains so great for writing. Nearly everywhere I’ve lived has been on an Amtrak line, and every time I’ve traveled by train, I’ve gotten some good work done, whether on the page or just in my mind. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | February 22, 2014

3189655796_401a228e26February 17 – 21

This week, Ann shed light on the connection between the lawn chairs littering wintery Baltimore streets and Lord of the Flies.

If you’ve ever wanted to know what it’s like inside Biosphere 2, Michelle can give you the tour!

Scientists are on a quest to find the Neil Peart of the animal kingdom. Who will win, Erik mused: monkey, cockatoo … or sea lion?

Roberta discovered ancient treasure beneath the gaint construction zone that is Seattle.

And with the line “Life is confusing enough without misleading my brain about what I’m eating“, Helen started a diet soda flamewar! [NB: LWON flamewars are incredibly polite]

Seattle: Land of Amazon, Boeing, and Ancient Mammoths

By: | February 21, 2014

shutterstock_150252941On February 16, 1961, the Seattle Times reported that geologists had dug out the roughly 10,000-year-old bones of a giant sloth from a peat bog near the Seattle-Tacoma Airport. Two years later, alongside an article about Boeing’s plans for a supersonic jet and an ad for “Ladies’ Days” bargains on bedspreads and cribs, the newspaper ran a story about 22 mammoth bone fragments and a tooth found at Sixth Avenue and Seneca Street during the excavation for a new building. The foreman, Byron Green, said that he planned to clean the tooth and let his kids take it to school.

Last week, Seattle started buzzing about a new discovery: an 8.5-foot-long Columbian mammoth tusk unearthed by an apartment development company in the South Lake Union district, the city’s epicenter for Amazon workers. The company, AMLI Residential, found the tusk last Tuesday. Luckily, they alerted the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture instead of simply bulldozing through the fossil. Continue reading →

Who Knows What Lurks in the Cans of Soda?

By: | February 20, 2014

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The other day on a flight from Chicago to Washington, D.C., I ordered a ginger ale. The flight attendant asked if I’d like the whole can—the plane had been in line for more than an hour waiting for a slot to take off, so I suppose she was feeling generous—and I accepted. More ginger ale, more happiness.

About halfway through, I noticed that the can proclaimed “25% fewer calories!” What? How does a soda have fewer calories? I turned the can and read the ingredients. And there it was, at the end of the list: sucralose. Continue reading →

Snowbound and Murderous

By: | February 19, 2014

Montreal_-_Plateau,_day_of_snow_-_200312My God but the veneer of civilization is thin. Baltimore had one of its whomping good snowstorms last week – I stopped measuring at 14 inches – and the next day it had another 3 inches or so, plus sleet, and the day after it had only an inch, plus more of that sleet, and then of course the inch yesterday.  Baltimore is a poor city and thinks of itself as Southern, and the combination means that neighborhood streets don’t get ploughed.  The houses are generally rowhouses, so close to each other and two cars each.  I’m setting the scene here:  lots of snow, lots of cars, no ploughing.  So classic dog-eat-dog kicked in, and a genteel and sociable neighborhood lost its civility.  It was ugly out there.  I personally was enraged.

Most of the neighbors have a bone-deep understanding of the dangers of dog-eat-dog thinking.  For the most part, we do the civilized work-around and opt for cooperation.  We shovel out our own cars, then help the neighbors shovel out theirs.  This maximizes the space available for parking and minimizes the chance of getting stuck in somebody else’s glacial ice, and most important, it feels good – we have parties afterward, safe and happy in our common good.  Civilization triumphs.

Civilization’s fall took only a couple of guys.  Continue reading →

This Is a Story About Dancing Monkeys. Really.

By: | February 18, 2014

shutterstock_87758917What do you do if you are trapped in a room with a chimpanzee, a macaque, and a sea lion? The answer, apparently, is pump the tunes and get the party started.

This week at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (basically the US version of the Royal Society) scientists discussed the ability of various animals to “synchronize with auditory beats.” In other words, to get their groove on. Some species, it seems, can recognize the beat of the rhythm of the night. Others reportedly can dance until the morning light. Unfortunately, ethologists are still divided as to whether they can forget about the worries on their minds.

The list of animals that can sway to the rhythm of love is short but growing. It includes macaques, bonobo chimps, an orphan cockatoo, a sea lion, and most shockingly, Peter Gabriel. Yes, these are adorable YouTube fodder but it turns out that this behavior might also open a window into a key set of mental processes.

Continue reading →

A Lungful of Quiet

By: | February 17, 2014

B2_Photos_Lung_IngramI’m writing to you from inside an artificial lung. Really.

I’m sitting at a desk in a cylindrical, windowless room, 180 feet across. The floor and walls are concrete, and the ceiling, several stories above, is rimmed with an enormous black rubber gasket which sighs gently—up, then down—every time somebody opens the door.

No one has opened the door for quite a while now, and the quiet is thick. I’m pretty happy about that.

Continue reading →