Finding Delight in a Terrible Year

By: | January 24, 2022

At some point last year, a friend told me about The Book of Delights by Ross Gay. Starting on one birthday and continuing to the next, Gay kept an (almost) daily catalog of things that delighted him. It seemed like an inspired idea, so I put the book on hold at my local library. Shortly after my father suffered a debilitating stroke, it was ready for pickup. It turned out to be exactly what I needed in those days I was shuttling back and forth between my parents’ house and the hospital. 

Gay is a beautiful writer (he’s a poet, after all) and his book delighted me. He acknowledges all that is wrong with the world, and gives permission to feel joy nevertheless. It was a reminder that even when everything is shit — as it was in those weeks after my father had his terrifying stroke and my best friend’s teenage son died by suicide — it is possible to find beauty in the world. 

Gay’s book inspired me to start noticing the delights in my own life. I told my mom about the book, and we began a ritual of sharing our daily delights with one another. I took delight in seeing a tidy row of birds always perched on the same power line on my drive to the rehab facility where Dad was staying at the time. Mom delighted in an odd quirk in the fonts of some of the street signs in a neighborhood she passed through on the same drive.

One afternoon during my many visits with Mom and Dad, I went for a trail run near their house and noticed a large boulder that had a bump that looked like an eye. I stopped, picked up some smaller rocks and arranged them so that the boulder was smiling at anyone who passed by. I knew that these rocks were inert shards of an indifferent universe, but for a blink of a moment I transformed them into beacons of joy. Delight!

A few months later, I met my sister halfway between her house and mine to celebrate her birthday, and we both pulled up to the hotel at precisely the same time. Delight!

Another morning back at home, I noted the satisfying crunch of the snow underneath my boots. Delight!

Often, my delight comes from creatures who share my habitat — a golden eagle, or the herd of elk that like to hang out in the meadow across from my house. I almost always experience a delight on my morning walk, but I find delights in interactions with other people too. There was the stranger I encountered out on the ski trails recently who wore a hat that said, “Find Your Paradise” and she smiled at me, and me at her, as we agreed that this place was ours.

While visiting my parents just before Christmas, I went out for a run near where I’d constructed the smiling boulder and found someone else’s rock smiling up at me. Delight! 

It has become a habit — this noticing of delights. I text them to Mom, and she sends me her delights in return. It’s a way of checking in on one another to confirm that we can still feel joy, even in these dark times. 

What I’ve learned is that the simple act of naming delightful moments helps me to cherish them a little more. Except to text them to Mom, I don’t write them down, but I don’t need to. The purpose is to savor the fleeting moment and notice it while it lasts. Delight!

If you liked this post, you might enjoy Jane’s recent post about the Book of Delights. (Great minds think alike!)

TWITTERFIGHT #don’tdoit

By: | January 21, 2022
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This first ran July 15, 2013. I was just learning to stay out of Twitter fights. I’ve needed to learn this several times since but I think I’ve about got it now. My reasons have changed though: not only the impossibility of a logical argument but also the improbability that everyone will understand the subtlety of my double-edged humor and will instead think I’m just an incomprehensible show-off jerk.

Last week one day my Twitter feed lit up like a rocket launch.  The people I follow on Twitter are mostly science writers and they generally confine their passions to the likes of supernovas, dinosaurs, fracking, insect sex, and disfunctionalMRI’s.  But last Thursday @page88, a media/culture writer with a Harvard PhD in literature, wrote for Yahoo News a short, breezy post about not understanding science and preferring literature, explaining that for her, this added up to a reason for being a creationist.  That is, all explanations of the universe are just stories, so you’re free to choose the ones you like best. She tweeted a link to her Yahoo News post.  The science writers got irate. She defended herself. TWITTERFIGHT!

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The Waiting Game

By: | January 19, 2022

Voters in Arlington, waiting to absentee vote before the 2012 Presidential Election. Photo by Aaron Webb/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

One of my fears, when I moved back home from DC to my minuscule hometown in a sparsely populated region of California, was that I’d lose what I consider an important modern survival skill: the ability to wait in line politely, or as the British put it, to queue. 

There were ample opportunities to queue in DC, including getting on or off on the subway, checking out at Trader Joe’s, or acquiring the latest novelty food item, like an (inspired) sushi burrito, or a (disappointing) cronut. I waited in grimy ballet flats that lacked arch support for endurance, or if I wanted to build up my tolerance for pain, in heels. Sometimes waiting made me cry, or want to. One sweltering afternoon I sat for three hours in rush-hour traffic in my 1999 Honda, sans air conditioner. I’m pretty sure I still have an imprint on my forehead from slamming it against the steering wheel in frustration. But waiting also made me more resourceful. (After that, I never drove in a DC heatwave without a thermos full of ice cubes.)

Queuing is a scientific discipline unto itself, I recently learned. The field was born in early 20th century Denmark from the need to configure early telephone switchboards to avoid long delays. Scientists have since applied mathematical models of queuing to 911 response time, the wait for an organ, and the number of times you hear “Please wait, your call is important to us” before a actual customer service representative picks up the phone. When a huge snowstorm knocks out power for thousands of people, it’s a mathematical model–rather than a system of “first-come, first served” –that typically decides whose power lines get fixed first. 

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A (Mostly) Indoor Sunday

By: | January 17, 2022
As it turns out, Millie Ramsayer, who lives down the hall and is the Best Girl, got me outside for a game of fetch Sunday evening, right when the snow was turning to something worse.

In Washington, D.C., in winter, a lot of horrible things fall out of the sky. We sometimes get a good honest snowfall. But usually it’s something worse – some godforsaken blend of snow and rain and ice and sleet that coats everything and makes you not want to attempt to stand on any hard surface or really to go outdoors at all.

As I’m writing this, it’s early afternoon on Sunday and nothing has started to fall yet. I took an overdue check out to the mailbox this morning. I don’t plan to go out again.

Of course, weather isn’t the only strong excuse not to go anywhere right now. There’s also the Omicron surge.

Last weekend I realized that the feeling I was having, of being unwilling to go anywhere or doing anything, wasn’t some weird manifestation of depression or something; it was the pandemic. It was the same feeling I had last winter, when I wasn’t vaccinated yet and any encounter with the virus could have meant death. It’s less scary now – I’m vaccinated and boosted, and so are my parents and most of my friends – but I still don’t want to get COVID.

Once I’d realized that, I could pivot to my pandemic-winter coping skills – there’s a skill set we didn’t know we’d be acquiring, two years ago – and set up plans. Zoom plans. I’m doing Zoom art again. Saturday night I hosted a Zoom knitting group. We all showed off our projects and exclaimed about how we had thought we were all Zoomed out, but here we were, so happy to see each other, even on screens.

I hope the hints we’re hearing about Omicron are right, that it will settle down soon and I’ll feel comfortable breathing around other people again.

For now, here I sit, on a Sunday afternoon. My phone tells me it’s 22 degrees outside. The Capital Weather Gang tells me to expect “dangerous road conditions late this afternoon as snow changes to ice.” Don’t worry, Capital Weather Gang. I’m not going anywhere.

Photo: Kate Ramsayer

Courage and Kazoos

By: | January 14, 2022
Kazoo, Wikipedia

This post first ran in October 2019. Here’s hoping for the glorious return of school talent shows in 2021-22.

About a year ago, I attended a high school talent show. It was over two hours long. The multipurpose room smelled of old pizza and pubescent sweat. The folding metal chairs made me squirm uncomfortably in my seat, as did many of the acts.

Watching parents pull out their phones and prepare to post their kids’ performances online, I thanked God that Facebook didn’t exist when I dressed up as Baby Spice in 8th grade. (I didn’t want to be Baby Spice. I wanted to be Sporty Spice, or at least Posh Spice, and wearing Baby’s pigtails and knee socks felt like a betrayal of my values — of myself.)

So much has changed for teenagers since I was in high school: the rise of social media, the demise of the planet as we know it. At this high school, however, at least one rule of American adolescence appeared unchanged: to maintain social status, it was imperative not to be caught trying very hard.

Most of the kids who entered the talent show sought safety in groups, performing acts that required little skill or practice. One group bopped around to the relentless, infantile earworm “Baby Shark” (don’t click if you don’t want your life to be ruined.) The popular girls performed a Mean Girls-esque, unsettlingly come-hither dance. The goofball senior boys played “Eye of the Tiger” on kazoos.

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Some crowd-sourced reflections on E.O. Wilson and Tom Lovejoy

By: | January 12, 2022

Just before the turn of the new year, E.O. Wilson and Tom Lovejoy, two of the world’s most celebrated biologists, passed away within a day of each other. That they left the world together felt fitting, given the extraordinary interplay between their work. It was Wilson, after all, who, in a series of mad, ingenious experiments on Floridian islets, proved some of the fundamental rules of island biogeography — namely, that small islands support fewer species than large ones, and are more likely to host extinction events. And it was Lovejoy who applied those rules in a terrestrial context through his brilliant Amazon Forest Fragment Project, which showed that roads, farms, and other forms of development have effectively, and disastrously, islandified mainland habitats. It’s hard to imagine modern conservation biology, with its emphasis on corridors and connectivity, without their insights.

Much has been written about Wilson’s and Lovejoy’s legacies — heck, they jointly invented the concept of biodiversity. Still, there’s so much more to say. On Twitter, I asked folks to send me their own brief reflections on what Wilson and/or Lovejoy meant to them. Here goes.

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Guest Post: My Other Pandemic

By: | January 10, 2022

I could tell you the fentanyl statistics – that in one year 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses, 28% more than the year before, and that 80% of those deaths were linked to fentanyl, a synthetic opioid – but I would rather tell you what I have learned from my teenage son. He is currently in recovery from fentanyl addiction.

Since early childhood, he has struggled with depression and anxiety, and started experimenting with marijuana to self-medicate a few years ago. Since then, he has lived through difficult times full of emergency room visits, stints at residential rehabs, calls from police, near-fatal overdoses and bouts of despair. I have searched for help in different places, with varying success. I have also learned about addiction, courage, and love from my son. I would like to share some of what I have learned in hopes that other parents might find it useful.

My husband and I didn’t discover the extent of our son’s problems in one horrific revelation the way some families do. We learned by degrees that he was using pot, then experimenting with harder drugs and eventually that he was truly addicted. The uncertainty about what was going on was agonizing. Drug addicts typically lie with great fluency and lack of scruples. So although he is often open and honest, during periods of drug dependency our son was not a reliable source of information. We originally thought over-the-counter urine-based drug testing kits would be more objective. They are quite accurate for many drugs and even have anti-cheating features, but we discovered a major flaw. They do not test for fentanyl. A fentanyl user’s urine will come back negative for opioids in general as well as for oxycontin and heroin specifically.  My husband and I spent three months arguing with each other because we didn’t know this, and our son almost died.

Once we figured out he was addicted, I started looking for treatment programs. I asked for suggestions from his therapist, talked to hospital staff and pored over glossy websites with pictures of sunsets and beautiful, acne-free teenagers. When I first spoke to the intake personnel, I felt like a drowning person being thrown a lifeline. They were so understanding and reassuring.

Over time and various rehab experiences, I learned that addiction treatment is a business. Most treatment centers are private and for-profit (lots and lots of profit).  Furthermore, few insurance plans will cover a reasonable length of stay.

On the positive side, our son generally did benefit from the different experiences, although not always. He met some wonderful staff people, often in recovery themselves, and connected with other kids who have remained friends. He also met some not so wonderful staff and some horrible kids. What he did not do was get ‘cured’.

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The Lion Sleeps Tonight

By: | January 7, 2022

I received the unusual gift this season of a stuffed mountain lion. On any other day I’d politely turn it down, but it was a thing to contend with and now it is perched in the den, a Christmas gift with its clawed catcher’s mitt of a right forepaw extended for a swipe. The pose is not serene, nose curled in offense, mouth displayed half-hissing. Putting this creature, six feet long from nose to tail, in the living room didn’t seem fair to our house cat, nor to the poor puma who I’d rather not have to watch us eat and watch movies. It went instead to the den where I write.

My stepdad, an adventurous gent, had shown me this strange creature years ago in a house in the woods abandoned by a divorce and left to rot. A realtor had told him about it and he saw the taxidermy through the window. When he took me there, it was a prank. He wanted to show me a den with a mountain lion in it. Those were the words he used, not a lie, and my mind ran with a snow drift framing a nest of tree roots where I imagined its entrance and exit strewn with sticks and dabs of mud and blood.

What I took my stepdad to mean was that he’d found an active den, not with an actual puma in it, but with fresh sign, maybe a kill dragged into a shelter. When he led me down behind the abandoned house, I thought how ingenious for a mountain lion to den among construction piles and pieces of equipment covered with half-rotted tarps behind a big log cabin. Who would bother it here? Snow three-feet-deep would have been good for tracks but I saw none, thinking the cat must have been gone from here for weeks.

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