I walk out my front door after dinner to check on the night, and before breakfast to check on the day. And every now and then, on the porch table, or the porch floor, or the front sidewalk is an arrangement — rocks, berries, plants of some sort. They’re not put there at random, they’re definitely arranged, each rock or plant or berry chosen according to some criterion (pretty color, shiny, whatever was handy) and put down next to another rock or plant according to another criterion (circles, lines, rows, whatever looked nice). I started taking pictures of them.
This post originally appeared in February, 2020. I resurrected it because I figure we could all use a dog hug, in this pandemic time of not hugging folks outside our households.
When I return home from a trip, or really from any absence longer than 15 minutes, my dog Taiga greets me with the canine equivalent of pyrotechnics: Leaping, writhing, twirling, lip curling, a quiver full of hyena sounds. Once, after a 13-day visit to Alaska, she reached my face in a single bound from the floor, her nose making high-speed contact with my mouth. Proof once again that love can draw blood—mostly metaphorical, sometimes literal.
Each time her affections explode into uncontrolled demonstration, I imagine what it would be like if humans greeted each other this way. The teenager who bags groceries jumping and singing at the sight of a familiar customer. The host of a dinner party flinging a saucy spoon into the air at the arrival of his guests, spattering the ceiling with a Jackson Pollack arc of pureed tomatoes and olive oil. Friends, upon unexpected sight of each other from opposite sides of the street, sprinting into an intersection to embrace.
This is my first pandemic, and I had no idea what to expect. Which is sort of on theme, because the the overarching feeling I’ve experienced inside the COVID-19 pandemic is uncertainty. Will I get sick? Will my loved ones die? How long will this ordeal last? Will we ever have a vaccine or a cure? If so, how soon? None of these questions have certain answers.
By late March, it was clear to me that a lot of people were going to die. I’d been reading the scientific reports, and I have journalist friends on the infectious disease beat who were freaking the fuck out. I was scared. A lot of people were going to die (more than 112,000 in the U.S. alone, as of July 2, per the CDC) and I wondered which of my loved ones would be among them. What if it was me?
The island of Moobopolis (named after my dog, whose face is on the official island flag)
The world feels more dizzying every day. Last weekend, I sat in front of my computer, scrolling through article after article detailing massive societal problems: police brutality and system racism; this pandemic; another pandemic brewing in pigs?; rising sea levels; corrupt government officials and what appears to be the sun setting on democracy. Welp, I thought, that’s enough internet for today. And I got up to spend hours staring at a different device: a Nintendo Switch.
I do not consider myself a video game person but in the last two months, I’ve been spending hours each week playing a game called Animal Crossing. If you haven’t played the game, the gist is essentially that you create a little avatar and you live on a completely self-sufficient island. There is no way to win or lose, and you can spend your time doing whatever you want. It’s the one bit of consistency and dependability in my life right now; the animation is adorable, the music is soothing, the relationship between cause and effect is predictable. You chop a tree? Three pieces of wood come out. (Wood is an renewable resource in the Animal Crossing universe; you can chop three pieces of wood from each tree, every day, with no consequences.) And unlike in the real world, I can go out without a mask, and try on clothes at a store. It’s a universe where you can catch fish and insects, pick fruit from trees, and collect seashells on the beach.
Yet I find myself wondering if there’s something wrong with me because I can’t fully enjoy the game without poking holes in the ethics and morality of the Animal Crossing universe. Even in this escapist world, I can’t escape my own brain; by real-world standards, my island has major flaws. For one, the game encourages a hedonistic treadmill of consumption; it incentivizes flying (! think of the carbon footprint!) to other islands to pilfer its resources and create a barren ecosystem. What about deforestation? Over fishing? Massive insect die-offs? They don’t exist in the game, of course, but I still can’t help but feel guilty about contributing to this non-existent problem.
It never hurts to celebrate, again, the oddities of life on Earth. Here’s a piece about a discovery reported in 2017 that reminds us of our humble beginnings.
Our microscopic relative might have looked like this.The fossil, waaaaay bigger than real life.
Let’s get down to brass tacks. Mouth. Anus. Reproductive bit in between. Isn’t that all one really needs to get by?
I’m oversimplifying, of course. Lungs are helpful if you live on land, for example.
But check out our newly discovered really ancient fossilized ancestor. Saccorhytus coronarious, unearthed recently by paleontologists in sedimentary rock in the Shaanxi Province of central China, falls into the group of bilateral creatures known as deuterostomes. (Here’s a nice description of that group.) Hardly an exclusive club, the deuterostomes include critters like starfish and urchins, but also giraffes, naked mole rats, and humans. All vertebrates, in fact. This particular animal’s body was a little more than a globular bag. It had a supersize wrinkly maw-anus combo (decluttering is not a new concept). Its form, at some 540 million years old, proves that we vertebrates have been pushing around our greedy mouths to stuff our faces, and letting fly the excess, for a really long time.
I’m truly amazed by how much paleontologists can figure out from microscopic lines left in stone. Having examined this millimeter-long creature under an electron microscope—without which the thing appears to be a grain of black rice— the scientists can say with some confidence where the animal lived (on the sea bed), how it moved (by wriggling and nestling between sand grains), and what its peculiar parts were for (e.g., lateral slits probably let it flush out excess water (precursors to modern gills), while mouth folds let it open extra wide when prey was bigger than predator’s head).
The researchers also know what the animal lacked: an anus. It had no dedicated release valve. No clearly marked exit. Apparently, butts aren’t mandatory after all. For some animals, a mouth or other opening does double duty. (See what I did there? Of course you do.)
So, here is the common ancestor of whole host of species, for now the earliest known knot in the evolutionary net that stretched to humans hundreds of million years later. (I’m testing out a new analogy for the tree of life. Apologies.)
Such analyses make me feel pretty small. To discover a miniature rock imprinted with what is clearly an alien face with four chins and maxed-out lips, and then to figure out aspects of the ancient animal’s physiology and behavior, life history, and its relationship to humans, well, that’s quite a thing.
I’m not sure whether my much younger self would have been as impressed. When I was in 5th grade we kids had the chance to go to work with someone who had the job we thought we wanted when we grew up. There were few marine mammologists hanging around Chicago, so I opted for my second choice. I hopped into a pickup truck at dawn with a soft-spoken bearded paleontologist and traveled to a site in Wisconsin where an excavation was in progress. I don’t remember what we were looking for there; I just know I was hoping for skeletons. Lots and lots of skeletons.
I recall the tidy square pits, some sunken like 1970s living rooms, and spray-painted markings in the dirt. Students with tremendous patience, in wide-brimmed hats, knelt on the hard ground sifting out tiny nothings from the dust. I was given a couple of tools and shown how to very carefully scrape away the earth around objects and brush away the excess. My digging experience limited to building drip sand castles, the area I was given to work was no doubt insignificant. If memory serves, I spent several hours gently freeing a stick from the soil.
This was what I envisioned unearthing during my day as a paleontologist. No such luck.
Memory definitely serves when it comes to the pain. The sun was a fireball stuck under my hat, and the ground punished my knees. My back was quickly drenched and sore and the edges of my ears turned an angry red. I hobbled around the next day as if I’d fallen into a well. It was the most tedious work I’d ever done, and by then I’d diagrammed a lot of sentences. Where was the grinning skull, the bony hand, the eerily crooked spine rising from the grave? I probably cried at some point that day.
Now, a day poking around in the dirt, even sans skeletons, sounds like a good time. (Being an adult has its perks, including enthusiasm over geeky things that don’t come easy.) If only that scientist had lied to me, telling me that somewhere under my bruised knees lay the imprint of our earliest ancestor’s absurd “face,” a find that would fill a gap in the fossil record so vital it would change everything we knew about everything. (A little drama makes all the difference in 5th grade.)
Just that little fib and maybe, just maybe, I’d be a happily sunburned paleontologist today.
Confession: I, like so many of my fellow Americans, am not getting enough sleep. Blame the baby. Blame the preschooler. Blame COVID anxiety. Blame my doomscrolling. Blame the dog, who threw up a clump of grass next to the bed at 4am.
On a typical night, I sleep between six and seven hours with two baby wake-ups. It’s not enough. My body craves more. So much so that when I snuggle down with my nearly five-year-old to read at bedtime, I am frequently overcome. Her bed is so soft. The stuffed owl behind my head is so squishy. One minute I am reading. The next I am asleep.
I am writing this post from bed. I can’t get up, because (shhhh) there’s a kitten purring on my chest.
We picked her up from the animal shelter yesterday. There were dozens of kittens vying for adoption, but as soon as I felt her nudge my hand — polite but insistent, green eyes steady — I knew that she was ours, and we hers.
Calliope admiring a video of herself playing in a pile of towels.
Calliope in her pile of towels.
Her name is Calliope,”Chief of all Muses.”
Naturally, she’s doing everything in her considerable power to prevent anything resembling work.
I was walking across a green space near my apartment building, bounded by streets and a transit station and criss-crossed by concrete paths and surrounded by roads. A recent mow–the first in months–had left it looking like a hay field. A hay field with a lot of litter.
Ahead of me I saw two fluffy gray lumps, with specks of blue on their wings and grumpy faces. I did what any responsible Instagram user of the 21st century would do; I took out my phone to take a picture of the two baby blue jays, just old enough to be out of the nest but not quite old enough to take care of themselves.
