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What To Do When It Rains

What To Do When It Rains

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Conked out to rain, woke up to rain. Rain on the weekend, on Monday, Tuesday, now Wednesday. Dodging the drops to take a walk. Today if there’s a break I’ll be outside again.

Meanwhile, morning arrives gray and soggy. It’s a good day to clean the basement, sort through old files. Only that’s not what I want to be doing on July 3!

Tomorrow will be better, they say. Until then, I pile the books beside me. Four from the library yesterday and another, electronic one I couldn’t find in hard copy. That’s the one I’m reading now.

I’m in war-worn Berlin, riding the U-bahn, hungry, cold and afraid. Is it raining? Is it dry? Who cares?

The Places In Between

The Places In Between

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In the winter of 2002, Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan. He arrived six weeks after the Taliban fell, and he dodged landmines, snow storms and rogue tribal chiefs along the way.

Stewart’s walk through Afghanistan was part of a larger trek that included 16 months of walking 20 to 25 miles a day across Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal.

All of which makes him an expert on walking. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s a passage from The Places In Between:

I thought about evolutionary historians who argued that walking was a central part of what it meant to be human. Our two-legged motion was what first differentiated us from the apes. It freed our hands for tools and carried us on the long marches out of Africa. As a species, we colonized the world on foot. Most of human history was created through contacts conducted a walking pace….

And Stewart thought these thoughts — of course — while walking!

Two Libraries

Two Libraries

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A recent Price Waterhouse Coopers report tells us that the consumer e-book market will surpass the print book market by 2017.

An accompanying chart shows the two lines converging: a pale yellow (easily breached?) line for the print market, and a robust red line for the e-book market, rising at an impossibly audacious angle from 2008 to 2017.

The revolution from manuscript to printed book took centuries. From the looks of it, the digital revolution will not last as long. Could it happen in a generation?

If so, we who are living through it are left with spinning heads and two libraries: one that is real, one that is virtual.
 

Zoobiquity

Zoobiquity

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Authors Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, M.D., and Kathryn Bowers coined the word “zoobiquity” to describe their efforts to use animal behavior and the latest finds of veterinary science to solve some of the great puzzles of human medicine.

Take fainting, for instance. Turns out that animals faint, too, and can better elude predators when they do. It’s not just “flight or fight,” then, but “flight, fight or faint.” A important lesson — that stillness is another way to fight stress.

Or take obesity. It’s common in the animal world, and studies on dragonflies raise the possibility that the condition might be caused by a parasite, raising the more intriguing possibility that obesity might be infectious.

Natterson-Horowitz, a cardiologist and psychiatrist, has observed first-hand what fear can do to the human heart — and she honed her theories by learning about animal hearts, how restraint or fear of capture can kill an otherwise healthy bird or beast. She then applies this to what is known about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and a study that found a threefold greater risk of this among swaddled (i.e., restrained) babies put to sleep on their stomachs and exposed to a loud noise. The combination of noise and restraint triggers a slowdown of the heart in the young of many species, Natterson-Horowitz says, and calls for more collaboration among animal physiologists and pediatricians. “Powerful yet vulnerable, the heart-brain alliance usually saves lives,” the authors write. “But every once in a while, it can also end one.”

Zoobiquity is big-picture thinking at its best.

Technical Difficulties

Technical Difficulties

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I wonder if anyone has done a study of the time spent trying to learn, operate and repair the electronic items in our possession. I wonder this because in the time I’ve spent trying to download a book on my much-neglected Kindle, I could have driven to the store and bought the book. (If I could find a bookstore and if the bookstore carried this book.)

The culprit: a new wireless network in our house, which means Netflix streams intermittently now, if at all, and the e-reader that worked with the old network and password is balking at the new one.

At these moments I inevitably anthropomorphize the gizmo, tell myself that it’s a creature of habit, doesn’t like the vibes given off by the new network, is a bit set in its ways. (Speaking of set in its ways, has it ever considered what it took for me to come around to reading on it?)

But no, apparently it hasn’t. And now the book I was planning to start for book group tonight is still up there in the ether and I’m reading something else entirely.

Everything is fast and easy these days. Until it isn’t.

(Ready to read — if only I could download the novel!)

Twisted

Twisted

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In this season of flower and shoot, consider the redbud tree. Its bloom is not red at all, but a vivid  shade of lilac. Like jewel-tone azaleas, this plant does not mess around with pale pastel. It is bold.

But it’s not the bud of the redbud I want to talk about, it’s the trunk — often gnarled, like the most venerable of the Yoshino cherries.

When I see a twisted trunk I think of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio:

On the trees are only a few gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected. … One nibbles at them and they are delicious. Into a little round place at the side
of the apple has been gathered all of its sweetness. One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground
picking the gnarled, twisted apples and filling his pockets with them. Only the few know the sweetness of
the twisted apples.

In spring our eyes are drawn to extravagant bloom and brilliant color. But underneath are the crooked trunks, which are beautiful all year long. They are sturdy in their imperfections. They are as sweet as twisted apples.

Unbroken

Unbroken

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I finally read the book Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand. Published in 2010, this is the story of Louis Zamperini, Olympic athlete and World War II airman who was shot down over the Pacific.

Zamperini and two other crew members drifted thousands of miles (47 days with sharks constantly encircling their flimsy raft) before being captured by the Japanese — and their real troubles began.

Beaten, starved, humiliated — but somehow never giving in — Zamperini survived the war and the first difficult years that followed. He has lived a rich, full life.

It’s an old-fashioned good read, and it stays with you. Not the details of plot, but the lessons of character. Read a book like Unbroken and it’s difficult to feel sorry for yourself.

Double Duty

Double Duty

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In the midst of a long-postponed office clean-up, looking through every file folder, feeling virtuous about the growing pile of to-be-recycled papers, I learn that my e-mail is being upgraded. Quick, I have to purge my electronic files, too.

Are we the only generation who will straddle this digital divide? What does it mean to live with one foot in the world of paper, books, interview notes printed and stapled, marked-up manuscripts — and the other in e-mail, text messages, tweets, jpeg and mp3 files?

Does it make us more tolerant? More inventive?

Or does it just make us more tired?

Empty Shelves

Empty Shelves

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I walked into our local bookstore a few days ago to find an empty space where most of the books used to be. Shelving stacked in corners. A few sections still intact, history, business, religion. But fiction? Gone. Children’s books? Decimated.

The bookstore in Union Station, my go-to place from the office, that one is closing, too.

It’s enough to make a print person crazy! I know the codex is doomed. I know that three-year-olds have kindles.  I know that libraries have become “media centers.”

But can’t we take this a little more slowly? Aren’t these transformations supposed to take generations?

I guess even change is changing.

People and Places and Things

People and Places and Things

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In his book The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss, Edmund de Waal tells the story of 264 small Japanese figurines called netsuke that generations of his family collected, displayed, lost and found. Made of ivory or wood, these tiny carvings of people or animals are delicate but strong. A cooper making his wheel. A rat with a curved tail. A hare with amber eyes. If you carry one around in your pocket, it “migrates and almost disappears amongst your keys and change. You simply forget it is there.”

The netsuke are by no means the most valuable artifacts the Ephrussi family possesses, and when the Nazis storm their Vienna home in April of 1938, a loyal maid with an ample apron manages to smuggle the statues out of the house. Everything else — the paintings, silver, porcelain, jewelry, an entire library of cherished incunabula — “the accumulation of all the diligence of the family, a hundred years of possessions” — was taken.

I’ve read other accounts of the Holocaust. This one moved me more than almost any other. The objects people touch and cherish are the keenest and saddest reminders of their absence.

After the war, the maid, Anna, gives the netsuke back to the family, and de Waal eventually inherits them. He treasures the figurines, but he also finds them an affront. “Why should they have got through this war in a hiding place, when so many hidden people did not? I can’t make people and places and things fit together any more.”

This book is not only about people and places and things; it’s also about love and loss and endurance.

(I cherish our old cuckoo clock, and — even though my family disparages me for it —the worn wallpaper, too.)