Northing

Hi!

Spring has sprung, as they say. The trees, most of them, burst their leaf buds about a week ago. It seemed like they went all at once, instead of species by species, though some seem slower than others. The oak leaves are still very small, although the red maple, I just noticed, are nearly full-sized. And I'd hardly noticed the oaks blooming at all before they started to leaf out, which surprised me. The forests are turning green, but it's still a sort of young, fuzzy green, and the canopy is still mostly open. I looked out the window the other day, and the young leaves on the shrubs and saplings, like fat green flakes, fogged up the previously clear forest understory like wet snow.

The silver maples are rapidly maturing their winged seeds, though their flowers only finished up a few weeks ago. Norway maple seeds don't mature until fall,or maybe late summer, though they bloom in late spring. I think silver maples, being river trees, try to get their seeds onto river banks bared by spring floods. Or maybe they're actually water-dispersed? They lean over the water, when they can. The sweet gum flowers, little pyramids of green, plush balls, are starting to fall, those that weren't fertilized, I guess. Cherry is flowering, though I don't know what kind yet, and all sorts of grasses and lawn plants are. The front steps are covered with little discarded vegetable scales, green with brown tips, that I guess popped off some species' buds when they burst, like training whewels discarded.

You, of course, probably don't care about any of this, being as they're plants you can't identify (yes, they're all angiosperms--you'd get that part, and you'd be right. There is no shame in accurate vagueness). One you might not even have encountered at all; the American hollies are dropping their old leaves, now. Your hollies are deciduous, and bare their winter branches in wet and frozen places. Ours are evergreen, their leaves thickened, leathery, lobed and spined, and their old leaves fall at the same time as their young leaves spring, giving our yard a fresh carpet of stickers. I walk around barefoot anyway, I don't care.

What I think you might care about is what I saw on the Weather Channel yesterday, a radar image of the Mid-Atlantic region with an angry-looking red and green ball, what looked like a round and very intense storm over the middle of Delaware, and almost half the size of that state. It was, the weatherman explained, a flock of migrating birds. He'd been following them on the maps all evening, and they were headed north while the wind blew towards the southeast. A flock of birds like a storm, all of them on a mission, and forty miles wide.

The weatherman also pointed out that the satellite image beneath the clouds showed real color, and where we are that color was green. The green lapped against the bases of the mountains to our west and ran north to a line that crossed New Jersey a little more than halfway up. Beyond that, the ground was greenish grey. Spring, sweeping North. It's made New York by now, I'll bet.

I'll be sweeping north soon, too, to New Hampshire and then, briefly, to Maine. I wonder if Spring will beat me there or not?

And it's almost a week now since another traveler went winging. Chris and I walked down to the little beach so we could watch the launch of the largest rocket yet to go up from Wallops Island. It was a test of a rocket that they hope to use to resupply the International Space Station.

We didn't make it to the beach in time, because we left the house too late, but we made it to the earthen causeway that links what used to be Cropper's Island to the mainland. We sat out on the cement fins that line the water there, and looked south.

And you know, we almost missed it. I was expecting, you know, something that looked like the shuttle going up, or virtually any rocket I've seen in the movies; a needle rising at the top of a column of fire and smoke, a line of smoke linking the distant rocket to its launchpad out of sight below. We didn't see it. I spotted what looked like an airplane, oddly reddish-orange and trailing a quickly-dissipating stub of a contrail. I dismissed it and looked away. Then Chris cussed, saying "Oh, f___, it's the rocket!" And indeed, it was; it had caught his eye by producing a true contrail as it passed through some appropriate layer of sky. As it rose higher, it stopped leaving the trail. What I'd seen was the exhaust fire itself.

Through binoculars, it shown a rising white needle, with a double feather of fire behind, one feather ahead of and outside of the other. They were reddish-orange, the same color that iron filings burn, if you drop them in a Bunsen burner flame. We watched the rocket for eons of seconds and it was totally silent, rising. It looked like it was moving horizontally across the sky, but it was really rising, probably vertically, or almost so, and as it approached the center of the sky, the zenith, it foreshortened until I could hardly see the rocket at all, only the glow of its fire at the back. And then it vanished. It had shrunk to a point, but it did not shrink smaller, it just went out, like a light. I had my binoculars on it when it did it, and I didn't lose it, it was in the middle of my field of vision. It just vanished. The sound had just reached us, a low, roaring growl, a huge sound.

That sound went on for several minutes, longer than we thought it would. Eventually it, too, vanished, and we continued our walk.

Later, we looked it up online and learned that the rocket's first-stage burn had lasted four minutes and that it had started to power down fairly abruptly at about  three minutes--on the video we saw online, filmed by a camera actually on the rocket itself, the red fire largely went out at that point, the exhaust turning clear grey, except for occasional flares. I'm not sure, but we could have watched it for a few minutes. Accounting for the time it was in flight before we saw it, it's possible what I saw when it vanished was the engine powering down. It's possible we heard all four minutes of sound. And the thing is, when that video showed the engine start to power down, the sky from the rocket's position appeared black, and the Earth curved below. Is is possible I heard a sound from the doorway of space? from the last possible moment before sound itself stopped in the air thin to vanishing?

I'm not a big fan of aerospace. It's not my kind of science, and except for communications and scientific satellites (pointed at Earth) and the search for potentially dangerous asteroids, I regard the space program as a waste of resources. And noise pollution, apparently, as it was astoundingly loud.

But that rocket sure was pretty.

Endurance

Hi, there,

I assume that you and yours are ok after this remarkable week, as I have not heard otherwise. I have not asked, because if something was wrong you would be too busy dealing with it  to respond. But I have been thinking about you.

What a week; political debates, explosions in both Boston and West, Texas, a massive manhunt, and today a rocket launch not far from my house. At least the rocket was both peaceful and intentional. This week I have joined in the national ritual of obsessively watching the news, as though watching something happen was the same thing as doing something about it, a kind of mass secular prayer.

What can I say, other than what I have already said, which is that I'm glad you apparently have not been blown up? I could say the expected things, but other people already have. And anyway, I don't feel the expected things. I never do at times like this. I don't feel a sudden flush of vulnerability. I'm always surprised, but not shocked, when violence erupts in some unexpected place. I mean, why shouldn't it happen here, beyond the fact that it shouldn't happen anywhere? I'm not overwhelmed by grief or sadness, either. I'm not angry. I'm mostly just solemn and alert, conscious that what is happening is a Big Deal.

Why am I not sad? I remember, after 9/11, sitting in a park near my house trying desperately to be grief-stricken, and it just would not come. I've learned since then to stop trying to feel what I don't, but it still puzzles me. I still wonder what it means about me, or what other people think it might mean about me.

Maybe I just don't understand violence or hate. I mean, I do understand, at least intellectually, several possible motives for this type of attack. What I don't understand is how anyone could actually want to kill other people. It's like how it's hard to properly appreciate the scale of interplanetary distances or the size of the national debt; they don't seem real. How can I be angry about something I can't quite believe? I don't understand hate and I don't understand hating, and I do not want to ever understand.

Then, too, if I'm going to have a knee-jerk emotional reaction, like sadness or fear, it's going to be to something personal and immediate. I was thinking about this the other day, by a lake inNew Hampshire. My personal, immediate situation did not include a bombing. My immediate situation included pine trees and brilliant blue water and a bath house, painted red, upon which a moth was trying, completely ineffectively, to blend in by resembling a grey patch of lichen. To move beyond the immediate, I have to think, and that changes my perspective. I want to know that my friends are ok, and I want to find out what is going on, what the scope of this attack may be, and what our country's response will be. I worry about the health and safety of our nation's Arabs, who of course had nothing to do with this attack, but unfortunately that is not likely to matter. I worry about the political repercussions and whether this will become another excuse to further erode or civil liberties and privacy. That day by the lake I didn't yet know who had planted the bombs, and I wondered if this attack would lead us, again, into war.

It's not that I can't feel sympathy for strangers far away. Occasionally a news story will strike home and reduce me to tears. Like an interview with a little Syrian boy who calmly described watching his neighbor killed by bombs. Or the documentary where they said bowhead whales can live two hundred years and so some of them can remember the height of whaling. Some carry old harpoon heads deep in their bodies. And I just started to sob, thinking of these animals and how American whaling, for us a matter of history we consider safely abandoned to the past, is still a living memory for them.

But these sudden windows on others' suffering are intermittent, unpredictable. They don't happen when everyone else is feeling the same thing.

I don't really want to respond to national tragedy by talking about myself, but I can't be the only one who doesn't feel the right feelings. Maybe I just want to make a pitch for the freedom to respond however one does.

What do you think?

-best, C.

Planning to Connect

Hi, there

I'm heading north next week for a brief visit--mostly on business, though I've arranged to have some social time as well. Maybe I should have asked you if you wanted to get together, but on short notice with such a narrow window, I assumed you would not. I don't even know if you'll be in the area yourself.

But I have been making plans with other friends. Everybody's busy, of course, and I don't want to sound intrusive or demanding, so when a friend and I were discussing whether to meet at a community event or to go for a walk, just the two of us, I couched the possibilities in very cautious, understanding terms. His response both startled and warmed me.

He said that his "slightly selfish request" was that we do both.

Of course, that is very convenient, because that is my preference as well--slightly selfish or not.  But beyond being convenient...it's not that I'm unpopular these days, most people like me, but when I try to make time to see my busy friends, I often feel as though I'm asking for a favor, a favor they are happy to grant, because they like me, but a favor nonetheless. I'm busy, too, but if someone showed up to visit, I'd do whatever I had to to make time to see them, and I'd be grateful that they had come. But no one comes, and when I go visiting I am cautious, careful to not wear out my welcome. I seem to be peripheral to most of the lives that are central to mine. For someone to want to spend time with me selfishly is a very great gift, the gift of being genuinely wanted.

But is that really what friendships are? A congruency of gentle selfishness, where I want your attention and you want mine, and so we trade? A year ago I would have said no. I was so dedicated to high-minded ideas of selfless generosity. Since then I have had reason to doubt that; it seems like no matter how hard I try to be generous, I still want something. I want to matter to others. I want my generosity to be helpful and wanted. And it isn't always, and when it isn't I feel just as rejected and thwarted as if I had wanted something for myself outright. So what is the point? Is it even possible to be anything other than selfish? Maybe a congruency of gentle selfishness is all there can be.

In any case, at this point, I want to be wanted, I want to relax into another's gratitude for my presence, to not worry that perhaps others have had enough of me and are hoping I'll take some hint...I want to at least not feel selfish for wanting a friend's company.

In the meantime, spring has sprung. The silver maples are setting seed, the heart-shaped ovaries of their tiny red flowers starting to widen, widen, towards they keys they will become. The red maples are close on their heels. I haven't noticed the elms lately, what they're doing, but I think the sweet gum is in flower now, or nearly so. Some of the grasses are flowering, as are the little herbs of the lawns and road verges and fallow fields--I don't know their names. The daffodils and forsythia are blooming in gardens and along roadsides here and there, maybe where houses used to be.

The birds sing all day, a wall of sound, a crowd of sound, a huge, chattering, musical crowd. Is there something about song that makes sound easier to detect? Annie Dillard wrote that it doesn't really matter why birds sing; the important question is why is it beautiful? I'm willing to argue that this is not the only important question, but I agree it is an interesting one. Maybe there is something about song, a certain class of sounds, that make them useful in a crowd of voices, and so both we and the songbirds are attracted to those sounds? But in that case, why don't we, too, speak in song? Why don't human crowds sounds like this?

I was listening the other day, listing to the almost solid wall of song, and it went on and on and on, hour upon hour. And just when I was thinking that I should tell you about it, it all stopped. All the birds stopped singing at once. If they were human, that would have been the moment when one of them, not realizing that it was the random moment for silence, would be carried forward by the momentum of speech to say something embarrassing into the lull. Let's see, what might embarrass a bird?

Anyway, they all started up again after about a minute.

I imagine they are simply identifying themselves, for the purpose of marking territories and attracting mates, and that while they may, indeed, find their own songs beautiful (why not? Humans often find our own work beautiful, even if we have prosaic reasons for working), I'm pretty sure they don't worry themselves about whether they are really wanted, and whether they should feel guilty for wanting to be wanted.

-best, C.

News

Hi, my friend.

Well, I'm officially sick; I have a cold. I don't get sick very often. I think the last time I had a cold I was a first year grad student. I remember Chris was up visiting for the week, and I couldn't take time off schoolwork to be with him, so I organized my week so that while he was up all my homework involved being outside with him. I wasn't sick the whole time, but I remember one day I went out to the airport bog to look for maleberry for my twigboard assignment, and it was all snowy and drizzling and grey and I couldn't get a good look at anything and I think I was running a fever stumbling around in the snow. So Chris took me to the little Indian restaurant in the airport and fed me tea and hot, savory stuff whose name I cannot remember except that it was green, and then for dessert these little spherical cakes floating in rose-scented syrup. And we sat and ate together and looked out at the wet snow.

So that was a very lovely way to be sick.

This time both of us are sick. Chris is sicker than I am, and has been for several days. He's coughing and spitting and blowing his nose every hour or so. At least he doesn't seem to be running a fever anymore. I have a milder version of the same thing. I don't consider myself sick just because I cough a little, but only when I have to change my habits to take care of myself. Today I felt all fuzzy and distracted for a while and my lungs hurt, so I think that counts.

In what is likely more interesting news:

The silver maples are flowering here, and have been for weeks now, since right around the time of the Climate march on Washington. Elms, too, though I haven't seen one lately. The daffodils are up, though they're slower than they were two years ago, when Chris and I used daffodils upon daffodils to decorate our wedding. A neighbor says a group of bufflehead ducks on the tidal creek have declined to migrate so far. He doesn't know why. For a week or two on every walk I saw a great blue heron in exactly the same part of a short canal, along with a group of ducks, but since then the heron has gone elsewhere. The ducks haven't. They still fly off when they see me. Once I saw what looked like large whitish birds dancing as a pair in the water. I've seen documentaries where birds dance on water side by side like that, but I don't know which of our birds do that and I didn't get a good look. I'm not even sure what I saw, just white bodies, dancing.

I am sure that I saw a pileated woodpecker clicking low down on a loblolly pine tree near the house where Kayla, the chocolate lab, lives. I don't know the names of her people. Kayla was not out at the time, but my beagle spotted the bird and strained at her leash at the bird, who flew away. I know, too, that I saw a bird's nest, I'm not sure what kind and I don't think it's in use, tucked inside a mailbox in front of a house listed for sail. Some junk mail lays on the doorstep of this nest and the mailbox is half, just half, way open.

I want to spend more time outside, being physically active. I used to live and work in the woods. Now I mostly live and work online. And I like writing. I really like writing. I just don't like all the sitting it seems like the different necessary parts of my life won't all fit in the same life at the same time. Maybe I just have to swing from one partial objective to another slowly over time and find in constant change what cannot fit in stasis., but I don't know what my next objective should be. I am glad we humans often get such long lives to lead.

Long life to you, too, my friend.

-best, C.

Voices

Hi, my friend,

How are you? How is your daughter? I've never asked after her, and you rarely tell me what she is up to, but when you do your voice softens, a comforting, vocal gleam. I do not know if anyone's voice softens for me like that; my own father has a different expressive style than you do, I guess.

I'm thinking about fathers, about parents, especially at present because I've just come from the home of my sister and her family, including my newborn my niece. She is small and round and pink and blotchy, and when she cries she makes the most extraordinary shapes with her mouth, rounding it, squaring it, extending her lips forward, pulling them back into a grimace; it's like she doesn't yet know what to do with her mouth, other than make noise with it and suckle with it. Her face was immediately and unaccountably familiar to me. A trip to the family photo album to inspect old baby pictures reveals that she looks a great deal like my mother, so no wonder. My niece seems both more demanding and more affectionate than her brother did at that age.

Not that my nephew is not affectionate. My primary job these past few days has been to keep him occupied, and he spent much of this evening alternating between leaping into my arms for great big hugs and attempting to feed me pieces of his toast. But he is also fairly self-contained; he can occupy himself when need be, he is generally obedient and helpful, and he is at once entirely sure of what he wants and entirely confident that demands are unnecessary. He is an extraordinary little boy, and his affection seems more a generosity of spirit than any emotional neediness on his part.

I've been learning to play with him and learning also to answer his questions, most of which consist of asking the names of things. He is in that semi-verbal stage in which he can understand what is said to him and use a few words correctly to communicate, but a stranger would not understand any of his words because his pronunciation is terrible.

An emphatic "Da!" with a single nod of the head is "yes."

"Dis!" and "Da," without the emphasis or nod, are "this" and "that" respectively, and he uses them, with pointing, to ask for things to be named to him, or sometimes given to him.

"Go" or "do" is "goat," which means both "goat" and "animal." Any animal he does not know the name of is a go, although the animals he can now name more specifically include a "graf," or something similar-sounding,which means "giraffe." There is one in one of his picture-books.

"Da da da" also means "Daddy," but I have not yet heard him say "Mommy," or anything equivalent.

"Dis!" he says, pointing to a pile of books.

I pick up one. "This one?" I ask.

"Da!"

He sits in my lap and we open the book to the middle. It's a reference book on singing insects, written for grown-ups. He points at pictures.

"Dis!"

"Cricket! That's a cricket!"

"Dis!"

"That's another cricket!"

"Dis!"

"That's another kind of cricket--a MOLE cricket!"

"Dis!"

"ANOTHER mole cricket!"

"Dis!"

"Oo!, That's a TRIG. I didn't know about trigs. And look! According to the map, we're in its range! Maybe this summer you'll see a trig! Or hear it! It goes trr trr trr." I trill like a cricket as best as I can and he laughs. If this kid doesn't turn out to be a nature geek it won't be for lack of support from me.

"Dis!"

"Oo, that's a CICADA! They're very loud. They're just this big and they make a huge noise," which I imitate and he laughs, "they're only this big, but they make a noise THIS big, bigger! It just fills up whole trees, you wouldn't believe such a big noise could come out of such a little bug. And the earlier in the day they start making that noise, the hotter it's going to be. My Daddy taught me that."

He tires of the book and flops on his belly and looks at me and grins.

One of my favorite things has been explaining things to him. You'd think answering such simple questions as "dis!" over and over again would be boring, but it really isn't. I don't get bored because we are engaged in a process I fundamentally can relate to, the process of finding all sorts of things out. I like talking about live things and I like teaching, and I'm just as happy to do that with a toddler as with adults older and generally more experienced than I am.

We go for a walk and I name for him grass, sticks, other sticks, moss, a small piece of moss. I stop to investigate my own mysteries: a flattened and dehydrated stink bug; a fallen maple flower; a very cold and slow fly.... A turkey vulture drifts overhead, fairly low, and catches my nephew's attention. "That's a vulture," I tell him, "a vulture. Isn't it pretty? I think the way the sun comes through its wings is so pretty." My nephew watches the big, honey-dark bird intently until it soars out of sight. It astounds me that he probably doesn't remember the green of the growing season, when trees had leaves on them and the farm fields were full of vegetables and he was still too young to walk. Spring is coming, and it's going to be a truly amazing thing.

Back inside and the baby is crying. She does that a lot, while awake, for when she is neither eating nor bothered by something she mostly sleeps. Her father swaddles her tightly in a big square brown shawl and lifts her. She's hardly big enough to fill his hands. He puts on classical music and he dances with her. My brother-in-law is an accomplished dancer and his feet move through the complicated steps of some kind of waltz, back and forth across the dirty, toy-strewn floor, to an instrumental version of "Once Upon a Dream," from Sleeping Beauty, and the child quiets, calms, looks around, her eyes dark and star-filled as the ancient night.

I know you, I danced with you once upon a dream

I hadn't known I knew the words, but they spin themselves out from the spool of memory in my head,

I know you, the gleam in your eyes is so familiar a gleam

The little pink beauty in her father's arms begins to droop; her eyes shut. This kiss sends her to sleep, but my brother-in-law keeps dancing, mindful that she might wake if he stops, and he is enraptured by the music, too, perhaps, as his feet keep the intricate patten, back and forth and turn and step, gallant and tall upon the toy and blanket-strewn floor,

I know it's true that visions are seldom all that they seem,
but if I know you, I know what you'll do,
You'll love me at once, the way you did, once upon a dream.

Sometimes, watching him, I think of you, for you were once also the father of an infant, young and inexperienced and probably harried. You've told me nothing of those years, just as you've told me almost nothing of what your daughter is doing now, and little enough of your own life. What little I know of you is not fodder for my writing, not truly. If I am unavoidably a journalist even among my own family, I am not so with you. You are as inviolate, as camouflaged, as the heart of an old tree with its cargo of owlets, just hatched now, in the grey of early spring, and I shall not even search the somber trunks, though I heard the adult birds calling in the winter and I know they must be there. But I know you well enough to guess that you have been harried, long ago, by a newborn's squalling, sleep-deprived and frayed, and that once a newborn fell asleep in your arms, to the sound of your voice.

-best, as ever,
C.

Remembering Girls

Hi! I have news!

My first niece was born last night! So now I have a niece and a nephew. She was a large baby who debuted after a relatively short labor, and I know her name but I'm not going to use it here.

She doesn't know it, but she's been born into the family of a writer (technically, several writers) making her life the subject of public art from the beginning. I have mixed feelings about doing this, but obviously I'm going with the part of the mix that says to do it anyway. When she gets old enough to read her Aunt Caroline's writings, hopefully she'll feel warmed and welcomed by my attention. I always have by my father's writings. I don't know if he's written anything about his grandchildren. He doesn't have a blog.

She. A girl. The only thing I know about her, other than her name, is that she is a girl, and therefor a first for her immediate family, even if a somewhat less momentous first than her brother, who was the first grandchild on either side of his family. It's an odd thing, but although I am generally more socially comfortable with men than with women, and most of my friends are male, boys, male children, are something of a mystery to me. Perhaps it's because I had few male friends as a child, so I don't really know how male children work? But then, I had few female friends as a child, either. Part of it is certainly that when I think of maleness in the abstract, an exercise that must run to stereotype but might still have some validity, I think of things very much at odds with my idea of childhood. Largeness, for one; you people are nearly all bigger than me, and you have these big voices, and that does not fit very well with my idea of a baby. I do not personally look to males for protection or provisions, though neither do I generally fear male violence yet I am aware that boyish symbolism runs heavily to guns. I've seen the boy's sections of toy and clothing stores, and they are full of the symbols of violence. Guns, ninjas, superpowered red-caped fists, and the less obvious violence of fast cars, big machines, and bold, dark colors. So what is a boy, then? Abold, protective  warrior in training and yet at the same time this sweet little person who initially wanted to call all animals, even fish, "goat"? I realize that such stereotypes have little to do with actual people, and I do not fall prey to them in my dealings with adults, but with a boy whom I had just met a little over a year ago, what else had I to go on? I knew no more than "boy." And now there is a girl, of whom I, equally, know nothing.

One in and one out. Last week a woman I knew as a girl, when we were in high school together, died. She had fought hard and long against brain cancer, and she leaves behind a ten year old girl. She was younger than I am. Her funeral was yesterday, though I did not go. I hardly knew her, and I remember less than I once knew, but her death is unsettling nonetheless.

I do not take it personally that she was younger than I--I mean, that her death is not a creepy reminder of my own mortality. I already know that I am mortal, and that while I do not expect to die any time soon, and I make a point of trying not to do so, I am aware that people can die in their thirties. I mind only that she did not have very much time, and that she left behind such a young daughter. I'm going to try to do something for the girl, not like it sounds as though she needs anything we can give--clearly she mostly needs something we cannot give; she needs her mother back. But the gesture might be some small comfort, and anyway the people I went to boarding school with persist in being a sort of enduring club, something like, perhaps, the bond that forms among veterans. Ours was a weird school, and ours is a bond of shared experience that no one else shares, and so it persists across decades. And so I think it might be good to turn this bond and face it forward, not back, to try to begin a tradition of sticking up for each other. This little girl will not be the last child of our diaspora to need help.

I did not go to this woman's funeral, but I was pleased, even comforted, to have the option. It bothers me sometimes that when I do die, the people I went to grade school with will not likely hear of it. I had very few friends as a child, as I mentioned, and those few I had have all drifted away now. I contributed to that drifting, and for the most part I do not miss my old school mates, nor do I suspect they miss me. But I grew up with those people, they were the boys and girls I knew, the people I saw every day, except on weekends, most of the weeks of my childhood. And I do not now know for sure that any of them are alive. I assume that at least most of them are. It would be strange for a few dozen people from the same school to all die young. I do not miss them, but I feel...less substantial, knowing that so few people who knew me as a child know me now. But at least there are people who know me now who knew me as a teenager--not many of them liked me, either, and while I think somewhat more like me now, that's not really the point. I'm not worried about people liking me, because generally people do these days. The point is that I do not want to be dependent upon being liked to me known. So if someone thought to tell me that this woman I barely knew died, perhaps someone will think to tell other people when I do.

Closer to home, and apropos of very little, I miss you.

-best,
C.

Nature

Hi, there,

It has been a long time since I've written to you, here or otherwise. I've been busy, and I have not known what to say, but still you have been on my mind.

In the month or so so last wrote I have now and again thought of things I wanted to tell you. How the weather was unseasonably wrong in early January, how it chilled up and snowed then, and how the birds crouched on the lip of the feeders in the snow, female finches of some sort, a white streak on their faces near the eye, taking sunflower seeds one by one in their heavy bills. Each one chomped up and down on her seed, cracking the shell, till the shell fell in shards and she swallowed the seed, a uniquely bird method of chewing. How, more recently, the weather has been warming and I'm re-starting my practice of early morning walks, listening in my beginner's ignorance to the conversations of birds. What sounds a bit like the buzz of the teeth of a comb? Or maybe a single note on a kazoo? Bird or bug or something else, two or three of them call from the trees across the road in the evenings. Mornings are arguments among beings with complex, multi-note songs that I'm sure have some sort of mnemonic that I don't know. A great blue heron, and also a group of ducks, flush from the little canal almost every time I go by.

The other day I watched an Attenborough documentary on snakes. I know you are a fellow fan. He has become such an icon, so I'm hardly alone in my devotion, but something in me is always about seven years old again when I watch him.

On this occasion, the documentary began with him watching a small green snake slither along a fallen branch, a gentle, fond wonder shining on his face. Attenborough documentaries all have certain things in common. There's always a focus on species, not ecological patterns and not individual animals. There is usually no human context--you can't tell if he's filming in remote wilderness or seventy-five yards away from a car dealership. There is no narrative. You can't tell how Attenborough got somewhere, or what discovery process his team went through to set up a scene. No other humans appear on camera, but Attenborough himself is almost always there, and he brings the viewer there, too. The illusion of being just out for a walk with him, one on one, is almost total. And there is that fondness that lights him up, this contagious, beatific love for live things. For a snake, for a bird, for some rodent that uses a giant pitcher plants for a toilet, everything alive is just bathed in his fondness. I've seen you light up in a similar way, gesturing excitedly while some feathered live thing gets dizzy in your hand. I saw light first on his face.

What would have become of me if I'd never seen him?

I mean, I watched other documentaries as a kid, but few of them had a person I could identify with as its focus. There was Marty Stoufer, of course, and Jacques Cousteau, and to a lesser extent, George Page, but none of them served as a personal tour guide on camera. None of them role-modeled their relationship to the extra-human world on camera the way he did. I don't know whether I was always going to be an ecology geek, and recognized him as an example of what I could become, or if I became an ecology geek following the example of what I think was the first truly happy adult I'd gotten to know--because when he speaks directly to the camera like that, it's like you know him.

And all of this happened because in the early '80's my Dad decided he had a political problem with commercial television best solved by boycotting it. I'm not sure if he just found the big networks too irritating to watch anymore or if he actually thought his boycott would do anything, but the result was that we watched a lot more documentaries on public television. Including those by Sir David Attenborough.

It's an odd thing that on some level I seem to believe luck can be retroactive. As though one of these days that crucial decision of television won't have happened, and my life as I know it will vanish.

Aside from the flow of causality, the issue is nature vs. nurture. Who would I have been if the events I perceive as formative had happened differently? I used to be preoccupied with events that I thought had shaped me to be unhappy, identifying this or that place where I seemed to be scarred by history. Now I'm preoccupied with what worked, what I wouldn't trade, what I appreciate. This persistent judgment of events I can't now change either way is stupid. Yet I persist in it. A certain tolerance, a certain humor regarding ones' own irrationalities is a necessary form of humility, I think.

Nurture was on my mind not long ago specifically. I'm not sure if you noticed on Facebook, but my Dad has a new book out--not that my Dad is on Facebook, but his publisher is, so I've been treated to splashes of publicity and much-to-do about my Dad every few days. If you haven't noticed, I've been "liking" and "sharing" these things whenever I see them.

Chris and I went to a book signing my Dad did a while back. He read some, his publisher spoke glowingly about his talent and intelligence, people bought books and asked for his signature. My Dad signed each book dutifully with an air of mild surprise, as though he had been quietly minding his business when he was unaccountably accosted by his fans. He didn't seem to mind, he was just puzzled.

You have to understand, my Dad does not toot his own horn. He does not generally acknowledge having a horn. But all those things his publisher said are true. I should know.

-best, C.