April 2022
Books read:
- All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine Wilkinson
- The Professor’s House by Willa Cather
- MINE! How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives by Michael A. Heller and James Salzman
- Bewilderment by Richard Powers
- The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler
Trails walked:
- Anne U White Trail near Boulder (April 11th)
- Foothills/Wonderland Lake trail near Boulder (April 11th)
- Royal Arch meander near Boulder (April 18th)
- Mt. Sanitas/Lion’s Lair/Sunshine Canyon loop near Boulder (April 22nd)
Song(s) of the month – Waxahatchee
Scientist Spotlight – Nikola Tesla
Baseball is back! OK, I can hear the groans across the internet...baseball is boring...it's a dying sport....only old white men watch baseball...it's too slow...the season is too long...the games take too long...it's soooo boring....OK, well even though much of that may ring true for many, I still love the sport (full disclosure: I'm an old white guy). I love the strategy, the talent it takes to hit a little ball moving towards you at 100mph using a curved and skinny bat, I love the ballet of turning a double play, I love watching grown men act like little boys after a walk off home run, and face it, the only two places where hot dogs actually taste good are on camping trips and at baseball games. Thanks to daughter's boyfriend's connections, seven of us were able to attend a Colorado Rockies vs Chicago Cubs baseball game on a crisp and cool Saturday night this month for free! It was the first baseball game for our grandson and the smile on his face in this photo with his dad will tell you all you need to know about the future of baseball:
He lasted five innings before getting antsy, and for a two-year-old that's pretty darned good. OK, maybe baseball games should only last five innings because many people these days now have the attention span of a two-year-old. The game was fun with all the Cubs fans chanting "let's go Cubbies" even though their beloved Cubs didn't win the game. We got to witness two monster home runs from the Rockies' power hitter CJ Cron (one of them sailed 466 feet!). We were lucky to be able to attend for free. I think the only way baseball truly survives is to find a way to make the games affordable for families to attend live. If we would have had to pay for 7 good tickets, parking, and food, the bill would have amounted to well over $500. How many families can afford that? At least the Rockies allow you to bring in outside food and drinks unlike many other ballparks; that saves a quite a bit right there. Major League Baseball makes so much money from TV revenues that you'd think they could find a way to make this happen. Until then though, there will always be a high school game, or minor league game, or even a little league game to attend for free or some small fee. Play ball!
While all of this month's hiking has been along the foothills of Boulder, my reading has taken me to the incredible fictional worlds of Willa Cather, Anne Tyler, and Richard Powers; plus two great non fiction reads, one about the climate crisis written in a series of essays by some incredible women and one on our human history of ownership, appropriately titled MINE!
Elon Musk has been in the news this past month. The founder of PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, and other ingenious companies wants to change the face of Twitter. Time will tell if he succeeds. April also included the 52nd anniversary of Earth Day, so I thought that I would spotlight the scientist after whom Musk named his now famous electric vehicle. Say what you will about Elon Musk, but he may be the one person most responsible for allowing Ukraine to fend off Russia up to this point and also it’s difficult to find any single individual who has done more to combat climate change with the battery technology he’s advanced and the success of Tesla. Musk named the car company Tesla after the inventor because it uses AC induction motors “which is an architecture (Nikola)Tesla developed.” According to Musk, Tesla deserves “a little more play than he gets in current society.” So, here’s just a little more play:
Tesla, an ethnic Serbian, was born in what is today Croatia, but what was then (1856) the Austrian Empire. His father was an Eastern Orthodox priest and his mother was an uneducated but apparently brilliant woman who made her own mechanical appliances and memorized epic Serbian poems. He completed his high school degree at a special engineering school where his professors thought he was cheating due to his ability to perform integral calculus in his head. He had a photographic memory and eventually spoke eight different languages. He nearly died from cholera after graduating high school and credited the words of Mark Twain and his foray into nature for his recovery from the illness. He attended college in Graz in what is now Austria, but never graduated. He drifted for a few years and eventually ended up working for a telegraph company in Budapest where he helped to completely redesign their central station. Next, he worked in Paris for the Edison Electric company installing light bulbs throughout the city but quickly graduated to designing dynamos and motors. At 28 he emigrated to the US and worked for Edison Machine Works in New York helping to electrify the city. But he only lasted six months before he eventually started his own company, Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing. He developed some patents, but eventually his investors abandoned him, and he was left for broke. He resorted to digging ditches for $2 a day. Eventually he found other investors who led him to providing his electric motor designs to Westinghouse where in a few short years he became independently wealthy from his proceeds.
With his newfound wealth, Tesla went on to make discoveries in several areas, including electrical generators, X-Rays (possibly predating Rontgen’s discovery by weeks), radio-controlled boats, and wireless communications. On a local note, he set up a lab in Colorado Springs in conjunction with the El Paso Power Company to test his wireless telegraphy technology (he wanted to send a wireless communication from Pike’s Peak to Paris). He ended up with over 300 patents in 26 different countries. Even though he had many good ideas, like most great inventors, he had several bad ones too, the most notorious of which was his superweapon that he called “teleforce” but which was cynically called the death ray. I’m pretty sure that Elon Musk appreciated all of the inventiveness and audacity of Tesla because it reminds him of himself.
He was socially complicated, sort of like Musk. He never married or had any serious relationships. He believed that anyone deemed an undesirable parent should not be allowed to reproduce (there didn’t seem to be any indication of his believing in a master race however). On one hand he highly praised women and believed they would eventually exceed men in all things, but on the other hand he made disparaging comments about women losing their femininity by trying to attain more political power. He rarely slept more than two hours per night and at one time worked for 84 straight hours on a project.
Tesla died in New York City at the age of 86, likely from injuries he received 5 years earlier after being hit by a (non-self-driving) taxi.
When I first heard the song Swan Dive a few years ago I thought that it was one of the saddest songs ever written (right up there with John Prine's Sam Stone and Townes van Zandt's Tecumseh Valley). And yet the song was sung to a tune that sounded like a Buddy Holly melody with that rolling guitar and drum beat. I liked it so much that I learned to play it (badly) on the guitar. I’ve heard a few Waxahatchee songs since then but I’d never done a deep dive until recently.
Katie Crutchfield is Waxahatchee. She started performing under this name in 2011 at the age of 22 (after 5 years in a punk band with her twin sister) and recorded her first album, American Weekend, in 2012. That album is very sparse and dark, with acoustic guitar only (and an old sounding piano on one of the songs). She recorded her fifth album, St. Cloud, in 2020. Although the songwriting between her first and her latest album is still stellar, the outlook is more hopeful on St. Cloud. A lot of that is likely explained by the fact that she decided to become sober in 2018. In an interview with the Detroit Metro times she said, “I talk a lot about the trope of the tortured artist,” Crutchfield says. “Like, we have to be these insane messes in order to make something or to tell a story that’s worth telling. I’m 100% guilty of that, and that’s very much the mindset I’ve had for a long time. So, through getting sober, and trying to just be mentally and physically healthy, and focus my energy on that, I was definitely trying to prove to myself that I could make my best album yet... I feel like I can still do this and have it be meaningful and have it be something people can relate to, and still make it dark and sad without making myself the victim.” And I believe that she has succeeded in making her best album yet. All of her work is incredible, but St. Cloud seems like her masterpiece to me. It was impossible to pick just two songs from that album for this blog, they are all great.
Some of the life lessons Crutchfield has learned in her young life took me 50 years to figure out. From an interview in The Fader in March of 2020: “… I feel like I'm softer now. When I was younger, I was hardened to the world and wanted to take everything on, but now I'm gentler with myself and with other people.” And from the song Fire on the St. Cloud album – “I’m wiser, and slow, and attuned.” I feel like I’ve only recently become wiser, slower, and more attuned, part of which includes being gentler with people (a trait that seems to be disappearing around the world). Here are just a few of the many great songs by this incredible singer songwriter from Alabama:
Grass Stain – From her debut album, American Weekend, just an acoustic guitar and words that pierce the soul, like most of the songs on that first album.
I'll embrace all of my vices
And we'll black it out
Or at least slow everything down
And I'll fish for compliments
And I'll drink until I'm happy
Noccalula – Also from her debut album this song reminded me a bit of Tom Waits’ Innocent When You Dream. It’s sung to the music of what seems like a slightly out of tune piano being played on an old record.
Allison's only calling me when her life's falling apart
So I pour it tall and talk to myself in my head alone
But it's really better until I learn how
To gracefully let someone in and back out
Swan Dive – A sad tale of a dysfunctional relationship. Granted, many great songs have been written around this topic, but this one just blows you away.
And I'm ruled by seasons and sadness that's inexplicable
And we will find a way to be lonely any chance we get
And I'll keep having dreams about loveless marriage and regret
Here’s the studio version that I first heard:
This live sound-check version perhaps shows more of the raw emotion of the song:
Recite Remorse – From her “rock” album called Out of the Storm. I can’t pinpoint exactly why I love this song, but likely it has to do with the Neil Young-like organ droning on in the background, creating this tension, while she sings lyrics like the following:
Reciting lines of remorse
I was losing my mind, yeah
I was halfway out the door
Her twin sister plays the organ and sings background vocals in this live studio version from KEXP in Seattle:
Arkadelphia – Any of her original songs from her latest album, St. Cloud, could be represented here, it’s that solid all the way through. I picked this song because it has such incredible descriptions that you feel like you are part of the story. Here’s what Crutchfield said in Pitchfork Magazine about this song: "Pitchfork: Is Arkadelphia Road a real place?
Yeah, it’s in Birmingham. The climax of this song took place there. This song is so fu***d up. I knew when I wrote it that I will never be able to really tell the story, because it’s not my place. It’s about someone I have known for a very long time who struggled badly with addiction. It starts with this imagery of the South from my youth and conjures this innocence. Then the middle part takes you into the thick of the addiction: it’s truly dire, it’s life or death. I have struggled, but not like this person did. So it’s just relating to them, trying to connect, and almost feeling like you’re getting ready to say goodbye. At the end it’s this whole thing of recovery and trying to do the next right thing in life. It ends in this sweet little place that says, “We’re doing our best.”"
I hope you know I did what I could
We try to give it all meaning
Glorify the grain of the wood
Tell ourselves what's beautiful and good
Light of a Clear Blue Morning – Also from St. Cloud, this is a brilliant cover of the great Dolly Parton song about hope, new beginnings, and the strength to carry on. I thought this would be the appropriate song to end this short story about Katie Crutchfield as she has come out of alcohol addiction. Juxtapose this song with Swan Dive and you can almost see Katie Crutchfield pulling herself up out of the darkness:
Every time I read a book on climate change I learn something new, and there is a lot to learn here. For me, the science of soil helped sew together many of the books on nature I’ve read in the past year, including The Overstory, Braiding Sweetgrass, Under a White Sky, and The Living Mountain. In addition to the 2 editors who gathered this collection, there are essays and poems by 57 different women. They all give me hope; the girls in high school giving up their normal teenage years for this fight, women from all walks of life, different races, different economic and cultural backgrounds, different educational and vocational backgrounds. Really impressive. I will have to say though, that this is not a book for anyone denying or doubtful that climate change is taking place. It’s for those who know it’s happening and need a dose of hope and reality. If you’re a denier or a doubter then this book would likely scare you into continuing to be a denier or a doubter because it all seems like just too much to change. Even the editors said: “this book is for everyone concerned about our shared future. For everyone seeking fresh perspectives and bold ideas. For those who value diverse voices on the pressing issues of our day. For those already involved and those still discovering what role they might play.”
Of the 57 chapters these were my favorites: Beyond Coal MARY ANNE HITT; Sacred Resistance TARA HOUSKA ZHAABOWEKWE; Public Service for Public Health GINA MCCARTHY; Mothering in an Age of Extinction AMY WESTERVELT; Being Human NAIMA PENNIMAN; A Letter to Adults ALEXANDRIA VILLASEÑOR; Calling All Grand Mothers ALICE WALKER; Like the Monarch SARAH STILLMAN; Community Is Our Best Chance CHRISTINE E. NIEVES RODRIGUEZ
It was impossible for me to pare down the list of great lines in this book. I tried, but it just overwhelmed my blog post. So instead of listing them all below, I’ve included them in this Google Doc that you can read or not. Well, OK, here are a few lines to whet your appetite to open the Google Doc link:
To address our climate emergency, we must rapidly, radically reshape society. We need every solution and every solver. As the saying goes, to change everything, we need everyone.
You don’t have to know the details of the science to be part of the solution. And if you wait until you know everything, it will be too late for you to do anything.
In 1970 a Hopi elder from the village of Hotevilla came forward and shared these words about the future we were facing: "Nature will speak to us with its mighty breath of wind. There will be earthquakes and floods causing great disasters, changes in the seasons and in the weather, disappearance of wildlife, and famine in different forms. There will be gradual corruption and confusion among the leaders and the people all over the world, and wars will come about like powerful winds."
Before my grandchildren were born, 2050 seemed far away. Not anymore. They are the faces of climate change for me. It’s that personal. (amen Gina McCarthy)
Responding to climate change requires a range of actions at all levels—not just a price on carbon emissions but laws, regulations, and the right targeted incentives; technological advances; divestment from fossil fuels and reinvestment in solutions; coups by enlightened shareholders; winning litigation against fossil fuel companies; and winning elections to put climate champions in power. It requires shifting budgets from dirty energy to clean and shifting agricultural practices to improve soil health. It requires phasing out fossil fuel–based fertilizers, pesticides, plastics, and other synthetic chemicals that have imposed immeasurable damage on our health, our ecosystems, and the biodiversity that keeps our planet alive. Each one of these efforts is necessary, and success will not happen without people demanding and embracing them.
In the winter of 2018–19, the western monarch butterfly population dropped below thirty thousand—a drop of 86 percent in a single year. Like the monarch butterfly,” notes the artist Favianna Rodriguez, “human beings cross borders in order to survive.”
It seems that the story’s theme is sort of an exploration of the old world vs the modern world (as it was at the time), and the professor is caught in the middle, trying to account for his life as he has aged into his 50s. As the novel begins, Tom Outland is introduced as a former student of the professor’s who had eventually invented and patented a new type of airplane engine but lost his life fighting in World War I before he could reap any benefits of his invention. So one of the best characters I’ve read is already dead as the novel begins. We’re briefly introduced to him when the Professor recalls the day he first met Tom, and wow, what a description! I wanted to know more about him right away and was worried that I wouldn’t. Luckily the entire 2nd section of the book was Tom’s description of his life which he recounted to the Professor over many discussions throughout their short time together. That life included being orphaned as a toddler while his parents were heading westward in a covered wagon, being raised by a kind foster family, and eventually working for the railroad and for cattle ranchers in New Mexico. During his ranching days he discovers ancient cliff dwellings on the Blue Mesa which hadn’t been disturbed since it’s residents mysteriously disappeared. Cather’s description of the Blue Mesa and Tom’s emotions as he spent more and more time here are priceless.
Even though Tom Outland was my favorite character, I found myself relating quite a lot to the professor and his examination of his life as he has aged. His life really was a good one. Raised in Michigan and Nebraska he then lived in France as a young man where he met the love of his life; became a professor at a university near his beloved Lake Michigan; had two wonderful daughters who married two good husbands; he wrote a six-volume history of Spanish Exploration that was well received; and he helped an uneducated, but brilliant Tom Outland reach the point of scientist and inventor. So what was he trying to understand about his life and what was causing his consternation? All of that is sort of left open ended, but I think that it mostly had to do with his eventual discontent with the modern world and what it’s led to.
Here are some of her great and descriptive lines from the book:
In the long hot summers, when he could not go abroad, he stayed at home with his garden, sending his wife and daughters to Colorado to escape the humid prairie heat, so nourishing to wheat and corn, so exhausting to human beings.
…it was the one place in the house where he could get isolation, insulation from the engaging drama of domestic life.
A man long accustomed to admire his wife in general, seldom pauses to admire her in a particular gown or attitude, unless his attention is directed to her by the appreciative gaze of another man.
There was something lonely and forgiving in her voice, something that spoke of an old wound, healed and hardened and hopeless.
The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own.
This country’s split in two, socially, and I don’t know if it’s ever coming together (this was about prohibition…sounds like nothing’s changed)
Is it merely that you know too much, I wonder? Too much to be happy?
A story of youthful defeat, the sort of thing a boy is sensitive about—until he grows older.
(discovering ancient ruins) comes to you as a sort of message, makes you feel differently about the ground you walk over every day.
That village sat looking down into the canyon with the calmness of eternity.
The arc of the sky over the canyon was silvery blue, with its pale yellow moon, and presently stars shivered into it, like crystals dropped into perfectly clear water.
I can scarcely hope that life will give me another summer like that one. It was my high tide.
He had made something new in the world—and the rewards, the meaningless conventional gestures, he had left to others.
She hadn’t any of the sentimentality that comes from a fear of dying. She talked about death as she spoke of a hard winter or a rainy March, or any of the sadnesses of nature.
The trailhead has room for maybe 30 cars. There were only 2 here when I started and around 12 when I finished. I imagine it’s pretty full on weekends in the summer. A lot of work went into building this 1.7-mile trail. All 19 creek crossings contain huge flat rocks that had to have been placed here by heavy machinery. And there are several spots with nice steps cut out to make uphill climbing easier. It’s a great trail for families with small kids or for folks wanting an easy and pleasant outdoor walk with the sound of rippling waters nearby. There are a couple of 5-6 feet waterfalls at around 1.2 miles into the hike that would be great places to stop and hang out. The trail follows Four Mile Creek until it ends at a private property boundary sign.
According to a note I saw on ProTrails “The Anne U. White Trail is one of the few places in Boulder's Front Range trail network where you may find the Calypso Orchid (also known as a fairy slipper or Venus slipper). This perennial member of the orchid family has small pinkish-purple flowers accented by a white lip, dark purple spots and yellow beard.” In reading about this interesting flower, it seems that it’s endangered in some US states, but not Colorado. It is fairly rare because it has a mycorrhizal relationship with only certain types of fungi. It blooms in late May through June; I may just have to come up here then to see if I can find it.
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| Perfectly placed rocks made the stream crossings easy and fun |
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| Very peaceful waters |
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| Small waterfalls along the way |
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| Trail skirting a rock overhang |
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| Nice pool below a small waterfall |
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| Lots of places to lounge near the water |
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| End of the trail after 1.7 miles |
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| Back at the trailhead a new home is being constructed, it won't be inexpensive! |
- Can you sell your kidney? Your stem cells? Your plasma? Your eggs?
- Why deny adults the ability to pay off a mortgage by selling a kidney instead of working in a coal mine or convenience store?
- Is it ok to pay someone to hold your place in line for concert tickets or to attend Supreme Court rulings?
- Is it ok that Disney allows you to cut in line if you pay them enough money?
- You can give away your child (adoption) but can you sell your child?
- Can you rent out your womb (surrogacy)? With your own eggs or others’ eggs?
- Do you own everything below and above the land you purchased? What about drones that fly too close? What about water or oil or gold under your land? What if someone has been living on your land for years without your knowledge? Is it theirs now?
- Do you really own that ebook you purchased on your Kindle? Or that movie you bought on Amazon?
- Who “owns” the space between the airline seat in front of you and your knee space?
- Can you sue someone whose trees shade your solar panels?
- After a snowstorm, why does a chair in the street hold your parking space in Chicago, but in New York you lose the space and the chair?
- Why can strangers in half of America come onto your unfenced land without permission and forage wild plants but not pick apples?
Along the way you learn about many fascinating aspects of history which have led to present laws, from The Homestead Act to Spanish Community Property Laws vs English Common Laws, to rules passed in the US regarding slavery and Native Americans. You learn about the scattered laws between countries and between states in our own country that can impact your financial status greatly when divorcing or retiring or dying (and surprisingly most of the laws don’t even reflect red/blue political leanings). I really enjoyed this compelling book, but I feel like I would have to read and re-read it several times to completely understand the breadth of what the authors cover. If you want a brief overview, check out the authors’ web page on the book.
Even the titles of each chapter are provocative:
Chapter 1: First Come, Last Served
Chapter 2: Possession is One-Tenth of the Law
Chapter 3: I Reap What You Sow
Chapter 4: My Home is Not My Castle
Chapter 5: Our Bodies, Not Our Selves
Chapter 6: The Meek Shall Inherit Very Little
Chapter 7: The Future of Ownership – and the World
Like All We Can Save, there were too many great lines to include in the blog. So I’ve placed them in this Google Doc if you want to read them. They are amazing, so I highly recommend it. But, again, here are a couple to whet your appetite:
Toddlers are relentless in their struggle to get ahold of what they want. These childhood battles are where humans start learning how to assert and defend our stuff, while we begin to understand and defer to others.
If people actually enter your land without permission, then openly and continuously possess it for long enough (eighteen years in Colorado), they can claim it as their own.
The list of conflicts over land possession is as long as the Earth is large and as old as time. Consider conflicting claims today in Jerusalem between Israelis and Palestinians, in Havana between current residents and Miami exiles, in Kashmir between Indians and Pakistanis, in Crimea between Russians and Ukrainians. Physical possession is powerful and not always aligned with abstract notions of historical justice and morality.
The most extracted mineral in the world today, exceeding by weight all the fossil fuels we pump, is sand and gravel, used for beach nourishment along with fracking, land reclamation, concrete, and glass.
Prohibiting (kidney) sales ensures the premature deaths of an estimated 43,000 people annually in America, the same death toll, as one study puts it, “as from 85 fully loaded 747s crashing each year.” By contrast, in Iran—the only country that currently allows sales—no one dies waiting for a kidney.
Slavery is the antithesis of self-ownership. It’s the original sin of ownership in America.
Until Congress passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974, banks could deny women credit cards if they did not have male co-signers.
In Genesis, Sarah comes to Abraham and says, “God has kept me from bearing a child; please lie with my handmaid; maybe I shall have a son through her.” Hagar then gives birth to Ishmael. Disputes between the descendants of Sarah and Hagar, Isaac and Ishmael—Jews and Muslims—continue to this day.
Silicon Valley emerged, not by MIT in Massachusetts, but next to Stanford in California. Several studies attribute part of the difference between these tech hubs—and this is trillions of dollars in value and hundreds of thousands of jobs—to noncompete clauses. Silicon Valley thrives because workers can and do easily move from job to job, pollinating ideas from company to company and turbocharging innovation. That is harder to do in stodgy Massachusetts, where noncompetes have long locked workers in place.
Today median wealth among white families is about ten times higher than among Black families. The history of Black land loss is one of the contributors to this racial wealth gap. Says one heir property researcher, “If you want to understand wealth and inequality in this country, you have to understand black land loss.”
Evidently Wonderland Lake is part of the historic Silver Lake Ditch waterway which was established in the late 1800s by J. P. Maxwell and George Oliver to bring water from the Arapahoe Glacier watershed into Boulder. The shareholders of this waterway handed down rights to their heirs and those buying their property so that many people still own rights to this water, which is untreated by the city of Boulder. There’s a whole Silver Lake Ditch Community that maintains the ditch and assures that water is being allocated fairly. So many interesting stories of water here in the West.
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| Foothills trail along the, er, foothills... |
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| Nice views of the flatirons with a huge dog park in the foreground |
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| Paragliders practicing their landing |
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| Paraglider park |
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| First view of Wonderland Lake |
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| Very informative sign |
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| Foothills reflections in the lake |
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| More lake reflections |
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| Pretty scene |
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| Reedy waters |
It's the story about a widowed astrobiologist father raising a 9-year-old son who is apparently somewhere on the autism spectrum. Their relationship is really special, somewhat reminiscent of the old TV show, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, for those of you my age or older. The dad refuses the school’s insistence that his son be put on drugs to calm him and ends up finding a professor on the leading edge of neurofeedback science. So already, you have an astrobiologist who is looking outward to the end of the universe and its billions of stars, being paired with neuroscience looking inward to our billions of brain cells. That’s quite a lot to cover. Add to that the impending extinction of species due to climate change along with a political environment unfriendly to science and you have a novel that feels very real. The neurofeedback seems to help his son, but earlier in the book the father had read to his son the great and sad sci fi book Flowers for Algernon, so you sort of knew that it might not last.
A lot of things happen in this novel that make it great, but in several chapters he sort of veers off into these other worlds where he and his son are sort of exploring planets that his astrobiology team may or may not have discovered recently. Although his descriptions of these planets seemed like a lot of work and were, I guess, poetic in a sense, they didn’t add anything to the story for me. I was far happier reading about father and son dealing with life, and with the fairly recent death of the wife/mom and her memory.
Powers is a philosopher who happens to be a great writer, and many of his ideas are pretty mind blowing. Here are some lines I enjoyed:
His second pediatrician was keen to put Robin “on the spectrum.” I wanted to tell the man that everyone alive on this fluke little planet was on the spectrum. That’s what a spectrum is.
We climbed up into the cove hardwood along a CCC path laid by unemployed boys not much older than Robin, back in the days before communal enterprise became the enemy.
(on meeting his future wife in the library): roll the dice and find your life catalyzed by another, one who, ten minutes later or three seats farther down at another computer screen, would have remained an undetected signal from deep space.
“What do you think happened to mom?” “I don’t know, Robbie. She went back into the system. She became other creatures. All the good things in her came into us. Now we keep her alive, with whatever we can remember.”
Two percent, Dad? He snarled like a cornered badger. Only two percent of all animals are wild? Everything else is factory cows and factory chickens and us?
“What do they want to put him on?” “I’m not sure his principal cares, so long as Big Pharma gets their cut.”
Cliff and Adele were a little stiff, welcoming us. They hadn’t yet forgiven my little atheist’s Thanksgiving assault on their core beliefs.
I wanted to tell him that democracy had a way of working out, however ugly things got. But my son had this thing about honesty.
At our wedding, in a part of the vows I didn’t know was coming, my wife-to-be gave me an oval loaf of ciabatta. This is not a symbol. It’s not a metaphor. It’s just a loaf of bread. I made it. I baked it. It’s food. We can eat it together tonight. From each according to her abilities, eh? Just stay with me, spring through winter. Stay with me when there’s nothing left. I’ll stay with you. There’ll always be food enough. I lost it, idiot that I am. I don’t even like bread. But I wasn’t alone. After an equally unrehearsed pause, Aly sighed and said, Okay. Maybe it is a metaphor. And all the crying people laughed, even my mother.
Maybe the last few months of neural feedback were hurting Robbie. In the face of the world’s basic brokenness, more empathy meant deeper suffering.
Earth had two kinds of people: those who could do the math and follow the science, and those who were happier with their own truths.
The dais filled with politicians who looked like yesterday’s America.
The trap evolution shaped for us: the entire species might have been on the line, and I’d still worry first about my son.
I wandered around the Chautauqua cottages a bit before reaching my car. It’s a very peaceful area around these small cottages, with great views of the Flatirons. Evidently some of them are privately owned, while others are available to rent from Colorado Chautauqua. I would certainly recommend staying in one of these cottages as the setting is spectacular, hiking trails are at your doorstep, there’s live music in the auditorium, and Pearl Street Mall is an easy 1.5 mile walk away.
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| I started at this connector trail on Baseline road |
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| Great flatiron views |
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| Really helpful junction signs with suggested hikes |
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| Cute collection of cairns |
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| Royal Arch trail gets steep in spots |
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| Paragliders above the rocks |
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| Trail gets pretty scrambly here |
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| Royal "arch" |
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| Royal Two Rocks Bumping Each Other |
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| Nice views of Boulder |
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| Someone was scrambling up this rock as I arrived |
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| Flatiron sticking out like a flat iron |
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| Nice views from atop Bluebird Mesa |
Like Breathing Lessons, The Amateur Marriage pairs two very different people in a marriage. In both novels, the woman is the more gregarious, fun, and volatile partner, while the man is the more quiet, demure, and detached partner. Any relationship that has this dynamic will have its challenges and I should know, because my wife and I very closely resemble this personality mix in a relationship (she’s the fun one). The tension between Michael and Pauline is palpable throughout their 30 years of marriage, raising kids, dealing with a runaway daughter, and then eventually an abandoned grandson.
The story begins in December of 1941 just after Pearl Harbor. Pauline meets Michael in the grocery store his mother runs and they fall in love at first sight. This part of the novel is a bit simplistic, and I was wondering if maybe this wasn’t going to be like the three great novels of hers I’d previously read. But she is a master at building characters and relationships, and that’s what she proceeds to do. He enlists in the army but is injured in basic training and they get married sooner than probably either of them expected, but life was sort of carrying them along at this point. Eventually kids come, a move to the suburbs, and more of life carrying them away in a marriage that only rarely seems to find its footing. After 30 years of arguing about seemingly small things, they get divorced. The initial awkwardness subsides, and they go their separate ways, both dating, him getting remarried, and eventually their runaway daughter returning after years of disappearance. The end of the story is brilliant; it shows an 80-year-old Michael walking through the old neighborhood where they had lived most of their 30 years of marriage while he has visions of his ex-wife (who has by now passed away). Even with the marital challenges, there is something to be said about a 30-year relationship and all the life that it includes. The Washington Post review said, “One cannot reasonably expect fiction to be much better than this.” I agree.
Here are some lines:
…he knew that on his deathbed, the last, best memory he would cling to would be the sight of Pauline in her red coat, flying down Aliceanna Street to see him off to war. Wasn’t that worth all the rest? Every other edgy, imperfect, exasperating moment of their marriage?
But the worst quarrels…were the ones where he couldn’t pinpoint the cause. The ones that simply materialized, developing less from something they said than from who they were, by nature. By nature, Pauline tumbled through life helter-skelter while Michael proceeded deliberately.
Till finally she had thought, I’ll end it. I’ll write him and end it; what do I care? What does it matter what people will say? While she was still choosing just the right words, though, Michael had his accident. You can’t jilt a man in a hospital bed.
The C word, Lindy called it. “Calm yourself; calm down”—always guaranteed to get their mother going.
For a moment, (their 3-year-old grandson) stood frozen within the circle of Pauline’s arms. Then he dropped his head to her shoulder. One grimy little hand reached around to pat her back. Michael felt his eyes fill. He had to look away.
When Michael saw how she went first down the steps but then turned back to wait for (the grandson) once she’d reached the bottom, diplomatically protective, he felt a flood of love for her. It occurred to him that his wife had amazing reserves of strength, that women like Pauline were the ones who kept the planet spinning. Or at least, they made it appear to keep spinning, however it might in fact be wobbling on its axis.
“We’ve been married thirty years, Michael. We’ve been through so much together! You can’t just toss that away because of one little thing I said!” “It wasn’t what you said,” he told her. “It was how I felt when you said it.”
All new parents thought their children were the only children in the universe, she reflected. They thought no others had ever been born; thought the world had been holding its breath all these centuries just for theirs.
People didn’t stay on an even keel in the Anton family. They did exaggerated things like throwing out their clothes or running away from home or perishing in spectacular crashes. Or showing up after twenty-nine years and wondering where everyone was.
He didn’t see himself as old. He had a stoop to his back, a tremor to his hands, and his face was some stern old codger’s he didn’t recognize in the mirror; but internally he was still twenty, riding off to war while a girl in a red coat waved goodbye.
they were way past the toddler stage—twelve and ten, more interesting to talk with now, surely, but no longer all chatter and giggles and unself-conscious glee.
Their conversations tended to skate across the surface a while and then break through to dark water with a crash.
The grass along the Lion’s Lair portion of the trail is extremely dry for this time of year. It’s not surprising that there have already been fires and evacuations along the Front Range. It wouldn’t take much to set this tinder on fire. Let’s hope for rain in the next few weeks otherwise it’s going to be a smoke and fire filled summer.
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| Great views from the top of Mt Sanitas |
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| Tree bending rocks |
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| Dancing trees |
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| Some nice views of the snow capped Rockies |
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| Nice gentle grade on the Lion's Lair trail |
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| Snow capped mountains hiding behind the crooked tree |
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| VERY dry conditions up here, summer could be scary |
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| Another tree bending rock |
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| Good junction signage |
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| Some crazy home designs along Sunshine Canyon |
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| The last mile plus back to the car |
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| First wildflowers coming up |