The Space Inside Your Head

I just finished reading a novel I had previously "read" by listening. I approached this as an experiment. Would I catch more of the nuance when my eyes scanned ink on paper? Would I possess the story more fully?

The answer, so far, is inconclusive. While the spoken version brought forth the rhythm of the language, and the voice of the narrator captured its emotive power, the act of reading did what it always does for me: it created a private conversation between the author and me. It's a conversation that seems more completely "mine" when there's no intermediary such a narrator's voice. 

The words of the novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, say it better than I can: "Turn a page, walk the lines of the sentences: the singer steps out, and conjures a world of color and noise in the space inside your head."

The Tableau

When my children were young, I would often end the long days by trying to clear a path to the couch to read or relax for a few minutes before sleep. Often, though, the couch would be occupied.

It might be a stuffed bear, rabbit and dog having tea. Or a bevy of Barbies strutting their stuff. Whatever it was, I hated to dismantle it. I'd been so busy all day doing my job that I hadn't had time to appreciate the work my girls were doing, play being the work of childhood. But the little scenes were so dear that I knew I would never forget them. 

Now we've come full circle. It's my girls who are coming upon these sweet reminders of their children's play. Except when the toddlers are over here, which they were yesterday. When I went down to the basement after the flurry of departures, I found a little something the kiddos left behind. 

I'm not sure what's going on in this tableau, other than knowing it includes a block, a plastic rabbit, Playmobil girl, tiny doll wardrobe on its side covered with a piece of lavender fabric, and red plastic monkey from a game we once had called Barrel of Monkeys. Needless to say, I couldn't dismantle this right away —and I took a picture before I did.

Clumping

As we move ahead into this strangely early spring, I'm enjoying the flowers that have bloomed and noticing a feature about them that I may not  have fully appreciated before ... and that is clumping. 

There are clumps of Lenten roses, clumps of daffodils and clumps of snowdrops. It's just the way they grow and spread, I know. But the impression is one of abundance and joy.

It seems that flowers, like humans, enjoy the company of their kind. 

The Fact Checker

Do facts matter? How integral are they to the underlying truth? These questions and more were raised in the one-act play "The Lifespan of a Fact," which I saw last night with journalist friends.

The play and book on which it is based raise all sorts of questions about literary license, rights of authorship and fiction versus nonfiction. But for me it was also a trip down memory lane, as I recalled a fact checker I worked with at McCall's magazine. 

Carmen had a quick laugh and a determined air. She wore well-tailored skirts and blouses, and everything about her was precise, from her sturdy pumps to her tidy bob. When she appeared at my desk with a manuscript covered in red ink and pencil marks I always wanted to slink down into my chair, down, down, down until I could slide under my desk and hide out there a while. 

Too late, of course. Carmen knew I was there. And even if she didn't, she would hunt me down just as she did every fact in every article. I'm not a sloppy reporter, but everyone trembled in Carmen's wake. In a pre-Internet era, fact-checking was no easy task, but Carmen and her minions made sure that every piece in the magazine was shipshape and gospel-true. There were no questions about the lifespan of those facts. 

Strings Attached

This is not a complaint, so I hope the weather gods don't take it as one. But the human body is more comfortable when it stays in one temperature range for a season. When it's 70 degrees one day and 40 the next, it does something to a body. In short, it makes it shiver, then roast, then shiver again.

Today the high is forecast to be 80 degrees. This is February 23, I'll point out. Daffodils are blooming. Snowdrops and hellebores have been out for weeks. By Saturday we may have snow.

Perhaps this is just a cycle, a La Niña phenomenon. But  unseasonable winter warmth — and these crazy yo-yo cycles, too — now carry with them a tinge of guilt and fear. In their balminess are denuded forests,  smoke clouds, flooded homes, loss. 

I love warm weather. But not with these strings attached. 

(This photo was taken in Washington, D.C., on January 24, 2023.)

From Ordinary to Extraordinary

To the untrained eye this is nothing but an ordinary parking lot. But to me — and the other people who parked their cars here — it's a suburban trailhead. 

Yesterday I took two short walks, both of which began in parking lots. In each case, I had to find the paths, which took online research (which happened years ago) and on-foot exploration. Then I traipsed the paths themselves, an ongoing process of discovery. 

Who would guess that less than a quarter-mile from the lot above there are fox dens and creek bends and greening briars glittering with raindrops? 

The photo above was snapped quickly with no attention to angle or light. But I'm glad it looks as ordinary as it does. It's proof that around here, the ordinary can lead to extraordinary. 

TMT

While I've never been a clean freak, I do keep a relatively neat house. Just don't open any closets or drawers, and avoid the basement at all costs. 

But even I can experience what I've come to think of as TMT — Too Much Tidiness. 

With four friends over for dinner last weekend, the house had come perilously close to this condition. Waking up to a blank coffee table for the second morning in a row, I knew what I had to do. I marched down to the basement and brought up two armloads of magazines. 

Here are two years worth of National Geographics, a year and a half of Atlantics and various other publications, plus a couple of books for good measure. 

Ah yes, that's better. 

Emotional Minefields

Last week I went through files in the basement, an ongoing task. I ripped and shredded and came up with two bags worth of trash. It barely made a dent.

A weirder (to me) but also necessary form of clean-up is digital detoxing. In the course of updating my computer's operating system (one of those pesky to-dos I haven't tackled in a while), I realized that I may not have enough memory to install the new system.

So I've been prodding and poking in the digital bowels of my machine, finding all sorts of hiding places where large files lurk. Many of them are videos sent with text messages. Clicking on those videos yields blasts from the past, old work snippets, footage of dogs (not mine) romping in fields. Those are easy ones to delete. But the other day I found a video with a much-younger Copper dashing around the backyard, giving his much-larger dog cousins a merry chase. 

To see him again in his younger skin brought a tear to my eye. There was our own dear, frisky pup, bobbing and feinting and generally being his own irascible self. I used to think only hard-copy cleanup was an emotional minefield. Now I know otherwise. 

Always Evidence

I'm writing this post as a break from designing an economic system. It's a class assignment, of course. I don't design economic systems just for fun. 

But once I've gotten going on this project, it's more enjoyable than I thought it would be, somewhat like the hours I'd spend drawing pictures of houses when I was a kid. They had towers and secret passageways and all sorts of bells and whistles. I didn't worry about the cost or the plumbing. I gave my imagination full reign.

This assignment is not quite so free-form. We must explain what this system would produce and cite evidence to prove our case. But one thing I've learned in my brief time as a graduate student is that there's always evidence ... somewhere. I'll go and look for some now. 

(A market in Myanmar, 2017, part of a more sustainable agricultural system.)

No Map, No Phone

The trail was unfolding as it had the last few times I hiked it. I thought I knew where I was going ... until I didn't. 

Yesterday I took off for a stroll in the woods without a phone or a map. This was not a well-marked Reston trail, where I usually know where I am. This was one of the district parks with sporadic signage and paths that meander all over the place.

When I saw the outlines of a rooftop in the distance, I took the turns I thought would bring me out on a street where I could get my bearings. But even doing that took more twists and turns than I would have liked. I was, in short, beginning to feel a bit anxious about being in the woods alone at 4 p.m., the sun lowering in the sky, not knowing exactly where I was and without the tools to find out. 

This is not a cliff-hanger. I kept walking and eventually made my way home. And in the end ... I relished that my heart skipped a few beats along the way. 

(Signage for a walk near Asheville, the kind I wished I'd had yesterday.)

Connector Trail

The trail beckoned, a trail beside the trail, a connector. It meandered from the Washington and Old Dominion (the W&OD), a rails-to-trails strip of asphalt that runs from the D.C. border to the foothills of the Blue Ridge, to a garden park. 

Connector trails are surprises. Often makeshift and cobbled together with stray pieces. Frankintrails, you might call them.

This one had a bridge, a warning to avoid trespassing on the surrounding land (on which was built one of the more impressive mansions I've seen in this region) and a bucolic stretch where the scenery had the scale and immediacy of a New England lane.

Beyond that, there was a street winding through a neighborhood, then a shaded trail threading its way among fir trees to the park itself. That part was hilly enough that I can feel it today in the backs of my legs.

Still, the connector walk was a beauty of a discovery. I'd take it again today, if I could. 

Love and Whimsy

A long walk yesterday along a Reston path, the Cross-County Trail, then around Lake Audubon and back to the car. 

It was one of those hybrid walks that I enjoy for its variety. 

Along the way, this Valentine's surprise attached to a fence post. A tribute to the power of love ... and of whimsy. 

Megalopolis!

Over the weekend, a family birthday party took me to Towson, Maryland. It dawned on me as I was driving that my niece, her husband and their now one-year-old daughter live in the same metropolitan area that I do. I can get in my little gray car and drive for an hour and a half and never leave home.

It sure feels like leaving home, though. Four expressways are involved: the Dulles Toll Road, the Capital Beltway, I-95 and I-695 (the Baltimore Beltway). And the two places have quite a different look and feel. 

The megalopolis is a strange creature, a many-bellied beast of a term. Coined in the middle of the last century, it means two or more adjacent metropolitan areas that share enough transport, economy, resources and ecologies to blur their boundaries and complete a continuous urban area. I see that megalopolis is an outdated term. It's now megaregion, according to the America 2050 Initiative. 

Given that most humans identify with a house, a block, a town at most, I think we're in dangerous territory here. Let the geographers have their fun, but as far as I'm concerned I definitely left home on Saturday.

(The Northeast Megaregion at night. Courtesy Wikipedia, which also served as source for some of the information in this post.)

23,000

23,000. The number flares, it burns a hole in the mind. The pain it represents. The terrible loss of life from earthquakes in Turkey and Syria and the human misery left in their wake.

The earthquake that struck Lisbon on November 1, 1755, occurred before there were ways to measure temblors, but it's estimated to have been as high as 8.0 on the Richter scale. Estimated loss of life: 30,000 to 50,000. 

The event widened an already wide rift in European intellectual life as philosophers like Voltaire challenged optimism and belief in a loving and engaged God.  

Natural events ripple through history. How, I wonder, will this current one ripple through time? 

(An engraving of the Lisbon earthquake and tsunami that followed. Courtesy Wikipedia. Four days after I posted this,  the death toll in Syria and Turkey reached 41,000.)

Hybrid Walk

It begins in the neighborhood common land, field and forest, and continues in the stream valley park that meanders through these parts. I cross a couple of bridges there that have seen better days, and once I'm over them, I make my way to another neighborhood street.

This one is hillier than ours. It reminds me of the great sledding hills of my youth, including one I heard about but never experienced, Banana Hollow. The slope begins on one side of the street and continues on to the other. You have to imagine the hill without the houses and lawns, see it the way it once was, part of the roll and sweep of western Fairfax County hunt country.

After 20 minutes on pavement, I'm ready to be in the woods again, and follow a well-marked trail most of the way home. 

The hybrid walk: it's good for what ails you. 

Visit from a Vulture

Today we had a visit from this fine fellow and two of his pals. Attracted by a suet block, I hope, though I later read that black vultures (his type, as opposed to turkey vultures) attack vulnerable small birds and mammals rather than dining only on carrion.

I marveled at the Thanksgiving-turkey-size heft of this bird, at his noble profile and the wisdom of his folded wings. He seemed to have arrived from an earlier age. 

My thoughts on him today are no doubt shaped by the book I'm reading. In Field Notes from a Hidden City, Esther Wolfson elicits understanding for the less-understood denizens of the animal world. She takes up for magpies, foxes and even slugs. 

"Slugs and snails, as everything else, have their place in the scheme of life, in the food chain, in the ecology of the earth: a purpose, you might call it, even if it's a purpose that doesn't always accord with our own. "

And as long as the vulture's purpose is not to eat the birds that sup at our feeder, I'm fine with that. 

Margins as Message

In a retrospective mood after yesterday's blog anniversary, I pulled out an old hard-bound journal and started reading. 

It was summer. The previous fall, I'd accepted an editorial position downtown, my first office job in 17 years, though I hadn't yet extricated myself from writing freelance articles. I had three- to four-hour roundtrip commutes and deadlines when I got home. My daughters were 10, 13 and 16. Every few minutes, I was driving them to band camp or track practice or the movies. 

Still, my first thought on reading the loopy entries from those crazy days was ... why didn't I leave wider margins?  Every available inch was pressed into service. I had trouble reading my own writing. 

It took me a minute to realize the connection, the appropriateness of the typography. The pages were as busy as I was. The margins were the message. 

(Above, some halfway-margined class notes from last week.)

Turning 13!

It seems just the other day it was toddling around, cutting its first teeth, skinning its knees. Now my blog has plunged headlong into its teenage years. Thirteen years ago today I wrote the first post for A Walker in the Suburbs, thinking that I might write every so often and coax it along for a year or two.

In the same way that parents of a newborn can't picture sitting in the passenger seat as their "baby" drives a car, so could I not imagine my blog turning 13.  

But the years pass, and the quest for toys becomes the quest for boys ... and here we are. Will my blog start demanding the car keys? Will it sneak out the basement window? Will it hide a skimpy sweater in its backpack and change when it gets to school?  

All I can say is, I'm prepared for anything. 

"Not So Different"

As part of our readings for the course I'm taking this semester, we're learning about animal behavior to enlighten our view of human behavior. The basic point is that we are more like bonobos and dolphins and many other animals than we might care to admit. 

Many species mourn their lost loved ones, from the chimp Flint grieving his mother Flo, as described by Jane Goodall, to reports of elephants crying from the loss of a parent or child. 

Animals have an innate sense of justice, proved by studies in which primates refuse to solve a puzzle to earn a grape because the same treat is not being offered to their cage-mate. Vampire bats will feed each other even if it means giving up 20 to 30 percent of their own calories. Yes, there is an element of reciprocity in this. They do it, in part, because it might ensure their survival on a bad hunting night. But not all of this behavior can be explained away as quid pro quo. 

A basic question Nathan Lents asks in his book Not So Different: Finding Human Nature in Animals is why must we prove animals have these emotions — rather than prove they do not?

(Photo of bonobos courtesy Wikipedia) 

Deadwood

It's a cold, blustery day. The cardinals and sparrows that usually throng the feeder are tucked away in roosts and thickets. I can imagine them puffing up their feathers against the bitter winds. 

I have my eye on an errant limb dangling from a white oak by the fence. It seems to be attached to nothing from my vantage point (a second floor window), but must be be hung up on a branch at least 70 feet above the ground. I just hope that, when it falls, it doesn't take out part of the fence. 

The small forest that used to grace the back of the backyard is now a few paltry trees. But because they are paltry they are precious. Even care and pruning can't stop the deadwood from falling, though. It's what deadwood does. 

Snow Sparkles

Puxatawney Phil has seen his shadow, predicting six more weeks of winter. Though the two-inch daffodil shoots and the flowering hellebores may disagree with that assessment, the low temps and blustery winds make it easy to believe. 

As I look out my office window this gray morning I see pockets of snow still left from yesterday's dusting, including a thick rind of the frozen stuff curled around the trampoline. It drew my eye before the sun came up, its whiteness gleaming in the dusk.

I'm glad I took an early walk yesterday, while snow still clung to every branch and  twig. As I strolled, the wind blew clumps of flakes off the boughs. The clumps exploded in a fine dust that sparkled in the air. 

(Yesterday, before the melting.)

Visits to Grandmother

I awoke to a snow-globe world, a yard transformed by frozen precipitation that, at least as far as I knew, wasn't predicted. It's a perverse way to celebrate what would have been Mom's 97th birthday. She would have hated the snow, as she did all winter weather. Another, better way to celebrate Mom's birthday is with this guest post by her, a tradition I established after she died. In this except from a story Mom wrote years ago she talks about visits to her grandmother Concannon. Mom is pictured above, second from right, with her sisters and brother. 

I can still remember our silent rides to see Grandma every Sunday afternoon. Daddy drove us to her house on High Street in his big brown Pontiac with the yellow wire wheels. My sisters and brother and I would have rather been anywhere else in the world. The dread we felt mounted as we got ever closer to her home. 

Her door was usually unlocked (most doors were in those days), but my dad always knocked gently before he opened it and led us inside. Sometimes our grandmother stood to greet us, but often she didn't get up from her high-back chair at the far end of the room, which to an impressionable child like me looked for all the world like a throne. We each said hello to this tiny woman my dad called Mama and she always answered with a similar hello followed by each of our names. I always wondered if she did that just to prove that she knew the three of us girls apart. 

After we spoke to her, we took our place in one of the small hard chairs along the walls and waited to be called on to speak. Once we were of school age we were always asked what we were studying and what we were reading on our own. I often rehearsed my answers silently on the way over, then gave them quickly and breathed a sigh of relief that it was over until the next Sunday.

Through all those years I watched Grandma and my dad together, mother and son, with so little to say to one another. Each bit of conversation between them was followed by a long period of silence. Although I did learn from listening that they both liked Franklin Roosevelt, were sure no other Irish tenor would ever replace John McCormick and didn't believe in buying anything you couldn't pay cash for, I was never able to figure out if they really loved each other. 

Grandma died when I was a senior in high school so she didn't get to see me graduate from college, the first in our family to do so. I wish she had known. I think she would have been pleased.