Archive for month: September, 2020

My parents’ passions were pretty much all in their heads. My father’s life was science. Making new discoveries and getting them published was his highest aspiration. Based on the time he spent with each, it seemed clear to me that he loved his lab more than his family. As for my mother, she wanted to “have it all” decades before that became a term. Having children was part of it, but mothering seemed less important than the work part of “all”. She ran a social work agency. She was president of the local Hadassah chapter. She was a university professor. As I was growing up, she got a PhD. In fact, my recollection is that she nurtured her thesis more than she nurtured her sons. When I was ten she required me to help her proofread her dissertation, a long and agonizing undertaking. My reward was a complicated game called Brainiac that never seemed to work right, and that I never enjoyed.

Such cerebral passions were hard for a kid, even a nerdy one like me, to accept. But I vividly remember two instances of physical passions, each of which made a deep impression because they seemed so out of character. One time, armed with plastic pails, we were all gathering blackberries. The pails quickly filled with shiny, jewel-like fruit. Except for my father’s. Why not? He put virtually every berry he picked into his mouth. Soon his hands were stained purple, as was his white shirt (he almost always wore white shirts). He had a goofy grin and vocalized crudely—mostly “umm, umm, umm!” I found his visual and audible display of blackberry passion more upsetting than endearing.

My mother’s physical passion also involved eating. She loved corn on the cob. She would slather it with butter, then shake pepper over it until it nearly turned black; the corn looked like it was crawling with ants. But what impressed–and disturbed–me most was not the peppery excess, but the intensity with which she applied it, and the lust with which she consumed the corn.

Although it didn’t increase my sense of being nurtured, seeing my parents experience such pleasure from food reassured me that they were at least somewhat normal. But at the same time these behaviors seemed undignified and embarrassing, in fact almost carnal. My reaction recalled the time, while rummaging through the top shelf in my parents’ bedroom closet (they were, of course, both at work), I discovered a big red box of Trojans. Yikes, my parents actually did it! How unexpected, and how gross!

My childish feelings toward my parents are an example of how we tend to reduce people to a few salient features. In other words, we make them into cartoons. This can be useful since it gives us a handle on who they are. But it’s way too simple: though my parents were indeed in their heads much of the time, they were more complicated than that. Their heads were connected to their bodies. And these bodies were passionate about certain foods, almost certainly enjoyed other sensory experiences, and yes, even made love.

If we can avoid reductionistic views of people, we can more fully appreciate them in all their contradictions and complexity. I aim to try to do so in all my relationships. Enjoy those berries, dad, and have another ear of corn, mom!

As I write this, our island, and much of the west coast, is being heavily infused with smoke. It’s coming from massive wildfires in California and Oregon, blown north by the prevailing winds.

It’s high noon, and everything is a dreary brown. The world looks like one of those old sepia prints with all the joy and life sucked out. Our windows are closed tight, and the air purifier is striving mightily to collect all the smoke particles that have managed to burrow their way into the house.

While out walking the dog with my N95 strapped on, I marvel at how dense and pervasive the smoke is. It must take gazillions of tiny products of combustion to block so much of the sunlight and foul the air. I think about how each of these smoke particles made the epic journey north. For example, as it crashed to the charred ground, an immolated Douglas fir deep in the Klamath National Forest in northern California sloughed off a chip of ash from a high branch. It was then carried aloft by a swirl of hot air, rose higher and higher, and spun out individual particles.

I imagine tracing one of those smoke particles on a 3-D map: Up, down, spinning around, going out to sea, then being pushed back to land as it travelled as part of an enormous pulsing pack. It back-tracked, zigged and zagged, then slowly lost altitude over Bainbridge Island. Drifting downward, it daintily settled on the visor of my hat. Then, right next to that minute fragment of the Doug fir may have settled a particle of smoke originating from the roof joist of a barn near Clackamas, Oregon.

After hundreds of miles of mixing, it’s clear that the pall of particles blocking the sunlight is actually a motley collection of bits thrown together from the residual of burned trees, buildings, animals, and grass from dozens of fires hundreds of miles apart. Thus, this smoke is a profound reordering of the pre-fire relationship of matter from forests and towns all over the northwest.

But then, I think, this massive mixing of matter isn’t confined to cataclysmic events; it happens all the time. For example, though I think of my body as a single unit, it’s made up of a vast number of widely sourced components. Consider the keratin forming the tip of the leftmost eyelash of my left eye. One of the carbon atoms making up part of that polypeptide chain may have come from the Bocca Burger that had for lunch with chipotle mayonnaise and a pickle a few weeks ago. And another part of that chain might have been derived from a bit of an epithelial cell from my tonsil that sloughed off, was swallowed, re-digested and reabsorbed by my small intestine. And for all I know, even before it was part of my tonsil it came from the crust of the fabulous pizza I had at Roberta’s in Brooklyn before covid, when it was still possible to eat out.

And so on, for the entire complex assemblage of my physical body—the noodle soup we ate after our arrival in Shanghai, a drop of sea water that landed on my upper lip as I paddled my kayak in our little cove, the awful bagel we had at that restaurant in Victoria, the mustard greens from the stir fry made entirely from the bounty of our garden last summer. Such diverse sources of matter are incorporated into my vagus nerve, and my right atrium, and the lining of my pancreatic duct.

So, like the huge mass of smoke swirling around me now, we’re all composed of ever-changing material from disparate sources, temporarily joined together. But as Carl Sagan famously said, the ultimate origin of all the shifting components of the smoke, of me, and of everything on earth unites everything together again: “We’re made of star stuff.”