Significance or Coincidence?

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A few days ago, I accidently dropped my vitamin D pill on the kitchen counter. It bounced a few times, rolled, and came to rest on its edge rather than on its side! Incredible, I thought. What were the chances of that?

My wife, Annie, says that when she looks at a digital clock, she’s surprised how often the time is 11:11. Very perplexing—why should this special time come up more frequently than other times?

We recently bought a box of Maldon Sea Salt. According to the manufacturer, this special salt is composed of “soft crunchy flakes”. It’s been made in Maldon, a tiny town on the Blackwater estuary in Essex, England, for four generations. Shortly after buying the salt, I got a birthday card from a good friend who lives in Portland. The card featured a lovely painting of the very same Maldon! Entitled “The Promenade,” it included a church, and a glimpse of the waterfront where the boats that collect the salty estuary water that’s turned into those soft, crunchy flakes are moored. When Diane called to wish me happy birthday, she told me she bought the card many years ago during a trip to the UK. For some reason, she felt impressed to choose it for my birthday this year. Amazing that she had held on to it for all those years, and finally sent it just after we bought some Maldon salt! How likely was that?

In 1995 Lena Paahlsson lost her wedding band, which was studded with seven small diamonds. She had taken off the ring to do some Christmas baking in her kitchen in Mora, a little town in central Sweden. (By the way, coincidently—or maybe not—Mora and Maldon not only both begin with an “M,” but have almost exactly the same population.) Alas, the ring disappeared from the work surface. Lena and her husband, Ola, searched everywhere. They even pulled up the kitchen floor tiles during a subsequent remodel to look for it, but no luck. Then, sixteen years later, while harvesting vegetables in her garden the ring turned up, encircling a freshly picked carrot! Lena and Ola speculated that the ring had been swept up from the counter along with fruit and vegetable peelings, found its way first to the compost pile, and then into the garden. Perhaps just as miraculous as the ring’s recovery was that the article reporting this story failed to attempt any puns referring to the weight of the diamonds on Lena’s ring as gaining a carrot.

These four disparate stories are linked by the fact that each was quite unlikely. Does this mean that they represent four miracles? Or at least supernatural phenomena? Hmm, let’s think about it…

How many times have I dropped a pill, or a coin, or another asymmetrical object that bounced and landed, as expected, on its side rather than anomalously on its edge? Probably about a zillion. But I certainly don’t recall such droppings—they quickly fade from memory as “normal,” and not particularly interesting. But when the pill landed on its edge, it got my attention. In fact, it was so unusual that I even mentioned it to Annie. And I’ve remembered it.

And how often in the course of the day do we look at the time? I suspect that we do so quite frequently, and mostly unconsciously. (More than once I’ve had the experience of checking the time. Seconds later when Annie asked me what time it was, I couldn’t remember, and had to look again.) Thus, we don’t tend to remember when the clock says 7:34 or 12:49. But when it comes up all ones, that’s notable. In real life I’m pretty certain that we see 11:11 no more often than any other time of day. It’s just that such times stand out, and we remember their occurrence.

As for the Maldon card, its arrival might also have seemed remarkable if we’d just visited an old church, or just talked about the first snow of winter, or just got an email from friends with news about their sailboat, or just booked a flight to the UK. Any of these would have made an “amazing” connection with the card. A huge number of things present themselves to us in the course of a day. Thus, there are many potential opportunities for linking, and therefore generating significance, to two independent occurrences.

Finally, how many thousands of rings have been lost that were never plucked from a garden circled around a carrot? Or found anywhere else. I doubt that even a thorough Google search would turn up many astounding stories of lost wedding rings that were never recovered. Or of rings that somehow ended up in the garden soil where a growing vegetable nudged the ring, but pushed it aside rather than growing through it. In other words, the very unusual occurrence makes the news, but we never hear about the denominator: all the sad, lost rings that never turn up, on a carrot or otherwise.

This is in no way to diminish the delight of such stories. The pill-on-edge might not be a miracle, 11:11 may not appear more often than other times, some supernatural power may not have induced Diane to send that card (but even I can’t say for certain that this was not the case), and there might not have been a special reason why the carrot was directed to grow through Lena Paahlsson’s ring. Nevertheless, all these occurrences are sources of enchantment and mystery. Not only are they magical, they make us more conscious of the world around us, and are to be savored. More prosaically, they even provoke learning. For example, due to the Maldon juxtaposition, I was prompted to read about Maldon salt, and then salt in general. Now, I’m tickled to be able to tell people that the Maldon salt flakes are “soft and crunchy” because the water collected from the Blackwater estuary is processed in a special way so that the salt crystallizes out in pyramidal structures. And get this: there’s at least one person in the world, Mark Bitterman, who is so obsessed with salt that he considers himself a “selmelier.” He has a shop in New York City that sells 130 varieties of the stuff, including, of course, Maldon sea salt. Thank you, Diane, for sending me that wonderful Maldon birthday card—without it I would have known none of these salty facts.

At least for a few days now I’ll be more conscious of when I look at the clock. The landing of my humble vitamin D pill provoked me to calculate the chances of various other outcomes, such as flipping a penny and coming up with five heads in a row. And reading the carrot article makes me think fondly of Lena Paahlsson, who is hopefully still wearing her carroted ring as she bakes and, together with Ola, picks vegetables from her garden. Don’t take that ring off again, Lena!

The Problem of Induction

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When I was courting my wife, one night at dinner her 5-year-old daughter asked, “Mama, why do Jewish men always stick out their pinky when they drink tea?” I immediately put down my cup. “Why do you ask, sweetie?” Annie said to Hillary, who answered, “Well, Kenny just did it, and our other Jewish friend, Alan, does it too.”

Hillary had made a generalization based on two observations. Annie and I were amused, but skeptical that a larger sample of tea-drinking Jewish men would support her inference. (By the way, I’m still not convinced that I raise my pinky when I drink tea, but who knows, maybe I do. I’ll have to remember to ask Hillary.)

We’re all guilty of faulty inductive reasoning. Recently I was in Yakima, Washington doing covid testing. Our team’s main focus was the Yakama (curiously, spelled differently than the city) Nation since they had been particularly hard-hit by the virus. With the cooperation of tribal elders, we visited several Yakama housing developments and went door-to-door asking residents if they were interested in being tested. The little houses in the first development were old, with peeling paint and an occasional broken window. The yards were rocky and weedy, and there was broken glass by the sides of the roads. Despite the sad surroundings, the residents were upbeat, and thanked us for our work. The next two developments were similar. That was enough for me to conclude that all Yakama tribal housing was poor and run down. I wondered if this “truth” extended to other Washington tribes, and perhaps even beyond the state.

Then toward the end of the week we went to another housing development on the reservation. It was totally different. The entrance was protected by a remote-controlled gate. The roads were clean and well-paved. The houses, beautifully constructed with a combination of wood and stone, were carefully cared for. And the yards had nicely mown lawns. So much for my impression of Yakama Nation Housing! I realized that based on just a few cases I’d made an unfounded inference, perhaps unconsciously invoking a pernicious stereotype of Native American reservations.

Since the time of the Greeks, philosophers have addressed “the problem of induction.” A typical formulation goes like this: I believe that the sun will rise tomorrow, since it’s risen every day in memory. Moreover, there are no counterexamples of the sun not rising. Thus, I conclude that the sun will continue to rise every day. So far, so good. But among other issues, the question is how many instances do we need to be secure in the belief that the sun will indeed rise every morning—or that all Jewish men hoist their pinkies aloft while drinking tea, or that all Yakama reservation housing is run-down?

Bertrand Russell makes the point that a chicken who’s fed every day expects this pattern to continue, ad infinitum. But then one day, instead of feeding it, the farmer wrings its neck and has it for dinner. So much for the predictive value of chicken induction. But I have to say, in this case Russell’s hen was much happier with her unwarranted conclusion than she would have been had she acknowledged the uncertainties of inductive reasoning. That is, being secure in the false belief that she would be always be fed daily seems a much better state of mind than waking up worrying about whether or not some grain would appear, or considering that her neck might be wrung.

Usually, when we employ inductive reasoning we’re not trying to shield ourselves from the possibility of a grim outcome. Rather, we think we’re deriving a truth, thereby increasing our understanding of the world. But we need to use induction with great care. It’s all too easy to generalize from limited, and possibly misleading, information. This can lead to erroneous and damaging conclusions. If we’re to properly use inference we need to observe carefully, make tentative hypotheses that are subject to further testing, and avoid coming to premature conclusions. In other words, keep an open mind. I think I’ll meditate on that over a cup of tea.

Room Service

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“There was a tear in the shower curtain, a picture was hanging crooked in a cheap frame, the baseboard and trim didn’t meet the wall or corners, and the electrical sockets were installed crookedly. Service was fine, and everything seemed clean enough.” So said a recent online review of the Seattle Hilton. All in all, it sounded like the reviewer had a pretty miserable experience–he rated the room a 4 out of 10.

Reading this review brought to mind several of my lodging experiences in other countries:

Chiang Rai: While living in Thailand years ago I took a trip to Chaing Rai, which was then a dusty little town in the far north of the country. I asked a local to recommend a hotel; he led me to what he said was “the best hotel in Chaing Rai.” It was a small, modest building with peeling paint. I asked the owner to see a room. He took me to what he proudly called “our very finest room.” With a flourish, he flung open the door. “See!”, he said. What I saw was an enormous rat scurrying up the far wall. It disappeared into the rafters of the open ceiling. Did I take the room? Of course—this was the finest room in the best hotel in Chaing Rai.

A tiny town in western Nepal: I flew out of Kathmandu on a small plane that landed on a dirt road two-thirds of the way to Pokhara. The bus to Pokhara didn’t leave until the next morning, so I looked for lodging. That was easy since there was only one hotel. It had about three rooms. The one I was assigned had just a single piece of furniture: a narrow, unmade bed with no pillow. There were no windows and no plumbing. The only electricity was a dim lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. When I straightened out the tea-colored sheet that had once been white, I saw that it was covered with numerous dots of blood. This was my first introduction to bed bugs.

The Himalayan foothills above Pokhara: I trekked up from Pokhara through steep terraced fields (see the photograph I took that’s associated with this blog). Soon I was in the foothills, with the jagged white Himalayas towering far above me. Late in the day I started looking for food. I came to a rickety building by the side of the path, where a sign said that they served dinner. The menu was simple: the sole offering was a large bowl of dal bhat—lentils over rice—for about 50 cents. A nice touch was that dinner came with a free bed for the night. So rather than bed and breakfast, with breakfast included, it was dinner and bed, with the bed included. My particular bed was a creaky wooden frame attached to an outside wall on the side of the building. The frame was topped with a thin lumpy pallet, with straw and dirt poking out through rips in the worn fabric. I think the Hilton reviewer would have liked this place since there was no torn shower curtain, crookedly hanging pictures, misaligned baseboards, or off-center electric sockets.

A small village in India, between Lucknow and New Delhi: My room was essentially a stall in a row of stalls. The door was a cloth curtain, and the floor was packed dirt. The walls were made of rough boards which went from the floors to a height of about six feet. At that point coarse black netting was attached to the boards and extended up to the bamboo ceiling. There was of course no air conditioning, but it stayed fairly cool since a breeze blew through the spaces between the boards and across the netting. Not surprisingly, the night was pretty noisy. But I didn’t expect to be irreversibly awakened at 5:00 a.m. That’s when my next-stall neighbor arose for what was apparently an extended upper airway cleansing ritual. This consisted of half an hour’s worth of very vigorous snorts, hacks, nose blows, throat clearings, and spitting. I hoped that he had some sort of spittoon to sequester the output.

Pader, Uganda: As part of a volunteer medical team, I had just arrived in Pader, in Northern Uganda, to provide care for the large refugee camps in the area. Our local contact was helping me settle in a room in what was optimistically called The Pader Hotel. I put down my rucksack and sat on the bed. He laughed and pointed to a one-foot hole in the ceiling. “Ha!”, he said, “don’t you see that you need to move your bed?” “Why is that?” I asked naively. “Because of the scorpions.” He said that scorpions liked to live in the walls and ceilings of buildings in this part of Uganda, and at night they often drop down from the ceiling, especially if they sense there might be something interesting directly below. I moved the bed tight against the opposite wall. The next morning I carefully checked everything out. Fortunately, I found no scorpions. But there were three rubbery little frogs in my rucksack, and two in my left boot.

Another review of the same Hilton was mixed: “Love this place and location. Beds were soft and comfortable. Room was clean, except I found a dental floss pick on top of the shelves near the coffee maker.” The reviewer gave it a moderate rating.

I reflect on my hotel experiences. Just as the worst US hotel I ever stayed in was far better than any of the ones I mention, so all of those were far better than not having a place to sleep at all. In each case, I had a bed. I wasn’t homeless, nor in a flood, nor an earthquake, nor a war zone. I didn’t feel unsafe, and in most cases I even had a roof over my head. And despite the threat of rats, bedbugs, scorpions, and frogs I got at least some sleep every night.

I think it may be a good practice to appreciate what we have rather than to obsess about how it could be better. Instead of “x out of 10”, perhaps hotel ratings should scaled: grateful, very grateful, and extremely grateful.

Note to my readers: I very much appreciate your interest and comments–please keep ’em coming!

Two Toddlers Go Out to Sea

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Dated October 25, 1883, an item in the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania’s “Weekly Notes of Cases” announces a divorce petition. It was filed by Marcus Heilbron, who wished to leave his wife, Rosa. Marcus states that Rosa “hath offered such indignities to the person of your petitioner as to render his condition intolerable and his life burdensome, and thereby forced him to expend several hundred dollars, as she, the said Rosa, demanded a trip to Europe and was bound to see her parents in Europe and other relatives, and left your petitioner alone at Homestead, in Pennsylvania, and your petitioner was forced to give up his home and break up housekeeping, and thus rendered the condition of your petitioner intolerable and his life miserable and burdensome, and the fact that she remained away and became the scandal and talk of the neighborhood of Homestead, Pennsylvania.”

The unhappy couple were my paternal great grandparents. What isn’t mentioned in Marcus’ petition is that when Rosa fled to Germany, she brought along my grandmother, Rena. I have a copy of the ship’s log of The Aller, documenting their return trip to the US from Germany. Rosa’s age is listed as 37, and little Rena was 2. They arrived in New York on February 23, 1892. The Weekly Notes says that Marcus initiated divorce proceedings on April 11, just six weeks after Rosa and Rena returned home.

Apparently, the time apart didn’t cool the passions on either side. In the petition Marcus goes on to complain that after she came back from Germany, his wife displayed “many outbursts of temper, not confined to bad language and threats, but accompanied by acts of great violence, and are scarcely denied by the respondent herself.” Marcus further states that “She admits that she broke a glass door in his store, and interfered with his customers; that she broke dishes and threw them down the stairs, threw hot coffee on the girl, and on two occasions, when her stepsons complained of the dinner, she brought in slop and threw it on the table.” It certainly appears that my great grandmother had a fiery temper, no doubt provoked by Marcus’ abuse. I’m sure he made it clear to one and all how much he loathed his wife, and wished to leave her, and thus Rena as well.

I also have a copy of a ship’s log for a voyage taken almost exactly 59 years after Rosa and Rena returned from Germany. Joyce Klein, age 33, and her son Kenneth, age 2, are listed as traveling in tourist class on the Queen Elizabeth. It sailed from New York on February 16, 1951. My mother was taking me to Germany so we could meet up with my father, who had left home some weeks previously to do research in the laboratory of a German scientist in Berlin. This was less than six years after the conclusion of WWII, in which my father had fought the Germans for five years. My father had lost relatives in the camps on both Rena’s side and his father’s side of the family.

Perhaps even more remarkable than that my father chose to work in Germany so soon after the war was that by going there he left my brother, who had been born just months previously. More amazing still is that my mother too left her infant son; when she and I boarded the Queen Elizabeth, Doug was a mere four months old. Years later, after I became a parent, I asked my father how he could possibly have left Doug at such an early age. He blithely replied, “He was so young, he didn’t know the difference.” And how could my mother do so? “Your mother was very strong-willed. She really wanted to come to Europe while I was there.” And who took care of my brother while the rest of the family were in Europe? “We found a lady from the Salvation Army.”

The recent discoveries of Marcus’s divorce petition and the ships’ logs has created an even deeper bond between me and my grandmother. At the age of two, our mothers took each of us across the ocean to Germany. Both voyages were triggered by our fathers: Rena’s mother was fleeing from her abusive father, while my mother was taking me in tow to reunite with my father. But even though the motives for each trip were different, Rena and I both must have felt apprehension, confusion, and fear.

My grandmother was no doubt a front-row witness to the tense and violent relationship between her parents. From the divorce petition we know only Marcus’ side. But family lore has it that he deserved everything my great-grandmother served him—broken dishes, slop, and all. And though my mother was taking me to–not away from–my father, I must have been very aware that my baby brother had been left behind. He was abandoned first by my father, and now by my mother. Though she chose to take me along this time, what guarantee was there that it wouldn’t be Kenny who would be left with the Salvation Army lady on the next trip?

So as my grandmother walked the decks of The Aller in 1892, and I walked the decks of the Queen Elizabeth 59 years later, I doubt that we were carefree children enjoying our ocean voyages. More likely, we were each anxious about the family dynamics, and worried about what we would find on our return home.

I don’t remember being consciously aware of my parents’ abandonment of my brother. And I wouldn’t be surprised that after the divorce my grandmother repressed her awareness of her parents’ mutually abusive behavior. But she couldn’t ignore her father’s absence; after the divorce he left, and cut all communication with his family.

When she was about ten, in an act of tremendous courage my grandmother found out where Marcus was living and went to his house. He refused to talk to her, or even acknowledge her presence. Thus, repressed or not, her early childhood memories of rejection were resurrected and reinforced. And when, just before I turned fifteen, my mother died of cancer, her death reverberated as the ultimate abandonment of not only my brother, but of me.

Tension and Pressure

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The wooden pole in the storage room was sagging under the weight of the rarely used clothes we’d hung on it. So I drilled a hole in the ceiling and popped in a sturdy molly bolt, to which I tied a nylon cord. Then I wound the other end around the middle of the pole. Finally, I cinched up the cord and tied it tight, which straightened out the bend. The pole felt much sturdier, and the clothes hung better.

This was a satisfying fix, but as I put away my tools I felt a little uneasy. It took me a while to figure out why, but I finally did: I was acutely aware of the newly created tension in the cord. It was stretched so tight that when I strummed it, it vibrated like the C string of a cello. The entire pole was under the influence of this tension. And so was the drywall in the ceiling, resisting the downward pressure of the wings of the molly bolt. I could feel it! Disturbingly, I realized that this considerable force would remain active for as long as the cord stayed in place. That could well be years. Perhaps many years.

I’ve been doing a lot of other home projects lately. Almost all of them produce tension or pressure. Every time I screw two panels of a bookcase together, I’ve created pressure. Every time I hang a door, or earthquake-proof a bookcase by strapping it to a wall, there’s tension. Every time I bolt a mower blade in place, couple two electric wires together with a wire nut, or replace a board on the deck, pressure.

Tension and pressure are everywhere. My house, for example, stays together because of them—I become a little giddy when I think of all the joists and studs and beams being held in place by a vast army of screws, nails, and bolts. Layer after layer of balanced forces are keeping everything stable: the roof, the walls, the floors, the stove and fridge, the bed on which I sleep.

When I drive my car I’m conscious of being surrounded by a complex array of forces: the pressure I create by sitting on my seat, that of my seat against the chassis, the chassis against the wheels, and the wheels against the road. To say nothing of the incredible force being generated by the explosions within the cylinders when I step on the gas. Sometimes it’s hard to fathom why the car doesn’t simply blow apart as I drive down the interstate.

Omnipresent pressure and tension aren’t of course limited to things made by humans. When a storm blows up from the northeast, the big Doug fir in our yard sways ominously. At times I can sense the stress of the branches as they push back against the wind, and the pressure on the base of the trunk as it’s stabilized by the roots clutching frantically at the soil to keep the tree upright. But even on a beautiful day, when there’s no wind and the bay is smooth as glass, all is not really placid. Superficially in equipoise, competing forces are everywhere trying to get the upper hand: in the bay, the weight of the water is pushing down on the seabed below, while on the shore the soil and sand are pressing heavily on the bedrock. These components of the crust are mashing down on the molten outer core, which in turn is squeezing down on the solid inner core.

While my mind is subterranean, I can’t help but think of the upward force of that molten core, liable to increase to the point of volcanic activity, so common in this part of the world. To say nothing of the tectonic plates of the Cascadia Subduction zone. They’re constantly butting heads with incredible energy, gearing up to produce the inevitable Big One. (Good thing I bolted the bookcase to the wall!).

And when you think about it, tension and pressure are ubiquitous within our bodies too. The pressure exerted by our beating hearts sends blood coursing through a complex maze of arteries and veins, nourishing our tissues. As we’re all too aware, if the blood pressure is too high, it can cause great mischief in our hearts and brains and blood vessels. The forces that are intermittently generated within our bladder and intestines allow us to eliminate waste. Muscle tension, even at rest, keeps our bones stable, and the tension in our ligaments and fascia keep our muscles and organs tidily in place. Tension across an ear drum allows it to vibrate (sort of like the cord holding up the clothes pole), enabling us to hear. And on and on. Sometimes, lying quietly in bed, I’m very aware of this symphony of forces at play in my body. Although I know that they all work together to promote normal functioning, this doesn’t necessarily enhance my relaxation.

So how can we peacefully live our lives when we’re conscious of the sometimes-extreme pressure and tension in the things we build, in the natural world, and even within our own bodies? Well first of all, we can be happy that these forces are there—otherwise we wouldn’t be. If gravity and friction were somehow repealed, our houses, our machines, our entire world, and us, would just disperse into space. So celebrate all the pressure and tension, usually in benign equilibrium, that allow our world—including that cord which is so patiently holding up our spare clothes–to exist. Be prudent when messing with those forces. And most of the time, just ignore them.

Of Trolleys and Mice

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The trolley problem is one of the most famous thought experiments in ethics. You are asked to imagine that there’s a runaway trolley racing down the line. It’s headed toward a group of five people who are tied to the tracks with no prospect of escape. From your vantage point in the trolly yard you have access to a lever that can divert the trolley onto another set of tracks, on which a single person is tied. The question is, would you pull the lever? Numerous surveys have found that about 90% of people would do so.

In a variant of the trolly problem, you’re on a bridge watching the trolley barrel down toward those five tied-up people. Standing next to you is a man. You know that if you push him off the bridge, his bulk will stop the trolley, saving the people bound to the tracks. Not surprisingly, even though the outcome is identical to the first instance–sacrificing one life to save five others–far fewer people would push the man off the bridge.

We’ve got mice in our garage. Lots of them. They gnaw into bags of stored food, poop everywhere, and for all I know promiscuously spread hantavirus. They’ve got to go. But the idea of poisoning them, or even setting up kill traps, is abhorrent to me—they’re simply cute, furry innocents doing what mice are supposed to do. So, I’m using a “live trap.” The critters are lured by peanut butter into a little plastic cage, which captures them without harm. Each morning I check the trap. If a mouse has been caught, I drive it to a nearby forest and release it beside a decaying tree stump. Most often, little Mickey frisks out of the trap, sniffs the air right and left, then rushes right into a hole in the base of the stump. I’ve been very pleased with myself for this arrangement.

For confirmation that I was doing the right thing, I Googled ‘the most humane way to rid your house of mice’. I was startled to read that, overwhelmingly, the advice from animal advocacy groups is that quick and certain death with an old-fashioned snap trap was the way to go. How could that be? Well, it turns out that the kind of mice that end up infesting houses don’t do well in the wild, especially when transplanted far from where they were trapped. They can’t adapt to the new environment and perish due to starvation, disease, or predation. Yikes!

Even so, after reading this thoughtful advice I’ve persisted in “humanely” trapping the mice and transporting them to what is apparently certain sylvan death. In other words, I’ve continued to pull the lever rather than push the man off the bridge, thus distancing myself from directly causing their demise. Even worse, as opposed to the trolley problem, where the two modes of death are equally sudden, it appears that out of cowardice I’m opting for the more inhumane mode of exit.

Well, of course, the rationalizations came flooding in: Maybe the forest wasn’t all that far from our house, or maybe these particular woods harbored plenty of rodent-friendly food and water. Maybe the previous releasees had been able to set up house in the hole in the stump, so the new arrivals would be welcomed into a thriving colony of their former housemates. Maybe these environs weren’t rife with rodential predators. But on the other hand, if there were predators, and the mouse was going to die anyway, wouldn’t it be better that it served as nourishment for the resident eagles and foxes and owls rather than being thrown in the trash after getting whacked by a snap trap? Finally, in any case, even if the released mice had only a slim chance of living a full woodsy life, wouldn’t that be a better alternative than certain death in our garage?

And yet… All the organizations associated with animal welfare were clear: they strongly advocate a quick and painless death as the most humane alternative–my rationalizations were fooling only me. But, I must admit, I still haven’t changed my practice. The fact is, it’s so much easier to pull a lever than to push someone off a bridge. So, so sorry, my little furry friends.

Purebred Mongrel

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My recent 23andMe report tells me that I’m 96.8% Ashkenazi, that is, Eastern European Jewish. This was quite disappointing. I always thought I was—and aspired to be—some sort of exotic mongrel; I’ve long been a proponent of the virtues of hybrid vigor. But it looks like I’m actually a purebred. Well, almost. What about the remaining 3.2%, the tiny chromosomal fragments that aren’t of the breed?

Turns out that they aren’t particularly interesting: 0.9% Eastern European, 0.4% Southern European, 0.2% Iberian, 0.1% Northwestern European, and—finally something a little off the beaten tribal path—0.1% Scandinavian! How nice to know that I’m at least a slightly mixed breed. But though I’m part-Scandinavian, I have to admit it’s a tiny part: if I were to convert the 0.1% of genes into 0.1% of my body weight, I’d be about 2 ½ ounces Scandinavian. That’s less than the weight of a serving of pickled herring.

If you add up these tiny bits of identified non-Ashkenazic genes, you get 1.7%. So what about the remaining 1.5%, which is unaccounted for by 23andMe? Maybe it’s just a rounding error. Or maybe it’s the most interesting part of my genetic heritage, which will remain captive until I pay the company a ransom for its release. It could still be that I’m more exotic than it appears.

In any case, I presume that those non-Ashkenazic European gene fragments represent interlopers who slipped into my purebred lineage long ago. In fact, 23andMe specifically informs me that the 0.1% of Scandinavian genes in my possession “were contributed by a single ancestor who was 100% Scandinavian, born between 1680 and 1770.” I wonder how they know—did they find a diary? However they determined it, it seems that this 98.6% pure Ashkenazi apparently had a great-great-great-great Grandpa Thor. I suspect that Grandpa Thor was a Viking warrior King, I can sort of feel it in my blood.

Uff Da! (whatever that means)—now I know why I’ve always enjoyed taking saunas! And maybe now that I’m aware of my Scandinavian heritage, I’ll start to think that Garrison Keeler’s Norwegian bachelor farmer jokes are actually funny. Moreover, since I’m surely eligible, I think I’ll put in an application to join the Sons of Norway. Conveniently, the nearest chapter is in Poulsbo, just a few miles from where I live. Maybe I’ll even run for office in the next SoN election—the prospect of an Ashkenazic-Norwegian treasurer might be a real vote-getter. At some point, I should sign up for one of those “roots tours” to the Nordic countries to see if I can connect with my heritage, and maybe track down a landsman or two. I’m even thinking of giving lutefisk another try. How wonderfully life-changing it is to learn of this 0.1% of my gene pool!

Parental Passions

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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!

Looking but Not Seeing

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We decided to hang a beautiful quilt on the wall of our grandson’s bedroom. I began by sewing a flat wooden stick across the top of the quilt so it would hold its shape. Then I needed two screw eyes to put at each end of the stick to hang it. So I went out to the garage and started rummaging through my trusty parts bin—it’s a little metal box containing 24 plastic drawers. It’s totally unorganized: in a single compartment you might find carpet tacks, washers, brass nails, a curl of wire, you name it.

Random rummaging didn’t produce any screw eyes. Thus, I started systematically at the upper left-hand drawer and worked my way across, then repeated the process across the next row. And eureka! At about drawer # 17 I indeed found two screw eyes snuggling up against some yellow wire nuts. I returned to the bedroom and attached them to each end of the stick. But then I needed two nails to hammer into the wall, on which to attach the screw eyes. What did I do? Naturally, I went back to the parts bin. Hmm. It occurred to me that just a few minutes previously I’d gone through almost all the drawers—why didn’t I remember which drawer contained the right size nails? The answer was obvious: I wasn’t looking for nails; I was looking for screw eyes. So I had to go through the whole drill again—across and down, across and down, looking afresh for nails. After digging through all 24 drawers, I decided that the nails in drawer # 8 would work the best. I was then able to hang the quilt. It looked quite nice, thank you very much.

After admiring the new wall hanging, I remembered that I’d decided to put a blackout curtain over the window so Ari would sleep better during his nap. To do so I needed push pins. Where could I find some? In the parts bin, of course. Did I recall seeing any push pins from the previous two romps though the 24 drawers? Of course not—I hadn’t been looking for push pins. So once again I started with drawer # 1.

What does this tell us about how our minds work? Among other things, it shows that we simply can’t take in the incredible amount of information that surrounds us, clamoring for our attention–we need to focus. But focus also means exclusion: the more we focus, the less we see. Thus, perhaps, the more single-mindedly we pursue a goal, the more we miss in life.

In a famous experiment, experienced radiologists were given a series of chest x-ray images and asked to identify any lung cancers. On this task they did very well. However, on one of the images the researchers superimposed a rather large black silhouette of a man dressed in a gorilla suit. And guess what? Only 18% of the radiologists noticed it! It’s not surprising that the vast majority didn’t see the hulking image—they were looking for cancers, not gorillas. This phenomenon is awkwardly but descriptively called “inattentional blindness.” In other words, “hiding in plain sight.”

No matter how busy we are, I think it might be a good idea to spend part of each day focused on nothing. Who knows what we’ll see!

Particles of Smoke

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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.”