My mom the cowgirl

My mom. An Air Force family, she and her sisters grew up in Pakistan, Germany, Taiwan, and Japan. She can still count to ten in Urdu and Mandarin Chinese. She's a cultured woman of the globe.

Her parents moved back Stateside just in time for her to graduate from high school as the fastest typer in Texas. Over the next twenty years, she morphed from typist to business owner (not that she can't still type lightening fast), opening a catering company, a series of executive suites with centralized secretarial services, and then the Express Personnel Services franchise in Shreveport that my sister now manages. So she's a smart gal with lots of initiative and lots of pants suits.

But to my knowledge, she never drove an AWD vehicle across any ranch. Or talked to cows. Certainly never bottle-fed any calf. Until she married Randy Glass. Now look at what's happened.

It's a good transformation. Seems like the natural next step: globe-trotter, entrepreneur, cowgirl. And blast if I'm not jealous about her feeding that calf!

Though I've not met him, that calf has already won me, or at least the lactating mother in me. Since he was born, the mama cow has kicked him away from her udders; Mom and Randy finally had to put her in a squeeze chute and tie back her leg so he could suckle. Hopefully, he got the all-necessary colostrum and will survive.

His surrogate mom will surely do her tongue-sticking-out derndest to make that happen. Ride 'em, cowgirl!

Birds and other books

Even if you don't like birds or books (oh, heavens, don't not like books!) please read Cindy Crosby's "Chuckleheads and Timberdoodles?" in the most recent Books and Culture. This review of The Birdwatcher's Companion to North American Birdlife is a treat, and most reviews aren't treats. So brew a cup of tea, grab your binoculars, and learn a few new vocabulary words from Crosby's lovely paragraphs.

This is for Malcolm

Just to confirm that I do take an interest in my husband's extracurricular activities, I would like to post these highlights from a very recent Books and Culture interview with William Langewiesche:

Q: Are you a pilot who writes or a writer who flies?

A: I'm a writer. Even when I was a pilot I was a writer.

and

Q: Should we honestly believe that if we're in a plane going down that our seat cushions can be used as flotation devices?

A: There are plenty of cases of airplanes going into the water and people surviving. What to do in that case is not difficult to remember. Get the hell of out the plane and don't wear your high heels down the inflatable exit ramp.

All righty, then.

This reminds me of that night outside Portland, Oregon, when we accidentally passed the Spruce Goose. We had been to a wedding in Medford, though we had stayed in Ashland at the beautiful Ashland Springs Hotel. We spent the post-wedding afternoon in the redwood forest ogling gigantic trees and then took a leisurely drive up the Oregon coast the next day because we were flying back home from Portland the day after that.

So we stopped at various points to watch creatures and eat local desserts and such, but as darkness achieved its westward creep from the east, we set our faces toward Portland. Until we saw this:


Imagine that the sky is a beautiful black and you haven't passed anything worth discussing in a while. Imagine that you're just driving down the highway and happen to glance left as you're approaching a huge hangar full of a huge airplane some ways off the road. Imagine that you say to your pilot husband, "Look, look" and the car drifts in the direction you are gesturing almost instinctually.

We can hardly close our jaws as we turn off the road and drive toward it, for the plane keeps getting bigger and bigger. I scramble for some kind of guide book that might tell us what we see, but signage finally makes it clear: that's the Spruce Goose.

Of course, the museum is closed because it's past dinnertime, but we park and walk around the hangar. The all-glass front wall lets you see the thing fairly well; what you can't see in the photo above is that other small planes (like the ones Micah flies on a regular basis) are lined up for display under the Spruce Goose's wings. The photo below might help you get a sense of scale: note the helicopter flying above the plane.


Now, the history of the Spruce Goose is a fascinating one, and so is the biography of the one who envisioned and built it. But the awe I felt driving toward it and standing next to it (albeit outside its hangar, which seemed all the more awful) was oddly not like the fear I feel for big things (like gigantic artifacts displayed at museums, like whales and all other massive creatures that abide in the ocean, and like the ocean itself) but more like a great intrigue for a meal I have never before eaten but suddenly find before me.

That is, it was deeply satisfying to see such a huge, crafted thing, such a bold creativity put so carefully together. And it was delicious to stand and reverence the thing, because that seemed the only right thing to do. Just like a primo bowl of macaroni and cheese at the Steakhouse. . . .

Stumpy! Stumpy! (Imagine Brando screaming that.)

Let's all take a thankful moment for the stumpy.

This Australian skink sacrificially loves her babies, carrying them until they weigh "on average, 35 percent of the mother's body weight," which is like a human birthing a seven-year-old. Obviously, the mother has trouble breathing, eating, and moving toward the end of gestation, making predator evasion difficult and general living uncomfortable.

And I thought I was swollen at 9 months. Give me stretch marks any day just so Noel comes out at 7 pounds, 13 ounces, rather than the weight and size of Anna Kate. Bigger, really, but I can't think of an actual seven-year-old at the moment.

The creation can teach us much about perseverance and longsuffering, but there is something particularly peculiar about the way God makes new creatures that generally seems rather instructive to me. At the very least, much gratitude wells up in this heart for the stumpy and for the radically different process that is human birth. I'm glad stumpy females go to so much trouble to make new stumpies, unwittingly but nevertheless consistently risking themselves for reproduction. But I'm also glad that it's less trouble for human females to make new humans.

Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink. / The very deep did rot. . . .

Yesterday, a friend came to visit Noel, and then she drove south to Lafayette for a night with her parents. When Ashlie walked into the house, her mother informed her that she'd been thinking of me all day because she'd earlier heard of a Jennifer Strange who died in a "how much water can you drink without going to the bathroom" contest. So, Ashlie left me a voicemail to this effect and I later researched the facts.

The BBC version of the story indicates that this doppelganger was only a year younger than I, though with three kids and a desire for a Wii. Thus, she entered a radio contest offering a free Wii to the contestant who drank the most water without a visit to the WC.

I can hardly believe that this radio station had the idiocy to concoct such a contest. In a day when the dangers of drinking too much water are a standard component of anti-hazing Greek governance (frats had taken to replacing beer-guzzling with water-guzzling for their underage members, but that only made undergrads die from water toxication rather than alcohol poisoning) and marathon training programs (because when you sweat that much, you must replace not only water but also electrolytes), one would think that someone at that station would have better sense.

As I understand it, the chemistry lesson basically goes like this: the cells in our bodies have an amazing balance of electrolytes and water, but if you take in too much water at once, you throw that balance off and the cells swell. But your body doesn't like swollen cells, so it shuts down.

Now, that doesn't mean you shouldn't drink water. I, for one, drink lots of it every day because I enjoy the privilege of autothermoregulation and general hydration. We drink so many sodas and caffeinated beverages that we don't realize how thirsty we really are. But everything in a balance: we need salty foods too so that the water can stick to our bones (as it were).

Just because "wee" is a homophone with "wii" doesn't mean wit can compensate for good sense. Still a dumb idea, but better if they had been drinking Gatorade or beer or soda. That's what my teary-eyed husband suggested after hearing the story, just before he insisted I quit telling him about it because it was just too horrible.

Slugs in Love

One morning last week, Micah claimed he was leaving for work but immediately returned, begging me to come outside. Since as I was still in my pajamas, eating yogurt and cereal in front of "The Cosby Show," I was less than in inclined, but he insisted, saying I had to see this.

And that, to the left, is what I saw—hanging from our city-provided trash can. Well, our slugs were more beautifully entwined, more tightly and therefore in a more aesthetically pleasing geometry.

This morning, I finally learned about it: indeed, as we had guessed, we had the rare privilege of spotting leopard slugs who had chosen our trash can for their odd aerial mating ritual. Even as we stood watching them, we could see the blue transluscent business moving.

If you want a readable scientific explanation for what's happening, see this page and prepare to be glad, with me, that we didn't see apophallation. If you want a more picture-book approach, check out this page, from which the photo above came. Too bad the rechargeable batteries in our camera needed recharging; otherwise, I'd be able to post my own photo here.

The good news about poetry and octopi

The mail continues to bring nice letters. Today, Christianity and Literature sent word that they have accepted "Down the Sea's Throat, Singing." Wow. That's the third poem accepted this year. The third poem accepted ever. The third poem accepted since I became with child. I think there's a connection here.

In other news, I have today learned about the mating practices of the giant octopus. Why? you ask. Long story. The point is, it's fascinating. The upshot: relatively small male octopus approaches relatively large female octopus, uses his fake arm (his reproductive organ is a third right leg) to insert a 1-meter-long rope of sperm into the female who later hangs strings of up to 100,000 eggs in underwater caves, then fasts as she tends them obsessively, clearing the strings of any possible sea debris for about seven months, at which point she dies (the father has died a few months after mating) and maybe 100 of the young survive.

I'm glad human reproduction doesn't require such sacrifice. Then again, maybe it does. Nine months tending the womb, not quite so obsessively, and most males and females involved in the process do survive the experience, but it's a daily death to serve the little bugger rightly. Maybe if I were mothering 100,000 simultaneously, even if only .01% survived, it would be a different story.

But maybe that survival rate has something to do with it. The mother octopus has given herself for a worldful of children, and she is designed to sacrifice herself entirely even if only for a very few who make it into real octopus-ness. The odds of becoming real humans aren't so much greater for our species. And we need true sacrifice from another perfect love in order to become so.

Hurricanes will Howl

My favorite science writer and altogether swell guy Mark Fischetti (who juggled eggs over a 2005 Centenary graduate just to prove a point--very cool) published an op-ed entitled "They Saw It Coming" in this morning's edition of The New York Times. Read it all the way to the bitter end, where you will find the last paragraph a bittersweet finale.

The upshot of his final sentence makes me fervent for education and action. We have so much to learn from Katrina and her refugees (so many thousands still waiting for refuge) about economics, sociology, race relations, welfare, public health, engineering, the oil industry, homeland security, charity, nursing homes, the elderly, rape, murder, love, blood banks, city government, national politics, war, and volunteerism, to name a few. So let's learn.