Hungry Little Caterpillars

Last night, while watching "Nature," Mark and I were blown away by the life of the Arctic Wooly Bear Caterpillar (left).  What on earth is such a delicate creature doing in such harsh climes?  During the sliver of summer that visits the Arctic each June, the Wooly Bear Caterpillar is eating every green thing he can cram down his little craw, all with the hope that he might turn into something that can fly away.

By summer's end, though, the little guy hasn't eaten enough to become a moth.  Instead, he finds a spot and curls into a little ball, where we assume he is quietly calling "uncle" to the wintery death that awaits him.   Against all odds, though--his tiny system shut down and frozen--the caterpillar is actually laying in wait.  Even when the temperature dips to minus 100, he lays in wait until the following spring, when he thaws out and starts munching away. . . only to be frozen again six months later.  This goes on for seven years.  Seven years! But one June day--finally!--he's eaten enough to begin his metamorphosis.

Suffice it to say that, in the Holt household, Eric Carle's Hungry Little Caterpillar has taken a back seat to the Arctic Wooly Bear Caterpillar, when it comes to top moths-in-process.

What would happen if we spent a year focused on the small things in our lives?  All those little things wedged between all those Big Things that Demand Capital Letters?  Like the Arctic Wooly Bear Caterpillar, I think we'd find ourselves changed.  More patient.  More focused.  Fortified by these little moments and, perhaps, even braver in the face of the Big Things we will inevitably encounter.

Big Things will always be there--brash and brassy, exhilarating and exhausting.  Awash in air horns and neon lights, Big Things have an obliterating quality to them, as they run their fat fingers along the edges of all the small moments that make up most of our days and nights.

No, this year, I'm going to turn my attention to the Arctic Wooly Bear Caterpillar.  To quiet afternoons spent with a good book.  To the joy of bad dance moves and that one minute each morning when the sky turns into a Creamsicle.  I am going to spend this year among the less-showy parts of my life, wondering at and wandering with the small things that do not holler.

Extra! Extra! Read All About It!

My dad, a lifelong journalist, once told me that some weird stuff gets into a newspaper between Christmas and New Years.  He attributed the strange stories to a year-end lull in the news cycle, when nothing much is happening, but the publisher still has all those column inches to fill each day.

Maybe that's why the Journal Star got all "meta" on us today, with an above-the-fold, front-page story whose headline asked "How Did This Paper Get Here?"   (Ironic that the Journal-Star will okay a front-page story about how the paper is made but has yet to report on all the layoffs that recently took place there).  Talk about a slow news day . . . .

That said, having once worked at 926 "P" St. myself, I actually do find it interesting to consider the back story of all those front-page stories, the mechanical-engineering wizardry that goes into producing a newspaper.  When I worked in the Newspaper in Education department (can you call a two-person operation a "department?"), my favorite part of our standard tour was in the production plant, with its incomprehensibly large vats of cyan, yellow, magenta and key (read "black") inks, and the Industrial-Age feel of the web press, as it folded and spindled while not quite mutilating the daily paper.  It was a sight to behold.

. . . but back to the content of those year-end newspapers.

How, exactly, is a newspaper editor in today's world supposed to help readers discern between the newsworthy and the whimsical, when we have a buffoon leading the polls and dominating the headlines?  I would argue that at least some of the readers' confusion lay at the feet of the editors themselves, who too often have supplanted professional discernment (or what we once called journalism's "gatekeeper" duties) with a hunger for clicks and "likes."

My God.  Could you imagine what would happen in education if its leaders took a similar approach?

"Today, students, we will begin our research project, applying critical pedagogy to the belief that Chuck Norris, indeed, once made a Happy Meal cry."

My dad--a funny, wise, bridge-building man who also happened to be a heck of a journalist--died 22 years ago.  In those 22 years, I  have mourned the deaths of too many other wordsmiths whom I admire--Molly Ivans, Charles Kuralt,  Bill Kloefkorn, and Leon Satterfield, among others.

Today, though, I mourn something larger than these fine writers--I mourn the meme-saturated, RIF-frenzied, profit-obsessed machine that is eating journalism.  Like the Samurai from the movie "Brazil," this garbled behemoth burps out end-of-year strangeness all year long.  And we just keep eating it, convinced that it can sustain us.

Feeling App-rehensive

I'd been thinking about buying a Fitbit for a couple of months.  Almost bought one at least a half dozen times.  And then, yesterday, just before leaving to watch "Star Wars," I impulsively hit "add to cart" and put my Amazon Prime membership into "ship" mode.

If I'm to be honest, one of the reasons I wanted a Fitbit was that it came in a snappy slate color. Additionally,  I also was intrigued by its ability to evaluate the quality of my sleep.  As though getting up at 2 a.m. to pee is not informative enough.

And then there's the fact that I already own a pedometer.  Sure, it is bulky and when I clip it on my low-rise underwear, a person might mistake it for a tiny colostomy bag.  But it does its job, dependably clicking each swing of my right leg all day long.

. . . Yeah, but it isn't tidy or slate-colored.  And it lacks bells and whistles which, apparently, hold some sway over me.

Why, then, did I log onto Amazon first thing this morning (well, okay, after lamenting snow storms that will not come to pass) and hope it wasn't too late to cancel my order?   Because Allison, who owns a Fitbit and happened to be spending the night with us, informed me that, if I wanted the device to tell me about my sleep, I'd have to load an app onto my phone and log onto to it every night before going to bed.

I guess I just couldn't imagine spending my last waking moment each night plugging information into my phone.

I'm plugged in enough as it is, without having to worry about my phone.  Especially at night, when the last thing I really want to do is to drift off--midsentence--while reading a great book, waking just long to utter "Good night, Honeyboo" to Mark (hey, no judging!).

There is no app for that.  And, if there is?  Well, I'm not buying it.

Uplifting Snowfall

I cannot follow the path of a single raindrop as it falls from the sky.  But snow on a calm, dark morning?  It is both possible and delightful to watch a single, perfect, meandering snowflake lick the top of the lamp post as it wends its way to the ground in front of me.

This morning's perfect snow is an early Christmas gift, even if a thousand other Lincoln adults will grumble about its inconvenient aftermath--slowed traffic, slick overpasses, the prospect of shoveling.  Even Richard--the Woods Park wanderer who whispers the rosary on his rounds (and shouts out his "HELLO, JANE!" much louder and earlier than I'd care for), even Richard today lamented the snow, wanting safe travels on Christmas Eve.

But what, really, has ever been safe about Christmas?  About childbirth?  About poor people in unsanitary conditions having medical procedures?  Jesus' birth was never about safe travels.   That's why I love the later story of him accepting, essentially, a foot rub with Chanel No. 5. . . a lavish, wasteful, audacious moment in the midst of war-filled, hunger-filled, dangerous times.

And so, I'll take the snowflakes.  I'll open my mouth in hopes that the perfect, icy geometry may alight on my tongue.  I will give over to my imagination, wondering what part of the universe, whose stories are imprinted in that perfect snowflake that is now a part of me. This beautiful morning,   I'll take the muted quiet that comes with snow, the first pawprints upon sidewalks, the slow descent of frozen precipitation that softens everything--the landscape, the sharp tongues, the divides, the man whose name I refuse to speak (and, no, it's not satan).

This world could use some softening, after all.  And I, for one, will not stand in the way.

Visual AIDS

After a relentless week of work in the library, Friday brought with it a refreshing change--a quiet smallness that filled me.  By afternoon, though,  having recently forgotten how to relax, I roused myself to focus on my "to do" list and settled on the "gather stuff for our 'protest' display" bullet point. My commitment to the project was short-lived, though, because Helen had found a photo of the AIDS quilt, which set me off on a sidebar activity-- searching for evidence that my brother Mike had lived.

What I bumped into was a bit jarring.

Mike died of AIDS-related cancer in January 1996--two months after Allison was born.  And, in my Friday-afternoon search for my brother, I was reminded that Allison wasn't the only youngster back then.  Still too young for kindergarten, the Internet didn't have much to show for itself in 1996. Which meant that Friday's Google search for Michael James Raglin turned up nothing.

. . . as though this vibrant, funny, well-connected soul had never existed.

Lest we think the Internet is the be-all-end-all of storytelling mediums, a bottomless storage bin for human history, my brother stands as proof of its shortcomings.

And so, I made do in the face of my fruitless Google search, going old school instead and telling Helen stories about my brother.  About his artistic bent, his funny laugh, his extensive and eclectic collection of friends.  I talked about how he had lived and how we managed to find a way to carry on after he died.  And she did what no Google search could ever do--she listened and, in her listening, made my brother real again.

Empty Spaces

Halfway up M Street is a house that is more museum than residence.  I've lived in the neighborhood for 11 years and, in all that time, the house has stood empty.  I suspect it has been standing vigil long before I first noticed it.

The only thing that seems to still be functioning in the house is the light timer that clicks on each morning before Finn and I make our way up the sidewalk.  Almost always, I turn my head towards the house, wondering what it was that someone walked away from.  Why has no one come back to let in some fresh air?  What is it they cannot bare to let go of?

Lately, when I walk by, I half expect to see a fox or a family of raccoons sitting on the couch, reading an old Life Magazine or catching some 70s rerun on TV.

Imagining a wild animal taking up residence on M makes me think of the young mouse family that showed up in my birdseed container a few years ago.  What seemed, at first, like nirvana--the perfect place to raise a family, with all that good seed acting as both bedding and breakfast--eventually became their death sentence.  The metal walls around them were too tall, too slick to scurry up. Their bellies swollen with safflower, one day, the mice must have realized that they could never leave.  Thirst replaced hunger and container became coffin.

There is something disturbing about seeing an abandoned building.  It feels at once both intimate and dismissive, as though the very moment of abandonment holds too much mystery and loss to keep it to itself. What seeps out as I pass is some combination of history and fiction,  an unsettling brew whose ingredients I can never quite identify.

In the pre-dawn darkness, I search the front window for clues to the story that sits within, imagining movement and laughter, the smell of coffee wafting up the staircase.  And I know, somehow, that this is one of those stories with a sad, quiet ending.

The Power of a Morning Sky

Yesterday, I almost made the mistake of writing about the morning sky instead of going outside and experiencing it, firsthand.  Fortunately, the room lit up like a Creamsicle,  and it was all I could do not to run to the park in my pajamas.  This photo, taken by my friend Katherine Endacott, is proof that my decision was a good one.

I certainly am not immune to the immense sadness and violence of this world, the incomprehensible weight of Serious Things.  But neither can I turn a blind eye to its beauty, to a sky that is always--always--whispering "Look up.  Look up.  Look UP!"

Where else but in the steadiness of the stars, in the meandering strings of geese stretched across the skies, could I be so clearly reminded of larger things that care not a whit about our problems?

I look up and I am grounded again.

True, the violence still punctures.  The losses accumulate.  The divides grow seemingly wider.

But that sky . . . 

And in those quiet moments, when I give myself over to something that is not made of  bolt, barrel and bravado, I am steeled by the surprising strength of beauty and kindness, ready to face all that is broken, having bathed in the Creamsicle glow of things that are more eternal than violence.