Alien Life

By the time I was in fourth grade I had decided what I wanted to be when I grew up, an exobiologist.  I was elated by this decision.  I felt that the great question of my purpose in life had finally been settled.  It didn’t occur to me that it might be less than obvious to the other people in my world why this was such an obvious choice for my vocation, much less that others might not even know what exobiology was.  I told my two best friends and received only blank expressions.  I gave my most enthusiastic explanation, still blank faces. I thought my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Bannock, would provide a better reaction.  I told her, she was very enthusiastic and I was delighted.

            “Dinosaurs are one of my favorite things to study as well!” she said.

            I was crushed.  In desperation I even told my father, who pointed out that there wasn’t anything, actually, to study yet and probably wouldn’t be for some time.  I saw the sense in what he said and ran away to join the circus.  So ended my brief career as an exobiologist.

Now days we call the field Astrobiology and NASA has a whole institute devoted to the study of alien life.  O.K. we haven’t actually found any yet, BUT in the last twenty years we have found liquid water in the most unexpected places in our solar system and we have found life in some very unexpected places on our planet.  Now my eleven-year-old son has got the astrobiology bug (so to speak) and we recently went to listen to a current astrobiologist, Dr. Benner, give a lecture at the museum in Denver.

On the drive there my son and I talked about what life is, exactly, and tried to hammer out a simple definition.  To my delight Dr. Benner spent much of the first half of his lecture talking about the philosophy of science and the difficulty of constructing a theory of life without bias.  He handed out a number of rocks and asked the audience to determine which ones showed evidence of life.  He talked about the human propensity to look for patterns – and see patterns, even if no patterns really exist.  He talked about constructive belief and how that influences the design of experiments meant to look for life.  He talked about theories that operated under the assumptions that life must: metabolize oxygen or carbon dioxide, fix carbon, be a cell, have our kind of DNA, make protein, have a minimum volume.

Good scientists, he warned, must continually check themselves and each other, examining the sources of assumptions.  Thinking outside the box with integrity is very hard work.

The rest of the lecture was filled with wonders.  We have made so many amazing discoveries about life just on our own planet, past and present.  The quest of astrobiologists has spawned whole new fields: paleogenetics, synthetic biology, computational bioinformatics and the intense study of extreamophiles.  Experiments related to the search for life are on board many of the missions we plan to send off into space over the next fifty years.  Mars is exciting, of course, but so are moons I had never heard of in my fourth grade enthusiasm: Europa, Enceladus and Titan.  What a great time to be alive!

On the car ride home I was waxing philosophical, relating Plato’s parable of the cave and connecting it to the thoughts on the philosophy of science Dr. Brenner had shared.  I was really on a roll when my son interrupted me.

            “Mom,” he said, “I really like synthetic biology.  I think you should help me learn organic chemistry next.”

            I didn’t have the heart to tell him that organic chemistry was the only class I ever had to drop in college because I just couldn’t hack it.  Isn’t life ironic? I heard my mother’s voice: “I hope you have four just like you!”   

Writer's Pit

Writing prompt from WFMAD (Write Fifteen Minutes a Day – Laurie Halse Anderson):

“What would it feel like if you weren’t dogged by this poisonous sense of inadequacy and failure?”

I am always so surprised when anyone shows interest or connection to my writing.  I reconnected with an old college professor a few years ago.  I went to college in the early 80’s.  I really admired this professor and always felt that my writing must be a chore for her to read.  All the other students were so effortlessly brilliant and witty.  I often felt slightly breathless at the end of a class, as if I had been running madly to keep up.  Now, thirty years later, my professor tells me that she kept a play I had written back then.  Not only that, but she had reread it the other day because it made her laugh (with me, not at me, you understand).  You could have knocked me over with a feather. 

I think if I had an iron clad guarantee that the writing would eventually come right, the screaming critic in my head would die.  I would be living each writing moment with faith in my own creative energy.  I would believe that ideas, words, the shape and flow would grow out of the initial muck.  Fear would be gone.  I would not feel the need to control the writing path with an iron will so that only well planned perfection flows from my pen – which means, in reality, that it never ends up touching the paper.

I’m the one who built this internal critic, this screaming banshee.  I built her out of fear and doubt.  So surely I have the power to banish her for fifteen minutes so I can scoop up some muck and spill it out onto paper.  Begone shrew!  Out I say!  I will write from a place of faith! Perhaps if I pan through it later I will find some flecks of gold, or not, no matter.  There is always more muck where that came from.  Writing, like laws and sausages, is not pretty to watch when it is being made.

Facebook and the Dead

I’m going to write about death and social networking.  Within the last year I’ve lost three friends to cancer.  This really sucks.  I know death is inevitable, but I don’t have to like any aspect of it.  Since they saw death coming they all “made a good end” as Ophelia says.  They had bucket lists and the ability to do most of the things on them.  They had parties to celebrate their lives, their friends, families and their children.  There was music, art and poetry.  One chose assisted suicide, the other two had access to good hospice drugs so, as far as we can tell from the outside, physical suffering wasn’t an issue at the end.  This, of course, is different from the profound and horrific suffering that has accompanied death through most of time and place on our planet.  Despite these good ends, I still hate the huge gaping hole that is left when they are gone, not to mention the stunning reminder of my own mortality and the fragility of all the lives around me that I love. 

So I turn to facebook. 

I notice an interesting thing begins to happen.  The facebook page of a dead person seems to go through a consistent transformation.  First it becomes a digital gathering place for people to leave condolences for the bereaved.  After some time has passed, posts transition to statements of praise and appreciation for the person who has passed.  After still more time passes posts begin to be addressed directly to the dead: “found a picture of us…,” “went to such a place where we…,” “was singing a song and thought of you…”  Five months after one friend had passed he had accepted the friend requests of over forty new people!  Finally, I have noticed that people are posting as if the dead person were still in communication – birthday greetings, events “Visiting the coast. Wish you were here.” “Hope things are going well for you in your new life.  Bet you are putting on quite a show up there!” 

The way we communicate has changed radically in the last ten years, but we are still tribal creatures.  We sit at computer screens in the gathering dark of an awesome, terrifying universe.  As a globe we each huddled around our flame in this digital community fire, while an invisible host of the living and the dead sits at our elbow.

The Missing Piece

I am deep cleaning my house this summer.  We moved to Colorado from Connecticut four years ago.  We packed in a hurry, scooping up whatever came to hand and filling box after box.  Although we gave away a lot of stuff I remember marveling, as I packed, at the amount of junk we still had: clothes that were no longer worn, papers that were probably not that important, a favorite puzzle with a missing piece.  We unpacked in a hurry as well, and dove into our new lives.  

New house, new job, new schools and end of life care for my parents all eclipsed house cleaning in priority.  This means that at the start of this summer the boy’s room, whose youngest occupant is now eight, still had shelves filled with the favorite toys of a four year old.   Alphabet blocks and electronic Lego kits competed for space.  The floor was ankle deep in school papers and hot wheel cars.  The boys went to camp the third week in June and I plunged in with a large shovel, determined to create order out of chaos.  I became a whirlwind of organization.  Papers were shredded and recycled, toys given to friends with younger children. After I had vacuumed I sat still and quiet on their little couch for a long time just relishing the calm and the order.   I ran my fingers absentmindedly back and forth along the edge of the clean rug when my forefinger detected one last piece of junk.  I yanked it out from under the rug with a shout of disgust and then stopped as I beheld a marvel.  I held one small jigsaw piece belonging to a detailed puzzle of the solar system.  I, of course, knew where the puzzle was now but this piece had gone missing about ten years ago, when my eldest was eight!  It had moved in the ebb and flow of small pieces of junk, from one child’s toy box to another’s drawer.  It had survived the babyhood of two inquisitive toddlers, a move halfway across the country and my recent take no prisoners vacuum job.  I don’t know if it is a metaphor for something profound or just a sign of my insanity in letting all these little drawers full of odds and ends remain in our lives.  But Oh!  What a feeling of satisfaction when I put that piece back in its puzzle.

Heat

The Walk from the Pool to the Bike

Heat

Kisses my chilled skin

Crisp with chlorine

Legs swing and melt

Into each gravel crunch

Heat

Seeps in deep

Soaks the very marrow

Breaths come so full and smooth

One more and I could fly

Heat

Slips through my hair

Flutters the skirt

Loose around my knees

Heat

Drenches slanting shadows

Lilies soused with gold

Overarch my path

Heat

Bakes into cricket’s trills

Into the Cicadian waves

That break on my ears

Like the sea

Heat

Pulls out the languid lilt

Of the sunset robin

A moon is rising

Rich as cream and

Full to bursting

P.S.

This perfect summer moment is brought to you in memory of Spalding Gray and his never-ending search for perfect moments.

Settling into Summer

            Summer has started and every year I wrestle with finding the rhythm of that particular summer.  I always have a list of millions of things I’m anxious to do; tasks, projects and even celebrations put off during the all-consuming school year.  Every year I worry whether I’ll be able to discipline myself into a workable routine and stick to it flexibly enough to have plenty of spontaneous fun but also accomplish at least some of my goals.

In the old movie “So Dear to My Heart” a boy is wondering how to find wild honey so he can sell some to the local shopkeeper.  The shopkeeper tells him “Just find a bee and follow it to its hive.”  The boy leaves and the shopkeeper’s friend chides him “You just don’t care how you waste that boy’s time.”  To which the shopkeeper replies, “What is time to a boy?”  I miss that feeling from childhood, that summer was endless and full of possibilities for quest and triumph.  But as I get older I am more and more conscious of the urgency of time pressing in on me.  The more I fret, the less gets done.  So, to the first task of the summer: Saturday I took my oldest daughter to take her SAT tests. On the drive there we saw an enormous bird fly low across the road just ahead.  It was a raptor, the largest I had ever seen flying in the wild.  It was being ‘dive-bombed’ by three or four small dark birds, but as it passed us it soared away, easily out flying its tormentors.  I thought it must be a golden eagle, but its wings were mottled with white.  I had never seen a golden eagle in flight before, just perched in captivity, where they are a smooth golden brown.  At home I looked it up in the bird book.  I think it really was a golden eagle. 

            That evening I took a bike ride to a local lake with my eleven-year-old son.  We live in such a beautiful place.  We saw avocets and egrets, white pelicans and killdeers, prairie dogs and even a beaver swimming across the far side of the lake with a branch in its mouth.  As we were standing by the lake, I looked to my left and saw a large grey brown mottled mass on the branch just next to me.  I wondered for a moment if it was an odd-looking hornets nest when it turned its head and I found myself looking into the yellow gold eyes of a great horned owl.  I quietly tapped my son on the shoulder and we both looked at the owl till it silently left the branch and glided out across the lake.  I am hopeful it will be a good summer.

School's Out

School finished yesterday.  All my reports are done and I left my room and desk spotless.  Now the summer stretches before me full of potential and here I sit, at a bright yellow table in a hip independent coffee shop.  My daughter is taking the SAT and I am waiting for her.  I thought I’d write a bit.  First I clean out my iPhoto; all the photos from a school year’s worth of adventures with remarkable students.  I think about writing something meaningful, wrapping up the school year and getting literary closure. I am overwhelmed by the thought.  I finish a chocolate croissant - forty minutes have passed.  I clean out the e-mail – another thirty minutes taken care of.  I finish my tea.  TEDx Denver has finally posted the April talks on Youtube.  I learn how to post Libby’s talk (the amazing woman from the S.A.M.E. Café) on my facebook wall – twenty minutes.  It is simply wonderful how easy it is to distract myself with worthy online chores when I sit down to write.  I have two goals this summer: write everyday and clean my house to a depth. Well, in truth, I have many goals, many, many, many; too many to accomplish in ten weeks.  But my main goal is to reign in my scattered self and really accomplish these two. I know the writing is possible because I did write everyday in March. The house – well, I’ll let you know.