Museum quality

The LNFU natural history museum, which I have long admired, has been undergoing a lot of renovations recently, and the department I work for is next. I was invited to attend the initial planning meeting for what to put in the exhibit. I was told I didn't need to attend if I didn't want to. Of course I attended. I will be sad to see the trio of weirdly named fish make their exit - farewell sergeant major, pudding-wife, and slippery dick! - but who wouldn't want to work on a museum exhibit? I do have to be careful not to overstep my bounds, however.  I have no scientific degree. I have no museum degree.

But what I do have is enthusiasm and creativity and a layperson's perspective. Yesterday when we were looking at what's currently on display, a middle-schooler came up to me and asked if we were examiners. Which in a sense we were.

Book sniffer

Things at the LNFU have been going swimmingly, something I like to say mainly because I work with and for people who study fish.Yesterday I took a little break to visit the special collections room of one of the LNFU libraries. They'd advertised a display of old, interesting-looking books, and for a limited time only! - so I decided to check it out.

Little did I know that I would actually get to hold in my bare hands a small book published in 1553. And flip through the pages of a big book published in 1554. Its cover had small metal hinges on it, fastened with tiny nails. Without even bothering to see if anyone was looking -- because, to be honest, I was in a room full of fellow oddballs -- I bent down and sniffed the big book. It didn't really smell like anything, which when you think about it makes sense because it's been kept safe from anything that would make it stinky.

Once I'd finished examining the books, I looked at some correspondence the librarians had laid out on a counter nearby. One of the letters was from Charles Darwin, and was written in in his own hand. It wasn't a photocopy. This one I didn't touch. Or sniff. I just bent over it while holding my hair back so I wouldn't shed on Chuck.

Ripening

I strolled Mount Auburn cemetery yesterday afternoon with Walnut and her bf. The bf is a tree fanatic and likes to gather seeds there for at-home tree propagation. I brought my binoculars and watched a pair of turkeys, a red-tailed hawk, and a woodpecker. Some dodo was making his way towards the turkeys. Lucky for him I am a volunteer nature cop. I told him to leave them alone because sometimes turkeys can be very aggressive.

Walnut's bf introduced me to the Kentucky coffeetree, whose seed pods are filled with hard brown beans encased in guacamole-esque green goo. Apparently the early settlers roasted the beans as a coffee substitute. Later we came upon a giant leaky maple and someone suggested I lick it. It didn't feel right to lick a tree in a graveyard, so instead I dragged my finger through the liquid and licked my finger instead. It didn't taste like anything. But I'm still pretty sure it was sap. I remember licking a maple tree at the corner of our summer fort at Grammy McQ's house. The fort was located in an alcove of sorts bordered on one side by a stone retaining wall and on another by a flight of cement stairs, at the top of which was a barberry bush with long red berries and lots of prickers. Apparently you can eat barberries. I was afraid of them as a kid.

There was a fair amount of creepiness at the cemetery; Walnut's bf found a fresh grave - I think the person had died nine days ago - behind a mausoleum. The ground had cracked in a rectangle, which I assumed was the size and shape of the cement box they tend to put coffins in these days. Earlier we'd peered in a mausoleum whose windows were dark and smeary, like plexiglass. What I saw inside made me want to wash my eyeballs. I don't really know why. It was a stained glass window of baby angels, but something about the quality of the light and the subject matter just made me shiver.

Luckily some douchenozzle who'd died a long time ago provided us with much-needed comic relief, in the form of a long epitaph extolling his many virtues. It continued on for at least two sides of an obelisk and used words like "thenceforth." But the best part was the mention of a trip to Europe, where he'd "ripened his powers." Ahem.

Reading

I've been doing a fair amount of reading these days. The NYer had a fawning review of a book of collected essays by a gentleman born a year after me, and the article talked about how we're in a sort of golden age of essays. And I thought: I missed the boat on that one, big time. And I felt: jealous, and disappointed in myself.

Then I requested the book from the LNFU and gave it a read. It was pretty good. It's some of the best writing I've read in a while - a mix of pop-culture references and feelings, but with the addition of multiple literary references-a Polish poet here, a bible verse there-and a mature and unique voice that is certain but uncertain at the same time, and OK with both.

I had been expecting uber-manly or at the very least super-egotistical, seeing as how the magazine article had lauded the author as the next Tom Wolfe. But this guy doesn't come across as an asshole. Though maybe that happens over time? I don't know. Anyway, I'm glad I read it.

I then moved on to a book about a taxidermist, which I'm reading right now, along with a book about Audubon. I have one more chapter to go on Hitch-22, which has been enjoyable if a bit verbose, something which is easily remedied by skipping entire chapters.

And I'm baking. Cookies, no-knead challah, pecan sticky buns. And I'm worrying, about what at times feels like a crippling inability to support myself financially. I need to go back to basics: meditation, a day at a time, no judgment. Love.

That's all for now.

Further Christmas tales

Our numbers have been dwindling on Christmas Eve at McPolack manor but thanks to reproduction there are a couple of tiny folks filling the empty seats. One of them came dressed in his holiday finest: plaid silk shortalls. With kneesocks - eek! And wee loafers. The adorable level was through the roof.

It was hard not to eat him alive. And harder still not to giggle when his father set him down on the leather sofa and little lord silkyshorts slid slowly onto his back. Because leather sofa + besilkened bottom is a gentler version of foot + banana peel.

The other tiny person was equally adorable and her pink velveteen dress had more traction. Also she is an animal lover. And by lover I mean this: when she was eating her dinner and food fell on the floor and a big, gentle, slobbery dog snuffled over to pick it up she SCREAMED with delight. She'd then catch the eye of someone near by, as if to say "are you seeing what I'm seeing and isn't it AMAZING?" Pure exuberance.

She felt this way about PolackPappy's chinchilla, Harold, as well, and asked many times to be carried to his cage, which she would smack with her little hand. Harold, btw, could have easily retreated to the man-cave Pp made for him out of cardboard, but he didn't. I think he liked the attention. Or perhaps recognized a fellow cute little package of fierceness.

Moldy Christmas

I asked my brother-in-law and PolackPappy to pull an old trunk of mine out of the barn so I could go through it, finally, and maybe bring to my apartment to keep. But it turned out to be covered in mold, inside and out, and mold had permeated Babcia's party dresses from the '30s, and the exquisitely tailored handmade fripperies from the late 19th century that had belonged to an old wealthy woman whose lawn PolackPappy used to mow.

I had to throw them all away. Along with my class yearbooks, my high school literary magazine, a bunch of photographs, and Blue, my mother's stuffed dog.

Mold had gotten to the real treasures, too: handwritten letters from dead relations and dead relationships. A tiny note from Babcia began "Dear McP, I do not like to see the word 'fuck' in print." Despite her disappointment at my word choice, she'd enclosed twenty-eight dollars, enough for a year's subscription to the weekly newspaper that was my first "real" job out of college. A letter she wrote when PolackPappy was undergoing chemo started out asking "How's my girl?" and then briefly mentioned how tired PP looked.

I get the sense that I'm the memory-keeper in my immediate family, though I wonder sometimes who I'm keeping the memories for. Anyways, I'm confident I held on to the important stuff.

Bean

PolackPappy brought home some Mexican jumping beans once. He kept them in his desk, and I used to pull them out and look at them. I don't remember anything hatching. But that's what happened with one of the beans in a jar on my desk at the lab. I came in after a long weekend of life and death to find a small moth had pushed open the trap door it had made when it chewed its way in as a larva.

The beans were given to me by a post-doc who's studying m on the sly - though her secret came out one afternoon when a couple of her officemates starting wondering why the envelope on her desk was rattling. I emailed her and asked her what to do; she said I could see if there were any moths in the jar of beans on her desk - there weren't - and so I went to the magical interwebs for advice.

Of course there wasn't much to be done for the moth. From what I gathered, it didn't need to eat - it would live for a few days searching for a mate, followed by mating, egg-laying, and death. Since I'm nowhere near Mexico the moth was going to fly around in the jar until its number was up. This depressed me. Surprisingly, some of my fellow lab members also felt sad about the moth. At one point we had a decent estrogen-fueled circle of maudlin going, with the moth at the center, but I was able to be the voice of reason.

This was thanks in part to experience and in part to the woman from the ornithology department I ran into by the elevator while getting the mail. She, too, felt depressed that the moth wasn't going to fulfill its life's purpose and suggested I bring it to the departmental holiday party. A fine idea if ever there was one.

And so, late that afternoon, I tucked the bottle with bean and moth into the pocket of the Lily Pulitzer pants I found at the thrift store and headed over to the natural history museum, where the party was being held. One of the finance guy's girlfriend is a professional photographer and she had a white sheet, a stool, and props. I had my photo taken with the moth and a sign that said Feliz Navidad.