Periodicity

Every year we go to Block Island for Memorial Day weekend. We always rent Pat and Tom Doyle's lovely second-floor apartment; we always go biking and walking, and have delicious fruit-and-pastry breakfasts in the apartment, and go out for some nice dinners. We always have some lunches sitting on the beaches. This year, as I ate lunch watching the waves come in against the rocks, I thought about the rhythms all around. Sometimes we notice things (especially when they come into bloom!):

Some things are easy to take for granted, unless you are rushing to catch the last pendulum swing of the day:

And some cyclical events seem magical no matter how many times we see them.

Seeing Rebecca and Sarah in this context, I thought about our family joke about the pictures we take of them each year on Block Island: If we lined up all of our photos of the two girls in front of the ocean at Block Island, year by year, we could make a flip book and watch them grow up!

And then something very different happened this year. On Sunday, we took our annual bike ride out Corn Neck Road, to the beach at the North Lighthouse. As we walked along the beach, Amy suddenly said, "Look! Seals!!"

There were perhaps a dozen seals (we think they were harbor seals), including a huge male, swimming off shore. At first they were about 60 feet out, but as we spent the afternoon watching them, one started surfing the waves at the point, and two came right up to the beach. They seemed as fascinated with humans as we were with them; they spent a lot of time staring at us when they weren't playing or floating. We were told that this visit was very unusual; seals are common in colder weather but are not usually seen in such warm water. What took the seals out of their usual rhythm -- a change in the currents, some change in available food, the seal equivalent of missing the last ferry? In any case, their change provided us with an unexpected pleasure.

Aliens

A small forest of these weird fungi appeared in our back yard this week. And then Sarah and I were in New Hampshire and saw these wonderful moss sporophytes:

These eruptions don't look anything like the "normal" plants and flowers I am used to. That probably has something to do with my expectations, rather than the real population of the natural world. I think these extraordinary growths are probably coming up all over, but we don't tend to spend much time in the places they are growing.

Which then sent my thoughts off to the people we Americans often call "aliens" -- which is to say, people who have come from another country. (Uncharacteristically, I am not talking about Star Trek creatures from another planet.) When we talk about "aliens," we mean people whose families came to America more recently than our own families came to America. There are many legal categories of such visitors / new arrivals, but one commonly applied distinction is between people who are "legal" and "illegal" (although of course it remains legal to be a person, it's just her or his presence in this country that is either within the law, outside the law, or ambiguous).

Two things to think about:

• We Americans tend to forget what a young country we live in. By European or Asian or African standards, we are all "new arrivals."
• It is quite odd to use the word "alien" to refer to these new neighbors. There is almost no difference between us and these "others" -- especially if your field of vision is broad enough to encompass the difference between us and the aliens whose pictures I have posted here this week.

(If you were wondering: that's the reproductive organ of the skunk cabbage.)

Reflections

I saw this heron when I was paddling my kayak back to Chaffinch Island State Park in Guilford a couple weeks ago. There was so much beauty in the scene: the heron standing perfectly still, the bird's reflection broken across the ripples in the water, and the green grass and blue sky also reflected in the water.

The way the water shone back the scene around reminded me of a conversation Amy and I had about the picture below, which I took a couple years ago in the Canadian Rockies:

Amy had said, "It's so hard to tell which way is right side up in this picture! Why is the color in the water more intense than the color in the sky?"

"Because I set the exposure of the camera based on the reflection," I said. "The camera can't adjust exposure for everything, and I chose to focus on the reflection."

Focusing on reflection is not necessarily a good thing. One thinks of Narcissus. But also, those of us who live near the woods think of male cardinals, which fly over and over again into our windows. Why? Territorial behavior: the bird mistakes his reflection for another male, and attacks the window to drive off the competition. Ouch.

So reflection has its dangers, but of course its benefits as well. After many hours in therapy, I find myself aided by self-awareness, when I can achieve it. Our music group Just Harmony has been singing a song we learned from a recording of Michael Jackson: "If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself, then make a change!"

On Turning 80

This is a picture from February, when we went skiing in Canada with my father-in-law Klaus. Yes, that's him. Yesterday we celebrated his 80th birthday!

Just to be clear, I do not intend to be downhill skiing when I turn 80... because at 52 I can barely control my sliding course down the hill. But I do hope that like Klaus I will be healthy, busy and pursuing my passions for decades to come. Klaus remains active in practicing law; supporting charities (including legal aid); visiting with friends; traveling; following and engaging in national politics; walking through the woods; eating good food and listening to good music. And of course he remains deeply engaged with his (our) family.

So here's a virtual toast to my 80-year-old father-in-law and all the energy and passion he exemplifies. A lesson we can all learn: blowing out the candle is well and good, but don't forget to savor the cake!