33. Quelea, with a bit of markhor thrown in

In my off-moments during the day, I sometimes turn to the phone and a quick game of Sudoku: the "hard" category—which isn't especially hard, though it requires a bit of focus. The app I use includes various contests: currently, a Daily Challenge, a First Try Challenge (which gets harder and harder—and believe me, the journey from "hard" to "expert" is no simple slide), and right now, an Independence Day "event." Also, always, an ongoing Tournament, which one enters simply by playing. 

Although I don't bother with any of these, I do sometimes check my (automatic) Tournament standing—because sure, I want to be a winner!—and get a little frisson of pleasure when I manage to make it (momentarily though it might be) into the top 10. Ten being as high as I've ever gotten, and then only on day 1, before the real players get going.

Rather winningly, all of us on the Tournament gameboard have monikers—the current top three being Busy Tiger, Fantastic Moth, and Unusual Moose. (What my moniker is, I have no clue: I'm simply identified as ME. But I hope it's something marvelous: Moonlit Mongoose perhaps, or Luminescent Flamingo.) Today when I checked, I was bemused by a couple of names in the top ten: Powerful Quelea and Alert Markhor (currently numbers 4 and 5). What are these creatures? 

Well, here I am to tell you (per Wikipedia):

Quelea /ˈkwiːliə/ is a genus of small passerine birds that belongs to the weaver family Ploceidae, confined to Africa. These are small-sized, sparrow- or finch-like gregarious birds, with bills adapted to eating seeds. Queleas may be nomadic over vast ranges. The red-billed quelea is said to be the most numerous bird species in the world. 

Until today, I'd never even heard of any kind of quelea, and turns out one of them is the most numerous bird species in the world? Well, knock me over with a (red-billed quelea) feather!

There are three species: the cardinal quelea (Quelea cardinalis), the red-headed quelea (Q. erythrops), and the red-billed quelea (Q. quelea). Though wouldn't you know it—its superabundance should be a clue—the last is a pest on small-grain cereal crops such as rice (corn being too big for its little beak) throughout Africa. Here they are in their abundance and beauty:

Okay, on to the markhor, aka Capra falconeri or "screw-horn goat," found mainly in Pakistan (of which it is the national animal), the Karakoram Range, parts of Afghanistan, and the Himalayas. It may be an ancestor of the domestic goat. Currently listed as near-endangered (its population was estimated at 5,800 in 2013), it has been aided by conservation efforts throughout its range; in 2024 the UN named May 24 as International Day of Markhor. It is featured in an Afghan puppetry tradition known as buz-baz. 

Every day, there's something new and amazing to learn about this world.

32. July 4

It's just tipped into July 4, Independence Day—the day after the deficit-exploding, basic needs–denying, ICE-magnifying MAGA bill (aka BBB) passed the House and headed to the Resolute Desk. David and I just watched Heather Cox Richardson talk about it, in her usual level-headed way. I guess it made me feel a little better—like, this depravity won't last forever. It may last longer than I do, but I can still hope that future generations of Americans manage to steer this ship back on course. Though with young people getting most of their messaging through TikTok and such bubbles, I really can only hope... But I'll be dead, so, to echo those MAGAts, who cares?

Here's the link to Heather's talk today: https://fb.watch/ADfzwPQnHT/.

As she said, misattributing the quote to Harriet Tubman (it was actually Robert Frost), "The only way out is through."

And of course I don't really want to echo anything MAGA folk say. I do care. I just feel powerless. And just maybe I should spend my last years (there may be twenty, even thirty more, there may be just a few: I'm past feeling immortal, though) living life to the fullest. 

And not worrying about bullshit I have zero say over. I will vote. I will write or call my representatives. I will join my fellow dissidents at Window on the Bay to protest. But I can't do much more than that. I am powerless. And worrying doesn't do a damn thing.

Here's a picture of our cats, in a rare moment of mutual civility, having taken over the dog's bed (one of them—he's got others): 

Let them be a model for us going forward.

As they might remind us, the Constitution belongs to us all. And it's our responsibility to keep it intact. However we can.

Happy Independence Day.

31. Sigh

Today the Senate passed the "Big Beautiful Bill"—what a stupid name for something so tawdry coming out of our formerly stolid government. It's gotten me thinking, wondering, about, oh, time. Life. A quick study of history will tell you that upset is more common than peace in human history. Why is that? Why does humankind seem to thrive so on chaos? But it does. Obviously. Our time, right now, is another testament to that. 

I was born in the fifties, and came up during the civil rights movement, the Vietnam war. But I wasn't very aware of all that: I was just going to school, getting good grades. My parents didn't talk about those events. Now, I would love to be able to sit down with them and ask them what they were thinking. How it impacted them. 

My parents were born in 1908 and 1914, respectively, so they lived through WWI, the Depression, WWII. They never talked about all that. Of course, as children, WWI didn't really affect them. During the Depression, my father had found employment with Chevron as a chemical engineer, so he was okay. And then he was hired in the chemistry department at UCLA, arriving in 1939. During WWII he spent some time in Philadelphia on a research project, and was involved in a laboratory explosion that compromised his liver; he ended up in and out of hospital for ten years. 

So yes, my parents encountered more than a little bit of history's ins and outs. I really wish I could talk to them about what they experienced, what they thought.

My father ended his life on the Republican side of the spectrum; my mother remained a stolid FDR Democrat her entire life. I'd love to be able to talk to them about that too: what they believed was right, was necessary. In real terms. From both their perspectives.

I know a lot of people think this BBB is a good thing, though I don't know why. Everything about it is abstract: the people who will be losing health coverage, the billionaires who will be getting even more money, the children who will die from malnutrition. But somehow, people think it will improve their lives? Because, what, of a momentary tax break? 

I find the Republicans in Congress reprehensible. Maybe the Democrats aren't so great themselves—politics is a game, for sure—but at least they voted against this monstrous bill. 

At this point, I have no faith whatsoever in my "government." It is as corrupt as can be. 

I am looking at my life now, how it plays out. I have money enough to survive, even once David and his pension vanish. If we old folks lose Medicare (which I don't find implausible), I may try to seek refuge elsewhere—a medical immigrant.  

A good 344 million people are caught in this travesty. I am not alone in my outrage. Even those who voted for Trump may well feel it soon.

In the meantime, I'll continue to seek out the beauty in life. I do have that. Plenty of beauty. Maybe it will keep me healthy a little while longer.

Book Report: Stone Yard Devotional

14. Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional (2023) (6/22/25)

This quiet book is set somewhere in the countryside of New South Wales; the narrator, a woman of a certain age and an atheist, has left her husband and the big city to seek remove in a cloistered community near the town she grew up in. It begins as a few diary entries on the occasion of her first visit back, and part two becomes a series of observations and musings about life in the community upon her return and seemingly permanent residence (though she does not take vows) with the ten or so remaining sisters. 

A few events punctuate the otherwise quiet life there: a plague of mice, which becomes worse and worse, exacerbated by drought (climate change); and the return of the bones of a sister who left the community several decades before to work "in the world." The bones of Sister Jenny are accompanied by a social-activist sister, Helen Parry, not otherwise affiliated with the monastery, who also grew up in the neighboring town (and went to school with the narrator). The backdrop to all this is Covid, and the general shutdown—meaning Helen is obliged to stay on once she's returned the bones, and the community has few visitors. Helen mainly keeps to herself, but even that causes certain friction. Meanwhile, the sisters and our narrator do increasingly gruesome battle with the rodential hordes, as they wait (and wait) for permission to bury Sister Jenny. 

That's it! At the end, the mice have mostly disappeared, the interment takes place (without permission, but never mind), and Helen departs. 

Some readers might object that there's no story, but I enjoyed the slow pacing and the thoughtfulness as the narrator grapples with big questions: What is our purpose? Can we be forgiven for acts of callousness and neglect? Why are we here? We learn that the narrator was formerly an environmentalist, but she lost faith in the cause—indeed, upon the dissolution of her marriage, in everything. She may not find answers per se, but she begins to find some peace. 

Here is a sample chapter (in full), opening with a quote (a not too tediously frequent device):

'We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will . . . Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If we turn our mind towards the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.' Simon Weil.    
     Our Simone [one of the sisters] once took me to task over my 'sneering' about prayer. My notion of prayer was juvenile: forget this telephone line to God bullshit, she snapped, hot with impatience. It wasn't even about God, she said, which I thought must surely be blasphemous. Praying was a way to interrupt your own habitual thinking, she told me. It's admitting yourself into otherness, cracking open your prejudices. It's not chitchat; it's hard labour. She spoke as if all this were obvious. I longed to understand her. It feels always that I am on the edge of some comprehension here but never breaking through to the other side.
     At night, just before sleep, is when I am closest to reaching it. In the morning, when the birds start, belief is as thin as the light.

And here's another quote, in a chapter that treats the idea that "if you don't life the life you are born for, it makes you ill," a remark made by Helen Parry at the breakfast table, to which one of the sisters, taking Helen's comment as condescending, responds quietly, "I was born for this life."

What I could not tolerate was the 'falling in love with Jesus' talk that I knew would come next, and it did. I find it nauseating; surely this life should be composed of something more sober than that. Something austere, and momentous, and powerful. Close attention, hard thinking. A wrestling, to subdue . . . what? Ego. The self. Hatred. Pride. But no, instead we have Sissy, and also Carmel, simpering that they are here because I fell in love with Jesus and want to live with him in heaven. As if they're talking about some teen idol crush. I have learned not to roll my eyes but there are times it is nearly impossible. Right at that moment, forcing myself to stay at the table, I was surprised to find myself meeting Helen Parry's glance, and more surprised still that both she and I held each other's gaze. Then she gave a tiny movement of her head in microscopic mimicry of Sissy's and Carmel's simpering, and I had to turn away not to laugh, in the process most completely failing to subdue my ego, the self, pride. 

Wood has written seven works of fiction, three of non. I may seek her out again.  

 

30. Wind phone

Today on FB I ran across a mention by actress Jamie Lee Curtis of a "wind phone" that was recently installed in Joshua Tree. It is in memory of two teenagers, Ruby and Hart Campbell, 17 and 14, killed in 2019 in a car crash. The memorial was created by their parents, who were also in the accident but survived. Unimaginable.  

As it appears, it is a telephone, but unattached to any wires, so unworkable in the strict sense. As the parents, Gail Lerner and Colin Campbell, explain, the original wind phone "was created in Japan [in 2010] by Itaru Sasaki while he was grieving his cousin who died of cancer. He bought an old-fashioned phone booth, set it up in his garden, and installed an obsolete rotary phone that was not connected to . . . any 'earthly system.' He called it Kaze no Denwa (風の電話), which translates as the Wind Phone. Using it, Itaru felt a continued connection to his cousin and found comfort and solace amid his grief." Here is Sasaki's original:

"Because my thoughts couldn't be relayed over a regular phone line," Sasaki said, "I wanted them to be carried on the wind." After the Fukushima earthquake, Sasaki opened the wind phone to the general public, and it saw regular use. The original booth was replaced with a sturdier aluminum one in 2018. 

The concept has been re-created in various places over the years. And now, in Joshua Tree. I'd love to go visit it next time I'm down there. The coordinates may be 34° 07'22.4"N 116° 15'58.8"W (or try 34.122889, –116.266333). As Colin puts it in his Instagram post on the new installation, "Anyone in grief can visit, sit down in the privacy of the vast desert, pick up the rotary phone and call their loved one via the cosmic connection."

What a service.

 

Since I wrote this, the Campbells' wind phone has been featured in stories in the New York Times, Washington Post, and New Zealand Herald, including photos. And here's a CBS Sunday Morning piece from a few years ago about a wind phone in Olympia, Washington:

29. Another day

I seem to get the idea to make an entry about "my day" once a month, because its been just four weeks since my last such—four weeks to the day, and another four weeks to the one before that. I also seem to get that idea on Fridays, when I've met with my Oaxacan friend for a bit of English practice.

Today she showed up with a children's book she'd picked up from the Free shelf at the library entrance, about the voyage of the Mayflower in 1620. She seemed tickled that there were a bunch of free books (last week it wasn't books on the Free shelf, but a case of half-pint milks; another time, it was flaky pastries) just for the taking. And so we learned a little bit about the Pilgrims (Peregrinos) and their ship (barco), though before we got to the Mayflower we learned about the Speedwell, which was too small to take the 102 Pilgrims from Holland, so they had to make a deal with some businessmen (hombres de negocios) in England, who said they could provide a ship in exchange for seven years' worth of goods such as furs (pieles) and lumber (maderas). I happen to know a few descendants of one (or perhaps two) of those 102 migrants, so it tickled me to learn something about the Mayflower. And we talked a bit about Columbus, coming 128 years before, and about Henry the Navigator and the Portuguese going to Brazil, and Cortés got mentioned, and colonialism. And I wondered if my friend has Spanish blood, or if talking about "when we came" to this hemisphere has a very different meaning for her. 

When I got home, David and I headed to downtown Monterey and the Wells Fargo bank branch there—our goal: to pay off our mortgage! But when we got there, there was a line. And a single teller. And although there were at least three other people doing something at screens throughout the bank, no one raised their head to notice: oh, a line; we should attend to our clients. After waiting ten minutes, with one person getting their business taken care of in that time, I said I was going for a walk. (I am not the most patient person. I don't know if it's a fault. It's just a fact.) And David headed out after me—which turned out to be a good thing, because we had planned to stop by Paris Bakery downtown for a couple of overpriced pastries, and when we got there there was only one left of the kind I like (cinnamon raison roll, aka pain aux raisins). Just imagine if we'd stood in line another thirty minutes! I would have been mad at the wait and sad because someone, I'm sure, would have snapped up that last pastry. Win! So with pastries in hand, we drove to the Wells Fargo branch near our house, and okay, there, too, there was a line (just two people), but immediately a fellow came to talk to each of us, and shortly thereafter, another teller arrived. Now, that's customer service. So snick-snack, we paid off our mortgage, and within ten minutes were on our way home, to fresh coffee and our coveted flaky pastries. All that shaggy dogginess to say, our house is now our own. No more mortgage!

It's almost miraculous, after thirty-plus years. And it essentially means an extra few thousand dollars a month in our checking account. In these uncertain times, that makes me feel a bit easier.

In the afternoon, I alternated reading a novel, set in Australia, and editing a book of essays translated from Bengali. Not always so easy to follow: like, "Another person will employ his everything in this work whose company has remained steady amidst my sorrows and defeats for many days." Huh? There were quite a few queries asking the translator to "double-check and make sure the text is as clear as can be." My editing magic goes only so far.

And just as David and I were about to set out on a longish walk with the dog, followed by a stop at the market for ingredients for saumon en papillotte, I checked my email—and was reminded of a jigsaw puzzle competition I'd said I'd participate in, with pickup at 5:15. Good thing I checked! 

The competition was fun. It was at a local library, and the conference room was packed with eager contestants: five (maybe six, maybe four) to a team, some fourteen teams. We all got the same 500-piece puzzle, with a cartoonish image of a carnival food court. Our team started out with three—Lynn (my walk-across-England friend) and Beth (a fellow wilderness ranger) and me—and then just before we got started we acquired two young women, Maddy and Nicole. Now we had some fighting power. We never talked strategy, we just got going: edge pieces, of course; pieces with stripes; pieces with orange or green leaves; pieces with words; pieces with pavement. Et cetera. It flowed organically. We didn't come first, not even close, but I think we all enjoyed the synergy. And it was lovely to be in a room with so many people so focused on something so lighthearted. (The photo here is from a puzzle I finished the other week, which took me months, and so I still have it on my drawing table so I can continue to admire all the hard work I put in. Maybe, though, now it's time to box it, and start another... I could even resolve to spend less than a year on it.)

In the evening, David and I watched the movie Mountainhead (meh), then a couple of episodes of the final season of The Righteous Gemstones—which I'm still hoping will have some redeeming value by the time it's done. 

Oh, and I should mention that before I went to the library to see my Oaxacan friend, I bade farewell to our great-nephew Nicola, who spent the night. We all had a sweet couple of hours yesterday evening catching up, chatting, reminiscing (he was on our recent far-northern Norwegian adventure). Nick graduated from Prescott College this spring in rocket science (or something similar!), and is now off to Torrance to start work as an engineer at Robinson Helicopter Company. It's heartening to see a talented, ambitious young man start off on his path. All the very best to him!

And there we go: another day in the life. This was a good one.

Book Report: Real Tigers

13. Mick Herron, Real Tigers (2016) (6/18/25)

The third in the Slow Horses series. Much of what I said in April about the second installment still holds: impossible to summarize, Herron's style—fast-paced, wryly humorous, great detail and characterization—super enjoyable, and I'm already eager to move on to the next in the series! Though I think I'll wait and try to fit in some more serious reading for at least a little while.

I had seen the TV version of this one and vaguely remembered how it went, including the kidnapping of a central Slough House denizen in order to stimulate a break-in into first one archives, then another—both of which, of course, went awry. I was actually kind of glad to have a visual memory of the final scenes; it made it less claustrophobic, gave more a sense of space, of physicality. And of course, to envision Gary Oldman as the curmudgeon Jackson Lamb: perfect.

But I had forgotten all the political machinations that ended up being behind the kidnapping and break-ins, and although at one point in the book I despaired of getting it straight (it doesn't help that the two main MI5 rivals have somewhat similar names—Diana Taverner and Ingrid Tearney, Taverner and Tearney), with enough deft retelling of various bits of backstory, in various contexts, I think I understand what was at stake. And just who, in the end—by handing over a coveted file that ends up containing nothing but a copy of the Angling Times—wins. At least for the moment. The Slow Horses may be screw-ups, but when called upon to fight for what's right, they deliver.

As usual with my reports on mysteries, I'm sure this report is more mysterious than anything else. But consider it a record for myself. Who knows, it's possible I'll be able to make sense of this in a few months' time. But not guaranteed.

I did flag one passage, the start of a chapter near the end. Again, it doesn't give much insight into the story per se, but it's a decent example of Herron's style:

The pub was off Great Portland Street, and she remembered being here once before, a wake for a dead agent, Dieter Hess. The usual pious utterances, when the truth was, like most doubles, you could trust the man as far as you could chuck a ten-pound note: where it fell, he'd be waiting. But that was the nature of the beast. A spook threw shadows like a monkey puzzle tree's; you could catch whiplash hearing one describe yesterday's weather.
     Diana Taverner was drinking Johnny Walker Black Label—a special occasion tipple—and trying to work out how special the occasion was.
     That Dame Ingrid had heard the sound of one big penny dropping was beyond dispute. Whether she'd heard it in time to catch the penny on the bounce was another matter. If she had, Taverner's career would probably not see out the week. It was one thing to plot and seethe in corners: that was what office life was about. But to actually set wheels in motion was a declaration of war, and the only war you could win against an enemy like Dame Ingrid was one that was over before the starting gun was fired.
     But it had been too good to miss, this opportunity . . . 

(A "double" being, no doubt, a double agent, and a spook being any kind of agent, double or no, but one adept at obfuscation.) 

Spook Street next. Though sadly, none of the local libraries have it. But I'm pretty sure I spotted it the other day at BookWorks in Pacfic Grove. I never complain about having to visit a bookstore.