Report from the Reef

I have both good news and bad news from the reef.  First, the good news:  the reef looks fairly healthy, with lots of fish of all sizes and coral that looks whole.  We have been diving when the coral has been banged up, either by careless divers or by careless boaters or by hurricanes, which take carelessness to a whole different level.

Now, for the bad news:  the seas were enswamped in jellyfish. 

In some ways, they were beautiful, translucently blue as they floated by.  They were HUGE.  I've never seen jellyfish this big.  They weren't the smaller jellyfish you find in the Chesapeake Bay this time of year.  No, these jellyfish were the size of dinner plates, large dinner plates.

After one of our dives, we had to swim through swarms of them to get to the boat.  We all got stung.  I've never had a jellyfish sting before, but they weren't as bad as I thought they'd be.  It wasn't a sharp, searing pain, but instead, the kind of buzzing irritation that I've always thought that stinging nettles would give.  We squirted our wounds with vinegar and seemed to be no worse for wear.

Jellyfish are an ominous sign for many reasons.  One is that they've never been as numerous as they have been this season.   Now that fact could mean that the currents are different, which would not have to be a big deal.  But the increase in jellyfish points to a decrease in the health of the oceans.  Jellyfish thrive in warmer waters than most creatures like, and the ocean temperatures have been breaking all records here.  You may recall that two years ago when I was diving/snorkeling, the temperature at Molasses Reef broke the previous record when it climbed to 91 degrees (I wrote about the implications here and here).  Since then, those temps have become a new normal.

Jellyfish also thrive in waters that are more acidic, and we know that the seas are becoming more acidic.  This fact means that we'll have less sea life:  to appreciate, to do their job in our interconnected world, to eat.

We can spend some time arguing about what's causing these things, but we know that warmer planet temps are the likely cause.  I've become convinced that we can't change global warming, at least not within the next few generations.  We've waited too long while the problem has accelerated far more quickly than scientists believed possible.

I have no doubt that humans will adapt, unless we're part of the great Holocene Extinction currently underway.  As one commentator said during an NPR show on global warming, at some point the planet will cool and people who have never seen the Arctic covered with ice will feel just as panicked when ice retakes the region as we're feeling now at the prospect of the Arctic with less ice.

What to do in the meantime?  I should dive more often, while there are still reefs and undersea vistas to enjoy.

And for you culinarians out there, start developing your jellyfish recipes--I predict abundant harvests for decades to come!

Children of Scientists

I'm off for a day trip to the coral reefs off Key Largo.  Part of it is business:  I'm going with a class field trip to write up an observation.  Part of it is pleasure:  I want to see these places, and return to them, while they're still here.  The oceans are both heating and acidifying, which will kill the coral reefs, probably within the next few decades.

I'll swim and observe and pretend I'm a scientist.  Maybe I'm glad I'm not an oceanographer or a marine biologist; I'd hate seeing the destruction of habitat.

I have scientists, and the children of scientists, on the brain lately.  Dave Bonta has interviewed both of his parents, naturalists of the best sorts, who have lived on a plot of land, improving it and observing it and taking care of it, for 40 years (interview with Dave's dad here, Dave's mom here).   Those interviews make me yearn for a plot of land of my own, for a place to sink deep roots.  Dave's mom has also had a writing career, and her interview has interesting background on how she moved into writing.  Both interviews also give intriguing insight into a successful marriage.

Jeannine Hall Gailey has been thinking about scientist's daughters, both in this post and in her poems.  She says, "Tracy K. Smith’s story about writing Life on Mars had a few familiar aspects: she was born a year before me, her father was a scientist (an optical engineer who worked on the Hubble telescope instead of a robotics engineer) and she takes aspects of mythology and science and applies them to autobiography in some interesting ways. It made me think about women poets whose fathers were scientists, including: Rachel Dacus, whose 'rocket kids' blog was named after her adventures as the daughter of an actual rocket scientist; Margaret Atwood, who was the daughter of a biologist; Louise Gluck, whose father invented the X-acto knife you might have worked with in science lab or art classes. And Tracy K. Smith. And me. Are there more? Is there something about being a scientist’s daughter that drives us into poetry?"

As I read her post, pieces of my own life clicked.  I'm a scientist's daughter!  I think of a scientist as someone who goes diving into the deep or who spends life observing a land mass.  But my dad is a computer scientist, back from the day when if you wanted a program for a computer, you had to write it yourself.  I remember seeing punch cards at his office and thinking about the computer that spoke in this strange language of holes.  My dad brought used paper, with holes on the edges and perforated seams from the days of dot matrix printers, home for us.  I created countless pictures on the back of this green and yellow paper, which could be as sprawling or compact as I wanted.

My dad helped me with the science fair project that won us honorable mention--or was it 3rd place?--in the 8th grade science fair. My exhibit talked about vacuum tubes and transistors and the microchip.  My dad loaned me a microchip, way back in 1979, which we mounted to a board with a magnifying glass so that people could see how the computer communicated information.  Little did I realize how much that microchip would transform my life and all our lives.

When I'm swimming around the Atlantic today, I'll ponder Jeannine's question:  is there something about being the child of a scientist that drives us to poetry?

If you want to see some of Jeannine's responses to this question, a great starting place is the Escape Into Life posting that pairs some of her poems with some fabulous art.  Kathleen Kirk, the poetry editor, has a magical ability to find the perfect art to go with the perfect poem--I don't know how she does it, but I'm always in awe of her talent.  Is she the daughter of a scientist?  Could that explain her ability to join disparate elements into a cohesive whole?  Or is that simply the way her artist's brain works?

Whatever the answer, I'm grateful for the work of Dave Bonta, Jeannine Hall Gailey, and Kathleen Kirk.  They inspire me to more careful observation and to making more interesting connections.

Happy Birthday to the CD

On this day, in 1982, the first CDs for commercial release were manufactured.  At first, they were solely for storing music, and later, they were rejiggered to store data.  Until recently, we'd have all been acclaiming how the CD had changed our lives, but along came other means, smaller means, of data storage, and our lives have changed again.

I remember moving boxes of vinyl records and wishing I had a CD player.  And then, I got one, and was faced with the question that seems to be eternal for me:  stay with older technology or try to replace all that vinyl?  It's a question I still haven't settled, as each new wave of technology crashes on my head.

I was thinking about the issue of technology the other day as a colleague decried the use of cellphones and how everyone is texting now and not paying attention to the humans around them.  I spent the rest of the day wondering about which technology I adopted in my youth that drove my elders crazy.

Would it have been the Sony Walkman?  I plugged in and tuned out in much the same way that people of today do with their smartphones.

This summer seems to be the season of references to the Sony Walkman.  In Super 8, the sheriff sees the Sony Walkman as the beginning of the downfall of Western civilization.  I loved this post in the memorable/meaningful records series that Charles Jensen just finished.  In a post about a Neil Diamond record, Julie E. Bloemeke meditates on the way the Sony Walkman changes her life:  "When Christmas 1986 arrived, everything changed. I unwrapped my first Walkman, not realizing then how my experience of listening to music would forever alter. I would no longer compete for sound space; I would no longer pick up and drop the needle over this song and that. Instead, listening would become about the trajectory of the album, the journey of following an emotion from one song to the next. And, with headphones, with a cassette, I realized I could drown out the voices in the front seat, the television in the other room. I could take my music on a walk, into my bed. I could take Neil with me wherever I went: his lyrics, his voice, his guitar."

I've spent the summer (and the seasons before it) thinking about technology and the way it has reshaped so many career paths.  We seem to be on some kind of collision course in the world of higher education, and it's unclear to me how it will all shake out.  Will we see a world where only a few of us are teaching courses to students across the country?  Will we see push back and a demand for face time by students who now pay a lot of money to come to college?  Will we even recognize the college classroom of 10 years from now?  I have no idea.

The twentieth century reminded us again and again that the same technology bestows gifts and curses alike.  As I think about the CD, I see more gifts and fewer curses.  So, happy birthday, CD technology!  Will we ever look back on you with the same kind of nostalgia that vinyl LPs inspire?  Oh yes, some of us already do.

In Praise of Repertory Theatre and University Drama Departments

Bookgirl has a wonderful post about summer theatre, in her case, Shakespeare by the Sea, which makes her feel like she both lives in a major city and lives by the sea.  Actually, it takes her a drive of at least 85 minutes to get to the festive event.  I admire her spirit in making the outing an event, complete with picnic (or stop at a Hungarian bakery, if there's no time for a picnic).  This year, she brought her children, and I loved watching her children discover live theatre as I read her piece.

I've been lucky to be part of a family that nurtured our love of all sorts of performing arts, including theatre.  I still don't understand how my parents lived on one salary and afforded all the cultural events we afforded.

Of course, not all cultural events have to be expensive, do they?  It's not like we were seeing Broadway shows every week-end.  No, when we saw Broadway shows, those were the big events that usually required a trip to a different city, like Atlanta or Washington D.C.  My childhood/adolescence was back in the days when touring Broadway companies didn't come to every midsize towns, just the big ones.  Now it's different.

I remember summer as a time of repertory theatre.  I remember the University of Virginia's theatre and performing arts department presenting at least 4 plays every summer.  What a treat to go to each play and to remember the actors from their other roles.

Going out to a show felt festive.  I loved the play.  I loved the fact that we went out for frozen yogurt or ice cream afterward.  I loved that it was warm and we stayed up late and the small towns of my childhood had a different summer vibe.

I remember going to see plays at the university during the school year too, but usually as a school field trip.  When I was in high school in Knoxville Tennessee, we often went to see drama productions put on by the University of Tennessee's drama department.  We saw Shakespeare and Greek plays.  I still remember Medea with its electrifying end--it was no less electrifying for being performed by college actors.

We saw these plays for an amazingly low price, something along the lines of $5 a ticket.  Wow.  What a service the university drama department did.  I hope that they still are.

It was a symbiotic relationship.  The area schools were a built-in audience, and schools could shape their curriculum around the plays that would be presented during the school year, which they did.  It was great to study a play and then to go see it performed.

We traveled to the University of Tennessee auditoriums in big, yellow schoolbusses, but I've also heard of drama departments that travelled to area schools, another great idea.  I've also seen many examples of singing groups--some of them huge in number--who tour and travel and build up good will for universities and colleges.

I haven't heard as much about poets and writers doing similar things in huge numbers.  I know that some states sponsor Poets in the Schools kind of programs--or they did, before our current economic crisis. 

But wouldn't it be fun to do this in a more concerted, concentrated way?  We could build travelling troupes of different kinds of poets, so students would be exposed to formalist poets, experimental poets, slam poets, people who did intriguing hybrid things with their poems.  Should I ever be poet laureate, maybe that's the program I'll create.

Lessons from Yahtzee and Other Childhood Games

A few days ago, my spouse and I didn't have time to do anything time intensive, like going kayaaking.  But we did have a bit of time, and we wanted to do something more than watch T.V. together.  So, we pulled out Yahtzee and played a few rounds.

Playing board/dice games always takes me back to various moments.  Of course, some part of me is back in childhood, crouched on a cold concrete garage floor playing the game or some sultry summer day trying to stave off boredom and heatstroke by stretching out the playing time.

And some part of me is back in graduate school when my spouse and I first discovered how cheap board games were (thank you Wal-Mart), and we started buying them--first for the nostalgia value and then because they were really fun to play.  And maybe we just hung out with weird people, but we found out that our friends really liked playing these games too.  We were on limited budgets back in grad school days, so having cheap entertainment, like a board game, helped immensely.

As we were playing Yahtzee, my spouse and I talked about how we learned to gamble.  Do you hold out for Yahtzee, even though it's not likely, or do you enter a zero in that column early, in the hopes that your 4 of a kind spot gets you a few more points?

That conversation took me back to a year at the beach, where my dad set up a kind of casino for me, my sister, and my cousins.  O.K., it wasn't a casino, but only one game, Klondike (you play it all the time--it's solitaire).  We paid my dad 50 cents to play, and he'd pay us a nickel for every card that made it's way into the piles that you build at the top of the card run.  It sounded like such an easy way to make money!  We lost so much money!  And my dad, wanting to teach us a lesson about gambling perhaps, did not give that money back.

I am now that obnoxious person who doesn't gamble or even buy lottery tickets.  And I'm sure that I can trace that attitude back to that hot week at the beach, playing Klondike and giving quarters to my dad.

And this line of thinking takes me back to Monopoly.  My strategy for that game is to try to buy up all the cheap properties.  Someone else can have Broadwalk.  Give me the low rent district just around the corner from Broadwalk.  I've won many a game with this strategy.  And if you look at my history of home ownership, you'll see that lesson followed me into adulthood.  My spouse would buy even more cheap properties, if we had more money to invest.

If you want to hear other people talk about their experience with a variety of board games, go to this podcast.  I love the whole show, which talks about ways to deal with summer heat, but about 20 minutes in, the group talks about board games.  The discussion of the game of Life took me back.  Ah, those happy summer days, with plastic cars and little sticks that represented people.  One of my friends loved to stuff her car with more children than the car could hold.  But that game did teach us that children are expensive.  It also taught us that delayed gratification (by going to college instead of getting a job) would pay off in the end.

I wonder what kind of games we'd make up about life now.  Would the lessons be different?

Of course, we played plenty of games with no lessons, overt and otherwise.  I remember games like Sorry, games where the objective was to get all your pieces into a final spot safely and first (maybe the lessons were there, but I just didn't see them).

Even today, with video games and other distractions, I've noticed that people still love these old-fashioned games.  Even my friends who play Scrabble electronically love an old-fashioned game played face-to-face.  And an evening spent playing cards offers all sorts of pleasures that we don't often get in other ways.  I think of my grandparents who spent many years playing Bolivia, which was a variation of Canasta.  I think of our family vacations at Myrtle Beach, where after a long day of fun in the sun (and losing money to my dad at Klondike), we'd set up card tables and play Bolivia.  I can't remember how to play, but I remember how much fun we had.

I'm glad that we can still amuse ourselves, even if the electricity goes out.  I'm glad that these games are still being manufactured (although sometimes in vastly different forms--the game of Life sounds very different now).  I'm glad that I have friends and family who are still willing to play.

My Chapbook Finally Arrives!

Originally, my chapbooks were supposed to ship July 8, but there were delays at the printers.  Yesterday, 10 months after first hearing that my manuscript had been accepted, the books arrived!

Happily that crunched corner did not translate to damaged books.

The picture below works as a metaphor for the whole process.  All along, I've had some idea about how the finished book would look, but it's been an idea wrapped in tissue paper, a book I can almost see, but can't quite.

And then, the books are unwrapped, and I can exhale.  They're beautiful, as books-as-artifacts go.  I'll be happy to have them join chapbook #1, Whistling Past the Graveyard, which I had far less creative control over in terms of design, but which also made me happy.

If you ordered a book, it should be on its way to you.  I'll be interested to hear what you think. 

And if you're wishing you had ordered a book, you can still order one from the publisher, from Amazon (eventually), or from me!

Anniversary Thoughts

On this day in 1988, at 11:00 a.m., my college sweetheart and I married each other.  We got married in Greenwood, South Carolina, in the same church where my parents got married and where my grandfather had been pastor for several decades before he retired--my parents will be celebrating their 50th anniversary in October 2012.  We chose an early wedding time because we had family and friends who would be facing a long drive after our wedding.  We had the reception in the church fellowship hall.

After a quick honeymoon in Asheville, it was back to grad school.  In some ways, our lives didn't change much.  In some ways, our lives would never be the same.

Most couples can probably say the same thing.  They can probably point to storms weathered and unpleasant truths discovered.  They can probably point to support, both expected and unexpected.  They can probably talk about changes, both important and unimportant.

As I look back, I'm somewhat amazed at how young we were.  I had just turned 23, and he would be 24 in September.  Did we know what we were getting into?  Does anyone ever?

As I look back at our wedding, and I think about weddings now, I'm amazed at what a beautiful wedding we had for such a tiny sum of money (less than $1000).  Part of it was my insistence that the wedding not cost much, coupled with my mom's desire for a beautiful day.  Part of it was that we were married in a small town church, where we didn't have to rent a hall or pay huge costs for a meal or incur the costs that come with alcohol.

That was such a long time ago that we haven't even digitized those pictures.  So, I can't share the picture of my grandmother ironing my wedding dress.  You can't see my face as I sipped the champagne that my parents had bought when they were stationed in France and saved for their daughter's wedding.  Champagne was not meant to be aged for 23 years!  You can't look at pictures of all of us as very young people.

Once, a dinner guest looked at our wedding pictures and said, "Look, pictures from your first marriage."

In some ways, it feels that way:  we're both older now, so different.  And yet, we're still so much the same.

If I could travel back in time, what would I tell those crazy kids?  I'd say, "Go ahead.  Get married.  Make that commitment in front of God, your family, and your friends.  You'll make some sacrifices, but it's better to go through life with a supportive person by your side than to be out there alone."

I know that I've been lucky.  We've been through some hard times, but they could have been worse.  I've been lucky in that I'm allowed to marry the one I love with the benefits that come from that.  We've been lucky in that one of us has always been fully employed, even if we've rarely both been fully employed at the same time.  I'm lucky in that we both have simple wants and needs.  Our marriage would not have survived if one of us had been the type of person who got our self-worth from having more and more expensive stuff.  I'm lucky in that we've both changed, but not in directions that made continued marriage impossible.

I'm hoping for another 23 years of luck and love.  I'm hoping for love for us all in these difficult times, in whatever form(s) we'd like that love to take.