Sir David, my fearless octogenarian knight

It's a breathtaking day outside, the kind of day fabric softener companies use to pitch their "Spring Breeze" scents, and I'll spend most of it in a windowless office listening to moronic cell phone conversations taking place right outside my door. By the time all the white-gold brilliance has faded out of the air and everything's draped in exhaust-colored shadows and the world begins to cool again, I'll emerge to drive Pants' comic book rally car back home, where two hungry animals will immediately begin howling at me for dinner.

Pants is in another state, flouting the laws of physics. Someone once explained naval technology to him as "a series of incredibly bad ideas that turned out well," and I think this is accurate. His current training exercise goes against thousands of years of evolutionary survival instinct-- technically anyone willing to do what he's supposed to be doing should have been weeded out of the gene pool eons ago.

In the meantime, I've been keeping myself occupied by watching someone else comically endanger himself. David Attenborough's BBC nature series, The Life of Mammals is hands down some of the most interesting TV I've ever seen. Not only have I discovered interesting facts about whale penises (the Wright whale has a 12-foot prehensile dong!), I've also gotten to see an 81-year-old man roped to the back of a swimming elephant, hoisted into the Amazonian treetops with pulleys, and buffeted on the freezing seas in an insulated wetsuit as he chased sea otters. Steve Irwin, rest his soul, had nothing on this guy. Attenborough is able to retain his eloquent British aplomb even when farted upon by a Florida manatee.

Lonely evenings with microwaved spaghetti aren't that bad when I turn them into dinner dates with Sir David. The conversations I have with him as the DVD plays aren't that much different from how they'd go if he were really in the room-- mostly "Holy crap!", "awesome!", and "no fucking way..." from me, and then long periods of silence while I stuff my face and listen to him.

Incidentally, he's also got a fabulous series on bugs called Life in the Undergrowth-- bat-eating centipedes! do you need another reason to watch?-- as well as The Life of Birds and Blue Planet, which is all about ocean life. I should mention that the only reason I've gotten to develop this one-sided relationship with my 81-year-old boyfriend is that my friends Stephanie and Will, whose incredible nature adventures deserve posts of their own, have been lending me their DVDs. Thank you!

Interesting side note: Pants refused to watch Life in the Undergrowth with me. All the other Attenborough series garnered accolades from him, but Pants is terrified, on the brain stem level, of bugs. Funny that someone can routinely and literally endanger his own life for a job, and then leap shrieking from the room when a spider peeks out at him.

To be perfectly clear, I'm not mocking his fear, not entirely anyway, because I have an equally incapacitating fear of needles. It's rooted so deeply that I can sit there and deliver an out loud, over-intellectualized pep-talk to myself while getting blood drawn-- "I must breathe deeply. This is no big deal. I acknowledge and accept my fear, but I will not let it control me. Blah, blah, blah..."-- and I'll still end up face down and twitching on the floor in a dead faint.

Will, lender of DVDs mentioned above, postulated this weekend that perhaps both mine and Pants' fears are rooted in a perception of invaded boundaries, and our lack of control over maintaining those boundaries. "Bugs are little," he mused, "and they can crawl up your pants leg or in your butthole." Same with needles-- they break the sacred boundary of the skin, the boundary that, for me at least, should clearly define where the world ends and I begin. I think his theory has merit.

I just found it especially disappointing not to be able to have Pants share in my marveling at the incredible camera angles in Life in the Undergrowth. The cinematography (is that what you call it? with nature shows?) was extraordinary. Where all the National Geographic shows from my youth showed insects looking hyper-focused, over-lit, and vaguely greasy, the BBC crew, with their new teeny tiny fiber optic cameras, were able to make a snail shell look like the sloped and smoothed-over scenery of Mojave desert rock formations, and the segments of a millipede look like the precision-tooled, battle-ready machinery they are. Seriously, I don't normally wax poetic about slugs and insects, but this camera work inspires me.

If only Sir David could make a beautiful, artfully arranged documentary on phlebotomy.

Wind Farm

1200 miles. That's the grand total of the mileage involved in our holiday road trip. Starting on December 20 and ending on January 2, the husband and I wove a giant lopsided spiderweb all over Texas. The bulk of the web, and therefore the likeliest part to catch small insects, was built over the hill country between San Antonio and Austin, but a long filament stretched out to West Texas and then way back south towards what'll serve as home for at least another couple of months.

Another move is approaching, but for now I'm not thinking of that.

Instead I'm thinking of the West Texas Wind Farm, which is easily one of the coolest things I saw in 1200 miles. A wind turbine looks like something you'd make out of thin strips of drinking straw wrappers if you were bored on a date and also skilled at origami. It's got three massive white blades, each longer than the bed of an 18-wheeler, that glide in slow circles atop a 371-foot pole.*

(*this is taller than the Statue of Liberty, according to the Renewable Energy Projects website.)

The wind farm sits on a high ridge, one of a few carefully rationed changes of landscape in West Texas. From one horizon to the next, as you crest the ridge, are these turbines, as carefully placed as birthday candles. The thing is, West Texas vistas are so huge that all sense of scale, even with a horizon-full of 371-foot wind turbines, is lost. They are both awe-inspiring and unimpressive at once. It really takes getting up close to one, or as close as the road will come, to fully appreciate their scale and the speed of the blades.

And thus another element of my fantasy retirement scenario has clicked into place: I'd like to spend a decade raising a pack of dogs and writing long, contemplative novels on several acres of land within view of a wind farm. I'd want to see them at night, at sunrise, and when huge electrical storms roll in, slinging lightning at the whirring blades. I'd like to be able to sit in the huge bar of shade cast by the pole of a turbine, and watch the blade shadows lope and lengthen over the grass. I'd like to see what happens when a turbine breaks, and how new ones are put up. And I'd love to make my family and friends increasingly uncomfortable and suspicious of my fascination with the wind farm, to the point where they would gently start suggesting I and my dogs move elsewhere for a change of scenery.

I think there's a proposal in the works to erect a wind farm down along the South Texas edge of the Gulf of Mexico, which I think would be a capital idea. Strong opposition, though, is coming from people who say migratory birds would be endangered. (Which reminds me-- we got a huge Cuisinart food processor for Christmas! It makes deliciously textured pesto.)

We need more things like wind farms which, besides the obvious benefit of providing a source of non-polluting renewable energy, also serve as handy metaphors for huge, but doable, change. Spread over the course of a lifetime, or a horizon, they seem natural, almost commonplace, additions to an otherwise flat line. To someone about to be uprooted, again, in a few months, this is comforting.

Sea Change

Last night on "Fresh Air" Terry Gross interviewed a Lebanese TV anchor named May Chidiac who survived being blown up in her car by Syrian militants, an attack which cost her her left arm and left leg. I was listening in stunned silence as I drove through the streets of the tiny, tiny town, on my way back from a mission to collect the ingredients for my very first spinach mushroom quiche.

I'd left the house in a buoyant mood, having been thoroughly busy and needed and ful of answers all day at work. I'd even spent a long tense moment in the HEB weighing the prospect of making my own crust from scratch or going with the intoxicatingly easy Pillsbury pre-made option (I went for the latter). Out in the parking lot the trees were covered, every inch of every branch, in clouds of chattering grackles, and I remember feeling triumphant that even though my car was smattered in bird shit, I'd made it safely inside without being hit. Then I turned on the radio.

There are some stories that, while I'm hearing or reading them, I get this weird feeling of moving inescapably forward with the momentum of the events, like I've suddenly stepped on an airport moving walkway and no matter what I do, even if I were to stop and stand completely still, I would still be caught and drawn forward in the current.

Last night May Chidiac described the day she went to a Beirut monastery with a friend to pray, and then got into her car to go meet her mother for coffee. The yards that passed by in my headlights, their tall scraggly grass, their Virgin Mary monuments and tilted concrete bird fountains, stood out in stark relief as she described turning around to put her prayer candles onto her back seat and then registering a sudden bright flash. I crept forward through a darkened four-way stop as she described seeing "black snow" falling all around her, and how she realized she was now in back seat with the candles and that she couldn't breathe. She described crawling out of the car and into the street, and then looking back and seeing her left hand resting on the ledge of the driver's side window. The last thing she registered was her own screaming, and how it took a long time for anyone to come and find her since it was the middle of the day, and the equivalent of a Lebanese siesta.

By the time May Chidiac's story ended on a note of dazzling grit and defiance-- she has prosthetics and continues to broadcast her show despite further threats-- I had been parked in front of my house for ten minutes clutching plastic bags of warm milk and wilted spinach. My mouth hung open. My eyes felt glazed. As I struggled out of the car, I heard a tangled melody in the air, tinny-sounding and almost obscured by the wind, and for a heartbeat I almost thought it was one of the prayer calls I'd heard in the evenings in Saudi Arabia, but it was actually an old Hank Williams, Sr. song coming from a handheld radio in the neighbor's garage. The moment was startling, and definitely like coming to the end of the moving walkway and nearly stumbling over your own feet as the world's momentum snaps back into real proportions.

Ever since I read Like Water for Chocolate, I've wondered if it's possible for the cook's emotions and preoccupations to end up influencing the taste of the food. (I especially think about this when I'm pissed off and making dinner for my husband and myself-- "Ta da! Spaghetti with resentment!"). If that notion has any truth to it, then last night's quiche was a world weary one, laden with questions about how the hell a completely destabilized Middle East can possibly untangle itself, and where our own country, its international reputation in tatters, will stumble to next in search of comfort and purpose and the remnants of a vision lost.

I've wondered and worried all day about how the elections will turn out, but even though it's my day off I've been careful to avoid the news. In this town, it's not hard to do. I offered up my complicated quiche at a breeders' brunch-- it turned out surprisingly photogenic, but its flavor was underwhelming and over-complicated by the recipe's curious addition of cream cheese-- and chatted about upcoming military-related festivities. Beneath the surface though, I've been pensive and restless. What's at stake for me has become drastically less abstract in the past two years, and I find myself calling on tenets of nature for hope-- surely there must be a sea change, surely in times of trouble there is a tipping point.

Thank you, dead people

Last weekend I went to see the Bodyworlds exhibit at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

I was entirely unsure of how I'd react to a giant room full of real dead bodies carefully preserved in plastic and posed artistically-- I have an intense interest in human anatomy, both from a medical and an artistic perspective, but I've also got this nasty habit of hitting the floor in a dead, twitching faint when anyone gets near me with a needle or even talks convincingly about doing invasive medical things to me. So this weekend could have gone down one of two very different paths-- either I block the flow of museum foot traffic by stopping and sketching the exhibits, or I block museum foot traffic with my inert and unresponsive body, possibly bleeding from the head.

Thankfully, it was the sketching.

The full bodies were just as breath-taking as I'd imagined they would be. I had seen pictures of some of the posed bodies, but the amazing thing was being able to walk around them and sketch from different angles, seeing how the lines of each body, and the character of the pose as a whole, completely change relative to where you stand. Also, the eye-line of the body, where the person's gaze is trained, effects how you feel looking at it, even though these people are obviously dead and no longer looking at anything.

I've sketched living naked people before in a figure drawing class, and the gaze there was significant as well-- if someone's standing there naked and looking straight at you, it affects how you feel about standing there clothed and drawing them. Without getting too New Age-y about it, it's that their essential humanity, their nakedness, their quality of being stripped down to the common denominator of what makes us all human-- just a warm sack of bumpy skin with some battle scars-- is more intense when you know they can see you looking intently at them.

At the Houston exhibit, this feeling was much stronger. The exhibits had a quality of intimacy and sacredness that went far beyond that of a living naked person being studied for form and structure. These people were more naked than naked. Their ribcages were opened, their muscles were splayed back, detached from the bone to show the tendons beneath, their skulls were opened to show the cradled brain. And because I didn't know their names, because they would never be able to look back at me, looking at them and at the revealed mysteries of their insides, was something close to what it felt like to walk over the tombstones in the floor at Westminster Abbey. Gravity, reverence, awe.

What I wasn't expecting was how touching it would be to look at the isolated organ specimens. Laid out carefully in glass cases arranged in rows between the full body exhibits were samples of individual organs, both healthy and damaged, and grouped by systems-- skeletal, circulatory, digestive, nervous, reproductive, endocrine.

I was expecting to see these parts with a much more clinical eye, as things with less impact than if they had been part of a whole. I expected that if I was looking at a spleen, and I couldn't see who it had belonged to, then I could look at it as just a spleen, a thing that manages the recycling of old red blood cells. Without a body to put it into context, it would be like looking at any plastic model from a high school biology class.

But as I gazed down through the smudged fingerprints on the glass, I realized that I wasn't looking at a model, or at an organ with no body (or nobody) attached, I was looking at my own spleen, my very own lungs tired from running, my long-suffering stomach.

Each organ became a humble and heroic reflection of my own, and if it's not too weird to say, I felt a real wave of sympathy looking down at that stomach. It was so small, and so simple-- just a sack with some tubes-- and here I've been waging this war on my own, demanding that it not only digest whatever food I allow it to keep, but also that it bear the weight of all my stress, and in return all I do is ignore its distress signals. Poor little thing, I thought.

For so long I've been worried about whether or not problems with my health show from the outside, but in the margins of my sketches, among notes I took on what other people were saying when they looked at the exhibits ("I don't smoke that much," and "Dude, that's what my dad's liver must look like"), is the phrase "Whatever you do on the outside eventually shows up on the inside."

I have nothing but the deepest gratitude for the people who donated their bodies for this exhibit.