Symbiogenesis: bug your elders
Mommy & Daddy (pic from Wikipedia)
So humans, fanatic wielders of Clorox wipes, are just one branch in long genetic lines of bacterial evolution. Our great-to-past infinity-grandparents were bugs and we are bugs, and we already know we can’t live without them, whether you’re pro-biotic or anti-biotic in nature. Just our digestive tract alone hosts a good ten times more organisms than we have cells in our body.
Bugs R Us. Not only do we contain them, the cells in our bodies quite probably evolved from them. Next time I see a toddler stuffing her face with dirt I’ll just call it a family reunion.
Our bodies are a vehicle of sorts, carting around 100 trillion microbes, according Carl Zimmer, who writes about the human biome, among other things (New York Times Magazine, 12/3/11). Amy Barth reported that we pack around 200 trillion microscopic organisms, including bacteria, viruses, and fungi and lists where they lurk in our guts, pits, scalp, elbows, skin, and so on (Discover, March 2011). What’s the diff among a few trillion microorganisms.
When I go out to feed my worms kitchen scraps and shredded junk mail, it is not the red wigglers I’m actually feeding, but all the bacteria in their guts, which they kindly process into yummy fertilizer I cast onto my broccoli plants. (Which just get eaten by the allegedly higher Orders, like isopods, crickets, and rabbits, anyway.) I call the composting shelves my Worm Condo but perhaps I should name it “Penthouse of Bacteria,” instead.
We like to think humans are more than just bacteria pods, but are we? And yet—some of us feel we have a certain intelligence in our guts, but that’s another story.
{An aside, or Station Break}
Speaking of bacteria pods, it’s not fair that our body’s high water content (70%) gets all the attention, such that creatures in one episode of Star Trek called the human species Ugly Bags of Water. Particle physicists used to say we’re just a lot of empty space, considering the corresponding distance between an electron and proton in just one atom of our trillions of cells is the equivalent of 11 miles, if you pinned the suckers down: The now-outdated Bohr solar system atom model is still useful for high school biology teachers, but now we understand, with quarks and their constituents buzzing around a nearly light speed inside a proton—or among whatever energy, magnetic, or gravitational field hangs out around there, that this “space” is much fuzzier and smearier, a whole dark matter of mystery inside and around an atom inside and around whatever n-dimensional space. (If anyone read this post I’d probably get canned for that new atomic cosmic analogy, but what can I say? It was a Thought Quark.)
{And now back to Bugs}
My Science Times podcast (in an interview with Carl Zimmer, sometime early 2011) reminded me that the DNA of microorganisms residing in our Gut Palace outnumbers the human genome a hundred fold. Who’s genes are we? What about that gut intelligence?
Microbial ecologists have also found that people have different types of biomes, or unique sets of microbial colonizations, not unlike the four different blood types (A,B,AB,O)–a sort of gut fingerprint is how I see it. (That from another Science Times podcast, which I listened to while walking the dogs so I don’t always note the date before the next synch casts it off.)
{Is it pejorative to call Bacteria ‘Bugs?’}
Evolutionist and academic rabble-rouser Lynn Margulis, now in her seventies, is still stirring up the worm castings. She’s a bio-logical provocateur, one of my favorite kinds of people. Discover interviewed her in April 2011, from which I gleaned some of her concepts.
Margulis revolutionized our understanding of evolution in 1967 with her concept that eukaryotes (cells with a nuke) and other complex cells evolved as a series of mergers among bacteria living collectively and then symbiotically. She believes that symbiosis, or “symbiogenesis,” is what makes new species evolve, far more than random mutations and natural selection. The latter exists more to maintain and weed existing species, she says. (That’s some heavy culling, I’d say, going from Neanderthal to Sapien sapien or Erectus to Habilis–what were they eating back then? We’re headed for Homo plasticus, minus the sapience, I fear.)
Margulis has some interesting points. Symbiogenesis better supports Stephen Jay Gould’s “punctuated equilibrium,” which is what you see as time gaps in the fossil record, for one.
Protoctists (eukaryotes) appear in the fossil record around 452 million years ago, Hominidae (our apelike forebearers) maybe in the past 15-20 million years, and actual humans, gosh, just in the past 200,000 years, max.
Ancient bacteria and their ilk became pretty handy at finding specialized niches those hundreds of million years ago: Margulis posits that every visible life form is a combination or community of bacteria.
Our teeny cellular powerhouses, mitochondria, for example, came from oxygen-respiring bacteria. We can’t live without these mighty organelles. When you run out of energy, blame them. In plants and algae, the great photosynthesizer, chloroplast, came from cyanobacteria (formerly known as “blue-green algae”).
How? So a zillion years ago, an amoeba couldn’t digest a bacterium, but they worked pretty well together—the bacteria made oxygen or vitamins that were helpful and at some point transformed themselves into mitochondria, because “long-term symbiosis leads to new intracellular structures” and so on, and here we all are, the isopods, the crickets, the rabbits.
Evolution, according to Margulis, is a series of acquired genomes. Sounds bio-logical to me.
Take the cilia (in rods and cones in the eye; in the inner ear, for balance; in motility systems all over the body): Rather than evolving from random mutation they could have come from the acquired genome of a spirochetish symbiotic bacterium that could sense light or motion, oh so long ago. Margulis theorizes that our cytoskeletal system came from the incorporation (what a perfect word) of ancestral spirochetes.
And why not? It makes as much sense as anything else. She really pisses off a lot of evolutionary biologists, though, among other theorists. They say, “wormshit!”
Margulis posits that all living cells possess consciousness, if consciousness is a matter of responding to sensory stimuli, if I read her right. Says Margulis, bacteria have been around since the origin of life and are still running the soil and air and affecting water quality.
Humans have been around for just a relative teeny blip in time; let’s round and say 1 million years vs. bacteria’s 350 million years–and look at all the havoc we wreak on the planet (OK, we’ve kind of junked up the solar system, too). Like an invasive species, we consider ourselves special and intelligent as we nonetheless overgrow our habitats.
In Margulis’ line of thinking, we’re starting to act like “mammalian weeds.”
A buggy weed.
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Electronic Poisoning
Summer of 2007: My kids hated camping and hiking in the Redwoods.
We got them on the spongy trails with the giant trees and they said, “This is boring. When can we go home? This is stupid.”
One of the most glorious places on planet Earth failed to move my seven- and nine-year-old daughters. We even let them lead us on the trail, hoping that would spark a drive to explore. Had we already lost them?
I lost the competition to attract and fascinate their minds: the digital world beat me. If I’d whipped out a laptop and set it on a bench amongst this magnificent antediluvian, presaurian, banana-slugfilled landscape, they would have whooped with joy.
All I could think, as we headed around the trails and sustained our harangue of “uncoolness” was that they were irreversibly electronically poisoned.
Where did I go wrong?
Not even preteens, but raised in Southern California on too much TV, starting with toddler day care, my daughters were already beginning to show signs of fashion sense and self-objectification. My seven-year-old loved flats and miniskorts. I’d bought educational CD Roms, but they gravitated to programs that allowed them to imitate and model urban life, like constructing whole SIMS villages and families. SIMs houses and their occupants were beautiful, except my daughter insisted on giving the dad a “hair peninsula,” which is what she called that spare remaining strip on my husband’s formerly prolific forehead.
Nothing on TV or in their software taught them to explore nature or told them that’d be cool, fashionable.
Whenever I sent them out in the neighborhood, on walks, they were the only ones out. Every parent in my generation seemed to think that if their kid went out to ride a bike or explore a canyon, that kid would be the one abducted and tortured. I sent my daughter once to walk to her friend’s house, and her mother, on the phone, panicked and sent her teens out to escort my child. I felt like a jerk.
I did walk to school with one of my daughters, and we held hands and watched birds, smelled morning flowers, chatted all the way through sixth grade. So many parents drove past us, rushing to work, smiling at us, though–some looking like they wanted to cry.
I lamented “electronic poisoning” to my hiking buddy, Brent, as we traversed seventeen miles into the backcountry of the Grand Canyon last year. He’d asked why my kids didn’t like to go hiking with me–not that they could handle what we were doing, attempting Cheyava Falls at the only time of year when the 800-foot waterslide is cranking–if you can handle the scramble to even get near the mist.
At base camp, Brent whipped out his backpacking reading material. The Economist, May 2010. I, for one, had brought Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire. Brent showed me research cited from the Kaiser Family Foundation, that American kids were spending more than seven and a half hours with media each day. “Into that space they packed an astonishing 10 hours and 45 minutes of consumption,” the article went on. And that’s where I blanked out.
One afternoon, on my walk to pick up my daughter from grade school (my oldest daughter refused the walk, horrified at the social implications), I listened to NPR, a book review on Richard Louv’s ”Last Child in the Woods,” and thought, ‘mmhmm, thank you, Mr. Louv, I already know. I’ve experienced this and realize, Houston, that we do have a problem.’
Who is going to write software to inspire kids to get out in the dirt, the real dirt, to explore, and by extension, protect our planet? Not just wilderness, which is already shrinking, but protect Nature, of which we are irreversibly–undigitally, unelectronically–but fundamentally and most desperately part?
Clock Rage
It’s not just the hours. The days slip right out from beneath me.
Clock says 11:00 a.m. Still a few precious hours before I go get the kids from school. These hours, the ones that belong to me, are tick tick ticking away. I walk past the clock, always eyeing it, jealously eyeing it. Suddenly I turn back, “Aha! Caught you!” But it reads 11:01. But next thing I know, as soon as I get interested and involved, the clock jumps ahead to 2:35. The last bell of school. I try to catch the clock in the act, its jumping past me in chunks just when I’m getting busy, but I can’t, in some Heisenbergish Prinicipal of mockery.
I am furious with the clock. I can’t beat it. It owns me. It makes me drive rakishly fast through town, curse lines in the grocery store, hate the vast quantities in my inbox that suck it down. I am especially perplexed when it vaporizes when I’m having fun, say, writing.
Time’s fun when you ‘re having flies, someone said.
I need to run that “Moving Clocks Run Slow” experiment, which I understand is a misnomer, but I don’t understand exactly why: A clock ticking in a supersonic jet lapses less time than a clock ticking down below, on Earth. This proved what Einstein intuited before we broke the sound barrier, that time is relative. Time is relative in the worst way. (You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your relatives, another someone said.)
As my free time ticks into its vapor trail, I am filled with rage. Why can’t time flow normally, when I need it most? If I just continue speeding my way through the day, why doesn’t time run slow?
Incidently, the funniest subtitle ever goes to Albert Einstein’s book (1916), “Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, A Clear Explanation That Anyone Can Understand.”
Clearly, I don’t understand.
Time was timeless when I was little. Time stood still, but not in a good way, when I researched and helped write grants for MRI studies of diseased livers. The liver is a Very Boring Organ. Every time I looked at the clock in that particular job and willed it to just please jump ahead a few hours and put me out of my misery, its dials slunk around the clock’s blank face. That job was not good for my liver. After hours.
The clock seems not to be my friend. Everyone notices that as they get older that time seems to speed up. I was twistedly relieved to read a passage in Hope Edelman’s latest memoir, The Possibility of Everything, about how the ancient Mayans viewed time and understood that the future accelerates, that each coming segment of time gets shorter and shorter. You’d think the Mayans felt they had all the time in the world, at least until 2012.
Maybe the Mayans had a problem with time, like I do, except they didn’t have a mocking clock. Maybe the scribes were getting older when they wrote that bit on accelerating time.
Deepak Chopra assures us that “Time isn’t working against you. Everyone needs to overcome this outworn belief. We can stop giving in to time as if it rules our lives.” Really?
Deep’ takes it one step further: “If we force our own limited conception of time and deadlines upon ourselves we disrupt these rhythms and become a victim of time. Whatever breaks down your body’s timing, creates aging.”
Banksy gets the last laugh: 
Latin Gags: There’s Thrust in Brevity
Go Glad
Words that make me gag:
*micturate (to pee)
*macerate (to chew)
*parturition (birthing)
Writers studying craft tend to prefer the short, crunchy Anglo-Saxon portion of our lexicon over the more abstract latinates. Anglo-Saxon is pithy: Words like suck, chew, hit, piss, and fuck get to the point faster than their polysyllabic brethren. There’s thrust in brevity. The English language was not spared in the Roman conquests, and folks still use the language of its conquerors to sound important, sometimes laughably so.
I do like greco/latinates in the right place, but the words for bodily functions make me squirm. Whoever came up with “micturate” for gawd’s sakes? Ew. I will never run to the bathroom holding my crotch for fear of premature micturation. Maybe that’s why I dislike the word masturbation–a general clinical ickiness submerged in polysyllabic lip slapping (macerate on that one). The word sounds so clinical, depraved, shameful, nothing like the very human sport of jerking off that kids usually discover by age 13.
*sternutation: Who would ever think this means “to sneeze”? How about “snatiation”–this is sneezing uncontrollably on a full stomach, a recent amusing coinage; the Romance language lends itself to such unromantic pairings.
Latinates can give writers the perfect word in the right context; it’s a damned shame when writers and editors use it to obfuscate or, as in so much science/nonfiction writing, when they need to deploy the Squid Technique: that’s when you don’t know what to say (or how to say it) so you hide behind a cloud of ink.
No commentsPsst-watch out for those reds
Hungarians topple Stalin statue (photo from Wikipedia)
On Saturday, October 23, my eleven-year-old daughter finished her soccer game as clouds skidded across the sky. I said to our coach, Janos, who is Hungarian but came to the United States on a soccer scholarship years ago, ”Happy Revolution Day.” My husband, whose father escaped Hungary in 1956, likes to make pörkölt, a kind of gulash, in commemoration. I think of Pierre, our friend in Paris, whose father survived communist prison camps, privation, and escape attempts.
Janos turned to our star soccer player’s mom, who was talking about her husband being from Cleveland. “I hated Cleveland!” Janos said, “It was awful! I was ready to go back to Communism after living there!”
I think all Hungarians have a penchant for hyperbole, but the soccer mom went one further, and said, “You don’t need to, Obama is bringing communism here, the direction this country is heading!”
Communism isn’t an abstraction to survivors of the Soviet takeover and their descendants. Russian tanks rattled into Budapest and the entire community rose up in protest, staving off bewildered soldiers for three wildly glorious days until the Red army rallied and crushed the opposition. My father-in-law is full of harrowing stories, including when he and his sister were nearly executed one evening, after getting caught bringing dinner to the resistance.
But at the mention of communism this fine Fall Saturday, the soccer mom went off. “Yeah, look at what Obama’s doing, all his scary socialist policies, he’s leading this country into hell….”
Janos had the temerity to say, “I am socialist to his bone”–look at Sweden, look at France, Germany, he said, all the other developed counties that provide decent healthcare, education, and so on. The soccer mom is probably so scandalized, who knows–maybe she’ll pull her daughter from the team to prevent further infection.
What Obama wants is not communism, let alone true socialism. It’s common sense and human decency for a society to provide its citizens basic needs.
What Obama wants is not communism: It’s common sense and human decency for a society to provide its citizens basic needs.
As I puzzle over the Tea Party madness boiling the brains of excitable people, I think of Irma, our weekly luxury and savior who helps clean our house each week (it used to take us the entire weekend to do it ourselves, and she can whip through in five or six hours). Irma told me this morning she cancelled her health insurance because it cost almost $500 a month. She could no longer afford it. That’s about what we pay her for her help. In the five years I’ve known her, I don’t think she’s taken a vacation. When she’s sick I tell her not to come, although we pay her every week regardless. A lot of times, she still comes to work even if she doesn’t feel well, perhaps for her own sense of job protection.
“What about the new health care bill that finally passed?” I asked. “Can’t you get something there?” She shook her head. She didn’t know where or how to get that. She doesn’t qualify for medicare.
The woman works hard. She’s a good person. Her father immigrated from the Mexican state of Nayarit, and the whole family works long hours to help support each other and their humble life here. They pay taxes, all of them.
She and other Americans should have better protection; folks like her anchor and contribute to this society. If the Tea Bagger soccer mom has her way, Irma will lose her only hope for insurance, whenever and wherever and however that kicks in. And the soccer mom can drive off into the sunset in her giant SUV, thankful that she has successfully fought off what she thinks is communism.
No commentsDaily Gifts
I dog myself for not getting enough accomplished in a day. Yet each day comes with gifts, and just one of those “life freebies” alone is enough to call the day a success, life well lived.
Today I hit a perfect forearm balance in yoga, something I’m not always confident about attempting, but this morning I knew, mentally, I’d do it. I’m thankful for balance, strength, good health, and opportunity.
This pic is from a couple years ago, when I celebrated my birthday with my yoga gang in the backyard.
The Tyranny of the Stupid Class
Education of the Stupid Classes: Kansas church teaches children to hate
Times like these I want to move to another planet: Polls that show what many Americans really think (“think” being an exaggeration, more like reptilian cogitation). Glenn Beck, Sarah-beyond-the-Pale-in and her ghastly illogic, Tea Baggers, the entire ilk of reptilian cogitators who invade our headlines with their unnewsworthiness. I am still reeling from the Kansas church protestors who came to San Diego, and a child in their congregation–a child– hoisted a sign that said God Hates Gays and Jews.
These people are comprehensive in their incomprehensible ignorance.
It’s the tyranny of the Stupid Classes. Makes me feel so lonely and afraid and shoved into my well-read corner: I can only hope the other quiet people have got the other three. By quiet I mean not making useless noise.
“Liberals” are not just an “educated elite”–we’re just busy reading, thinking, doing, creating, hoping that these mouthy people will crawl back under their planks, go back to their fecund festering dark places; knowing they always erupt in Bruegelian periodicity when the economy sours, when we need scapegoats, when we need labels for chaos and uncertainty.
The whining mewling and frighteningly powerful stupid classes. I tell myself they have their points, they have a few reasonable concerns (the fear of any government wielding too much power). They don’t articulate well (“Obama is the Antichrist”? Global Warming is a hoax? Obamacare is Socialism, complete with Hitler mustache? Gutted and pathetic as the Healthcare bill is, it pales in comparison to what other advanced countries offer its tax-paying citizens). I tell myself that the Noisy People’s ghastly opinions and commentary come from a lamentable lack of awareness, global understanding, basic education (leaving aside scary hidden agendas and a dark desire to manipulate): Lamentations of ”Obamacare” feed right into the for-profit insurance companies who are all too ready to exploit the underinformed.
What’s chilling is that some corporations are using the Stupid Classes to fuel their own commercial agendas and have the money to incite stupidity, leaving us all in their yacht wake of political devastation. Don’t get me wrong. I like to sail as much as anybody, but I will never fill my sails with Global Warming Gassy hot air.
A little integrity please. A little integrity.
I am not of the educated elite. I put myself through an inexpensive State university, which was all I thought I could afford at the naive age of 17 (otherwise, hell yes, I would have gone to Stanford or Yale and if not there, Berkeley), worked hard, studied hard, and continue to read and think past my advanced degree. It’s not so hard, really; in fact, thinking is painless. My grandfather, with his sixth-grade education, read widely and understood far more than the bobble-head rabble-rousers inciting unreason and recruiting membership in the Stupid Classes.
Results from a new Harris Poll:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-03-22/scary-new-gop-poll
• 67 percent of Republicans (and 40 percent of Americans overall) believe that Obama is a socialist.
• 57 percent of Republicans… (32 percent overall) believe that Obama is a Muslim
• 45 percent of Republicans (25 percent overall) agree with the Birthers in their belief that Obama was “not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president”
• 38 percent of Republicans (20 percent overall) say that Obama is “doing many of the things that Hitler did”
• 24 percent of Republicans (14 percent overall) say that Obama “may be the Antichrist.”
A Good Walk Gone Better
I was a little scared to go back.
Someone with that much anger could go ballistic. I’ve experienced a person at the negative tipping point who’s tipped himself right into a psych ward. Society, formatively early bad experiences, the culture–too much can overwhelm one’s coping mechanisms. But not everybody snaps. I took solace in that.
Michael was nice, after our Good Walk Gone Bad no-on-8 klatch; but he could just be luring me in. Maybe he was one of those misogynists who, no matter what, hate women. Charlie pointed out, when we went to gay revues in the 90s, that the boys doing the beauty pageants and the talent shows were making fun of females, they really hated women, but I said, no, look, look at their meticulous costumes and makeup, and damn if I could look that good in a bikini, ever. They care, but they’ve internalized the deep antifeminine vein that runs through our macho-poisoned culture like many females do, and they’re objectifying themselves and the whole scene, unawares. Hey, I mock beauty pageants, too, without the deeply sarcastic, and yet hopeful, vein of trying to be in one. And I’m not even sure these men are gay–more like female-identified males, poor souls, trapped in male bodies and male sociology, a double-whammie for confusion.
Michael was a tire-biter. A full-blown all-testosterone gay male, out of my ken. He drove a man truck and he was going to kick ass on any plump mom republican suburban bitch yes-on-eighter who dared traverse the canyon on his property. Such haters trampled his universe.
The thing that gave me comfort was, while Michael and I were talking, sharing stories, another man came up, a neighbor, and gave me a hug. So his friends were warm. He was part of a larger community. That would keep him grounded. Yet I was still a woman belonging in the uber-hetero community, even if a progressive liberal-demo.
I don’t know what it’s like to grow up gay in a society that tears you down from the moment of birth. I’ve only observed this wrenching reality in people close to me. Besides those survivors who are strong and prevail, there are some who want to turn and fight, strike out, pay back. And who wouldn’t?
Refusing to be bullied, yet always nevertheless reaching out, I walked up the carport and rang Michael’s door bell. His door was ajar. It took a while for him to come to the door.
Odd allies, he and I. A bit late, he thought I wasn’t coming. His partner couldn’t join us, a parlayed Sorry.
They have a big, beautiful home, with a little yip-yip dog, and a wood deck overlooking my coveted mountain, tall, muscular Mt. San Miguel, that was dwarfed in flames this past wildfire. We hiked down the canyon together. It was a little awkward. We hardly knew each other. He handed me an embossed card, inviting us to the December gay-men’s chorus, with whom his partner sang. It’d been a few years since charlie and I’d been to the Chorus. We knew a few people there.
Megan, waiting with her teacher and hoards of classmates, saw us and blanched.
I waved her over and said, “Megan, this is my friend, Michael. We had a misunderstanding but everything’s ok. Really, it’s ok.”
Michael said to her, “Megan, I am really sorry about this morning. Sometimes grownups make mistakes. I want you to know that I am truly sorry for scaring you and being so mean.” He reached into his pocket and handed her an envelope. Inside was thick linen cardstock with an etched drawing, a handwritten note on the flipped side. A gift card for Coldstone Ice Cream slipped into her hands.
Safely off school grounds, the three of us headed up the canyon trail. Megan was speechless. I tried to explain.
“Megan, you know how we walked with Ace and how we hated all those giant Yes on 8 signs on the way to school? How I wanted Ace to pee on all those signs? How rude those were?”
Megan. “Yeah.”
“Well, Michael thought we might be one of the families who were like that, trying to hurt him.”
Megan immediately turned to Michael and said, “Oh my god. We have friends who had people in their neighborhood bothering them! My mom does yoga with this guy who had people write chalk things from the Bible on their sidewalk in front of their house and they wrote bad things on their signs and even put Yes-on-8 bumper stickers on their [his and his partner's] car!”
For once I was glad I talk to my children about reality–not the worst, but things I was currently fighting.
At the top of the trail, we three parted ways, after chatting a little longer. As Megan and I headed up Grandview, Megan vented a huge sigh of relief.
“What?” I asked.
“When I saw you with that man at school, I was really scared. I was afraid you’d get in a fight in front of everybody. Then, when you said you were friends, I was afraid he had a crush on you. It wasn’t until we were on the trail, when you said he was gay, that I finally relaxed. He couldn’t crush on you! It was safe!”
Ah, poor Meggie. Negotiating this strange adult world. Brave, brave girl.
No commentsI saw a grownup
Grownups always seemed so weird to me. Fluffy or thin hair, paunches, cigarette-and-coffee breath. They had all the power. They intrigued and perplexed me all too early. I questioned and observed them, when I was still supposed to respect them unquestioningly .
If they weren’t so flawed, I wouldn’t have noted their existence, at such an early age. I would have simply evolved into one, maybe even tried to be like one. But I couldn’t just do that. I’d gotten frozen into wondering what one was and remained the perpetual observer.
I just realized, the other day, that I am probably older, now, than half of the world’s population. The other half of the population is probably younger than I. What a scary concept! That now I have to entrust the young with my future, i must depend on them for my world. (Can they handle global warming?) What’s worse?
One thing I noticed, when I was little, is that some grownups were fakers. They really didn’t know. They really weren’t wise, I could tell.
We’re all born into this gig and many of us don’t know how to perform once it’s time for us to perform. It was so obvious, to me, the performances.
My mother fed, clothed (reasonably), and sheltered us. She didn’t help with life. I sensed she was just as confused. But she wasn’t a charlatan; she was a human caught in the crossfire of life (single mother of 8 whose husband left, long before the divorce) and doing her damnest by us.
So what makes a grownup?
I think I saw one. I’d met him in his early 20s. Still a Stanford undergraduate when I met him then, so I knew him 20 years ago. All the sudden, I saw him two decades later. We met with a group of friends for dinner.
So when you don’t see someone for two decades, you notice some things. things that have changed. What I remembered is that he had darting eyes. Questing eyes. Lights shooting out of his eyes. curious eyes. Nothing was sure. he had so much to prove, but only after exploration, and he’d get back to you on that, because he was confident, sure, but truly he didn’t know.
When I met him, two decades later, I couldn’t stop looking at his eyes.
The light was steady, calm. Calm. He wasn’t seeking anymore, and he didn’t need anyone to acknowledge or confirm his quest for existence, his quest, at least, for competence. He had arrived at some place in life.
But as the conversation grew, and facts–long, old dried-out facts, but with modern implications arose, i swear I saw a sparkle. An old interest. A raison d etre if only for the dinner conversation. Because that is the old useless spark that strikes, unawares, when you least need it but enlivens your soul. A dim light when all is given up, grown up. But when I peered into his eyes, engaged, I noted only a steady, proving calm: an insistence that ‘I am grown up.’
Did he know that? was that his aim, too?
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