MINOR HAPPENINGS AT GROUND LEVEL

in the green...

the pond is full for June. Easy to tell once the bridge, visible only by the worn away handrail, becomes a floating bridge.  No idea how much longer it will last, what with being nearly underwater every spring, and now summer too.  It's usually fed by seepage alone, but this time it was rain, and a small stream is draining much of the unmowed meadow.  

the field is unmowed for two reasons, first, it's too wet to mow, and secondly, birds are nesting in the grass, specifically bobolinks, and possibly meadowlarks. The farmer who mows the field isn't going to mow until late July or the start of August.  Barring another wet summer, of course.  Both bobolinks and meadowlarks nest on the ground in open fields.  I've seen and heard the bobolinks, but not the meadowlarks. Both are endangered.  I learned only recently that both are not native to New England, but to the prairies of the Midwest.  With most of that land turned to agriculture, they have moved east where they better odds of survival.  But how good are those odds, really?

taking whacks at buckthorn has resulted in the bare patch next to the shed. Buckthorn–– if you care to know––can be found just about everywhere along forest edges, and all too often within the forest.  It's a particularly widespread invasive in Addison County and the Champlain Valley in general.  Here's Fish and WIldllife's view of its impact:

Common buckthorn berries contain a natural laxative that aids its spread but prevents the birds and mammals that feed on the fruit from absorbing necessary sugars. It is also a host for crown rust fungus and Asian soybean aphid, agricultural pests affecting oat and soybean crops respectively. Buckthorn leaves have a high nitrogen concentration, which can increase the amount of nitrogen in the soil and affect what other species can grow in the area. 

Nobody like likes buckthorn.  It's iseen as an invasive just about everywhere, not just New England.  It's origin is European and Asia.  Like so many other plants and animals, it was an escapee from private gardens, commercial plantings, attempts at "wildlife enhancement" programs or other human manipulations.

Son-in-law Chris has been warring with invasive buckthorn that lines our woods just about everywhere. He's taken down buckthorn in the woods and has recently been working on the woods on the side of my driveway and part of the lawn.  He's taken down tree-sized buckthorns.  He knows he's not going to get rid of it for good because in order to do that you have to remove the roots, a near impossible task that means digging out the equivalent of a half acre of roots, some of which have probably long been entwined with other trees and shrubs.  Since the tree/shrub has been happy to be growing where it is, it will likely continue to thrive.  Why not?  It is content to live in sun or shade, it fruits later and flowers longer than most natives, is pretty much disease free, and insects and animals don't care to eat it. Just the thing for my garden, someone must have once thought.

now you can see the stream, as it carves its way through the woods. Without the buckthorn hedge there's a fresh view into the woods.  The bear that visited last week and overturned a trash barrel darted through the buckthorn at this spot and vanished into the woods below. If he'd been here this week instead, I'd have seen him better.  The stream used to make lazy curves, but the past few years have seen downpours more frequently replacing gentle rains. and the curves are evolving, forming steep banks that will eventually weaken the bases of some the trees lining the edge.  It already looks different than it did ten years ago.  

most of the buckthorn has ended up here in my burn pile.  But there are at least two more giant piles of the stuff. After last year's piled turned to ash, I put grass seed where the pile had been.That was overly optimistic. There will always be a burn pile.  Always.

suddenly last summer this (above) stopped being my kitchen garden.  There were (are) two raised beds, one behind the other, completely hidden under the foliage.  The 4 X 4 wood frames began to give way at the corners last year.  Now I can barely see them.  The meadow is getting ready to reclaim the whole thing, frames and all.  In another year or so I expect the grasses are going to eat it all up.

the new garden is better located, near the kitchen, where it should have been from the start. Planted there this year the tomato plants are already about four feet high, which may not be obvious from the photo, bent over as they are from rain.  Why so much greenery?  The height seems a little excessive since they probably won't have more tomatoes than usual; it's not as if there are dozens of flowers.  But, really, who knows what the ultimate fate of any kitchen garden will be.  One year I had only two cucumber plants and they pushed out 36 cucumbers. Last year I also had only two plants, figuring that was enough to get at least maybe 10 cucumbers. But I got nothing.  Well, not literally nothing. I ended up with a sorry bunch of white zucchini-like things that had no flavor and never turned green, and were basically inedible.  What kind of mutated plant were they, anyway?

speaking of bold greenery, these huge blue hostas, maybe four feet across this season, have decided they are going to outgrow the giant 'Sum and Substance' golden hosta––seen now as only a tiny yellow triangle–– trying to survive behind these two. The blues are also producing about a dozen baby blue hostas that I find poking up everywhere.  No yellow hosta babies. What's going on?  All three giants used to share the location in a friendly, non-aggressive manner. Each had its place.  Now the blues are into world domination. What prompted this? 

overgrowth seems to be happening everywhere.  The maple is coming into its own, but the apple tree is too, and it looks like they are running into each other.  I am not the one who planted either of them, but at the time the distance between them must have looked vast.  But this seems innocent.  Neither tree is trying to dominate the other.  Maybe they're both just probing their boundaries.  

Another view of the burn pile.

  

What's that poking out of the weigela shrub?  Everything wants to have a place in the sun, no matter what else has to be jostled or squeezed between.  But this attempt looks a bit silly.

A mosquito at the window.  Another gift from the wet.

who knows what all these plants and trees will look like in, say, ten years from now.  Or what they would have looked like if a human hadn't been messing around cutting, trimming, planting.  Would there be new invasives?  Maybe a new form of something that was innocently planted but had unrecognized strengths?  What is an invasive exactly?  It can't simply be something that is not native, for that wouldn't allow for the bobolink. Or a plant that has become "naturalized," which sounds like an excuse for nurturing an alien life form.  If invasive means only plants or animals that have "bad" traits, making life harder for other plants or animals, that can lead to some strange quandries, like the issue of barred owls vis a vis spotted owls in California:  barred owls are the more adaptable, thereby threatening spotted owls which have been threatened for some time. Which one should we favor, and by what means?  How long ago must a plant or animal have arrived to no longer be an intruder,or an invasive?  Are starlings, first introduced in 1890, still considered intruders? Invasive?  Maybe these are all our decisions to make, as we are, after all, the master manipulators of nature, bar none.  Or maybe all these decisions of what survives and what doesn't will be made for us.

THE REMARKABLE COLLECTION OF RALPH FARNSWORTH

I originally posted the story of Ralph Farnsworth's unusual collections in March of 2021.  Only a year later I heard that he'd died.  Our local paper, the Addison Independent, had a story this week about the auctioning of at least part of his collection (old gas pumps, for one).  It seemed like a good time to revisit what was once his own museum. Memento of a "lost world" of a sort.

*

You wouldn't ordinarily expect to find little boutique museums around here, would you? Not unless it belongs to a nearby college (Middlebury has its Mahaney Arts Center) or is perhaps the collection of a local Historical Society (Middlebury–the town, this time–has its Sheldon Museum).  The Farnsworth museum, that is, Ralph Farnsworth's museum, open by appointment only, is neither.  

Ralph Farnsworth, of the eponymous museum

 

Localized for you!

It is the obsession of one Ralph Farnsworth who lives in my town.  He is a gentleman, I suppose one would say, of the "old school," not being a newcomer in any sense of the world, still living on the same farm he grew up on, taciturn, the kind of person you might picture when someone refers to an "old Vermonter."   I use the word obsession because you would have to call it an obsession when you collect so many old things over a period of many years and amass so much of it that you need to devote an entire building to house it all.  If his collections were disordered, you would considered him a hoarder and the collection a hoard.  But his collection is very much in order.  And ordered.  By shape, size, and category, mostly.

Still, it's a bit of a shock when you first walk in and see all the–well, stuff.  It's as if you walked into an old general store, pharmacy, farm shed, hardware store, gift shop, all in the same space. 

Everything that's fit to keep

Did I say orderly?

Pencils. Why not!  Plus the odd ruler. 

   

Yes, pencils are arranged together with pencils, hasps, knobs and latches together with hasps, knobs, and latches, clocks with clocks, vacuum cleaners with vacuum cleaners, and so on.  I have no idea what the pencils share in terms of history, if any, but they do make for a pleasing design.

Many, maybe most of us, have samples of the above artefacts in our sheds and garages.  But do we 
arrange them anywhere near as well?  I don't think so.

The above are merely decoration compared with the collection of old tools and what I would call "pre-appliance" appliances, when the word "appliance" still meant merely applying oneself to something, or was used as a noun to describe a water wheel or other such mechanical device.  What, after all, do you call a vacuum cleaner, sans electricity, when it functions more like some sort of dry suction pump (if there is indeed such a thing)?  You could claim it helped build up your arm muscles while using.  But for the fact that those women who cleaned probably weren't in need of additional exercise.  They would more likely have said the hell with this! Give me a broom!

The "Success" model, made by the Hutchison Mgf. Co. of Wilkinsburg, PA, 
its function being demonstrated.  (Mr. Farnsworth hovered, so we weren't 
allowed to touch.) 

Or imagine mowing your lawn with the implement below.  The model in the ad suggests it dates to the 1940's or later.  Was this someone's nutty idea, or was this actually on the market?  Since our curator has two of them, we can guarantee they sold more than one.  (Hmm, it says "sold only by mail order.”)

It weighed in at only 8-½ pounds!

Can you see an early Cuisinart in this food chopper?

We were told by Mr. Farnsworth what each piece was supposed to do, 
but this one had a tag:  "food chopper" 

In the radio, television, phonograph, telephone, toaster and "other" aisles ("other" is part of every display) there are some beautiful old victrolas and an authenticated (provenance on display) Edison equipment.

Toasters and clocks and telephones and more...

Homage to Thomas Edison

The DVD is foreshadowed!

"The Picture Record"?  How, exactly?

And the tape recorder...?

I forget what this was, but it seemed a pretty amazing invention for the time.  No! Not a stove!

Evolution of the light bulb, sort of.

There is what I would call a memories section, labels and advertisements, comic books, and huge stashes of old newspapers.  Nevermind that old newspapers can be found via microfiche.  A few examples below.

Mementos of places visited, events and people remembered, a kind of bulletin board of the past. I 
wonder what it was like at "The Tops" back in the 1920's.  Intriguing.

From the stone age, before Siri began telling us how to get there from here.

Collectibles.  Shocking–to me–that these 'ancient' calendars are only from the 1960's.

As we wound our way through the crowded aisles of things and more things, we came to the Coca Cola section of which there was quite a lot of material, considering it is just one brand.  Why so much about Coke?  "I like Coca Cola," said Ralph.  There you have it.

Toy trains and Matchbox cars join the endless Coca Cola logos.

The Coca Cola area was the last major section of our museum tour.  By this time we were glassy-eyed.  Throughout our wanderings through his collections Mr. Farnsworth dogged our steps, perhaps fearing our fingers might be a tad too nimble.

THE MARCH OF WINTER, OR THE WINTER OF MARCH

 

February 24, 2024, just passing the time.

Is this the way it's going to be?  Winter as March, followed by more March, and then actual March? 

A mere three days ago it was 3 degrees.  This week it will be nearly 60 degrees.  I wrote this when it was still February. 

Now it's actually March.  We're already acclimatized.

December 18, 2023,,  Looks like March snowmelt.

The pond has flooded, frozen, flooded again, frozen, thawed, frozen.   The fields are completely empty of snow.  The woods too.  Fortunately for the mice and other little creatures, the weather was too wet to mow last summer because I didn't want it mowed until the bobolinks had left their nests.  By then it was too late.  The summer of rain had begun,  Not mowing left acres of really tall grasses.  All that grass turned into hummocks piled up like miniature thatched huts.  From a mouse point of view, that is. Normally at this time of year – whatever "normally" means anymore – pathways of small creatures are only visible after the snow has melted.  Now you only see these tiny roads when they run across the field paths that I always keep mown.

Lucky mice, lacking snow, but not fortunately not cover.

Looking for snow this winter reminds me of when we lived in Massachusetts and regularly made day trips to the White Mountains in New Hampshire to ski, either downhill or cross-country, often on the kind of days when there was little or no snow at home in Lexington.  On rare occasions we might head to western Mass, but if the local snow wasn't worth much, north to the Whites was the only direction to go.  

Once again I go to the mountains to find the snow. 

 

February 4, 2024, Where the Long Trail crosses Rte 125

February 25, 2024, Wilkinson Trail Network, Moosalamoo

Melting ice on the stream, Moosalamoo

Looks are deceiving.  The hoar frost of February 4 was a temporary phenomenon.  The snow was pretty good for skiing that day, I heard.  Not great, you know, but pretty good.  At first glance, nothing looks wrong about the ski trails in the photograph.  It's the footprints that are out of place.  There are no ski tracks.  In fact, if you attempted to ski this, or any of the other trails in this area on February 25, or probably on any other day in February, you could be risking your life:  alluring downhills were unforgiving, crossed every twenty yards or so by ditches 3 or 4 feet deep that might otherwise be filled with snow but instead had mud and ice, rocks likely lying in wait at the bottom, disguised by a mere inch or so or snow.  Lovely, though, for a walk.

Not that good skiing is impossible.  It's just that where it usually is, it isn't.  You have to go find it.  

And then there's the wind.  Did we always think about wind?  When your house is surrounded by old tall trees as ours was in Massachusetts and it gets really windy one day you may think absently about limbs breaking, considering the possibilities.  The weaknesses of those big old trees are often hidden, hence unpredictable.  But still, it's not usually the first thought that enters your mind.  The wind's never really all that bad.   So I never thought much about wind.  Really crazy wild wind, blowdowns, they happened in the high mountains, tornadoes, they happened elsewhere.   The only time we ever came close to experiencing one of those was when a tornado siren started up just as we were driving into Little Rock, Arkansas, precisely at this time of year.  That tornado spun itself out elsewhere so I never did share that unlucky experience.  The friends we were visiting told us tales of tornadoes they'd been through.  One nightour friend's grandfather was blown clear out of his house, bed and all, and deposited intact on the lawn, still in bed.  There has been plenty of wind this, um, "winter" – all those clashes between warm and cold temperatures moving the air around – and scary gusts.  In the mountains a few miles to the east, in the town of Lincoln, an 80-plus wind speed was recorded on the day of the first major windstorm, and a speed of almost 90 in the second windtorm lthat rolled in about a week later.  Sobering that was. 

This year's sugaring will be, well, I don't know.  Sap started flowing in the warmth of December, and probably has been flowing off and on in these mixed temperatures pretty much ever since then.  I'd heard about a guy with a commercial sap business who had tapped about 20,000 trees in December and had 400 gallons of syrup before it was even January.  Other syrup businesses probably did the same.  Here, in my little sugar shack, everything is ready to go, and time's a'wasting.  The family members who do the sugaring are out of town.  Out of town in pursuit of snow, incidentally.  (Finland)  Maybe the weather will stabilize in the next week and the taps can still be set, the sap will still be running, and the weather will settle into a helpful pattern of warmish days and chill nights.  What are the odds?

I just saw a red-winged blackbird.  I've never spotted one this early in the season.  

Wood is stacked and ready.  

Only one jar left!

These are only small things though –– no snow, weird sugaring seasons, pond freezing and thawing, wind, but no damage here. Minor complaints.  Or maybe not. 

And now, of course, it's actually March, the real calendar month of.  Can summer be far behind?

WHAT DARK AGE?

The dark, descending?

The dark beginning in the middle of the afternoon.  That type of dark. Much rain, sleet, cloud, glimpses of sun.  No turning for cheeriness in the news, that's certain.  Not often the place to find cheeriness of course but honestly, this time it seem worse than usual. On all fronts.

Angry lake, in rare and beautiful sunshine

How will this present we have been living in look in hindsight?  Unless we're around some 40-60 years from now we're not going to find out.  But I can still wonder.  What will it be called?  The Age of Unreason?  Age of ---?

Imagine if the people living in Florence in around 1550 or so knew they were living in the Renaissance.  When the wealthy looked back on their best days as they grew old maybe they remembered them as a Golden Age. Which for them it was, literally golden, all things considered.  Those at the bottom of the heap might have been surprised had they known there was a renaissance happening, as they only just managed to survive their first naissance, never mind doing it again.  

The period of time we're living in now has been named the Anthropocene, at least by those writers concerned about climate change.  It's defined as "a period of time during which human activities have been the dominant inflluence on climate and the environment."  That seems clear to the naked eye.  It amounts to a climactic achievement in one sense, as the Christian Bible commanded humans to "be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."  We have indeed managed all those things.  The multiplication part was easy, and the subduing and dominating a bit harder, call it a work-in-progress.  It was 1989 when Bill McKibben wrote "The End of Nature."  He was a bit early.

A work in progress because with as much as we've learned and begun to understand about, for instance, animal behavior or the inner workings of forests, both are still being stressed, subdued, and under pressure, dominated, by us humans.  Working to preserve and save or sustain both kinds of living things is a pretty daunting prospect. Even more so when you consider how challenging it is even at the most local level.  Like the local level right here in Vermont.  

As for instance:  This state is seen as being environmentally advanced compared with many other states.  And yet:  On the wildlife issue our state still operates in 19th century mode.  Yes, 19th, not even 20th.  I'm thinking of our Fish and Wildlife Commission which continues to support all sorts of trapping (think leghold traps, body crushing traps, etc.), hounding, and unrestricted coyote killing, long shown to be against the wishes of a majority of Vermonters.  If we can't be good enough, who can?

We're considered fairly socially advanced too, and I suppose we are on a couple of issues.  It's easy of course when our current demographics show 93% of us are white, a mere 1% Black, and other races combined add up to no more than 4%.   We're not tested much here on racial issues, so most people come across as unbiased.  But who knows, really?  

BEWARE OF THE DOG, warning found in Pompeii

Anyway, getting back to the Anthropocene.  That's the name of an Age, not an Era.  Our own time or era will eventually be dubbed the Era of something or other.  What overarching dominating force, for good or evil, might typify the times we're living in?   The worst title can think of would be the Trump Era.  It would include both a metaphorical and real time span, the living person plus the culture that was prepared to see him as their leader or idol or whatever even before he was on the scene, and the ripple effects that exist during and will exist after his wielding power time.  Unfortunately, we are not yet at the after.  We may not even be anywhere near the after.  Now that is quite a scary thought for our country and its future.  But wait: just the other day he said when he wins he's only going to be dictator on day one.  Maybe the question he was responding to caught him by surprise.  But who knows what he really wants.  Well, actually we do. History tells us dictators don't tend to be shy about telling you what they're going to do.  They lay it right out there.  Almost like a dare.  And we can assume the worst that can happen will happen to others.  Not to us.  And elsewhere.  Not here.

 

Perhaps all will be well after all.  Just another Age, just another Era after all.  

 

 

.  

LOOKING BACK ON OCTOBER 30TH FROM ANOTHER WORLD

The end of October came around again and November moved in.

I wanted to remember October 2016.  And then I didn't.  Days passed.

I wrote something back then.

Inexplicably I came across that again.  So I am putting it up here...

Ken:  Along the coast somewhere in Peru, with a pisco sour and a raffish look.

The world is already a different one than Ken knew.  I can’t really believe that time has passed since October 30th, 2016.  The election happened. That was enormous. I went to Washington for a weekend and I want to tell him about it.  I bought a dress he hasn’t seen.  The leaves fell. It snowed, and the outdoors is different too.  

 

I’ve been gathering and reading all his notebooks. They remind me of things I already know. He didn’t like me poking around when he was alive.  

 

Ken was an explorer of the natural world. He was filled with curiosity.  He was an observer. He wanted to understand the universe.  He wanted to understand the behavior of an insect.  He loved to quantify things.  Ken was intense about every pursuit.  And he was always modest about it.  He never boasted.

 

***

We had adventures together.  Many trips we took were more than just visits to places.  They were explorations, they were adventures.  We collaborated on planning them.  Our last big trip to the Galapagos happened only a year ago. That one was his idea.

 

His interests all through throughout his life spanned an amazing range.  I loved the fact that he was always up for something, something new.  Sports he tried out were technical climbing, hang gliding (only briefly, thank God), rollerblading, scuba diving.  Others he stuck with for years:  fly fishing, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, downhill skiing (even last winter), running, bicycling, hiking.  He took long walks as recently as September.

 

***

I’ve been reading through all his notebooks. There are a lot of them.  Most of them are half-filled. When he had something he wanted to make notes about he grabbed the nearest one.  When he was in a shop that sold small notebooks he picked up more of them. 

 

A lot of his thoughts he took notes on were about science.  He wrote:

 

“For thirty years I worked as a physical chemist, but I don’t consider myself a scientist.  I am a fan of science, an amateur in the original sense of “amateur” –– a lover of science.  Much of the science I love is not chemistry. Had I been better at math, I might have been an astronomer or a physicist.  Chemistry seemed to sit in the middle of all this.  The child in me was delighted by the smells and colors:  the marvel of electricity generated by chemical batteries, and the explosions and pyrotechnics.”  

 

But he really was a scientist at heart.  He wrote:

 

“It’s the sense of discovery, the rhythm of theories and ideas which enlarge, encompassing one another.  A cycle of new insights, overturning earlier insights, only to encompass them.

 

On walks he would have a magnifying glass so he could examine a bug, a mushroom, animal scat, or a lichen.

 

And then there was art, and opera, music, and the theater––until his hearing got so bad even headphones didn’t help.

 

He was a scientist too when he was cooking, always trying the same dish in different ways, never satisfied merely to repeat it, even if I told him it was perfect just the way it was.

 

***

 

The notebooks are full of lists–shopping lists, to-do lists, lists of interests to follow up on, lists of phenomena he wanted to understand, lists of animal or plants he observed, lists of behaviors he wanted to improve upon.  There are short essays on a huge range of topics, and there are travel notes.  Some of his lists are interrupted by recipes.

 

***

 

 

More than ten years ago, after he was retired, he took a writing class in Cambridge taught by Mopsey Strange Kennedy (not a name to forget) and he began to write often, mostly about his early life.  After that he took a poetry class.  Both these classes helped him look back on his life, especially his early life.  There was a reason for that.  

 

As some of you may know, he was haunted––scarred even––by the death of his birth mother.  After she died, an aunt moved in to take care of him and his brother, but after a while she moved away to live her own life.  His dad, who by now had begun drinking more heavily, sent both boys to live with their maternal grandparents who lived nearby.  It wasn’t long before his grandmother died, and not long after the grandfather he’d begun to care deeply about died too.  Ken wrote about these losses again and again.  Here is an excerpt from his notebooks:

 

“I was young, three and a half years old, when my mother died in childbirth.  Seventy-five years later I can remember the time.  My brother was brought home from the hospital, and I have the image of a few women carrying him upstairs at our house.  I can see myself as a small figure behind them, as if I were on the ceiling looking down at that small boy climbing behind the group.  That image, and a powerful sense of loneliness and abandonment, was compelling.

 

In middle age I met a neighbor from that time.  She remembered me, and my telling her that my mother had gone to heaven.  I recalled fantasizing as a child that I could climb a tree and go to heaven to see her. She recalled how I told her I was going to go up into the sky where she was, and that I had looked like a little old man. I remember seeing a movie about a tree in front of a house where climbing the tree was linked to a grandfather and death.  I have always liked the view of great spreading trees with lower climbable branches.”

 

His actual mother was never allowed to be mentioned in his childhood household.  It was as if she’d never existed.  That was only part of his story. 

 

***

He was often pessimistic, sometimes depressed.  But he also wrote this.  He titled it “Me, Myself and I.”

 

“I want to tell you about myself.  It’s complicated because along with myself and me, there’s also my mind which has a mind of its own, so that’s four of us.  That as far as I know.  There could be more lurking back there.

 

Myself doesn’t talk much, although he wants to.  It can be hard to drag anything out of him.  He’s ambivalent and sulks a lot.  He’s not that happy a person mostly, but when he is, it’s a rush for me.  I feel like dancing then.  And laughing.

 

“I’m pretty gregarious.  I like people, I like the out of doors.  I like parties.  I like to fish and ski.  I liked my job when I had one, and I like not having one now.  There’s not a lot I don’t like or can’t tolerate.  I don’t like mean people.  I don’t like being pushed around.  Mostly I enjoy my life.”         [1/06/04]

 

***

 

In his notebooks, the notes, and the lists, drawings and the essays, are a window into his mind.   They tell me how hard he was working those last months to corral his wide-ranging interests as his brain was changing.  

 

One to-do list reads as follows:

 

1.     One:  “Gather firestarter wood

2.     Two:  Draw birds

3.     Clean trash bin

4.     Saturday night Norma’s birthday dinner

5.     Check re Bill for lunch

6.     Higgs boson

7.     Is there anything special at the center of the universe, galaxies, nebulae?  All flying away from the Big Bang?”  

 

 

He made notes about what he was reading to help him remember.  There are notes on the plots of books, and other things, like:

 

o   “How much dark matter is there?

o   The five pillars of Islam

o   Temple Grandin’s “Animals in Translation”

o   The poetry of T.S. Eliot ”  (and comments on Eliot’s metaphors of loneliness)

 

He thought a lot about what was going on in his mind:

 

“I am remembering a series of sketches at an Alzheimers [art] exhibition.   First there

was the initial drawing.  The initial drawing begins to change.  Face fragments and gaps appear, then distortion in a series of images, and a shattered visage at the last.  Captured is a slow loss of faculties, of interests, especially by the gaps in the image where what was, is gone, irretrievably.  Humanity is lost in the void.”

Elsewhere he wrote:

 

“Instead of the flotsam (ideas) following the current of my thought, they are trapped in the whirlpools on the surface; circulating, not following the train of thinking.  Part of brain that enables sequential steps is impaired.”  [2013]   

 

What goes on in cognitive impairment causes a loss of initiative, prevents movement on complicated tasks.  Same reason I can’t dance well.”   

 

On the next page he wrote: “Learn to dance.”

 

 

Then this, on a page by itself:   [2005, unattributed] 

 

My soul’s wings are clipped and

A devilish cat approaches in the night.    

 

***

 

Everyone who knew Ken, those who knew him well and all those who came to know him, from Vermont to Australia, knew he was a man of “sweet strength and kindness.”  (That phrase isn’t mine; it comes from a sympathy note.)  As he grew older he had compassion for every living thing.  He like sad stories less and less.

The first thing I knew about Ken was his laugh.  It was infectious.  It was filled with joy.  I can still hear it.

 

 

There are lines from an Irish ballad that have been haunting me:

 

Many the mile with thee I’ve traveled,

Many the hour, love, with thee I’ve spent

I dreamed you were my love forever

But now I know, love, you were only lent.