An osprey at work

 We watched an osprey fishing over Alexander Lake Sunday afternoon.

I once spent a morning in Scotland doing nothing but watching ospreys catch salmon in Loch Fyne. When we lived in Galveston, I’d go to the West End and watch ospreys in the marshes.

Ospreys have a reversible toe that allows them to clamp down with two toes on either side of a fish.

Pandion haliaetus is smaller than an eagle and bigger than a red-tail hawk. If you’re wondering what you’re looking at, the giveaway is the way the osprey holds its wings in flight — a peculiar M shape. (If you were a kid flapping your arms to imitate an osprey, you would have to bend them at the elbows.)

A cool front came through the Piedmont Sunday — the temperature was only 67 at noon — and this bird was flying into a light wind from the northeast. It hovered like a harrier, and I was hoping to see a dive. But then it plodded on. Even superb fishermen don’t always catch fish.

The Locrian girls

 Greek mythology and history are full of weird stuff. The story of the Locrian girls might be the weirdest.

When Troy fell, Princess Cassandra ran to the temple of Athene to take refuge. A Locrian ruler dragged her from the sanctuary as she clutched the statue of the goddess. This villain was known as Lesser Ajax to distinguish him from Greater Ajax, a tragic hero in The Iliad.

Greek gods and goddesses were worse than cartel bosses, and Lesser Ajax came to a bad end. But Athene was not satisfied and went after his friends, family and countrymen. She struck Lesser Ajax’s hometown with plagues and famine.

The local authorities consulted the oracle at Delphi. And so each year for a thousand years, two Locrian girls were smuggled into Troy to serve as servants in Athene’s temple. Troy was rebuilt, and the new Trojans didn’t want Locrians in their territory. The new Trojans made it clear that the girls and their guides and Locrians in general would be killed if caught trespassing.

Borders were porous in those days, and girls were safe in the sanctuary of the temple. They usually served their terms and were smuggled out when replacements arrived.

The Locrians reasoned — more than once — that the curse might have been lifted. But every time they stopped sending girls to the temple, something bad happened.

The story is all the weirder because it ended around 264 BCE, in historical times. At least some people thought this strange practiced ended about a thousand years after the Trojan War.

• Source and note: Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 338 and 344.

A crop report

 It’s peculiar how symbols tend to fossilize.

Georgia is the Peach State. But The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported these figures for crops produced by Georgia farmers in 2025:

• Peaches: 62 million pounds.

• Blueberries: 116 million pounds.

When it comes to peach production, Georgia is No. 3, behind California and South Carolina. The license plate on my pickup truck still has a peach on it.

• Source: Olivia Wakim, “Blueberries taking bigger bite of business in Peach State,” The Atlanta Journal Constitution, May 10, 2026.

How many heroes does it take?

 How many mythical heroes does it take to pull off the concept of the Trojan Horse?

Robert Graves’s answer: 3.

• One to come up with the idea, inspired by the goddess Athene: Prylis.

• One to build it: Epeius.

• One to take credit for the whole thing: Odysseus.

Epeius was an interesting character. His father was caught embezzling temple funds, and the gods decided he should be punished by having a cowardly son.

Epeius’s name became an eponymous adjective. As the builder of the wooden horse, Epeius was the only one who knew how to operate the trapdoor and its lock. People enjoyed inventing stories about how he was persuaded to go along with the storm troopers.

Graves says the sense of the adjective changed with time.

 

In early saga Epeius’s reputation for courage was such that his name became ironically applied to a braggart; and from braggart to coward is only a short step.

 

I think something similar will happen when people make sense of the most notorious braggart of our own times.

• Source and note: Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, p. 336.

A man who loved quotations

 My great friend Melvyn would have been 95 today. He set out to be a concert pianist but had to find something else. He became a professor of medicine who followed politics, loved opera and literature, painted landscapes, built dollhouses for children and rooted for the Astros. He was also a collector of books of quotations. He went through them like popcorn.

In winter, he liked to get under the covers with a new book. He would first check the section on Shakespeare and then see what the quotable people had to say about love. He’d frequently wake up in the middle of the night, glasses still on his nose, but the book on the floor. He was always peeved that his place had been lost.

It surprised him when people quoted him — so he’d be surprised now:

 

I am predictably surprised when a former student comes to visit and quotes to me something that he/she remembers that I said, some memorable phrase to build a life on, the saying of which I do not remember at all. I know I should deny authorship, but I blush and stammer and say, “Oh gosh,” and slither out of an embarrassing but pleasing situation. It’s a little like telling a lie, and I know that’s wrong, but I also know it’s a mistake to mess with people’s memories.

You can quote me on that.

 

Everyone should have a friend like Melvyn. If you haven’t found him yet, get out of the house and start looking. It’s worth it.

• Source: Melvyn Schreiber, M.D., Sunday’s Essays; privately printed, p. 151.

Back home: Outdoors

 On Memorial Day, we ran across some ripe blackberries in the woods around Stone Mountain. Most are still red, but some are ready to eat. It was only the stern warnings of the Wise Woman that prevented me from wading out into the briars.

A lot of the spring wildflowers are gone. But I love to see two little ones that people tend to overlook: slender yellow woodsorrel, Oxalis dillenii, and Venus’s looking-glass, Triodanis biflora. The looking-glass blossoms are purple.

Back home: Politics

 We spent Election Day on the Cumberland Plateau, so there was some catching up to do when we got home. 

Two justices on the State Supreme Court were re-elected: Sarah Warren by 18 points and Charlie Bethel by 2.

Both are Republicans and both are bad judges — not because they are Republicans but because they looked for ways to empower people who wanted to overturn an election that the current occupant of the White House lost.

Judicial elections in Georgia are allegedly nonpartisan. They are on the same ballot as the primary elections.

To me, the failure to unseat such candidates was the big story. But I’m used to being in the minority.

In 2022, during the last midterms, more people voted Republican than Democratic. This year, 52.6 percent of the 2.07 million voters cast ballots in the Democratic Primary, 45.3 percent in the Republican and a little more than 2 percent requested nonpartisan ballots, meaning they voted only in the judicial elections.

Turnout was 28.2 percent.

People who tamper with elections or encourage others to do so shouldn’t be judges. And if we can’t inspire 30 percent of the registered voters to have a say about that, we’re in trouble.

I spent some time looking at newspapers and news sites operated by volunteers. I’m convinced that a lot of registered voters didn’t know that people in Georgia vote on judges or that judges who had such a shameful history were on the ballot.

People who want better government in Georgia have a lot of work to do.