An activity in lieu of making resolutions

Most people are making resolutions today. I’m fiddling with a new pocket calendar. It’s one of the few ways I know to get a handle on time.

Wirecutter, The New York Times’ site, had an article on “Our Favorite Paper Planners” on Dec. 10. My calendar, made by Letts, didn’t make the list. It’s a traditionalist calendar. The company says John Letts started making these in 1812.

It doesn’t have any of the new features mentioned by Wirecutter. It does have some things I like:

• It has two “year planners,” one for 2022 and one for ’23. These are just headings for each month with a list of dates below. I use the 2023 planner as list for birthdays and other days I want to mark, including the Winter Solstice. My grandmother kept such a calendar on a nail at the old farmhouse. It had the birthdates of friends, relatives and ancestors. My own list includes Greater and Lesser Saints. The Greater are the living loved ones. I hope I can remember to send each a note this year. The Lesser are my heroes, living and dead. They are writers, musicians, artists who have influenced me. Umberto Eco, who was born on Jan. 5, is up first. He’d be on my list if he had written nothing more than The Infinity of Lists.

• The calendar has a bunch of pages that I don’t need. A lot of Letts’s customers apparently need hotel and restaurant information for Zurich and Hong Kong. I do not. But I need those pages because I paste short poems in my calendar — things to read when I’m stuck in line at the grocery store. I just made a copy of Kim Stafford’s “Citizen of Dark Times.” I’m looking for my stick of glue. If you have a recommendation for a notebook poem, please let me know.

• The pocket calendar is just the right size to hold a few index cards. The yellow ones are for notes on things I want to think and write about. The red ones are for chores. (The Wise Woman is shockingly good at recommendations.) The blue ones are for shopping lists. The green ones are for things I want to do: a book I’d like to read, a new café I’d like to try, an exhibit at the museum I’d like to see.

I am marking the new year, thinking about the passage of time. I have a lot I want to do — too much for one day, maybe too much for one lifetime. But keeping the little calendar helps.

I only thought I knew what they were doing

 Yesterday's note was about the difficulty in making general statements about trees. Today, a note on animals.

Last spring, I saw two male cardinals, one pursuing the other, branch to branch, relentlessly. I saw them outbound on the walk up the creek. They were still at it, 10 minutes later, when we returned down the creek on the way back to the truck.

The quarrel seemed to be about one tree. I was ready to write about territorial behavior and started collecting material in my notebook. The next day when we passed the disputed tree, we saw two male cardinals, sitting calmly five feet apart.

Roy Bedichek, the wonderful Texas naturalist, didn’t understand birders who looked at birds only to identify them. Bedichek always asked: What is that particular bird doing?

When I look now, I ask. Most often, I just don’t know. What to say of those two cardinals? Perhaps they were engaged in relentless instinctual behavior but were required to take 10 minute breaks each hour. Something about union rules.

When do cypress trees change color?

 I would like to be able to tell you when the needles on the cypress trees change color and when they fall.

It would show a certain woodsy wisdom on my part, don’t you think?

But cypress trees are individuals. They seem to like to defy generalizations.

Last year in January, we walked around Woodlawn Lake. Some cypresses had some green needles. It was remarkable because most the cypresses along Elmendorf Lake were brown.

I looked for an environmental explanation. But Woodlawn Lake is 2.5 miles north of Elmendorf Lake. It’s not more sheltered from the cold fronts. 

It was only when I looked more carefully that I began to notice how much variation there was among individual trees. One was still green. One had some two-tone leaves, green and yellow. One was brown, with some shedding. One was almost bare, with brown needles deep on the ground.

What’s the meaningful generalization in all that?

The more I walk along the creek, the more I am aware of how my mind wants to devise rules to make order out of the bewildering variety of life. But the world is made of individuals, and they don’t always follow the rules.

How can a cypress tree have so many colors?

 Wittgenstein said that philosophy is an attempt to get rid of a particular kind of puzzlement, the puzzlement of language. For example, he said, the concept of the color wheel allows us to talk of greenish blue, but not of greenish red.

I know what he means, of course. And still, still, I think of that remark every day on the creek, as we a pass the cypress trees, which are riotous combinations of greens, reds, rusts, maroons and almost-purples.

It’s hard to imagine how a natural thing can be so many shades of red and so many shades of green at the same time. No Christmas decoration can match them.

The change in color has been going on for months. A reader reminded me that it’s been a while since he’d seen a report from the creek.

So here goes.

Zarzamora Creek is on the edge of two regions: the brush country of South Texas and the Hill Country of Central Texas. The weather patterns are predictable. Warm, moist air creeps up from the Gulf of Mexico, about 150 miles away. Then a front of cold, dry air will move south from the Great Plains, chase the fog off and wring the moisture out of the air in a quick downpour. It’ll be cold and clear for a few days until the warm, moist air starts creeping back again.

Such is winter along Zarzamora Creek.

The air from the Gulf of Mexico has been winning the tug of war recently. Through the holidays, the highs mostly have been in the 70s, and lows in the 60s. It was 83 on Christmas Day.

Gunter, the German shepherd, gets us to the creek almost every day. Twice a day, when he’s rambunctious.

I should have reported that the shovelers have arrived and are rounding up the minnows and small fish in the creek. These lovely ducks form a circle, and swim in one direction, gradually tightening the circle around a school of fish.

More scaups have arrived, along with mallards and a few goldeneyes. They mix in with the domestic ducks and geese that live on the lake year-round. One kingfisher is hanging out at the upper end of the lake but won’t let me get a close look. I’ve seen several Great blue herons.

A single swan appeared on the lake a couple of months ago. We’d seen a couple of swans on Woodlawn Lake, 2.5 miles north. I’m guessing one flew south for the winter. He’s tame and comes when people bring bread to feed the ducks and geese.

But the real show on the creek has been the cypress trees. 

New England and the North Woods have their autumn leaves. I’ve seen and admired them. But if you like color, look for the cypress trees along a Texas creek.

E.O. Wilson, a biologist who wrote about learning

E.O. Wilson, arguably the most important biologist of the day, died Sunday. He helped us to understand how social structures influence the development of species, including our own.

I’m enormously interested in his work on biology, but my interest goes beyond that. Wilson wrote some more personal essays about how we humans learn.

He said we learn by following our own interests.

Wilson, who taught at Harvard, started with a boyhood interest in ants. He wondered why some insects are so highly developed socially while others are not. He followed that interest his entire life.

A basic interest in insects led him to other interests in other disciplines. You can make a hobby of collecting insects. But to really understand them requires an understanding of biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics. 

Wilson has argued that the proper course in education is to encourage that initial interest. Let a kid who’s interested in ants learn about ants. Let that interest grow naturally into and across the disciplines.

The wrong thing to do is what we in fact usually do: tell the aspiring scientists that they cannot study insects until they have mastered the prerequisites.

Wilson studied advanced math because he wanted better tools to help him to understand ants.

We learn when we are driven to learn, not when we mindlessly follow the abstract demands of a curriculum. And that driving force is interest. It’s individual, quirky, eccentric.

• Source: E.O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence; New York: Liveright, 2015.

One fine essayist sizes up another

 The best assessment I’ve seen of Joan Didion, a wonderful essayist, was by Hilton Als, another wonderful essayist.

Als’s main point: An artist’s job is to question the values that went into making this place, whatever place you call home. We all inherit a textus recuptus, the book that tells us the way things are. It’s the received tradition that tells us why this place is as it is, and we absorb it, whether we want to or not, as children.

The writer’s job is to question how it got to be that way and to ask: What happens if you disrupt it?

Source: Hilton Als, “An Awful and Beautiful Light,” The New York Review of Books, Dec. 17, 2020, Vol. LXVII, No. 20.

 

Joan Didion, keeper of a notebook

Joan Didion, who died right before Christmas, wrote essays and kept a notebook.

Essays and notebooks are two of my preoccupations.

Her essay “On Keeping a Notebook” should be part of a writer’s education.

Recording accurate information is not exactly the point of keeping one, she said. 

“How it felt to be me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook.”

You keep a notebook to remember what it was like to be you.

You change. You grow. You have trouble recalling what, exactly, you were thinking.

I’m one of those people who have a hard time distinguishing life from awareness.

It seems to me that a complete biography would be a record of what a person was paying attention to. And so it seems to me that a good keeper of notebooks — a Thoreau, a Kierkegaard, a Virginia Woolf — always produces something that is a little better than the best biography.