botanizing

Chastened for Pence

I’ve had a pocket-full of pennies, and a friend and I were investigating them.  We marveled especially at the cheap appearance of the 2009 penny.  It has a thin lip.  The artwork on its backside is too busy and lacks the simple elegance of the Lincoln Memorial portrayed on previous pennies.  E Pluribus Unum, which last stood banner-like at top center above the Lincoln Memorial, has been moved downward and reduced to the appearance of lawn, emblematic perhaps of our late national tendency to tred on the interests of many to enable the greed of a few.

My pocket-full of pennies was jingling heavily when I crossed the street a few days ago for a muffin.  There’s a coffee stand in the building across the street from my office where I go regularly to pick-up The New York Times and a blueberry muffin.  The muffins are university products, a day old and sticky under cling-wrap, but they provide a sweet top-off for my earlier breakfast.  There was no one in line at the stand one day this week so I decided to cash-in some pennies for my $1.89 muffin.

I pulled a pile of change from my pocket and began to sort-out and push pennies toward the barista.  She counted the pennies and slid them into denominational (so-to-speak) clusters.  As we approached the end of the transaction, she pushed one penny back toward me.

 “It’s Canadian,” she said.

 “Sorry,” I said.  Up here in the northern tier of states, we frequently get Canadian coins sliding surreptitiously in our change.  I put the Canadian penny back in my pocket.

 I slid a few more pennies toward the barista.

 “What’s this!?” She asked sharply.

 I looked up at the bright penny.

 “It’s one of the new pennies,” I said.

 The barista picked-up the penny for a closer look.  “Queen Elizabeth!” She said.  She tilted her head low to glance beneath her bangs at me.  She was dubious—as if I’d attempted to undermine the economy by pushing a British pence.

 The barista dropped the Queen’s penny in my palm, and I slid it into my pocket.  I pushed another penny across the counter to her.

 The barista said nothing.  She swept the pennies into her hand then clanked them into the cash register.

 Chastened, I took my muffin.

5%?

When I went to a colleague’s office this week to chat, he offered me a squirt from the Purell bottle that sat on his desk opposite the guest chair.  I held out one hand for the ethanol-based hand sanitizer and then rubbed my hands together.  My colleague gave himself a squirt as well and rubbed it around his hands.  “I’m following university recommendations to avoid swine flu,” my colleague said.  Indeed, we have received various communiqués from the Provost and other university powers that detail procedures for student illness and recommendations for avoiding the swine flu.

We have an outbreak.  Although flu seems at odds with our beautiful days of bright sun and cool breezes, a little epidemic of swine flu has arrived with the return of students to campus.  So many of our students have swine flu we have been in the national news all weekend.  The media attention rivals our once-a-decade participation in the Rose Bowl and the twice-a-decade appearance we make in the NCAA basketball tournament.  Seldom does national news emanate from dry, rural eastern Washington.

Students have been sending me e-mails all week that say something like this:  “I’m sick, and the doctor has told me not to go to class for the rest of the week.”  I’m impressed by the communication—few students ever e-mail to say they are sick and won’t be in lecture.  Indeed, surreptitious skipping of my lectures by students has always seemed very popular.  I send e-mails back to the students to tell them not to worry—stay away until the fever passes, and we’ll take care of the missed work next week.

In my botany class of nearly 100 students, perhaps five sent e-mails this week to say they were sick and told not to attend class.  That five percent is impressive, although perhaps not as astounding as the numbers of students who succumb to sniffling, sneezing, and coughing about a month into the semester when tests, late nights, and stress in the tight living environments of dormitories and apartments add up to colds in a substantial proportion of my class.  None-the-less, I am impressed that five percent of my students may have swine flu, and I’m a bit concerned about the time when the virus reaches the front of the class.

The five percent illness in my class is short of the level in the university as a whole, in which the national news has been reporting that about 2000 of our student population of nearly 22,000 have swine flu.  With nearly 10% of the student body putatively suffering swine flu and only about 5% suffering in my class, I wonder about the difference.  Is my class not a random draw from the university population as a whole when we consider disease distribution?  For example, are all of the landscape architecture students in my botany course too tasteful to be living in cramped quarters with other students and, thus, avoiding infection with the virus?  Or perhaps more than 5% of my students have the swine flu and only 5% have opted to stay away from class—it is a bit worrying that the other ill 5% of my students may be bringing swine flu viruses to class with them.  And it’s possible that swine flu infection rates on campus are growing quickly, and I may find a much higher percentage of my students with the disease reporting to me next week.

The natural history and epidemiology of swine flu on campus make me curious.  I’m not so curious, however, to want any expanded personal experience with the disease.  It would be pleasing not to have any more students with swine flu.  And so far, I can report that the students who have returned to class after recovery appear as bright and lively as they did before the disease.

*   *   *

N. B.—I am not the only person on campus to blog about our little pig pen outbreak, I see the university’s president is also blogging about the disease.  He wisely repeats on his blog the university’s recommendations to avoid Swine flu.

Minnesota

We’ve just boarded a flight from Spokane to Minneapolis.  There is a used car salesman from Kalispell in the row ahead of me.  His voice is a piercing, rough whine.

“I saw a ticket from Kalispell to Minneapolis for $280,” he says.  “When I went back the next day, the price had risen to $1000.”  He shakes his head.  “What’s going on?”

“For that price,” he says, “I had to drive over to Spokane to the airport.  The price from Spokane to Minneapolis was only $290, but I also had to get a motel room and there’s gas.  Ya know?”

We make a sharp turn onto the runway, and the plane accelerates quickly, pushing me back into my seat.  “Here we go,” the salesman says.

“Two days ago there were only middle seats on this flight,” he says above the rush of the jet’s engines.  “This morning I asked for a window seat, and they had one.”  He shakes his head at the mystery of it.  “Some times you want to sleep.  Ya know?”  He puts his head against the fuselage next to his window seat to mimic sleep.

The salesman is perhaps 45 and has dark hair that is parted on the left.  He wears a plaid shirt and blue jeans.  He moves swiftly in sudden jerks.  An elderly couple sits next to the salesman.  The couple listen, responding with nods or a word edged after his rhetorical ‘ya knows,’ with a hint of distraction from their own conversation.  He tells the couple about his house in Kalispell.  “I have a piano,” he says.   “It was my grandmother’s.  She played piano and gave lessons.  You play an instrument?” he asks his seatmates.

As we reach cruising altitude, he tries to recline his seat.  He bangs the seat with his left shoulder, but it won’t move.  He twists his torso perpendicular to the seat back and throws his weight against it . . .once, and then again.  Still, it won’t budge.  His eyes are fierce.  “Ah, it won’t go,” he says after banging hard a final time against the seat.  “You can recline yours’ if you want to,” he says to his seat mates.  They shake their heads no.

A flight attendant comes past with a beverage cart and snacks.  “Peanuts or cookies?” she asks.

The salesman hesitates at her question.  The flight attendant stares at him through pregnant moments—she lifts her eyes with expectation; still, she shows trained patience, widening her eyes and lifting her head as she waits for the salesman’s response.

“Mmmm . . .  cookies,” he says.  And then, “Could I have both?”

The flight attendant looks unsure.  She purses her lips.  One can see that she doesn’t want to say no to a passenger.

Before she can respond, the salesman reads her concern.  He says, “It’s o.k. if you don’t have enough.”

The flight attendant says, “If I have any left over when I’m done, I’ll bring you back some.

The salesman takes cookies from the flight attendant and relaxes for a moment.  He then turns to the woman in the middle seat beside him and says, “I’m going out to Minnesota.  Never been to Minnesota.  There are all these opportunities there.”

A land where the cookies and peanuts are plentiful, I think and smile, recognizing that I, too, have thought of Minnesota as a place of opportunities.  A wonderful place to visit and to live.  I hope the salesman finds what he wants in that land of many lakes, lovely Minnesota.

Tiara in a Tea Shop

Tiara is shiny and sleek.  She has a coppery mop of bobbed hair. And she has great shoes.  Her pumps are pointy and have heels shaped like an hourglass.  A woman’s shape.  The long opening of the shoes exposes the cleavage of her toes.  Just back from that low opening, a strap crosses the bridge of her foot to frame tightly the clefts between her toes. 

Tiara places her order at the tea shop in Seattle. A young woman in a loose, wooly sweater and an older woman in a straight shift stand behind the counter.  The young worker asks, “Where did you get those shoes?”

“I don’t know,” Tiara says.  “My mother picked them up in a second hand store.  They’re my favorite pair.  They make me feel like Audrey Hepburn.”

The eyes of the young woman behind the counter widen.  She breathes-in Hepburn air.  Then her shoulders slump a bit beneath her shapeless sweater.  “What’s your name?” she asks.

“Tiara.”

The eyes of the young woman behind the counter widen further.  “Do people harass you about that name?

“No,” Tiara says.  “Just Spanish speakers notice.  It means ‘dirt’ in Spanish.”

The other young woman asks, “It’s not like a crown?”

Tiara looks quizzical.  She hasn’t thought about her name as a crown.

After Tiara leaves, the older proprietress of the tea shop says, “I don’t think I’d have somebody here named Tiara.”

The younger woman slumps again in her wooly sweater.

*   *   *
[Thanks go to Adrian for capturing these details!]

Feather snow

We have feather snow.  The eight inches that fell last night have a goose down top.  The flakes lay lightly in jumbles, making fans that mimic down feathers.  The spines of the flakes, lodged in icy lattices, are like the soft, plumaceous barbs of feathers. 

*

The snow does not shovel like feathers.  My back screams.  Each scoop goes shortly before I need to lift and toss.  My arms strain.  The piles of snow are already high.  New snow has fallen nearly every day for over a week.  Long berms of snow line the shrubs along my drive from the daily shoveling.  The snow piles grow, and the shoveling time each day grows, too.

Knee to knee

We are knee to knee.  “Business trip?” she asks me.  I sit in the front row of the small airplane, and the flight attendant sits facing me.  We are close, and our knees nearly touch.  The plane’s engines engage, their tone tightens and their drone turns guttural as the rpms rise.  The flight attendant straps in.

“I’ve been asked to speak at a botanical garden near Los Angeles,” I tell her. 

She takes a moment to digest this idea.  “What are you going to talk about?” she asks.

Now it’s my turn to hesitate.  How do I tell a flight attendant that I plan to talk about the role of serial homology in evolutionary innovation?

“The evolution of flowers,” I tell her.

Hesitation returns to her.  I see the syllables clink through her thoughts.

“I have a petunia,” she says, “but it looks more like a carnation.  Is that what you mean?”

We are quickly at a cross road in this conversation.  Why can’t I just say yes?  Those kinds of variations in nature, I could say, provide the raw material for natural selection, which either selects against the variant or allows it to persist, reproduce, and become the material basis for further diversification.  I know I can’t take that road.  Instead, I take a road full of dangerous curves. “That’s probably a genetic modification made by a plant breeder rather than evolution in nature,” I say. 

My biologist’s soul itches uncomfortably as I speak.  All of the artificial selection data gathered by Charles Darwin as evidence for the creative possibilities of selection, whether natural or artificial, scrapes against my answer.  And, of course, there are all of the fascinating new results from developmental genetic studies that have used variants like the flight attendant’s carnation-like petunia to understand the genetic basis of floral forms and the molecular basis of evolutionary transformation.

“You mean like a wildflower,” the flight attendant says.

“Yes, they are wildflowers.”  I grow slightly more comfortable, thinking that I won’t need to explain my research in any more detail.

“I used to go on Sierra Club hikes,” she says.  “Not so much anymore since I’ve gotten older.  But there was a guy who would point out all these different wildflowers.”

My cheeks flush.  I’m that kind of guy.

“Some of the wildflowers smelled like dirty socks,” she says.  “What were those flowers?” she asks and looks directly into my eyes, expecting a good answer.

I have no idea where in the world or in what kind of environment this woman encountered bad smelling flowers.  I could ask, but instead I answer her promptly and keep my eyes linked to her eyes.  “Jacob’s ladders,” I say.  “They are also called sky pilots and even skunk leaf because of the strong smell.  They are common in the mountains.”

She looks dubious.  “Jacob’s ladders,” she repeats.  Her hard gaze continues to hold my eyes.  “What kind of plants do you study?” she asks.

This question was so much easier in the years when I worked primarily on hydrangeas; otherwise in my 30 years of research on plant evolution, I have seldom worked on any plants that are remotely familiar to the lay population.

“They are probably not plants you’ve seen,” I say.

“What do they look like?” she asks.

I describe the flowers, feeling suddenly challenged to find words that are not technical.  I use the word stamens, and I can tell by her look that this was a mistake.

“Are the like roses or daisies?”  she asks.

I want to hug her.  I want to thank her for giving me a multiple-choice test that acknowledges her range of knowledge.

“Roses,” I say.

She says, “I’ve heard that flowers were made by God for the enjoyment of people.”

I smile and nod and open my book.

Wood smoke

There was this morning, when I stepped from the house, the smell of wood smoke in the air.  I looked around the neighborhood for a chimney with gray white smoke.  Later, when I went from my office to get a copy of the New York Times, I could again smell the smoke and could see across the valley of downtown that a haze of gray smoke sat on the hills.  Had one source burned in the night a lot of wood or was this the accumulation of many fireplaces banked against our early cold?  While I was unsure about the smoke’s source, I was sure that the fragrance fit like a metaphor for the chill of the morning.

Chill returned quickly when the sun set this evening.  I was at home by then at work on a review, from which I turned to go to the woodpile.  The fireplace now warms the living room where I’m reading and writing.  The smoke of my fire is surely welling among the neighborhood trees.  I will step out to check the cold and the smoky fragrance.

Drunk zone, the university community

Someone pushed against a window below my bedroom in the night.  Lying still, I listened for a pensive moment.

Loud music had been coming from the direction of campus before midnight.  The music stopped a little later, and I turned off the light in my bedroom to hope for continued quiet and sleep.  It was only a few minutes later when I heard steps come down the hill beside my house.  These were not the quick rustling steps of a squirrel or the exploring steps of a raccoon.  It was clearly a person who had a short, quiet stride, which I heard amplified in the dried leaves.  The person stopped against my house, just below my bedroom, and pushed against a window.

I slipped from bed and tried first to look out, but it was impossible to see the area where the person stood.  I dressed and found a flashlight, then slipped out a door on the opposite side of the house.  From the top of the hill I shone the light along my house but could not see anyone.  I walked down the hill to check among the shrubs and under the juniper that stands beside the house.  There was no one.  When I was back at the top of the hill, I heard a neighbor yell, “Get away from my house!  Get away from my house!”  I went quickly inside to call the police and then went to check on the neighbor.

My neighbor told me that the prowler had tried to come into his house through a door on a back deck.  He pointed in the direction that the prowler had gone, and I walked toward my driveway.

“Here he is!”  I hollered, and my neighbor and his visiting brother came running through the lilacs and plums along my drive.

The prowler sat on his butt under a mock orange at the edge of my driveway.  With the lights of our flashlights on his face, the prowler sat—if I may use a hackneyed phrase—frozen like a deer in headlights.  He was silent and unmoving—stoned.  I called the police again to urge a quick arrival.  The dispatcher began to question me.  Were we restraining the prowler?  No.  What was he doing?  Sitting motionless. He’s obviously very drunk or very high.  Has he said anything?  He’s mumbling now, but I understand only his swearing.  Do we have guns?  No.  Could I describe the prowler?  Male about 20 with short dark hair, about six feet tall, wearing a gray sweatshirt and blue jeans; the jeans are rolled-up at the ankles.

When the police arrived, one of the officers had the prowler stand and walk to the street.  He staggered from side to side.  The other officer questioned my neighbor and I.  How did he try to get into our houses?  Did we want to press charges?  “He’s in no condition to take care of himself,” the officer said.  “What we usually do with these kids is take them to the hospital for the night.”

There was Pac-10 football on campus yesterday.  A day of drunkenness.

In the middle of the afternoon, soon after the football game had started and traffic had settled, I went out for errands.  At the intersection with a major street that runs through campus, I saw two young women walking.  Their arms were looped, but one was clearly providing support for the other, who stumbled and staggered with each step.  As I watched, the drunk young woman ran from her partner into the lawn they were passing, where she bent over to vomit.  Less than a block down the street, I saw another young woman fall face down in a flower bed.  Her two companions leaned, hands on their knees, over her.

This spectacle of drunks, offering vomit and flattened flowers, is a common part of university communities, but it can also be more intrusive, as our midnight prowler demonstrated.

The New Year

Fall begins the new year.  I have never been able to accept that a new year could begin in the dark, cold deadness of winter.  Winter, a time we weather as best we can, is a long span of work, reading, and writing as well as snow shoveling; it is not a time of significant transitions that I can in any way associate with newness.  The cold of winter is strictly old.  Fall, in contrast, is a time of change—my wardrobe shifts from shorts, t-shirts, and Tevas to blue jeans, Oxford shirts, and shoes that require socks.  My days in fall return to the tight schedule and quick pace of the academic semester.  The new year has begun and, for a week, I’ve been ironing shirts and writing lectures.

Just as I have moved the start of the year, I have dissociated seasons from solstices and equinoxes.  The new year begins with fall, which starts today, 1 September, and lasts with assurance until Halloween.  That trick holiday is like a last laugh before the beginning of winter, which begins on 1 November, despite any following days that might have a lingering resemblance to fall.  Winter persists as the longest of seasons until the end of February.  The revivification of spring starts with March and carries through until the end of May, when the spring-flowering plants are well along the way to making fruits.  Summer begins with June and ends at August’s end.

Just as the beginning of the new year was on my mind through the past week as I began my term of lectures, my thoughts this weekend turned to fall.  A neighbor’s young maple has a fringe of red leaves.  I look up from the couch to assure myself that the maple is truly changing color.  More than the maple has begun to change—the light is flattening, and shadows stretch earlier.  Over the weekend, the cold nights of fall rushed in, and I rushed to close the windows.  The temperatures have fallen dramatically—I shiver when getting into bed and have put two down comforters over the covers.

I love the beginning of the new year.  Thoughts seem crisp on the cool air of the new season, and the light—less sharp than in summer—offers opportunity for subtlety.  The crisp subtlety of fall is here. I shall pull on a sweater and mull on its delights.

Happy new year!

Insouciant

I had been engaged for hours by paintings.  The exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum examined the sources of inspiration the Impressionist painters had found in art of earlier eras.  As usual, I was struck by the boldness of Manet—here, especially for me, seen in his painting of Victorine Meurent, which dated from 1862.  Her brightly lit face with its subtle yellow light and ochre shadow was hardly simpler, hardly more complex, than her white blouse with its black lines of detail and quick swishes of gray shadow.  Despite the bright face of this working woman our gaze was pulled upward to the blue ribbon in her hair.  The ribbon was a subtle challenge—the will of a working woman to find elements of beauty and a painter’s will to compose and use color beyond expectation.  In the Renoirs was the pillow of pleasure.  The indulgent softness of his paintings always for me excludes all possibilities aside from the joys of pleasure.  Despite the offering of flesh in the Renoirs, my favorite of his works in the show was “Still Life with Bouquet,” which was overwhelmingly, brightly orange.  The still life had red and yellow flowers wrapped in white paper that shown with crisp creases and angles of bright light along with two leather-bound books and a Japonisme vase that held a Japanese fan and a feathery plume.  In the background of the painting, hung against an orange wall by a red ribbon, was the image of a Manet etching, which was itself a copy of a painting by Velasquez. 

I grew hungry and went to the museum café for a late lunch.  I selected an over-priced, fashionably unusual, but still basically ham, sandwich and a bag of lightly salted chips.  I stood at the register to pay.  The young man behind the register tapped at its keys with his right hand and his left hand lay lightly on a seating chart.  As I watched his right hand work at the register, I studied the tattoos of orange and black fish that seemed to swim on the pale flesh of his forearm.  The tattoos had the softness of Renoir’s brushstrokes.  He did not look up at me.  I began to stare at his face in the hope that he would register my presence and let me pay for my food.  There was a small loop earring in each of his ears.  The earrings reflected his white shirt and stood in contrast with his well trimmed black hair.  I thought about the black and white contrast that Manet used to call attention to the subtlety of a face as I waited.  It seemed I waited several minutes, standing still and almost patiently.  The young man seemed delicate.  I began to wonder how delicacy shaped his life and how parts of his life must further refine the delicacy.  I waited in a calm challenge to the storm of my growling stomach.  How long had it been when he finally looked up at me?  The stud in the flesh just below his lower lip glinted like a sliver of glass in the café’s sallow light.

“Have you been helped?” the young man said. He looked at me as if I were an inconvenience yet inconsequential.

“No,” I said.

He tilted his head a little.  I offered my sandwich and chips.  “I would like a cup of tea.  Please.”

He flipped light-handed a laminated tea list to me.  “An Earl Grey, please,” I said.

His turn was as slow as a painted pirouette, as if he was one of Degas’s pastel ballerinas, and he was gone.  I knew I would wait several minutes for my tea.

*  *  *
The exhibition was "Inspiring Impressionism:  The Impressionists and the Art of the Past," which is currently at the Seattle Art Museum.