Making Things Others Probably Won't Buy

is not futile.

There is this joy: remembering the picture-taking; centering and affixing the photographs on the cards; folding and creasing them; aligning them along my dining table. Should no one want the cards, I will use them myself and enjoy them over and over and over again.Meanwhile, like all good company, they converse and entertain, shining in lamplit dark.

A Welcome Visit

An eighth-grader when I taught her, Amelie is a professional woman now, just as lovely and lovable as she was that long time ago when we shared a classroom. Over eggs and coffee, we chatted easily about books and the news, her classmates and family, her professional and personal life.

Once I taught in a girls' school, and the girls return to memory often and sometimes in person. Their visits are always welcome.

Connections

Images, Technology, and Music: The Ballets Suedois and Les maries ...Robley Munger Hood's dissertation, "The Ballets Suédois: Modernism and the Painterly Stage," convincingly argues that the company was a "kind of ...
mq.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/gdk003v1

Searching the Internet for something quite different the other day, I came upon the above reference. The shock of recognition was immediate, and my surprise even greater. Someone has actually read my dissertation and apparently had something complimentary to say about it. When I followed the link above, I discovered that the writer's article was published in The Musical Quarterly, for which I'd have to pay a fee if I wanted to read the rest of her comment.

Over the past several days, I have had other Internet lagniappes: communication with a distant over-the-sheets cousin about our ancestors and emails with another person who shares my unusual first name. I have enjoyed both virtual connections more than I might have expected and look forward to more of the same.

Plenty of folks complain about the depersonalization and isolation brought on by the Internet. My experience has been the opposite. I have been connected to relatives and possible relatives (a descendant of slaves with a family name), to former students in their 50s and still in their teens, and to friendly (carefully selected) strangers. Now, I have even been reconnected -- however marginally -- to the persona and scholar I once was.

How these unexpected miracles cheer me!

Image to follow when Blogger is working correctly.

Joe Obama

Though not usually a fan of lap dogs, I am smitten with Joe, the wiggle-worm, who squirms and shakes and scampers his way up the steps each day at The Lemon Fair when he and his human companion replace me for the afternoon. Who wouldn't be charmed by this enthusiastic bundle of fur with happy smile, sharp underbite, pink tongue, long silky hair, and trusting eyes?

That Light

is magic.

It's not Oxford, but on a late fall afternoon, it'll do.

The Gossips in the Corner

look friendly from a distance but stink up close. Familiarity, even with ladybugs, breeds contempt.

Tomorrow, they're taking a little trip.

Outside, in dustbin.

Then let them do their deeds all they want -- somewhere else.

The True Bug

"What is that?" she said, entering the shop.

"A bug," her granddaughter responded.

I had to look.

Sure enough: a true bug.Armored, triangular-headed, leaf-footed, his wings camouflaged and folded tightly along the back, this prehistoric monster of a bug (at least an inch and a half long) almost sprinted up the screen to the top of the door. Before I could get a well focused shot, he shot straight up like a helicopter or the golden snitch in quidditch. I watched him soar across the street, gaining altitutude, until finally losing him as he buzzed above the bank. I found him online: species Acanthocephala declivis.

I read what I found, but I prefer what my entomologist friend emailed:

They are true bugs. Hemipterans (which means that 1/2 of their wings are sclerotized, and half membranous), and subgroup Coreidae. They have sucking mouthparts. All those homologous mouthparts that you saw in the grasshopper are modified in these bugs to make a straw-like mouth for piercing and sucking. Incomplete metamorphosis, because the young nymphs look like miniature adults, without wings.

I call them leaf-footed bugs, but they are surely close to the photo you sent.

Assassin bugs are in this group. Also kissing bugs. Kissing bugs carry Chagas' disease, a blood parasite that lodges in the heart. Darwin described being bitten by a kissing bug (so-called because they bite around the lips and nose), and some medical historians think that he had Chagas' disease. Kissing bugs live as commensals in wood-rat nests. As a graduate student, I excavated wood rat nests and found quite a few. Darwin or wood rat, it doesn't matter.

Who wouldn't love the ugly bug!