Re-entry

This weekend I read an article about Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield and his recent return to earth after spending five months aboard the International Space Station. Hadfield is an Internet celebrity because of the Twitter account he maintained while in space, and he became a virtual rock star after sharing on YouTube a video of himself performing a version of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” in zero-gravity. What I found most interesting about the article describing Hadfield’s homecoming, however, was his description of the intensive rehabilitation he and other returning astronauts have to undergo upon re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere, their bodies having become unaccustomed to the incessant pull of gravity:

“Right after I landed I could feel the weight of my lips and tongue … I hadn’t realized that I had learned to talk with a weightless tongue,” he said.

He is suffering overall body soreness, particularly in his neck and back which are again having to support his head after months in weightlessness.

These details about an otherwise healthy man having to relearn the basic mechanics of life on earth—like how to shower without fainting or how to walk on feet that are no longer toughened with protective calluses—is fascinating enough, but I found them even more interesting since I’m still reading Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, which also provides fascinating insight into life after zero-gravity. (If Roach’s book sounds familiar, it might be because I blogged it back in April.) What is it like to return to the familiar weighted existence of “home” after having floated rootless in space for so long?

I’ve previously used the term “Re-entry” to describe my own experience of coming back to my mundane life at the end of the academic year, after having spent too much time buckled down and focused on the minutiae of end-term grading. In many ways, my experience feels like the opposite of Hadfield’s: all those paper-piles and an accumulation of end-term tasks were oppressively weighty, and now I’ve been freed to float in the relative tranquility of summer, with “only” my online classes to tether me to earth.

But even so, the end of every academic year requires more than a bit of rehabilitation. While I was laden with papers and projects, I fell behind with other obligations and am now slowly digging my way out, taking my car for a long-overdue oil change on Friday, for instance, while slowly re-introducing myself to friends who don’t see much of me during the school year. I still need a haircut, which is something I never seem to find time for during a busy academic term; I still need to clean the bathroom. The dusty bookshelves and piles of unsorted junk in the basement—tasks I’d optimistically thought I’d tackle over winter break—are still staring me in the face, silently asking me “If not now, when?”

Before I devote myself to such weighty projects, however, I want to take a few days to enjoy the (relative) weightlessness of summer; before I devote myself to my summer checklist of projects, I want to spend some time doing as close to “nothing” as I can get away with. A couple times this past week, for instance, I found myself puttering around our backyard with a camera, simply content to spend time enjoying the scenery. Chris Hadfield has also been enjoying the earthly (and entirely grounding) art of puttering, noting that he and his NASA colleague Thomas Marshburn have been “sort of tottering around like two old duffers in an old folks home” while rehabilitating in Houston. It sounds like re-entry is the same regardless of where you’re returning from.

Click here for more photos of rain-bejeweled greenery, shot during this morning’s stint of backyard-puttering. Enjoy!

 

Downtime

I submitted the last of my spring semester grades on Sunday night, which means I’ve spent much of this week catching up with things that fell by the wayside while I was grading, like keeping track of who’s been spending time in our backyard.

 

Transitional

Every April-into-May while I’m preoccupied with the long, uphill push that invariably marks the end of the semester, something sly and subtle happens. While I’m busy with paper-piles and end-term grading, Spring somehow slips into Summer.

I know that the summer solstice doesn’t come until June, but I’m never fooled by what the calendar says. Something has shifted in the last week or so, with spring-green leaves ripening into a darker summer hue. The nights are warm rather than chilly now, and we sleep with the windows open. Already the leaves on our backyard hostas are tattered where rabbits have nibbled them, and our backyard tulips have dropped their petals, spent.

Already, in an instant, the neighborhood wisteria are hanging heavy with an abundance of blossoms, and the year no longer feels like a coil that is tightly wound, ready to spring. Instead, the season has sprung, and only a ripening of days stands between us and the fullness of summer: a transition so subtle, you’ll miss it if you blink.

 

One week

At 2:50 pm last Monday, I was taking a break from grading to sort through and edit the photos I’d taken at the Boston Marathon that morning, which I used to illustrate yesterday’s post. It wasn’t until about a half hour later that J and I received a phone call from a relative asking if we were okay: our first indication that something bad had happened in Boston, and we should turn on the news.

I spent the rest of last Monday not grading papers, listening to news coverage while continuing to sort through and edit happy, festive photos that in no way matched the version of events I was hearing, as if I were watching one movie while listening to the audio of another.

Today at 2:50 pm, I was taking a break from grading to sort through a handful of photos I’d taken around lunchtime–the photos illustrating this post–when an alarm I’d set earlier in the day went off, sounding with a cascade of cathedral bells. The governor had requested that Massachusetts citizens observe a moment of silence at 2:50 today, one week after the first Boston Marathon bomb went off, so when my alarm sounded, I stopped what I was doing, closed my laptop, and sat in silence for a minute, thinking about the people whose lives ended or were irrevocably changed one week ago today.

 

The Marathon I want to remember

Now that the second Boston Marathon bombing suspect has been taken into custody, a wave of relief has washed over the greater Boston area after an emotionally draining week. Now that the Boston Marathon is no longer breaking news, I want to show you some scenes you haven’t seen in the national coverage: images of the Boston Marathon I want to remember.

The Marathon you saw in the news was the site of carnage, trauma, and heroism: a series of events set into motion by cowards with pressure cookers. But the Marathon I want to remember is the one that happened earlier in the day and out in the suburbs, before the elite runners and the regular Joes who follow in their footsteps had reached Heartbreak Hill, before anyone other than the fastest wheelchair runners had crossed the finish line, and before everyone’s heart was broken.

This is the fifth year J and I have watched the marathon wend its way through Newton, walking from our house to an intersection on Commonwealth Avenue between Miles 18 and 19. Over the past five years, we’ve established something of a ritual, standing at “our” corner and cheering for the last of the wheelchair runners, the first of the fleet-footed women, the arrival of the elite men, and then the throngs of anonymous runners who come next: a surging sea of pounding footfalls.

Last year, I’ve explained how I always get choked up watching the runners pass on their way to Heartbreak Hill, and this year was no exception. Newton residents take our responsibility as spectators seriously, devoutly believing that if the runners are going to survive the series of elevations that give Chestnut Hills its name, they are going to do so only via the impetus of loud cheering, clapping, drumming, bugling, and cowbell-ringing. It’s as if Marathon Monday is a massive love-fest where the sheer enthusiasm of residents rooting on strangers will push everyone up and over Heartbreak Hill.

New Englanders are renowned for their reserve, but that chilliness melts on Marathon Monday. For this reason, I’ve come to think of the Marathon as being Massachusetts’ high holy day: an event that coincides with the arrival of spring (finally!) after another long winter, and an event that gives the residents of greater Boston an excuse to spend a day outside mixing and mingling with their neighbors.

If you watch the Boston Marathon near the finish line on Boylston Street, as I did when I lived in Beacon Hill, you’ll find yourself in a cosmopolitan mix of locals, tourists, passersby, and passers-through. You’ll hear a babel of languages as friends and family cheer for “their” runners, and you’ll be reminded at all turns that the Boston Marathon is a world-class event that happens in an international city. Everyone around the world, it seems, loves Boston, and everyone around the world, it seems, eventually shows up at the finish line of the Boston Marathon: the whole world in a single, thronging crowd.

Out in the Boston suburbs, however, the scene is much more pastoral and parochial…and I mean that in a good way. Out in the ‘burbs, most of the people watching the Marathon are locals who camp out for extended stretches of time, toting coolers, picnic baskets, and wagons filled with footballs, soccer balls, Frisbees, and ball gloves: the accoutrements of a day in the park.

This year, a child watching the marathon next to us was practicing her pogo-stick skills; across the street, a child was mastering his scooter moves. Viewed from the finish line, the Boston Marathon is a world-class sporting event; viewed from the suburbs, Marathon Monday is a massive, very loud block party that happens to have a road race running through it.

In the days after Monday’s bombing, I’ve experienced the usual emotions that arise in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. I’ve experienced grief and helplessness, fear and anger. The nature of my anger has surprised me because of how primal and territorial it has felt. Once the initial shock and sorrow at the unfolding carnage settled, I felt a sense of violation. Whoever did this doesn’t deserve to be in my city, I remember thinking with fierce resolve. This wasn’t a xenophobic reaction, since initially we didn’t know who the bombers were or where they hailed from; instead, it was the visceral reaction of a person whose home has been invaded or whose sacred space has been desecrated.

As I said above, Marathon Monday is a high holy day in Boston, a day devoted to the secular observance of Good Neighborliness. On Marathon weekend, Boston is inundated with visitors who come to run, cheer on runners, or just watch, and on Marathon Monday, locals turn out in droves to display extreme hospitality.

“Hospitality” might not be the first word you’d associate with the Boston Marathon, but it’s a virtue that’s entirely apt. On Marathon Monday, locals volunteer in droves to hand out water, direct traffic, aid the injured, and cheer until they’re hoarse. On Marathon Monday, locals hand out fruit, wave signs, and offer an infinite number of high-fives, all in the spirit of spurring on strangers.

The Boston Marathon is Massachusetts’ annual holiday of helping, and it’s that willingness to help, I’ve decided, that chokes me up every year. All of us, deep down, have the urge to help others: to feel like we have made a difference. Cheering on a marathon runner—especially the ordinary folks at the back of the pack who need encouragement—makes you feel like you’re somehow contributing. Maybe someone is beginning to tire or cramp; maybe someone’s inner enemy is saying “Quit” or “I can’t.” When you cheer on a marathon runner—when you hold out a cup of water, an orange slice, or a freezer pop, or when you wave your sign or hit your drum or hold out your hand for a high five—you’re holding out hope that we, collectively, can somehow help a stranger. Maybe at a particular moment of need, you can offer exactly what’s needed: the right words, or a heartfelt bit of encouragement.

I believe that deep down, we all want to help—we all want to encourage—we all want to be a part of something bigger and greater and more decent than our own individual egos. This, my gut tells me, is what the marathon bombers simply Did Not Get. Marathon Monday is a celebration of radical inclusion, where everyone cheers for anyone and alongside anyone, regardless of who they are or where they come from. Turning this 26-mile festival of inclusion into an occasion for injury and trauma is more than criminal: it’s sacrilege. Whatever the bombers’ motivation turns out to be, this much I know: they are already the victims of their own small-mindedness.

There was one photo I almost didn’t take on Monday morning. After J and I had spent a few hours cheering ourselves hoarse at “our” intersection, we did what we always do, which is follow the runners on foot, walking toward Newton City Hall. Along the way, we saw a runner lying on his back in obvious pain, suffering from a leg cramp or other injury. In the past, we’ve seen runners stop on the side of the road to stretch or take a rest, and we’ve passed them quietly, allowing them the privacy of their own pain. But this was the first time we saw a runner lying prone, in obvious need of help, and somehow it seemed wrong to photograph a stranger in a moment of duress. After a split-second of thought, though, I took that photo, but not because it shows a stranger suffering. I took that photo because of what else it shows.

The Boston Marathon is Massachusetts’ high holy day of hospitality because if you fall down in our neighborhood, we will stop and help you. It doesn’t matter who you are, what you believe, or where you come from. It doesn’t matter if we know or like you. If there is a man or woman down, anonymous spectators will stop and help. By the time J and I reached this runner, a police officer had already arrived, and by the time we’d walked by, a medic was jogging to the scene. Help was on the way, but it almost seemed like a moot point because help had already arrived.

National coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings has shown image after image of people helping the injured and traumatized, and that coverage is true. But don’t think for a minute that this sort of heroism happens in Boston only in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. Even before everyone’s broken heart turned toward Boylston Street last Monday, out in the Boston ’burbs people did what they do every year on Patriots’ Day: they showed up and helped.

When we cheer for marathon runners, we get a surge of satisfaction knowing that maybe our encouragement was appreciated. Some have wondered whether the Boston Marathon will happen next year, and my reply is that the Boston Marathon will happen next year even if I have to lace up shoes and walk every last inch from Hopkinton to downtown Boston myself. The Boston Marathon must go on, next year and every year, because as long as there is an inkling of hope and decency in the human heart, that impulse cannot be denied.

Click here for a photo set of happy images from the 2013 Boston Marathon, taken before last week’s heartbreak happened.

 

Pets

You’ve probably heard the Boston area is on lockdown while authorities search for the second suspect in Monday’s Boston Marathon bombing. Luckily, our cats are highly practiced when it comes to hanging out, hunkering down, and otherwise doing a whole lot of nothing, inside, so we’re spending the day taking lessons from the lockdown experts.

This is my contribution to today’s Photo Friday theme, Pets.

 

When the world seemed safe

J and I are safe. We watched the Boston Marathon passing through Newton earlier today, arriving in time to watch the elite front-runners then staying to watch the first mass of regular, “average Joe” runners, as we have in the past. Both J and I took dozens of pictures of runners, spectators, and the atmosphere of festivity that always surrounds Marathon Day here in the Boston suburbs, as we have in the past. We watched the race, stopped for lunch, and walked home, as we always do…and then we learned about today’s explosions.

Now when I look at the pictures I took today, before the explosions, I feel a queasy heaviness in my stomach, knowing that had we and the folks around us been further down the race route, those pictures could have been very different. Although it’s been years since I’ve watched the Boston Marathon near the finish line, where the explosions occurred, J and I are accustomed to watching the race where it passes within a mile of our house: a world-class event that occurs in our own neighborhood. It’s sickening to think that a family-friendly, festive event–one I’ve enjoyed blogging in the past–is now associated with death, injury, and trauma.

So instead of showing any of the happy photos I took earlier today–photos of local folks, family, and friends cheering for runners, and the runners themselves–I’m showing you two photos I took yesterday, when Marathon Day still seemed like a happy occasion to look forward to and Boston and its suburbs felt like a safe place.

 

The miracle is to walk on earth

I’m currently reading Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. I’m a fan of Roach’s previous books, so I bought Packing for Mars when it first came out in paperback, then I promptly stuck it on my bookshelf and never got around to reading it. Now that Roach has come out with a new book, I figured I should go back and read her “old” one, so I’m currently slow-poking my way through her tongue-in-cheek account of the scientific challenges behind manned space travel.

The basic premise of Packing for Mars is that space exploration calls for absolute precision and predictability, but human beings are anything but. Rocket scientists can engineer a spacecraft down to the merest micron, but what happens when an astronaut inside that craft gets an upset stomach, needs to relieve him- or herself, or falls in love with a crew-mate? In her usual hands-on style, Roach travels to Moscow to visit the Martian Surface Simulator, a module designed by the Institute of Biomedical Problems in order to study the psychological effects of long-term confinement. Were Russia or any other country to send human beings to Mars, they’d want to know how well those humans would cope with the isolation of being locked for months inside a cramped space capsule.

In the course of talking with various Russian researchers, Roach discovers something that doesn’t surprise me at all. Apart from the simple discomforts of being away from family, sharing tight quarters with colleagues, and eating processed food from tubes, astronauts suffer woefully from the simple absence of nature. Sitting in the climate-controlled isolation of what David Bowie famously described as a “tin can,” astronauts come to crave the things the rest of us take for granted, like grass, trees, and flowers. As Roach explains, this phenomenon isn’t limited to astronauts:

I once met a man who told me that after landing in Christchurch, New Zealand, after a winter at the South Pole research station, he and his companions spent a couple days just wandering around staring in awe at flowers and trees. At one point, one of them spotted a woman pushing a stroller. “A baby!” he shouted, and they all rushed across the street to see. The woman turned the stroller and ran.

Although I haven’t chased any baby strollers lately, every spring I feel a bit like those South Pole researchers. Having been locked for months in the tin can called “winter,” in spring I find myself gazing in wonder at the simple beauty of fresh leaves and flower buds. After all these years, you’d think the whole “spring” thing would get old, but it doesn’t. This year like every year, I still find myself looking at unfurling leaves and blooming flowers, wondering how exactly they ever fit inside their tight buds or how those buds ever survived months of snow, sleet, and cold.

Later in the same chapter, Roach talks with cosmonaut Alexandr Laveikin, who spent six months in the Russian space station, Mir, and now runs Moscow’s Memorial Museum of Cosmonauts, where Roach tours a replica of the cramped living quarters inside the Mir’s main module. Recounting her conversation with Laveikin, Roach concludes

Humans don’t belong in space. Everything about us evolved for life on Earth. Weightlessness is an exhilarating novelty, but floaters soon begin to dream of walking. Earlier Laveikin told us, “Only in space do you understand what incredible happiness it is just to walk. To walk on Earth.”

The moment I read Laveikin’s remark about the “incredible happiness” of simply walking on Earth, I thought of one of my favorite passages from Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness, a joyful little book that describes meditation as being as simple as paying attention and being grateful for life’s mundane wonders:

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child—our own eyes. All is a miracle.

Thich Nhat Hanh has never explored outer space, but as a Buddhist monk, he’s spent plenty of time in the isolation chamber of his own mind. Most of us would have to leave Earth to appreciate Earth, and most of us have to spend a few months in the drear barrenness of winter to appreciate spring greenery. But Nhat Hanh realizes what it took Russian cosmonauts a lengthy space mission to figure out: the biggest wonder in the entire Universe is the Earth under your own two feet.

 

One year ago

One year ago today, we put Reggie to sleep. I’ve been anticipating this one-year anniversary, wondering whether it would feel like a momentous occasion or just another day, and now that the day is here, it somehow feels a bit like both. In many ways, it feels like an entire lifetime ago—far more than one year—since I spent so much time carrying a thin, increasingly decrepit old dog up and down the stairs, helping him get settled comfortably when he wanted to lie down, helping him turn over when he grew stiff or sore, helping him to his feet when he wanted to eat or drink, and plying him with treats and tasty bits at all times, trying to coax nourishment into a creature who was gradually fading away to fur and bone.

The first few months of last year, my entire life revolved around Reggie and the routine rituals of his care: the feeding and cleaning and medicating and relieving. On days when I taught in Keene, J was in charge of Reggie-care, and the first thing I’d do when I got home was climb the stairs to the second floor to check on Reggie: was he resting comfortably or restless? Long gone were the days when Reggie would meet me at the door of my apartment in Keene when I came home from teaching, his entire body wagging with gladness to see me. In his final months, Reggie could no longer stand up on his own, much less jump and prance around. In his final months, Reggie couldn’t even wag his tail, that once-emphatic exclamation-point having grown limp and lifeless from a debilitating combination of spinal arthritis and degenerative myelopathy. Given how much emotion a dog expresses through his tail, this particular indignity of Reggie’s old age seemed particularly cruel.

One of my most vivid memories of Reggie’s final months was an otherwise unremarkable morning when I’d gotten him comfortably settled after our morning walk. I was stroking his fur, rubbing his belly, and feeding him bits from my breakfast granola—our usual morning ritual—when suddenly Reggie rested his head in my lap and wagged his tail, thumping it firmly on the floor as he had when he was younger. Both arthritis and degenerative myelopathy are incremental in their onset: you don’t notice gradual impairments until your pet can no longer do things he always used to do. At that moment when Reggie thumped his tail, I burst into tears, realizing how long it had been since he’d been able to do something so simple. When your pet can no longer energetically express his gratitude, you focus on more subtle cues: a kind of quiet communion. When Reggie’s body permitted him to wag his tail on that otherwise unremarkable morning, I accepted it as a kind of gentle reassurance: inside, he was the same dog with the same gentle spirit, and it was only his body that was faltering.

The biggest shock of putting an elderly dog to sleep isn’t the simple reality of his absence, as you can (and do) brace yourself for that. The biggest shock of putting an elderly dog to sleep is the massive gap that’s left in your schedule, your life no longer centered on the mundane, almost liturgical routine of caretaking. In retrospect, it’s been helpful to have other pets to tend: had Reggie been our only pet, J and I wouldn’t have known what to do with ourselves in the immediate aftermath of his passing, when we suddenly didn’t have an old dog to tend to constantly. These days, the energy we’d devoted to Reggie’s care is divided among our other pets, with our twelve-year-old yellow Lab, MAD, showing the first signs of arthritis, too. As the Buddha knew, old age, sickness, and death are an endless cycle: the wheel of life and death never stops turning. One year after Reggie died, we’re re-using with MAD the oral syringes we’d used to give Reggie his arthritis medication: same malady, same medication, different dog and dosage. For now, MAD can still wag his tail, jump to his feet, and otherwise prance around, but his days jumping on beds and racing up the stairs are over: different dog, similar story. As J remarked when the movie “Marley and Me” premiered: “I don’t need to see that movie, because I know how it ends.”

Today’s photos come from Hemlock Gorge, which I’d first explored in 2008, when Reggie was showing the first signs of old age.

 

The cruelest month

Already, less than a full week into it, this April has been odd. It’s unseasonably cold: although the snowdrops, crocuses, and glory-of-the-snow have already appeared, the trees haven’t begun to leaf, and I haven’t dared open the windows much less venture outside in shorts or sandals. The past few nights have been below freezing, we still have piles of snow lingering in shady spots, and the lawn looks like it’s forgotten what it means to be green.

Yesterday, the temperature soared into the 50s—not warm by usual April standards, but warmer than it has been—and at least one pair of intrepid young entrepreneurs set up the first lemonade stand of the season even though a hot chocolate stand would have been more appropriate. Spring might be a long time coming this year, but kids nevertheless will go about the business of being kids, weather anomalies notwithstanding.

Although the temperatures this week have said “March,” the angle and intensity of the sun nevertheless says “April.” In February I lamented the glaringly harsh sunlight of late winter, when white-bright light falls on nothing but gray. Now in April, the sunlight has warmed, mellowed, and yellowed, as if it were intended to fall on tender, spring-green leaf buds and blooming daffodils. In the absence of these, the golden light of an April afternoon falls instead on gilded willow twigs and the almost-blooming buds of forsythia. “Almost, almost, almost” this golden light seems to intimate; “not yet, not yet, not yet” these swelling buds respond.

This year, we’ve not been starved for light, but I do find myself craving color: anything, please, besides this dead, dull gray! “April is the cruelest month,” T.S. Eliot claimed, “breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.” Right now in this early, odd April, I don’t dare dream of lilacs, only leaves: before we can handle pale purple blooms, let us cut our tender teeth on spring green. Right now in this early, reluctant spring, anything other than gray would be a welcome novelty.