The first time I met my future mother-in-law was an August afternoon more than thirty years ago, over a picnic table in her back yard. Her warm, unpretentious welcome quickly melted any jitters about meeting my boyfriend’s mother. Over the years, I learned I wasn’t alone in that reaction. Calm, peace, kindness, reassurance, wisdom, care, comfort: I don’t have words for the magic that drew friends and relations to her, especially in times of stress when they needed what some called “the Martha fix.”

My other first impression was that she was a woman of intellect and quiet curiosity. Music, birding, and history were just a few of her interests. We still treasure her carefully labeled rock collection. From fourth grade she wanted to be a geologist. Warned that superstitions about women underground might limit those opportunities, she taught chemistry and math until shortly before I met her. After retirement, she attended seminars, joined a book club, traveled widely, and watched academic lectures from The Great Courses.

After Alzheimer’s began to steal her words and conversation grew thin, I enjoyed courses with her on DVDs from her large and varied collection. Even near the end, curiosity took her to the memory care window to contemplate “critters” (blowing leaves) in the alley and the colors of passing cars. Other times, we’d join a wheelchair group to listen to a guitarist. One of the listeners started to cry. Martha reached over and took her hand. The Martha Fix was still there.

​Happy birthday, Martha. We miss you.

Snowdrops! Robins! The throaty call of sandhill cranes! Spring is starting at last—or is it? Meteorological spring, based on temperature, began the first of the month. Based on the relative positions of Earth and Sun, though, we’re in astronomical winter until the equinox.

April may be the cruelest month, but March is the most topsy-turvy. Some years it comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. Other years it’s just the opposite. One March here in Wisconsin, I watched a man and his dog walk on the firm ice of Fish Lake. Five minutes later, a woman drove by in a convertible with the top down.

The onset of daylight time the second Sunday of March compounds the muddle. While most U.S. states turn their clocks forward, Arizona and Hawaii stay on standard time. However, the whole Navajo Nation goes onto Mountain Daylight Time, including the part in Arizona. Confused yet? The Hopi Nation, surrounded by Navajo lands, stays with the rest of Arizona. Don’t get me started on how most of Europe doesn’t switch till the last Sunday of March, or how Australia varies by state.

In my grad school studies about England in the 1600s, it wasn’t even clear which year a particular March occurred. Resisting the new Gregorian calendar as “popish,” England clung to the old Julian calendar with its starting date of March 25. Imagine having to sequence diplomatic correspondence with the Continent.

This month is as mad as a March hare. The saying long predates Alice in Wonderland and refers to the animals’ bizarre antics in the mating season. To be fair, hares aren’t the only mammal to behave oddly in the throes of lust.

My entire life is on my desktop computer calendar. Appointments, intentions, to-do lists, recurring monthly or yearly dates to remember. It’s easy to update and keeps everything in one place. Decades ago, my entire life was in my pocket calendar in ink, more limited in scope but always with me. My friends and relations now use mobile phones to get the best of both worlds.

Technology keeps changing. Human nature doesn’t. We’ve always created ways to track the cycle of the seasons; now we can track in more detail. We’ve always craved communication; now we can connect over longer distances. We’ve had schoolyard fights as long as we’ve had schools; now we have more lethal methods to worry about. We’ve always had conspiracy theories and misinformation; now technology lets them spread farther and faster.

Two hundred years from now we may know more, live longer, and have more powerful tools to carry out our wishes, for better or worse. I’m not convinced we’ll have fewer wars, greater justice, more compassion, or less hate. Does that mean to shrug at the futility of it all? To forget about the seventh generation and a world better than we found it? Of course not. Action now can bring material benefits for the future. Institutionalizing positive values makes them harder to reverse. New knowledge has potential to improve lives, even if I’m right that human nature will stay much the same.

Besides, I may be wrong.

Image: The Chicago World’s Fair celebrated the city’s first century of technological innovation.

That’s a great metaphysical question people have pondered for millennia. It’s also what I ask myself when I’ve walked to another room and can’t remember why.

That started as a quip, but the two are as related as the forest and the trees. The meaning of a life can change over the decades: to learn and grow, to raise a family, to serve the community or nation, to tend to loved ones, to create a legacy. Decades are composed of years; days are made of moments. For a life well lived, I hope my purpose in each moment is at least consistent with, and often motivated by, my answer to the greater question: What am I here for?

Image: Photo by Evan Dennis on Unsplash.

Five years ago, I was visiting San Antonio when the first cruise ship passengers flew into nearby Lackland Air Force Base for quarantine. Seven million deaths later, there’s still no consensus on how the Covid pandemic began. Reputable scientists revised their hypotheses in light of fresh research. Politics muddied the waters. Laboratory leaks are real, though most viruses new to humans start as spillovers from other species. Bias is real too, though scientists have more guardrails than most of us against letting it shape their conclusions.

Newly appointed CIA Director John Ratcliffe announced in January that analysis of the limited data available pointed to a virology lab leak in Wuhan, China, as the source of Covid-19. The Department of Energy, the FBI, and the CIA all reached that assessment well before the current administration took office. I haven’t found details of their reasoning, for which they expressed “low confidence.”

Meanwhile, among scientific papers favoring the Wuhan seafood and animal market as the source, one published last September in the journal Cell intrigues me. The research team did genetic analysis of hundreds of environmental samples gathered in and near the market in early 2000. Samples of the new coronavirus were concentrated in the corner of the market with live wild animals, particularly raccoon dogs. Study of mutations gives evidence—but not proof—of when and how the virus spread, perhaps from bats to raccoon dogs to humans.

Proponents of both theories agree on one thing about how Covid-19 began in Wuhan: Nobody knows for certain.

​Images: (left) Raccoon dog, akin to foxes and named for its appearance; (right) Wuhan Institute of Virology, which studies coronaviruses in bats.

“Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”
           – Darren J. Beattie on X, Oct. 4, 2024 (archived)

Some of my best friends are competent white men. Many of them, in fact. And if the competent white men among my friends were in charge, things would work very well.

I doubt the acting undersecretary of public diplomacy at the State Department questions the meaning of white or men. That leaves the muddier question of competence. It includes character, skills, judgment, willingness to learn, ability to inspire others, and so much more.

The competent white men among my friends avoid groupthink. They know the difference between silencing dissent and seeking common ground. They listen to voices from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, knowing the best decisions follow from seeking out multiple perspectives. They recognize competence and potential wherever they find it, whether in women or people of color or other white men.

If competent white men were in charge, we would soon see competent people of every stripe at every level of leadership in our institutions. That is, if we want things to work.

Image:  Anonymous man. Photo by Bruce Mars  on Unsplash. 

Fewer and fewer Americans are old enough to remember the deep fear of polio, the closed swimming pools, the schoolchildren lined up for the new vaccine. The disease left one of my schoolmates in braces for life. Globally, polio killed or paralyzed about half a million children a year. Today endemic polio occurs only in Pakistan and parts of Afghanistan, with fewer than a hundred cases last year.

One thing I’ve learned through polio work is that viruses don’t respect boundaries. Business travelers and vacationers can bring them back unawares. The U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) collaborate to contain deadly infections like Ebola before they reach American shores. Their scientists took the lead to eradicate smallpox and nearly stop polio.* CDC can’t do it alone. Protecting Americans requires neutral access to WHO data, laboratory samples, and outbreak alerts from many countries, not just our friends.

Vaccines to protect American seniors from flu are re-formulated for each year’s strains. They would be less targeted if our scientists couldn’t learn what strains are circulating abroad. Setting aside issues of WHO efficiency and funding, U.S. global leadership, or other nations’ health, I know that I am personally safer when CDC and WHO work together.

* Major funding for polio eradication comes from Rotary International, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and foreign aid from many nations. UNICEF coordinates vaccine procurement and community education.

Disaster fiction isn’t for everyone. During a major hurricane, pestilence, or flood, some who are personally affected and unsure of the outcome will read or watch everything they can about it. Others go out of their way to avoid the topic.

The wildfire devastating Los Angeles feels more personal to me than most catastrophes. I’ve hiked in Eaton Canyon, where a major part of the fire began. I’ve stayed at a friend’s house in Altadena, now in ashes. But the friend moved out years ago, no one I know is threatened, and I’m not traumatized as people in the path of the flames might be. That lets me look forward to novels from the library about monumental fires of the past:

• Karen Brooks, The Chocolate Maker’s Wife (2019). Conspiracy and family secrets during the Great Fire of London in 1666.
• Susan Wiggs, The Hostage (2000). The first volume of a romantic trilogy of riches and revenge set in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
• Susan Meissner, The Nature of Fragile Things (2022). Resilience and solidarity for a mail-order bride in the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire.

Image: A large fire in the night. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:– I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
                 - United States Constitution, Article II, Section 1, Clause 8

Every four years on January 20, before the incoming President takes office, he swears or affirms the oath prescribed in the Constitution. The Twentieth Amendment (1933) fixed Jan. 20 to start presidential terms and a slightly earlier date for terms in Congress, to have new Representatives in place to select a President if the election were inconclusive.

Only for the President does the Constitution spell out exact wording for the oath of office, quoted above. George Washington said, in his second inaugural address, that if he ever knowingly violated the oath, “I may (besides incurring Constitutional punishment) be subject to the upbraidings of all who are now witnesses of the present solemn ceremony.”

The Constitution requires hundreds of federal and state officials to vow to support the Constitution but leaves the wording open, provided no religious test is required. The oath for members of Congress has grown from a brief “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the Constitution of the United States” to a more detailed version than the President’s. They vow not only to support the Constitution but to defend it “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” They swear they take this obligation without purpose of evasion. The President’s oath seems simple by comparison, but the obligation he undertakes is no less solemn and binding.

Image: President Washington takes oath of office, April 30, 1789.

Jigsaw puzzle season is here again. Winter holidays are over; balmy days lie too far ahead to lure me outdoors. Between sessions at the puzzle table, I read the next chapter in my current mystery novel. Add bits of writing, exercise, housework, and human contact, and my day is complete. I have no wish to make time for more.

Philosophers debate the meaning of time. I’ll avoid that fray. For me its meaning varies among (1) the time of the natural world: day and night, summer and winter, new moon and full; (2) the time humans invented to coordinate plans and records: clock hours, calendar weeks, the date one year ends and the next begins; and (3) the time we experience: what flies when we’re having fun and drags when we’re bored.

The Industrial Revolution pushed culture from the seasonal rhythms of farming toward the mechanical rhythms of clocks and calendars. Factories could operate year-round. Electricity freed assembly lines and offices from having to close at dusk. The seasons of most American jobs rest less on climate or daylight than on holiday shopping, tax time, or annual meetings.

​Before retirement, I lived largely by clocks and calendars. Now I feel closer to the rhythms of nature. Countless plants and animals take winter to rest and regroup, without apology. Why not humans? The warmer, longer days will cycle back soon enough, with no prodding from us.