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A house for Coconut

Here is a photo of Mike Wilson, a carpenter from South Austin, installing the house we had built for Coconut the Owl  last month. Mr. Wilson used to build owl boxes for his carpentry clients, but now he makes them to fill his days in retirement. His phone is full of photos of owls from the back yards of happy customers. “I’m not making a fortune,” he told me, “but I’m making a fortune in friends.”

Mr. Wilson has built over 800 (!!!) owl boxes for folks all over. He builds two a day and installs two a day. We got box #833. He told me he wants to get well past a thousand. “I just want to keep going,” he said.

The boxes are custom-built with reclaimed wood for smaller Eastern Screech Owls like Coconut, mainly to help protect them from bigger predators, like the Great-horned Owl, but also to encourage them to stick around and have babies.

Mr. Wilson said his quickest box installation to owl inhabitant time was 14 hours, but it took Coconut a little longer… or so we thought.

Here’s a video of her still in the palm tree, chilling in the sunshine on February 3rd.

And here’s a video of “her” four days later, on Superb Owl Sunday, except she was looking a little skinny and angry.

Three days later, on February 10th, she’s looking like herself again, but still not in her house.

And then, two days ago, before our big winter storm, Coconut was looking really mean and miserable. We were getting really worried about her. Why didn’t she go sit in her box?

And then, yesterday… a miracle! Coconut was in her house, looking radiant! I immediately texted Mr. Wilson some photos.

Mr. Wilson was quick to point out that it seems we’ve been looking at two different owls — Coconut, and what appears to be her MATE. Yes, in a perfect Valentine’s Day twist, what appeared to be Coconut in a sad, miserable state, was probably just… well, her husband, basically.

UPDATE (2/20/21): Several people have written to me noting that screech owls puff up when they’re happy and “go skinny” and weird when they’re trying to blend in with the tree. Well, dear readers, I am happy to inform you that we have visual confirmation that there are, indeed, two owls living in the box!

So now we’re all snowed in, and Coconut looks cozy, and it appears that the chance for Owl Babies is looking very, very good!

PS. If you live in the Austin area (he does not ship!) and you want Mr. Wilson to build you an owl box, contact him at 512-940-1161.

The old way

photos from my great-grandpa’s farm

My grandma Laura Helen Wilson Davis (b. 1924) died this week. On December 15, 1999, I interviewed her and my great uncle Phil (1919-2004) for a school project about their childhood living on a farm in Ohio during the depression. Phil was 80 years old, and grandma was about to turn 75. I was 16. These are my notes on what they told me.

* * *

The family was my great-grandma and great-grandpa, Austin and Jessie Wilson, and their seven children, Wells, Paul, Wayne, Phil, George, Laura Helen (my grandma), and Bob.

Every year the farm had about 100 acres of corn, 100 acres of wheat, and 100 acres of pasture. No tractors until they were out of high school. Great-grandpa liked to work with horses — he’d plow corn with two horses in one row.

They had a car, a 1916 Chevy, but no truck. Great-grandpa used to put baby calves and sheep in the back of the car.

They sometimes rode in a horse and buggy, but only for fun.

They milked cows in the morning before school. They worked in the garden, carried water to the animals.

The house had a tin roof, later replaced with slate. There was glass in the front door, so they could see who was coming. When the boys would wrestle, they’d have to put a board in front of the glass to keep them from kicking it out.

They didn’t have electricity until the Rural Electrification Administration, when they got the first lights and radio to their house.

They had little round stoves in almost every room of the farm house that burned coal and wood. In winter the snow would blow in on their beds. They had their windows open all summer. No fans until electricity.

The kitchen had a wood-burning range. When it was too hot, great-grandma used a little kerosene stove.

They took a tub upstairs with a sponge.

Because they had so many children and boys with shirts to launder, they had a gasoline-powered, one-cylinder washing machine.

They had a party line phone with a crank you turned and talked to the operator to connect you. Sometimes the women at home would just talk to the operator.

They stored food in the cellar. Potatoes, canned vegetables, fruit, and meat.

They made ice cream in a hand-turned freezer. Sometimes they went in to town to get a cone.

Great-grandpa didn’t drink anything but water and milk. No soda, root beer, or alcohol. No tobacco. He said he didn’t want to ruin good water by putting coffee in it.

The boys wore corduroy knickers, knee pants, and a shirt. They wore bib overalls to do chores. Girls weren’t allowed to wear pants, so grandma wore dresses. In the winter, grandma wore long underwear under her stockings and snow pants over her dress. Sometimes kids would dry their wet clothes on the register at school.

Grandma went to high school in the same building where I went to elementary school. In school she studied math, physics, English, history, bookkeeping, Latin, French, and physical education. Professors from the university gave free lessons, so she took violin and played in the orchestra..

They had a wind-up phonograph, but they mostly made their own music. The brothers sang in The Wilson Brothers Quartet, and everyone played an instrument: Wayne on violin, Paul on the saxophone, Wells on the piano, Phil on the trumpet, George on the clarinet, grandma on the piano.

As a high school graduation present, Phil got a radio that was 3 feet tall. It worked on something like a car battery and he had to take it to the nearest town to get it charged up.

Every Sunday morning, they would go to church. Sometimes great-grandma would stay home to cook. Sunday afternoons, there was always lots of company. People visited with each other.

They played basketball in a big round barn on the farm. My grandma met my grandpa when he came over to play ball with her brother George. My grandma played in high school for two years until the state of Ohio decided basketball was too dangerous for girls. That broke her heart.

In summer, they would go to the swimming hole at the creek and play marbles under the big maple trees. The ground was bare from so many kids running around.

It was better to live on a farm during the depression. They lived pretty well. There wasn’t much money, but they always ate. They got agricultural gas rations, so they could drive the car. My grandpa lived in town, and my grandma would bring him milk, butter, eggs, and chickens from the farm.

They always got the local newspaper, and great-grandpa got the Columbus paper, too, to know what was going on. People weren’t as interested in current events until WWII. Another time it was good to live on a farm: farmers tended not to get drafted.

Most folks thought FDR was good for the people. (Except for the “red-hot Republicans.”) The WPA and the CCC really helped.

When the oldest, Wells, went to college it was a big event. It was the first time my grandma saw her mother cry. Several of the boys went to Ohio State. Route 23 was a dirt path, and they would hitch rides up to Columbus and rent rooms. Sometimes they mailed clothes to be cleaned and ironed and mailed back. They came home for a good meal.

I asked them what they thought of young people today, and Phil said, “I think they’re growing out of their pants!”

Neither of them ever thought about making it this far.

David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives was published in February 2009. I read it in January 2017. (I called it “good pre-dream reading.”) Now I’m writing about it in February 2021. These dates suggest to me that it is a great wintering book, a collection of possibilities (that word will have more relevance later) in a season in which the possibilities feel quite grim: Death, frozen pipes, snow that is white and terrifying like a blank sheet of paper.

There are two afterlives in this book that I think about often.

The first is from the title story, “Sum,” in which you “relive all your experiences, but this time, with the events re-shuffled into a new order,” and “all the moments which share a quality are grouped together.”  So you sleep for 30 years, sit on the toilet for 5 years, have sex for 7 months, experience pain for 27 hours, etc. That story is a reminder that “a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces” is a well-designed and endurable one.

The second is the afterlife in “Metamorphosis,” a limbo-esque lobby the dead wait in until every single person on Earth has ceased to remember them. It starts this way: “There are three deaths: the first is when the body ceases to function.  The second is when the body is consigned to the grave.  The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”

I think of these three deaths whenever a loved one dies. Their first and second death has passed, but their third and final death has not, and the absolute earliest it will is at the moment my brain forgets their name. So, until my own first death, I keep them alive. This is easiest for my favorite musicians: Put on their record, and their voice fills the room.

I can’t remember if this blackout poem was inspired by the book or not…

One question that it didn’t even occur to me to ask when I first read the book: What are Eagleman’s actual religious beliefs? From the 2011 New Yorker profile of Eagleman called “The Possibilian”:

Eagleman was brought up as a secular Jew and became an atheist in his teens. Lately, though, he’d taken to calling himself a Possibilian—a denomination of his own invention. Science had taught him to be skeptical of cosmic certainties, he told me. From the unfathomed complexity of brain tissue—“essentially an alien computational material”—to the mystery of dark matter, we know too little about our own minds and the universe around us to insist on strict atheism, he said. “And we know far too much to commit to a particular religious story.” Why not revel in the alternatives? […] “Part of the scientific temperament is this tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time,” he said. “As Voltaire said, uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.”

“I’m not saying here is the answer,” he says. “I’m just celebrating the vastness of our ignorance.” (For more, look to his piece, “Why I am a Possibilian.”)

It’s really of no matter. Sum is like the movie Groundhog Day: it gets at something universal that will be claimed by humans of all walks.

* * *

[PS. The New Yorker profile, which I only read this afternoon, features Eagleman hanging out with one of my heroes, Brian Eno, and hooking drummers up to an EEG monitor while they played. “The question is: do drummers have different brains from the rest of us?” Eno says. “Everyone who has ever worked in a band is sure that they do.” (Eno, an early reader and enthusiast of Sum, wrote some soundscapes to go along with readings, and the composer Max Richter actually turned it into an opera.)]

* * *

Every Saturday I put one of my favorite books on the Bookshelf. To see more of my favorite books, check out my reading years.

Smells of the lamp

A blacked-out baseball card from Baseball Card Vandals

When I wrote about Claude Debussy’s burn on overworked musical pieces, “They smell of the lamp, not of the sun,” I didn’t realize that he was quoting a very old idiom. From a 1898 Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: 

Smells of the lamp
Said of a literary production manifestly laboured. Plutarch attributes the phrase to Pytheas the orator, who said, “The orations of Demosthenes smell of the lamp,” alluding to the current tale that the great orator lived in an underground cave lighted by a lamp, that he might have no distraction to his severe study.

In Lives, Plutarch writes about how Demosthenes wasn’t necessarily quick on his feet with speeches — if he was asked a question in public, he wouldn’t stand up and talk about something he hadn’t thought about, but took time to go away to his study and work out arguments. 

For this, many of the popular leaders used to rail at him, and Pytheas, in particular, once told him scoffingly that his arguments smelt of lamp-wicks. To him, then, Demosthenes made a sharp answer. “Indeed,” said he, “thy lamp and mine, O Pytheas, are not privy to the same pursuits.”

In another translation: 

…many of the popular pleaders used to make it a jest against him; and Pytheas once, scoffing at him, said that his arguments smelt of the lamp. To which Demosthenes gave the sharp answer, “It is true, indeed, Pytheas, that your lamp and mine are not conscious of the same things.”

And another story about his lamp:

And to the thief nicknamed Brazen, who attempted to make fun of him for his late hours and his writing at night, “I know,” he said, “that I annoy you with my lighted lamp. But you, men of Athens, must not wonder at the thefts that are committed, when we have thieves of brass, but house-walls of clay.”

Now I am conflicted, as a burn that is about overworked creative efforts was originally pointed at a dude who was probably just introverted and studious and thoughtful and against bullshittery!

(Always learning.)

Searching outside the algorithm

For years people have asked me, re: this blog and the newsletter, “How do you take in so much?”

I’m not sure I take in any more than anybody else, but I do try to stick with my genuine, self-directed interests and I also have systems for saving it and processing it.

Your output depends on your input, so one way to make your output more original or interesting is to make your input more original and interesting.

This sometimes requires actually staying intentionally ignorant of what everybody else is tweeting and posting about and getting outside the algorithms of social media.

“People forget that non-algorithmic browsing is still an option,” says Ann Friedman. “I subscribe to magazines in print and directly visit the websites of publications I like.”

My friend Alan Jacobs recommends subscribing to quarterly magazines. “Quarterlies don’t, because they can’t, deal with the newest news: they offer more considered, more reflective responses to the world we live in.”

The non-algorithmic searching I miss the most is the serendipity of the stacks: digging through thrift stores and book stores and record stores.

I miss that digging and scratching.

For now, it’s all about more search, less feed.

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