The Curious Case of Life Imitating Art

The muse must have been looking over my shoulder yesterday because, unexpectedly, I stumbled upon a case of life imitating art. Or was art imitating life?

I’d spent most of the day walking my dog, talking with friends online, and reading Anna Quindlen’s novel, “Still Life with Breadcrumbs,” the story of a photographer whose career is in decline.

In late afternoon, I decided to take my car out for a spin, since the last time I’d started it up, it had been sluggish. I feared the battery was about to reach its moment of planned obsolescence. (That would be about par for 2020.) But I hoped that if I drove around for an hour or so, maybe I could revive it.

On a whim, I grabbed my camera before heading out (something I haven’t done in a while, since it’s been too hot during the day for photography). “You never know,” I thought, imagining for just a second a chance encounter with a dust devil, or maybe a space alien. The car sputtered to a reluctant start. Before it could die on me, I put it in gear and headed north.

My destination was Oracle, about half an hour up the road – an unincorporated town whose most famous resident to date has been Buffalo Bill Cody. En route, it occurred to me to plug in an audiobook that was in my phone.

Unfortunately, I’m not too good with modern audio systems in cars (or in phones, for that matter). In fact, I was surprised I’d managed to get the book copied into my phone at all. So as not to cause an accident, I turned off the main highway, Oracle Road, and onto Biosphere Road (which, inconsequentially, leads to Biosphere 2) in order to park, thumb through my owner’s manual, and figure out how to tell my car to read a book to me.

After a few hundred feet, I came to a turnaround. It looked like an ideal place for rattlesnakes and tarantulas to hang out, but I wasn’t planning to get out of the car and join their party, even if they were wearing masks. Heavy, dark storm clouds were gathering in the distance, and a few were above my head. I was anxious to queue up my book and get back on the road.

The clouds had other ideas. They suddenly moved out of the sun’s way, and a shaft of light landed on something smooth, tall, and bright along the trail: a scarred and dusty shrine in the middle of the desert.

It seemed to be a case of life imitating art. You see (spoiler alert), on page 37 in Still Life With Breadcrumbs, that book I’d been reading earlier that day, the protagonist goes for a hike in the woods and comes upon a shrine – a white wooden cross with a glittering child’s volleyball trophy lying on the ground next to it. She takes some photos.

I felt like life was trying to tell me something, so I shut off the engine, grabbed my camera, and got out of the car. Scoping out the ground for snakes or spiders, I cautiously approached the little memorial and took a few photos. As soon as I’d finished and gotten back in my car, I realized I might have made a mistake.

It was 107 degrees out, and there I was in the middle of the Arizona desert with a car whose battery was on its last legs. I wondered how long it would be before AAA could find me. I turned the key in the ignition. The engine choked for a few seconds, and then, reluctantly, it caught.

I sighed, turned the car around, and glanced back at the shrine, but by then the sun had ducked behind the clouds again; the scene was now in shadow. I’d gotten there just at the right moment.

All I could think of on the drive home was the phrase, “life imitates art.” So today I looked that up and learned a thing or two. The idea has been around since at least the time of Plato, who believed art was a poor imitation of life, and for that reason could be dangerous. Aristotle, on the other hand, welcomed art’s imitation of life. And Oscar Wilde’s take was that life imitates art more often than art imitates life. Even Dostoevsky got into the debate, describing it as more of a codependent relationship, where art imitates life, which then imitates art, causing life to owe its very existence to art.

As for me, I was totally flabbergasted by the way my life (finding the shrine) seemed to be imitating art (the book I’m reading). Or maybe art (the book) was imitating life (its pathos) which in turn was imitating art (the shrine). It’s something I thought was worth pondering, especially when I realized one more thread:

In “Still Life With Breadcrumbs,” the protagonist doesn’t notice a certain, possibly significant, detail on the cross until she gets home and enlarges the photo. That same thing happened to me – I didn’t notice the coins at the base of the statue until I got home. Can you spot them?

I’ve searched online for other photos of this shrine but couldn’t find any, so I don’t know who it’s for. I wish I did. In any case, I think I’ll return soon and add some coins to their collection.

 

 

Birthday’s Silver Lining

I have a big birthday coming up. I won’t say which one, but it’s an even number. If you must know, it ends in a zero.

Here’s another hint: my hair started turning gray years ago. Prematurely. Yeah, that’s it.

I used to color my hair until the roots started turning a very light shade of gray (white, actually) and were too “stubborn.” That’s what the hairdresser called them, as if they were recalcitrant children. She’d covered them with dark brown dye and left them in a time-out so long that she couldn’t remove the dye she’d accidentally gotten on my forehead. I walked around with a dark brown border on my forehead for a few days. I vowed to never again color my hair.

When the roots started to grow out, I looked kind of like a mushroom, with white roots and the rest of my hair dark brown. I’ll never forget the high school freshman who passed me in the hall one day and blurted out, “What’s wrong with your hair?” Social skills were not his strength, but then, hair fashion sense wasn’t mine, either.

But now, people, even complete strangers, are constantly telling me how much they love my hair color. Maybe they’re just thinking “at least she doesn’t look like a mushroom,” I don’t know. But I guess gray hair is all the rage these days. And mine is even better: silver and white on top, gradually blending to dark gray underneath. There’s a name for that, but I can’t remember it right now, because … well, you know … birthday.

I looked it up just now. It’s called “ombre,” which means “shaded” in French. I am part French, so in a way, I’m going back to my roots. (groan)

There’s a silver lining that comes with growing older. You learn to appreciate the little things in life more. For example, a nice thing happened to me today as I was out for a walk with my camera. A man passed me on the sidewalk. (No, that’s not the nice part.) Seeing my camera, he asked, “What are you taking pictures of?”

“Flowers,” I replied.

“Well, there’s a whole bunch of mushrooms about a half a block up there, near those trees,” he said.

I kept walking and found the mushrooms.

I got down on my stomach in the grass and clicked the camera. As I did so, I couldn’t stop thinking about how nice that fellow was to tell me about the mushrooms. Or maybe he just liked my ombre hair.

The Language of Living Things

How do birds chirp? This is a question I asked myself yesterday while taking a walk and listening to a songbird.

Do they have vocal cords? Do they blow air through their nostrils? Or is it something I can’t even fathom, like maybe a hum that starts in their bellies? I’d like to know the answer.

Somehow, the universe must have heard my question, because last night my husband turned on the TV to watch NOVA, and the episode was about how animals communicate. And although it didn’t specifically answer my question about how birds sing, it did have some fascinating things to say about the language of animals.

Did you know, for example, that male spiders have a vocal language when they mate, and that whales have certain hit songs that spread from ocean to ocean like the British Invasion of 1964?

We humans have much in common with other animals when it comes to language, and I’m not just talking about our mating behavior. Take Zipf’s Law, for example, which I learned about for the first time last night on NOVA. According to Zipf (by the way, I’m not sure how to pronounce Zipf, but he probably could tell me if he were still alive, since he was a linguist), there’s a universal rule when it comes to language.

Using computers, linguists have analyzed large texts in several languages and have found that if you rank the words in order according to how often they appear, there’s a mathematical relationship (Zipf’s Law):

• The frequency of word #1 is two times that of word #2,
• the frequency of word #1 is three times that of word #3,
• and so on.

If you plot it on a graph, it makes a straight line (slope) from upper left to lower right. And the same graph happens no matter what language you use. It even works with vocalizations of dolphins, elephants, and birds!

I don’t pretend to know much about animal language, but it’s already changed how I react when I listen to the birds sing.

I wonder if they write poetry, too?

My Carb-less Day

My cholesterol is high. Well, at least that’s what the doctor says. Do I believe her? Well, yes … and no. I read the lab test results, and I looked at the chart. I can see that my numbers are higher than they should be. But it’s complicated. My good (HDL) cholesterol is very, very good, while my lousy (LDL) cholesterol is quite bad. My triglycerides were very bad the first time I had the test, but now (only one month later) they’re fine. So what’s going on?

I’ve tried figuring all of this out via the internet, but the answers are either conflicting or lacking, especially in regard to medical research of the female variety. I’ve decided not to panic, but to make some changes and get re-checked in six months.

I already eat ground flax seed every day to boost my Omega 3’s and reduce cholesterol. (I know salmon’s supposed to be even better for that, but I’m allergic to fish, so no salmon for me.) I’ve cut down on dairy, I no longer use half-and-half, and I rarely have bacon, eggs, beef, or pork.  I guess you could say my diet is Mediterranean, for the most part, but I probably do eat too many carbs.

One thing I read on the internet (and for some reason I believe it) is that cutting down on carbs can reduce cholesterol. So yesterday, I decided to try going a whole day without a single carb. And I’m not even Catholic.

It wasn’t that hard, because I knew I was only going to try it for 24 hours.

My food intake consisted of: coffee (with unsweetened soy milk), a smoothie (banana, orange juice, mango chunks, ice, soy milk), three hard-boiled eggs (I know, I know … cholesterol!), an avocado, an orange, a few berries, an apple, and lots of natural, unsalted, unsugared peanut butter on that apple. (I despise plain apples.) Also, a tiny bit of cheese, and a cup of green tea (without my usual honey).

No wine. No crackers. NO CARBS. (Except the sugar that was in the fruit. Oh well.)

I was pretty proud of myself. But then this morning happened.

I had: coffee, toast with peanut butter and jelly. And a snack: crackers with avocado.

But later, I wasn’t even hungry for lunch, and my dinner was a handful of black olives, a cup of green tea, half of an apple, and lots of peanut butter on that apple.

I’ve learned that giving up carbs yesterday wasn’t that hard, and it seems to have carried over a bit into today. I’ll let you know in six months how this is working out.

In the meantime, maybe I’ll have just a tiny bit of spaghetti tomorrow.

In Sync Saturday

I’ve heard people say that there are no coincidences. I take that to mean that they believe in a grand plan, where whatever happens to us happens for a reason. Or that we’re reliving the same events over and over. Or that the universe serves up whatever we imagine. Or something like that. I’m not really sure what I think about all of that. I do know one thing for sure: life is a mystery, and our tiny brains aren’t very well-equipped to understand it. When I meditate, I feel a connection to something, or maybe it’s a biochemical reaction to getting more oxygen to my brain. I don’t think I’ll ever know for sure. That really bugs me. I want to know why we’re here and what it all means. But for now, I’ll have to be satisfied with just scratching my head in wonder at all of the weird coincidences and synchronicities that keep happening all around me.

For example, after posting my last blog post about Lena Spencer and her coffee house, I googled Ms. Spencer and learned that she was the daughter of Italian immigrants from Avellino. I have an AMAZING coincidental story about my Uncle Frank that I’ll tell you sometime (if I haven’t already, haha) having to do with Avellino.

But the reason I’ve been thinking about synchronicity today is the coincidences that my mother and I have been experiencing when working on crossword puzzles. That’s something we do when I visit her. And several words in our puzzles have been popping up here and there in our real lives — on TV, especially. Here are a few strange, coincidental examples:

1) Crossword clue: a staple of Southern cooking

Answer: OKRA

We happened to see it on the menu while out to dinner the same day that I was working on the puzzle. How often do you see OKRA on the menu?

2) Crossword clue: Actor “Pat” in Karate Kid

Answer: MORITA

We were watching an artist paint a picture of some dolphins, and out of the blue he mentioned that he knew “the actor Pat Morita from Karate Kid.” I think they had some sort of a dolphin connection. About an hour later I picked up my crossword puzzle and the word I needed was MORITA.

3). Crossword clue: Cheese named after Italian word for “sheep”

Answer: PECORINO

The day before that puzzle came into my life, Mom and I were watching the Travel Channel (we actually do more than just watch TV, believe me!) and the host of the show just happened to mention that Pecorino is the Italian word for “sheep,” a fact I filed away for future reference without realizing that it would someday find its way into a blog post.

4) Crossword clue: The Green Violinist painter

Answer: CHAGALL

Mom heard his name on TV just the other day.

5) Crossword clue: _______ Dhabi

Answer: ABU

It must have been in the news, because Mom remembers hearing it somewhere recently, just before doing her daily puzzle.

I’m going out with my sisters tonight. I wonder what other coincidences will befall me while we’re out . Oh, I just remembered … the name of the band we’re going to hear is Georgie WONDERS Orchestra!

Mountain Man

Today I attended the funeral of my brother-in-law, Jerry. He was married, had two sons, worked for 30 years as a self-employed building contractor, and loved nature. He climbed all 46 of the Adirondacks mountain peaks. The room was packed with friends, neighbors, and family who came to say goodbye. There was a tremendous outpouring of love for Jerry. My mind is so full of all of the beautiful reminiscences, quotes, anecdotes, stories, and descriptions of the man that I am at a loss as to what to say on this page tonight. All I can do is tell you a little bit about him through the following poem that I wrote for him.

For Jerry

When I think of you, Jerry,

I think of mountains

and oceans,

your arms and hands

gentle yet well-suited

for climbing

and fishing

and building.

I think of your smile

and of fatherhood

and of sticking with a plan,

and of your interest

in our family

and in many things

other than yourself.

I’m so sorry you are ill

but I’m thankful that you feel no pain

I hope for your recovery

and yet I know that you are climbing

the steepest mountain of your life.

(Is it number 47?)

And we are here with you

calling out to you,

steadying your feet,

handing you a rope,

but we don’t need to do that

you can handle it

you with those mountains in your eyes.

Some of us are up ahead,

and others of us, well,

we aren’t too far behind

we’re keeping our eyes on your light

shining like a beacon on the mountainside.

Daylight Saving Time

Last Thursday night, I got only five hours of sleep. I blame Nano Poblano. All of those impassioned opinions, perfect word choices, and gutsy poems – you peppers really know how to inform, inspire, and interrupt a good night’s slumber. I was awake until 3 a.m. reading. Your titles were compelling and your photos so interesting. Even your badges were calling my name. I think I dreamt about peppers that night (er … morning).

Later that day (at 8 a.m.), I pulled myself out of bed because I had company coming over at 9. I rubbed my tired eyes, stumbled to the coffee machine, and pressed “brew” without putting water in first. After a couple of tries, I finally got everything (water, coffee, cup) arranged and ready. After my success making and drinking my first cup of java, I decided I was capable of vacuuming the living room rug.

All was going fine until I decided to try connecting one of the attachments. I couldn’t get the hoses and attachments to fit together. Everything seemed to be the wrong size; nothing would fit into anything else. Five minutes, four failed attempts, and three expletives later, I finally managed to figure it out. But then I tried turning the vacuum on again, and I couldn’t remember where the “on” switch was. (I’m not making this up.) This is not my normal operating mode. I do not have early onset Alzheimer’s. I just wasn’t running on all three bike tires.

I’m not complaining. I’ve always been a night owl, but lately I’m starting to see that maybe it’s not that healthy to skimp on sleep. I read an article about this the other day. The article said that you can never catch up on lost sleep. Once lost, it’s gone forever. If that’s the case, I figure I’ve lost 20,160 hours of sleep since graduating from college. That’s more than 2 years’ worth of lost time. Does that mean I’m really 2 years younger than I thought? Or am I older? I need another cup of coffee to figure that one out.

In the United States, we have something called “Daylight Saving Time” for part of every year. This government-imposed fiddling with our biological and actual clocks came about during World War I in an effort to save energy. In most parts of the country, clocks “spring ahead” one hour in the spring and “fall back” an hour in the fall. They are about to fall back this Sunday, Nov. 5, at 2 a.m. The rationale behind this widely accepted (but unpopular) practice is explained here.

I happen to live in Arizona, where Daylight Saving Time is not observed, unless you live on the Navajo Nation, where they do observe it. But then, if you live on the Hopi Reservation, which is completely surrounded by the Navajo Nation, you don’t observe Daylight Saving Time, which must be especially confusing. Arizona seems to celebrate confusion. After all, we have towns named Why, Surprise, and – believe it or not – Avenue B and C.

Since I live in Arizona, I won’t be “falling back” one hour this year. But while the rest of the country celebrates their extra hour of sleep, I’ll make myself content in the knowledge that even if I’d gotten the extra hour, it would not have made up for the 20,160 hours I’ve already lost.