Oh What An Untangled Web

So there I was minding my own business when someone mentioned that orb-weaving spiders made up their webs fresh every day. Like everyone knows that. Like, it's certainly the kind of thing a person who tries to pay attention would know. Especially if she were an attention-paying person whose father photographed spiders for fun and who has an actual degree in biology. "You mean they suck their whole web back up their butts and start over every day?" I asked, betraying myself.

"Pretty much," came the answer. Well!

I had no idea. In retrospect, I think I know where I went wrong. I never wake up early enough to notice what my spiders are doing. Also? I can go weeks without making the bed. I've fixed skirt hems with Scotch tape. If I went to the trouble of crocheting something as magnificent as a web out of my own butt, I'd let it go as long as I could. Throw on a patch as needed, and call it a day.

But orb weavers are better citizens than me in that respect. It turns out to be true: spiderwebs have existed for more than a hundred million years, but most last only a day. The spiders do not suck them back up their butts: they eat them, and start fresh, usually in the evening. It's probably a sensible thing to do, evolutionarily speaking, since they count on their webs for snagging the groceries, but who knows how it got started? Could be some of them just got peckish of an evening, and ate their webs, and then they were all dammit and they had to start over, and those are the ones who were most successful and got their genes passed down. Score one for gluttony.

Speaking of gene-passing, male spiders are probably the most libidinous creatures on earth. They'd have to be, since they survive courtship only 20% of the time, and if they try for a twofer, they're done for. The longer the male remains mounted, the deader he's going to be. He might get away with a five-second job, but if he hangs on ten seconds, the female is going to eat him, and not in a good way. So that extra five seconds must really be something. It's not too bad for the female either. Her suitor might use a special silk strand that vibrates in such a way as to entice her--that would totally work on me, too--and also he brings dinner. In the form of himself.

Almost all spiders have eight eyes, set up in various ways and pointing in various directions, which is helpful for keeping the kids in line, in those species that watch out for their kids. Most don't, on account of being dead at the time, like Charlotte. You will recall that Charlotte's kids all parachuted away from Wilbur the pig, except for three, and that is indeed what happens in many species. First thing an itty bitty baby spider does is stick its butt in the air, and if there's any breeze at all, it tugs silk out of the spider. I imagine that feels kind of nice. And once the strand of silk is long enough, it takes off on the breeze and carries the spider away, because it is so very tiny and lightweight. It's a nice start to life.

But other spiders do tend to the chilluns, like the wolf spider. The wolf spider will carry her egg sac around on her spinneret, holding her rear end up in the air so as not to drag it in the dust, and then when the eggs hatch, a thousand teeny tiny spiders climb up her legs and pile up on her abdomen, and it doesn't creep her out at all, so don't you complain.

Because I felt remorse over not having known about the daily web construction, I recently observed a spider right outside our window, and discovered all on my own that she achieves such perfection in her web by measuring it out with her own foot. She grabs a previous portion of the web with a foot while dabbing her butt on the radius to attach the strand, so it's always exactly the same distance away. I discovered this my own self, although, as it turns out, this is not information new to science. I can't help that.

A World Series, And Everyone's Out

We love baseball. Any kind of baseball: major league, park-league, softball, even the kind where short people dribble the ball off a standing tee and charge off to third base to wave at Grandma. All of it. It's the greatest game in the world. And, in as good a sign as I know of that America is headed down the wrong path, no one seems to play it anymore. A casual stroll through any neighborhood here reveals perfectly sound softball fields with nobody on them. Kids can be found playing something close to soccer, and basketball courts usually get some action, but we're  hard pressed to find anything baseball-like to watch. At this point, I'd go to all kinds of trouble just to see a game.

Which we proved the other day.

A tiny notice in the paper said the Gay Softball World Series was taking place all week long right here in Portland, and one of the fields was within walking distance! Huzzah! I inked Tuesday on the calendar.

Tuesday turned out to be the day the ash from the gorge fire was falling on Portland and we had been advised by all media to stay indoors and breathe shallowly, because we are old farts. But we're contrary old farts. When have we ever listened to advice?

Delta Park was only four or five miles that direction (I am waving my finger vaguely northwest), and we zigged and zagged our way through the residential areas with confidence. A gentle breeze scuffed up the ash in the alleyways but we persevered. We're old: we got skills. And nose hair. Then we pulled up at Columbia Boulevard and frowned at the next mile.

One of the things we appreciate about Portland is that we can walk just about anywhere. There are sidewalks and blinky crosswalks and water fountains right there on the street. But suddenly, past Columbia Boulevard, things got real auto-y.

4,000 people at Delta Park and the ladies' rest room was empty.

After slogging on the narrow, trash-strewn shoulder of a loud, fast road, we bailed out onto a little service road and confronted acres of warehouses with cyclone fences. The service road wasn't going the right direction. "Let's bushwhack," I said. Dave looked grim. Bushwhacking wasn't the sort of  thing an urbanite in a pedestrian-friendly city should be expected to do. Plus, he wasn't nearly as confident as I that we'd ever find the field.

"And," he muttered, "I'd put the chances that we will actually find a working softball game today at zero." This is Dave's style. He likes to be pre-disappointed so as to save time later. But he followed me. We skirted several hundred yards of cyclone fence on something like a human deer trail--well-worn, narrow, its side shoots spangled with trash and tent-parts and petering out in the blackberries. Rounded the corner, reconnoitered, checked slant of red sun, dead-reckoned, bent our ears toward any crack of a bat, opted for a winding trail over a slough and behind another cyclone fence, stayed true to instinct, wound through a sea of Dumpsters to a new patch of payment, and lo!

Walmart!

And just beyond, the five pristine softball fields of Delta Park.

"This is great!" I said to the first friendly face. "Are there any women playing today?" My new friend looked wary.

"Well, this is the gay World Series," he said, cautiously.

"I know. But are there women?"

He paused. "Depends on how you look at it," he said.

There were women, as it turned out. Three or four, on just a few teams in the D-division. That's just the way it is. No offense taken. There aren't many women who can compete with grown men, and that's just a fact. The D-division was fun to watch, but relatable. In that they made mistakes. "Run it out, run it out!" I hollered. "Where's the backup, where's the backup?" I hollered. I have no skill at all, but I know how to play, and holler. The Seattle Honey Badgers lost, but they didn't give a shit [you know you want to see it again]. We came back Friday and Saturday.

The smoke was gone. The A-division was tremendous. The beer was outstanding.

And on our way out, we caught the end of the Masters tournament: age fifty gets you in. I've been after Dave for years to join a Masters team, but he won't do it: too sure he'd be disappointed in the skills and strength he's lost. As though the point of a Masters team is to prove you're still twenty.

"Look at that there," I said. "You could totally play on that team. You could star on that team."

He could. Even he could see it. At 66, he could play any position in that field.

And he wouldn't even have to stop to tinkle on the way to home plate.

Me Too

Me too, naturally.

I'll start with just a couple, for now. The earliest ones. Nothing too dreadful, or too early--I was raised in a family of decent people and well shielded.  I knew not to take candy from strangers, but what designs those strangers might have had on me were a mystery. Art Linkletter was on the tube, not Girls Gone Wild.

No, my introduction to the peril of being female began only when I'd just started to develop. Eleven, maybe, or twelve. It's not a good time of life. It's the beginning of the end of innocence, and by that I mean the condition of being whole in oneself, the pilot of one's own consciousness, the skinner of knees and the collector of caterpillars. If you're as lucky as I am, you get to be that child for a good while, rowing your own boat in a protective flotilla, allowed to drift at will with a cargo of your own imagination.

Then things start to change, and it becomes ever clearer that navigating the world and its demands and betrayals is going to require some compromise of the spirit, some deceit and pretense. And that's just to keep your head above water among your peers. But there's a wider world.

The first time, I was walking down the block to Robertson's Five and Dime, as I had done for years, every time I found a few pennies in the sofa cushions. I was nearly there when a man, a grown man, pointed at me and grinned. "Hey, I know you," he said.

I probably looked perplexed, and I probably smiled back. As one does.

"You work at the bar, right? That's it! I've seen you dancing at the bar. Oh, yesss." He was really grinning now.

I can't remember what used to be on that corner next to the dime store, but now it was a topless joint. That was a new thing then, and a scandal in the neighborhood. The man grinned harder and his eyes traveled down my body. My new body. I smiled again, probably, and told him I didn't work at the bar.

"You sure look like her though. You could."

I ducked into the dime store, bought a Maryjane, and peered through the window to make sure the man was gone before I walked home. Not that he wasn't friendly. He was real friendly.

It's a mild enough story, but as poor as my memory is, it stands out. What's interesting about it is not the man's ploy, his game, his easy, casual assertion of his own power. There's nothing special about that. "When you're famous, they'll let you," a powerful man says, but even those with nothing going for them will play up any edge they can conceive of, and that edge is often over women. All women, any woman. We're all in the same lower caste and they'll make sure we don't forget it. There's nothing more mundane than that story. What's interesting to me about this story, and the next, is my own reaction.

First, a sense of menace, accompanied by the first realization that I would have to negotiate life more carefully from now on, and take other people into account in a way I'd never had to do. I was suddenly not a little girl anymore, but a little girl in costume, in drag, and people were going to look at me in a different way, and at the same time no longer see me at all. So I felt menace, and loss. But also something else. 

Do I really look like the dancer at the bar? Could I really be mistaken for the dancer at the bar?

[No, eleven-year-old little Mary B., no, no, no. Christ on a stick. That man knew you were not a dancer at a bar.]

And so I felt as though I had dodged a bullet, but also that I might have some power of my own, something that made other people notice me. That I had some new currency in this new world, something from the props department I could use as I climbed the big stage and learned how to act.

That night, I took my shirt off, threw my shoulders back, and examined the progress in the mirror. It's a strange bit of business to witness on yourself. I did not want to grow up, but as long as I had to, I wanted something I could work with.

This is how it starts. If you ever wondered why some women accept this situation as normal and consider unsolicited attentions a compliment, become accomplices in their own subjugation, this is how it starts.

That's not entirely fair, of course. Most people, anywhere on the sexual spectrum, try to attract. It's all part of the game. The unfair part is that men can really mess you up. They can kill you.

Story Two, not long after. I'd been in the church choir since I was little. I'd graduated to the adult choir with my dad, and Ronnie Oldham was acting different. Mr. Oldham was old and fat and had never paid me any mind at all, but now he was waggling his eyebrows and making low whistles at me as I walked past. "Oh, brother, George," I heard an adult say to my father. "You know your little girl is growing up when Ronnie starts taking an interest." Everyone chuckled. It was general knowledge.

I'd gone into the empty rehearsal room to retrieve something when Mr. Oldham came in behind me and put a hand on my shoulder. When I turned around, he covered my mouth with his and forced in his tongue, squeezed my breasts with both hands, and backed me into a wall. One of the women in the choir came in and said, "Now, Ronnie, you know better than that," and he left the room immediately. My reaction? I was really relieved that lady came in when she did. And I was also as embarrassed as I'd ever felt in my life. Absolutely humiliated, eight shades of crimson, paralyzed, incapable of speech. Exactly as if I'd been caught doing something wrong. What else could I have done? I had never been given a script in which I could say "no" to an adult.

But somehow I was partly to blame.

You'd Think They'd Be On Snow White's Side

The Trump administration has announced the rollback of major provisions of the Obama-era Poison Apple Elimination Act, prompting outcry from progressives who hate freedom. "How can the Republicans be in favor of poison apples?" they demanded on the Senate floor. Majority leader Mitch McConnell's cheeks plumped in an indulgent smile.

"The government should not be in charge of determining which apples are poison and which are not," he explained tartly. "This is simple overreach. The market is perfectly capable of sorting out the apple situation."

"That is absurd," thundered Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley, exhibiting the first stages of flabbergastion. "It is entirely within the government's purview to protect American citizens from poison in their food."

McConnell had already left the chambers. "Hogwash," he replied, through a spokesman who vouched for his familiarity with hogwash. "This entire bill has had the effect of damaging the Apple Pie industry. Democrats simply don't trust Americans to choose their own fruit products."

"Democrats Wage War On Apple Pie," read the tabloid headline. Yellow-headed anchorettes from Fox News drummed the theme. Sources say the original Poison Apple Elimination Act was the brainchild of Democrat Senator Phil Necro after he was discovered trying to kiss a beautiful young woman who was already dead and in a casket. "I was merely trying to smell her lips to determine the cause of death so we can avoid this dreadful calamity in the future," he said, shortly before resigning to spend more time with his family.

In an interview on Fox News, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan assured Democrats that this action should not be taken personally. "The President is merely trying to target waste in government by rolling back all legislation enacted between 2008 and 2016. It is not possible," he said, "to conduct the careful review that Americans demand and expect while these laws are still on the books. They must be withdrawn before they can demonstrate any effects."

Democratic leaders met behind closed doors with speechwriters and polling experts to speculate on how they had become the anti-apple-pie party. It was agreed that nothing good could come of pointing out that Republican Rep. Morguetrotter had been caught in exactly the same situation as Senator Necro without suffering reprimand of any kind from his party. "I can hear it now," groused the consultant from Public Relations, adopting a mocking tone. "What Mr. Morguetrotter does in his free time is not something the American people care about. And unlike his Democrat counterpart, he didn't introduce needless job-killing legislation that hamstrings the apple pie industry. In fact, the congressman is proud to say he didn't do anything at all."

Everyone slumped.

"We can go ahead and let that Morguetrotter business play out on Facebook, as usual," the consultant went on, "but our constituents don't spread 'gotcha' memes like that as much. They're too wrapped up in climate change and civil rights issues."

"As well they should be," Merkley snapped. "Did you see that massive giveaway to the coal industry those assholes are cooking up now? They're pulling us out of solar and wind until they've taken down all the mountains in Kentucky."

The consultant riffled the papers in front of him, and stabbed a finger at one page. "Ah. Here it is. The Heritage Emissions Protection Act?"

Merkley lowered his head to his desk and began to pound slowly.

"Thing is, they keep funneling all the money to their wealthy cronies while ginning up all these controversies to distract us. Like that NFL taking-a-knee fiasco. How did that peaceful protest get to be a dig at our armed forces? How did we lose control of that story? It's utter bullshit."

"I know! Let's do it their way! 'Republicans take stand against jobs and American workers' rights by demanding that professional players exercising freedom of speech be removed from the football field.'"

"I'm on it," said an aide, tapping away at his phone.

"Fake News!" the President tweeted twelve hours later. "Nobody loves field Negroes as much as Republicans do. Believe me."

Dispatches From The Crust

I recently mentioned that I have moments of doubt while writing. Not many, and not often, but more often than I used to. Some of the stuff I've learned hasn't stayed learnt.  I wrote a sentence the other day with about fourteen more clauses in it than anyone really needs, and by the time I got to the end of it I was just shoveling in pronouns with no confidence that they were the right ones. In those cases, I get a machete and whack at my sentence until I get control of it again. But it would be nice to be certain. It's humbling to feel at sea in my native language.

It's not just language, though. Thanks to the social media, I'm much more likely to weigh in on other issues. I'll stick my opinions out there like I'm planting flags on conquered territory--fervently, righteously. There are so many people who need correcting, and I'm just the one to do it. It's easy to let fly without lining up your shot first.

There are times I'm sure I'm right but can't say exactly why, and there are times I'm not sure I'm right at all. Humility can be a good thing. It's a big wide world out there, and I haven't learned everything about it yet, and unlike some people I won't name but didn't vote for, I know how complicated it actually is.

So I came across a thread about all the natural disasters that are happening all over the world, and someone said climate change was exacerbating the earthquakes, and as much as I like to sound the alarm about global warming, I don't like to attribute things to it promiscuously. There's enough misinformation out there already, and I didn't want to see someone set up a straw man that some Denier could knock down. Far be it from me to suggest we're not screwed, I typed, or words to that effect, but that's not how earthquakes work.

Because, you know, I'm all science-y like that.

Tectonic events are shaped by things that are beneath us, not to put on airs. Heat within the earth, friction and pressure, that sort of thing. This guy contending that we're getting earthquakes now because the crust is heating up? I suspected him of also having the inside skinny on The Rapture. So I just made my comment and flang it out there.

And there it dangled, nice and slow, so I could get a look at it. And doubt crept in. Was there something I hadn't read about? Some new discoveries? Did I go off half-cocked? And what does half-cocked mean, anyway? How much else don't I know?

Lots, as it turns out! Yes indeedy, score another one for humility--global warming is affecting earthquakes. It's not going to create one that isn't all cooked up and ready to go, but it can trigger them in a number of ways. A fault ready to slip can go off if the weight of the atmosphere eases up on it because of a good low-pressure typhoon. Rainfall can result in landslides massive enough to release strain on a fault. Ice sheets maintain a load on the crust, but when they melt, the crust levitates. The surface of Iceland is rising fast as glaciers disappear, and it's expected this release of tension will pull in more magma below. Et cetera, et cetera.

I lie in bed and think about it. Do I believe it? Our cat Tater weighs a thousand pounds when she lies on my feet. I'm trapped. There will be no rolling over until she gets up. And when she finally does, limbs are gonna fly.

I believe it.

A Comma Mistake

I got into a tiff with my word processing program the other day. I've got a new laptop and it came with a lot of features I don't need, like its own opinions. I'm always willing to listen to another point of view for a while, but not if it's going to be yap yap yap all day long.

This is a Mac program, and it is constantly weighing in with what is wrong with my writing. But I'm comfortable in my native language. Why, I'd even say I am above average in it. In fact, it is very uncommon for me to wonder how to phrase something, or spell something, or punctuate something. I know some folks who are even more reliable than I am, but not really that many, if you don't mind my saying so.

Because I used to use Microsoft Word, I'm accustomed to having my prose light up here and there. It's Microsoft's way of saying "Really?" And I check it, and often as not I say Yes, really. I meant to say "recombobulated" or "flappety." And every now and then it catches a typo, for real. There's one word I'm always sticking an extra "m" in, the first time--it escapes me now, but there is one. So it's useful. As long as it doesn't go ahead and correct everything for me without checking in first, I'm okay with it.

The Mac program is willy-nilly retyping everything without permission. I know there's an off switch on that and I plan to flip it, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. And the other day, I typed the following sentence:

        "How wet is it?" we asked.

Stupid program kept capitalizing the "we." I'd fix it, and it would just retort with another capital letter. I'd smack it down, and it would pop right back up. And this went on enough times that a little zephyr of doubt floated into my brain. What if I had it wrong? What if the way I want to write that sentence was never right in the first place?  Just a couple years ago, I discovered I was supposed to capitalize quotations in the middle of a sentence, and that was news to me. So it can happen.

Worse, these hesitations happen more frequently now. It's an age thing. Words come up missing, and I find myself wondering about things I used to know for sure.  It's like being the youngest kid in the family and you say Remember when Uncle Buddy cooked the cow pie in a crust and tried to serve it to Mom, and your older sister says It was pond scum on pizza dough, we don't have an Uncle Buddy, and by the way you're adopted.  It's unsettling.

In this case I was certain my word program had gotten all flustered at my question mark. As far as it was concerned, the question mark meant we were now at the end of a sentence, and it was time to start a new one. With a capital letter. But it was being a real bitch about it. 23 out of every 24 hours I would be confident I was right, but this was that other hour--the dark hour in which I look up "oligarchy" for the thousandth time--and I thought, well, I'll just ask my Facebook friends. Two or three people I trust will confirm I'm right, if I am. It's not such a bad thing to be humble. It's not shameful to admit doubt.

That said, here's a really good cure for humility: go online for advice. Scores of friends weighed in. A thundering majority tried to correct something that wasn't wrong. I was supposed to put "i" before "e" except after Labor Day; I was warned to avoid relative clauses whilst Mercury was in retrograde. There was a fire sale somewhere on commas and people were offering them to me in buckets. "Stick a comma here," someone would say, and someone else would be equally enthusiastic about the comma but insist it go somewhere else. This went on for a while.

I love my friends. I do appreciate all the help. I'm keeping my original sentence as originally written, and--no offense?--I have a whole other idea where you can stick your comma.

Encore Avec Le Petit Pantalon Grenouille?

Throughout most of human history, women were not expected to make a contribution to science. They were expected to make a contribution to dinner, and to reproduce prolifically, and maybe do a little light sewing. Those who did help to advance the cause of scientific inquiry labored in obscurity. This made them crabby.

Take Madame Rene Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur, for instance, without whom Monsieur Rene Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur could never have succeeded in his quest to determine what a male frog brings to the procreation table. In the early 1600s, the state of understanding about the male's role in fertilization was fluid, but murky. Some contended that an egg only was required. Others fingered the sperm. It was a popular belief that one or the other contained an entire miniature being that only needed plumping up, like a sea monkey. The so-called "spermists" believed the male sent the tiny being into the female where it began to grow; the "ovists" believed the tiny being was already in the egg to begin with. It was not understood in the latter case what the point of the semen was, unless it was just there for encouragement.

M. de Reaumur began by trying to accumulate any materials that might be required for successful fertilization, in the privacy of his own sal de bain. Ha ha! No, he used frogs. Female frogs were certainly known to produce eggs, but what did the males produce? In order to find out, he decided to outfit the little hoppers with tiny pants to contain their effluent, but he wasn't about to make them himself. Mme. de Reaumur was used to this sort of thing by now. She duly produced a series of frog trousers, one pair after the other, refining the design to accommodate her husband's complaints. The first pair was made from a pig's bladder, as requested, but the leg holes were too big, and the frog kept climbing out of them. The second pair was more form-fitting, and, inspired, she added rear pockets, which ruined the frog's line. "Taffeta, darling," her husband suggested.

"Again with the tiny frog pants?" she muttered, the third time, only in French, and trudged off for more pig bladder and taffeta while the Monsieur went back to his precious thinking room. The third and several subsequent versions were problematic because of the frogs' anatomy, with their skinny legs and plump paunch, but inasmuch as this was also typical of men's physiques at the time, she knew just what to do, and soon produced taffeta frog pants with suspenders. "Voici," she said, tightly, "and maybe Mr. Genius Fancypants Science-Boy could think about inventing Spandex some day."

M. Ferchault de Reaumur dressed his male frogs for love, and after what appeared to be a successful introduction to the gravid females, he examined the trousers for secretions, but either did not find any, or got bored and wandered off to piddle around with geometry; in any case he did not report his findings.

After the divorce, M. de Reaumur began new experiments with frogs, butter, parsley, and lemon, and the Mme. provided for herself nicely in her new career designing loungewear for the King's hamsters.