As my skill at solving the New York Times crossword puzzle every week might demonstrate, I know a little about a lot of things. However, after reading Adam Grant’s recent challenging book Think Again (Viking Press 2021), I confess that there are many more things about which I know at lot less than I think I do. It turns out knowing a little about many things does not equal knowing any of them in depth. Subtitled “the power of knowing what you don’t know,” Grant effectively convinced me that while I hold countless opinions (as do most Americans) I have very limited bases for many of them. My views seem to have been hobbled together from brief newspaper articles, conversations with friends, an occasional documentary film and my personal experience. Grant would maintain it would be not just humbling but in fact empowering to admit my ignorance.

A few months ago an experience with my granddaughter illustrates his point. Her extended paternal family is largely Republican and she wanted to know why I was a Democrat. A perfectly sound question from a 13 year old to her elder. My first response was the honest admission, “I guess I have always been a Democrat. My parents were Democrats. My grandparents voted for F.D.R.” Listening to myself, I realized that my response was embarrassingly close to the truth. She, of course, has only learned of the very left wing Democrats who are currently espousing socialism as the cure to society’s ills. I am not a proponent of socialism, so she needed more explanation.(My views on socialism, by the way, are no more rounded out than many of my opinions!) I told her that the Republican Party as it presently stands seems to me to promote the wealthy and the Democratic Party looks out for every one else.

But she made me realize that I have not had an in-depth conversation about politics rooted in deep thought in many years. Grant would maintain that the situation is the same for many areas in which we hold strong opinions. He says we lose out by keeping to our own views and never encountering any others. One of his points which I intend to remember in the future is “approach disagreements as dances, not battles.” It’s certainly worth a try.

I woke up at 3 in the morning last night and composed a perfect post. It had a witty title, read with ease, made a good point in just enough words, was sure to engage my readers, and was laid out in my mind. I was so certain that I would remember the whole thing in the morning that I didn’t write it down. I awoke this morning with no clue about that post. It apparently has disappeared into the ether of my brain.

It is one thing to forget why I came into a room or to forget to return a call in “just a few minutes.” But this, I assure you was a perfect post. And it is gone. No matter how I lay down on the bed again(maybe posture will bring it back) or huffed and puffed around the kitchen fixing breakfast(maybe it needs a distraction) I could not grab hold of a single thought to retrieve it.

Well all I can say is I guess you have to believe me. I certainly do!

Marianne Moore writes in her clever poem Poetry which begins “I too dislike it,” that sometimes a poem can offer up “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” This line came to mind as I was reading the recently published historical novel Those Who Are Saved by Alexis Landau. The story relates the decision, made in the belief that it would save her, that a Jewish couple in France makes to leave their young daughter with a farm family as they are being interred in a “work camp.” In a horrid irony, the couple escapes to the United States but is unable to take their daughter with them. The novel focuses on the pain of the separation and the long search to reunite the family.

There are many approaches to historical fiction. Some focus on meticulous research about appropriate details but with invented characters. Some use actual characters and invent the details. In both cases the writer can succeed or fail, less on the details but more on the strength of characterization and plot. But Landau, whose details, plot and characters are generally convincing, adds a third approach. She invents the central characters but places them in the Jewish emigre community of the 1930’s in Los Angeles. Here the actual writers, artists, film makers, actors, singers and psychologists appear as friends of the central characters.

For me this aspect of the book was the most compelling. While I was aware of the large Jewish emigre community in New York City during the same time frame, I was unaware of the parallel group in and around Los Angeles. Apparently I shared this ignorance with the author, a Jewish woman who had grown up in the area with little familiarity with its history. Although I would never characterize the real people in the book as “toads,” I do think the writer very skillfully inserts actual people into an invented scene, proving Moore’s point that we are drawn into such portrayals.

Even though I cannot wholeheartedly recommend the novel because of occasional plot devices which left me cold, the book definitely captures both the atmosphere among Jewish emigres and their constant anguish from having escaped a fate in Nazi Europe unlike so many of their friends and family. That alone made it worth reading for me.

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When we first moved to Connecticut we visited Mozzicato’s bakery in Hartford pictured above. The left picture shows portions of two of the three filled cases they feature, filled with sweets, savory offerings, candy and gelato. On the right is a selection shown close up to give you an idea of some of the variety they sell. I had grown up knowing only plain or sugared doughnuts, butterhorns and bear claws. Now I was stopped in my tracks, overwhelmed by the assortment with no idea how to choose. I wanted to be handed one that I might savor and not have to deal with so many at once.

Friends from the gym and friends of friends formed a Zoom book club a few months back to meet once a month and discuss a book chosen by one of us. This past Friday we were meeting over a selection of short stories by Amy Bloom called Come to Me. I struggled with the book without exactly knowing why. I appreciated nearly each story, but I didn’t like reading them as a collection. I was having the Mozzicato experience: too much to digest!

It turns out that I like to linger over a story, a novel, a poem, a painting or a piece of music. I shy away from collections of each. Even in an art museum I prefer to focus on one painting for a long time instead of taking in the whole exhibit. And I frequently am ready to walk out of a music performance after I feel full.( I do wait for an intermission!) It’s taken me way too many years to understand that about myself. It took an agreement to read a collection of short stories to finally see what is true: I get overwhelmed by variety. No wonder I always order vanilla ice cream!

When we used to return to school after Christmas we would all have exchanges around “what did we get” as gifts. It was as common a question as “what did you do last summer” when we came back in September. Fast forward many years and the refrain everywhere around me is “what did you get?” In this case did we receive the Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson & Johnson covid vaccination?

We have each received whichever was available when we went to get our shots, but this doesn’t seem to have stopped the conversations. Since my friends have mainly received just the first dose, we note whether we have a three week(Pfizer) or four week(Moderna) wait until the second dose or no wait at all for the Johnson & Johnson one dose vaccine.

A year ago you could not have paid me enough to believe that there would be a vaccine, much less three, available for this scourge. And you certainly would have had me laughing at the notion I would be comparing which one I got. What a difference a year makes!

I recently finished listening to the audio version of Kristin Hannah’s latest novel, published in February 2021, The Four Winds. Sometimes writers can take actual historic events and place a character neatly in the center of them allowing the reader a first hand sense of the times. Hannah does this with this long novel set in the Dust Bowl years of the state of Texas in the early 1930’s. While I was aware in a general way of the devastating climate catastrophe of those years, I had only a cursory sense of what it would have been like to live then.

So taken was I by the novel that after I finished it I found and watched a four hour documentary by Ken Burns on the Dust Bowl. Here numerous images filled out the ones in my imagination created by my reading. The drought and blowing away of nearly 75% of the topsoil during the 1930’s covered 100,000,000 acres of the central United States. While the drought was a significant factor, the farming technique of deeply plowing the grasslands destroyed centuries of drought tolerant grass which had held the soil in place.

But of course we know so much more today! While we can comfort ourselves by knowing more about farming land not designed to grow certain crops, we are just as headstrong in this country about where we choose to live. Ignoring the reason people never lived in the desert, huge population growth has taken place in the southwest US draining the Colorado River, using up the aquifer and relying on electricity to cool homes where the summer heat is now hitting 120 degrees F.

Perhaps some fiction writer in the future will chronicle a single mother in Arizona trying to provide for her family in intolerable desert conditions. She can look back to Hannah’s account of a woman trying to do just that in Texas as the soil blew away.

I have always loved learning about the origin of words or phrases. I also enjoy witty detective novels, especially if I can find a character who loves word play as I do. In Charles Finch’s most recent novel An Extravagant Death, Finch takes his Victorian sleuth from London to Newport, Rhode Island to solve the murder of a young debutante. While the murderer is easy to spot by anyone who reads a lot of murder mysteries, the joy in this book comes from the observations of New York and Newport society when a flood of newly rich industrial titans built ostentatious homes on a peninsula in New England. As a British observer, Charles Lenox, our investigator, sees how strange the jockeying for position seems in a society new to the idea of old and new money.

My favorite part of the novel, however, comes in the several instances that Lenox tries to entertain someone with the etymology of a word. In one case, he mentions the origin of backlog to someone who fails to either understand or be amused by his explanation.

Later he tells the reader that shrapnel was named after Lt. Henry Schrapnel who invented a cannonball filled with small lead balls which shattered on contact sending shards of hot metal into enemy lines. Was this necessary in the plot? Not at all, but this continues to help us see Lenox’ wit though few of his America contacts appreciate it.

So if you, as a very nerdy high school student like me, used to settle in with the Oxford English Dictionary on rainy days, you might enjoy meeting Charles Lenox in Charles Finch’s tales.

It’s funny, but I kept thinking about that disclaimer or statement before that webinar. I appreciate the comments I received so far because they show a balance of views. I agree that something seemed a little self-conscious about that wording as if it was responding to some issue I was unaware of. I also agree that it is important to know history of a place. But as a once 50 year resident of Oregon, I am aware of the much larger history of Oregon and non-whites, none of it pleasant. In addition to the treatment of the people already living in the land now Oregon, once it became a state it forbid freed blacks to settle there after the Civil War, it went ahead with the federal order to remove Japanese-American citizens from their land and businesses during World War II to be sent to internment camps, the KuKluxKlan had an active presence in the state, mostly against Jews and Catholics, and migrant workers, mainly from Mexico, were treated in an appalling fashion. And today, many young adults have moved into Portland displacing a formerly African American working class neighborhood of single family homes with tall “hip” apartment buildings.

I operate from a stance that all people over time have done things that people later on look back on and condemn. I am certain that future generations will question many things we do today. I am most interested in what actions we can take today that represent what we know today. For instance in Connecticut right now a disproportionate percentage of COVID vaccine has gone to white citizens. Rather than simply display that statistic, the officials in charge have looked to the root causes of this discrepancy. They are addressing the historical skepticism of communities towards “beneficial” government programs, the lack of internet access to book appointments, and the transportation barriers to getting a shot(not everyone can drive to the drive through mass site) and are acting on this knowledge. Working through churches and sending vans into communities they are delivering the vaccine in ways tailored to different situations which, though historically caused, can be addressed today.

I still don’t know if I was expected to learn something from the wording before the webinar, feel ashamed before the event, or moved to action after the talk. Thus my continued pondering.

On Sunday I tuned into a webinar featuring a former colleague from my art college days talking about his lifelong art making life. It was hosted by a university art museum and delivered on its promise of being well done and in depth. But before the talk started, the moderator began with a speech which I saw as a disclaimer, though I am not sure of its original intent. She explained that the university was built on land formerly inhabited by an indigenous group who had been dispossessed of the land in the mid 1800’s. She went on to say that descendants of that people still lived in the state.

After the webinar I remembered how much I had loved working with the featured artist and felt renewed gratitude for my twenty-five years teaching among artists. But this morning I began to ponder that opening talk by the moderator. It had nothing to do with my friend, by the way. He neither works for the university nor does he live on that land. It was a history lesson which may or not be told before every university talk. But to what end, I wonder. For some reason on this morning in Oregon the moderator felt the need to tell us the history of the land under the school hosting the webinar. I continue to question why.

I don’t want to get into a rancorous discussion about this, but I am curious about other times any of my readers have encountered this kind of announcement. Do you have any insight about its value?

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In the United States at the moment each state is responsible for distributing the Covid vaccine. I am grateful to be living in Connecticut which, while not particularly exciting, is known for its motto “the land of steady habits.” In the case of the vaccine this low key, no nonsense approach is paying off. Our governor looked at the mortality rates for our state and determined that we would distribute the vaccine by age brackets beginning with 75 up and then opening up by 10 year spans in the ensuing weeks. While many complained at his system, he showed a chart which clearly showed that although only 18% of our population is over 65, over 90% of deaths occurred in this age group.

Last week I joined a very well organized process shown above on the left and received a shot in my left arm (I have no idea who that person is on the right!) A drive through operation coordinated with uniformed National Guards and staffed with doctors and nurses, it runs smoothly. Apparently the health clinic worked with a business used to handling crowds. Both skills are needed for this kind of mass inoculation site.

I am thrilled to have received the first of two Pfizer shots, with the second in two weeks. My grandchildren are excited to be able to come in the house with us after one full year of sitting outside, rain, snow or sun, to visit a good distance apart.

Our country has done a disastrous job with the pandemic, losing over 500,000 citizens to a disease once described by the then leader as “nothing worse than the flu.” Thank goodness change has arrived.