Favorite Things

Words. I like words. Not only in sequences, but individually. I read incessantly as a child, and of course I'd encounter new words all the time, and some of them made me stop to consider them, turn them over in my hands, enjoy them for their novelty and outlandish fascination.

One of those words was gutta-percha. I have no idea what I might have been reading where I'd have seen that, maybe some Sherlock Holmes or something where they'd be creeping after some Victorian malefactor and they'd have outfitted themselves with shoes soled with gutta-percha. I understood that it was a rubbery substance, but the word itself was so strange, so unlike most words, that I would just repeat it to myself several times, like a talisman filled with a supernatural force. I understand now that it's a Malay word for a type of rubbery sap, of course, and I have a sense of language families, so that an unknown word based in a Romance language seems nevertheless familiar in a way that a word in, say, Basque does not. Gutta-percha! What an odd little kid I was. Well, at any rate, the dentist was finishing up my firstest ever root canal yesterday, and he filled the root canals with what he told me was gutta-percha, and I had this strange sense of a circle closing. It's as if I extended my hand in delighted recognition: Well, I declare! Gutta-percha! We finally meet, after all these years!

That was one of the day's high points, to be honest. The world of politics is unedifying. Law and sausages, man.

Far more pleasant to contemplate celestial things. There's a new round of sunspots happening, and we may hope that it'll be like in 2003, when we saw the aurora borealis here in the Mid-Atlantic. It was late fall, and I saw a ruby glow, like spilled port, spreading across the night sky. I'd never seen it before, and it was utterly fascinating. That was on my way home from some errands. At  home, I sat at a window facing north, and watched as bars of light moved with stately grace across the sky, pale white on one side, green on the other. I sat in the dark, and the cat came and sat beside me, and we watched the sky. The Northern Lights, making a rare appearance further south. Unforgettable.

The Hubble Space Telescope is suddenly on the fritz, it seems. They were going to send the shuttle to fix one problem, and then the thing stopped sending data entirely, so they've canceled the mission until they can figure out the second problem and be able to address it. That's OK. If you get depressed about people in general and American people in particular, remember the Hubble. I didn't really contribute much to its actual design or construction or placement in orbit, or anything—I'm pretty terrible at math, actually—but I helped pay for it and I really, really appreciate it, and I guess that counts for something.