Moby Whatever

“I’m reading an interesting book,” Jay told me.  “It’s called Railsea.  I think you’d like it.  It’s hard to describe, exactly, but it’s full of allusions to Moby Dick.”

I looked up from my laptop.  I’d been writing.  Ok, no, I’d been thinking about writing, but mostly dinking around on the internet.  “Oh.  Um…”  I hesitated, my ambivalence practically leaking out my ears.  I ought to be eager, I thought.  Why wasn’t I thrilled?  I’m always looking for book recommendations, and my husband was touting this one as fabulously literary.  And -- I’m a literary-type person… aren’t I? 

Or… not.  Oh, I like to think of myself that way.  It’s part of my self-image as Renaissance Woman and Utter Dork.  Moreover, a lot of people seem to assume that I’m wonderfully well-read, given my fancy-pants predilection for ten-dollar words, not to mention my more generalized cerebral nerdery.  But, faced with the prospect of a whole novel’s worth of references to Herman Melville’s greatest work, I was uncomfortably aware that my biblio-intellectual aspirations were more pretense than reality.  

I’ve never read Moby Dick.

This doesn’t seem like such a terrible admission, I suppose.  Although Melville is extolled in the lit-crit world for his writing talent, plenty of other folks agree that he had an even greater talent for inducing catatonia with his 135 chapters about monomania… and whales… and ships… and some more about whales.  So, yeah, I gave up on him -- so what? 

The problem is, my liter-idiocy regarding Melville is just the tip of the whale’s fluke.  A quick perusal of “The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time” – as selected by The Guardian/Observer -- reveals the depths of my shame.  I have not read Don Quixote, although I can make vague references to tilting at windmills.  I also skipped Robinson Crusoe; while I’d like to think I have some sort of clue about wilderness survival, I doubt my strategies would include naming someone “Friday” and converting him to Christianity.  I never got past the first couple of chapters of The Brothers Karamazov or Wuthering Heights, although both mutely torment me from my bookshelves.  I’d rather wade through ice floes on the Yukon River than make any attempt to wade through Pilgrim’s Progress.

I’ve read a few from the list, but I suspect that titles absorbed under duress don’t count for much.  The Scarlet Letter was dreary, to put it mildly, and The Great Gatsby might have been better if not forced into me, page by dull page, in high school English class.  I did get through Emma semi-voluntarily, based only on maternal urging, but (to put it in properly literary terms) it annoyed the crap out of me.  The same is true of almost every example of the genre that I think of as “Uppercrust Twits Obsessing.” Although Pride and Prejudice and its ilk make me desperately grateful to have been born in a time and place without crinolines, arranged marriages, or a need for me to refer to my husband as “Mr. Cable,” I still don’t want to read them.  (I’ll make an exception for Cold Comfort Farm, which is not only a brilliant parody, but also contains the memorable phrase, “You have a simply smashing set of unmentionables.”)

Jay, undaunted by my hesitation, continued touting Railsea.  It was, he elaborated, kind of sci-fi, and kind of steam-punk, and kind of post-apocalyptic.  It was written, he added, for young adults.

Now, that sounded a lot more tempting – and yet, at the same time, more embarrassing.  I’m forty.  I have a PhD and a career and all that.  Shouldn’t I want to read books that are intended for honest-to-goodness grownups, and that don’t involve wizards, spaceships, androids, or elves?

In the same vein, I’m not sure that the titles that I can wholeheartedly endorse from among the “100 Greatest” offer a more flattering reflection of my acumen than those that I can’t.  The stories I’ve enjoyed seem to be mostly children’s tales, satires, or farces – not a combination that speaks well of my intellectual prowess.  Sure, I loved The Lord of the Rings – who wouldn’t?  It has wizards AND elves!  I also enjoyed Gulliver’s Travels, Tom Jones, The BFG, Charlotte’s Web, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Little Women, Huckleberry Finn, The Wind in the Willows, Catcher in the Rye, and Lord of the Flies.  Some of these I’ve loved more than once, and some I’ve already shared with my six-years-olds – but that doesn’t exactly confer genius status upon me, or qualify me to write novels of my own.

Writing.  Yes.  That.  The reality of my limited reading is all the more undermining because I so desperately want to write, and always have.  These days, I foist page upon page and chapter upon chapter of unpublished dross on the patient members of my writers’ group.  But even at the age of seven, I fancied myself a novelist when I won ten dollars (ten whole nineteen-eighty dollars!) from Huntington Public Library for Freddy Goes to a Baseball Game.  Three years later, I conned my poor mother into copy-typing almost a hundred pages of Summer Search, a tale of mystery, riddles, and adventure enjoyed by a set of not particularly intrepid fraternal twins. (Does that count as real-life foreshadowing?). 

For much of my childhood, books didn’t merely interest me, they consumed me.  I knew all the idiosyncratic rabbit-vocabulary in Watership Down, and I wept for heroic Justin in The Rats of NIMH, even though he was fictional…. and, you know, a rat.  I explored Pern on dragonback.  I visited countless other planets, and at least one neutron star, thanks to Robert Forward. 

I was as omnivorous as I was voracious.  I didn’t stick to “good” books.  Sometimes, I deigned to even touch them.  I tested out Nancy Drew before realizing that every mystery was pretty much the same.  I spent some time with Piers Anthony and Jean Auel before stumbling out, befuddled and chagrinned, on the other side of puberty.  But along the way, I found Jane Yolen.  I dug into Lois Lowry.  I spend days – weeks! – on Wildcat Island, and traveled through time with dangerously liberal Victorian E. Nesbit.  I discovered the ABCs of science fiction -- Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke -- and many more, less well known but equally visionary.  I plunged into the realms of my parents’ bookshelves, and kept myself nightmare-enhanced with Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Lolita.  Although more prone to the fanciful than the factual, I hit the nonfiction shelves long enough to meet Anne Frank and Stephen Hawking, and to educate myself about ancient Sumerian counting systems, edible wild plants, and innovative methods of cryptography. 

“I think you’d like Railsea,” Jay reiterated, then phlegmatically left it at that.

Ok.  Fine.  What was this book all about, anyhow?  I was already wasting time on line; I looked it up.

The novel, it seemed, was about moletrains.  And pirates.  It was about a young man named Sham Yes ap Soorap, and a one-armed woman with a vengeance-quest against a massive ivory-colored moldywarpe, and a discovery that just might turn an intricately imagined world inside-out.  This sounded not in the least bit literary, and immensely appealing – for its sheer weirdness, if nothing else.  

Upon reflection, it occurred to me that I am not actually anti-intellectual in my choices of reading material, but merely just as omnivorous as an adult as I was as a child.  Over the past twenty years, I’ve learned that I truly enjoy Shakespeare and Dickens, and I’ve relished a few others from that darned 100: Frankenstein, David Copperfield Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Call of the Wild, A Passage to India, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and On the Road.  On the other hand, I’ve also learned that I like Dave Barry, Bill Bryson, Dan Savage, George Martin, Terry Pratchett, Suzanne Collins, and a whole host of others who definitely don’t make it onto any highfalutin lists.  Many of them write, ostensibly, for children.  Most of the poetry I’ve read – not just in the first two decades of my life, but in the latter two as well -- was written by Shel Silverstein.

But – maybe that’s ok.  Young adult fiction, I realized, is written by writers who are at least as “real” as Herman Melville, and sometimes a great deal more so.  In the past few months, I’ve dived wholeheartedly into a dark comedy about a boy who goes on an epic quest while dying of mad cow disease; a gritty tale of children in a bleak future who strip vast beached tankers for scrap; a fanciful imagining of a semi-alive genetically engineered flying leviathan; an entire retelling of the Greek myths from the perspective of a teenager who discovers he’s one of Poseidon’s half-human bastards; the tangled adventures of a girl who has the power to read characters into and out of printed pages… oh, and so many more.  Yes, these are kids’ books.  I would love to be able to write half as well as their authors.  

Besides, deep down, I know that sticking to the esteemed ought-to-reads would, for me, destroy the decadent bliss of the sport.  Really, isn’t the joyful immersion what it’s all about?  The edification is only a byproduct.  It’s optional.  It’s the reading itself that spins words from the page, spins my brain, spins my galaxy, and makes me want to write.  And write.  And write.

There are a few classics on the Guardian’s list that I really would like to get to – given world enough, and time.  I will read them one day.  I really will.  In the meantime, though, I read Railsea.

It was quirky, wildly creative, and highly entertaining.  It made me think.  It helped me write.  It did, in fact, fairly wallow in Moby Dick references, allusions, motifs, and themes – but it did not foster in me any particular desire to crack open that classic, ever.  And… I’m just fine with that.

Sorry, Melville, but everything’s copacetic. Now, pardon me while I go looking for a Top 100 list that includes a whole lot of centaurs, quasars, subterranean kingdoms, and something containing the phrase, “You have a simply smashing set of unmentionables.”

Race from the start

“It takes remarkably little for children to develop in-group preferences. Rebecca Bigler ran an experiment in three preschool classrooms, where 4- and 5-year-olds were lined up and given T shirts. Half the kids were randomly given blue T shirts, half red. The children wore the shirts for three weeks. During that time, the teachers never mentioned their colors and never grouped the kids by shirt color. The kids didn't segregate in their behavior. They played with each other freely at recess. But when asked which color team was better to belong to, or which team might win a race, they chose their own color. They believed they were smarter than the other color. "The Reds never showed hatred for Blues," Bigler observed. "It was more like, 'Blues are fine, but not as good as us.' "When Reds were asked how many Reds were nice, they'd answer, "All of us." Asked how many Blues were nice, they'd answer, "Some." Some of the Blues were mean, and some were dumb—but not the Reds.”

[from Nurtureshock, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, 2009]

Nurtureshock was such a good read that it may have persuaded me to stop hiding from self-improving literature.  It was entertaining enough to distract me (via mp3) from my poor snow-biking skills, and scientific enough to satisfy my nerdy skepticism.  It also prodded me directly in my liberal-white-middle-class-parent complacency.  Because, according to the authors – and they had some compelling studies to back them up -- kids are inherently racist.   

Wait, I thought (still pedaling along), not my kids!  Or… were they? 

At some level, I already knew that Bronson and Merryman were right.  Children, like pro-sports-team fans, are obnoxiously zealous in their us-versus-them labeling and loyalties.  It’s not that babies are born with a color preference; it’s just that as soon as the mental neurons start firing, they start categorizing.  Kids are obsessed with “good guys” and “bad guys.” They avidly sort the world into “like me” and “not like me.”   According to a wealth of studies, countering this tendency takes more than vague platitudes about diversity, tiresome Dora stories, and footage of President Obama.  Little white kids whose well-meaning parents Just Don’t Talk About It… end up Just Not Getting It. 

The data were pretty clear.  What wasn’t clear was whether I was one of those lily-livered parents.  Were Molly and Lizzy getting mixed messages about race, I wondered?  Were they getting any messages at all?

Oh, I’d made sporadic efforts, in keeping with the generally distracted and unplanned nature of my parenting. In preschool, my kids met several peers who didn’t look much like their mommies or daddies, and we talked about it a bit, in the context of explaining adoption.  One of their best friends since infancy looks – at least at a glance -- more like her Native Alaskan daddy than like her blonde mommy.  I bumbled my way through some rambling Fairbanks-centric history lessons, struggling with an audience who could not fathom how the “long ago” of the gold miners was different from the “REALLY long ago” of the Bering Land Bridge.  My children were interested in the idea that some people had lived here for generations following a subsistence lifestyle, while others had arrived far more recently, following a lifestyle that included canned Spam, an obsessive interest in shiny or stinky stuff under the earth, and bad politics.  Nonetheless, the kids were confused.  No one in Fred Meyer was wearing cool outfits like the ones on display at the University Museum, and (unlike the New York suburbanites of my own childhood) most of the white people they know pick berries and eat moose, too.  I felt kind of dumb for trying. 

Now I wondered how well my kids had processed all this partial information.  I dredged my memory for clues.

I recalled one summer day when I’d been cajoling my then-four-year-olds to do some actual scrubbing in the bathtub, rather than just playing with their massive fleet of plastic toys. Molly paused in her lack-of-washing and stared down and her small, pinkish self.  She gave herself quite a perusal.  Then she announced, “I wish I was Tim!” 

“Um…”  I could hear Freud snickering at me.  Tim was one of her preschool buddies, a precocious and outgoing little guy. At a recent playdate at his parents’ farm, all the kids had ended up joyfully naked. “Why?” I asked, carefully.

She looked up at me with the ‘you-are-stupid’ look that somehow she’d managed to perfect before hitting kindergarten.  “Because then I wouldn’t have to wear sunscreen,” she explained. 

Well, duh, Mommy.  Tim’s parents had adopted him from Ethiopia.

Ok, so at age four, my white daughter wanted to be a black boy.  An unlikely aspiration, perhaps, but not precisely a racist one.

Fast-forward a year or so. 

Lizzy stood at the cash register at Value Village, counting out three dollars in dimes. And nickels.  And pennies.  Coins accumulated in little heaps.  Occasionally she lost count and had to recount a pile. All the while, she was cradling her intended purchase -- gently but possessively – with its head nestled on her shoulder, amidst Lizzy’s fine pale hair.

It was a doll. Not a baby-doll, but a little-kid doll, perhaps intended to look about Lizzy’s own age – which, at the time, was only five. It had a soft, cuddly body and a plastic face with a sweet smile and wide eyes.  Its thick black hair was tied with ribbons, and its plastic-and-cloth skin was a deep shade of brown. 

Luckily, there was no line behind us at the register.  But still, I fidgeted anxiously, sure that we must be trying the patience of the young cashier.  Even I was getting twitchy.  (Yes, kid, I’m vaguely proud that you can count by fives so well, but can you do it faster?)

To my surprise, though, I found that the cashier wasn’t frowning or tapping her foot.  In fact, a small smile was playing on her lips.  “Is this your own money?” she asked her small customer.

Molly answered for her.  (This happens a lot. Sometimes I try to curtail it, and sometimes I give up; consistent parenting is not my strong suit.) “We saved our allowances,” she announced proudly.  Her purchase, an only-slightly-used-looking teddy, was already safely bagged. 

Lizzy had finally completed her laborious calculations.  Cautiously, she held out the doll so that its price code could be scanned ($2.99).  She used both hands, earnest as a new parent allowing a stranger to admire her infant.  Now, the joy of her purchase overwhelmed her reticence.  With almost palpable ecstasy wreathing her face, she beamed up at the cashier.  “Isn’t she beautiful?” she sighed. 

The cashier smiled back down at her as the scanner beeped.  “So… you got to choose whatever you wanted, with your own money?”  She relinquished the paid-for item back to its new owner.

“Yes,” my daughter breathed.  “I chose her all by myself.”  She clasped the doll to her chicken-ribbed little chest.  “Isn’t she BEAUTIFUL?” she repeated.

The young woman’s smile was large and genuine as she smiled at this tiny little blonde person and her wealth of pennies.   Her own hair was thick and black.  Her own skin was a deep rich shade of chocolate brown. “Yes,” the cashier said.  “Yes, she is beautiful.” 

So far so good.  Such cultural sensitivity!  A happy parenting moment!  Then the doll came home.  I asked Lizzy what name she had chosen.

“Gingersnap,” Lizzy announced with finality.

I winced.  It sounded like some kind of weird condescending southern nickname.  Why ain’t that swee-ut, Aunt Jemima makes pancakes, and her little pickaninny Gingersnap bakes cookies!  I teetered on the brink of trying to explain this to Lizzy, of trying to convince her to name her doll something respectable like Rachel or Susan.  But I knew that to her, the name was mellifluous, delicious, complimentary, and utterly without stereotype or association.  Growing up, I played with dolls named “Bedtime,” “Good Girl,” and “Fat Doll.”  Who was I to talk?  Besides, I couldn’t find the courage or the words to explain hundreds of years of enslavement, oppression, colonialism, and hatred to someone whose concept of bad human  behavior included hair-pulling or sneaking a piece of candy.  Gingersnap it was.  And Gingersnap was beloved.

Soon after the purchase of Gingersnap, Martin Luther King Jr. Day (2012) rolled around.  It occurred to me that I should talk about race, and the shameful underbelly of American history.  I made a feeble attempt to start a discussion.  But my kids beat me to it. 

“Oh, we already learned all about him,” Molly told me, with the kind of confidence of knowledge that is only possible among people who have recently lost their first baby teeth.  She rummaged in her ladybug backpack and extracted a coloring page.  It depicted two boxes of crayons – the kind of simple eight-packs that were the industry standard in her kindergarten class.  She had colored the first box entirely blue.  The box itself was blue.  So was every crayon.  The second box was more standard, a rainbow of hues.  “It’s better if you have all the colors,” Molly explained. 

I have a dream…

“Yes,” I agreed, both pleased and disappointed by this opportunity to duck the uglier side of the subject.  “All colors of crayons, and all colors of people.” 

Both kids nodded, beaming because Mommy understood the lesson.  With a mental nod to Frederick Douglas, Rosa Parks, William Paul, and thousands of others -- the President not the least of them -- I reassured myself that my kids, while possibly deeply confused about the role of Crayola in civil rights, were not racist. And I left it at that. Again.

But that was last year. 

Martin Luther King Day rolled around again in 2013, and now the kids were six – a whole twenty percent more mature.  Now they rode the school bus.  Now they shared recess with second and even third graders.  What had they already overheard?  What might they overhear in the future?

Too clearly, I recalled the divisiveness that gradually encroached throughout my own childhood – not just with regard to race, but with regard to practically everything.  In first grade, I played with Aaron, with Daniel, with Doris (who was Hispanic) and with Yvette (who was black).  But after about age six or seven, social pressure dictated that boys didn’t play with girls, and the Puerto Rican and Haitian kids started socializing mainly amongst their own groups.  I remember telling my mother that Aaron could not come home with me on the bus to play, because other kids would make fun of us; we were eight.  I recall the second graders who had received First Communion surrounding shy Jennifer, who had not, and telling her that she was going to Hell.  Even the arbitrary division of the Reds and the Blues by Coach Mitchell for Field Day resulted in vehement Us and Them cliques on the playground.  I was discomfited. 

Then I read Nurtureshock.

I started talking with my kids.  We talked about the real Martin Luther King Jr., not the crayon version.  We talked about slavery.  We talked about civil rights, and segregation, and Whites Only.  We talked about women’s suffrage, and No Irish Need Apply, and the broad swath of our pock-marked, ugly, struggling history.

A few days ago, I read my children a bedtime story about the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins of 1960.  When the story was over, both kids looked troubled, and thoughtful – especially Molly.  She’s prone to empathy.  At last she said, “I don’t think people will ever be that way again.”

Oh, Molly…

I would have liked to have agreed with her, and left it at that.  But if we’re going to continue changing the world, then pretty soon, my generation is going to need her generation’s help.  So I told my six-year-olds about extant racism, modern-day social injustice, and ongoing efforts to educate away hatred – close to home, and overseas. 

It broke my heart.  But it also felt deeply, wonderfully honest.

I tucked the kids into their little-person-sized bunk beds, top and bottom.  Under her fuzzy blue blanket – the one that used to be Daddy’s when he was little -- Lizzy cuddled up with her doll.  Her beautiful doll.  Her doll with the dark eyes, indubitably tangled black hair, and deep brown skin. 

Sleep tight, Lizzy.  Sleep tight, Gingersnap.

How to be a Zero

Your Overall Performance…

Yes?  Yes?  I wasn’t sure I bought into the idea that this webpage was going to tell me anything non-bogus, let alone insightful, but I was kind of curious.  I mean, who wouldn’t want the scoop on their Overall Performance? 

No, this was not an I.Q. quiz.  Nor did it claim it would tell me what my patronus is, what video game character I am channeling, or how many  minutes I’d survive after the Zombie Apocalypse. The test at hand had been provided by the BBC’s Science and Nature department – not exactly peer-reviewed literature, but dorky enough to seem credible.  The purported goal of the survey was to provide “an indication of where you fall in the male-female brain continuum.”

In truth, the whole concept made me squirm.  What is “brain-sex”, exactly? I’ve always railed against the mindset that brought us Teen-Talk-Barbie (“Math class is tough!”)  I’ve always maintained that beyond the obvious hormonal and physical differences, the two genders aren’t as inscrutably alien to one another as we insist on pretending they are.   Women can change tires!  Men can change diapers!  Come on, people, trendy books notwithstanding, we are not actually from different planets.

Or… are we?  Being of an analytical mindset (how very male of me), I’ve never given much credence to joke-memes about male vs. female shopping habits, communication habits, and showering habits (except to note that I am invariably doing it wrong, and don’t own a loufa).   However, present me with a few salient facts about hemisphere dominance and the relative sizes of the inferior-parietal lobule, the limbic system, and the parietal region, and I start to take notice. 

It seems that researchers have found measurable differences in brain structure and function, which yield significant disparities in performance.  According to the BBC webpage, the average female respondent tipped the scales at 50 points in the “womanly” direction.  The average man leveraged fifty points on the opposite trajectory.  As I worked on the test, I couldn’t stop myself from wondering where I’d fall – and I couldn’t prevent my defensive pre-reaction:   Hey, whose inferior-parietal lobule are you calling “small,” buddy?

I’ve always felt justified in my knee-jerk reaction to gender rules.  After all, many of the cultural trimmings and trapping of male vs. female are so obviously arbitrary.  The color pink is not scientifically linked to estrogen.  George Washington and his compadres wore high heels.  Tailors and seamstresses do exactly the same job.  In some cultures, only women are allowed to go fishing.  And I do like a man in a kilt.  

Besides, I’ve known for a long time – forever, possibly – that I can’t cram myself into the mold of most female stereotypes.  I have no sense of fashion, I am terribly out of practice at crying, I studiously avoid shopping, and I sigh longingly over power tools, science fiction, and higher mathematics. 

Then again, male stereotypes don’t usually do it for me either.   Beer pretty much tastes like sump-water to me, and I don’t give a rat’s fundament what kind of vehicle you drive.  I enjoy reading aloud Shakespeare. I reserve the right to snuggle with cats and small children

I sometimes think I come across as a defensive boor in my all-female writers’ group; I keep trying to inject science and logical theory into other people’s Very Personal Essays, and I want the novelist to know whodunnit before she crafts the first three chapters of the murder mystery.  This group is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a girly bunch of females.  This is a split-your-own wood kind of crowd.  And yet I still feel, sometimes, a bit like an interloper.

On the other hand, not surprisingly, I also feel like an interloper when I’m part of a boys’ club, although (thanks to the good graces of some fantastic male friends) I’ve been there often enough.  Many years ago, I spent three summers working on a trail crew with a daunting gender ratio.  Despite my participation in wrestling matches, Tabasco-drinking dares, and farting contests, I never got male bonding 100% right.  I wrestled without first consuming cheap canned Budweiser, and I drew the line at eating horseflies on a Ritz cracker.

In other words, I screw things up in both directions.  I tend to think that when a woman tells me her problems, it’s because she wants me to solve them, rather than Just Listen.  Note to self: she doesn’t.  But when a good male friend tells me about his softball victories – or lack thereof – I’m not really there for him the way I should be, either. 

Could a BBC brain-quiz explain any of this? I had my doubts.

Whatever was up with my brain, I was pretty sure it was a congenital and permanent condition. As a kid, I adored climbing trees, making up stories, wrestling, giggling, playing checkers, and playing with dolls.  This mostly worked out fine; I made up stories in trees, giggled while wrestling, and played checkers with my dolls (yes, really).  In the years that followed, I didn’t mind being the only girl in the Huntington Public Library Dungeons and Dragons Club, and the only girl on the fifteen-person Metropolitan New York All-Stars Mathlete team… three years running.  (We were bused to Penn State to compete in the national championships.  We played bridge, discussed calculus, and did logic problems en route.  One year the bus caught fire in the middle of the night on the way home.  It was, in a word, awesome.)

On the flip side, I was also happy to attend all-girls sleepover parties and watch LadyHawke and The Princess Bride approximately eleventeen times.  Moreover, there was a goodly portion of my brain that deeply, secretly, shame-facedly, wanted Sweet Wesley to accompany my sorry little teenaged self through the Fire Swamp. I was pretty sure I’d be more use against the ROUS’s than Buttercup, but still… Farm Boy?  Fetch me that linear algebra textbook…

Such daydreams were clearly less-than-obvious to all the people who, over the years, implied -- or flat-out stated -- that I was most definitely a lesbian, or that I ought to be attracted to women.   What’s a butch straight girl to do? [Note: moving to Alaska helps]. Someone out there is probably cursing my flippancy, because being gay in our society – or any society – still is not piece of cake.  I know that.  I also know that it’s not a choice, one way or another, because it was never my piece of cake.

Annoyed at assumptions and generalizations, I tried to compartmentalize.  Gender differences were merely physical, I decided.  Brains were gender-neutral.  Brains were unbiased.  Brains were fair.  But the data was stacking up against me.  And now, here was a test purporting to measure – quantitatively! – mental traits that really do differ, on average, between the XYs and the XXs. 

What traits were they, exactly?

The results are based on the angles, spot the difference, 3D shapes, and words tasks.

Even as I worked my way through the test, I felt the scores slotting into place.  Angles?  That was probably a boy-task, but it didn’t seem too hard.  Words?  Oh, indubitably, I am an unrepentant logophile, girlishly besotted with perspicacious badinage.  Spot the Difference was a different story.  Women are supposed to notice subtleties – in shades of lip gloss, in friends’ hairstyles -- but I am the sort of person who permanently loses a pair of heavy-weight hiking boots in a thousand-square-foot home, and who once failed to notice when her housemate shaved off his full beard.  If asked to determine what items have been removed or rearranged from an arbitrary assortment of line-drawings of teapots, lawn chairs, and hats, my brain sneaks away to hide.  On the other hand, mentally rotating objects… well… don’t tell anyone, but I do it even when not completing online quizzes, just for kicks. 

Of course, life isn’t all rotating objects and missing teapots.  What about other purported differences between men and women?  What about the social, emotional, and communication stuff, the “He just doesn’t understand me!” stuff?  Truth be told, I’m even more leery of this kind of touchy-feely analysis than I am of Spot the Differences.  However, this BBC website wasn’t the only one I’d stumbled upon in my virtual perambulations.  The internet is always a great way to erode your sense of self and waste time, all in one simple step. 

Based on the fairy reputable Baron Cohen indices, I’d already learned that I “empathize” (that is, obsess about other people’s feelings) about as well as the average woman.  I “systematize” (which, as far as I can tell, means act like a cross between a train-spotter and a computer geek) about as well as the average man.   No mention was made of how either of these scores panned out in terms of diaper-changing and tire-changing, but I had my suspicions that whatever the mold was, I wouldn’t fit it.

And now, here was a moment of truth.  Your Overall Performance…

I scrolled down.

Your personal brain score: Zero.

Ah.  Well then. 

In a world of male 50s and female 50s, I was hanging at the fulcrum, in no-brain’s-land.  I was a Zero.  A Nothing.  A Nada.  And I wasn’t one bit surprised

In a way, it was relief to earn scores – scientific results! -- that so tidily matched my suspicions.  Still, the inevitability didn’t help me much in knowing what to do with my new label as the Null Set.  If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, was I out charting my own interplanetary orbit?  Did I simply not belong in anyone’s gravity well?  Was I likely to be evicted from my writers’ group?  Was I recalled with disdain by my trail crew friends?

Or… was there perhaps a role in this world for a Zero, after all?

As I pondered my Zero-ness, it occurred to me that in all-female groups I sometimes play the (annoying, but perhaps balancing) role of devil’s advocate.  What do you want with wilting flowers in the middle of February?  So what if he pees in the shower?  So what if he mentally rotates objects?  C’mon, it’s fine, all guys do it. 

And in male groups?  Well, I may not have gotten things 100% right among the Tabasco-drinkers, but maybe it was sometimes better to be a little bit wrong.  On trail crew, I was useful as a Giver of Backrubs.  Straight boys will not do this for each other, ever, no matter how long a day they have put in with a crowbar and shovel -- but they are so pleadingly grateful for a girl with strong, callused hands.  I also read aloud in the tent at night, like a peculiarly mud-splattered parody of a Cub Scout leader.  All those large, sweaty guys begged for just one more chapter of the Hobbit. 

I now realized another salient fact, too.  The bell-shaped curves of Normal Distributions being what they are, I am not the only Zero out here.  Yes, science shows that male and female brains differ, but they differ on average.  Even the BBC page admitted to the word “continuum”.  Statistics are meaningful at the population level, but they tell you nothing about whether little Susie thinks that Math Class is Tough.   Maybe Susie likes to mentally rotate objects.  Maybe – shocker – she’s a Zero too.  If so, I want to meet her.

When I find myself with other Zeros – suspected or confirmed, male or female – I feel a thrill of camaraderie.  When I encounter someone who mixes math-nerdery and word-nerdy into a single fruity cocktail, who sees no inconsistency in cracking raunchy jokes during a Serious Discussion of Feelings,  who gets wildly distracted by trying to explain an esoteric scientific principle to a small child snuggled on his or her lap… I get it.  We’re the Zeros.  We’re bilingual. We’re interplanetary.  We’re at once both total misfits and missing links.

I still get all edgy when too many “him vs. her” jokes clog my Facebook page.  I still want to eviscerate Teen Talk Barbie.  But I don’t need to deny the existence of Venus.  I don’t have to pout at the mention of Mars.  Even if I don’t inhabit one of those celestial orbs, I’m not adrift in space.  After all, there is a planet between the second and fourth rocks from the Sun… and I hear it has a way better atmosphere.

At Large

“Hey, please don’t shine your headlamps over here!” 

Jay’s voice was disembodied in the blackness.  He’d obviously turned off his own light, allowing the moonless canyon to swallow him whole.  For a moment I wondered what nefarious activity could possibly require such absolute privacy.  Then he added, “I’m taking photos of the stars.”

Photos.  Of the stars.  

The red sprawling glow of monstrous, dying Betelguese was clearly distinguishable from white-hot triple-stellate Rigel in the tilted outline of Orion – unsullied by distant glow of diffused neon and insistent headlights.  Our tent, insignificant and alone, was staked in sand imprinted by the heavy paw of a mountain lion. It rippled in the dust-dry breeze of New Year’s Eve in the Grand Canyon

This was not what I’d expected.

Nearly five million people visit the Grand Canyon each year.  That, for the math-challenged, is… kinda a lot of people.  As in, about seven times the population of all of Alaska. I’m no misanthrope, and I don’t yet share Jay’s opinion that all regions south of the 50^th parallel are deeply suspect and over-subscribed by humanity.  Still, when I’d booked our “backcountry” itinerary -- months in advance, per Park Service advice, in order to wrangle with thousands of presumed competitors for our tent spots -- I’d had my misgivings.  I fervently hoped that most of the five million would never leave the Canyon rim (“Gosh, how lovely, now we can buy knick-knacks and cross this off our bucket list!”)  There was also the question of mules.  How wild could this place be, if the trails are daily traipsed by four-legged big-eared cross-bred copiously-pooping equines?  Based on websites and hearsay, I imagined the sort of camping that involves Ranger Tess (who wears a comical hat and provides Informative Lectures About Wildlife); or Rhonda and Al from Cleveland (who have grandkids just about the twins’ age, would you like to see photos?); or Unprepared Bill (who wonders if maybe you have some spare fuel, and manages a snore so impressive that it can be heard from the next Designated Tent Site).  

Don’t get me wrong, I like Ranger Tess, Rhonda, Al, and Bill.  I’m moderately gregarious (albeit socially maladroit), and meeting other campers offers me the chance to turn them into fictional characters at some future date.  Besides -- gratifyingly, if mysteriously – they always seem to dote on my kids.  When I booked the Family Vacation, I was hoping (with the blind optimism of all such bookings) to have fun, create great memories, and dodge disaster.  Two adults, two six-year-olds, five Alaska Airlines flights, a rental car in a vast and unfamiliar city, promises of accommodation from friends who  tolerated me two decades ago, and a six-day camping permit for a place I’d never set eyes on – what could possibly go wrong?  Ok, so I was hoping for a lot.  But whatever I was expecting from the Grand Canyon, it wasn’t a True Wilderness Experience.

As a long-time official (and unofficial) environmentalist, I’ve been privy to a few too many conversations about the Meaning of Wilderness.  Particularly in Alaska, wilderness is an issue of politics, and ethics, and economics.  Does wilderness preclude all sight or sound of humans?  Is it sustainable?  Is setting aside “untouchable” land culturally inappropriate, with respect to indigenous peoples?  Is our adulation of wilderness a blind glorification of a less-than-glorious and perhaps mythical past?  Is it essentially nihilistic?  And can it possibly occur in a popular National Park, a mere few hundred feet from an established trail?

It seemed improbable.  But here, tweaked by latitude, were our own winking Alaskan stars, as seen from remote and uncompromising outposts such as Windy Gap or Tolovana.  For once, I was experiencing early-evening darkness without skis, or snowdrifts, or temperatures cold enough to make my nostrils crackle. After playing Uno and building rock-forts for teddy bears amidst the prickly pear, I could point out to my kids the fine-scale detail of the scabbard at the Hunter’s hip (and then I could define “scabbard”).  What could be more pleasing to a backcountry nerd?

And yet, this joy-of-isolation was not in contrast to the mood of the more social and civilized portions of our six-day jaunt; it was in counterpoint.  Thus far, everything had gone swimmingly.  Our flights were on time.  Our baggage showed up.  The rental car was not an Edsel, and Google Maps calmly talked us out of Phoenix.  (“The robot never gets mad when you miss the turn,” noted Molly.  I can’t imagine to whom she might be comparing said robot.)  Our brief stay in Flagstaff with my college friend David and his family could not have been more perfect.  Hospitality and good company are a boon in and of themselves, but did we really deserve perfect sunshine, a tour of the city, a hot tub, and kids precisely aged to match ours? 

Even when we arrived at our destination to discover that our entire camping itinerary had been derailed by a snow closure on Hermit Road… it was all ok.   I shuffled into the Backcountry Information Office mentally cursing Arizona for spiraling into panic over a mere dusting of the white stuff, but within five minutes, a charmingly cavalier young ranger arranged for new campsites.  It seemed things were not as all-booked-up-three-months-in-advance as direly predicted.  He also granted us a couple of nights of “at large” camping. 

I liked that phrase, “at large,” because it had a vaguely dangerous, on-the-lam feel too it.  Watch out, world!  Frescos and Cables at large!  I didn’t dream, however, that we would be as “at large” as this.  I knew we didn’t have the whole canyon to ourselves.  We certainly didn’t hold title to the whole wheeling cosmos.  Still, even if wilderness is a human construct born of smoke-and-mirrors idealism, I relished the illusion.

But I also, as it turned out, relished our evenings at Bright Angel and Indian Garden. I happily helped the kids pluck grass to feed to over-eager big-lipped mules in their dirt-trodden pen.  I enjoyed watching the twins eagerly yet laboriously print missives on oversize postcards while sipping lemonade at Phantom Ranch.  I liked the blunt and gregarious ranger who told us that, “Kids are never the problem; it’s the fat guys who ‘did this no problem twenty years ago’ who have heart attacks down here.”  I laughed at the fact that the campground and the nadir of the Grand Canyon offered heated bathrooms with flush toilets, putting our own frigid outhouse to shame.

I even, perversely, enjoyed all the people who stared at the kids and then asked us questions that barely veiled their horror. Like my parents, who had visited the place a decade and a half ago, they seemed a mite worried about … cliffs.  Also edges, drop-offs, vast precipices, and the conjunction thereof with Very Precious Children. Throughout the trip, we encountered people who clearly thought we were irresponsible nut-jobs, but were too polite to couch it in exactly those terms.   I’m not particularly afraid of heights myself, and I have a fair bit on confidence in the self-preservation instincts of my offspring, but I can’t help being endeared to anyone who thinks my children are worthy of protection.  A few years ago, I might have worn the Bad Parent badge with greater unease, but many other adventures – including Five-Month-Old Twins Go Winter Camping! and Four-Year-Olds Love the Chilkoot! -- broke me in nicely. 

I was also amused by the now-familiar refrain of, “You’re making your kids walk how far? Over what?  And sleep where?”  I hereby maintain that little kids will gladly walk all day long, if 1) they don’t realize that they can’t; 2) you really, really like playing Eye Spy; and 3) you provide enough lollipops.  Having lots of mule poop to examine is a total bonus.  If we only saw one other smallish child in six days (we borrowed her for Uno), it was not because of “can’t” but because of “don’t.”  But it just meant more smotherings of adult attention for our two.  They enjoyed it, and so did I.

And, interspersed with all this camaraderie, I also enjoyed – deeply, achingly – that moment when the stars deigned to have their pictures taken. 

Jay showed me his photo attempts.  The distant suns showed up with startling clarity, even on the dim little screen.  “That’s just thirty seconds.  When I tried a really long exposure I got blurring,” he said.  “All the stars looked like little lines.”  

I smiled into the darkness.  “Because the earth is turning,” I said.  

The earth was turning in the star-speckled darkness, with us on it.  I couldn’t entirely explain why that fact made me so happy.  And I couldn’t define whether we had found true wilderness.  But ultimately, I decided, did definitions really matter?  Maybe wilderness – or plain old “wildness” if you prefer – is at least partially subjective.  Perhaps it is something to be savored in small doses, like the “naughty” foods on the USDA nutrition charts, lest we become dulled to its charms.  I knew I would not have enjoyed this moment as much without the other moments, the Junior-Ranger-Badge-earning moments, the loaning-someone-our-cooking-pot moments.  Maybe wildness is as multi-layered as the canyon itself, and can be enjoyed best when you dip down, then up, then down again across its crazy landscape.

On the very edge of a new year, there we were: the four of us, plus sundry stuffed animals… at large.  Sunset had long since lingered, reddened, and winked out from the red-green-brown layers of the jagged, looming walls.   The voltage of thirteen batteries was all that lay between us and the blackness.  We’d walked scarcely two miles off the mule-beaten track, past the chest-high cairns that marked the official edge of wildness.  And yet we had the night, the canyon, the whole universe, it seemed, to ourselves.  And Orion was winking at us.

You Stink

“Mmmmm….”  Molly burrowed into my lap, long legs tucked against my stomach and face somewhere in the vicinity of my armpit.  She sighed happily.  “I love how my mama smells like mama,” she said.

I stared down at her. She smiled back up at me beatifically.  I quickly calculated when I’d last showered.

Having determined that it had been within the last 24 hours, I felt at least marginally exonerated.  Ok, so by the standards of Middle America – and most other people who think that running water is not optional – I wasn’t 100% clean, but I didn’t actually smell, did I? 

Except that, of course, I did.  My daughter had just told me so.  Moreover, I was fairly sure I did not smell like soap, or shampoo, or deodorant, or flowers, or chocolate chip cookies.  I smelled like mama. 

Probably, I thought, I should change my shirt.  But I had a kid on my lap, and when not inhaling my armpit aroma, she was reading aloud Mr. Putter and Tabby Clear the Decks.  I didn’t want to miss a moment of the action; who knew what Mrs. Teaberry’s good dog Zeke might do next? 

I considered telling my daughter that, her complimentary tone notwithstanding, people aren’t supposed to smell, and that both the smelliness itself and the act of commenting on the matter are generally considered gauche.   At almost the instant the thought crossed my mind, I recalled learning the same lesson myself, at roughly the same age that my twins are now. 

It was Christmas.  For weeks, a brown-paper-wrapped parcel emblazoned with lots of little Queen-of-England stamps, fascinating U.S. Customs stickers, and indecipherable postmarks had been squatting in my mother’s closet.  Granny always sent her gifts early – Thanksgiveing-early – perhaps based on the assumption that postal technology was still somewhere in the speed range of the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.  However, in my mind, this was exactly the way parcels should be mailed, because Granny could do no wrong. 

When I visited Granny at 3 The Crescent, Tunbridge Wells, Kent I entered a magical world in which milk came in bottles with the cream floating on top, homemade baked goods and fizzy lemonade were considered an important afternoon meal, and everyone’s voice sounded a bit like my Mummy’s.  Granny was willing to play infinite games of Eye Spy and Parcheesi.  She had a vast, ancient, important-looking metal biscuit-tin full of Cadbury’s chocolates -- in sumptuous varieties unknown on our own side of the ocean.  She let me trail her around her lush garden with a tiny watering can, and she allowed me to shell peas more delicious than any pea that had ever before graced my plate.  At Granny’s house, the bathtub had feet and the towels were pre-warmed. At Granny’s house, I was allowed to operate the Lettuce Spinner, and the spinach was magically delicious.  Thus, the opening of the Granny Parcel was imbued with weeks of pent-up anticipation and long-distance adoration.

From amidst the glittering scattering of sweeties in the box, I pulled out a soft Christmas-wrapped item with my name on it.  My name!  Carefully, I unSellotaped it.  The paper fell away to reveal a hand-knit sweater.  Now, normally, clothing was no more thrilling to me than it is to any red-blooded six-year-old.  But this was a special sweater, a sweater made by the marvelous age-spotted hands of Mummy’s own Mummy.  I pressed it to my face.  I inhaled deeply.  “It smells like Granny,” I sighed.

My family’s less-than-positive reaction to this statement took me by surprise.  “Granny doesn’t smell,” snorted my big sister.  My mother, more gently, tried to explain the finer points of scent-related etiquette: namely, that according to the official rules of polite society, no one smells.  Ever.

Except that we all do.  We smell.  Telling me it wasn’t so didn’t make it not so.  Telling Molly the same thing now, as she snugged herself down in a book-and-mama lap-sandwich would only be hand-me-down disingenuousness. 

Officially, sight and sound are the channels by which we humans communicate, educate, and interact with the world.  Sniffing things is deemed animalistic -- and heaven forbid that anyone notice that humans are, in fact, animals.  We try to sidestep our distaste by claiming to have no ability in the realm of aroma-detection.  Granted, we’re not bloodhounds.  But plenty of studies show that humans are far more nose-gifted than we care to admit.  Via t-shirt-sniffing alone, a typical human can easily differentiate her own scent, or her lover’s, or her child’s.

Of course, most people don’t take up shirt-sniffing as a hobby.  Nor are they willing to crawl around with their faces half an inch from the sidewalk or press their noses to their friends in order to prove a point.  Richard Feynman, however, had no such qualms.

As well as being one of the most brilliant physicists of the twentieth century, Feynman enjoyed a plethora of quirky and iconoclastic pastimes.  One of them was smelling.  At parties, he liked to figure out which beer in a six-pack had been touched by whom, using his nose alone.  (I’m never even half that interesting at parties, regardless of what percentage of the six-pack I’ve personally touched).  But he wasn’t really trying to demonstrate that his ability was superlative.  He was trying to show than anyone can do this, if they have the right warp on life, and cheerful disregard for anything approaching “company manners.”

I didn’t start reading Feynman’s popular works – the aptly named “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” and “What Do You Care What Other People Think?” until junior high, when he leapt to the spotlight because of his astonishing and damning demonstration, in the wake of the Challenger disaster, with an O-ring and a glass of ice water.  Long before then, in the wake of realizing that ones grandmother is not supposed to have an aroma, I’d tried to take anti-nasal injunctions to heart. 

Like the good little social-rule-learning child that I (mostly) was, I internalized the tenets governing which smells were considered terrible and unmentionable (anything poop-related, for starters).  Oddly, it was ok to mention non-biological odors that were, to me, much yuckier than poop or sweat: gasoline, Windex, oven cleaner, and most perfumes.  At the same time, I didn’t entirely let go of my faith in my sense of smell.  The school milk, back in those days before magically Ultra High Temperature pasteurized dairy products, was sour about 10% of the time.  I got in the habit of sniffing before sipping, and became something of a lunchroom expert in the subtleties between fresh, on the edge, and seriously nasty beverages. 

I also learned that although smell seemed like a big part of the world around me -- filling me with emotions ranging from doctor’s-office-antispetic-trepidation to dry-leaves-soft-hummus-joy-- there was a limited vocabulary to express this richness, and an even more limited context in which to use it.  The Crayola box might offer fifteen words describing different shades of blue, but I had no adjectives to properly describe the mingling pre-dinner scents of slightly burned garlic, bubbling minestrone, and brownies in the oven.  There were no words for the smell of the dampness that precedes springtime, the reek of overheated tar in a July parking lot, or the licked-clean scent of a cat’s fur as she purrs on the bed.

I liked sniffing fruit too.  I still do.  How else can one reliably judge a fine, ripe melon?  A good pear has an aroma to be reckoned with.  Apparently most Americans rely on sight to choose their tomatoes, apples, and oranges, which means that we are offered fruit that are round, shiny, brightly colored, and taste like Styrofoam.

I was secretly thrilled when, in junior high, one of my more radical hippie teachers instructed us to examine soil samples based on not only texture and color but also odor and flavor.  He wants us to eat the dirt!  Everyone expressed overblown horror at the thought, and decided that of course it must be a joke.  A few boys tried it out, with exaggerated bravado.  I tried it out with excited curiosity.  The earth tasted the way it smelled, loamy and complex.  Not good, precisely, but fascinating.

At about this same junior-high age, all my compatriots started to have much more interesting odors, shifting from the warm-skin uncomplicated-sweat milk-and-peanut-butter scents of childhood to the tangy whiff of pheromones and angst.  This was definitely in the do-not-mention category.  My mother bought me deodorant.  I’m sure she didn’t tell me that this was shameful… but I was pretty sure it was shameful.

It was at around this time that I discovered Feynman.  I was fascinated by his writing because I was fascinated by physics, but I found that his take on other aspects of life was equally riveting.  He cracked safes, played the bongo drums, and won a Nobel prize for his work in quantum electrodynamics.  He was, above all, someone who refused to believe something was so simply because that was what everyone else believed.  And, of course, he liked smelling stuff.

I will not, alas, ever make any fabulous discoveries in the field of particle physics, but I can still aspire to be an oddball scientist.  In this spirit, who am I to undermine my kid’s appreciation of one of her fine and subtle senses?   If I loved the smell of Granny when I was a first-grader, who am I to say that mama-scent is icky? 

We have only so much time to soak in all the nuances of our information-laden world, and a scent can be worth a thousand words.  In addition to the mundane usefulness of telling us whether the cantaloupes are as juicy-delicious as we hope they are or warning us away from the bench that is newly painted, odors are deeply emotional and achingly evocative.  They can send our minds whirling back to the mud-puddles of childhood.  They can imbue a sweater with memories of a grandmother a year unseen and an Atlantic Ocean away. They can conjure joy.  And they can whisper to us with poignancy, fondness, tenderness, or frank allure: you are my beloved.  Beauty resides not only in the eye of the beholder, but in her nose as well.

In my lap, my child turned a page of her book.  I pressed my face to the top of her tousled head, and kissed her. I considered good manners and propriety.  Then I unconsidered them.  “I’m glad my Molly smells like Molly,” I told her.

.