Endless Knots

Pause

I'm taking one, here at post #484. Back soon; will continue to post comments as they come in.

Sum-mer-timmmmme...

Jessica Lipnack meet Jessica Lipnack

An unusual name has certain benefits. For example, you get to think you're the only one on earth, viz, I was 15 years old before I met another Jessica. This exclusiveness was mitigated big-time when the name Jessica became the most popular one for girls somewhere along about 20 years ago. That roar has died down but not so much that I don't frequently hear my name called by someone decidedly not trying to gain my attention. (Too many negatives in that sentence, i.e., I'm constantly turning around in grocery stores only to see someone, shall we say, considerably younger, responding appropriately.)

Now consider my last name. Very few Lipnacks (originally Lipniak, meaning white wood or linden tree, in Polish and Ukrainian, we've been told). At least I thought there were very few until a cousin, Alan Blank, appeared out of nowhere (well, San Diego) long about seven years ago, with his father, Jules, in tow. Turned out said father was my father's first cousin. Family reunited.

Comes then a message this past week from an Allyson Lipnack, saying that she only knows one Jessica Lipnack, who happens to be 17. Yes, friends, I have a doppelganger, and now Jessica Jr, as she's dubbed herself, and I are friends in the one truly modern way - on Facebook. So, Jess Jr., we'll have to start working on some really good stories that we can use to confuse people for many years to come. (And thanks to Cousin Alan, who follows such things, all the lines of connection are being drawn back to the old country where Jr's great-grandfather and my grandfather were most likely cousins in the small town of Mishnitz.)

Re: Dymaxion Man - The New Yorker and me

It's always a happy day for a writer when the words "The New Yorker" and one's name appear on the same page, especially when it's the magazine itself bearing the logo. In this issue, my Letter to the Editor appears in response to Dymaxion Man, a profile of Bucky Fuller (link takes you to the index of my many posts about Bucky and Margaret Fuller) by Elizabeth Kolbert. This was my first time out sending such a letter to The New Yorker so I hadn't before experienced the magazine's prodigious fact-checking procedure.

Here's the tiny behind-the-scenes: On Tues of this past week, I received an email saying my letter was under consideration, asking if I was OK with their edits. Frankly, I'm not that picky when it comes to editors choosing my words. My rule on this: Unless they've turned me into a liar or a lunatic, I go with what the editor suggests. They asked me to call or write. Those who know me can guess what I did.

Yes, I called (as soon as I was able to duck out of the workshop I was giving for a few moments) and suggested only that it be more explicit about Bucky's influence on the field of chemistry. (Three chemists shared the Nobel in 1985 for their discovery of the buckminsterfullerene, a new class of molecules, which is explained in full, I now see, by Richard Wolfson's letter, the one that appears before mine.) Next, I received an email asking for detail around two "facts" in the letter, which fortunately I was able to produce as soon as I returned home. Then came the email saying mine would appear today. Which it does. Thank you, New Yorkers, especially Scott.

Glory in the morning

By this time on a typical Monday (6 AM), our street is rumbling with cars rushing people to work and people rushing their dogs on their walks. Today it is quiet, as if Newton is in the country and the farm animals haven't yet woken. I've always been an early riser, in love with this kind of quiet but rarely is it as still as today. I just snapped a few pictures in the garden. I hope you like them.

Spyrea

Petunias and friends

Lavender making a comeback

Peonies near bloom

Margaret Fullerenes - The Film - Friday, May 23

Delighted to share this good news: filmmakers Ron Mortara and Kim Romano will join our Margaret Fuller birthday gathering at Mount Auburn Cemetery this coming Friday, May 23 (meet inside front gates at 8 AM, then proceed to the Fuller lot on Pyrola Path).

Ron will film, Kim (check out the trailer for her film Muriel) will do sound. "We" [she smiles toward Ron] plan to make a very short film about this gathering. The "script" goes something like this: We'll take a quick tour of the Fuller graves, I'll read from Fuller's work, anyone moved to speak will do so, and we'll end with John Halamka playing a mourning song on his Shakuhachi (Japanese flute).

I had the chance to work with Ron three years ago on his film, The Beat. Ron used his knowledge as an ex-neurosurgeon for this imaginative piece in which a scientist discovers that the same part of the brain that recognizes rhythm is responsible for violence. In the film, I played the scientist's artist-wife. We filmed in my friend Emily's painting studio. Here's Ron on the set of The Beat.

For those who love water, whales, sailboats, and beautiful essays, you must see Ron's short, HUNGER ANGER LOVE PLAY, his meditation on what a whale might be thinking.

Local readers and those in Boston this Friday, please, all welcome to join.

Exactly like a fox

This post requires a picture but alas the camera was elsewhere at the proper moment. When the subject and the object come together, I shall definitely post. Meanwhile, back at the homestead, we were leaving our house last night, getting as far as the driveway, when a reddish, longish, thinnish, canine-ish being crossed in front of us, scurried to the shed in the sideyard, then began digging like a maniac. A fox! A really beautiful fox, who then disappeared around the back of the shed and stuck its pretty little head around the side, looked at us, then went back to digging, evaporating into the hole under the shed.

Sighting the fox is either a good omen or a terrible one, according to an exhaustive Internet search (not). But it sure is pretty. Wish me luck in snapping a picture. A neighbor reported seeing the same animal in our yard a few weeks ago and witnessed a stand-off between it/s/he and Sola, our beautiful granddog.

"Feeling Numb" - Ars Medica

"Feeling Numb," my essay about MS in Ars Medica, Vol 4, No 1.

Download ars_medica_feeling_numb.pdf

With thanks to Allison Crawford, Ian MacKenzie, and Liz Konigshaus of Ars Medica.

Contact Ars Medica.

Oh, Pottstown

It isn't often that I hear reference to my hometown and its surrounding areas, never mind all day long. But that's what's going on right now - and it will be over, completely, by Wednesday. Turns out Southeastern Pennsylvania is one key area for the Democratic primary tomorrow - thus the candidates and busy bees swarming around them are dropping in and out of Pottstown and Reading and Phoenixville.

Today on Robin Young's Here and Now, "two farmers from Pottstown" were holding forth on the economy. Actually, there are no farmers in Pottstown, haven't been since before I was born. It's hard to find them even outside of Pottstown without going more than a bit of a distance. But it sounds like there should be, doesn't it? What there were in the Pottstown of my little girlhood and are no more: factories. Bethlehem Steel, Firestone, mondo plants that employed everyone. Made me very sad to drive down High Street a couple of months ago and see all the boarded up stores (though that link in the previous sentence provides a bit of a more upbeat view of the town's economic health).

And lastly on this ephemeral topic: Have you heard mention of Montgomery County, Chester County, and Bucks County as being pivotal in the primary? I lived in all three: Pottstown's in Montgomery County; when I was 13, we moved across the Schuylkill (take a guess on how to pronounce it) to Chester County; and when I was 15, I went away to school in Bucks County. I guess this means I'm deciding the election.

This one's for all my sister Js: "You were everything I wanted, Jessica"

My friend Bruce - about whom I can't quickly find a good link so let me leave it at this: he's in a truly sweet position, importing fair-trade organic sugar - sent me something equally sweet, which he specifically said to pass along to my hubby so he could "serenade" me. Enjoy "Jessica" by Jake Amerding, words below.

Download 07_jessica.m4a

Jessica

some people say that the start of the day is the sunrise
i would agree, if it weren't for my false medication:
me taking you, and semi-living till i do
she said to meet down on asbury street by the station
i got lost on the way and it shattered my day into pieces
it was the corner of blair, and my morphine was there
you were everything that i wanted, jessica
you were everything that i needed, jessica
there was a counselor checking his notes in the meantime
he tapped on his head with his pencil and said,
"this is not what i wrote down"
then he went to the room where he weaves and he rolled up his sleeves
'cause you were everything that i wanted, jessica
you were everything that i needed, jessica
some people say that the start of the day is the sunrise
i drink my decaf and say, "what a beautiful morning"
and i know that He is agreeing with me...