Paper Chase

         Ralph’s Market off of Sports Arena Boulevard in San Diego is laid out like most grocery stores: a produce section on your right as you walk in, a bakery to the left, and somewhere in the middle aisles, a magazine section. I was looking for a San Diego Chronicle, or at least a USA Today. My son has an ongoing current events assignment for his government class, which for some archaic reason requires compiling actual news clippings – no photocopies. Not too hard, right? Most students have had similar high school assignments; I used to cut up my parents’ Time magazine on a regular basis.

            “Do you carry newspapers?” I asked one of the cashiers.

            “Oh . . . ."  She looked around. “Sure, right on that, that thing over there.” She pointed to a freestanding set of shelves near the balloons.

            I thanked her. “I think it’s called a newsstand,” I said.

            The word is passing out of common vocabulary along with papers themselves. Soon Starbucks will offer nothing but table-mounted e-readers, diner-style like jukeboxes, for anyone who might have come in without a laptop. In my search I have tried street-corner newspaper vending machines in three different cities. These seem to not actually dispense; they simply roll your quarters back out at you to give the illusion of occasional function, like the nearby pedestrian walk buttons.

            There is one type of paper that’s thriving and always easy to find:

               When the world changes over completely to virtual paper I will miss the actual pages of books: the feel of them turning, the way they are all present simultaneously, and the way they avail themselves for notes.  I don’t feel the same about newspapers, which are smelly, messy, and wasteful. On-line subscriptions are the ideal form for rapidly changing written news, and I’ll gladly pay just to keep my recycling bin from overflowing.

            The tabloids at least have some heft to them; the thickness of current-day Newsweek or Time is, to the micron, that of the following line of type:

CHEAPCHEAPCHEAPCHEAPCHEAPCHEAPCHEAPCHEAPHEAPCHEAPCHEAPCHEAPCHEAPCHEAP

The non-subscription price of each weekly is $4.99 for about fifty pages, which is the price per page of a photocopy at the public library. Maybe my son’s teacher is a Newsweek stockholder.  I imagine that their continued existence is for the sole purpose of eventually convincing die-hards that buying the on-line version is by far the superior choice. Credible news writers need to be paid.  Here’s something for anyone who doesn’t already read Doonesbury:

Favorite Words

     I would like to write about estivate, a word with a lovely meaning but unfortunate tone that encourages a sneer when spoken. It’s close to estrous, and in fact the two have some common origins involving the concept of being in heat. It makes one want to say something like, Don’t mind Sally, she’s estivating, though of course that’s far off the mark on more than one level. Here's a better idea of its meaning:

      The word hibernate, sister to estivate, elicits the opposite sort of thoughts. Hibernate, with its long vowels, is picturesque on its own. Its syllables sound like high, as in high country, and hide, and brrrrr, all of which are things that bears do in winter. There is also natal at the end, a bear activity at winter’s dénouement, the moms emerging around the time of the mountain azaleas with sleepy looking balls of fur stumbling behind.

       Estivation, on the other hand, is often practiced by snails, which spend much of the summer hidden in a state of torpor to avoid the slime-drying sun, emerging only as the heat subsides. Sound familiar?  It’s what I do in summer, minus the slime. That’s why I spend a lot of time peering out windows – including my air-conditioned cubicle-on-wheels, which I consider a legitimate human adaptation that any snail or amphibian would gladly use if only it could keep from sliding off the seats. 

     Like most Arizonans who have a choice, I emerge just after dawn or before sunset; animals that do this are crepuscular. Two posts ago I mentioned a crepuscular dawn, which is not redundant but refers to dark and light striations: the shafts of light. Snails are often crepuscular or nocturne, for the same reason that they estivate. Desert squirrels – those mini ones who pop out at the Phoenix Zoo and enjoy animal crackers – estivate as well.

       But now I’m in Monterey for the weekend, visiting my daughter, and it’s suddenly like Arizona winter – with more water. That’s not a bear on the rocks but a California ground squirrel. He's a hefty guy twenty inches and one-and-a-half pounds, who knows how to have a good time.

Condensation!

     I went mushroom picking yesterday, in my backyard. The tops look good enough 
to eat, like the meringue ones we make in December for bouche de Noel, with cocoa

powder sifted on top. Those meringues have been stolen more than once by the 
perpetrator shown below, along with missing toast, cheese, pastries, cups of 
coffee, and half-glasses of beer.

Needless to say, I needed to get the real mushrooms out of the grass before 
Sparrow (yes, named for a pirate) managed to poison herself.
       Fungi aside, all this moisture makes southern Arizona feel as if it had a genuine variable climate. I went to buy some fish on Tuesday and could barely see through 
the fogged-over display glass. The attendant came around to my side with a towel 
and stepped in front of me, wiping. "Sorry," he said, "I have to do this every half hour 
today because of the humidity." Humidity – here in Arizona!

      Arctic sea ice is melting and we're seeing record heat waves in the eastern US. 
Could it be that paradoxically, global climate change is Arizona's temporary best 
friend? (So often besties are fickle.) Maybe we'll become a new tropical paradise.  
"Don't worry, be happy," will be on our souvenir t-shirts. "Here in Chandler," we'll say, 
"we're so relaxed that even the hummingbirds just sit, sipping their hibiscus daiquiris."

Auto Glass

            Last Friday night was a full moon, and I was the craziest one on Route 8, determined to make it to San Diego by midnight. Cary and I were driving to a soccer tournament; my husband had to work on Saturday night. I’d passed up eating in El Centro because MacDonald’s was the best thing there, so I was powering on cheese sticks and Amp Zero. We’d already passed the sand dunes in the darkness; the dunes, formed from river silt, are non-reflective even with the moon on high beam. The sand is teeming with beetles, weevils and wasps but we saw none of this before the highway narrowed.

            After miles at a sluggish 65 mph, the flow of traffic shot up to 80 as the road rose and funneled into single lanes too treacherous and remote for the local highway patrol to risk. It seemed that Darwin’s law would prevail. The edges were studded with reflectors placed where the road tended to slide off into nothingness. As we climbed, glowing rectangles appeared in sequence like luminaries at the Desert Botanical Gardens, our headlights  a speedy candle lighter running in front of us.

           At the same time, in the periphery of the headlights, pinhole meteors burst as instantaneous streaks shooting towards us: all those winged insects drawn to the light and glowing as if we were in hyper-drive. As the road curved upward through invisible hillsides, a monstrous wind turbine rose up to our right. We were at the height of its midsection, and its Martin arms were flailing in a wind created only by the turbulence from speeding motorists. After forty-five minutes in the mountains the lights slowed to red-yellow-green, and we crawled our way to the motel.

            On Sunday night, we saw the same trajectories, the same momentary spews of light as amateur fishermen cast their phosphorescent floating lures (light sticks!) again and again from the pier down to the surface like fireworks. In the morning, behind me as I packed the car, was a pink, crepuscular dawn, the light again streaking down. All I had was my cell phone!