Might Have Longed for the Grey Skies

The internet is spotty.  These days, interestingly it is streaming audio that seems to be the last thing affected by bad internet.  VoIP calls seem to drop easily.  Email hangs but the music on Youtube or Spotify streams on.  Skype has been miserable for a while.  It would appear that Microsoft’s strategy is to starve the core free version and drive you towards paying for Skype for Business.  As a result, it was the last thing my company thought to invest in when we agreed to pay for such a service.  We chat will almost always get you through.  But not today.  We chat calls kept dropping over and over.  Now at the end of the evening Youtube is flickering like a candle with its wick’s run nearing the end. 

I have on this fascinating collection “Flowers in the Wildwood- Women in Early Country Music (UA 1923 - 1939) Blues, Folk, World  & Country.” My homegirl Trouble over at WFMU had played “Single Life” and I now have on Grady & Hazel Cole - Brother Be Ready for that Day,” on the air.  (As I’ve been typing this out the throughput has now picked up and we may be out of the woods on flickering internet.) 

Some novels take you away and you don’t necessarily want to go where they’re heading.  I wasn’t always inclined to rush back to Oskar’s Danzig world in the recently finished “Tin Drum”, what with his mother vomiting on the beach when the eel fisherman hauled in a horse head he used for bait to pluck the eels out.  Today however, I kept heading back to the rest room, or flipping pages with my salad at lunch there in the Gombe forest near the border of Tanzania and Malawi with Jane Goodall and the chimpanzees in “In the Shadow of Man.”  It is a pleasure to step away from work and join her there. 

Lying there in a hammock with Malaria I might in fact have longed for the grey skies of Gdansk, but generally Ms. Goodall is deceptively simple and at ease with her extraordinary demanding and dangerous task.  It reminds me of an earlier vow I reconsider every time I read something related to the sciences:  Do this more often.  It is so easy to bounce from literature to history.  It takes a concerted effort for me at least to reach for something on, say, biology.  Once I do it is wonderfully refreshing and expansive.  

Monday, 4/10/17