A Sinking Feeling

 On Sunday the Common Household Husband said to me, “Did you see the sinkhole in our driveway?”

I said, “You mean, the driveway is uneven.”   I imagined a small divot in the asphalt – inconsequential.  I did not go anywhere on Monday so I thought nothing further of it.

On Tuesday morning I had to go out to fetch something I had left at a friend’s house. I drove out of the driveway and then thought, Wait, did I just drive over a hole?!

I parked on the street and got out of the car to examine the situation.  There was a hole about a foot in diameter in the asphalt of our driveway.  I tried to look down in, but didn't want to get too close.  Maybe it is like a BLACK hole and would suck me in!  I could not tell how deep it was, but there was definitely at least several feet of space in there below the asphalt.  I feel lucky the car didn't plunge into it when I drove over that portion of the driveway.

I have had no life experiences with sinkholes, other than making fun of when the city bus got stuck in a giant sinkhole in 2019 in Pittsburgh.  We shouldn’t have made fun, because that sinkhole formed at the exact spot I and a huge crowd of people had stood on the week before at a political rally.  The bus literally took the fall instead of all of us.   

I was quite distressed about our sinkhole, and asked around on what I should do.  A friend said to call "PA One Call" - an entity that checks on what utilities lie under the ground before any digging occurs.  I did that, and the woman there calmed me down a bit, taking down all the info.  Then, with disturbing visions of piles of cash poured into the sinkhole, I nervously drove off to fetch the thing I had left behind at the friend’s house.

Our decidedly less dramatic
but still alarming sinkhole.

On the way home I started imagining the neighborhood kids falling into the hole.  I decided I should go to Lowe's to buy a traffic cone and some "Danger" tape.   But I thought I had better take another look at the sinkhole first.  As I arrived home, Andy, the person from our town's Department of Public Works, also arrived.  Andy examined the situation and said, "It's definitely the township’s sewer pipe that has collapsed."  This is, or was, a 15-inch-diameter pipe that runs under our lawn from one end to the other.  Andy showed me on a cool map with all the township’s underground infrastructure.  He said the hole was at least 5 feet deep.  Yikes!  Andy covered it with two orange traffic cones and said the township would be back soon. 

Andy takes a photo inside our sinkhole.
I feared for his well-being the whole time.

A friend sent me a link to this timely opinion by Alexandra Petri. A fine piece of satire, sobering up at the end to deliver the true tragedy of that person's evil and heinous behavior. 

It didn’t occur to me until later that day that our sinkhole lies directly in the path of the Common Household Husband’s access to the EV charger in the garage.  The CHH started calling the sinkhole “the gateway to hell.”   And further asked, “Is it a divine punishment?”

In the middle of the night, we woke up. The CHH said to me, “Do you think the house has fallen into the abyss while we were sleeping?”  Gee, thanks.  Now I will not be able to get back to sleep.  I read my book, a chapter about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, definitely not material designed to help me sleep. 

There are some things to be thankful for.  The house has not slid into the abyss.  Yet.  As my older brother pointed out, at least it’s not one of those underground coal fires that sometimes occur around here.

My younger brother helpfully said, “You should drop Cheerios down into the hole.”  This is a reference to this childhood memory:  When we were kids, our parents got us a globe because they were all into education and stuff.  It had all the latest countries on it – Yugoslavia, the USSR, East Germany, to name a few.  At some point the family globe developed a ½” diameter hole.  I think it was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  Of course, we kids thought it was a brilliant idea to put Cheerios into that hole.  That was highly educational.  It taught us that once a Cheerio went in there, it was dastardly hard to get it out.  My father was disgusted with our flippancy toward geographical knowledge.

Eastern Europe in the 1970s, about the era of our 
family globe.

On Wednesday, The Director of the town’s Public Works Department Himself and three other Public Works employees showed up at our house.  While the workers installed a steel plate over the sinkhole, The Director explained to me that the township needs to entirely replace the pipe running under our yard. This means much of that side of the yard will be dug up, and three of our trees will need to be removed.  

THREE TREES!  This is devastating.  We will be losing two pin oaks and one red maple.  They were already mature trees when we moved in about 30 years ago.  I wanted them to go on existing forever.    

The Director said the township will pay for all of it, and will even plant new trees for us. I wonder how much time we will have to decide on how many and what kind of trees to plant, and where.  I have an inkling that trees vastly affect the heating and cooling of the house but I don’t know the particulars.

The Dept of Public Works won’t start doing any work until next week at the earliest.  In the meantime, no kids, pets, adults, wildlife, or cars will fall in the hole.  We might be able to get some Cheerios in there, but I am not going close enough to find out.   

I will never feel the same again when I am standing on the driveway to shovel the snow. There will always be the feeling that the driveway could swallow me up at any moment.   

The whole (!) thing reminds me of one of the very best YA novels I have ever read.

First Lines: September 2023 edition

  

Art at our local library - 
a book tree!

Below are the first lines of the books I finished reading in September.  Includes one memoir, one Y.A. lit, one Bible book, two history books, one mystery, and one dystopian novel.

 

Book 1

“Work hard, kid, and you will be rewarded with a piece of the American Dream.” 

- Every suburban dad born between 1939 and 1963.

It came from a good place.  They wanted you to follow the path that had worked for them – the path that got them the home and the midsize sedan and the patch of lawn they’d constantly bitch about having to maintain. 

 

Book 2

Case 1: Till Death Us Do Part

Saturday, June 6, 1812

We were to meet him at midnight in the Dark Walk.  It was not an ideal arrangement: two unaccompanied women confronting a blackmailer in the most ill-lit, deserted part of Vauxhall Gardens.

 

 

Book 3

Grand Failure

Eleven-year-old Virgil Salinas already regretted the rest of middle school, and he’d only just finished sixth grade.

 

 

Book 4

The beginnings of this story lie far back in time, and its reverberations still sound today.

 

Book 5

Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God,  ….

 

 

Book 6

One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.

 

Book 7

Chapter 1: The Gas Man

If you want to get to the beginning of the shale revolution, pick up Interstate 35E out of Dallas and head north forty miles and then take the turnoff for the tiny town of Ponder.  Pass the feed store, the white water tower, the sign for the Cowboy Church, and the donut store that’s closed down.

 

Did not finish 

Understanding the Contours of Africa’s Past

The stories of entire continents cannot adequately be told in single-volume histories.

Altered Book
by artist Chris Fondi, August 2019

The titles and authors revealed:

 

Book 1

American Grunt: Ridiculous Stories of a Life Lived at $8.00 an Hour, by Kevin Cramer.

Local author!  354 pages. Published 2023.  

This book is funny and poignant all at the same time.  This fascinating memoir gives us a first-person look at what it is like to work at certain jobs, and especially reminds us to be very kind to the person who cleans out our rental cars.  Or who clean out anything.  Plenty of cuss language but it is all warranted and effective.  I recommend this book, especially if you have lived in SWPA.

 

 

Book 2

The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies (The Ill-Mannered Ladies #1), by Alison Goodman.  464 pages. Published 2023.

This book is essentially Woke Jane Austen.  Interesting characters, clever and unlikely plot twists.  I enjoyed it.  I have yet to find the existence of Book #2 in the supposed series.

 

Book 3

Hello, Universe by Erin Entrada Kelly with Isabel Roxas (Illustrator)  320 pages.  Published 2017.  Y.A. lit.  Winner of the Newbery Medal.

Quirky but lovable characters, except for the bully, who does not get his comeuppance, which makes the ending slightly unsatisfying, but more realistic.  Includes some scenes which were truly scary to me.

 

Book 4

King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild.  376 pages (text thru page 323; the rest is end notes). Published 1998.  With an intro by Barbara Kingsolver (which I did not read).

I feel that this is a book that a certain governor-running-for-president would not want people to read.  This book is not for the squeamish, but delves into an important part of history.  There is one part where the King of Belgium carries out exactly the same public relations move done by one Atty General William P. Barr, getting in front of a potentially damaging government report.  This is a well-written book on a disturbing topic.

 

 

Book 5

Letter to the Romans, by Paul.  Yes, that Paul.   20 pages.   First published about 58 CE.

I did a speed reading of this difficult biblical text.  There’s a fair amount of contradictory stuff in this letter.  You are saved by God’s grace, not by your acts, but also Do good acts so God doesn't punish you.  One very touching part is the mention of a whole bunch of women, presumably leaders in the early groups of Christians, at the end of the book.  What impressed me most was how little snippets of the book were extremely familiar, as this book is often quoted in short spurts, but most people, including me, have little understanding of the context for those snippets.

 

Book 6

The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid.  180 pages.  Published 2022.

This short book presents an interesting dystopian scenario. The opening is reminiscent of Kafka’s Metamorphosis.  The writing style, mostly lengthy sentences that wander all over the place, conveys uncertainty, which may have been the best for the subject matter (but I am not certain!).  I kept thinking that the scenario was meant to be a stand in for the pandemic, decided against it, only to revert to my original thought.  Its main concern is racism, but I feel it just stayed on the surface of that complicated societal ill.  In short, an unsettling book. 

RE the writing style:  The first sentence (above) is probably the shortest sentence in this book.  The second sentence is:

This dawned upon him gradually, and then suddenly, first as a sense as he reached for his phone that the early light was doing something strange to the color of his forearm, subsequently, and with a start, as a momentary conviction that there was somebody else in bed with him, male, darker, but this, terrifying though it was, was surely impossible, and he was reassured that the other moved as he moved, was in fact not a person, not a separate person, but was just him, Anders, causing a wave of relief, for if the idea that someone else was there was only imagined, then of course the notion that he had changed color was a trick too, an optical illusion, or a mental artifact, born in the slippery halfway place between dreams and wakefulness, except that by now he had his phone in his hands and he had reversed the camera, and he saw that the face looking back at him was not his at all.

Book 7

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin.  512 pages, but not all of that is text.  Published 2020.

I read this because I wanted an overview of the energy market, including the onset of fracking.  This is a good overview, although I found the author too dismissive of Native American needs and wants.  He gave a flippant treatment of the protest at Standing Rock against the oil pipeline.  The book did not include anything about renewable biodiesel, which I want to understand better.

 

Did not finish 

A History of Modern Africa: 1800 to the Present (Second Edition, published 2012) by Richard J. Reid.  448 pages.  The first edition was published in 2009.  

The first lines of this book counseled me not to read this very book!  So I didn’t.  I wanted to learn more about Africa.  This book probably would have partially met my need, but I chose to finish reading King Leopold’s Ghost instead, going for depth instead of breadth.  This book was not available for kindle, so I would have been required to read it on my tablet - another thing that helped me decide not to read it.  I might come back to this one.

 

 

 

History of These United States, the month of October

Selections from the Equal Justice Initiative History of Racial Injustice calendar.  I’ve chosen historical items from after 1900, with one exception this month.

Oct 6, 2009

White Louisiana official denies marriage license for interracial couple.

(A few weeks later, that official resigned under pressure.)

Oct 12, 1995

Police kill unarmed Black man in Brentwood, Pennsylvania, during traffic stop.

His name is Jonny Gammage.  He was suffocated by the police officers’ use of force.  Charges against the police officers were reduced or dismissed.  One officer was acquitted by an all-white jury and later promoted.  The US Dept of Justice stated in 1999 that there was not enough evidence that unreasonable force had been used.

Oct 15, 1883 - This is not 20th Century but I am including it to remind myself of where we have been before in this country.

Supreme Court strikes down 1875 Civil Rights Act; legitimating segregation and violent assaults against Black people.

The SCOTUS said that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 did not apply to private entities, only to governments.  

“The Supreme Court’s decision in the Civil Rights Cases eliminated the only federal law that prohibited racial discrimination by individuals or private businesses, and left African Americans who were victims of private discrimination to seek legal recourse in unsympathetic state courts. Racial discrimination in housing, restaurants, hotels, theaters, and employment, became increasingly entrenched and persisted for generations. It would take more than eighty years for the federal government to again attempt to outlaw discrimination with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

Oct 18, 1933

White mob of 2,000 people lynch George Armwood in Maryland

Oct 25, 1989  

Boston police harass Black neighborhoods after false shooting charge.

Oct 27, 1986

Federal Anti-Drug Abuse Act signed, creating racially biased 100 to 1 crack/powder cocaine disparity.

A recent attempt at a partial remedy.

Oct 28, 1958

Two Black boys, seven and nine years old, arrested and jailed for over three months after White girl kissed them on their cheeks.

[A mob of White men threatened to lynch the boys and their mothers.]

What We Learned This School Year 20/21: Covid Edition

A 2021 Still Life
April necessities

This was the school year when nearly all of us learned how to do a virtual class or meeting.  Not all of us learned to turn off our camera when eating or walking around during a zoom class/meeting.

Here are some selections from the broad swath of what our graduating senior, Younger Daughter, learned during her final year of college.  

What Our Graduating College Senior Learned

Class: Project Seminar 

This class was about archives.  The cadaver (physical body) - the ones used in medical school - can be thought of as an archive.  I learned that in this case, one must destroy data in order to use it and preserve it.

Class:  Lit and Science

I learned that anatomy textbooks used to be like pop-up books. And that before the 1800s the way people got cadavers was - if people were condemned to death and hung, hospitals were allowed to use the bodies.  

(Mom’s comment: She spent a lot of time thinking about cadavers.)

Class:  Molecular Biology

Really cool!  I learned about viral recombination and the viral reproductive system.  I learned that people are using bacterial DNA to form computer circuits to store data that can then be transformed back into movies, books, and other information.

(Mom’s comment: SAY WHAT?! DNA is used to store movies?!)

Class:  Cell Biology

I learned that it is apparently difficult for many people to give an engaging 15-minute presentation.  Most people don’t know how long 15 minutes is.  I learned about autophagy:  your body is supposed to chew up mitochondria, get rid of them, and remake them later.  However, as you get older, your body gets worse at doing this.

Class: Cell Biology Laboratory 

I learned that professors like to use undergraduates as free labor to do their lab work.

Class: Undergraduate Teaching Experience

(i.e. being an Organic Chemistry Teaching Assistant)

I learned how to put together a slide presentation. I learned that however interesting you make a presentation, no one will show up (neither in person nor online).

Class:  Biology Writing Class

I learned how to write scientifically, which was more fun than I thought it would be.  I learned how to summarize while still keeping an interesting tone and maintaining a low emotional level.

Class: Language of Medicine

I learned about Foucault - his theory on the evolution of medicine from the French Revolution until now.  I learned that I don’t want to read Foucault any more.

Class: Cellular and Developmental Biology Seminar

I learned that I was losing focus by this point.  It was very hard to do this class by zoom. 

Class:  Developmental Biology

I learned about the Hox genes - they determine where your arms go and where your legs go, so they don’t get mixed up.  The Hox genes work in a cascade fashion.

I learned that a sea urchin turns its body inside out when gastrulation is finished (except “inside out” is not exactly it). Gastrulation is the formation of the layers of the body  - the endoderm, the ectoderm and the mesoderm.

I learned that there is a primitive streak in the chick. 

(Mom’s comment:  I have no idea what any of this means.)

Class:  Developmental Biology Laboratory

I learned that I hate working with flies so much!  They look cute under the microscope, but they are so annoying!  You have to put them to sleep, but there are always some who will not go to sleep (and more complaining about flies).  And fly embryos are even more annoying.  I also learned that I was the only one in the class who kept a proper lab notebook.

(Mom’s comment:  Only a biology major would think flies look cute.)

Class:  Life

I learned that I enjoy having people over for tea.  I learned how to bake.  I learned that moving is an incredible hassle that I never want to do again.

(Mom’s comment:  She said that before the move had actually taken place.  It’s done now.  But she certainly will have to move again at some point.)

What the Common Household Mom Learned

I learned to be so very grateful for my mother’s life and wisdom at the same time as I miss her greatly.  I learned that grief has no timeline, and that each of us grieves differently.  

I learned that democracy is fragile and far more dependent on norms than we expect it to be.  That is a lesson of the past few years, not just this school year.

I learned that 39 candidates for one office is too many candidates to reasonably keep track of (actually it was for 9 seats of the same judicial office but no matter how many seats, 39 is too many). 

A distanced graduation.  But at least
they got to graduate in person.

 

It can snow in April - but we already knew this.

History of These United States, the month of August

Selections from the Equal Justice Initiative History of Racial Injustice calendar.  I’ve chosen historical items from after 1900. 

From the month of August

Aug 1, 1944

In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 6,000 white transit employees strike after eight Black men begin training as motormen on street cars, a job that had been reserved for white men only.

Aug 4, 1964

Bodies of murdered civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman are discovered in a Mississippi dam, nearly two months after their disappearance.

Aug 5, 2014 (a mere 7 years ago!)

Black workers at Memphis, Tennesse cotton gin file discrimination lawsuit after White supervisor uses racial slurs and threatens to hang them for drinking from “White” water fountain.

Aug 10, 1988

More than 45 years after internment of Japanese Americans began, the U.S. government authorizes reparations payments to surviving detainees.

Aug 11, 2017

White nationalists protest removal of a Confederate statue in Charlottesville, Virginia; the next day, a protestor dries a car into counter-protestors, injuring 19 and killing one woman.

[The statue of Robert E. Lee was removed on July 10, 2021.]

Aug 14, 1908

After failed lynching attempt, mob of 5,000 white people storms Black neighborhoods, burns Black businesses and homes, and kills Black citizens in Springfield, Illinois riots.

Aug 22, 1905

White people riot in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after Charles Miller, a Black man, enters a public restaurant.

Aug 23, 1989

White mob in Bensonhurst, New York, murders Black teenager Yusef Hawkins for visiting a white girl.