Christmas Decorations, Present and Past

     Last week, I cut down a little fir tree close to my house and brought it inside. Then I invited a friend to come over for eggnog and tree trimming. 

    It's not a modern Christmas tree, with a perfect cone shape and tight limbs. It's a wild tree. The ornaments don't nestle into branches; they dangle where you can see them. (Look for the origami and other decades-old, hand-made ornaments in the picture.) I found the the tree growing trunk-to-trunk next to a large ponderosa pine. With truncated back branches it nestles close to the banister, allowing walking room to the pantry and the bathroom.

    The Christmas trees in the larger house of my childhood were always ceiling-high and broad-limbed, as Christmas trees from lots were in those days. We, too, had ornaments from long ago, such as twisted tin dangles made from tin cans during World War II. Tinsel had to be hung one strand at a time, the way I still do it. Every year, when the tree was trimmed, my mother would stand back and say, "It's the most beautiful tree we've ever had."

    One year my father built a five-foot-tall Christmas star. Every year after that he would lay the metal strips, screwed into a star shape, on the floor and string the large-bulb, multi-colored lights along the points. Then he would climb onto the roof and erect the star at the peak. Every evening during the Christmas season, we would plug in the star just at dusk. We couldn't see it, but we knew people driving down the road could. (After a while, Dad just left the star on the roof, unlit until the Christmas season.)

    We were so proud of that star! When we had been out and were driving home, down the long, dark hill of Long Island Drive, we eagerly looked for it. We were probably at least a mile away and still high on the hill when we spotted it, colorful and bright and big, asserting itself alone through the distance, in the dark. No other Christmas lights were visible, just our star. We thought it was thrilling. 

    It was that kind of family. Not that we had to have the best of everything but that what we had was so often what we had created. Other houses were more grand, but ours was the Coogle home. Other Christmas lights were more elaborate, but ours was a Coogle star.

Atmospheric river

    It has been raining steadily for two days and nights. Is it another atmospheric river? 

    Such a great term! My son, Ela, visiting during the days of intense rain before Thanksgiving, gave it to me.

    I was immediately charmed. It sounded like something from a fairy tale, a flow from mystical regions through the sky, touching down to earth with replenishing rain, flowing and weaving and meandering like an earthly river, carrying fairies and elves riding on dragonflies, riding the currents on invisible canoes. 

    I wasn't far wrong. The atmospheric river starts in the tropics and moves towards the North Pole, sliding over the Pacific Coast into the valleys, then up and over the Cascades. It's a river of vapor, carrying more liquid than the Amazon River and treating mountains the way the Rogue River treats boulders—obstacles to flow over. 

    Since 2019, atmospheric river events have been rated, along the lines of hurricane ratings, from AR 1 (weakest) to AR 5 (strongest). AR 5 means "exceptional" or "primarily hazardous." AR 4 means "mostly hazardous, also beneficial." Damage could be from mudslides, flooding, saturated soils, windstorms, and, where I live, downed trees. That week's storm was rated between AR 4 and AR 5. 

    At that, I abandoned the fairy-tale fascination. 

     That afternoon, clothed against the rain, Ela stepped through the upstairs window to unplug my gutter. 

    "Don't get swept away in the river!" I warned.

    Unlike the Rogue River, where you could, if you wanted, stand on the shore and watch it flow past for years, an atmospheric river eventually flows past. At 4:00 that afternoon the rain stopped. Everything became quiet. Occasionally a drop of water plinked against the deck. Patches of blue showed through thinning gray mists.    

A Great Job

    One of the most exciting jobs I have ever had is to write profiles of Marshall Scholars for the Marshall Scholars Newsletter. I have met so many amazing people this way, people who have followed astonishing careers and done much good in the world. Here are a few examples:

    Terrorism studies. Audrey Cronin's career has centered on understanding terrorism and terrorists and helping governments and other groups prevent terrorist acts.

   Pharmaceuticals. Alex Oshmyansky was so angry at drug companies for their exorbitant prices that he started a Public Benefit Corporation, backed by billionaire TV personality Mark Cuban, to lower the cost of generic drugs by eliminating the middlemen of the industry whom Oshmyansky called "the worst actors…a morass of, basically, theft." 

    Music. Concert pianist Donna Stoering started a nonprofit, Listen for Life, through which she has gone around the world to preserve native music by filming and interview musicians, making their music as exciting for young people as MTV. 

    Climate change. Jennifer Mills is a scientist at a company that counters the effects of climate change by using an "enhanced weathering technique" to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. (You can imagine what a stretch that article was for me to write!)

    Literature. John Galassi became a publisher with and, finally, president of the prestigious literary publishing house Farrar Strauss and Giroux, discovering, among other writers, Lydia Davis, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, George Packer, and Alice McDermott. He is also an award-winning translator of Italian poetry.

    Journalism. Lane Greene is a business and finance correspondent for The Economist. (Another topic way outside my usual path.)

   Sports. Ahalya Lettenberger is a world champion swimmer whose physical impairment (arthrogryposis) led her not only into paralympics sports but into bioengineering studies and a search for assistant technologies for people with disabilities.

    Medicine. Geoffrey Tabin, a world-class mountain climber and one of the inventors of bungee jumping (along with other members of the Oxford University Dangerous Sports Club), has gone around the world as an ophthalmologist with the goal of eliminating treatable blindness in developing countries. He is a recipient of the Dalai Lama's Unsung Heroes of Compassion Award.

    These Marshall Scholars are also just plain brilliant. Take Alex Oshmyanski. He taught himself trigonometry and calculus when he was in grade school, graduated from the University of Denver in one year, entered medical school when he was 19 and won a Marshall Scholarship the same year, earned a Ph.D. in mathematics at Oxford and an MD from Duke, and took a year of law school as "an elaborate hobby" while he was doing a medical residency. 

    I am awed by such brilliance, but even more, I am impressed by the way so many Marshall Scholars use their brilliance to make the world a better place.