Dear Friends, Family, Neighbors, and Those of You I Don’t Yet Know —
Welcome to this issue of Odd Company, which I hope will be mainly about gossip, though I expect that, along the way, we’ll touch on the Zen of orchid neglect and relationships with people about whom we’ve made uninformed assumptions.
Welcome also to the end of June (how the heck did that happen?) and the beginning of July. I’ve had such a busy time for the past couple of weeks, I haven’t been able to give the garden (let alone my little flock of bedraggled orchids) as much attention as usual. The big garden and the vegetable garden are well enough established to last a while on the automatic irrigation system and an occasional handful of slug bait, but bad things can happen even so. Last week I found one of my artichoke plants wilted and keeling over. It happened suddenly, and the artichoke right next to it was doing fine, so at first I assumed some pesky gopher had eaten its roots. But no. A little extra water revived it. It could use a shot of fish emulsion, too, but as mentioned in our last issue, we are beings with a finite amount of time and to-do lists of infinite length. The best we can do is what seems most important or most urgent. The rest…well, the orchids are a good example. They are so uncomplaining. They will go a month with no attention whatsoever. On that schedule, let’s just say it’s hard for them to look their best. They make air roots by the bzillion. Their leaves shrivel and droop. They still bloom, of course, because they’re convinced they’re dying, and spreading their DNA is at the very top of their to-do list.
Meanwhile, having gotten to bed late last night, today I needed a nap more than I needed to water the orchids. More than I needed to fertilize the artichokes. More than I needed to clean the cats’ litter box. And when I got up, I needed to do some sourdough baking more than any of those other things, because my sourdough starter hadn’t had any attention at all, literally, in six months. The good news is that, as explained to me by my friend Liz who is a biologist and ought to know, refrigerated sourdough starter in a tightly sealed jar will go dormant and can survive that way almost indefinitely. She must be right, because we now have freshly baked homemade sourdough whole wheat banana bread. We also have homemade sourdough focaccia, which will be lovely with the fresh tomato soup I’ll soon be making, assuming the various critters who love tomatoes spare a few for us. Life is so full of possibilities dependent on contingencies. Which is why it’s a good idea not to think about the future in too much detail.
Last week I spent a very pleasing afternoon and dinner with one of my nephews. I don’t see my nephews very often, so this was a particular treat. The circumstances weren’t ideal. He had come to Stanford to see a medical specialist and I was standing by to lead him through the maze of our behemoth medical center. In the end, the news was good. Whew! But in the lead-up, he was understandably as jumpy as a cat. He is a tall 40-something white guy with many beautiful tattoos. He lives in California’s central valley, works for a Kenworth diesel parts distributor, is a serious hunter and fisherman, and proudly supports Donald Trump. You might think he and I would have little in common other than shared blood. But in fact, we had no trouble laughing and joking and finding things to talk about. What one quickly learns at such times is that political leanings are small beans in the big soup of human relationships. It doesn’t take long for people with integrity to earn each other’s trust. And it’s very hard to dislike someone once you understand they would give you the shirt off their back.1
How did we get into this predicament — this massive misunderstanding about who we are and who everybody else is? There are a lot of theories. Most boil down to an erosion of trust in…well…just about everything and everyone. But what caused this erosion of trust? Jonathan Haidt blames the “Like” and “Retweet” buttons on social media platforms.2 I agree, social networking is partly to blame, but only partly. The real-world institutions and organizations that once helped us get to know and like people from many different walks of life — churches, volunteer activities, bowling teams — have all but disappeared. We’ve become so obsessed with making and spending money (and in many cases, our employers have become so obsessed with owning all of our waking hours) that we have almost no time for socializing. We often work far from where we live. We barely have time to read our children a story before bed. But we also prefer to associate with people who are like us. It’s just more comfortable. And we have more and more options for avoiding people we don’t see eye-to-eye with. But the most glaring fact is that we have fewer and fewer opportunities to create the one thing that is most vital for human thriving: a robust network of people we care about and who care about us.
Gossip also plays a part in all this. Have you ever had a friend who is constantly saying mean things about people you both know? I have, and eventually I concluded that if she was saying mean things about others to me, she was probably also saying mean things about me to others. Human beings have a natural desire to share information. This sharing can be a great benefit to all involved. But there are many types of information sharing, some of which are actively bad for human relationships. Webster’s and various psychologists will tell you that “gossip” means just the exchange of information. But call someone a gossip and you’ll quickly find out how negative the word actually is. That’s because out here in the real world, gossip is different from ordinary communication. It’s stuff we say about people when they are not present. It may be rumor and innuendo — claims we’re not sure about, but we repeat them as if they’re God’s truth. As the social scientist Brené Brown points out, when we tell a friend something in confidence, we feel betrayed if they repeat it, especially if it’s behind our back. Most of us will never fully trust that friend again.
Modern culture gives us permission to gossip freely — and even encourages it. Gossip is bad enough when it’s spread one person at a time. But when a rumor “goes viral,” as so often happens on social media platforms, lives can be pointlessly ruined. Personally, my rules of thumb for avoiding ruined lives are these:
Never say something behind someone’s back, in an email, or in a social media post that you’d be unwilling to say to them in person.
Only repeat things you know to be true.
If repeating something would be unkind or hurtful or would betray a trust, don’t do it.
If repeating something would be pointless or unhelpful, don’t do it.
Time to close for tonight, as I’m beginning to see double. Always a sign to pay attention to! Because it’s so close to July 4th, I thought a patriotic song would be nice. So here’s Ray Charles, who needs no introduction, with what is surely one of the greatest performances ever of “America the Beautiful.” The melody was written in the late 1800’s by an Episcopalian choirmaster in a church in New Jersey. The lyrics were written around 1895 by American political activist Katharine Lee Bates. Speaking of which, my first stepmother was an elementary school teacher who spent many years working with six and seven-year-olds. One day she assigned her class to draw illustrations for “America the Beautiful.” One earnest little boy produced a drawing of an airplane with all sorts of colorful globules hanging from the wings. When asked what this picture illustrated, he said, “This is the fruited plane! Can’t you tell?” Of course!
Happy Fourth. I hope you’ll take the day off and go someplace for a picnic. Till next time, use your words with care.
Related to this topic, I’ve been reading David Litt’s warm, hilarious book, It’s Only Drowning: A True Story of Learning to Surf and the Search for Common Ground, about Litt and his brother-in-law, who initially have very little in common other than a love of surfing.
“Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” by Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic Magazine, May 2022.