Diane Ackerman: Farewell to Summer and Its Buzzing Creatures

This essay was my favorite of the week because it was the only one that brought back my own memories.  That coupled with the recent end of summer and the beginning of fall made this a more interesting read than the others.

In the essay, Ackerman acknowledges her “precious last days with the hummingbirds.”  This made me think of the last days of this past summer and my awareness of its soon approaching end.  I remembered my recent attempts to do activities only possible in summer before it got too cold in the fall.  I savored the last swimming, cliff jumping, and enjoying the generally relaxed feeling associated with summer just as Ackerman enjoyed her final days watching the hummingbirds.

At the end, Ackerman’s last line is, “..they always leave too soon.”  This is true for anything you enjoy, but also makes the time you enjoy it that much more valuable.  Just like you would take sunny days for granted without the occasional rain, Ackerman would probably not enjoy the hummingbirds as much if they were around all the time.  The hummingbirds, like the changing seasons, are variables in our lives that would make our everyday routines that much more bland without them.

Ski trip

One friday night when I was still in high school, my friend and I decided to go on a ski trip.  This was pretty much a spur of the moment idea and was a ridiculous decision to start.  My friend Brian got out of work at 10:30 pm, we hatched this plan by 10:35, gathered our gear and left for Sunday River in Maine at 11 pm.  This is normally about a 5 hour trip, but for two idiots leaving in the middle of the night with a road map and a case of Mountain Dew, it would take much longer than that.

We were on the right course for the first leg of the trip, as it took us right past Killington, a trip we had taken many times before.  We started to get in trouble when we got into New Hampshire, as this was beyond our familiarity.  This is where bad instructions were given, by myself in fact.  In a fatigued, but caffeine powered daze, I read the map wrong and told Brian to take a right instead of a left.  This was the worst possible spot to do this as we travelled over an hour and a half going the wrong way before we realized our next turn had not come about.  It was about 2:30 in the morning by the time we finally turned around.  On the return trip back to the correct route, we encountered no less than 6 moose in the road.

It was 5:30 am when we finally arrived at Sunday River.  We tried to sleep in the car before the mountain opened, but were unable to so we just lay awake cursing over our mistake.  By the end of the full day of skiing, we had both been awake for about 30 hours.  In this state I had become almost delirious, even more so when we were driving back home.  By the time I got to sleep in a hotel near Killington, I had been awake for 38 hours and was pretty much hallucinating from lack of sleep.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr: In the Kitchen

To start, I thought “In the Kitchen” was going to be about something else entirely.  The last thing I was expecting was that it would be about hair and how important it was to Mr. Gates and his family.   This essay made me think differently about conformity.  I had never even though of this as something people did to fit in better.  The extremes that were taken to make your hair look different seem extremely strange to me, but it gave me more insight into the times.

I have to say, this essay was extremely boring to me.  I did learn something new, but it was not something that I could relate to or was interested in.