Up Dates

   It's an odd phrase, really.   Why not use the word "in addition" or the actual meaning of the word which would be "up-to-date?"  Only about 70 years old, the term "updates" or the slang version of the singular ("Here's an update") is relatively recent and almost begs for a new phrase (much as the symbol # which has grown up to a new generation of Twitter users as a "hashtag" and to an older generation of voicemail and telephone users as a "pound" symbol, as in "to hear this menu again press the star key; to end this call press the pound key"...it's also the "sharp" key to readers of sheet music).  Ahem, so the word "updates."  It's in our lexicon and almost instantly recognizable, but what exactly IS an up-date?  Funny how language sometimes pulls us in without questioning.  The show Chrysti the Wordsmith points out many such words and phrases, one of the most recent stumpers being the word "bleachers," a poignant word with baseball's current World Series (limited to the "world" of the U.S. it should be noted, another puzzling part of the relatively new American vocabulary); turns out that even she had difficulty finding it's origins other than a sleight posed a century after the Revolution when the British made fun of the American form of grandstanding and defined the word in their dictionaries (this from Collins English dictionary) as: ...a tier of seats in a sports stadium, etc, that are unroofed and inexpensive; the people occupying such seats.  It should be noted that the upper tier of the Colosseum in Rome has just be opened to the modern public, bleachers in definition for they were deemed unworthy of seating anyone except the poor; the British version apparently reserved the term solely for the cheap wood platforms that sat out in the sun and were soon "bleached," according to Chrysti (one has to give credit to the word itself of "bleach" turning from a verb to a noun as in "pick up some bleach at the store" -- dive into the chemical side of bleach and you'll find some controversy over its possible effects on both our waterways and our noses leading many to switch to just using hydrogen peroxide, an oxidizer commonly found in "color safe" bleaches).

    Phew, took a bit of a side road there...so, updates.  Mainly, the leaves are still falling in my area and looking skywards the trees are only half done.  The weather is cooling but not freezing other than the pre-dawn cold which locks in patterns of dampness and leaves the unwatered lawns dusted with frost.  For some such talk of fall leaves, mulching, and mowing is either old news or something totally foreign so to be brief, I am throwing in a few pictures of the changing season as it happens (lest you think me jesting about the amount of leaves to rake up and mulch almost daily).  The bees and hummingbirds are for the most part long gone, but I leave the sugared water out for the stragglers who are storing up their carbohydrates (in speaking with an aviary, hummingbirds need protein far more than carbohydrates in the cooler weather so any that haven't already migrated will likely be doomed due to the lack of insects). 

Patterns of leaves frosted on the deck

 

My actual back yard being carpeted with the leaves of fall.

    Often at such times of year, the cooler weather bringing a bit of a chill to the air and the grass itself declaring its own readying for the coming winter (watering stopped weeks ago as this is the time of year to drain sprinklers and begin storing your patio and lawn items) I reflect on the changes surrounding my own life as friends and even family discover maladies that were apparently well hidden.  Melanomas, cardiac issues, repaired knees, even tumors.  The London Review of Books had a diary piece by author Harry Strawson talking about the fMRI tracking his brain tumor (the "f" is for
functional", the MRI delving deeper in the magnetic iron and allowing for a more detailed series of images as to your brain's functions and reactions to images, sounds and thoughts).  After a series of tests he is given yet another and commented: It ended after about a third of the alphabet had been cycled through.   I was given a short break between exercises; it felt eerily quiet as the machine fell dormant.  Soon a voice over the intercom explained the second exercise: an image of a noun would appear on the screen, and I had to think of a corresponding verb.  I could foresee problems here too, but the images were straightforward and flashed past at speed (there is a limit to what you can reasonably and rapidly think to do with a football, a spade or a shoe).  Half an hour or so later I was spat out of the scanner, frozen and ears ringing.  It felt as if someone had ransacked the inside of my head and left the windows open.  I climbed down from the bench and unsteadily crossed the room, disorientated and sea-legged.  I put my belt and watch back on, and scooped up the handful of change.  I saw the fMRI scans the following week.  I sat in the same chair in which I had misspelled ‘world’ backwards a month earlier, facing the neurosurgeon who had asked the question.  As before, ghost-like images of my skull hovered on computer monitors – cheered up, this time, by spots of blue and red.  I looked at them: here were the eloquent areas of my brain, from which all the words I have ever spoken or written emanate, and all the words I have ever heard or read are transformed into meaning.  It didn’t look like much – as if a child had absentmindedly taken her crayons to the scans and quickly got bored.  The colourful regions were meagre in size compared to the colourless hulk of the tumour, which bore down threateningly.   

    He survives (some of my friends haven't been as fortunate).  But as with those icy patterns left by the leaves, such reflections are worth noting, as if updating our lives.  Where are we at this point?  How much time are we taking to notice the world around us?  How much of life are we letting slip by?  Time is valuable, as they say, but how much value are we giving it?  The seasons do that for me, the renewal of spring as valuable as the closure of fall.  Take this with you: researchers can now store 250 million (that's 250,000,000) GIGAbytes of data in just one gram...of our DNA!  Every day we should be amazed; something as simple as my dog rolling around over and over in the crunchy leaves brings an unexpected joy as I gaze at her simple joy.  She is celebrating the fall, even at 13, perhaps knowing that she's happily sailing past the normal life expectancy of German shepherds, creaky bones and all.  As to those updates I had mentioned earlier, well, perhaps they'll appear in a new post simply titled "in addition."  Or maybe even the word "bleachers."  Another time, as they say...

Another fall sunset taken last night