Notes From A Bear's Journey

     My thoughts swirled like a whirlwind of tiny dust particles caught in a beam of sunlight when it hits the living room floor...random, floating, too small to grasp or capture, plentiful.  Much of this was because I had been sporadically reading a number of those Best American series of books.  It's something I do every three years or so, order about 8 or 10 of the books from past years (in this case from 2017 to 2020) and see what I may have missed.  New (to me at least) was the series Best American Food Writing (their other collections span everything from sports to science & nature, short stories to mysteries, travel to poetry, and more, even comics and non-required reading).  As before, I found it dazzling to read just from the few I had ordered.  The writing was as terrific as in past years, and reminded me of the difficult task each editor faces when honing down the list from the hundreds and hundreds of submitted published pieces, to a smaller list of just a hundred

     At some point you may have entertained the thought of moving to a new place, whether to a new apartment or home or even to another part of the country.  But whether you rented or owned, and regardless of whether you wanted to move or were forced to move, you likely faced a price shock.  How much was the rent on that apartment?  Or was that all the homes that were available?   Said a piece in TIME :  The median price for a house in the U.S. has climbed nearly 20%, while the mean price of a rental unit has jumped roughly 14%, according to a Zillow index (it notes that in Sunnyvale, a city just south of San Francisco, "...the median price of a midtier home exceeds $1.5 million; a one-bedroom apartment rents for an average of $3,330 a month.")  Said HUD (Housing and Urban Development) Secretary Marcia Fudge in the article: The housing crisis...is about much more than housing.  It’s about people no longer being able to live where the jobs are.  It’s about companies no longer

Image: Semnic/Shutterstock       We seem to live in a world of numbers, a world of statistics and counts.  One example was the LRB report on the recent climate summit, COP26 .  Such events draw dignitaries and government spokespeople, similar to economic meetings such as the G7 and G20 summits.  So I figured if you added a few hundred countries plus, their delegates or whatever. (not counting security), you may reach a number shy of 5-7,000, or that would have been my guess.  I was wrong.  Here's how reporter Jenny Turner described it: The​ COPs are by far the biggest meetings in the UN system, and COP26 really was enormous, with nearly forty thousand delegates registered by the UNFCCC.  From the outside, it’s a sealed campus made up from three events venues --the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre, the Ovo Hydro and the Armadillo-- linked together, with a temporary structure built over the car park as big again as all three.  On the inside, it’s like an airport, concours

     Have you ever done that, just "thrown" something out to the universe?  My wife and I did just that the other day, looking at a few pictures of our dogs from months and years past and "asking" them to keep an eye out for another dog that might be ready for a home.  While we weren't quite "ready" since our other dog had only been gone for a few months, we did miss having a dog in the house.  Now if asking the universe to do something like that sounds a bit kooky to you, let me back up a bit.  My wife and I are believers in thinking that for our our animals (and others really), it is the quality and not the quantity of life that matters.  And so 2 months earlier we made the decision to put down our rescued dog, partially because of his pannus (a hereditary disease which left him almost completely blind) and also because his rear legs were rapidly failing; with winter and the resulting ice already here, his first slip on the outside ice caused him to