Author Archive: Christopher Waldrop

Basket Case.

Author: March 14, 2025 3 Comments

People make fun of me when I tell them what I’m majoring in at college. They say “I thought that was just a joke!” Well, let me tell you, it does sound funny and a lot of us who major in it joke about it too, but there’s also a very serious side to it. Do you think basket weaving is easy? Have you ever tried it? Do it before you make jokes. There’s a lot more to it than just threading a strand around the spokes. That takes a lot of manual dexterity and also concentration and time. And you have to think about the materials you’re using. Wicker, reed, rattan, and bamboo all have to be handled differently, and each one can be woven in a wide range of styles. Those are just some of the most common materials, the sort of stuff you’d get from your local hobby shop, if it hasn’t gone out of business. If it has, well, you can buy a kit online if you want, but, as a college student, I’m also learning how to forage for as well as grow my own raw materials. If you think that’s easy then just try it. But don’t come crying to me when your willow tree dies because you didn’t know where to plant it.

Yes, I know, the process of making baskets can be mostly automated. Mostly. Who do you think designs and builds the machines that make baskets? Well, mostly engineers, but they need to consult with trained basket makers to know where to start. It’s all interrelated. And think about how useful baskets are. Let’s back up a bit. Think about the whole history of humanity and our reliance on handmade crafts. That kind of puts things in perspective, doesn’t it? Now think about all the things you can use baskets for: storage, carrying. Well, they can be decorative too. The point is, if you’ve got a nice basket for carrying things or storing things you’re not just going to throw it out. If you were going to do that you might as well use a plastic bag. Thanks for helping to trash the planet. And when’s the last time you heard about a kid suffocating inside a woven basket?

Great, so you want to know about the other part. That’s not easy either. What, do you think we just sit waist deep in a swimming pool? Or hold our breath while weaving? No, we go all in. We don’t have to do it but we like the extra challenge. And that’s what it’s all about: learning to overcome challenges. I realized that way back in fifth grade when my English teacher used to use “underwater basket weaving” as a metaphor for something useless that didn’t require any thought. Not that I’m knocking English. After all English majors know what I’m talking about. We even get the same questions. “What are you going to do with that?” I don’t know. How does creative problem solving, manual dexterity, and scuba certification look on a resume? Exactly. It’s not like I’m studying something so highly specialized it’ll only be applicable to one career path. If I wanted that I would have studied accounting.

Source: Tenor

Not Non-Fiction, Submitted For Your Approval., The Weekly Essay

Passing Through Uranus.

Author: March 13, 2025 1 Comment

Source: Wikipedia

On March 13th, 1781 the composer, musician, and amateur astronomer William Herschel looked through his telescope and realized what he’d initially thought was a comet was, in fact, a previously unknown planet. It was the first planet discovered in modern times and, after a lot of discussion, would eventually be named Uranus, after the primordial Greek god of the sky. Although it had been observed since ancient times it was so distant and so difficult to see it was assumed to be a star. The discovery that it was a planet is why I think Uranus deserves special recognition.

When Voyager 2 flew past Uranus in 1986 astronomers were unimpressed and thought it was a pretty boring planet. Since then interest in Uranus has picked up. Seasonal changes and wind speeds of 560 miles per hour have been found on Uranus. Its temperature of -200 degrees Celsius means Uranus is a very, very cold place. Until very recently it was thought to be the only gas giant that didn’t emit detectable heat. Now it’s been determined that it does emit heat, though less than Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune. It also remains unusual for its axial tilt of 98 degrees, making Uranus the most lopsided planet in the solar system.

If space travel advances Uranus may someday also be very important as a launching point for missions leaving the solar system. The large quantities of methane in Uranus may even be a source of fuel, if we can tap into it. It’s fourteen times more massive than Earth so Uranus has a very intense gravitational pull. It’s also not easy to get there. Even traveling at the speed of light it would take an Earth ship almost two and a half hours to get to Uranus.

More terrestrially there’s the town of Uranus, Missouri, a small stopping point for tourists along the historic Route 66, where you can visit the Fudge Factory And General Store, and where, the mayor tells me, they have a special celebration every March 13th.

This is why I think Uranus Day is an event we can all get behind.

Source: Uranus Fudge Factory

Adventures In Busing., Happy Birthday., Keep Looking Up, Ramble With Me., Submitted For Your Approval., The Vault

Morning Light.

Author: March 10, 2025 2 Comments

The change to Daylight Saving Time this weekend meant that for the first time in months I left for work in the dark. Because my morning commute takes me almost due east there were a few days when I was driving right into the sun. Maybe that’s why this morning I was so conscious of the artificial lights I passed, still aglow in the rising dawn. If there’s an advantage to the time change it’s that it makes me more aware, although I may be unusual in that. While waiting at a red light I saw two guys in the middle of the cross street standing by a white pickup truck; there was a dark blue pickup truck right behind it. The blue pickup’s front was touching the white one’s back fender. They were both laughing about it and before the light changed they pulled into a parking lot, presumably to exchange insurance information, though from my vantage point I couldn’t see any damage.

It’s strange that I’d see an accident on my way to work. For one thing I don’t see many accidents anyway, and I’m grateful for that. But also at least one study has found that there’s a drop in accidents following the spring change to Daylight Savings Time, with an increase in the fall.

Seeing a small fender bender made me even more conscious of the road ahead as I drove into the dawn, streetlights winking out and lights still on in businesses and apartments dimming as I got closer to work, the sun still not over the horizon after I parked and walked across the roof of the parking garage.

Adventures In Busing., Quick Takes., Ramble With Me.

Like A Surgeon.

Author: March 8, 2025 2 Comments

Earlier this week I was walking across a college campus and passed by a poster offering help to students who are preparing to take the MCAT—the Medical College Admission Test that would-be doctors have to take, and pass, to start their real medical training. And it reminded me of a time from my own college days when my friend Jen took the MCAT. The day before she took it a bunch of us gathered in someone’s dorm room and made posters expressing our support and cheering her on. Most of the posters were the standard “GO JEN!” type, and they were really fun. One of our friends was an art student and hers were really good. She drew the MCAT as an actual cat, a supervillain with an “M” on its chest, being punched pour by Jen. I, however, am not an artist. I like to doodle, sketch, and even made a brief but disastrous attempt at oil painting, but that’s another story. However I was an English major so of course I’d taken Anatomy 101, not only to get that science credit out of the way but because I was, and still am, interested in science. I think that’s the nature of English majors, though, and writers generally: we’re curious about everything because anything can be material.

Jen, by the way, not only aced the MCAT but has had a long and successful career as a doctor. To celebrate that, and to cheer on all those preparing to take the test, and just for fun, I decided to recreate the posters I made. These aren’t too far off from the originals. Like I said I’m not an artist but a little knowledge can be a funny thing.

American Graffiti.

Look Before You Leap.

Author: March 7, 2025 3 Comments

When I was offered a golden parachute for my retirement I jumped at it. Well, not literally. The jump would come later because it turned out what they were giving me was an actual golden parachute. Literally. I don’t know how they got enough pure gold to make an entire parachute and it’s probably best not to ask. Sure, it’s just gold foil so it’s not exactly thick but it’s still a parachute. All folded up and in the pack ready to go. The thing’s got to weigh at least fifty pounds. I checked and the price of gold is close to $3000 an ounce right now. If I can find a place to cash all that in I really will be set for life. That’s the problem, though. It’s not like I can just walk into a pawn shop with fifty pounds of gold foil and expect them to buy it from me on the spot. Even if I can still find one of those cash for gold places I couldn’t expect them to have enough on hand to buy it all. If they could I’d need five, maybe six briefcases for all that cash. Okay, now I know I’m being ridiculous. They’d give me a check or maybe we could work out some kind of direct deposit. Even if they could, though, I’d be lucky to get the whole amount. Talk about flooding the market. It’s not like a few years ago when there was one of those cash for gold places on every corner and I could have made a separate stop at each one before they knew what hit them.

What about the taxes? Could I set up a Swiss bank account? How hard is it to do that? Or maybe one of those offshore deals in some place like the Cayman Islands. I would have looked into this if I’d known I was going to suddenly get this much gold. I guess I still have time, though.

Yeah, now that I think about it I realize I really don’t want to cash it in all at once. It would be better to break it up into little pieces and cash it in over six months or maybe a year. That would be smarter and even a little bit of gold is going to be enough to live on for a pretty long time.

That still leaves me with the question of whether I can sell it like it is. Are there places that take gold foil? Maybe I could find places that make statues, like the Oscars or something. Or those super fancy restaurants that put gold foil on desserts sometimes. But I doubt they’d want this much gold. Now that I have it, though, I’d kind of like to try one of those desserts. Hey, I could even make my own. Then I’d get the gold back. Yeah, that’s kind of gross but I still wouldn’t want to waste it.

Maybe it would be smarter to melt it down into little ingots or something. How hard could it be to melt gold foil? Oh, this says the melting point of gold is almost two thousand degrees. I guess it wouldn’t be that easy. Maybe I should buy a forge or something. I bet I can get one online for pretty cheap. Sure, I’ve got a big wad of gold right now but I still want to be smart about how I spend it.

Speaking of research I also need to figure out how to open this parachute. I never really thought about it before but I think this building’s got about twenty, maybe twenty-five floors. That’s got to be at least three-hundred feet. Should I check that? Never mind. I should be fine if I just pull the cord as soon as I’m in the air. But it’s almost five o’clock and that’s when they said they’d be throwing me off the building so I really need to figure this out.

At least I’m not stupid like Dan in the next cubicle who took the severance package. That cost him an arm and a leg.

Not Non-Fiction, Submitted For Your Approval., The Weekly Essay

I Feel Like A Dip.

Author: March 4, 2025 3 Comments

Bobbie’s Dairy Dip is open again. It closes every November and the owners used to put up a sign that said, “Closed for the season. Reason? Freezin’!” Maybe they stopped because they didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that they were closed, but I liked that sign. There was something bittersweet about it, knowing that, like migratory birds or hibernating animals, the ice cream stand was gone but would return with warmer weather. Well, it’s still not exactly warm. They reopened on a very chilly March 1st and when I passed by I didn’t feel like waiting in the very long line for a caramel milkshake, or even their special black bean and avocado burgers, though one of those would have been a nice way to warm up.

When I was a kid we didn’t eat ice cream in the winter. I don’t think it was ever explicitly stated, and there was no specific reason for it other than no one in my family seemed inclined to combine frozen weather with frozen food. There wasn’t even a specific time period; my mother just stopped buying ice cream once the cold weather settled in. I was aware of it but didn’t really think about why until I was visiting an aunt one January and she scooped up a couple of bowls of mint chocolate chip.

“We’re having ice cream in winter?” I asked. I wasn’t objecting—quite the opposite, really. It was just a very minor part of my worldview being, well, not shaken, but slightly altered. The aunt laughed and said, “Any time is time for ice cream.”

She was, and still is, right, of course, but there’s also something special about a place like Bobbie’s Dairy Dip only being there part of the year. The anticipation makes their ice cream so much sweeter.

Now I wish I had stopped and gotten a caramel milkshake. And I’m going to the next time I go by there. I won’t even wait for the weather to warm up.

Adventures In Busing.

A Matter Of Interpretation.

Author: March 1, 2025 2 Comments

Every time I go to the dentist I pass by these flowers. They’re plastic so they last but they’ve been there at least three years—I’ve written about it before—and someone regularly refreshes them, adding new ones and making other changes. There’s still no note, nothing to explain why they’re there, but I still assume they’re some kind of memorial. I still respect the privacy of whoever put them there. Even though it’s in a public spot their reasons for putting the flowers there are, I believe, personal, and should remain that way.

Still that got me thinking about how we interpret works of art. There’s a deep impulse to find meaning in things and it does seem obvious that if someone made something they had a purpose. At first I thought about how it applies to visual arts. Paintings and sculptures often get interpreted based on what we know about the artist and the time in which they lived, though titles can help too, and some artists are happy to explain their work. Others aren’t. Writing—both poetry and prose—can also have layers of meaning, and there are writers who are happy to talk about their inspiration, their craft, and whether there were deeper ideas they were trying to convey but didn’t state explicitly. And there are others who won’t do that. Cormac McCarthy regularly turned down often large fees to come and speak, saying anything readers wanted to know they could get from his books.

There’s an episode of Sanford & Son that opens with Fred and Lamont in a museum. The tour guide shows them an assemblage of metal pieces and asks, “What do you think the artist was trying to say?” Fred quips, “Stay off the freeway!”

Source: YouTube

It’s a joke and I still think it’s funny but even when I was a kid and saw that episode for the first time I thought, that could be right. My parents regularly took me to art museums, which I think is the source of my interest in art, and I learned pretty early that there’s no one way to interpret anything. Maybe that’s why I’ve remembered it and even as an adult think the assemblage could be interpreted as a statement about the perils of technology and the speed of modern life.

Fred is inspired to build an assemblage of his own, but it’s dismissed as worthless, not a “real” work of art, and he tears it down. Why? I wondered. As a kid I was often frustrated by sitcoms that seemed to get into something really interesting right as they hit the twenty-two minute mark and there’d be a quick, cheap resolution that reset everything just before the credits rolled. That still annoys me and I still ask questions like, why is an assemblage in a museum a valuable piece of art but one built by a junk dealer in a backyard worthless?

There’s no right answer to that question.

American Graffiti.

Night Watch.

Author: February 28, 2025 2 Comments

Orion was high in the west last night before I went to bed. Jupiter, the brightest object in the sky right now with only a very thin crescent Moon waning towards new, was up too, and almost directly overhead was Mars. I know a lot of people think of Mars as our next step into the universe now that we’ve been to the Moon, though we haven’t been back in more than five decades now. In so much science fiction Mars is inhabited, or at least habitable, a home away from home for terrestrial life, but last night looking toward the brighter planet I thought about how Jupiter is really the New York of our solar system: if we can make it there we can make it anywhere. Not that Jupiter even has a surface we could land on, and if it did the gravity would crush almost anything we’d send down, but it’s got dozens on moons we could settle on if we could overcome a few challenges like creating a breathable atmosphere, producing food, dealing with the intense radiation—Jupiter spews out more energy than it receives from the sun—and also hauling almost everything we’d need more than a billion miles through space. Getting to Jupiter makes the Oregon trail look like a hop, skip, and a jump.

Then I turned toward Orion, the constellation of the hunter, the second constellation I learned to recognize after Ursa Major. I was never very good at connect-the-dots puzzles but there’s a certain clarity about constellations. After seeing a picture of the Orion constellation in a book I just looked up one night at the right time and there it was, literally right before my eyes, a distinct figure, not quite pareidolia but close.

Winter is hunting season, when herds are culled and freezing temperatures and snow mean meat’s on the menu so it’s fitting Orion is high in the sky. But Orion is at its peak I also know it means winter’s coming to an end, the grass and hibernating animals will be waking up, the spring birds will be coming back. The squirrel nests, big clumps of dry leaves taking up space in the empty branches of trees, will be replaced by green leaves. The horizon I can see now will be obscured by greenery, and the sky directly overhead, so clear right now, will get hazy with humidity.

It was a warm night for late February and I stood out there for a long time thinking about the planets, the stars, and also how all of us, even when completely still, are always in motion.   

Keep Looking Up, Ramble With Me., The Weekly Essay

You Don’t Have To Be Crazy To Work Here.

Author: February 25, 2025 7 Comments

One of the nice things about a new coworker is they can remind me of things I’d forgotten or that I just take for granted but should still appreciate. The other day a new coworker dropped by my cubicle to ask a work question but instead asked something much more important: “Why do you have a big ball of string?”

It’s the last remnant of when I worked in the mailroom. Packages, especially from overseas, sometimes came in wrapped up in string and I started saving it because you never know when you might need some string. I also had hopes it might one day rival the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota but I moved on to other jobs. Even though I still dropped in to check on the mailroom occasionally the number of packages, especially those tied with string, declined. I still kept the ball of string but I’ve had it so long I’d completely forgotten about it until the new coworker asked about it.

I couldn’t there, though. I had to share the one time I actually used the ball of string for something. Several years earlier another coworker, now long gone, dropped by my cubicle to ask a work question but instead asked something much more important: “Hey, do you think you have enough string to reach the ground floor?”

Do not underestimate the value of questions like this. The office is on the 7th floor so the distance to the ground is approximately seventy feet. I’d never measured the string but this would give us a good idea how much I had. At the time the office windows opened—they’ve since been sealed for safety reasons and to make temperature regulation easier. The coworker had a pink stuffed hippo and we decided to use it as a weight. Unfortunately I’d forgotten to tie the last piece of string to the rest and, as I was lowering it, the hippo and about a foot of string took a sudden tumble to the ground.

We took the elevator to the first floor and pulled the hippo out of the bushes.

Back on the seventh floor we decided to make another try but this time with a pencil—something we wouldn’t mind sacrificing. As it was descending past the sixth floor, which is a parking garage and also smoker’s lounge, a hand shot out and grabbed the pencil.

“Hello? Hello? Who’s up there? Who’s doing this?”

For someone taking a smoke break they sounded unusually edgy. I started pulling on the string but they wouldn’t let go. My coworker quickly grabbed a pair of scissors and we sacrificed a few feet of string.

It wasn’t necessary to share all of this, of course, but I feel it was important to give my new coworker a sense of what they could expect from me.

Here’s a detailed illustration of where all this occurred:

Adventures In Busing.

Point, Click…

Author: February 22, 2025 3 Comments

The first camera I had was a hand-me-down. It was vintage, really, a kind with a strap that went around my neck and hung to my stomach so I’d have to look down into the viewfinder. I think it was some model of Kodak Duaflex. What I’d see through the viewfinder wasn’t very clear and, as was so often the case with old cameras, I really wouldn’t know what the picture would look like until it was developed. And that meant using up the whole roll of film first then taking it to a little hut in the middle of the Kmart parking lot, then leaving it for a week or so with a guy who looked like John Fogerty, probably because he was John Fogerty.

Most of the pictures I took with it were disappointing. I remember one very specifically that I took on a very cold winter day. There was a vacant lot behind my house that I loved exploring. It had a high rocky wall at the that held all sorts of treasures such as a cache of smoky quartz crystals and brachiopod fossils, and what looked like a dinosaur tooth but was probably just an oddly-shaped rock.

There was one spot where water trickled down over a series of jutting rocks, runoff from the hill above it. I transplanted some moss to one of the rocks, and some staghorn lichen, and some British soldier lichen with its crimson caps. All of it grew really well, a strange miniature rock garden of my very own.

The day I took the picture the water trickling down had frozen into icicles. I wasn’t worried about my garden; even then I knew lichens are ridiculously tough and can even survive in space. I just thought the whole scene was beautiful: mottled grays and greens, and even traces of azure from the lichen. I probably took as many as three pictures—film was limited and expensive both to buy and process, but I still wanted to make sure I wanted to capture the scene. What came back was dull, blurry, barely recognizable to me, and I was the one who’d taken the picture.

I realize now that even with a better camera it would have been difficult to get a proper picture. There wasn’t a clear focal point, no real composition. The best I could have done was focus on one of the lichens but they were obscured by ice. The sky was overcast so the lighting was awful. With all that I actually liked the picture. It was an excellent lesson in what not to do in photography and even now, with digital cameras that can show you exactly how your picture’s going to turn out before you take it, I think about how challenging it can be to even get a halfway decent shot. So many factors, which the photographer has varying degrees of control over, have to come together. I still haven’t managed it.

The music video for Bishop Allen’s Click, Click, Click has a camera similar to the one I had. And it’s just a fun video and song.

 

American Graffiti.