Trapped at the Fred Meyer gas station

Today Rachel accidentally locked Ingrid in the car at the gas station. She'd just given Ingrid a snack so our little girl sat there unperturbed in the carseat eating craisins and goldfish as the windows slowly frosted over (it was -30F).

There wasn't a phone in the gas-shack so Rachel told the gas attendant to watch the car while she ran into Fred Meyer. The police department told her they could come, but their only mode of entry was to break the window. "Call a taxi, they always have door opening equipment," the dispatcher said (when I heard this I was deeply disappointed in the Fairbanks PD, though the bright side of their complacency is that I don't know anyone who has gotten a traffic ticket in Fairbanks).

Ten minutes later a cabby came, wearing short sleeves and no gloves (no joke). By this time Ingrid's breath had thoroughly encrusted the inside of all the windows so the grumpy man couldn't see the lock controls. After ten minutes of scrambling, prying, and poking the door swung open.

"Here's your daughter back. That'll be 35 bucks."

Here's Ingrid with her imaginary friend Jailey. Rachel didn't tell the cab driver Jailey was also in the car for fear he'd charge her more.

You've reached Ben Abbott at 907-45. . .

Why do people restate their number in their voice-mail messages? There are plenty of useful things we could be including in our messages. A few years ago my brother turned his message into a weekly trivia quiz:

"This is Sam. How many Nieuport 17 fighter planes were made during WWII? Last week's answer: Rene Descartes." 

But your phone number? That's the one piece of information you can be sure every caller already has..

I wonder how many minutes are spent annually listening to the restatement of phone numbers. I wonder how much AT&T made on that last year.

If any of you are number-restaters, or have insight into number-stater psychology, please phone me up. My voice-mail greeting will let you know the number to call.

Currivulum Vitae

This morning I opened up my C.V. to update a few things and correct a misplaced comma. By chance I scrolled to the top of the page and noticed the first word on the document was "Currivulum." 

"That's weird, I thought C.V. stood for Curriculum Vitae, Latin for 'the course of one's life'." A quick Google search revealed that I was right, which meant that I was wrong (and had been for a long time). I quickly opened several old C.V.s and, sure enough, since 2007, I've been sending out my Currivulum Vitae. At least it makes me less self conscious about the comma.

AGU talk titles

It's the final day of the American Geophysical Union fall meeting. Every year 20,000 scientists get together to exchange new research. Here are some of my favorite titles from the past few days:

• Soil Chemical Weathering and Nutrient Budgets along an Earthworm Invasion Chronosequence in a Northern Minnesota Forest

• Acupunctural Afforestation for Desertification Mitigation over Semi-Arid Regions in East Asia

• Decomposition is always temperature dependent, except when its not

• Feeding the World While Sustaining the Planet: Building Sustainable Agriculture Within the Earth System

• Translating Watersheds Into Trustworthy Hydrological Models

• Four Billion Years of Marine Nitrogen Cycling

• Reduced Nitrous Oxide Emissions in Tomato Cropping Systems under Drip Irrigation and Fertigation

First scientific pub

My first scientific publication went out this morning in the comments section of Nature. I think you need a subscription to download it but here's a link to the article,

Climate change: High risk of permafrost thaw

Arctic tundra just north of the continental divide in the Brooks range

There has been a much bigger response than I expected (I mean, I think this stuff is cool and important but I didn't realize how interested the science journalism community would be).

Here's a link to the Institute of Arctic Biology's "in the news" site with some articles about the article!

The take home nuggets from the article are:

1. The amount of organic matter stored in permafrost-region soils is huge-around 1700 gigatonnes. This is twice as much carbon as is in the atmosphere, four times what humans have emitted since the industrial revolution, and (this is the one that gets me) more carbon than exists in all living things (pile up all the blue whales, redwoods, termites, and bacteria and they won't equal the northern soil pool).

2. This carbon is there because of chilly soils. Any spruce needles, dead roots, or squirrel bodies that fall into the soil are refrigerated (or frozen completely) which slows decomposition.

3. As the climate warms a portion of this soil carbon will be released as carbon dioxide and methane (two of the major greenhouse gases). Because this release will come from remote and distributed landscapes it will be particularly difficult to contain. We estimate that carbon from the permafrost region will have more than twice the impact on global climate than carbon released by deforestation over the next century. However, emissions from fossil fuels are predicted to remain the biggest driver of climate change. Permafrost carbon simply amplifies the impact of greenhouse gases we emit. The estimates we generated indicate that this extra carbon could increase the impact of human emissions by 20-30%.

Thermokarst feature where permafrost has collapsed near the Toolik Field Station. This thaw slump formed in three months this summer.

Old Ben Franklin is right in this case, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." 

Doorknob

I don’t know if you know this, but toddlers aren’t bothered by toot smells. It’s not that they don’t know they’re there. At dinner tonight I asked for some Gorgonzola. “I want some,” Ingrid asked nicely. I broke off a piece with my fork and Ingrid popped the musty chunk into her mouth. She started to giggle and said, “It kinda smells like a little toot.” So, if they can smell it, why doesn’t it bother them?

Think about how picky infants and toddlers can be about tastes, and taste is mostly smell, but when pappa rips a fruity one, or mamma hisses out a wet-cardboard walrus burp Ingrid just goes on playing. It really is the best of all possible worlds for her. She gets to laugh at the sound, experience the smell but not be bothered by it, and laugh at those who seem to be suffering from the haze. 

So is disgust at flatulence a learned response? That seems pretty radical, I mean it's a flavor that seems natural to dislike, but on the other hand it's a scent that we have been around for a long time (evolutionarily speaking). Could go either way, but I bet that we learn to wrinkle our noses when the guy in the elevator squeaks one out on the first floor. I bet the disgust wouldn't have occurred to us if we hadn't seen other people responding so negatively to every fart, toot, and flattle. 

Free your minds. Breath it all in. Oh yeah. . . doorknob.

I've gotten frostbite twice in the last week. A tiny circle on my neck last Monday and a tiny circle on my nose today.

The damage

The feeling of frostbite is terrible. It's stealthy like a sunburn in that you don't sense it until the damage is already advanced. Between -10 and -20 is the danger range. Any colder than that and I completely cover up. Any warmer and things get cold but don't freeze.

I'll be riding along and feel an uncomfortable sting on a patch of exposed skin. After several minutes of ignoring the discomfort there is a moment where the zing pinches and bites deeper into the tissue. Flesh freezes with astounding speed. It's like a gerbil bite. You know how they will nibble your finger playfully, pressing their teeth gently on your skin first,  and then BAM, the teeth clamp shut and the sharp square incisors sink into your skin. That's what it's like, a bunch of tiny gerbils that all bite at the same time.

This morning it was -30 and I knew the gerbils would have their teeth bared so I covered up. On my ride in to work I didn't have any troubles with my skin but my front shifter did freeze up and I had to mash up the hill to campus in the biggest chainring. I had some business on lower campus (had to drop off the newly finished two person pedal-powered generator). I dropped off the gear, chatted with Frank about his almost ripe baby and walked back outside. The ride from lower campus to my office only takes three minutes.

"I don't need my balaclava it's only three minutes and it has warmed up to -15." I stepped onto the bike, my face warm and moist from my involuntary sprint up the hill. Moist skin is to frostbite what a dude with a chihuahua and a GoPro camera on a surfboard is to Jaws. Bad news for my chihuahua. Even well below zero, water wont crystalize into ice until it finds a nucleation particle--an ice seed. Moisture on skin, especially perspiration with all its tasty compounds provides plenty of seeds.

In front of the museum the gerbils sunk their teeth. "Ouch!" I chirped and grabbed my nose. Even through my thick mountaineering mitten I could feel the stiffness. I pulled my hand out of the mitten and sure enough, the tip of my nose and the tops of my nostrils were stiff like the corner of a plastic milk jug. Hand to my face I hammered to the top of the hill (still in my darn highest gear) and ran into the office. Not sure if my nose had just felt stiff or if it was really frozen I grabbed my little frostbite prevention mirror (after my first frostbite incident Rachel brought in a mirror to the office so I could make sure my headgear was giving proper coverage before heading out). The skin initially looked fine but as the minutes went by, the nose turned pink and puffy. I do wonder why, even though the whole top of the nose was solid when I touched it, I only got a blister at the very tip.

On the subject of frostbite mirrors and frostbite viewing in general, I've only seen my own still-frozen frostbite once. Last spring, when I walked in the door after riding up the hill Rachel screamed,
"Your nose your nose your nose! Quick, fix it!" I jumped into the bathroom and caught just a glimpse of the fast shrinking pure white spot on my nose.

Last night we saw a homeless-looking man standing next to his bike outside of Fred Meyers. He had a dirty down coat, jeans, and tennis shoes. It was -27. He was wearing plastic grocery bags as a second layer of socks--one from Fred Meyers and one Walmart. I have a place to go, money to buy protective clothing, and a frostbite mirror, because I have connections and resources. He doesn't and now his tissues are vulnerable to ice crystals. None of his friends are on LinkedIn. The thought of our system leaving his tissues exposed to the deadly air made me want to break down and cry. Ingrid and I went to get him a deli burrito but he was gone when we got back. For him it wasn't just his nose and neck that the wind could rip up but his thighs, toes, and fingers. I wanted to give him all my clothes. One December, when I was a missionary in northern France, my sister Maren sent me a pair of soft leather gloves. I gave them to a man on the street who said he'd give them back in the spring for me to keep till the next fall. My sister is incredibly giving-fiercely tender.

As we did our shopping I found myself singing Bob Dylan's "Only a Hobo" as a sort of prayer. The link is to a Slovenian music site (there weren't any versions on Youtube).

Always to scale

It's amazing that, from a newborn to an NBA forward, each person's fingers fit in his or her own nose. Earlier today Ingrid said, "I have a booger daddy." I looked at the tiny orifice and thought,

"Man, I'm never going to be able to pick that out. Not even my pinky could fit in there."

While I shuffled through the drawer looking for something small enough to scoop the mucous, Ingrid took matters into her own, perfectly sized hands.

Boosegumps

We saw little Harry for the first time today (Ingrid has been calling him/her that for a month now). We get weekly updates from babycenter.com telling us the size of the fetus likened to different fruits and small food items. After the nurse took some measurements she told us that the little she/he was 14 weeks old instead of the 13 we'd been thinking. This means Harry got promoted from a medium shrimp to a lemon (what a difference a week can make).

  Good thing they labeled the first ultrasound image. Until I saw the "BABY" label I thought we might have finally located Ingrid's lost dolly.

 After hearing about Harry's early graduation Rachel looked confused, "But wait, my husband wasn't around 15 weeks ago, how can that be?"
"Yes, how can that be Rachel?"
"The weeks are a developmental estimate rather than a guess at the exact conception."The nurse assured us.

When we first saw the creature it flinched and sprung from one side of the womb to the other (like he/she was startled by someone turning the lights on suddenly). The live images seemed interactive and it was weird to realize that he/she didn't know we were watching and couldn't watch back.  Harry's movements were confident and coordinated as she/he rolled, twisted, and even yawned.

At one point Harry did look right at us (the picture on the left). Rachel squealed and said,
"Wooh! That gave me the willies! It looks kind of like a horse."
"Did the little horse give you boosegumps Mommy?" Ingrid asked considerately.

The last cutting board

"Oh No!" she screamed from the kitchen. I jumped up from the couch and saw Rachel facing the counter by the microwave, hands to her face, something dark red on the counter next to her. After ruling out finger severage, my second thought was that the bottle of carbonated cherry juice we'd set outside the front door in the snow to cool had exploded. Once I was at the counter I saw that it was the skin of the red onion I'd just cut for our salad.

"This was the last cutting board that was onion and garlic free!"
"I'm really sorry honey, I'll wash it off right now."

"Once a wooden board is contaminated it's permanently ruined."
"I knew we had a system but I figured this one was safe because you were cutting potatoes on it."
"No, the non-groove side of the smaller wooden cutting board is the fruit and bread board!"
"I am really sorry honey. . ."
"I just hated as a kid when the banana bread or watermelon tasted like onion because my Mom would cut it on a contaminated board. She said you couldn't taste it but I always could."
"Let me see if I can get the taste out."
"I'll just have to get a new expensive one at Alaska Bowl Company."
"Don't be mad Rachel, I know you've wanted a board from there for a while but don't get back at me by spending money frivolously."
"Holy Cow!" Ingrid piped up from the table. Rachel and I cracked up at Ingrid's new phrase and walked over to the table (onion crisis temporarily forgotten).
"Who did you hear say that?"
"Grandma Susan."

"Oh no!" Rachel's grabbed her head a second time. "You have to put a plate under that bottle of dressing, it has already made eight spots on the table!" I quickly snatched up the oily bottle of homemade vinaigrette while Rachel grabbed a plate.
 "Bummer." Ingrid said with sage disappointment in her voice. We were laughing too hard to ask her where she learned that one. For the record, the red onion and the salad dressing were my only contributions to tonight's dinner.


After dinner we walked to the mailbox to send some of Ingrid's water colors. Ingrid stuffed her dolly, a flamingo, a stuffed king crab, and that weird dog with bunny ears into her backpack for the walk.
 

Thanks to the Blacks for the bird and dog. Thanks to the Lights for the crab.

Ben's Banana and Bean Bowel Buster Bars (brownie variant)

If you want super flavorful, nutritious, fibrous, and delicious energy bars try out this recipe we've been working on:

Some ripe bananas

Some beans (black, navy, white, whatever)

Flax seed

Quinoa

Rolled oats

Several generous dollups of honey

Some peanut butter

Nuts (walnuts and almonds are my favorite)

Dried fruit chunks (blueberries, cranberries, cherries, whatever)

Hot peppers (we use Grandpa Hansen's chili tapines for this, put in more than you think you need!)

Dark chocolate chunks

Applesauce (if mixture is too dry)

Cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla etc.

A splash of lemon juice/lemon zest

Start with mashed bananas and beans. I usually use three bananas and one can of black or navy beans (a half pound of dry beans boiled on the stove works good too). This will make a good full pan of bars. If you've got one of those fancy stick blenders (we do, in fact we may have two of them) you can use that to mix the banana and beans. Otherwise it works fine to mash it with a big spoon. Don't worry about crushing all the beans, they will get worked in as you go along.

Now that you have a clumpy mixture add whatever you want in whatever portions you want. If the mixture gets too wet add more dry oats or quinoa. If it gets too dry, add applesauce or honey. My only caution is that, if the zester you're using has "Dr. Scholl's" marked on it, it might not be a zester at all but a bunion rasp (that happened to us once when we were house sitting at Margaret's place--luckily there was a little catcher pouch on the back that kept most of the foot crumbs and dead skin out of that batch of bars).

Spread the thick chunky mess in a greased pan or on a greased cookie sheet. Put in the oven at 325F and cook for 30-50 minutes (depending on how hard you want your bars). Dryer bars will keep longer, though even very moist bars will keep for several weeks in the fridge.

If you are feeling lazy, there is a brownie variant. It's the same process except you start with a dry brownie mix and add the bananas, beans, blueberries etc. to it.

The brownie variant is more cake-like and holds together better. The straight banana and bean mix is denser and more crumbly.

Here's a batch of brownie variant that we made yesterday. Notice the tiny green halibut sneaking up on them. They were that good.

Pomegranate, Popcorn, Pomegranate, repeat. . .

"There's a blizzard outside!" I burst through the door covered in corn snow.

"Like a frog"? Ingrid looked concerned.

"Oh! Not a lizard Ingrid, a blizzard. The snow is blowing around all over Fairbanks." It had been -10F on Wednesday but had warmed up to 20 above with the low pressure.

After brushing off we had a standing dinner of tiny pieces. We started with a course of pomegranate. It was Ingrid's first.

"What is that? I don't want that."

"OK, I'll have it."

"I want that." She's not very hard to convince. "It tastes like candy." I love how pomegranate is a food and also an activity. It's like someone crossed a tangerine with a Rubik's cube.

To balance out the sweet Rachel baked up a bag of buttered popcorn (an old family recipe, butter and popcorn). Here's what was left after three minutes:

We finished with a second course of pomegranate and got ready for bed. The bottom half of Ingrid's clothes came off in one heap. She said it looked like a little person named Jailey.

Ingrid put a crown on my head and then tried to get it off. Each time she would reach up I would nuzzle her chin and she'd fall to the floor laughing. Wouldn't it be great if we replaced all the tasers with ticklers. It would be a more effective defense tactic, tickling is much more debilitating anyway.

Every night we go through the same bedtime routine. Ingrid reads us a story then Rachel reads Ingrid the same story. We pray--always holding hands at Ingrid's insistance, then Rachel carries Ingrid into her room and I chase them both like a tiger. Rachel then "talks about the day" in the big comfy chair (Rachel says she hates that but I love to listen to them). Finally Ingrid goes to bed. So it was last night in our little Alaskan home.

Metals

Titanium (Ti). A transition metal with 22 protons. It's strong, light, and corrosion resistant. These are objective characteristics that make it superior to many other materials for many applications. Yet, this metal (or at least its marketers) is as self-conscious as a sweatpants-wearing middle schooler. I have never seen a piece of titanium anything that wasn't branded. Camping cook-ware, bike frames and bits, my brother's wedding ring-they all say "TITANIUM" (usually in all caps) or sometimes just "Ti" somewhere on their under or backsides. I ended up with some titanium crank bolts. Both the male and female halves proudly proclaim "TITANIUM." This poor metal thinks that without its eight-lettered moniker, people wouldn't be interested in paying three times more for items made out of it.

On the other hand, the name is pretty awesome. If titanium didn't exist, Marvel Comics would have invented it to reinforce Wolverine's skeleton instead of adamantium.

Now on to another metal. Nickel (Ni). This one has 28 protons. It's also a transition metal but is heavier than Ti. It's the stainless part of stainless steel and, mixed with iron makes up the earth's core. It's been used since 3500 BC (according to Wikipedia) and, since 1983 it is an essential nutrient for plants. Why did it take us so long to figure out plants needed Nickel you might ask? After all, we had isolated the other nine essential plant micronutrients by 1954. Well, the answer is a sneaky one.

The way you determine an element is "essential," is by attempting to grow plants without it. There are lots of elements which enhance plant growth or yield but without which plants can still complete a normal life cycle. I love the plant ecologist term for this: luxury uptake. In the early 20th century agriculturists started growing plants hydroponically-that is, without soil. Plants don't take up anything directly from soil, in fact they can't take up any solid materials whatsoever. Even when rooted comfortably in their usual brown, they derive their nutrition from the soil by way of soil water and their carbon and oxygen from the air. The soil, as long as you can keep the soil water nice and nutritious, is actually unnecessary. Without the dirt, you have a highly controllable plant environment in which to test plant requirements. Since you've deprived the plant of its normal pantry (soil), it only gets what you feed it.

So, these farmer-scientists started systematically depriving plants of various elements.

"Oops Dave, your beans died when you took away Boron, put that on the list."

"Looks like they need Chlorine too, who'd have though?" and so it was with molybdenum, selenium, zinc, manganese, copper, iron, and sodium (you know, maybe titanium is so insecure because nobody needs it).

So why not nickel? Here's a picture from Dave Eskew's 1983 study that finally put nickel on the nutrient map. Panel A, on the left side is a picture of a soybean plant grown with no nickel. Wait a minute. It looks basically fine! Panel B on the right shows a plant after several generations of Nickel deprivation--also not looking too shabby. As Matt says, "WT Heck!"

If you take the beans produced by the Nickel-deprived plants and plant them in a nickel-free environment, they grow fine. If you take the beans from that generation and grow them . . . and so on and so on until the fifth generation (or somewhere thereabouts). After five generations of this nickel fast the plants develop dead spots (necrotic lesions), particularly in the leaf tips. When Dave's group analyzed the dead spots they found elevated Urea concentrations. Urea is a nitrogen compound found in--well, urine. It's created in normal plant nitrogen metabolism and it's usually super yummy for plants. Excess urea needs to be broken down, and the plant does this by an enzyme that contains. . . NICKEL!

So, why didn't urea build up in the first generation? Well, the answer lies in an erroneous experimental assumption. The investigators assumed they had blocked all nutrient inputs to the seed except for known elements they they added through the hydroponic solution. However, they hand' t taken into account the seed's own tissues. There is enough nickel in any given soy bean (or mustard seed or maple whirligig) to furnish the whole plant with urea-chomping enzymes. In the absence of external sources, when the plant gets itchy for nickel it harvests its own tissues and moves the element where it needs (a process called translocation). Enough of this translocated nickel gets into the next set of seeds that those plants can scrape by and so forth unto the fifth generation!

So everything looks fine for generations and then, all of a sudden, the plants die. Isn't that terrifying? I mean what sort of masked deficiencies am I suffering from (either inherited from my parents or invented by my own peculiarity)? How long will it take to reveal my anemia, and how many people will see me in my apparently hunky-dory state and think, "I guess XYorZ isn't necessary to happy human functioning!"?

Well I guess that's why God invented blogs right? That way we'll catch wind when somebody develops necrotic lesions and we can comb their posts to find out what they stopped eating.

On a different note, here's a headlight I made for winter bike riding. I got the parts off dealextreme.com for $30 (when you see the sight your first thought may be "they are going to steal my credit card info"--that's what I thought, but they turned out to be legit), and used a broken camera tripod for the mount. It puts out 500 lumens, will run for six hours on high, and has rechargeable Li-ion (speaking of metals!) polymer batteries that function well down to -70F. We usually don't get much below -50F so I should be fine.

Grass farmer

I've become the most shameful kind of cultivator. I love grass. I'm not talking about a secret grow in the hills outside of town, I'm talking about something much more dark and dastardly than that. Wasting time, fertilizer, and square feet on useless grass. Tonight I raked and seeded past midnight, working towards a pure monoculture. I want creeping fescue and Kentucky bluegrass all around my home.

Growing up, grass tenders sat next to litterers and accountants in my head--both evil and boring. In Utah, water was a big deal. From second grade on, somebody was always talking about "the" drought. Through the nineties, the snowpack seemed to hover around 20-30% what it should have been year after year. I was sure the forced evacuation of the whole state was imminent. Our family would be OK, because Mom had hundreds of pretty well rinsed out Ocean Spray bottles filled with emergency water in the basement, but I worried about the neighbors and the city folk trapped in Provo or Salt Lake. You were reckless if you left the water running while you brushed your teeth and criminal if you watered in the daytime.

The worship of green was understandable in the gray and white desert, however. The idea of something wet and verdant after an afternoon of 105F at 4500 feet was sacred. And who can argue with sprinklers. Our automatic sprinkler system would deploy various water turrets and sprayers in the different lawn zones at totally unpredictable hours. Neither of my parents had any idea how it worked. The armored green box would blink its smokey red display in the garage over the toolbench, set in some Indonesian time zone. Intended to conserve, it ended up watering the lawn at 2pm with no shut off switch.

When Sam lived with us last year we built two raised garden beds on the edge of the lawn. I had to pester him several times to save the turf (which I was carefully using to cover a whole left by a septic tank repair the fall before). He looked as I reverently arranged the sod to cover the scar.

"I just can't get that excited about grass I guess."

But Sam! You don't own a home. You don't feel what I feel! Every inch is a project, and grass is a beautiful thing, a physical manifestation of excess and leisure. At least in Fairbanks it needn't carry the same stigma as it does in the intermountain west.

Fairbanks actually gets less precipitation annually than Orem (heck, it gets less than Tucson), but water is everywhere. Cool temperatures keep evaporation low and the boreal forest towers as a consequence. Sure lawns still take time, fertilizers fixed with fossil fuels, and multiple trips to Fred Meyers but they're worth it. Aren't they? Part of this obsession is domination. Here it's not a refuge from dry and dust, it's an orderly clearing in a chaotic forest. I want to hold the forest at bay--make a garden where my daughter can play. Part of it is homeowner brainwashing. Nothing makes my house look better than a smooth rolling carpet all around it. Some of it is human. Art is what makes us distinct right? Not even Homo erectus or neanderthalensis made scratchings in their caves like we did. My lawn isn't necessary but I slave away at it because I am human. I want to make sure they know I'm human.

Breakup

The snow is softest in the morn

where the shadows were the day before

You can't forgive what you can't forget

More than halfway to freezing this morning. As I turned off Chena Ridge Road it was either the Rolling Stones, Uncle Earl, or the Gorillaz who sang something about not being able to forgive what you can't forget. How do forgiveness and forgetfulness relate?

You surely can forget things that you don't ever deal with. Most experiences fade into unconscious archives without much analysis or resolution. Likewise, you can forgive faults that still occupy your awareness. So forgiveness and forgetfulness are not simple synonyms.

I put forth that once you have forgotten a grievance you can no longer forgive it. To match the phrasing of the original expression, you can't forgive what you have forgot. Forgiveness isn't when problems go away. It isn't when the offender makes restitution. Forgiveness is a deliberate pardoning and letting go of desires for retribution. It is the expanding of the soul. Forgiving is therefore impossible after forgetting. Forgiveness will remove the sting from remembering and render our memories complete.

Sandwich directions

Open a toasted English muffin (capital E)

crumble on some gorgonzola

three moon slices of pear across the cheese

sea salt, pepper, lemon juice

spread a forkfull of mayonnaise

on the other half and close