Paul Nordberg
My activities & loves
Paul Nordberg
My activities & loves
My knowledge of lichens is scant, to the point that I realize on casual inquiry that most of the few things I thought I knew about them are not actually true. I am not even sure what is a lichen, what a liverwort, what a moss, what a fungus. Somehow, my imagination had lumped lichens together with mosses, thinking that they would do best in the shade. – Wrong by almost 180°, it turns out.
My attention is drawn by the gradual appearance of clusters on stonework I have placed in the last dozen or so years. I would have guessed that the growth would take at least decades, if not generations. I didn't know I could have this seeming marker of hoary authenticity!
The most helpful words I have found on lichens recently is that there are many different kinds, with very individual and disparate tastes for light, temperature and surface.
One of the most common in my area and many others is, I learn, Flavoparmelia caperata, the common greenshield lichen. It grows preferentially on tree bark. It is more tolerant than other varieties of polluted air and may be found in cities. Indeed, I have seen it in Cambridge, across the river from Boston. The examples above and to the right below seem to me, as a layman, a close relative, Flavoparmelia baltimorensis, rock greenshield lichen. As its name suggests, this latter thrives on stone, even hard granite, newly split, or covered with carbon remaining as pollution from the coal-burning era. 
It seems less interested in brick, even though brick is softer and offers what I would have imagined a less forbidding surface.
I realize that there are all kinds of other examples spread wide around me, which I am trying to learn about. One variety, widespread through the dunes of Crane Beach, appears to be Cladonia rangifera, often called reindeer lichen. It is soft and fluffy when damp, a bit brittle when dry.
As a matter of pure logic and hygiene, the timing of cleaning in spring seems strange to me. Wouldn't it make more sense to do it in fall, after windows are closed to wind-borne dust and there is less trekking back and forth from the outdoors?
And yet something just feels right about the activity as there is more light and we have renewed energy.
A couple of factors are moving me toward action now. One is that the winter so far has been very mild, allowing me to get ahead of outdoor chores that usually become consuming once the ground thaws. Another is the expected arrival of my organ in a couple of months, and the associated conversion of function from dining to music room. The space was in borderline need of repainting, a much easier task before placement of a new musical instrument than after.
Of course, cleaning is as hopeless a task as any other obsession. The more you take care of things, the more things you see that need taking care of. I am finding now that my attention is riveted, horrified, on the tops of surfaces that accumulate dust: window sills, door mullions, baseboard molding, picture tops. That much is fairly easy. A slightly damp cloth takes care of the worst of it. – Soon enough, the call of the outdoors will become irresistable. There will be many other things that needs to be done indoors, but they will be out of sight and out of mind.
I have purchased an organ. It is supposed to arrive around May 1.
Ideally, I would have begun the instrument at a tenth of my current age – although it would have taken special arrangements for my feet to reach the pedals. Before proceeding, I set myself tests of my continuing ability to learn, working at skills I had never been able to master. I find that, if anything, my ability to learn is better than it was many years ago. There's less of mere determination, and more of judging calmly, as I go along, whether a given tactic is working or not. If not, it's not repetition that's lacking, but some approach I haven't figured out yet. I may not know what it is that's missing, but at least realizing that I'm missing a piece of the puzzle is a step forward.
Modern organs are increasingly electronic, almost exclusively so in the market niche I'm in. Today's electronics are amazing. It is a trivial task to match the sound produced a given pipe of a legendary organ, a Stradivarius violin, or other world-class musical instrument. It has become commonplace to mimic the reverberation that takes place in a concern hall as sounds bounce back and forth from one surface to another, and slowly decay. What has only recently worked its way into practice is to copy the sound pattern of some particular locale, usually a cathedral of enormous size with hard stone surfaces that reflect sound well. After a certain point, acoustics is empirical. Applying mathematical theory, you could come close, but computer chips haven't quite been there to match top-level physical sites. That's changed. Now, chips do a million calculations per second. At the touch of a switch, you can move your organ's sound from one famous cathedral to another.
But when my organ comes, I will begin at the beginning, and look to master basic fare. That will keep me busy for more than a while.
I have been aware for quite a few years that the lenses of my eyes have been developing increasing cloudiness that at some indefinite point began to qualify as "cataract." The condition has been coming on ever so slowly, faster than a glacier but not as fast as the tide. The effects to date have been very mild. I expected that the future would come sometime. It did.
A few days ago, I had a corrective procedure for the left eye. It took about ten minutes. There was no pain and no period of disability, at all. By the next day, my vision in that eye had improved from 20/70 to better than 20/20. That is galloping success. I had been looking forward to the procedure just to have it over with. There is another surgery scheduled for the right eye in a few weeks. This time around, I am feeling that I just can't wait – not simply to have it over with, but for the sake of better vision.
The helpfulness of volunteers through the Ipswich Council on Aging in transportation has been simply amazing. It is a group of wonderful people out that I had no previous acquaintance with.
© 2024 Paul Nordberg