“Ultimately, I’m my best self in the outdoors—curious, brave, and present. That in turn gives me confidence and optimism. All these seem like character traits I should hold on to as I age.”
—Caroline Paul
I’ve chosen this quote from a million possibilities, as it happens to resonate with me, make the point, and continue a theme, but the thing about Oldster Magazine, a Substack-based publication I’m here to rave about today, is that I find myself wanting to save a handful of quotes from every piece I read there. (This one happens to be from a very funny excerpt of Caroline Paul’s new book, Tough Broad.) By way of both introduction and possible disclosure, Oldster is the creation of writer-editor Sari Botton, who I feel like I probably have friends in common with and might have met before?* (If that’s true and you know me and know her, please introduce us!) Or maybe she’s just one of those people you feel a kinship with even though you’ve never met. Anyone who describes themselves as a “late-blooming Gen X weirdo” is ok by me.
She describes Oldster like this: “Oldster Magazine explores what it means to travel through time in a human body—of any gender, at every phase of life. It focuses on the good, the bad, and the ugly we experience with each milestone, starting early in life. It’s about the experience of getting older, and what that means at different junctures. Regardless of age, we’re all the oldest we’ve ever been, which makes every one of us feel, well, old.”
While I recently turned 55, I’m not even anyone’s mother, much less grandmother – I’m still just me — so it’s taken until now for me to accept the term “middle aged.” It just seems mathematically inarguable at this point, right? But while I am by no definition old, I’m increasingly aware that society thinks I am, and feel ever more pressingly the urge both to understand what that means along with people my age and older, and to disabuse younger women, in particular, of the idea that there’s anything wrong with aging. We all age (those of us who get the opportunity), and so for young women to perpetuate harmful and derogatory stereotypes about older women is to literally lay a trap for oneself.
But ultimately, I love Oldster because it is frank and irreverent and entertaining — just like a life well-lived.
//
*Also, I’m 100% certain I have friends in common with Caroline Paul, but I don’t think we’ve ever met.
Friedrich Nietzsche is said to have said “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,” and I’m sure some have been conceived while stationery. (Not all truly great thinkers have had the use of their legs, for starters.) But one thing I’ve known about myself for years is that I do my best thinking (writing, problem-solving …) when I’m walking, and also that my mental health suffers when I’m not. Also, while walking around a city block is helpful, it’s no match for a walk in the trees.
The connection, for me, is clear as a bell, so it comes as no surprise that study after study after study in the past few years has proven it to be a general truth that walking literally improves brain function (even growing new neurons), as well as that spending time in nature, and living among plants and trees, not only lowers our exposure to extreme heat but improves our physical health in numerous ways — impacting our risk of everything from asthma to hypertension to dementia and beyond — right down to the cellular level.
Our ancestors didn’t need studies to tell them that nature is vital to human well-being, but understanding this fact — and how uneven access to it is — has never been more critical, as even just the headlines above make clear. But I hope you’ll dig in. Each story is a world of jaw-dropping intel unto itself (if you only click one, make it the 3rd in the list), but what they add up to is vitally important.
There’s one more observation I want to add that I haven’t seen written about anywhere. As you may know, we recently spent two years in Florida, and while I had certainly witnessed tree canopy cover disparities like those detailed in the links above, being a participant in Florida’s very broken home insurance market, where so many people are underinsured, at best, gave me a new perspective. Where we were, you can’t help noticing that the wealthier neighborhoods are jungle lush, while the poorer ones are comparably barren — even the palm trees are scarce. That lack of trees’ cooling properties is not only perilous in the increasing Florida heat, but what I came to understand is that it’s not only a question of civic investment in trees and parks, or who has the money for a yard full of plants, or even who can afford the time or landscapers for tending to them — although all are no doubt factors. It’s also a question of who can afford to have a tree fall on their house in a hurricane. Who could rebuild and replant, and who would do without trees, just to be safe — forgoing not just the beauty but the health benefits as a result. I feel like more attention needs to be paid to that part of the story.
So with all of that said, happy Spring! Get out there and walk, if you’re blessed with mobility, as often as you possibly can. Reap the benefits of whatever green space you have access to, in whatever ways you are able. And heed the old saying: The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago; the next best time is today.
p.s. For a look at how magical trees are, in and of themselves, see last week’s post, Tree Fever.
After having said I’d be posting every M/W/F this month, life had other ideas, so I’m going back to every-other weekday. Which means Tu/Th this week, M/W/F next. See you tomorrow!
Spring officially starts next week, and with a warm breeze already blowing through the house, the grass greening three weeks earlier than last year (I know! equal parts thrilling and alarming) and tiny blooms beginning to form on the little dogwood we planted in the fall, I’ve got major Spring Fever and trees on the brain. Lots more to say about it next week, but for today I wanted to share these three (or four) gems with you:
• The Trees Saved Me by Alan Burdick with photos by Nicholas J. R. White (New York Times Gift Link) This fairly short but beautifully produced story about the Forest of Immortal Stories, a community effort to document and protect 2,544 beech trees in the Romanian mountains (“a land of fog, fictional vampires and real-life wolves, as well as several thousand brown bears and roughly two-thirds of the remaining virgin forest in Europe”) is deeply moving to me. (See also: Why You Should Plant Oaks. “The oaks in my yard are not just oaks, they are vibrant communities of hundreds of species,” Mr. Tallamy said. …)
• The Architecture of Trees by Cesare Leonardi and Franca Stagi One of the biggest (literally) treasures in my small library — pictured above, hand for scale — this book is indescribably great. Created for landscape designers, it is chiefly an atlas of tree species, rendered in fine pen-and-ink drawings, with and without foliage, and in a scale proportional to each other and to the book itself. It contains a few intro/essays that I found utterly fascinating, despite not being a landscape designer (to my frequent chagrin), and pages of spirographs depicting shade patterns and of ink splots acting out seasonal coloration, along with plant-catalog-style descriptions of each of the trees depicted, plus glossary and index. It’s just incredible.
• The Overstory: A Novel by Richard Powers And if you are a person who loves, or even worships, trees — or is open to learning why we all should! — and you haven’t read Richard Powers’ The Overstory, I highly recommend it. It’s sort of a lesson on trees (magical beings, so vitally important) in novel form, with at least one character and moment I will never forget until the day I die. Patricia, for years a solo soul, “takes his shaking hand in the dark. It feels good, like a root must feel, when it finds, after centuries, another root to pleach to underground.” It’s not a perfect book (or my favorite Powers) but the Patricia chapters, among others, are some of my favorite chapters I’ve ever read.
Have a lovely weekend, thank you for being here, and I’ll see you Monday!
If I could convince everyone I know to read one thing right now, it would be this Cory Doctorow deep dive into the word he famously coined last year: ‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything. I would preface the link with my standard soapbox speech about Facebook being the downfall of civilization, but Cory covers most of it — and then so much more. It’s deeply important stuff, and yet in a perfect enactment of his term, I have to tell you how you can get to it if that link doesn’t work:
1. Go to the IG feed of @ft_weekend (in your browser or the app) 2. Tap/click the link in their profile 3. Scroll to the image of neon green slime spewing out of a computer monitor in front of a cloudy blue sky 4. Tap that and read the piece!
PART TWO: The verb ‘to tweet’ and where I’m doing it
In the early days of Twitter (speaking of enshittified things), there were several similar services, and before a term for using them could come into fashion, they died off. One’s Twitter feed was composed of individual “tweets,” and the verb for using Twitter was “to tweet.” Then along came Elon Musk, who of course abandoned the name Twitter in favor of X, and in the wake of that came Meta’s Twitter clone Threads and Substack’s Twitter clone Notes, along with the ascendance of Mastodon and Bluesky, and who knows what. If I were to say “I’m tweeting on Substack Notes,” I would sound like a digital rube who’s confused about the lingo. But I think there’s a case to be made for adopting “to tweet” as a platform-free verb for the action of posting on those kinds of services. It’s a perfectly good verb! Certainly more descriptive than “posting,” and after all Musk doesn’t want it.
Which is a long way to say, “Hey friends, I’m toying with tweeting on Substack Notes!” If you are using it — either tweeting 😉 there yourself or using it as a feed reader — follow me on Notes @karentempler for blog updates and likely other random chitchat. (I say ‘toying with’ because it feels like a really slippery slope. We’ll see, but I’m there.)
ALSO: If you’re following @collapseanddelight on (the highly enshittified) Instagram for blog updates, make sure you are engaging with the posts (like/save/share/comment) so Instagram knows you actually want to see them — and/or better yet, turn on post notifications! by going to the feed and tapping the little alarm bell in the upper right. (For updates beyond the blog, I’m also @karentempler) And don’t forget you can always see what you chose to follow (rather than what they’re pushing at you) by tapping the Instagram logo and choosing “following” — although you have to do it every time.
If you really want to make sure you never miss a post here, use the subscribe field at the bottom of the page to sign up for email notifications.
Thank you for following along, by whatever means! I appreciate your support.
The final 1/3 of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is a really good book, but the first 2/3 might be one of my favorite books I’ve read in ages. James McBride can spin a yarn: There’s enough plot and characters in here for a good dozen novels, but they seem to come so easily to him that he doesn’t need to hoard them. It’s 1936, and in the early parts of the book we meet just about everyone in the titular grocery store’s neighborhood (and then some), and even minor characters receive introductions that span years and parentage — the erstwhile parents with their own lively, richly described histories — all within a few paragraphs. Take Bernice Davis, for example, who lives next door to Heaven & Earth and is the estranged best friend of its proprietress, Chona Ludlow:
“She was second cousin to Earl ‘Shug’ Davis, driver for the vice president of Pottstown Bank; second cousin to Bobby Davis, who once worked as an all-around handyman for Buck Weaver, the great Pottstown baseball player who played for the Chicago White Sox; and also, by dint of a twisted, convoluted intermarriage between her grandfather and his son’s stepdaughter, was great-aunt to Mrs. Traffina Davis, the wife of Reverend Sturgess, meaning Bernice was actually twelve years younger than her great-niece. She also served as stepsister to Rusty Davis, the handyman who fixed everything; fourth cousin to Hollis Davis, the Hill’s only locksmith; and polished it off by being niece to Chulo Davis, the legendary jazz drummer who left Chicken Hill to play with the famous Harlem Hamfats in Chicago before he was shot dead over a bowl of butter beans.”
And that’s him just warming up. You get the idea someone could say “tell us a story” at the dinner table, and he’d improvise an entire novel on the spot. In drawing them so vividly, he creates characters you genuinely care about, and while occasionally heart-wrenching, it’s also an incredibly funny book. I was going back and forth between reading and listening — it makes a great audiobook — and so could often be seen walking around my neighborhood by myself in recent days, earbuds buried under my beanie and puffer hood, laughing out loud.
The book is set in the poor, tight-knit, Black and Jewish neighborhood of Chicken Hill, in otherwise WASPy Pottstown PA. It opens with a flash forward to 1972, wherein we’re told a body has been found in a well, setting up a mystery and an eventual reveal. But who winds up dead in the well isn’t ultimately all that important in the grand scheme of the book, so as the narrative builds toward its big dual-track action scenes (leaving some of the main characters and the grocery store behind), it ironically loses some steam. But that’s faint criticism for a fantastic book.
So I was sad when it ended, I’ll miss the characters, and I’m eager to read more McBride. It’s rare for me to have read so much fiction – and especially so much new fiction — in the span of a few months, but as with Sigrid Nunez, McBride is a writer I’ve been wanting to read for years, and I jumped right on their latest. Like Nunez, McBride has left me happily wanting more.
Time measures Nothing but itself. —W.G. Sebald, Across the Land and Water
The sun makes days, seasons, and years, and the moon makes months, but people invented weeks. —Jill Lepore, How the week organizes and tyrannizes our lives
I do not plan to start anew in January that is for spring —David Gate, @davidgatepoet
. . .
Daylight Savings is my Christmas morning. The day on the calendar I look forward to with anticipatory glee. The most wonderful time of the year. Just as the shortness of winter’s days (lengthening though they may be) becomes insufferable, and evidence of spring is tauntingly everywhere, this brilliant thing happens. Literally overnight, the day is longer.
For me, a weight lifts. But for others, despite the fact that we all “lose track of time” on a regular basis (muttering things like “2:00 already?!” and “Where does the time go?”), the loss of that lone hour upon “springing forward” is experienced as a bodily misalignment, and there is a documented increase of strokes and other health risks in the 48 hours after the time change. That we can be so bad at tracking time with our bodies and senses throughout the year, and also so impacted by the time change is a modern mystery. But then again, time is a bit of a mystery: one of those seemingly unquestionable things that, the more you think about it, the more questionable it becomes.
What is time? Why are we so ruled by it, so attached to measuring it? And can it really be lost?!
. . .
There was a piece by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker a few years ago called How the Week Organizes and Tyrannizes Our Lives, in which she discusses the history of “the week” — a concept not only man-made but changeable! — and it will twist your mind into a pretzel trying to imagine how the world would function without the construct of weeks, so fundamental are they to 21st-century life. If we only minded days (marked by the rising and setting of the sun) and years (by the repetition of seasons) how would anyone know when it was the right day to do recurring things involving other people, like attend a church service, or watch a broadcast TV show, or play a game of sports?
Not to mention the week’s central role in how modern-day, Western calendars are typically laid out, with the grid of weeks stacked into months, which then form years. (“Months”! That imperfect tool for trying to align the calendar, the year and the moon’s cycles.) But nothing about calendar time is set in stone. To this day, cultures around the world mark different start dates for a new year, and even in Christian Europe, as Jason Farago notes in his exquisite 2023 art-essay Searching for Lost Time in the World’s Most Beautiful Calendar, “for many centuries … the new year didn’t start on Jan 1. It began on March 25.” Spring was a fresh start in even more ways than it is today. Plus not all modern-day calendars across the globe have the same number of days or months from one year to the next, or dates that repeat or are fixed in any sense, like ours are.
Farago’s piece includes a look at many calendars from different places and eras, but it is primarily a deep dive — both funny and fascinating, a lesson in seeing — into a stunning hand-painted early-15th-century calendar, the private datebook of a wealthy French duke, known as the Trés Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. I really urge you to click through and enjoy the ride he takes you on, but what struck me most (which I’ve been chewing on in the year since I first saw it) is the discussion of time being cyclical on the left-hand pages of the duke’s datebook, and linear on the right. “We perceive time only through change,” Farago writes (and those of you who know my past struggle living in seasonally monotonous places will understand how vigorously I nodded my head). “But what kind of change? Do our lives evolve in history or do they repeat themselves? Is time an arrow or a wheel?”
I was, at that moment, in the middle of recording both — in two separate journals.
THE CIRCULAR
In mid-2020, quarantined at home with my husband in Nashville, having closed down my business, and in the midst of that perilous election year, I saw a mention of someone’s 5-year journal and it seemed like a good idea at that particular moment in history. So I ordered one from Letts. I kept it simple: Each day I recorded what we ate for dinner (thinking it would give ideas to future me), noted the temperature (for year-over-year comparison), and added a sentence or two about the day’s events. Similar to the duke’s perpetual calendar, with a 5-year journal you start back at the beginning every January, so by the time Farago’s piece came along in April 2023 I was on my fourth pass through the book, entries stacking up on top of each other. Each day was not only itself but its past selves, remaining present.
Sept 30 — as the random example it fell open to — was the day that one side of our tiny NY galley kitchen was completed (2023); that we flew to TX for my grandma’s funeral (’22); picked up dear friends who came to visit us in FL “post-Covid” (’21); and that I finished emptying out my old business studio space in TN (’20). Others ranged from mundane to amusing to aggravating all over again.
Like the calendars that fill store shelves every year in our world, the duke’s 1410 calendar contains 12 monthly spreads, each with a calendar opposite a pretty picture. His pretty pictures (intricately handpainted by a trio of Flemish brothers, and topped with a half-circle of cyclical time) depict how central the seasons — and more specifically the management of land and crops — are to the wheel of his trés riche life. Up until my parents’ generation, my people were middle American farmers. Every March, my ancestors prepared to sow and harvest. In the years contained in my 5-year journal, every March I packed or unpacked our belongings.
THE LINEAR
My second journal, kept simultaneously, was the version of a DIY datebook I’ve developed for myself over years and iterations. In late 2020, I settled on the form I’ve been using ever since. People familiar with the bullet journaling community would call it a “bujo,” despite that the only thing it has in common with Ryder Carroll’s inspiring Bullet Journal method is the linear 1-31 date list — which, as the duke’s book shows us, is a tradition as old as calendar-making. I couldn’t help but feel an affinity with this handmade datebook from 1410, as extraordinarily different as it is from mine, and wonder what of its features I might be able to incorporate. Farago compares it to an almanac; mine does track the weather.
. . .
Time is not only how we experience the world, it’s also how we describe it. Halfway through writing this, I became aware of time-based language piling up in the sentences, completely unintentionally: time as metaphor (“my Christmas morning”), as compulsory citation (a piece published “a few years ago“), as a point of comparative reference (“21st-century” life) or indicator of current relevancy (“modern-day” calendars) and as common parlance (“to this day”). Would we be able to tell each other stories without the components of time to lean on? But also why do we lean on it so hard?
On January first of this year, when it was time to start a new #bujo for myself and also turn again to the first page of the 5-year journal, I decided to let the latter go. Living in the present means letting the past be in the past, for better or worse. Whether like a wheel or an arrow, time moves forward, and I have my book of days to keep me on course.
I was in college, studying graphic design and design history under a Cranbrook alum, circa 1990 just as Mid-Century Modern revivalism was at peak fervor. In other words, I was bathed in it both at school and in the home decor magazines I hoarded. But while MCM’s main manifestation — both originally and in the early ’90s — was the bright, spare, mid-century-only look, I’ve always favored the more layered and eclectic Ray Eames approach. You know, the undersung Ray!, wife of Charles Eames, who was his partner in life and design, and whose design style is on full display in their iconic Pacific Palisades home, aka Case Study House No. 8. Their life as a creative couple — and the ways in which that whole group collaborated and influenced each other — is the most interesting thing about them, to me. But I hadn’t known about their friendship and playful collaborations with illustrator Saul Steinberg (and his wife Hedda Sterne) until I ran across this fantastic, magazine-sized book, Steinberg Meets the Eameses*, in an email from one of my all-time favorite bookstores, William Stout Architectural Books in San Francisco.
I love a beautifully designed show catalog or publication that sits right on the line between “book” and “ephemera,” and this one is a true gem, especially in how it incorporates various samples of Steinberg’s editorial work in ways that convey or even mimic the original formats. It’s the catalog for an exhibition organized by the Eames Institute,** also called Steinberg Meets the Eameses, which you can explore online. And there’s another of their online exhibitions, not to be missed, called Ray’s Hand.
*This one is not available through Bookshop so I have happily linked back to Stout for it, but remember you can leave a tip anytime! 😉 **Eames Institute apparently acquired Stout Books in late 2022 when I had my head turned!Wow.
You’ve likely heard Brené Brown’s phrase “dress-rehearsing tragedy” (from her book Dare to Lead), and if not, you probably immediately get what it means. According to Brown’s research, 90% of us do it: “Something wonderful happens, and for a brief second you let the joy wash over you — and then five seconds later, the excitement is gone and you’re panicked about a bad thing that’s going to happen to counter the positive. When’s the other shoe going to drop?”
In the face of joy, we imagine terrible scenarios, tell ourselves we’re bracing, preparing, practicing, in an effort to lessen the impact of the imagined inbound pain or disappointment. We’re dress-rehearsing tragedy. The antidote to this thoroughly pointless tendency, she tells us, is gratitude. Simply appreciating the good things in our lives as they happen — and actively, outwardly expressing that on a regular basis — can help break the catastrophizing habit and allow more joy into our lives.
I can attest to that, but a recent NYT Well newsletter by Jancee Dunn, on the power of savoring, contained an idea by a professor of social psychology named Dr. Fred Bryant that goes one step further:
“Dr. Bryant amps up his appreciation for the present by imagining himself in the future, pining for his current life. He has a 7-year-old granddaughter, and sometimes he’ll pretend that she is all grown up, has moved away, ‘and that I would give anything, just for one more day with her,’ he said. Then he opens his eyes and tells himself that his wish is granted.”
Corny? Maybe. But effective.
I do a version of this when it comes to sleep. If I’ve woken up in the middle of the night, or too early in the morning, with enough time left for at least a nap’s worth, I imagine I’ve already been up (or sometimes I actually get up for a minute and walk around the cold house) and that I get to slip back into bed for a precious nap. Imagining and savoring that stolen moment of curling up and tuning out the day, which I get to do so rarely, is often enough to put me right back to sleep.
TIP ONE: The most fun a book nerd can have on the Internet
If you ask me what’s the best oddball/grassroots concept the Internet ever made possible, I’ll launch into a rapturous digression about a once-weekly event called Layer Tennis and then say but definitely my idea of the thing that made the Internet worth having is the annual Tournament of Books. And the happy news is that it’s still going strong — in fact, the 20th tournament officially kicks off on Wednesday of next week, which means you have this weekend (if you aren’t already a fan) to dig into the history of the tournament and look over this year’s contenders and judges. I’m 1/3 of the way into James McBride’s incredibleThe Heaven and Earth Grocery Store*, but otherwise have read none of them — it’s ok, that’s part of the fun of it. Mark your bracket if you have read them, maybe order yourself a t-shirt, and get prepared to follow along!
TIP TWO: The hole in the Paris Review paywall
I just bought myself something I’ve wanted for a long time, that I’m not 100% sure why I’ve never indulged in: A subscription to The Paris Review literary journal. In addition to it being reliably great-looking and great-reading, their Art of Fiction author interviews (which date back to the 1950s) are among my all-time favorite things. I have all of the paperback compilations — The Paris Review Interviews: Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3 and Vol. 4* (sent to me by the publisher back when I had Readerville) — and love dipping into them, but they only go up to 2009. A fifteen-year gap!
I think I haven’t subscribed to the journal because it robs me of the joy of buying an issue now and then when I find it on the table at some great little shop. But I’ve been hitting the paywall more and more lately, and decided finding the issue in my mailbox has to be just as thrilling as the random encounter, right? Plus, the archive!
With or without a subscription, here’s a hot tip for dipping into the vast archive:
They have a mailing list called ‘The Redux,’ and if you sign up for it you’ll get an email every Sunday linking to a few pieces from the past that they’ve made public for that week. This week happens to have been the three short stories from last year that just won them the ASME Award for short fiction. You can read them via these links if you click today or tomorrow (or anytime if you’re subscribed)—