Wednesday and Life

I wasn't ready for Wednesday morning.  I was just getting into doing nothing - last night I transplanted the rest of my zinnias into a bed (they had reseeded everywhere, and I can't bear to mow them down), harvested eggplants and cherry tomatoes, and watered and mulched my loofah sponge gourds (they're growing like mad!).  I did all of this, mind you, with a glass of wine - so I wasn't hurried, I stopped and watched the hummingbirds swarming the salvia and I rubbed the Stanimal's belly (even though he felt that sleeping on the basil was a wonderful idea - I forgave him). 

But this morning my cell phone rang a little bit after 7 and it was one of my graduate students.  The ring surprised me - few people have the number - I was probably one of the last 5 people in Charleston to get a cell phone;  I told myself that I would get one when my car reached 100,000 miles.  It did, and I have.  I forget that it's my work emergency contact number.  So I answer and it's my student who is calling to tell me that his wife wants a divorce, she's 100% sure, and that he didn't think he would make it in today.  He started asking about attorney's and the process and...I told him that he should talk with his parents.  He's young;  he's only been married for two years.  Then he told me that I was the first person he was calling, that he would call his parents next.

Sometimes I forget the presence I have in my students lives.  It always catches me off-guard, surprises me.  But the word "mentor" is big and is about life - it isn't only about experimental design and process and scientific growth and edits - I still remember the day that my second doctoral student came into my office, and in tears told me that his mother had terminal breast cancer.  He was an only child and never knew his father.  Then a former student came into my office to talk about her parents who had been married for 30 years who had decided to separate.  Like this morning, life walks into my office on a regular basis and presents itself - naked, raw, painful.

I thought today about my reaction.  First, compassion.  Are you okay in this moment?  Can I do anything right now?    He needs help finding a mediator and/or attorney - I have several attorney friends and I email them and they immediately suggest names, send phone numbers and email addresses.  He's grateful.  Then empathy - I think back over these moments in my own life, when relationships were dissolving - relationships that lasted far longer than his two year marriage - and I remember those moments of clarity when I knew it was over.  I can close my eyes and remember where I was at those moments.  But it saddens me that a tough lesson is being learned here for the first time - that life goes down a twisted path, it starts off one way and then goes another - it rambles and sometimes changes direction at breakneck speed.   And sometimes it just simply stops in mid-sentence.  People can become people that you don't recognize.  Love - and the commitment of that love (which is more important?) - aren't always enough...but then I become THE BOSS, realizing that he needs to get back on his feet quickly - we have a big study scheduled to begin this week and he needs the data for a poster presentation in a few weeks.   I know that he wants to defend his dissertation proposal in mid-Fall and that we can't lose a month or two of momentum if we want it to go well.  Moving forward is all we can do.  Tomorrow we start moving forward.

After this early morning call, I raced to The Charleston Place to catch a session at the International Society for Developmental and Comparative Immunology - I'm not an immunologist, but there was a full session on marine mammal immunology, and since I have a small bottlenose dolphin project, I thought it would be useful for me to sit and perhaps learn a little bit.  I knew a number of people there - and as I sat in the back row I saw the dynamics split into their two camps - all one had to do was watch the body language, listen to the tone of the questions (and responses) - and to watch who got up and went outside when.  Maybe I was still thinking about my student, I don't know - but it saddens me that this happens, that groups (even groups that have labs down the hall from one another) become so divided.  Marine Mammal research is tough - we don't have easy access to the animals, we know little about them, there is little funding to do the research - so what do we do?  We try to increase our own standing by belittling our colleagues.  Hubris.   It was swirling around the room, sitting in all of the empty chairs, pouring itself cups and cups of coffee, and laughing until tears were running down it's..hmmm, I don't think I can say 'face' here.  Hubris is an entity that was almost tangible in that room - it had dimension, you could almost see it's outline, sense it's presence, smell it's odor.  One scientist asked a speaker "So, you have this large data set from live capture coastal dolphins - who cares?  Haven't most of the die-offs been observed in pelagic species?"  That was one of those questions that makes an uninformed audience immediately discount years and years of effort - while the informed audience knows that we don't have methodologies to safely capture pelagic dolphins (besides nets - which stresses them to the point that they often die or have severely impaired immune responses).  But there were fewer informed individuals in the audience - there was a gasp (!), like they just realized that they had been mislead and were appalled.  What they missed was that this data set that had just been presented was the most comprehensive of it's kind - and provided incredible insight into marine mammal health.  But hubris was in the room this morning - and had won control of it.

It was nice to go back to my laboratory for the afternoon, to talk about the QuickExtract protocol and whether we could order the glycerol from Fisher.  It was nice to be free of the hubris that is present more and more when I step out of the 1,000 sq feet that I can control - we leave it at the door, where it wanders down the hall until it finds someone willing to play.  It generally finds someone easily.

It's time to go out into the garden.

Comments

[Jason]

You are a little bit amazing, all around...

[TJ]

Wow. I wish I'd known you when I got divorced. That was an amazing thing that you did.

[Pam]

Jason - Thanks. Although I'm probably more like a little bit frazzled and stressed - but I'll accept amazing this morning.

TJ - I wish I had known me too.

[TJ]

Pam, If you find yourself say Hi for me.

[JanetLee]

I agree with Jason, will you come be my boss?

P.S. I still don't have a cell phone. I think I am the last person in the tri-county area without one.

[Joan]

What a nice entry and how lucky he was to have you to call.

I deal with so much of this as well - often from seniors but teenagers too. I find myself the first to learn of spots on lungs, lumps in breasts, romances and acceptance into educational programs. I've held so many teary folks I have a roll of toilet paper on my desk now because we couldn't find tissue last time. Mostly good stuff though, mostly good.

[Pam]

TJ - I haven't found myself yet. I'm worried that it just might not happen.

JanetLee - Sure, if the benefits are good, and I can get lots of days off to go sailing and do nothing. Or chocolate and good martinis. That would work too.

Joan - Geez, I bet you get all sorts of stories!

[Daniel]

Explaining how science (as a field) is both different from and the same as other forms of human endeavor is one of the challenges of covering science. Science as a process and philosophy? One thing. Science as practiced by human beings? Another. Yet human failings don't sink science -- they are just another variable for which one must control when thinking about problems.