Hamsters, puffins and Father's Day

Also: Basketball is an escape — and an inspiration [Donate ❤️]( [View in Browser](  June 16, 2024 Dear Cog reader, This week, I’ve been listening to a new podcast created by Sam Anderson for The New York Times. It’s called “[Animal]( and in the six-episode limited series, Anderson spends time with animals – ferrets, puffins, wolves, manatees, bats – trying to glean what lessons they offer inhabitants of the human world. In the very first episode, “Walnut,” we learn about Mango, Anderson’s daughter’s pet hamster, who escaped from his cage into a hole in the floorboards of their family’s very old home. After a couple of days of frantic searching, Anderson had lost hope and was reluctantly making peace with Mango’s demise, when Walnut, the family dachshund, began staring and barking at a certain section of the wall. Sure enough, Mango the hamster was inside — alive. They lured him out with an open jar of peanut butter. I promise “Animal” has something to do with the work Cog published this week, which today centers on two beautiful essays just in time for Father’s Day. Anderson and I are about the same age, and apparently this stage of existence delivers some universal revelations about life’s tenets (beyond the idea that perimenopause may be the root of all that ails you). We all get older, impermanence is constant, everybody and everything dies. At some level we always know these things, but it’s not until mid-life when major loss — for those of us lucky enough not to endure it earlier on — elbows its way in closer to the center of our psyches, and funerals become more frequent than weddings. And this is also what “Animal” is about. In Anderson’s words, we “know the trajectory [of life] is set – nothing we can do about it.” Some people (including me, on not-good days) rage against the reality, get sad and angle to burn it all down, because what does it matter if we’re all going to die anyway? But on my better days, and maybe Anderson’s better days, too, we bypass the nihilism for something more like curiosity and wonder. In the case of “Animal,” Anderson seems to be reaching for something profound – the unexplained, the messy, the joyful – things that are common to life on earth in its many forms. And this is definitely what the two fathers who wrote for us this week are grasping for as well. The author [Lucas Mann]( who you may know as the co-owner of the Riffraff Bookstore and Bar in Providence, Rhode Island, wrote about the decision to buy the bookstore – and thus become an extremely busy small business owner. He explores the transition of parenting a baby to fathering a little kid, and how owning the bookstore changed his relationship with his daughter. [Colin Campbell]( wrote a very different story. His kids, Ruby and Hart, died when a drunk driver going 90 mph hit the family car in 2019. They were 17 and 14, and he buried them on Father’s Day. Every year he wants to pretend the day doesn’t exist, yet every year he summons the courage not to — because Father’s Day was one of his favorite holidays, “the holiest day of the year.” “I don’t want to wall myself off from life, because those walls don’t actually protect me from the pain anyway. Pain gets through every time,” he writes. “Pain finds the cracks, or makes new cracks, or just goes right over the puny walls I try to build. So I might as well lean into it.” My dad is still very much alive – he works, walks 10,000 steps most days, roots for the Cubs, can still beat me in HORSE. My husband, Sam, isn’t so fortunate. He lost his dad last year after a long illness, and this is the first year that he’ll be celebrated as a father, without having one of his own. It’s sad and weird; we really miss him. But Sam's mom is here for a visit. He's also going to play golf early with a couple of friends today and we’ve been invited to a yummy brunch. I know he’ll be happy to receive handmade cards from our kids, however bittersweet. In the episode of “Animal” focused on puffins, Anderson travels to a remote island in Iceland where the birds make their burrows on cliffs high above the sea. He loves puffins, but he makes the trip at the exact moment his daughter, Greta, is leaving for college, and he feels uneasy about having such an extraordinary trip while his kid is leaving home. In the early days of a baby puffling’s life, the mom and dad puffins bring food back to the nest. But eventually, the parents depart, leaving their pufflings alone to make the daring leap off the cliffs, into the open ocean. Sometimes they make it, sometimes they don’t, but this is what always happens. The lesson about letting go – in the many ways life demands – feels especially related to Cog’s work this week. Whether you are a father, have a father, or are missing your own dad, we’re wishing you some peace today. Thank you for reading, Cloe Axelson Senior Editor, Cognoscenti [Follow]( Support the news  Must Reads [I won't let grief rob me of my favorite holiday]( Being Ruby and Hart’s father was and is central to my identity, writes Colin Campbell. From the moment my kids were born, I was all-in. Now how do I celebrate Father's Day without them? [Read more.]( [I won't let grief rob me of my favorite holiday]( Being Ruby and Hart’s father was and is central to my identity, writes Colin Campbell. From the moment my kids were born, I was all-in. Now how do I celebrate Father's Day without them? [Read more.]( [Me, my daughter and ‘a place that is ours’]( When my wife and I bought a local bookstore and bar in Providence, we worried their 5-year-old daughter would feel left out, writes Lucas Mann. But she’s the one who showed it belongs to all of us. [Read more.]( [Me, my daughter and ‘a place that is ours’]( When my wife and I bought a local bookstore and bar in Providence, we worried their 5-year-old daughter would feel left out, writes Lucas Mann. But she’s the one who showed it belongs to all of us. [Read more.]( ['Revenge porn' should be a crime regardless of intent]( The bill pending in Massachusetts does not have to make the same mistake as most other states have in defining the crime by looking to the intentions of the perpetrator,write Jessica Magaldi and Jonathan Sales. [Read more.]( ['Revenge porn' should be a crime regardless of intent]( The bill pending in Massachusetts does not have to make the same mistake as most other states have in defining the crime by looking to the intentions of the perpetrator,write Jessica Magaldi and Jonathan Sales. [Read more.]( [Basketball is an escape — and an inspiration]( Alastair Moock appreciates the Celtics brand of basketball more than ever. "Rooting as hard as I do for unusually tall men to put a ball through a hoop may seem like a strange coping mechanism, but I find I’m in good company," he writes. [Read more.]( [Basketball is an escape — and an inspiration]( Alastair Moock appreciates the Celtics brand of basketball more than ever. "Rooting as hard as I do for unusually tall men to put a ball through a hoop may seem like a strange coping mechanism, but I find I’m in good company," he writes. [Read more.]( What We're Reading "I didn't feel like I had a community anymore after college, and the internet culture of serving gave me a sense of identity," "[The Good Waitress]( Dirt. "In a media habitat that elevates cheap debate and stymies contextualization, the ground becomes lush for culture wars to invade, spreading petty but harmful disagreement and mirroring a country that screams better than it listens." "[The Media’s Role in Fracturing Sports]( The Washington Post. "'Consent' is a surprising and often jarring book: part memoir and postmortem, part recrimination and reclamation, and yet, part love story, too." "[At 17, She Fell in Love With a 47-Year-Old. Now She Questions the Story.]( The New York Times. "Playing and watching hoops are the times I can stop thinking about national elections, local politics, climate change, Gaza and all the other things that keep me up at night. " — Alastair Moock, "[Basketball is an escape — and an inspiration]( ICYMI [Painting Cape Cod's dunes in the dark, I trusted it would all add up in the morning]( At night, when the visual world breaks down, all my senses are on high alert, writes Elizabeth Flood. Night painting challenges me to adapt, creating a kind of trust exercise between the land, my senses and the work. [Read more.]( [Painting Cape Cod's dunes in the dark, I trusted it would all add up in the morning]( At night, when the visual world breaks down, all my senses are on high alert, writes Elizabeth Flood. Night painting challenges me to adapt, creating a kind of trust exercise between the land, my senses and the work. [Read more.]( If you’d like to write for Cognoscenti, send your submission, pasted into your email and not as an attachment, to opinion@wbur.org. Please tell us in one line what the piece is about, and please tell us in one line who you are. 😎 Forward to a friend. They can sign up [here](. 🔎 Explore [WBUR's Field Guide]( stories, events and more. 📣 Give us your feedback: newsletters@wbur.org 📧 Get more WBUR stories sent to your inbox. [Check out all of our newsletter offerings.]( Support the news     Want to change how you receive these emails? Stop getting this newsletter by [updating your preferences.](  I don't want to hear from WBUR anymore. Unsubscribe from all WBUR editorial newsletters [here.](  Interested in learning more about corporate sponsorship? [Click here.]( Copyright © 2023 WBUR-FM, All rights reserved.