Claude the Bear

Claude the Bear

We can tell here in north central Connecticut that we are coming up on spring because it’s time to take the bird feeders down. If we don’t do it, someone else will. In this case, it’s our latest neighborhood denizen, a circa-325-pound, male black bear that, for obvious reasons, we are calling Claude. With warming temperatures of late before the latest chill we figured the bears would be back. They have become increasingly common visitors to our yard and to our area since we first started taking notice of them 15 years ago. Far from encouraging them, we do everything we can to avoid tempting them, which is why we keep our garbage pail stored in the garage until we put it out at the last minute. I had a premonition of things to come Monday morning when I found the pail up top by the street on its side and partially emptied. The wind had been howling, and it’s possible a gust blew it over. But now I’m pretty sure it was the work of our newest incarnation of “Ursus americanus.” We had already taken to bringing in the bird feeder at night; its location just outside our kitchen,...Read more

Marriage

If you think about it carefully, which I would certainly not advise, the whole idea of being married and living with someone else for decades is basically nuts. The big demographic surprise is not that half of all weddings end up in divorce but that they last at all. It’s been exactly a year since I traveled out of town and overnight, so the opportunity to have spent every one of the last 365 days at home has been a real eye opener in terms of what it takes to get along. Jane and I have been married now for 33 years, 2 months – I know this because we got married on a Jan. 1, so counting is easy. That was exactly a day and a year after we had met – at a small New Year’s Eve party that I later realized was set up all along as a kind of blind date. We were both living and teaching along the Canadian border in way upstate New York. She was at Clarkson University in Potsdam and I was just down the road at St. Lawrence University in Canton. Winters were cold back then. Temperatures of -30 F. were...Read more