Gayle Early's Blog
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Mar.05.2012
Why is it we have words for sounds and colors but not for smells?
I know what a banana smells like: it smells like the object it's named for. It doesn't smell yellow. And I can only further define the smell, based on the adjective of the name of the object, like unripe or ripe or overripe. Why isn...
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Jan.27.2012
So humans, fanatic wielders of Clorox wipes, are just one branch in long genetic lines of bacterial evolution. Our great-to-past infinity-grandparents were bugs and we are bugs, and we already know we can’t live without them, whether you’re pro-biotic or anti-biotic in nature. Just our...
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Mar.29.2011
Summer of 2007: My kids hated camping and hiking in the Redwoods.
I was so stunned, when we got them on the trails with the giant trees and they said, "This is boring. When can we go home. This is stupid."
One of the most glorious places on planet Earth failed to move my seven- and nine-...
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Feb.25.2011
I thought I came from fairly boring peasant stock until my mother’s Catholic priest came home from Ireland one summer with a book he found there, "Biddy Early: The Wise Woman of Clare." Our last name is Early, and we are a large clan of ten (technically--there was a divorce, let’s say...
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Nov.05.2010
It's not just the hours. The days slip right out from beneath me.
Clock says 11:00 a.m. Still a few precious hours before I go get the kids from school. These hours, the ones that belong to me, are tick tick ticking away. I walk past the clock, always eyeing it, jealously eyeing it. Suddenly I turn...
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Oct.24.2010
On Saturday, October 23, my eleven-year-old daughter finished her soccer game as clouds skidded across the sky. I said to our coach, Janos, who is Hungarian but came to the United States on a soccer scholarship years ago, "Happy Revolution Day." My husband, whose father escaped Hungary in...
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Oct.18.2010
I have two daughters, k1 and k2. K2 started middle school this year and has the usual anguish over what to wear (Hollister out? Abercrombie & Fitch still in? Levis supercool now?), how to fix her hair (side bangs? bobby pinned? flat or curling ironed?) She struggles with the ghastliness of...
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Aug.28.2009
It is one of my singular misfortunes that belching is considered bad manners.
I am really good at it.
My six brothers were both envious and proud that their little ol' sister had the biggest pipes in the house. All it took was a big juicy red apple or potato chips, and I would blast them out of the...
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Mar.15.2009
I was a little scared to go back.
Someone with that much anger could go ballistic. I’ve experienced a person at the negative tipping point who’s tipped himself right into a psych ward. Society, bad formative experiences early in life, the culture–too much can overwhelm one’s coping mechanisms. But...
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Dec.04.2008
Scrambled eggs and rocks
You can’t have eggs without salt. I’m too far from my predatory roots to enjoy the quick snap and slurp of a stolen shell. I need to scramble my eggs on a propane-fueled cook stove, scramble them just like the heat- and pressure-scrambled rocks around us. Back in La Mesa...
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Dec.04.2008
Mondays are hard enough. But it helps to start out a new day walking to school with Megan. We tried to walk last year, but Tropico is a narrow, curving, hilly, blind-spotted road, and to get to school we thought we had to suck in exhaust from the zillions of SUVs flying past, as parents race to...
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Aug.25.2008
Red ripe garden tomatoes. Yes, we know they're fruit. In fact, they're ovaries. Yes, fruit are the ovaries in the plant world, sorry to break it to you.
Plucking each tomato's genetic lineage right off the vine, yesterday, hoping to end it in a lasagna, I filled my basket. (Sure, I could harvest...
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Aug.22.2008
Flatiron Building, NYC. Spiderman’s day job at the Daily Bugle
I used to wonder why I was only one of five protesters during the first Gulf War.
There was so little national dialogue. Sure, Father George gathered his international consensus, everyone but the sons agreeing Saddam was creepy, his...
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Aug.11.2008
I've finally turned the corner, after two weeks of either viral meningitis (can't test for that, tho the spinal tap showed inflammation) or a bad reaction to not resting after oral surgery.
Just a simple tooth extraction and bone graft. My inner world can be so chaotic that I ground myself by...
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Jun.25.2008
Chia's not all you think. Didn't know you could actually smoke that Homer head? (Yes, you can buy a chia plant that grows out of Homer's massive cranium.) But that ain't the smokable variety, actually, it's a cousin in the giant Salvia clan.
Of a zillion species, the Salvia you usually eat is sage...
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"I'd rather die on a full stomach or by the gun of a jealous husband."”
—My grandfather
About Gayle
I’m a freelance writer in San Diego. Published a few essays in magazines (see "The Great Stinkhorn Patch"--about the wonders of Phallus impudicus) and a cover story on The Androgynous Male in an Arts & Culture review (plus other stories). Won a...
Causes Gayle Early Supports
Environmental protections, human rights, marriage equality
Gayle’s Favorite Books
Everything. I mean everything. I've got piles of New Yorker's, Discover, Smithsonian, Ode, Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, New York Times, and other litmags in...