Richard Wolkomir & Joyce Rogers Wolkomir

 

 

After he anchored his boat at the reef, the ichthyologist let us choose—Richard opted for aqualung, Joyce for snorkel.

 

Here, not far out from George Town, the Grand Cayman Island capital, we looked down through perfectly clear Caribbean waters at black bat shapes gliding across the white sand bottom.

 

A moment later, we swam among them. They looked like B-2 Spirit strategic stealth bombers.

 

Sting rays.  

 

We should have been frightened of creatures that looked so lethal. In fact, the Australian conservationist and zookeeper, Steve Irwin, died after accidentally disturbing one and receiving a sting to the chest.

 

Yet, we felt no fear. We felt charmed.  

 

As Joyce snorkeled near the surface, rays flew up and swam with her, gently flapping their huge wings. She felt surrounded by friendly dogs.

 

Richard, near the bottom with his aqualung, found himself escorted by a squadron of the black animals, each the size of a dining room table. One swam up from behind and wrapped its wings around him, scuba gear and all.

 

And what Richard would always remember, looking into those brown eyes—sentience.

 

Maybe humanity doesn't need to go as far as the stars.  

 

We can find intelligent alien life here on Earth, and in its waters.

 

—Joyce & Richard

 

 

We just read a CNN story so touching we felt a need to share it.

 

In the small nation of North Macedonia, a child experienced bullying on her way to elementary school.

 

They bullied her because she has Down syndrome, a genetic condition that causes learning and health disabilities, and makes you look a little different.

 

President Stevo Pendarovski heard about the 11-year-old girl and took presidential action—he walked Embla to school.

 

Holding her hand, he strode with her, to the school's front door. Then he sat down with Embla's parents, to hear the problems they face every day and to discuss solutions.

 

"They should not only enjoy the rights they deserve," the president said of children like Embla, in a statement to the press. "They should also feel equal and welcome in the school desks and the schoolyard. It is our obligation, as a state, but also as individuals, and the key element of this common mission is empathy."

 

Maybe, in a small, obscure country, empathy is easier to find. 

 

--Joyce and Richard

 

 

 

We met a woman today who noticed the t-shirt one of us wore, with a picture of a Pembroke Welsh corgi on the front.

 

Our best friend, we said. He'd been astonishingly bright.

 

So she told us about her dog—also now gone—a Bernese mountain dog, with some collie mixed in.

 

"He was a genius," she said.

 

As evidence, she told us how one of her cats would escape, out to the meadow, where  danger lurked. Coyotes, for instance.

 

So she would tell the Bernese mountain dog: "Go find the cat."

 

Off he'd go, into the meadow, sniffing for cat. When he found her, he had no way to bring her home. So he'd gently place his huge paw on her and press her down.

 

Then he would wait for the lady to come and retrieve her imprisoned cat.

 

Later that day, our friend Eric visited us, with Murdock, a west highland terrier. We told him how impressed we'd been with that Bernese mountain dog's intelligence..

 

Eric looked unimpressed.

 

"Sometimes my cat disappears in the house," he said.

 

He stared down at Murdoch.

 

"Where's kitty?" he said. "Find kitty."

 

Immediately Murdock went hunting her. Is she behind the television? Under the bed? Did she sneak into the pantry?

 

This was our house, with no cat. However, Murdock diligently looked for her. Just like that Bernese mountain dog, he understood—"Find kitty."

 

So, double proof—some dogs know exactly what you're talking about.

 

--Joyce and Richard

 

 

After I left O'Hare, I drove  out of Chicago, then through farmlands and hamlets, until a futuristic skyscraper loomed on the horizon—Fermilab.  

 

Scientists took me down into the buried accelerator, a subterranean ring, 3.9-miles around, where they crashed protons into anti-protons, to study the debris.

 

That's how physicists here discovered the "top quark."

 

I had a day rife with bosons and gravitons, gluons and photons, and chalkboards covered with equations—finally I had spinning head syndrome. So I went outside, taking a break.

 

Sunshine, and a tremendous gabbling of waterbirds.

 

Fermilab's accelerator generated tremendous heat, which went up into a surface pond to radiate off into the atmosphere. Always warm, steaming even in January, that pond became a heaven for ducks and geese.

 

I wandered off to look at the lab's approximately one-thousand acres of reconstituted tall-grass prairie. Something moved behind those thick grasses, tall as a basketball player, and the grasses parted—I gazed at the enormous head of a bison.

 

Fermilab maintains a herd of bison, currently 32, with little bison born annually, aiming to preserve a bit of the ancient prairie.

 

So, under my feet, subatomic bits of energy whizzed and collided. Down there, I suppose, and in the skyscraper, our future understanding of reality's underpinnings is evolving. Up here, I'd stepped back centuries, to when giant grasses covered the prairies, and vast herds of bison roamed.

 

After all that, heading back to Chicago to catch my plane, I found I'd lost my rental car in the lab's huge parking lot. I had to enlist security guards in a patrol cruiser to drive me around until I found my wheels.

 

There's meaning in all that, I think. Someday, maybe, I'll figure it out.

 

--Richard   

 

 

We woke early this frosty Thanksgiving morning, and looked down from our third-story apartment at our building's little park, with a hillside meadow beyond—we saw a fox.

 

A handsome red fox, healthy and robust, with an extravaganza of a tail. It stalked the mowed meadow, sharp eyes alert for mice, ears pricked.

 

For a moment, it strolled along the park's macadam walking path, just as its twin pranced up, equally handsome and healthy and robust.

 

We thought: the Magnificent Mr. Fox, and the equally Magnificent Mrs. Fox. They brought beauty into our morning, and wild joy.  

 

In a moment they hurried up the knoll, and over, and were gone.

 

We have much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving. Right now, though, most of all, perhaps, we're thankful that, in this world, there are foxes.

 

--Richard and Joyce

 

 

My new novel, just published, is The Girl Who Got Her Tiger On (And the Dog Who Had Her Back)—it's a small departure for me, because it's a young-adult thriller.

 

It's not much of a departure since I'm unsure there's much difference between a young-adult novel and an adult novel, except the YA protagonists are youths.

 

In this story, the heroine is a 17-year-old telling about what happened when she was only 12, just after her father's helicopter blew up in Afghanistan, and her mother became deeply depressed. She felt she had "bad weather" in her head. Amidst all that, new neighbors move in, creepy people, she thinks, and she starts watching them—trying to do the right thing, she gets deep into danger.

 

 There's a new boy across the street, who wants to be her friend, but she avoids her classmates. With all her troubles, they seem shallow to her.

 

Virtually all my novels have a corgi character, and this one does, too. He's the heroine's best friend, William, a Pembroke Welsh corgi, who "helps" with her surveillance of what she calls "The House of Evil."

 

Novels are about characters—usually humans—going through difficulties. Maybe they're destroyed. Maybe they're changed. But, on that basic level, I don't think the protagonists' ages matter much.

 

--Richard

 

 

We flew to Egypt to see temples and obelisks, tombs, giant stone pharaohs, and people who died thousands of years ago, wrapped in linen.

 

Our boat, featured in the movie Death on the Nile, reconditioned (sort of), took us upriver toward Sudan, through places where no tourists go.

 

On a hill paralleling the river, a little boy rode a burro, eyeing us—across his lap, a Kalashnikov automatic rifle.

 

Farther on, we foundered on a sandbar, and a farmer and his wife brought basketfuls of dates, gathered from their palms, and pleaded with us on the boat to accept their gift.  

 

We chugged on, until our engines got the vapors, forcing us to dock at a city nobody ever heard of, with perhaps a million residents, and virtually no contact with the larger world.

 

Joyce joined a number of other women from the boat to take a walk through town. Quickly, young men and boys surrounded them, staring and clapping and chanting. Joining arms, the women pushed through the crowd and power-marched back to the boat, and safety.

 

Richard, meanwhile, also took an exploratory walk. Somewhere in that city, a Jeep drove up and pressed its front bumper an inch from the back of his legs. Two men in uniform inside, with suspicious eyes, indicated they needed his passport, which he had no intention of surrendering. With an affable smile, and hand signals, he suggested he'd go back to the boat to fetch it, although it was in his back pocket.

 

All the way that Jeep pressed its bumper against the back of his legs.

 

Finally, repaired, the boat got underway—next stop, the Valley of the Kings.

 

--Joyce & Richard

 

This photograph shows our friends Eric Morse and Murdock, the West Highland Terrier, just after they won yet another "six-legged race," meaning one human and one dog.

 

We think this photograph speaks for itself.

 

--Joyce

 

 

We roared up mountainsides, then down the opposite slopes, just above the white pines' tops.

 

This B-52 flew out of the Griffiss Air Force Base, in Rome, New York, a practice bombing run over Maine—we hugged the ground to elude enemy radar.

 

A senior officer, evaluating the crew's performance, checked on me, too, strapped into a jump seat behind the pilot—was this wild ride making me sick? No, my real difficulty, as the plane gyrated, was trying to jot notes for the article I'd been assigned.

 

Then, ahead, a black-cloud wall, lit by lightning flashes—a massive unpredicted storm. It blocked our way back to Griffiss.

 

We diverted over the Great Lakes, to a B-52 base in Michigan.

  

Problem: not much fuel.

 

Fuel weighs a lot, and so does a B-52. It doesn't take off easily. So we'd lumbered into the air from Griffiss with only the fuel we needed to get airborne. A tanker plane refueled us in midair, just enough for our mission to Maine and back.

 

 Distance to Michigan: much farther than to Griffiss.

 

To save fuel, we flew up into the stratosphere, where the thinner air offered less resistance, but we needed oxygen.

 

I'd had oxygen training in an evacuated chamber before the flight. I'd paid more attention to jotting article notes, though, than learning to turn the oxygen system's handles just so.

 

By sheer luck, I got the oxygen flowing into my mask.

 

Fuel nearly gone.

 

"We may ditch," the pilot announced over the intercom.

 

Below us, one of the Great Lakes.

 

I'd need to climb downstairs and drop from a belly hatch.

 

I'd had no parachute training. Above a certain altitude, I'd need to pull a certain handle. Below that altitude, pull a different handle. However the altimeter revolved crazily. I couldn't read it.

  

It didn't matter. I didn't know how to shed a parachute harness, especially in icy water.

 

Let's cut to the chase: we landed in Michigan on fumes.

 

Griffiss Air Force Base closed years ago, but two moments from that flight stick in my memory.

 

First, as the pilot made decision after decision, I heard him radio the home base—

"Our  passenger's wife's at a motel," he said. "Somebody tell her we've been diverted, and don't know when we'll be back."

  

Late that night, as the copilot drove me to Joyce's motel in a Jeep, he struggled to say something, but the words wouldn't come. We stopped at the motel and he sat looking out the windshield, still struggling.

 

Suddenly, in a burst of emotion, he ripped off one of his uniform's service patches. He handed it to me.

 

--Richard

  

Reeve, pictured above, is sending us all a message.

 

We told Reeve's story five blog posts back—

 

Bad situation in her native Louisiana, then adopted by Ben Power, a Broadway musician, who gave her such a warm new home that people ask us: "Who is that man who's so wonderful with that dog?"

 

Ben's been traveling back and forth to the city—his show, Come From Away, is due to revive from covid dormancy in September, with practice sessions already underway. His friend Maggie has watched over Reeve while he's away, and she took this photo.

 

She says: "Doesn't this picture speak volumes about the simple pleasures in life?"

 

It does, and Reeve can add to that message—In springtime, to lie in new green grass and sniff the violets brings peace.    

 

--Joyce & Richard