Curiosity as cure
by Anton Zuiker on March 4, 2019
This weekend, Anna accompanied me on a short drive to the hardware store to buy a shovel, an axe, a sledgehammer, and a San Angelo digging bar. Along the way, we talked more about her university options and about what kind of roommate she prefers. I reminded her that, when she meets her fellow college students, she should strive to be interested in them and to be curious about them.
“That’s how people will find you interesting and want to know about you, and that’s how they’ll want to be your friend.”
It also leads to other connections.
A colleague at Duke recommended I meet with Neil Prose, a pediatric dermatologist who teaches medical students about patient communication, humility, and empathy. He spoke about that at TEDxDuke last year. I met Dr. Prose today, and we talked about Voices of Duke Health and his Keepers of the House poject. He suggested I read this essay on curiosity by Faith Fitzgerald.
“I believe that it is curiosity that converts strangers…into people we can empathize with,” she writes. That’s why nearly every day at work, I ask visitors if I can help them find their way through the hospital. As I walk them to a clinic or the elevators or toward the food court, I ask where they’re from, about their work, and how their family members are doing. I try to be curious, and I listen.
Dr. Fitzgerald finishes her essay with a delightful anecdote about a seemingly boring elderly patient who reveals a remarkable connection to an historic event. It’s worth reading for just those 25 lines.
Another worthy read is today’s blog post from Josh Bernoff, In praise of ignorance and being wrong. He argues that you need to embrace the discomfort of feeling stupid if you want to learn anything new.
“There is no shame in ignorance, only in failing to act to cure it,” Bernoff writes.
Bob Gadbois
by Anton Zuiker on March 3, 2019
Claire Gadbois wrote to share this video tribute to her late husband, Bob Gadbois, that was shown at the Our World Underwater convention evening film festival last month. (Bob was my father’s cousin.)
I last saw Bob and Claire at the 2017 Zuiker Family reunion in Tennessee. As with previous family gatherings, they came prepared to show photos of their world travels. That summer, they especially wanted to share their excitement for the solar eclipse that was coming up. We gathered in one of the cabins, and they explained what would be happening when the moon moved between the sun and Earth. I snapped a photo and posted it that day to my microblog.
The next day, Bob and Claire were part of the family’s excursion down the Little Pigeon River. I slid into my tube and kicked down the river and was sipping bourbon from my flask as I glanced back to see Bob, sick with cancer but suited up anyway and camera around his neck, sit onto his tube. Oliver was already speeding down the river ahead, so I went after him, inspired by Bob’s love of the water.
In the crosswalk
by Anton Zuiker on March 3, 2019
I took my regular Sunday walk into town to get a cup of coffee at Gray Squirrel. The two-mile stroll, down the hill and back up into Carrboro, gives me time to think and plan and dream. I walk without music or headphones, and try to notice what I’m noticing along the way. Today the blue jays were most vocal.
On my way home, I waited for the signal at the Smith Level Road crosswalk near the elementary school. The light turned red, the walk sign went white, a Honda hybrid slowed to a stop, its engine went quiet. I began to cross the street, but then heard the rapid revolutions of tires getting louder. I paused in front of the Honda, looked up to see an approaching pickup truck, and waited for the drier to see my bright orange jacket and jolt to a stop before I continued to the other side.
I’m back in the house now, where it is still and calm and safe.
Listening for the future
by Anton Zuiker on March 2, 2019
Malia and Anna with Grandma in the Loop.
So far in 2019, I have taken three trips.
The first was a weekend trip to Chicago with my daughters, Anna and Malia, to celebrate Malia’s birthday. We stayed at a hotel in the Loop, bundled up, and hustled through the snowy streets to the Art Institute of Chicago to look at great art, the Willis (Sears to me) Tower to view the city from the Skydeck, the CIBC Theatre to see Hamilton again, and back to the mesmerizing Cloud Gate sculpture. My mother, who I hadn’t seen since she headed north to DeKalb last summer, took the train in one day, and we walked with her to the Berghoff Restaurant for lunch and then to the Marshal Field and Company Building (now a Macy’s) to shop like the old days.
On the plane to Chicago, I read Do Listen, a heartwarming reminder from Bobette Buster to take time to practice listening to yourself, to your loved ones, to strangers, to the sounds of the world and the silences of art. I loved this book, and it fit so well into my travels and training and time with my daughters.
The next trip was to Ann Arbor, Michigan to attend a workshop on “creating a vision of greatness for work or life” at ZingTrain, the training facility of Zingerman’s Deli. More snow! But I was inspired by the session — visioning is describing a narrative about where we’re going, with enough specificity to know when you arrive — and I began to draft a vision for where I will be 2025, where I see Voices of Duke Health and The Long Table and my decade of listening and my work in science communication and community building come together in a specific way at Duke. Before I left Ann Arbor, I went to Zingerman’s Deli for a delicious sandwich and to Literati Bookstore’s upstairs cafe for a cappuccino.
On the plane home from Detroit, I read Do Story, also by Bobette Buster, this one drawing on her expertise in screenwriting and her attentiveness to who’s told clear and uplifting narratives (Steve Jobs, JFK, DJ Forza, Winston Churchill). “Dare to be personal. Dare to be vulnerable. And dare to listen to others sharing their stories.” I circled that message, closed my eyes there on the plane, and thought about the Voices episode we’d just published — The Gauntlet is a conversation with Dr. Anthony Galanos about his unfathomable grief about the death of his son, Nick.
My third trip was with Anna up to Baltimore to visit Loyola University Maryland, one of the colleges that has accepted Anna. We like Loyola, a Jesuit school like John Carroll University, where Erin and I met and which also has accepted Anna. After the session at Loyola, Anna and I went for tea at Artifact Coffee, realized we had another hour before we needed to head to the airport, and so went to the Baltimore Museum of Art.
On the way home from Baltimore, I read Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. It, too, is marked up in pencil.
Travel. Family. Books. Ideas. Looking to the future.
Cherry trees and home
by Anton Zuiker on March 1, 2019
Leaning cherry tree is hiding behind the big pine; both are coming down.
When Erin and I bought this property from Mr. McCallum in 2017, he proudly pointed out the solid brick house he’d built in 1961, as well as the fruit trees he’d planted in the yard. There was an apple tree and two pear trees out back, and four tart cherry trees in front around the well house. The apple tree hadn’t been pruned in a long while, it’s trunk was collecting water and the bark was collecting lines of holes from the sapsuckers, and it wasn’t bearing any fruit. One of the pear trees, though, was abundant with small kieffer pears last summer. The squirrels claimed the tree as their own, sitting in the high branches, peeling the pears, and eating the fruit. In the evening, groups of deer would gather under the tree and eat the peelings.
The cherry trees in the front also gave fruit, most of which the birds go to, but I was able to gather a handful of cherries right just before we went on our trip to the South Pacific. Our move into the house and that trip, along with the late harvest at Levering Orchard, meant I wasn’t able to make the annual drive with my friend Rose Hoban to pick cherries. I set my sights on cherries in 2019.
The cherry tree nearest the gravel road, though, was already leaning at 45-degree angle, with a split at the trunk’s base, and then it got hit by a worker’s truck. I finally cut it down with the chainsaw this winter. The apple tree and two of the other cherry trees were sacrificed last week as we began a major tree removal project to clear around the house for safety and open more sunshine for flower gardens and vegetable boxes. We’ve taken down an old blackjack oak, a bunch of big pine trees, and a couple of tall red oaks. The massive trunks of the oaks will be stacked at the side of property, and in a couple of months Randall the sawyer will pull his mobile mill up to the property to transform the trees into a stack of boards. The boards will sit and dry for a year. Then, I’m hoping Randall the table builder (same guy, Anna’s former teacher at Carolina Friends School) will transform some of the boards into at least one long table that I can set up out back for a summer evening meal.
Yesterday, on my way home from work, I stopped by the Southern States farm store in Carrboro to buy two Balaton and one Montmorency tart cherry trees. There’s also an apricot tree and a Russian pomegranate sapling I purchased earlier that are waiting to be planted out back. I hope this new orchard, and the way Erin and I had the house renovated and updated, will be a fitting tribute to Mr. McCallum.
James Richard ‘Dick’ McCallum died in January. He was 94, a veteran of World War II (he served in the Aleutian Islands), a tradesman, a scout master, and from the charity mailers we continue to receive, a very generous man. We are grateful that he chose to sell this property to us. We had been searching for 15 years for a house to fix up and land on which to garden and tend fruit trees and host long-table dinners. It feels good to be home.