Three things from DAH. 

DAH is me, David Anthony Hance. Yes, and. 

First up this week, Youth …  
George Bernard Shaw is cited for saying something like, "youth is wasted on the young." That's so negative. I prefer the words of Henri II Estienne (16th Century): "si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait!" In English: "If youth knew, if old age could!" My immigrant nuclear family was small. In my youth I craved larger togetherness. The shared lives a larger family with more generations might bring. I still long for the charms and challenges of a big, close family. Since I don't have that, I treasure friends. It's difficult to create and keep a multi-generational friend-circle. Difficult, too, in our modern world, to saddle youth with old age (and vice versa). I've not the energy I had in youth, but I can still be useful. 
Multigenerational Living Isn't Immigrant Culture, It's Human Culture

Second up this week, Yawning …  
Am I yawning more as I age? I think I should. I'm deservedly more tired, right? Studies suggest that yawning is contagious in humans. I don't feel tired enough when I'm with lots of others, so I haven't tested this. I have tried it with my dogs, because yawning is reportedly contagious between dogs and humans. Yet I can't make this work at all. I yawn at my dogs and they just stare at me, likely waiting for treats to fall from my gaping maw. My dogs yawn at me and I feel no impulse to return the yawn. Nobody seems certain why we yawn. I read one theory that suggested it was to cool our brains. Wow. I'm sure that's why my dogs yawn. 
Did Your Dog Just Yawn Because You Did?

Third up this week, Yumminess …  
Long ago (in the 1990s) winemaker Clark Smith asked, "Does U.C.Davis have a theory of deliciousness?" At that time some suggested that the elimination of flaws in wine (reductionism; breaking a system down into its component parts) didn't necessarily result in a better, more delicious wine. Reductionism is a useful practice: Identify component flaws and fix them. I do this in the kitchen. I try a recipe, then begin adjusting individual elements to fix perceived shortcomings. But in the end I usually muck about a bit until things turn yummy, recipe be damned. I'm aiming for a more holistic approach. Perhaps a gestalt of yumminess, as in the book Cooking at Home, by David Chang and Priya Krishna.  My favorite winemakers and chefs, and creatives in general, all have a sense of yumminess that escapes reductionism. 
Are reductionist approaches useful for understanding wine?


A Book I'm Reading: Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children's Literature as an Adult, by Bruce Handy.
"A companionable romp … Like The Runaway Bunny, it's really a gently obsessive tale, a man gathering up so many words and ideas as if to create a magical stay against his own children growing up." (The New York Times Book Review)

And a bit more:

Surviving, by Leona Gom

growth,
the smell of it
like warm vinegar,
it pushes through all
the burned-out places, the
logged-out places, crawls
from stumps, vines,
the dark throat of seeds,
from all the things
that know
how to hold
their breaths
and wait


And that's all for this week.
From Mary Oliver’s poem Sometimes …  

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it. 

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