Starlings Need Not Apply

by
Scope Correspondent

In 1890 a group of sixty European immigrants arrived in New York City on a boat. Lacking shelter, they made their home in Central Park for a time. It was tough going at first as they struggled to adapt to their strange new surroundings. New York was unlike anything they had ever experienced. Everything was different: the towering skyscrapers in all directions, the sounds, the smells, the food. They stuck with it, though, and in a few years time they managed to carve out a niche for themselves. Their offspring were even more successful, assimilating seamlessly into their parents’ newfound home. Over the course of several generations their numbers swelled and they fanned out across the country, thriving nearly everywhere they went. Full Article »

Swamps and Soliloquies

by
Scope Correspondent

In the backyard of my childhood home, there was a swamp, a mud kingdom of sorts. For hours each afternoon, we played hide-and-seek behind the ferns and skunk cabbage. Some days we crossed the wooden bridge to my parent’s garden to pick raspberries, blackberries, peaches, whatever the neighborhood kids hadn’t yet stolen. We walked through the creek that marked the border between towns, muddying our overalls. We hid toy parachute soldiers in trees, inside holes carved out in the trunks masking the secret lives of chipmunks. We pranced along the green moss carpet. As evening approached, we were herded like cattle to the dinner table to eat our chicken and carrots and drink a full glass of milk. The faster we ate, the more time we’d have outside before the sun went down. Full Article »

Shutter Speed

by
Scope Correspondent

I sat in a chair across from the hospital bed, watching each shallow breath shrug its way out, into, and out of my grandfather’s chest. The amount of time between the conclusion of one breath and the start of the next one was just long enough that my eyes constantly flicked up to the monitor to make sure his heart was still beating. A stroke had paralyzed his right side from the shoulder down and severely impaired his ability to speak, and at 96 years old, he was already in less than peak condition. Full Article »

Empathy: A Vestigial Organ?

by
Scope Correspondent

My father says now that he knew as early as his teenage years that he couldn’t feel for other people.  The son of a small-town pastor, he couldn’t manufacture tears at funerals, surrounded by the weeping members of his community.  Usually, he faked the appropriate emotion well enough to keep up the charade.

He held me as an infant, small enough to fit between the crook of his elbow and the tips of his fingers, and squeezed my leg as I wailed, not shifting his position, unable to figure out that he was applying pressure directly where I had just had my vaccinations.  After a middle school orchestra concert, he asked if I thought I had played well enough to deserve a cookie at the reception. I was mortified, and another child’s mother was visibly shocked.  “It was a joke,” he said later in the car.  “You don’t understand my humor.”  Full Article »