Mukilteo Musings

Brilliant People in Seattle

The Seattle Times had a frontpage article today about "Frasier". Anybody who watches TV knows "Frasier" is set in Seattle (though not filmed here) and the final episode is tonight. The gist of the article by Kay McFadden is that Seattle has become more like the "condo-dwelling, wine-sipping, opera going" characters in the sitcom. Evidently, we have more opera attendees per capita than any city in the nation; we read more books; and we go to more movies, too.

According to the article, Judith Chandler of Third Place Books in Seattle commented, "But the show [like Seattle] is full of theatrical and literary references in a town that loves the theater and reading. It's about brilliant, highly educated people that don't know how to ask for a date." I live with one of these "brilliant, highly educated people" who sometimes does not demonstrate a lot of sense.

Of course, there are advantages to having a brilliant scientist around the house. When we lost two Golden Retrievers one after the other of leukemia and lymphoma, my husband called his friend who happens to be a dog geneticist. She knows the lines affected by the bad genes and we picked a puppy unrelated; this is no guarantee, of course, that our Apolo will live a long life but we have tried to reduce the risk.

Living with such a person can also be embarrassing. For example, one evening at our prior house we noticed a "creature" hanging from the eave on the second story. Evening light in this area at a house surrounded by huge trees tends to be dim so the creature wasn't clearly visible. To my highly educated husband it was obviously a huge bat of some sort. We do have bats around here no doubt. Our Governor Gary Locke and his wife Mona and their children had to move out of the Governor's mansion for a while because they had bats. But we do not have huge bats.

My husband became excited thinking this was a large fruit bat that had hitched a ride on a load of bananas from South America; or perhaps this is an example of how global warming is drastically changing our flora and fauna. So what does my husband do? He calls his friend and colleague who just happens to be the world's number one expert on wildlife in the Galapagos Islands; her particular area of interest is penguins. Over the telephone, she became equally excited about the ramifications of finding such a creature in the Pacific Northwest. She told us to get some pictures and then call the State Wildlife Department to capture it.

Sometimes when it comes to the animal world, I have more guts than my husband (except for rats or mice). Also, I just wasn't quite sure about this animal that seemed to be remarkably still; however, bats do sleep hanging upside down. I was the first to go upstairs and remove the screen from a small bathroom window and lean outside to get a better look hoping all the while that bats sleep soundly. I am not afraid of bats, I tell myself remembering how as a child on camping trips my Dad at dusk would use his fly rod to try and catch bats. But because of their unbelievable sonar, they could detect the fishing line attached to the fake insects and they could never be caught.

"Oh my God!!! IT'S A SOCK! A DAMN dark blue SOCK!!", I scream. A sock hanging from a vent hole in our eave!!! Evidently, a small bird whose eyes were bigger than its nest, tried desperately to stuff a large, cozy, fluffy men's blue sock into its home. She managed only to get the toe through the small hole leaving the rest to dangle.

I climb down. "Call Dee back!" I tell my brilliant, highly educated husband.

"No, I'm sure she's busy now."

"Call her and tell her the rare species was a SOCK before other people are involved!" I reply insistently.

I think that was the most difficult phone call my husband has ever made. We left the sock there for a while so we could see it in different light and to try and convince ourselves we jumped to a sensible conclusion. Hmmm! Maybe they should replace "Frasier" with "Scientists in Seattle!"