Lately I have been thinking about waterfalls, which in this town is like daydreaming about icebergs in the Mojave. Davis ranks among the flattest places in the United States. The flatness explains why we have more bicycles per capita than any other American city, and it explains why we have so little falling water.

The nearest waterfall belongs to an unlikely landlord: UC Davis, my employer for the last 36 years. It sits in Stebbins Cold Canyon, about twenty miles west: to find it, drive to Winters and then keep going. Logic says our waterfalls should lie to the east, in the Sierra, but the closest one drops off the Coast Range, instead. In October, it drops nothing at all. By my unscientific count, Davis has seen about half an inch of rain in the last six months, and the creek in Cold Canyon waits, dry, for winter.

I use the public pianos of Davis as my prospective rain gauge. Yesterday I noticed that the public piano at Second and E Streets had vanished, wheeled away to whatever warehouse shelters our street pianos for the season. Locals read that empty corner the way farmers read clouds: when the piano disappears, rain soon follows. After a big storm, I watch for water in the south fork of Putah Creek on my walks through South Davis. The falls in Cold Canyon must wait for winter.

T. S. Eliot, who occupied much of my doctoral dissertation, imagined country like this in The Waste Land. Eliot writes “Here is no water but only rock / Rock and no water and the sandy road.” At least the dry land that Eliot imagined had mountains. Ours in Davis has greenbelts and bike lanes.

Other members of my family, meanwhile, have had waterfalls to spare. Recently my wife Kate flew to Buffalo, and my son Truman rode the bus up from Ithaca College to meet her. They went straight to Niagara Falls, bought disposable parkas against the mist, and ziplined in helmets and laughter past the falls. They viewed the falls from Canada and came home praising polite Canadians.

At Niagara, Truman saw waterfalls even more impressive than those of Ithaca, where he lives during the school year. As you may know, Ithaca sells bumper stickers that read “Ithaca Is Gorges,” and the town earns the pun. In the summer of 2025, Truman guided my son Jukie and me to his favorite cascades, and our Ithaca undergraduate still texts photos with captions like “These are the falls I took you and Jukie to.” In one week, my family’s group chat stretched from dry, flat Davis to Niagara Falls.

On their wistful way back from Canada, Kate and Truman discovered that the Google Maps on their phones labeled Lake Ontario as “Lake America.” After a petty and misguided presidential decree in late August, Google relabeled the lake for American users, citing the federal Geographic Names Information System, known as GNIS. Canadians still see Lake Ontario, and Ontario Premier Doug Ford planted a sign on the shore declaring it Lake Ontario, now and forever.

I thought first of the generations of schoolchildren who have memorized the Great Lakes with the word HOMES: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior. Now they’ll need HAMES. The old mnemonic already carried layers of history. “Huron” comes from the name French traders gave the Wendat people, and “Ontario” comes from an Indigenous language, a name the lake carried long before France or England arrived to divide the shoreline between them.  

GNIS brought my thoughts home. On August 2, 1979, the database recorded the name Luphers Run for the Pennsylvania stream that cuts through our family’s land. My grandmother Vera and my mom, Mary, bought the property on Reservoir Road in Beavertown in the 1950s.

My mom brought my brother and me there nearly every summer, from about 1971 until I left for college in 1985. In later decades, whenever she phoned from the cabin, she reported the creek’s depth. The creek has a tiny waterfall, a drop of maybe three feet. WPA workers built up the creek bed in the 1930s, pouring concrete over the rocks, and my grandmother remembered talking with them while they worked. When I was six, I hauled stones to a half-built island just below the falls, attached a paper flag to a stick from the woods, and declared the island mine. I sat there reading books, wrapped in the same cool mist and roar that soaked Kate and Truman at Niagara.

Looking back, I see how my flag resembles a child’s rehearsal of what nations do: plant a marker, declare ownership, assign a name.  

My mom died in 2024. In the summer of 2025, my brother came from Los Angeles with my niece, my two sons came from Davis, cousins came from Detroit and Portland, and my dear friend Amanda MacKaye came from Washington, D.C. We celebrated the lives of my mom and my Uncle Chuck, and we spread their ashes beside that little waterfall. My mom loved the cabin. When the original fell down around 2002, she built a new one, still without running water. She trusted the creek to provide.

The U.S. Board on Geographic Names accepts naming proposals from the public, though its rules require a five-year wait after the person’s death. Our waterfall is too small for most maps to notice, but its creek used to cool both watermelons and six-packs of beer for my mom.

I propose we call it Mary’s Falls.

---

Author’s Note: I recorded a video of me drafting this essay while out for a walk. Find it on my new YouTube channel.

After last week’s afternoon’s rains, I feel lucky to have gentle sunshine this afternoon. Last week and every week remind me that I love hosting events outdoors, as long as I can work with a strong sound system, such as what we have at Sudwerk on Wednesday nights. Last week we had more than 30 teams, which is a lot, so come early to grab a table (or call ahead for a reservation.)  Also, take heed that the quiz is a svelte 879 words long, if you include the answers. Wordsmiths will do well tonight.  

In addition to topics raised above, tonight’s pub quiz will feature questions on actors, actors, athletes, bands, bands, bartenders, basketballs, bishops, campaigns, cards, championships, charts, chocolates, cities, comics, commercials, deserts, dystopias, elements, emperors, encores, explorers, footballs, fortunes, gamers, goals, groceries, guilds, harvests, instruments, kingdoms, magazines, metals, metals, migrants, movies, musicians, myths, newspapers, notes, novels, plays, politicians, pumpkins, pyramids, rappers, records, religions, sales, sitcoms, stadiums, statues, sweets, twins, unions, whistles, current events, books and authors, and Shakespeare. 

Thanks to all the patrons who have been enjoying fresh Pub Quiz content. Ryan has just joined at the silver tier! Thanks also to new subscribers Janet, Jasmine, Joey, Carly, and The Nevergiveruppers! Every week I check the Patreon to see if there is someone new to thank. I also thank The Original Vincibles, Summer Brains, The Outside Agitators, John Poirier’s team Quizimodo, Gena Harper, the conversationally entertaining dinner companions The Mavens who keep attending, despite their ambitious travel schedules and the cost of avocado. Thanks to everyone who supports the Pub Quiz on Patreon. I would love to add your name or that of your team to the list of pub quiz boosters. I appreciate your backing this pub quiz project of mine! 

Best,

Dr. Andy

Three questions from last week:

21. Books and Authors. A survey of writers and literary critics compiled by The New York Times ranked what Toni Morrison novel as the best work of American fiction from 1981 to 2006?

22. Film. The 2026 documentary film You Can See Everything had two directors. Name one of them.

23. Youth Culture. Which Pixar film features The Triple Dent Gum jingle, which the Mind Workers keep sending up to Headquarters?

One of my favorite California poets, Tongo Eisen-Martin, will read in Davis this Friday, October 23, at 7:30 p.m. at the John Natsoulas Gallery as part of the Jazz Beat Festival. I hope you’ll join us.

I’ve heard Tongo read perhaps half a dozen times in San Francisco, where he served as poet laureate, and I’ve hosted him via Zoom for my Poetry Night reading series. His combination of musical invention, political commitment, and startling language keeps drawing me back. Friday brings a rare opportunity to hear him here in Davis.

Tongo’s work earns admiration across a remarkable range of readers and listeners. Prize juries, newspaper critics, and fellow poets praise him alongside the community organizers, teachers, and incarcerated students he has worked with. That breadth of connection interests me. His poems travel through classrooms, literary festivals, and organizing spaces, inviting people to listen closely and reconsider the world around them.

Here are five reasons I look forward to hearing him again.

1. The jazz in his lines

People often reach for musical comparisons when describing Tongo’s poetry. KQED Arts heard “a sublime cadence in Eisen-Martin’s work that is polyphonic, gritty, and unexpectedly fragile, like jazz.” Terrance Hayes praised his “swinging type body language,” while Cultural Weekly called him “a poetic Jimi Hendrix on the page and the stage.”

Those comparisons capture the interplay of freedom and control in his work. His language invites us to follow a phrase through unexpected turns, to hear how one thought opens into another. For a reading during the Jazz Beat Festival, that musical imagination promises a particularly fitting encounter.

2. Poems that summon a voice

Chinaka Hodge wrote that Tongo’s poems “beg to be read aloud, to be pronounced as spells and incantations.” Claudia Rankine called his poetry “resistance as sound.”

I appreciate the emphasis both poets place on sound. A live reading gives us the poet’s breath, timing, and emphasis. We hear where he pauses, which words he presses, and how a line gathers force. 

Tongo has also brought poetry into conversation with percussion and video. In 2022, San Francisco’s Magic Theatre opened its Poetry Program with Black Fire, a performance combining his poetry with percussion by Ahkeel Mestayer and video. That year he also released his debut spoken-word album, I Go to the Railroad Track and Follow Them to the Station of My Enemies.

If you have a few minutes before Friday, listen to some of his work online.  

3. Recognition across the literary world

Tongo’s Heaven Is All Goodbyes (2017) won the American Book Award, the California Book Award, and the PEN Oakland Award, and reached the shortlist for the international Griffin Poetry Prize. The Griffin judges called it “equally a work of commitment and of wonder.”  

His next collection, Blood on the Fog (2021), won California’s independent booksellers’ Golden Poppy Award and reached the finals for the California Book Award. Elisa Gabbert included it among the New York Times’ best poetry books of 2021. In 2024, the Academy of American Poets awarded him a Laureate Fellowship.

These honors suggest how widely his poems resonate among people who spend their lives reading, teaching, and recommending poetry.

4. Politics that animate the poems

Tongo calls himself a “movement worker.” His poetry confronts state violence, police brutality, the prison industrial complex, and the forces that shape life in American cities. His curriculum We Charge Genocide Again!, which addresses the extrajudicial killing of Black people, has circulated among teachers and organizers across the country.

That work connects the poet’s attention to the responsibilities of teaching and organizing. Whose experience shapes our understanding of a city or a country? What can language reveal about the arrangements we live within?

Michael Robbins, writing in the Chicago Tribune, described Tongo as “singing in dark times about dark times.” I want to hear a poet who brings such imaginative force to these dark times. I’m grateful we’ll have that chance Friday.

5. A teacher’s invitation to find your voice

When Tongo spoke on a panel about poetry, inspiration, and sustainability at the San Francisco Writers Conference in 2023, I tried to record his insights as quickly as he shared them.

My notes return repeatedly to voice, attention, and the practice of writing. The observations below come from those notes; some may condense his phrasing.

On finding your voice:

• The only journey of the poet is the journey towards your voice. Your voice is your birthright.
• The more specific you are on the page the more specifically you are being yourself.

On attending to your own experience:

• This conversation I’m having with my grandmother has as much to say about reality as what the voice of the hegemony has prescribed.
• See how best you can excavate your slice of reality.

On following the work:

• Keep moving the pencil until something real happens.
• The poem of the ages begins before you pick up the pen.
• Sonny Rollins said that his tactic as a soloist is to start with a cliché and then walk towards his subconscious with it.
• We don’t plan our night’s dreams.

The Sonny Rollins observation brings us back to jazz. Begin with something available, even familiar, and follow it toward discovery.  

Which of these observations speaks to your own writing or reading? Let me know.

And I hope you’ll join us to hear the voice behind them. Tongo Eisen-Martin reads this Friday, October 23, at 7:30 p.m. at the John Natsoulas Gallery in Davis, as part of the Jazz Beat Festival. After hearing him half a dozen times, I’m eager for another evening in his company. Come join us.

---

Thank goodness the rain has arrived, though I don’t think it will rain on our quiz tonight. Still, join us for the pub quiz tonight, won’t you? Last week we had more than 30 teams, which is a lot, so come early to grab a table (or call ahead for a reservation.)  Also, take heed that the the quiz is longer this week (over 1000 words), so you will learn so much. I’m also grateful for that.

In addition to topics raised above, tonight’s pub quiz will feature questions on, Actresses, Anagrams, Animations, Archipelagos, Athletes, Ballparks, Bands, Battles, Calendars, Careers, Charities, Comedians, Composers, Consoles, Countries, Courtrooms, Critics, Documentaries, Elements, Etymologies, Filmmakers, Gamers, Generals, Grammys, Gyms, Injuries, Isthmuses, Mammals, Marchers, Measurements, Meditations, Memberships, Muscles, Nations, Novelists, Palaces, Photographers, Photographs, Pianists, Playwrights, Poets, Politicians, Protests, Provinces, Rappers, Revolutions, Saxophonists, Singers, Streamers, Studios, Thrillers, Treaties, Trumpeters, Tundras, Vaccines, Vocabularies, Waterfalls, Weapons, Workouts, current events, books and authors, and Shakespeare. 

Thanks to all the patrons who have been enjoying fresh Pub Quiz content. Thanks especially to new subscribers Janet, Jasmine, Joey, Carly, and The Nevergiveruppers! Every week I check the Patreon to see if there is someone new to thank. I also thank The Original Vincibles, Summer Brains, The Outside Agitators, John Poirier’s team Quizimodo, Gena Harper, the conversationally entertaining dinner companions The Mavens who keep attending, despite their ambitious travel schedules and the cost of avocado. Thanks to everyone who supports the Pub Quiz on Patreon. I would love to add your name or that of your team to the list of pub quiz boosters. I appreciate your backing this pub quiz project of mine! 

Best,

Dr. Andy

Three questions from last week:

1. Mottos and Slogans. Starbucks has explored taking over a restaurant chain that has used the slogan “Food with Integrity.” Hint: The chain’s name comes from the Nahuatl name for a smoked and dried jalapeño chili pepper. Name the restaurant chain.  

2. Internet Culture. Featuring the now-wife of Harrison Ford, which late-1990s TV legal drama gave the early viral “Dancing Baby” animation a recurring role as the main character’s hallucination? Ally McBeal, starring  

3. Newspaper Headlines. The 2026 Nobel Peace Prize went to Navi Pillay, a former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights who also served as a judge on the international tribunal for Rwanda. What country is she from?  

(This photo of me teaching in 2021 comes courtesy of Gregory Urquiaga at UC Davis.)

Last spring, on the final day of my first-year seminar, a senior named Elizabeth carried a big pink box through downtown Davis as I gave her and her classmates a public art tour. She lugged it past every mural and sculpture I showed the class, and when we reached the courtyard behind the Pence Gallery, she opened it: donuts and éclairs for everyone, bought with her own grocery money. She told me afterward that our walking and journaling seminar was one of her final classes at UC Davis, and she wanted to make it count.

I understood the impulse. This fall I’m teaching that seminar, “Victory Lap: Journaling Our Long Walk Together,” for one of its final runs before I retire next July. Each Monday we meet somewhere new on campus, walk, talk, and close with an entry in our hardback journals. I’ve begun calling this year nostalgia in progress: I miss experiences while they’re still happening.

This past Monday, the campus gave me two more moments to miss.

We started at Mrak Hall, where we stopped to regard Robert Arneson’s two eggheads out front, and where I told my students about Emil Mrak and Larry Vanderhoef, two of the three UC Davis chancellors I admire most. The third, Gary May, employs someone I spotted next, Chris Macias.

I’ve known Chris for about ten years. A UC Davis alumnus, he spent 18 years at The Sacramento Bee as a features writer and critic, covering music, food, and regional culture. He came home to campus to write speeches for Chancellor Gary May, and he has frequently guest-lectured in my journalism classes. Between visits, we run into each other around campus and town and sometimes meet for a daytime beverage. 

When Chris learned that my students keep journals, he lit up. Keep writing, he told them, even after the quarter ends. Then he described the Gateway District, the stretch of campus anchored by the Mondavi Center and designed to welcome prospective students and other visitors.

So we walked it: past King Hall to the Alumni and Visitor Center, then to the Mondavi Center, the district’s focal point. Out front, standing on a bench, I recounted some of my favorite Mondavi experiences (in the audience and on stage).

I also told the story of bringing my dad and stepmom there in 2002, just before the performance space opened. The three of us compared it to the Kennedy Center in Washington, where my father spent so many evenings reviewing plays, and where we later held his memorial service.

Our last stop was the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art. I was concluding my introduction when Cesar Chavez, the museum’s manager of visitor experience, stepped outside. He wondered whether he’d forgotten a scheduled tour. I told him ours was unauthorized, a trespassing tour. He laughed, then gave my students a preview of what’s coming: The Gift of Fashion, a show of haute couture gowns and jewelry from Maria Manetti Shrem’s own collection, and California Dreaming, a major exhibition with David Hockney, Judy Chicago (with whom I once danced at a conference after-party), and Ed Ruscha that opens in Florence next spring before arriving in Davis. Then he invited anyone interested to apply for a job at the museum.

I had known Chris for a decade and Cesar for about four minutes. Both treated my students as honored guests. On the first day of class, I promised my students guest lectures from local notables without knowing who they would be. Previous impromptu guest lecturers have included my local heroes: Spanish professor Bob Blake, my deeply compassionate friend David Breaux, and artist and musician Heidi Brekebrede, who sang my students the City of Davis Song in 2021, back when my outdoor seminar was among the first UC Davis classes offered during the Covid lockdown.

These surprise visits belong to what I call the UC Davis advantage. A class like mine can wander across the largest UC campus for an hour and crowd no one. After I dismissed the class, one student told me Davis feels safer than Seattle or Atlanta, two cities where she has lived, and then asked about Poetry Night. At UC Davis, we also trust students to manage real institutions, including the Coffee House, Unitrans, The California Aggie, and KDVS. On Monday, the advantage wore two faces: an old friend and a new one, each willing to devote part of a busy day to teach a group of first-year students they had never met.

My former student Elizabeth had bought pastries because she knew her time at UC Davis was running short. When you know you’re near the end of something, you start handing out what you have, as I am doing with all my teachable stories. Chris handed my students a piece of advice, and I plan to take it myself. This quarter will end, and next July my teaching will, too. I’ll keep writing.

---

The weather will be as pleasant as you would expect from a mid-October evening, so I hope you will come join us at Sudwerk, home of the Pub Quiz with Dr. Andy. Last week. The Mavens took a rare week off, so during the dinner hour, the host traveled from table to table like the disguised Odysseus amid the suitors. Somebody took him in. 

Join us on the patio if you can get a reservation or arrive early enough. As for the quiz, expect 31 questions on a variety of topics you should know something about, this week with extra questions on notable films, a topic that I never tire of even though I rarely visit the cinema houses these days. The Varsity is his favorite.  

In addition to topics raised above and below, expect questions tonight on the following: animals, anniversaries, athletes, babies, blockbusters, borders, brands, carnivores, championships, classics, classics, comedies, commonwealths, companies, countries, crops, definitions, diamonds, dogs, drones, elections, endorsements, European countries, factories, families, farmers, films, frequencies, fusions, governments, hearts, hockey teams, horror films, insects, joints, jurists, lawyers, lifespans, loans, lost masterpieces, mayors, mayors, mergers, musicians, nineties, novellas, novels, Oscar nominees, peppers, petals, pianos, poets, prizes, quarterbacks, quests, reading speeds, recent releases, restaurant chains, revenues, romances, schools, secretaries, shouts, sixties, songs, states, storms, streaming services, superheroes, symbolic fathers, thirsty people, TV dramas, universities, vermin, voice actors, water rights, western cities, current events, and Shakespeare.

For more Pub Quiz fun, please subscribe via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/yourquizmaster.

Thanks to all the new players joining us at the live quizzes and to all the patrons who have been enjoying fresh Pub Quiz content. Certain friends have upgraded their memberships recently, which I really appreciate.

We are now past 150 Patreon members, including people who have upgraded their paid memberships! You know who you are, and I salute you! I also incidentally salute Heghnar, Cathy, Kevin, Christine, Caroline, Bobby, Prescott, James, Damian, Meebles, and Bill and Diane! Thanks also to The X-Ennial Falcons, and The Nevergiveruppers! Every week I check the Patreon to see if there is someone new to thank. Maybe next week it will be you! I also thank The Original Vincibles, Summer Brains, Still Here for the Shakesbeer, The Outside Agitators, John Poirier’s team Quizimodo, Gena Harper, the conversationally entertaining dinner companions and bakers of marvelous and healthy treats, The Mavens. Thanks also to my paid subscribers on Substack. 

Thanks to everyone who supports the Pub Quiz on Patreon. I would love to add your name or that of your team to the list of pub quiz boosters. Also, I sometimes remember to add an extra hint on Patreon. I appreciate your backing this pub quiz project of mine! 

I also want to recognize those who visit my Substack the most often, including Elaine, Michael, Luna, Jean, Ron, Myrna, Maria, to whom I send sustained compassion.

Best,

Dr. Andy

Three questions from last week:

1. Books and Authors. The current number one best seller in actor and entertainer autobiographies is titled The Steps. What living Oscar-nominee wrote the book?  

2. Film. With a title starting with the letter V, what new film stars Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, and Josh Hartnett? 

3. Youth Culture. A 2026 HalloweenCostumes.com survey found that 15% of people start their Halloween planning on what social medium?  

On Monday my first-year seminar gathered at the flagpole at the north end of the UC Davis Quad. In this course we walk, we notice, and we write. Before we set out, I talked with my students about Cornell and about what could happen to writing they shared with me.

A former Cornell student known publicly as Jane Doe alleges that members of a fraternity gang-raped her in October 2024, when she was a junior. Her allegations became public two years later, raising serious questions about the university’s response. Campus police investigated, but questions remain about what evidence reached the Tompkins County District Attorney and what he reviewed before declining to pursue charges. The Ithaca Police Department, a separate agency, learned of the allegations from news reports. No arrests followed the initial investigation. The criminal investigation has since been reopened.

I keep counting weeks. Jane Doe had started her junior year a few weeks before the attack. My third-year students have just started theirs. Women fill most of the seats in my writing in fine arts class this quarter, and most of the students who walk the Quad and the rest of campus with me on Mondays are women. Three thousand miles separate Ithaca from Davis. But the juniors in my class are at almost the same point in their college lives that Jane Doe was when she says she was attacked.

Here’s what I told my students. Under university policy, I am a responsible employee. Your journals may contain writing you never share with me. For the pages you choose to submit, however, I cannot promise confidentiality. If writing you submit discloses sexual assault, sexual harassment, or stalking, I am required to share that information with the university’s reporting office. I want you to know that before you decide what to submit.

The reporting requirement is meant to move information to people who can act on it. But it can also silence a student who wants to tell one person and nobody else. I cannot offer confidentiality, but I can explain the rule before a student decides what to share.

Then I named the alternatives. UC Davis CARE, the Center for Advocacy, Resources, and Education, offers free, confidential advocacy and support. I also pointed them toward confidential counseling and explained how to report concerns through HDAPP, the university’s Harassment & Discrimination Assistance and Prevention Program.

Explaining the rule does not remove the constraint. A student may still leave something unwritten, or keep it out of the pages submitted to me. But she should not discover the limit on confidentiality only after she has trusted me with her story.

News like this can return a person to a night she has tried not to remember. A student who has carried something alone for two years might set it down in her journal this week, at the end of a walk. I know from experience that journals can invite us to write about our most difficult moments, memories, and revelations.  

After 36 years of teaching at UC Davis, mostly in small classes, I cannot read the Cornell reporting as a distant institutional story. As a university administrator, I am troubled by the distance between reporting an assault and receiving an adequate institutional response. A student can report an assault and still find that the institutions responsible for responding have failed to assemble—or act on—the full account.

As a faculty member, I welcomed the introduction of Cornell faculty’s resolution of no confidence in their university leadership. It also raised a question closer to home: how do professors remain responsible for students’ welfare without assuming that an institutional referral completes our responsibility? I can’t say what any Cornell professor knew or heard. I can say how I’d feel if Jane Doe had sat in my seminar. I would feel that her university had failed her. I would also have to ask whether I had done everything I could.

After our walk on Monday, my students and I sat down to write. I don’t know what they put on the page. But before they began, I had explained who would read the pages they submitted, what I would be required to report, and where they could find confidential support. An invitation to write about your life should come with that clarity. Every Cornell student deserved it two years ago. Every UC Davis student deserves it now.

---

Hottest October ever! Still, join us for the pub quiz tonight, won’t you? Last week we had 40 teams, which is a lot, so come early to grab a table (or call ahead for a reservation.)  Also, take heed that the performance of the quiz may move along quickly — the entire quiz is under 900 words long! 

In addition to topics raised above, tonight’s pub quiz will feature questions on airspaces, auras, battlefield, bestsellers, bloodbath, bloodhounds, bloodshed, bookworms, buttermilk, buttery delights, campfires, chemistry, cities, coastlines, costumes, dancefloors, dips, employees, eyesight, farmland, faults, faults, finales, fireplaces, flatbread, flights, footsteps, frontbenchers, frontman, German words, ghostwriters, grasshoppers, gunpowder, heartbreaks, heartthrobs, highland, Hollywood, humans, insects, islands, Merseyside, moonlight, mousetrap, nosepieces, pancake, pantyhose, paratroopers, peaks, pints of beer, playmakers, popcorn, prizefighters, prizes, rainforests, returns, rockstars, schoolgirl, screams, screenwriters, Silicon Valley, singers, smartphones, soldiers, soothsayer, statesman, steps, sunburns, sunlight, supernovas, superstars, sweetheart, teatimes, touchdowns, tourists, wildfires, current events, books and authors, and Shakespeare. 

Thanks to all the patrons who have been enjoying fresh Pub Quiz content. Thanks especially to new subscribers Janet, Jasmine, Joey, Carly, and The Nevergiveruppers! Every week I check the Patreon to see if there is someone new to thank. I also thank The Original Vincibles, Summer Brains, The Outside Agitators, John Poirier’s team Quizimodo, Gena Harper, the conversationally entertaining dinner companions The Mavens who keep attending, despite their ambitious travel schedules and the cost of avocado. Thanks to everyone who supports the Pub Quiz on Patreon. I would love to add your name or that of your team to the list of pub quiz boosters. I appreciate your backing this pub quiz project of mine! 

Best,

Dr. Andy

1. Mottos and Slogans. Starting with the letter A, what company tells us that we can “Belong Anywhere”?  

• Internet Culture. What do we call the process of adjusting computer hardware settings to make components like the CPU or GPU run at speeds higher than their default factory specifications?  

• Newspaper Headlines. Science Daily reported on September 29 that what organic compound made up of amino acids “may help build muscle even without exercise.”  

My late father and my brother, Oliver, met more celebrities between them than most other people I know. My father auditioned Barbra Streisand, went to college with Coretta Scott King, worked with James Earl Jones, and directed Susan Sarandon in a movie. Oliver has interviewed Tony Curtis, Gwyneth Paltrow, Dwayne Johnson, Ernest Borgnine, and hundreds of other people whose names you would recognize.

For all that, Oliver remains thoroughly unimpressed with celebrity. His insouciance may be one reason stars so enjoy talking to him: he gives them room to be ordinary people.

I’ve had my own brushes with fame, mostly with literary celebrities such as Gary Snyder, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Seamus Heaney, and Elie Wiesel. I’ve also met members of Congress and a few A-list celebrities, including Evander Holyfield, Oprah Winfrey, and Stevie Wonder.

This week, though, the brush with fame that impresses me most belongs to my son Truman. It happened on his 21st birthday.

Can you guess whom he met? Consider these clues: He is a five-time Oscar nominee, with two nominations for writing and three for acting in three different decades, the most recent this year. He is also a published novelist. And for his role as a troubled minister, he won 25 awards, including the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead and the critics’ “trifecta” from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the National Society of Film Critics, and the New York Film Critics Circle. The film earned an Oscar nomination for its screenplay. Somehow, he was not nominated for his performance.

Here is how Truman reported the encounter in a text to his family:

I was reading in the Odyssey Bookstore. I heard a voice in the next room say he couldn’t find Lonesome Dove. It sounded like Ethan Hawke. He had walked in with his wife and young daughter.

After a moment, I ask:
“Excuse me, may I ask your name?”
“What’s your name?”
“I’m Truman.”
“Hi, Truman. I’m Ethan Hawke.”
…
“Wow, I just want to say you’re my favorite actor of all time. It used to be De Niro, and now it’s you.”
His wife says: “Well, De Niro is still alive. There’s time.”
We all laugh.

I say: “I’m a film student, and after I watched your film Before Sunrise, it completely changed the way I see movies.”
“Thank you. Richard Linklater is pretty incredible. You should see the movie he made last year Nouvelle Vague.”
“I saw that, and of course Blue Moon. I thought you should’ve won the Oscar for that.”
“Thank you.”
“I know you get this all the time, but is it okay if I take a picture? It’s totally okay if not.”
“Sure.”

After we took the picture, his wife asked: “How many years is that program?”
“Four years.”

Ethan says: “All right, all right. Well, go off and do good things, make some good stuff.”
“Thank you!”

I was reading in the room where Ethan Hawke was, but I visited a different room in the bookstore so he wouldn’t feel like I was watching him.

As Ethan Hawke leaves, he says: “Okay, take care, Truman.”

I like how Truman moved to another part of the bookstore, giving the famous man room, the way his uncle Oliver does. And on his way out, Hawke stopped to say goodbye.

Every famous person I’ve met was kind to me in passing. None of them checked back in to say goodbye by name.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.” The warning about meeting your heroes comes from the same place: up close, the public figure becomes a private person, one who sometimes disappoints. Truman met Ethan Hawke at his most private, a father looking for a copy of Lonesome Dove with his wife and daughter, owing nothing to a stranger. Character shows in moments like that. Hawke’s goodbye took two seconds and cost him nothing, and it will likely be the part of the 21^st birthday story that Truman will be telling for the rest of his life.

---

As Glenn Frey would say, the heat is (back) on. Doesn’t October start tomorrow? Where’s the fall weather? Someone on the greenbelt asked me about my weather reports, so here it is. It’s hot today. Plan accordingly, and plan to join us at the pub quiz on the beautiful outdoor patio where we have room for almost everyone. The rest of you can sit inside where players will still be having fun in the AC. As Coretta Scott King said, “The greatness of a community is most accurately measured by the compassionate actions of its members.” I encourage you to come early to snag a table. Also, take heed that the performance of the quiz may move along quickly — the entire quiz is under 800 words long! 

In addition to topics raised above, tonight’s pub quiz will feature questions on actors, actresses, anniversaries, appetites, axles, birds, birthdays, boots, bracelets, cathedrals, chickens, cocktails, commuters, couriers, cowboys, degrees, diplomas, disappearances, disguises, expressways, flowers, frequencies, galaxies, gowns, heartbreaks, hosts, husbands, initials, islands, lyricists, martial artists, memoirs, monarchs, muscles, neighbors, nicknames, openings, Oscars, outbreaks, pawns, paychecks, periods, permutations, pitchers, poets, possessives, preservatives, presidents, processors, promotions, pronouns, rappers, receptors, remarriages, rentals, robots, rubies, schoolboys, shamrocks, sins, skateboard wheels, snacks, socks, spheres, stadiums, stop signs, supplements, tigers, tins, toes, transformations, uncles, vacations, video games, vows, wallets, wildcats, current events, books and authors, and Shakespeare. 

Thanks to all the patrons who have been enjoying fresh Pub Quiz content. Thanks especially to new subscribers Janet, Jasmine, Joey, Carly, and The Nevergiveruppers! Every week I check the Patreon to see if there is someone new to thank. I also thank The Original Vincibles, Summer Brains, The Outside Agitators, John Poirier’s team Quizimodo, Gena Harper, the conversationally entertaining dinner companions The Mavens who keep attending, despite their ambitious travel schedules and the cost of avocado. Thanks to everyone who supports the Pub Quiz on Patreon. I would love to add your name or that of your team to the list of pub quiz boosters. I appreciate your backing this pub quiz project of mine! 

Best,

Dr. Andy

Trivia from last week:

1. Superheroes. In the Marvel comic books, when Luke Cage and Jessica Jones seek a nanny for their daughter Danielle Cage, they hire a young superheroine who can communicate with squirrels. What is her superhero name?  

1. Bodies of Water. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are all bordered by what body of water?  

2. Pop Culture – Music. Both chemistry and romance come up in the name of what band that dominated the emo/alternative scene of the 2000s with theatrical rock?  

P.S. Join us for Poetry Night tomorrow. Brad Buchanan will be there!

If you own a bar or tavern and you care more about community than quarterly returns, you probably don’t want to host the Poetry Night after-party. We’re drawn to exactly those kinds of places.

The Poetry Night poetry series that I have hosted since 2006 started at a restaurant in the old City Hall building called Bistro 33. The Bistro 33 folks kindly fed the visiting poets before our readings and even offered them honoraria. If the reading didn’t continue past closing time, sometimes some of us would meet for a drink to catch up with each other and to discuss topics poetical and philosophical. 

Bistro 33 closed at the start of the pandemic lockdown.

In the 2010s, our after-parties moved to De Vere’s Irish Pub, where I also hosted its Pub Quiz. Because the pub paid me in credit, interns and undergraduate regulars sometimes ate courtesy of Dr. Andy.

The afterparty remained at De Vere’s until the pandemic ended just about all in-person parties. DeVere’s tried to reopen in 2021, but closed for good soon thereafter.

With its outdoor seating, The Wine Shop on 2nd Street was a place that we visited a few times after Poetry Night. They are closed now.

Delta of Venus was a favorite location for our after-parties for the last couple years. Everyone knew and appreciated the Davis artist, author, and drummer Kat, once a Poetry Night regular and a former student of mine, and our favorite Delta employee. Sometimes as many as 20 of us would descend upon Delta, eventually filling up the front patio with stories and laughter. Lee, the owner, created a place that attracted people because he prioritized community over profit. Last year Lee and Delta were presented the Thong Hy Huynh Award for their commitment to community, inclusion, and civil rights in Davis. To express my admiration, earlier this month I released a 34-minute video expressing my appreciation for Delta and its owner. 

You have probably read that Lee is retiring. Last month he announced the closure of Delta of Venus.

So, we moved over to The Beer Shoppe on G Street. Last week when I asked why they were accepting only cash, the proprietor told me they would likely be closing for good soon. Today—September 23—is their last day after 15 years. Today Wendy Weitzel announced the closure of Lake Boulevard’s Super Owl Brewing, likely around Thanksgiving.

Here’s what troubles me: Lee won an award for the very values that made Delta difficult to sustain as a business. The qualities for which Lee and Delta were honored—generosity, inclusion, patience, a commitment to community—are not always qualities the market rewards. He prioritized community over profit, and the community showed up. We poets showed up. We filled the patio with stories and laughter.

Poets, artists, and community activists are drawn to the kinds of places that have trouble surviving in the current economy. While we poets stayed late and made these spaces feel alive, we couldn’t make them sustainable.

I wonder what downtown proprietors should know: if the Poetry Night crowd starts meeting at your bar on alternating Thursday evenings, enjoy the company and the conversations. But understand that you’ll host people who gather primarily in establishments that honor community over returns. We seek out such places. And such places run the risk of folding.

Meanwhile, I’m glad that Sudwerk is thriving, especially on Wednesday nights when we typically average 30 or more teams attending our Pub Quiz. Whether we love trivia, live music, or even televised sporting events, we should be doing our part to support spaces that make room for us. Loving a place may require more than filling its patio on a good night; it may mean buying dinner, tipping well, returning on ordinary evenings, and treating its survival as part of the cost of the culture we say we want.

Great poets need great restaurants. But more than that, a community needs third spaces that can survive because they’ve found a way to balance what they and the community value with what the market demands.

Last week it started warm, but then I performed the pub quiz in a hoodie that my wife Kate brought me. What should we expect this evening? Dress in light layers if you plan to enjoy the pub quiz on the beautiful outdoor patio where we have room for almost everyone. The rest of you can sit inside where players will still be having fun. As Coretta Scott King said, “The greatness of a community is most accurately measured by the compassionate actions of its members.” I encourage you to come early to snag a table. Also, take heed that the performance of the quiz may move along quickly — the entire quiz is under 700 words long! 

In addition to topics raised above, tonight’s pub quiz will feature questions on action verbs, American cities, ancient warriors, architectural institutions, artificial intelligence, beverages, birth decades, bodies of water, Broadway musicals, careers, chemical elements, cinema history, classic authors, collegiate programs, competitions, compositions, computational tools, concealed identities, conflicts, containers, demographic statistics, disguises, dystopian governments, economic pressures, energetic synonyms, environmental movements, European geography, fictional dictators, filmmakers, fitness trends, football positions, fuels, geometric shapes, Greek mythology, horror films, hunters, instrumental ensembles, lawyers, literary characters, magical characters, masterminds, metallurgical processes, monarchs, musical bands, nations, private institutions, professional athletes, programming languages, residues, shells, specific decades, state geography, supernatural creatures, superheroes, typographic designs, woodland creatures, current events, books and authors, and Shakespeare. 

Thanks to all the patrons who have been enjoying fresh Pub Quiz content. Thanks especially to new subscribers Janet, Jasmine, Joey, Carly, and The Nevergiveruppers! Every week I check the Patreon to see if there is someone new to thank. I also thank The Original Vincibles, Summer Brains, The Outside Agitators, John Poirier’s team Quizimodo, Gena Harper, the conversationally entertaining dinner companions The Mavens who keep attending, despite their ambitious travel schedules and the cost of avocado. Thanks to everyone who supports the Pub Quiz on Patreon. I would love to add your name or that of your team to the list of pub quiz boosters. I appreciate your backing this pub quiz project of mine! 

Best,

Dr. Andy

1. Books and Authors. Who authored that Twilight series that launched late in the 2000s?  

2. Current Events – Names in the News. Born in Wabasha in the bordering state of Minnesota, Rep. Tom Tiffany, the Republican nominee for one state’s governor, swam to safety after his plane recently made an emergency landing in a lake. Name the state.  

3. Sports. The son of Jack Buck, also a Hall of Fame sportscaster, has recently agreed to a new ESPN deal worth over $100 million. Name the Buck.  

Dear Friends,

This past weekend in San Francisco, I sat down with my oldest friend, Tia, to record a video conversation for friends from our school years. Tia was visiting from Germany where she has been living with her German-born husband for more than 30 years. She has two beautiful children and two thriving careers as a nutritionist and flight attendant for Lufthansa Airlines.

Tia and a bunch of my other closest friends attended my wedding 34 years ago this month. I have fond memories of Tia and others joining us on the reception area to rock to “Rock Lobster” and to dance to “Let’s Dance” and “Safety Dance.” Thrilled to have married my lifetime sweetheart in Kate, I left everything on the dance floor, I don’t think I have danced that long or that joyously since.

I remember talking to Tia on the phone when we were both college students. It felt strange to me to live in a different city from her, for she joined my class at the Washington Waldorf School in about fourth grade. she followed me—at least in the version of the story I like to tell—to The Field School for high school after we graduated from Waldorf. I had seen Tia just about every school day for 12 years.

In 4^th grade, the boys debated whether Tia was the prettiest girl in the class. Tito, the most confident boy in our class, was somehow assigned a desk next to Tia’s, and during recess Tito proudly displayed the little scratches she gave him during their classroom roughhousing, and he seemed almost as pleased by the attention as wounded by it. Clearly Tito and Tia spoke each other’s language.

Later in elementary school, my brother Oliver and I would encounter Tia and her younger sister, Andrea, who was exactly Oliver’s age. Andrea used to torture Oliver the way that Tia tortured Tito. We didn’t really understand girls.

As Tia and I became closer, I showed my affection and appreciation with acts of service. Because Tia and I lived about six blocks from each other, sometimes I would walk her home while carrying her books (as we saw done in Act II of Wilder’s Our Town and in Archie comics). When I had an afternoon Washington Star paper route from 1979 to 1981, I would leave an extra newspaper on her doorstep, even though she and her family were not subscribers.

In high school, I created a fraternity of the coolest guys in high school, The Trendsetters. Despite the outrageous art-based pranks we pulled off while seniors (We once spray-painted a moose and a message on a six-king-size sheet mural and hung it from the third floor of our school building), our school principal, Elizabeth Ely, never chastised or punished us, mostly because she (somehow) knew that most of our members followed my lead in not smoking or drinking. She saw our particular strain of nerd-dom as promoting healthy lifestyles and good choices.

The Trendsetters had one straight-A student and one female member: Tia. All the Trendsetters felt comfortable with her, and she tolerated our antics and immaturity. She also loved accompanying us to the movie-theater adventures which were such an important part of our lives back then.

So, in that interview in Huntington Park next to Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, where we made a video to share with friends from our school years, Tia revealed on the video that she figured out that she and I first met in the fall of 1976, exactly 50 years ago.

Tia was in the room during most of my formative educational experiences of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s. After we all graduated from college, Tia and our closest friend Tito and I walked through the woods of Glover-Archbold Park, the park where Tito and I spent so much of our early childhood (and that being the last time we saw our late friend in DC). Tia came to support Kate and me on our wedding day, and in 1998 she and her husband and one-year-old came to walk through our unfinished first house in Davis just before the walls were added. Now, thanks to Lufthansa, we meet irregularly in San Francisco to talk about home cooking, parenting, and old and departed friends.

Her visit reminded me of my friend’s gift for making an old story feel newly alive: she smiles readily, remembers parts of our childhood that I had forgotten, laughs without meanness, and makes even a short visit feel like a return home.

I’m grateful to have known such a lovely and loyal person for five decades. I never had a sister, but if I were to adopt one at this advanced age, she would be my friend Tia.

---

Expect delightfully warm weather this evening with the misters will be cooling all of us at the Sudwerk patio. I hope you can join us on the beautiful outdoor patio where we have room for almost everyone on this mid-September evening. The rest of you can sit inside where players will still be having fun. As Albert Schweitzer said, “Happiness is the only thing that multiplies when you share it.” I encourage you to come early to snag a table. Also, take heed that the performance of the quiz may move along quickly — the entire quiz is 763 words long! 

In addition to topics raised above, tonight’s pub quiz will feature questions on actual construction specifications, advertising campaigns, alliterative two-word phrases, American literary awards, animated films, broadcasting professions, California locations, castle locations, comedy sketches, conservatives, contracts, dark comedies, distinctive architectural designs, distinctive marks, dividing lines, ecosystem cycles, etymologies, film franchises, franchises, French people, historical periods, household cleaning tools, intimate slow-dance ballads, jazz techniques, Midwest states, music producers, pressures, prominent authors, religious settlements, romantic moments, spouse collaborations, state geographies, statesmen, strength and stability, voter registrations, water-adjacent flight patterns. current events, books and authors, and Shakespeare. 

Thanks to all the patrons who have been enjoying fresh Pub Quiz content. Thanks especially to new subscribers Janet, Jasmine, Joey, Carly, and The Nevergiveruppers! Every week I check the Patreon to see if there is someone new to thank. I also thank The Original Vincibles, Summer Brains, The Outside Agitators, John Poirier’s team Quizimodo, Gena Harper, the conversationally entertaining dinner companions The Mavens who keep attending, despite their ambitious travel schedules and the cost of avocado. Thanks to everyone who supports the Pub Quiz on Patreon. I would love to add your name or that of your team to the list of pub quiz boosters. I appreciate your backing this pub quiz project of mine! 

Best,

Dr. Andy

Three questions from last week: 

1. Current Events – Names in the News. It was announced recently that Jalen Brunson will be hosting the season opener of  Saturday Night Live on September 26. What two words best describe Brunson’s occupation?  

2. Sports. The website Bleacher Report says that “By just about any estimation, [one Florida NFL team has] the weakest roster in the league after purging veterans all offseason.” Name this team placed last in the power rankings. 

3. Shakespeare. In which of the five acts does the great storm begin in the Shakespeare play King Lear?  

“Men have become the tools of their tools.” Henry David Thoreau, Walden

The Summer Institute on Teaching and Technology starts tomorrow. I have hosted this UC Davis event for most of its 31 years. This will likely be my last year as host.

Imagine a cell biologist who stands next to a sociologist at a conference table. The biologist concerns herself with cellular structure; the sociologist tracks patterns of human behavior across populations. 

The biologist mentions mutation and adaptation, and the sociologist hears how communities change under pressure. They begin to draw on the same whiteboard. Neither knows what the other knows, which paradoxically makes them useful to each other. Using tools such as whiteboard markers, the two are altered by the encounter.

These are the introductions that institutions, when they work, create.

The Summer Institute on Teaching and Technology has persisted for thirty-one years because it creates introductions, that is, conditions where faculty from different disciplines encounter new approaches to teaching and technology.

When we build systems to measure outcomes and deploy technologies to scale reach, we risk treating the teaching and learning experience as a problem awaiting optimal solutions. Focusing on the tools, we may come to believe that systematization equals progress and that efficiency equals virtue.

Taking a page from James Baldwin’s essay “A Talk to Teachers,” I aspire to let students know they are seen, to introduce them to previously unconsidered possibilities, and to invite them into intellectual and rhetorical conversations from which they might initially have felt excluded. Likewise, at SITT, faculty reveal to their colleagues how their teaching work looks from the inside, leading to faculty from one discipline encountering faculty from other disciplines and discovering unexpected kinship.

The early iterations of SITT (and I was there from the start, having attended the last 31 SITTs) depended on many in-person work meetings of the organizers and staff. We spent time making copies, filling loose-leaf binders, and compiling indices with archival care. We negotiated with Dos Coyotes for huge burrito orders. We brought toasters from home for the bagels. We were generous with our time and efforts with the hopes that faculty would be generous with one another. We wanted to hear their tips, their discoveries, and their stories. 

These meetings happened because teams of center directors and staff stood in the background, making introductions, creating a space for collaboration, and trusting that a schedule of diverse speakers would lead to unexpected revelations about teaching in a tool-rich age.  

We face an alternative teaching arena today. Systems can deliver content more efficiently than humans, algorithms can predict what students need, platforms such as UC Davis Canvas can help a faculty member manage every educational transaction. Such efficient systems can help a professor provide speedier feedback or adapt pacing to a student’s demonstrated competence.

But teaching is not primarily about efficiency. Like a poem or a genius comedian, teaching should introduce you to what neither you nor an LLM could predict. Teaching can and should follow a student’s questions into unmapped territory. Teaching shifts with a student’s particular fears and hungers. Teaching should meet the irreproducible singularity of each person rather than serving middling content for an algorithmic average.

This is why the theme of this year’s Summer Institute on Teaching and Technology is “Authentic Teaching in a Tool-Rich World.” Tools serve education only when they lead to the sort of  introductions among learners and between learners and ideas. Consider the whiteboard marker, the projector, or even the Google Doc that a professor and her students will turn into a collaborative document or “sense of the meeting” together. Optimizing teaching to fit tools risks eliminating an essential human connection that is difficult to replicate online.  

As the longtime host of this summer institute, I am grateful to my teaching mentors, to the teams that do the work to make SITT happen, and to the faculty who have introduced me and others to their ingenious and innovative approaches to teaching classes that are student-centered, activity-driven, and dependent on myriad forms of feedback. All these practices lead students not only to discovery, but to deep understandings that they can revisit and deploy for the rest of their lives.

---

Today will be the hottest Wednesday evening for the rest of the year, but the misters will be cooling all of us at the Sudwerk patio. I hope you can join us on the beautiful outdoor patio where we have room for almost everyone on this September evening. The rest of you can sit inside where players will still be having fun. As Albert Schweitzer said, “Happiness is the only thing that multiplies when you share it.” I encourage you to come early to snag a table. Also, take heed that the performance of the quiz may move along quickly — the entire quiz is under 700 words long! 

In addition to topics raised above, tonight’s pub quiz will feature questions on action stars, alcoholic beverages, ancient civilizations, antioxidant nutrients, Asian populations, athletes, blockbuster films, botanical expeditions, Canadians, cell growth vitamins, disease elimination achievements, entertainment legends, fast-moving toys, franchises, generational terminology, honorees, horror releases, hosts, international power structures, inventors, invertebrates, islands, locations, marriage milestones, measurements, metal combinations, multi-platinum artists, mystical song themes, nerve clusters, New England states, newspapers, 1950s musicians, office products, Pacific forests, rainforests, reptiles, revolutionary displays, rosters, Shakespearean tragedies, social magnetism, sports arenas, technological breakthroughs, television icons, current events, books and authors, and Shakespeare. 

Thanks to all the patrons who have been enjoying fresh Pub Quiz content. Thanks especially to new subscribers Janet, Jasmine, Joey, Carly, and The Nevergiveruppers! Every week I check the Patreon to see if there is someone new to thank. I also thank The Original Vincibles, Summer Brains, The Outside Agitators, John Poirier’s team Quizimodo, Gena Harper, the conversationally entertaining dinner companions The Mavens who keep attending, despite their ambitious travel schedules and the cost of avocado. Thanks to everyone who supports the Pub Quiz on Patreon. I would love to add your name or that of your team to the list of pub quiz boosters. I appreciate your backing this pub quiz project of mine! 

Best,

Dr. Andy

1. Mottos & Slogans. Born in 1722, who has a beer named after him that claims “Independent Since Forever”?  

• Internet Culture. People are really excited about GTA 6. What do the letters GTA stand for? 

• Newspaper Headlines. Africa’s 2nd-richest economy has recently sent a massive aid convoy to war-ravaged Gaza with 62,500 food baskets and 1,874 tons of fuel. Name the country.  

This year, Labor Day falls on September 7, which happens to be my wedding anniversary. On September 7, 1992, Kate and I were married in Hinsdale, Illinois. 

This year, we celebrate 34 years of marriage.

Anniversaries invite grand gestures. For our 30th, I gave Kate a book containing 100 love poems that I had secretly written for her. The book had a print run of one and an audience of one. Writing it took months, but I enjoyed the process and the conspiratorial planning. Working on this poetic gift for her was a labor of love.

The benefits of being married to a poet are lyrical rather than financial. Kate receives a new poem on her birthday, our anniversary, Christmas, and Valentine’s Day, so poetry season begins for me every September and continues through the winter.

Still, the longer I am married, the more I recognize that a marriage is sustained by varied forms of devotion, not just love poems. They arrive as breakfasts, grocery lists, cups of tea, paid bills, completed errands, solo movies, long walks, and remembered preferences. Such gifts are easy to overlook precisely because they happen so often.

Labor Day honors work that is visible enough to be named. Marriage depends just as much on the work that goes unnamed: the errands completed, the preferences remembered, the sleep protected, the burdens quietly lifted.

This is the invisible work that makes a marriage visible, sustainable, and continually rewarding.

Every morning, I make a five-egg omelet. Three of those eggs go to our son Jukie, who needs the extra cholesterol as a treatment for Smith-Lemli-Opitz Syndrome. The omelet also contains two to four times as much spinach as a reasonable person would consider appropriate because I love cooked spinach.

My alarm goes off at 6:35. During the summer, I often wake before then. On those mornings, I try to slip out of the bedroom, head downstairs, and begin writing poems, preparing lesson plans, or composing pub quiz questions. When 6:35 arrives, the alarm sounds somewhere beyond Kate’s hearing, and she sleep a little longer.

Kate performs plenty of invisible work of her own. She does most of our grocery shopping, often more than once a week. She knows when we are running low on spinach, frozen blueberries, Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, and creatine. She anticipates what our daughter Geneva might need as well. She keeps track of bills and brings formidable skill to the medical and governmental bureaucracies of modern family life.

As the household’s chief anticipator, Kate sees the entire field. She anticipates tasks, appointments, and deadlines. Sometimes the person who performs this sort of work receives little recognition because a well-run household makes the work disappear. Everything simply seems to happen when it should.

My own expertise includes making Kate’s tea. I need to know if any particular Wednesday is a sugar day or a Splenda day, how much whole milk to add, and how hot the tea should be. Even the position of the tea bag’s string in relation to the drinking side of the cup receives consideration. Rituals like the preparation of the tea transform repetition into a language of love. 

Walks have become part of our shared language, too. When our schedules align, Kate and I walk together through the greenbelts of South Davis. I love it when one of my greenbelt friends encounters Kate and me together – sometimes they look around for Jukie, my afternoon walking partner. When possible, Kate and I walk downtown to Crepeville for brunch and then return in time for Jukie’s van. We get four or five miles of exercise, a fine meal, and a stretch of uninterrupted conversation before the afternoon begins.

A marriage is filled with activities that sound unremarkable when reduced to a list. We made tea. We went for a walk. We bought groceries. We cooked breakfast. We played The Ronettes while washing up. Their significance lies in the room they make for each other in the shape of our days.

This attention becomes especially important because the people within a marriage keep changing. Kate and I are different from the people who stood together in Katherine Legge Memorial Park in Hinsdale, Illinois in 1992. A long marriage asks each spouse to keep learning the other. 

Love depends upon attention because attention allows affection to remain current.

Sometimes attention means deciding whether your spouse needs you to hear, hug, or help. Sometimes it means interpreting a tired remark with generosity. 

Sometimes it means exercising restraint and recognizing that an unwelcome comment could remain an unspoken thought.  

The most revealing labors of love are often the ones that cease to feel laborious.

Kate will occasionally come downstairs as we prepare to leave the house and realize that she has forgotten something upstairs. She will ask me to retrieve it. I am glad to do so. My shoes are eager for steps, and my legs are eager for stairs. A request that once could have produced exasperation becomes another opportunity to be useful to someone I love while working towards my daily goal of 17,000 steps.

Through repetition, service becomes instinctive. Over time, a husband learns which cup to use, which groceries to replenish, which burdens he is best equipped to carry, and which small kindness will improve his wife’s morning.

Thirty-four years after our wedding, I still write poems for Kate. I still believe in declarations, surprises, celebrations, and gifts for an audience of one.

But Labor Day also seems an appropriate anniversary for us because marriage depends on work that rarely appears in public: the five-egg omelet, the carefully prepared tea, the quiet exit before the alarm, the long walk, the remembered grocery, the trip upstairs for forgotten lip balm or a pair of socks.

Over time, these small acts become so familiar that they can seem to disappear. Yet they are how love becomes visible: not once, in a grand gesture, but daily, in the shape of a shared life.

How nice that the temperatures are dropping for our outdoor pub quiz. Please plan to partake in the festivities on this pleasant evening at Sudwerk in Davis, the happening spot on 2nd Street. Bring your team to the beautiful outdoor patio where we have room for almost everyone on this September evening. The rest of you can sit inside where players will still be having fun. As Albert Schweitzer said, “Happiness is the only thing that multiplies when you share it.” I encourage you to come early to snag a table. Also, take heed that the performance of the quiz may move along quickly — the entire quiz is a mere 829 words long! 

In addition to topics raised above, tonight’s pub quiz will feature questions on adjectives, admissions, anatomies, anatomies, arrays, athletes, beginnings, benchmarks, bogs, borders, brewers, calculations, carbohydrates, carnivals, championships, changes, choruses, continents, contraltos, convoys, decorations, detoxifiers, digits, divas, dynasties, felonies, Francophones, genres, giants, gunslingers, harmonies, heritages, histories, improvisations, laureates, markets, Martians, measurements, mollusks, monarchs, principalities, producers, projections, Puritans, rankings, revolutionaries, riddles, rivers, robots, seabirds, shorelines, sitcoms, skeletons, soundtracks, tentacles, thoroughfares, transformations, vehicles, verses, volumes, waitresses, westerns, current events, books and authors, and Shakespeare. 

Thanks to all the patrons who have been enjoying fresh Pub Quiz content. Thanks especially to new subscribers Janet, Jasmine, Joey, Carly, and The Nevergiveruppers! Every week I check the Patreon to see if there is someone new to thank. I also thank The Original Vincibles, Summer Brains, The Outside Agitators, John Poirier’s team Quizimodo, Gena Harper, the conversationally entertaining dinner companions The Mavens. Thanks to everyone who supports the Pub Quiz on Patreon. I would love to add your name or that of your team to the list of pub quiz boosters. I appreciate your backing this pub quiz project of mine! 

Best,

Dr. Andy

1. Books and Authors. The travel cycle of Sinbad the Sailor was added to the collection of the One Thousand and One Nights. How many voyages did Sinbad the Sailor make?  

• Film. What 2016 animated film has a mountain gorilla named Johnny say, “Look Dad, I….I’m sorry. But I just don’t want to be in your gang. I wanna be a singer”? 

• Youth Culture. What are the six letters in the internet slang term that means “delusional”?  

P.P.S. Join us September 3 at Poetry Night for Terry Moore and Natascha Lanes.