Dear Reader,
Today’s guest, Riley Black, is the author of The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, Skeleton Keys, and many other books about fossils. She is also a regular contributor to National Geographic, Scientific American, Slate, and other publications covering the latest and greatest fossil news. And when Riley isn’t writing about fossils, she volunteers with museum and university field crews on digs all around the American Southwest, as they search for traces of ancient life. Her new book, The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, is all about what happened in the second, the day, the week, the month, the year, and the million years after the asteroid impact that ended the Age of Dinosaurs--a story of the loss and recovery that shaped the world as we know it today.
You can reach out to Riley via, http://rileyblack.net/contact
Loving layers
"The Naming of Cats," T.S. Eliot once reminded us, "is a difficult matter." I should know. I've fostered more than 70 over the years, many of which required temporary titles before their adoption day. There was Beatrice and June, Eliza and Maddie, Tilde and Umlaut and Ampersand, and more. I always hoped that I picked something they liked, even if, as Eliot knew, I couldn't possibly guess their real name.
But it's one thing to offer a name to a squeaking little foster who might go home with a new family next weekend. It's another to name a purring kitten crouched in a crate on the way home from the county shelter.
She'd been dubbed Clover by the people who found her in a dumpster with her mother and a new litter of siblings. I admit, Clover wasn't a bad name--especially for a cat lucky enough to survive nearly a year in the city. But that moniker didn't quite feel comfortable in my mouth as I tried to reassure her that the drive would soon be over and she'd receive a warm welcome to a new forever home.
I tossed a few suggestions back and forth with Splash, my girlfriend. None were bad names--how can a name even be bad?--but none quite fit. I had hoped that there would be something about our kitten that would give me some direction, something about her personality that would offer some guidance. But I barely knew her.
Only a half hour before I had walked into the room where she had been kept to find that those shy eyes hiding behind a scratching post belonged to a warm ball of almost inexhaustible affection who purred, nuzzled, and cheek-rubbed as she crawled all over me.
She had a beautiful coat, marked on the form as "tabby" but not quite like a classic tabby cat. She had fiery orange flecks along her back, a cream-colored stripe at the tip of her tail, and tortoiseshell toes, some combination of tabby, tortie, and calico that created soft stripes from behind her little pink nose to her tail. "Her markings remind me of rock layers...what are they called?" my girlfriend said as we approached a stop light.
"Strata," I said, thinking of the great bands of colorful rock I had spent so much time stomping around every summer as I looked for tooth and claw of fossil creatures. There was something about that word...
"Strata," Splash echoed, turning the word over in her mouth like a pebble. "You know, I think I like that," I said. Splash agreed. We said we'd think on it a little more and offer up anything else that came to mind, but nothing did. Strata felt right.
Of course, Strata is only one of her names. I call her "Little one," "baby," "small fry," and a half dozen other nicknames so often that I temporarily worried she'd get a little confused. But a month later, whether it's with a hint of annoyance over a misplaced claw or an affectionate coo, she perks her ears and meows back when I say "Strata," the name for a loving little fuzzball whose layers I'm only just beginning to uncover.
-- Riley Black
You can reach out to Riley via, http://rileyblack.net/contact
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
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