Whether by circumstance or temperament, my mother has always skewed more homebody than adventurer. When our family did eventually make it to some faraway place, she could always be counted on to utter her signature phrase: Can you believe it? We woke up this morning in San Diego, and we’re going to sleep tonight in [insert city name here]! Bangkok or Boston, it didn’t really matter; it was the disbelief that delighted her. Her exultation made me cringe. In truth, my head would also be spinning on that first night away. But instead of openly sharing my mother’s astonishment at our rapid dislocation, I would either ignore her comment or, if I was feeling particularly adolescent, roll my eyes and sigh with disdain. A worldly person, I thought, wouldn’t be bothered, so that’s the attitude I aimed for. But over the years, I’ve come to see my mother’s exclamation as a clever hedge against the twin pillars of disaffection and dread. Because to revel in the essentially unfathomable—that a body might be flung on to foreign shores while still digesting breakfast eaten at a familiar table—somehow manages to forestall both.
I imagine A. Kendra Greene, author of the illustrated essay collection No Less Strange or Wonderful (2025, Tin House Books), shares my mother’s wonder at the workaday world. Her stories capture both the cosmic and the comic, the quotidian and the quietly transcendent. Take the essay “My Mother Greets the Inanimate,” in which Greene’s mom says hello to voiceless things like lizards or mountains whenever they enter her line of sight. This happens with such regularity nobody in the family thinks twice about it—until Greene’s teenage brother ups the ante: “‘Hello, Bonnie!’ the mountains now replied, the words slowed down, dropped into a deep and resonant register, as if reverberating from bedrock.” Over time, Bonnie comes to expect all her children will play along, but eventually those children fledge. About her empty nester parents, Greene writes, “For a while there were stories about how my father had enrolled in flight school, how my mother had started teaching a class at the local college. . . . Then one day she didn’t bother to mention their new adventures, didn’t muster up any evidence it was all okay. ‘Fine,’ my mother said, ‘we’re fine. But nothing talks to me anymore.’” Loss and loneliness might be ubiquitous, but Greene reminds us of their infinite manifestations, each with a specificity so intimate we feel it like a punch to the gut.
Or take Rusty, a model of a giant ground sloth who stars in the essay “Megalonyx Jeffersonii.” The author writes how she and other staff at the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History dress his Late Pleistocene figure in ties and togas, “. . . because it amuses us. Because it’s strangely compelling. Because we are drawn to it for what it is, even as we want to make it something else.” Certainly the goofiness of the costumes undercuts the formality of the museum, but the grand anachronism goes further, thumbs its nose at our unforgiving universe and its ceaseless march of minutes. Spend enough time contemplating the thousands of years that have passed since Rusty’s kind roamed the earth, and you can’t help but feel a certain overwhelming insignificance. Dress Rusty as Santa or the Statue of Liberty, and you’re proclaiming your existence, saying you’re here, even if not for very long.
Greene’s cheek takes a different but no less satisfying turn in “Speaking of Basheis.” It’s a story about a curiously shaped dog, “surely some variation of basset hound and shar-pei,” and the inevitable response he elicits from strangers: “That’s a funny-looking dog!” Again, Greene’s brother shifts the narrative. “She’s a bashei,” he begins to reply. Greene writes, “It changed everything to have a name. The posture of the stranger would improve. The tone of their voice would lift and soften. They might bring one hand to their chest in a modest gesture of surprise. ‘Oh,’ the stranger would say. ‘I’ve never seen a bashei.’” The story comes full circle when, instead of commenting on the dog’s funny appearance, a stranger asks, “Is that a bashei?” Marketers have long known the manipulative power of naming; how marvelous to see noncorporate humans, using nothing but regular conversation on daily walks around the neighborhood, put this sly magic to work. It illustrates not only how culture gets shaped but also each individual’s power to shape it. Mostly we follow the crowd, of course, but Greene seems to want us to remember that sometimes, if the mood is right, we might lead.
But it’s the essay “Winston Became a Speck” that reminds me most of my own mother’s exclamation, perhaps because it too deals with distance and time, with endings and beginnings and that liminal space in between. Winston is a dog who chases so many seagulls so far down the beach he almost vanishes, becoming the titular speck. Greene tells Winston’s story to a four-year-old friend, who then asks for it to be repeated over and over. Greene writes, “I assumed she asked for the time Winston became a speck in part because it was fun to say speck, the way she could draw out the sibilance but couldn’t help but pop-crack the end.” Speck is indeed an irresistible word, as soft as it is spikey. But eventually, Greene decides there’s more to the girl’s fixation: “It dawned on me, telling after telling, that she was studying the map of this story, weighing its evidence. She seemed to be gathering data. She was, I think, not so much imagining the visual effect of distance on the human eye; she was testing a vanishing point. She was peering out at the imperceptible. She was considering the stone-cold fact of a creature traveled to the brink.” Greene then muses about ancient civilizations and the many ways humans have struggled to communicate “the idea of naught” over the millennia. Linking a contemporary four-year-old with all the ancient thinkers who have wrestled with the essential question of “How can not being be?” has the effect of collapsing time yet again. It’s as if to say that while we are a very good deal different from our ancient ancestors, we are also, in our fascinations and flights of fancy, the same as we ever were, or ever will be.
In a time when all the familiar narratives—of good triumphing over evil or truth prevailing over its opposite—feel far from assured, when humans themselves seem so at odds with each other, it’s nice to imagine there are some ideas that might still connect us. It’s also nice to know there’s comfort to be found in the meandering of our own minds and the spectacular epiphanies of everyday existence. With her deftly crafted essays, Greene celebrates the meaning-making inherent to the human experience. She reminds us that there is revelation all around. That there is enlightenment, however ephemeral. And as always, that there is folly.
