Here’s a picture from a couple of years ago, when Victor and I were working on mountain plovers in Texas. It’s actually a still from some video that Victor shot of the first mountain plover we managed to catch. We were the first people to successfully catch mountain plover during the month of December, so pay attention; this picture captures a historic moment.
Italo Calvino, in some essay that I forget the name of, says something like (and I paraphrase) “When you are old, everyone you see wears the face of a dead man”, the idea being that, 1) Old people have seen a lot of faces so everyone reminds them of someone else, 2) Being old, most of the people they have seen are now dead.
Today on the Stanford campus, when I was making my library run, everyone I saw wore the face of Clark Cotton. He’s this guy I knew in Laramie. It was just one of those things. Weird, huh?