Kathleen wants her own children, but hasn’t yet found a life partner—just after her 40th birthday she had her ovarian eggs frozen in hopes of preserving her fertility.

Brigitte heard about egg freezing but discovered scarce info online—so, after undergoing the procedure, she launched a national advocacy website last year called Eggsurance.com.

And Carolyn, who got married at 39, suffered two miscarriages before using eggs she had frozen. At 41, she got pregnant with twins—one of a handful of such pregnancies over-40 nationwide.

These women are early adopters of a newly improved fertility technology known as oocyte vitrification, a flash-freezing of ovarian eggs. An experimental label for the procedure was recently lifted, making the banking of women’s eggs increasingly viable and popular.

Yet the social experiment of delaying motherhood via egg freezing has prompted some to ask: Will women in their 20s and 30s put motherhood on ice, purchasing costly fertility plans while pursuing careers or avoiding marriage?

That’s the 2.0 version of the Amazonian myth, these women say. And noise from critics wouldn’t stop them from freezing their eggs, anyway, because the sound of the biological clock ticking is much, much louder.

See the full story in this month’s issue of Style Magazine. 

On the 1972 mission, astronauts John W. Young and Charlie M. Duke, Jr., were driving up to the crater, Descartes. You can hear their exchanges, captured but not released at the time.

“This is going to be SPECTACULAR!” Charlie yells. “YoooHoooo!”

After picking up crystalline rocks* and marveling at their own footprints, they begin the bounce-walking that marked all of the astronauts’ explorations on the moon. Only this time, they broke into song.

“I was strolling on the moon one day… in the very, merry month of . . .December..”

“No. May!” one  says. “May!” sings the other.

…”When to my surprise, a pair of lovely eyes…”

“Dum, de dum, dum, dum de dum, dum, dum. . . .”

Later, one reflects, “Houston, as I stand here in the wonders of the unknown, I realize there’s a fundamental truth to our nature. Man must explore.”

Another wonderful truth these astronauts discover: Humans, by our intrinsic nature, can be downright joyous and silly while doing it.

* p.s. Just this past week, some of those gee-whiz rocks prompted a new discovery in the source of ancient water on the moon: comets. A new bit of science forty years after the wild rumpus.

Alec Bings, the boy who grew down from the air, in The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster.

tiny ephemeral gifts of friendship

from East to West

Writing is not a career. It’s a way of being in the world that can be both painful and beautiful.

Writing is like a wild animal. You will never tame it. Some days it eats out of your hand, other days there’s not even a glimpse of a tail in the shrubbery.

On a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t really go very fast. Still, it’s gone before you know it.

Girl: “Oh . . . Brigands are men, aren’t they?”

“Yes.”

“Then I can handle ‘em.”

– Kay, played by a young Joan Crawford in I Live My Life (1935)

A black-inked note on the drawer:

“Do not open
all the way
will fall out”

Another faded ink note taped underneath:

“I don’t see Will
he must have fallen out.”

My daughter arrived at the appointed hour (my son waited for me, so we were a couple minutes after nine), and the hunters had already scoured the field clean. Baskets overflowing. My daughter found 2 eggs. My son: zero.

Okay, you might say it’s survival of the fittest, this game, this race–more skill than chance. Snoozers are losers. But this elbows-out aggression over cheap plastic eggs filled with even cheaper chocolate has always seemed to me a strange way to mark the resurrection of Christ or the spring equinox, depending on your religious point of view.

And the trouble here is: The rules of this children’s game, in our neighborhood at least, is just 12 eggs per child–an attempt to ensure a fair distribution of goods among the members of our community. After all, we were supposed to contribute 12 such eggs per child to ensure the supply was sufficient.

But, alas, the Achilles heel of communist idealism: if there’s no dictator to enforce the rules, people don’t exactly “commune” on their own.

“Come on, kids,” I said. “Let’s go. This is a bust.”

As we walked away, a few older kids came up and redistributed their wealth, handing a few eggs to our children, a gesture urged by parents nearby who heard my griping or saw our 7-year-old’s pinched face.

The Haves reaching out to the Have Nots: More an issue of guilt over their own avarice than altruism, maybe, but a kindness nonetheless.