Free Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself by Alan Alda Page A

her feel more fulfilled. It was what I had hoped for her in her life, and she had found the way all by herself. She hadn’t needed my words of wisdom at her graduation.
    I thought I was giving the commencement talk that day, but the locusts gave a better one. They left a more lasting impression. They were the ones with the subtle, life-enhancing message. Going about their lives, they followed the signals inside them. When it was time to be dormant, they took a rest. When it was time to swarm, they swarmed all over us.
    I doubt that Elizabeth remembered that I asked her to be flexible that day and to be true to herself. But that’s what she did. Like the innocent, curious locusts, she followed her nature, she listened to her heart. And her simple doing of it meant more than my talking ever could.

Chapter 6
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    A Passion for Reason
    Thomas Jefferson and I might not have become friends if we hadn’t been brought together by Julann Griffin.
    Julann had stuck a pin in a map, and it landed on a town in Virginia, so she sold her house, bought a farm, and moved to Palmyra, not far from Jefferson’s Monticello. I always admired her courage for picking up and moving; her willingness to step out into randomness and take a walk. Past the age of sixty, she wanted to set out on a new life, to leave California, where she lived then, and she decided to stick a pin in a map. Julann is open to unconventional ideas, and she felt, I think, that her unconscious, or the spirit world, or some unseen power, would guide the pin. Whatever power it was, it didn’t do too badly, because within a few months, she had an old house on a thousand acres, a pond full of fish, an old graveyard, some chickens, and a huge pig named Nancy. She loved the place and invited us to stay with her for a few days.
    When we got there, Arlene and I both had bad colds. Julann went to a closet, opened a large case in which she kept homeopathic medicine, and gave us two glass vials. When we got upstairs to our room, we regarded each other with what you could call a questioning look. As I understand it, the theory behind homeopathic medicine is that you ingest a highly diluted dose of a substance that will induce the same symptoms you’re suffering from, with the hope that the body will fight off all similar symptoms.
    But the substance is so diluted that there isn’t even a molecule of it left in the solution, just some supposed molecular memory. So what good can it do? On the other hand, how could it hurt? So we took it.
    An hour later, we were dumbfounded. My cold was gone, and so was Arlene’s. We told Julann with amazement that we actually felt better, but she took its efficacy so for granted that we avoided using the word
placebo.
Julann liked to experiment and invent. She once concocted an antimosquito lotion made of herbs and vodka that worked so well, we urged her to market it. She said she would, but she couldn’t remember what herbs she’d used. And the vodka made the stuff too expensive. But her bent for invention made Thomas Jefferson’s house, which was a few miles from her farm, one of her favorite places.
    She drove us there and introduced us to Dan Jordan, who runs the place. He took us on a tour of the ingenious gimmicks in Monticello: the giant clock Jefferson had designed for the hallway, with weights that went all the way down through a hole in the floor to the basement; the cabinet that servants would fill with dishes of food in the kitchen and then swung on a hinge so they would appear magically in the dining room. Dan let me sit in a leather chair with large wings that had been designed by Jefferson. I was sure that Jefferson, who was partly deaf, had formed the wings of the chair into a parabola in order to hear conversation better. Dan said I had a pretty creative thought, which was a gracious way of saying it was just the other side of unlikely. But I clung to the idea—even after I sat in it and felt no improvement in my own poor