In college, when I was deep into my painting studies, I began attending weekly life drawing classes at a local art gallery. It was challenging to draw from the model, especially at first, but it was terrifically instructive for my abstract work, grounding it in reality. And it was resonant, the sheer physicality of drawing somehow pulling me into sympathetic harmony with the model, a kind of pas de deux between model and artist. As she, or he, moved briskly through short poses, then longer ones, I followed the body's contours brightly, capturing with deft, quick strokes the essence of the motion in crayon or ink. The sessions became a weekly practice in seeing and feeling, of empathy and engagement with form.

I couldn’t really afford the course fee, so after a few sessions I worked out a deal in which I modeled once every six weeks in exchange for free attendance. Since I was also an artist, I knew what the other artists wanted: a twist in the torso, a complicated arch, a spiral body position. I had trained as a dancer, so was limber and flexible and fairly strong, and could move into these dynamic poses and hold them for long minutes. As a model, my body became a landscape; my job was to make that landscape rich and complex, challenging—even abstract. The idea was to transform myself into a complicated object, a thing more than a person, a What more than a Who.

After one of my modeling sessions, a fellow artist, Phil, handed me two pastel drawings he’d made that night. They were both from longer poses, twenty minutes each, so he’d had time to capture the details of my face, my hands, my hair and torso. Phil was about thirty years older than I, and had been drawing for decades. His drawings, like his paintings, were gestural, full of an adoring, exuberant attentiveness, each line a caress imbued with feeling. His work was sensual, sometimes tipping into sexual. Phil never could quite turn me into a What.

I took the drawings home that night and carefully stored them with liner paper, thinking one day I might frame them. That was twenty-four years ago. Now, pulling them from their wrappings, I see my younger self through Phil’s vibrant lens, two exquisite images that captured me in a tiny slice of time—forty minutes of my young life. Who was this young woman with the piercing eyes?

I want to hang them now, to try to answer that question. They're nudes, so too provocative for our main living space; would I want my dinner guests to glance at them, as I poured the wine? But they could be hung in the bedroom, over the bed.

Why have I waited?

Yesterday: Christmas day. The highlight, much more than the jollity of presents and family and music, was the companionship, throughout the day, of a barred owl hunting in our yard.

We saw him first at mid-morning. I had seen out the window a swoop of wings and a settling, and I followed the gesture to the spot where a large bird now sat, streaked and stony, just inside the wood’s shadow. The three of us—my husband, my mother, and I—gathered at the window in the back bedroom to watch him, using our small spotting binoculars to get a better view of his contours and expression. He was beautiful, enchanting, but after awhile this idleness of watching made us restless, and we quit the bedroom for the warmth of the kitchen, called in by the smell of fresh Christmas tea bread warming in the oven, and the tea itself on the boil.

We were eating and sipping and chatting when my mother looked up suddenly and exclaimed, “Oh! Now the owl’s right here by the door!” The bird had pounced on some unseen quarry, and was now half-submerged in snow, his wings lightly aloft. He was not more than fifteen feet from the house, and this time when we gathered at the door to watch him, he looked straight up at us, his eyes meeting ours. These eyes were a deep coal-black, glossy and round, and his bill was a curl of yellow just in the center of his face. Around each eye was a ruffle of buff and gray feathers, a corolla that gave him an awake, penetrating look. It was hard to look away.

Perhaps the lot of us spooked him, or perhaps he had simply missed his quarry, and he retreated suddenly to a high branch at the back corner of the yard. But he quickly settled there and began another scan, twisting his head nearly half-way around, first right, then left, and then looking straight down at the snow below. And then he pounced again, landing hard, feet-first in the snow with a little plash, his head hitting lightly, too, and then raised himself up and stamped his feet once, then paused, and stamped them again. He swiveled to look this way, then that, keeping an eye for his own predators now that he was earthbound. He gave a few more stamps of his feet, and then with one powerful claw hauled from the snow a long black mole, lifeless and sagging, and placed it in his bill. Then, jerking his head once, then twice, then a third time, he swallowed it whole.

Up, and up, he lifted himself again to the trees, and without any pause began to hunt again, scanning downward, scanning the landscape, listening for the minutely audible susurration of tiny feet under snow, of fur and tail brushing channel walls, of the purr and chatter of near-blind mice as they met in surprise and greeted each other in the blue-white dim of their snowy passageways. The owl pounced again, but this time came up empty, and he moved to another part of the yard. And then, after another few attempts, he lifted away, off into the mottled gray of the winter woods, and was gone.

He was back in the afternoon, though, startling me by appearing once again through the window of the back bedroom, this time perched on a thick branch of our towering sugar maple. He saw me again, too, and our eyes met briefly, his black gaze looking deeply through me, and I felt a transfixed chill, as if it were I that was his prey. Then suddenly he broke and turned, looked down into the open plain of the yard, folded open his wings, and glided in a flawless arc to earth, landing hard in the snow once again. But at this moment my cat Rhubarb joined me at the window, and the owl looked up suddenly, startled by the cat’s appearance, and lifted up into the woods again, and again was gone.

Later, I pulled on my tall boots and my parka and gloves, and I stomped into the yard to look at all the places the owl had been. Each landing spot was a hole in the snow about six inches deep, with a small, concave indentation at one edge that could only have been the impression of his bill. Sometimes his wingtips had made a fan in the snow around the hole, and some holes were bermed with loose snow at the edge where he’d kicked his feet.

I dug into every one of these holes, looking, and everywhere I dug I found the tunnels, part of the sub-surface network of comings and goings we humans see only in late spring, when the snow is on its last breath and the channels lie half-open, the plain evidence of a once-vibrant under-snow community. But the owl sees these channels all winter, sees them precisely and with both eyes and ears, and then leaves his own tracks in the snow, his own evidence of the miracle, this everyday miracle of hunting and feeding.

Earlier this year I canceled my subscription to the New Yorker. The damned thing comes on like a snowstorm, all prose and folly, a blizzard of words. It's impossible to read it all in the time allotted, and the following week it comes around and hits you again. It seemed so bourgeoisie to subscribe and yet not read it all, almost unethical. I felt ashamed of the issues lying about, drifts of them languishing, reminding me of my inattention, my dilettantism. So I canceled.

Usually I feel better after a decision. Not so here. I missed it. Friends would occasionally remark on New Yorker stories they'd read, and while I'm never bothered when a friend talks about a television show (I haven't lived with a television since moving to college), I felt sorely left out. This mattered more. Here was compendium of our best writing by our best writers, the mouthpiece of our culture's mind, our collected ideas about who we are and what we are about. But I had willingly, willfully, set it to mute.

So today I re-subscribed. There was no one to stop me, to throw themselves, open-armed, before me, pleading sense and reason. I figure I'll read it at the gym while climbing my one hundred twenty-five stories on the stair mill (thirty minutes of slightly breathless vertical effort that always lands me, oddly, in the same place).

Batten down the hatches.

A senior executive I know recently returned from a conference on social media. It was his first exposure to social tools and social toys, their range and impact. He's never used Facebook, never Tweeted.

"The conference was great," he told me. Then, leaning forward conspiratorially, he added, "I get it."

But knowing about social media isn't the same as getting social media. If you've never experienced it, you've never been exposed to its joys and pitfalls, never been offended when a friend or follower dumps you, never wondered whether your 140-character status haiku struck gold or a nerve with an important other, never struggled to reveal (or hide) your true character under the avatar, never delicately negotiated the intricate textual landscape of meaning, intent, and tone to reach across the electronic ether and win a new friend for life.

The normative is different in social media. If you use it, you will make mistakes. It will exhilarate you, and it will disappoint you. It will hurt you, and it will also heal you. Social media, in other words, is like sex: if you don't do it, you don't get it.