It wasn’t all bad
■■ Born in Afghanistan, Laila Mir started learning to cook traditional dishes from a young age. After immigrating to the United States at age 9, she found she could recall her homeland by preparing dishes like kofta and firni. Now Mir is helping Afghan refugees settling in the San Francisco Bay Area get a taste of home. Over the past weeks, she has cooked and donated hundreds of meals, including a large delivery to the Muslim Community Center in Pleasanton, Calif., each meal with a personal note welcoming the recipient to the United States.
■■ Randy Bachman dreamed as a teenager of buying the orange 1957 Gretsch 6120 guitar he saw at a music store in his hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba. By age 19, he had saved up to buy it, and the founding member of the Guess Who used it to write several hit songs—until it was stolen from a Toronto hotel in 1976. “Part of me was lost,” the rock star recalled. Nearly 45 years later, Bachman fan William Long scoured every image he could find of an “orange Gretsch,” tracking it through a 2016 ad from a Japanese music store and eventually to a Japanese musician who goes by Takeshi. Over Zoom, the two musicians tearfully agreed on a guitar exchange.
■■ Wind turbines built about 27 miles off the Virginia Beach coast have become havens for marine life, attracting mussels, sunfish, and occasional sea turtles. Dominion Energy began operating the two turbines, which are currently used for research, last year, and it plans to build another 180 by 2026 for a commercial wind farm. That would be good news for fish in the Atlantic Ocean, who have flocked to the structures and started building a reef. “It’s just amazing the fish ecosystem that is growing around these turbines,” said Dominion environmental technical adviser Scott Lawton.