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Cast Party

Mon, 25 Apr 2016, 01:47 AM (-06:00)

As Trudy and Izzy celebrated the last show of Legally Blonde, I sat in the front yard watching the afternoon sun light up the orange and pink blossoms of the Coneflowers. I was feeling guilty, having participated not one iota in Miss Izzy’s stage debut, leaving the training and logistics to the fair and industrious Trudy.

I sat in guilt-ridden silence watching the bees on the Coneflowers, enjoying the cool breeze and the smell of BBQ blowing over from the neighbors’ backyard. The show had long been over. The day was coming to an end. And in the silence of my self-imposed solitary confinement, it occurred to me that perhaps Trudy and Izzy had gone to the cast party.

Then, as I was huddling over a blossom watching a bee, a Mockingbird flew by and landed in the Agarita. I looked over to see it gulping down the red berries that had ripened overnight. I watched the bird. The bird watched me and then flew around to the Lantana beside the mailbox where a week ago there were pink and yellow and white blossoms but now there were… ripe berries.

What would you rather be doing on a Sunday late afternoon: celebrating at a cast party or contemplating bees, birds and berries? Wait — don’t answer that.

Ruler of The Queen’s Navy

Thu, 21 Apr 2016, 05:36 PM (-06:00)

We used to play a game in our family in which one of us would sing the first word of a song, and the others would guess what song it was. I know it doesn’t sound as if it would work, but it did. If no one got it at first, we’d go around again with two words. Then three. And then four. Eventually someone would guess correctly; it was just a matter of time.

The challenge was that if you were singing, you had to remember the lyrics, you had to remember the melody and you had to sing loudly. Or not. Which was of course what made it so entertaining. There was inevitably much gut-wrenching laughter, and much poking fun.

I remember, however, only one particular song and the singer who sang it.

It was my grandmother. When it was Nani’s turn this one evening, she thought only briefly and then, with a wicked smile on her face, sang out a single syllable “King!” in an ambiguous tone that gave us little hint of the melody.

We were, of course, stumped. All of us… except the three Sisty Uglers, who knew their mother and were able, thru some incredible act of time travel and musical extrapolation, to deduce the specific song: Gilbert and Sullivan’s The First Lord’s Song, the first verse of which is

When I was a lad I served a term
As office boy to an attorney’s firm.
I cleaned the windows and I swept the floor,
And I polished up the handle of the big front door.

He polished up the handle of the big front door.

I polished up that handle so carefully
That now I am the Ruler of the Queen’s Navy.

He polished up that handle so carefully
That now he is the Ruler of the Queen’s Navy.

Now, you will notice that the word king appears nowhere, as it indeed appears nowhere in the song. And even if you allow for the substitution of queen for king, you will see that the royal title does not occur as the first word. Yet in spite of that, her daughters guessed the song. They guessed the song from the wrong word sung in the wrong place to virtually no tune at all!

We laughed so hard, our sides did ache. And my grandmother won the game!

Happy Birthday, Nani.

Taken Back to Michigan

Wed, 20 Apr 2016, 10:10 PM (-06:00)

I worked late today. The fair and industrious Trudy had taken Miss Izzy to the university, where she (Miss Izzy) has a speaking role in a musical version of Legally Blonde. It’s been a lot of work training Miss Izzy and carting her off to campus to hang out with her theater friends, and I have helped not a bit I confess, today being no exception. Instead, I worked late knowing that I wouldn’t be missed at home.

It was absolutely quiet when I finished. The office lights clicked on as I made my way to the outside door. A vacuum cleaner blocked the hallway where it had been positioned by the cleaning staff who were working diligently in some other area of the building. All the desks were empty.

Outside, it was that time of day when the sun has set but it hasn’t begun to get dark. The sky was broken clouds with pastel blue showing thru, the rain having gone. The air was glowing, something about the color of the green in the trees. And there was a clean freshness about, maybe because of the rain that had fallen. Some birds were singing in the trees: a Titmouse nearby and a Mourning Dove somewhere far away.

As I walked across the parking lot, these sensations all hit me at the same time. The glow in the sky. The warmth of the air. The dampness from the rain. The birdsong.

And for a brief moment I was taken back to Michigan. It was a summer day. I was young. Wait! Where in Michigan? Where was it? Where was I? What was that feeling, again? How old was I? Dang, I lost it. Maybe if I close my eyes and breathe in the sweet air again. Nope. As quickly as I was transported there, I was back again in a parking lot in Central Texas.

Watching the Rain Come Down

Tue, 19 Apr 2016, 05:55 AM (-06:00)

The rain started falling lightly just at the moment of maximum entropy as I was digging in the dirt and emptying the rain barrel and moving heavy rocks and landscape timbers and carting around wheelbarrows of dirt. As it started falling harder, I slowly began to reassemble the furies I had unleashed and one-by-one put them away. But this took a while, because I was tired and moving slowly. And because it wasn’t cold and the rain frankly felt good.

Around the corner, Izzy sat under the bench, tied onto her long rope. She was watching me dig in the mud in the rain, no doubt wondering why I didn’t have more sense. She was quiet, didn’t say a word, but I could see the look in her eyes. For heaven’s sake, what are you doing? Can we just go in now, please?

As it happened, after the dirt was safely piled up and the wheelbarrow was stowed and the tools were put away, we found a dry spot (such as it was) on a chair under the eves in front of the garage.I grabbed a mostly clean rag and dried the two of us, and I held her tightly for a moment.

And we sat for a while — she and I — and watched the rain come down.

The Better Day

Mon, 18 Apr 2016, 10:03 PM (-06:00)

Boston was today. What you have been training for over these many months. And from a distance, from a long distance with a hot cup of coffee on the desk beside me, I brought up the race-tracker and prepared to follow your trek from Hopkinson to the finish line.

What was it? Wave 3? And which corral was it you started in? 9:30, you said. You said you’d be off at 9:30. So at 9:50, I entered your bib number and up popped the table charting your progress. Except, yeah. You had started just 20 minutes before, so you were unlikely to be at the 5K mark, yet.

And so I took a sip of coffee and ran a few database queries to try to figure out why my messages weren’t showing up in RabbitMq. And the queries led me to make a few changes to my XSLT. Which led to some scratching of my head. Which continued for hours, until it was lunchtime and I was famished, and the code was still not working, and then the code was working, but something was still missing, and I had to insert some reference data into a lookup table… until there was a clap of thunder outside and it was late afternoon.

I uncovered on the race-tracker window to see that it was long since over. You had indeed finished.

So this is how it went: As you ran. I sat. As you kept your steady pace. I puzzled over my messages. And as you climbed those hills at the end, I confess I was sitting in the comfort of a desk chair with a coffee cup beside me long-gone-cold.

Who had the better day? The race-tracker tells no lies. I saw your splits. You did. Congratulations.

Run Well

Fri, 15 Apr 2016, 07:29 PM (-06:00)

Farmer’s Market

Sat, 9 Apr 2016, 11:56 AM (-06:00)

1. First Arrival

I pulled into the parking lot of the Sunset Valley Farmer’s Market.

It was 7:30 on Saturday morning. There was a bit of a chill in the air, and the grey sky was spitting a few raindrops, but I was determined to get eggs before they sold out. Except… there were only a few vehicles in the parking lot, and most of the vendor booths were empty.

Oh, isn’t this just par for the course, I thought to myself. Always at the wrong place. Or at the wrong time. But I could see Ben helping get some of the booths set up, and he looked up and noticed me, so I got out of the car shaking my head as I walked over. He was smiling.

“Dang it, I’m not going to miss the eggs!” I said to him, laughing.

“Just and hour and a half early!” he said.

“l’ll be back.”

2. Second Arrival

So I went home and grabbed a book.

I read about affine spaces and the theory of determinants, something I should have mastered and moved beyond decades ago but is now just somehow soothing and comforting for me to read. I found a warm spot and read for a while and then set the book aside and left for the Farmer’s Market again.

And still I got there early. …because dang it, I was not going to miss the eggs.

There were more vehicles in the lot. And there were more vendors, although some were still arriving and several were still setting up.

And there was Ben, walking along the path between the booths. Smiling and chatting with the vendors as he went. Sometimes stopping and pounding in a steel stake to secure the awnings over their tables, because the rain was picking up, and the wind was beginning to blow. Booth by booth he checked to make sure that each leg of each awning was in no risk of blowing away. Booth by booth he chatted with the vendors who had tomatoes and cabbages and onions and strawberries and carrots and greens and art and soap and honey and tacos and coffee arrayed on their tables.

I sat inside the car without him seeing me, watching him in his element.

3. Eggs and More

It was still early, but I noticed a woman leaving with two young children behind her and a bag of produce over her shoulder. And then I saw another man walking up from his car with an empty bag over his. And I thought of the eggs and feared that I might yet flub it and arrive too late. So I quickly got out of the car.

I got two dozen eggs that looked like Easter when they opened the cartons to show them to me. And I got four ripe tomatoes. And some carrots. I put my haul in a bag over my shoulder and began walking along the path, admiring the pastries and the soaps and the honey and the Pakora and the other stuff at the other booths.

At the SFC booth, I saw Ben, but he was busy, and I was on a (second) mission to secure a cup of coffee and a breakfast taco. So I continued along the path.

“Yoo hoo!” I heard behind me. I turned to see him walking over.

“Ben! I’m back!”

I bought him some coffee, and some of his friends began introducing themselves to me. And Ben took me back along the path of vendor booths and introduced me to others, including Margaret who has duck eggs which we discussed for a while, me confessing that I had already bought two dozen chicken eggs. (“Next time,” I promised.)

He found some pastries — me choosing a raspberry shortbread kind of thing, him gratefully purchasing a corner of a coffee cake that the baker woman had saved just for him.

“I’ll let you go,” I said. “You have a job to do.”

“I’ll call you, although it might be not so good for kayaking,” he said as he looked uncertainly over his shoulder at the approaching black clouds.

4. What’s The Point?

Why do I tell you this? It’s not much of a story. There’s no real point. Except there is.

Ben has cousins who are chemists and successful game designers and firemen. He has cousins who are creating careers and identities for themselves in the city and in the wilderness. He has cousins studying chemical and bio-engineering. And he has a father who rolls his eyes a lot.

Ben has a father who struggles to see the path his son has chosen (is choosing) for what it is rather than for what it isn’t. His father measures (often against his better senses) his son’s achievements relative to standards that are not relevant. And although there is almost nothing in this world of which his father is more proud, Ben has a father who does not acknowledge all of this nearly enough.

There walking along a crushed granite path, there amid the farmers and other vendors, there with a smile on his face and a handsledge in his hand, there was Ben’s father’s son — the remarkable product of the father’s labors. And his father did see it, as he often does it but rarely speaks to.

And so here with no rolling of the eyes and no misplaced judgements and no misgivings, here Ben’s father speaks his pride to the world out loud for all to hear.

And that was the point.

What’s up with the “gh”?

Sat, 9 Apr 2016, 10:40 AM (-06:00)

1. Strange Noises

There we were sitting on comfy pillows in the “pod” at the end of the fourth grade hall. I was on a huge one with another comfortably pushing against my back. I had a mic around my throat to compensate for my weak voice and a bottle of water to ease the pain. The kids were arrayed around me on square pillows on the floor which they would grab and bring up to the front so as to be as close as possible, except for the quiet kids who were content to sit silently towards the back listening more intently that the rest to every word I said.

It starts out this way, “Twas brillig, and the slithey loves…”.

And then, “Il brilligue, les toves rubricieux…”.

And finally, “Ex brillig war, die schlichten Toven…”.

Every time we sit down like this — every single time, because each year it’s a different batch of fourth graders — their eyes widen and their jaws drop, and they start glancing at each other to see if the others are thinking what they’re thinking.

2. Strange Spelling

“Ein-zwei, ein-zwei, und durch und durch, die vorpal Schwerd zerschnifferschnuck!”

Holding up my hand as if I were holding a sword, I ask them what’s happening?

“The sword!” they say. “One-two. One-two!” some of them shout.

Right! “One-two, one-two, and through and through…”

And then I stop. In the sudden silence I stare at each one of them and lean slowly forward. “How do you spell ‘through’?” I ask.

They love this. They know the answer. They know it’s a trick. And they spell the word correctly, although in their zeal, they often forget the ‘r’.

Right! And then I stop again and lean again. “But… what… is up… with the ‘gh’!?”

They know what I’m talking about. You do, too. They’ve wondered the same thing, although I suspect they’ve never heard an adult ridicule it in precisely that way.

3. The Evolution of Language

Imagine, I tell them, that there’s someone in a village who speaks old German. So the word ‘through’ to them is ‘durch’. Say it with me: durch.

They all repeat it as if this is a German class. And they get the ‘ch’ right, relishing this sound that no English word lets them make.

But now, I say, imagine that that person has children, and that child has cousins, and those cousins pronounce the word differently, with some kind of accent. They say ‘th’ instead of ‘d’, because… well because their tongues are lazy. So they say ‘thurch’. Say both of the words with me: durch, thurch.

We say the words together.

And now, those cousins have children who have cousins who have children. And their tongues get tired of saying ‘ch’, so they pronounce the word, thur. Say them with me, durch, thurch, thur.

And the follow along again.

And then, I say, imagine that some of their children or their cousins get confused about the word. Imagine that they switch the ‘r’ and the ‘u’, so that they pronounce the word ‘thru’. Say them with me one more time, durch, thurch, thur, thru.

And so, one more time they repeat the words with me.

Durch, thurch, thur, thru.

Did you hear that!? What was that last word? Where did we end up?

Their eyes open wide.

4. Archeologists of English

Do you know what archeology is? (Some of them do.) Digging and dusting and sifting thru stuff to discover things about past civilizations.

Do you know what paleontology is? (Some of them do.) Digging and dusting and sifting thru stuff to discover things about extinct species.

What did we just do? We dug and dusted and sifted thru words. And we discovered something buried in the language we speak. We discovered something about English. We discovered that buried all around us in the words we know is evidence about the past. We discovered that English used to be something like German.

You, I say to them, are archeologists of English.

And with that, it is usually time for them to go to the next Culture Fair station.

Dragon

Fri, 8 Apr 2016, 07:50 PM (-06:00)

Nailed it.

Noble Gases

Tue, 5 Apr 2016, 06:47 AM (-06:00)

The kids had chosen their team name, Tiger Roar! We had just done a team cheer to get started, and now I was giving them some instructions — about weighing out the ingredients of their experiment, about putting food coloring into the water (just a few drops), about each of them taking turns letting one of them do the work.

My voice was very low. I mean, very, very low, as it’s been lately. Resonant in a way. Sonorous, even. My theory is that this is mostly because of the severe Oak pollen that’s been falling from the trees, but undoubtedly it also has something to do with the cancer. Either my throat is still recovering from the trauma of the surgery. Or it’s still healing from the radiation. Likely all three.

One of the boys came over to me as soon as I spoke.

“Have you been breathing … neon?” he asked.

It must have been a joke. If breathing helium makes your voice high, then perhaps one of the other noble gases makes it low. Knowing these kids, I’m surprised he didn’t ask if I’d been breathing ununoctium.