Damian is home from South Africa

Damian is home from sixteen days in South Africa with a small school group. Among the highlights of his trip were meeting his penpal Bheki in the Kliptown Youth Project in Soweto; finding a fossil primate tooth, seeing all of the "Big Five" including two leopards in a game reserve; climbing Table Mountain in Capetown, visiting Capetown's Malay quarter, and seeing rock hyraxes.

Damian's the one standing on the chair in this picture. This is a day they spent painting houses; Bheki is in the green shirt beside Damian. The lady holding the chair is the house owner.

Here's a leopard the group saw on a night drive. These animals are shy and usually really hard to find.

Alas, somewhere in the game park, near the border with Botswana, Damian lost our camera. This is the same camera that leapt from my pocket into a stream when my horse bucked in Botswana last year. I discovered the loss half a mile farther on. A week later the guide retrieved the camera and sent it back to me. Not only did it still work, the pictures I had taken looked great. But now the camera has won. Apparently it really, really wants to live among wild animals in southern Africa.

Three kids in transition - graduation highlights

This has been a season of graduations and transitions. Sabrina and her cousin Peter graduated from Tufts three weeks ago, and Sabrina got a job in a psychology lab the next day. (Peter already had a job). Sabrina's twin Owen graduated from Stanford Sunday. And Rhianon, our eldest, who graduated from Stanford two years ago, is leaving her job with a Stanford pediatrician (where she was working on research about maternal/child health in world areas of conflict) to move on to medical school at Johns Hopkins.

Here are some highlights of the last four days:

1. The Wacky Walk. Stanford graduations are held in the football stadium, and by tradition the undergraduates dress up in silly costumes and parade all around the stadium before they settle into their chairs and presumably their adult lives. Two years ago Rhianon and her friends, with a hundred colorful balloons, went as the movie Up. Owen and his friends dressed up as characters from Mario Kart. Other groups marched as a Rubik's Cube, iPhones, a giant squid, boxers in a moving ring, billiard balls, and many more. One carried a sign saying "My name is David. Hire me," with a phone number. We ran into him later and asked if he'd had any offers. "Nothing legal," he answered ruefully. But aside from him and a few others, the costumes had no deep inner meaning. They represent just one last chance to be childishly creative.

2. The Talisman concert. For all four years, Owen has sung in Talisman, a coeda capella group that sings multicultural songs, mostly from the African diaspora. They sing in Xhosa, Zulu, English, Swahili, and occasionally Korean, Chinese, or a a Native American language. Talisman sang at the baccalaureate service in the quad, and afterward they retired to the arcades in the next quad over. There they sang again, just for the families this time, though passersby gathered, including a tour group of young Asian kids who listened entranced. We stood very close to the performers in an atmosphere of joy and spontaneous celebration that made me feel what it must be like on their South Africa tours.

3. A visit to Jasper Ridge. Yesterday Owen took us up to see Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. Over a hundred years ago, what is now Jasper Ridge was the site of the logging town of Searsville, until Leland Stanford moved the people out and dammed the San Francisquito Creek to make Searsville Lake to supply water for his new university. For the past two quarters, Owen has taken the docent course there, and he took us on a hike from oak meadow through riparian woodland and up into the chaparral. We passed the field where researchers are doing experiments on the effects of global atmospheric change. We passed the carcass of a deer killed by a mountain lion, and we looked down on the creek where Owen snorkeled to catalog fish species.. We walked across the dam where the Stanford women's diving team used to practice before they were allowed to use the pool with the men.

Owen will be back at Stanford next year getting his master's and serving as head TA in the freshman Earth Systems course. It was fun to see him in his element, outdoors, leading and explaining and telling stories.

This morning the three kids set out to drive Rhianon's car across the country. They have to hurry to get back to Boston so Sabrina can return to her job by Monday. I know they're going to have a great time. I just hope they drive carefully.

Topsfield Fair

Yesterday Leo and I took Damian and his friend Ryan to the Topsfield Fair, and Leo wrote up a great blog entry that tells the story better than I can. Read here about fluffy animals, nail-biting competition, and the effect of spinning carnival rides on adult digestion.

Katahdin II

Here's a guest entry from my husband Leo:

Damian & I took a quick trip up to Baxter State Park in Maine with Eric and Lian to climb Mt Katahdin. We arrived late Friday night, staying at a bunk cabin in Millinocket, then getting up at 4am to get to the park entrance in time to secure a parking space at Roaring Brook campground (since we didn't purchase one of the 40 parking permits in advance, it was first-come, first-served).

We set off on foot at 8:40am, hiking the Roaring Brook trail to Chimney Pond, then up the Saddle Trail to the Baxter peak plateau. It was a beautiful day - sunny, breezy, 65F - so different from the sleet conditions we encountered in summer 2007! We were up at the top by 2pm and treated to wonderful views in all directions, the leaves just beginning to turn in some areas.

Given the ideal conditions, we decided to hike along the Knife Edge to Pomola Peak. This was a hairy experience of clambering over boulders, with the average width of the crest only about 30ft, and in some sections as narrow as 12 ft, requiring hand-over-hand climbing for much of the way. Damian and Lian, despite their apprehension, were real champions, brave and mutually helpful. Eventually we got to the Helon Taylor trail, descending after sunset and using flashlights to get back to Roaring Brook at 7:40pm - in all it was a 10 mile, 4000 ft, 11 hour hike.

Katahdin

Leo and Damian are off to climb Mt. Katahdin this weekend. It's the highest mountain in Maine,



and I've climbed it with family three times: once on Rhianon's ninth birthday, once when the twins were ten, and once when Damian was ten. It's a tough climb, especially for me, with my lungs compromised by years and years of asthma. The five thousand foot climb starts off nicely enough among the trees, but then gets ever rockier and steeper until you're clambering over boulders or hauling yourself up among iron handholds.

Still, at the treeless top, it's beautiful. Crossing the high plateau the first time , walking among blueberries and mountain cranberries, I experienced a moment of pure elation, mixed of pride and fatigue and joy at the fresh, fresh air.

Two summer ago, along with our good friend and fearless woodsman Eric Harrington, we climbed the Hunt Trail on an August day that was predicted to be sunny and in the seventies. We set off in the early sunshine, but we hadn't gone the first mile before the rain began to sputter on and off. By the time we emerged from the trees, the rain had grown cold, and the boulders were slippery. On the plateau, sleet was blowing sideways, and the wind was gusting so hard I worried about Damian and his friend Lian, the two youngest and lightest of our party. Despite the cold and the falling visibility, we decided to cross the mile and a half of plateau to the elevation sign at the peak. The picture we took at the peak is grayed out and blurry: we look as if we're caught in a winter storm.

At that point our only concern was to get down before dark. We selected a more direct route down the mountain. It led down a steep slope of scree. All I could think about was one of us slipping and turning an ankle. Leo stayed close to Damian, and Owen came back to stick by me and give me a hand over the worst parts. We managed to get down out of the wind, and at 4 pm, standing in the pouring rain and the partial shelter of two leaning rocks, we tore into our lunch: packets of tuna crumbled by hand over pieces of pita bread. Then we kept walking.

Eventually we reached a bunkhouse, rested a few minutes, and set off again along the shallower, wooded trail, now soft underfoot. The rain finally petered out, and we meandered through the woods, among the ponds, and eventually down to the parking lot, where we borrowed a friendly couple's car to get back to our own campsite.

That was my last trip to Katahdin. Not necessarily my final trip - I didn't say that - just my most recent. Still, this weekend Leo and Damian are going without me.

Home Libraries and Family Scholarly Culture

Last time, I wrote that having books in the home seems to boost kids' scores on national tests by a significant amount. Today I report on an international study showing that having more books in the home appears to increase the number of years of schooling a child attains.

Some of you have already read about this study, but when a study takes twenty years to complete, it doesn't become old news that fast.

Basically, M.D.R. Evans and colleagues found that across countries and cultures (e.g. black vs. white South Africans), having 500 or more books (rather than only one book) in the parental library translated to an average of 3.2 more years of schooling attained. The impact was greater in poor countries than rich countries, with the highest effect in China (6.6 years) and the lowest effect in Canada (1.6 years). These differences were as great or greater than the difference between having parents with 15 years of schooling versus parents with only three years of schooling.

In the US, the effect of having 500 versus one book was 2.4 years of schooling, after controlling for other measures of family background, such as parental education, income, or occupational status. Across the 27 countries, the steepest part of the curve was toward the end with fewer books; that is, the first 25 to 75 books are just as important as the next 400+. As the authors say, "It is at the bottom, where books are rare, that each additional book matters most, not among the literate elite; each additional book yields more 'bang for your book' among the book-poor than among the book-rich."

Of course, it's not just piling books in a corner somewhere that makes the difference. Households with books tend to be households where parents nurture a scholarly culture by talking about ideas, encouraging reading, and sharing knowledge. Parents at any level of wealth or education can encourage such a culture, and books are a great resource to help it happen. So are public libraries.

Two final notes of interest. The first is that the average number of books in American homes is 112, about average for the 27 countries studied; but based on wealth and education levels, we would be expected to have more like 200 books per household. So maybe we're shortchanging our kids.

Second, although number of books in the home has proved to be a valid indicator of scholarly culture in the past, correlating well with other measures like how often parents read about science or go to the library, that may change as more of us turn to using ebooks instead.

Waiting for Earl

All week, we waited for Hurricane Earl with mild apprehension. Should we haul the boats? How high would the winds be? For a while there was a tropical storm watch, then warnings of winds 30 to 40 miles per hour, then only 20 to 30.

Yesterday was leaden gray and calm, though the wind rose slightly during the day. Damian and I went swimming off the dock so that someday we could say we swam in the Atlantic the day the hurricane arrived. The water seemed a few degrees colder than it has been, but maybe we just thought so because the air was cooler.

By evening, a thick fog rolled in. Still no sign of seriously bad weather. Damian wanted to swim again at midnight, and because it's so nearly the last day of summer, I acquiesced. We stayed up as late as we could, he belatedly finishing summer reading homework, I reading The Big Sleep.

Maybe the book title affected me, but I couldn't make it to midnight, so at 11:15 we changed into clammy bathing suits and made our way down through utter darkness to the dock, where the automatic floodlights sprang on. It had been raining intermittently, and the dock was wet underfoot. The fog hung at a distance, blotting out the stars and draping the far shore in gauze. The tide was dead low, and the water so smooth it looked almost greasy.

One after the other, we took the jump, a long pitch into dark water. The water was pleasantly cool. As we climbed out, rain began to fall in large, vigorous drops that glittered in the floodlights. Wrapped in towels, Damian and I congratulated each other for being extremely cool.

Earl arrived just before dawn, a gray and weepy old man with no bluster left in him. Despite the drenching rain, the leaves are hardly fluttering on the trees. We'll be bailing boats. I don't know about a swim.

Old family videos

Leo has been converting old family videos into DVD format over the last couple of weeks.  Each one takes some time, so when we walk past the computer where it's happening, some video is constantly running, like a comic or nostalgic background to whatever we do.

There's us feeding the twins in the special care nursery, when Owen and Sabrina are still so small and their features so indistinct it's a little hard to tell one wrapped-up bundle from the other. There's Rhianon at two and three, singing songs to order. (One, two, three strikes you're out at the OLD . . . BALL . . .GAME!)  We can see generations of cousins riding their tricycles and Hot Wheels down the slope off the side of our Maine house, heading precipitously toward the water.  Kids spraying water at each other, painting Mommy's face and doing her hair, running races, performing home-created plays--lots of good, everyday times.

More nostalgic are the films of Leo's mother and grandmother feeding and patting the twins; my father in suit and tie on the floor playing with Rhianon; my mother reading to three little kids at once.  Of those three, only Leo's grandmother is still alive and living in her own house in the Philippines at 95.

It was a lot of effort for Leo to find the right attachments and connections to finally set up this conversion, which he's been talking about for a couple of years.  All I can say is, it's worth it! The kids love looking at old films of themselves, though Owen shakes his head and says, "I keep seeing more evidence that we're not a normal family."  As for me, seeing all these pictures of the kids when they were little makes me walk around with a silly smile on my face feeling very fond of my family.

Fictionary

When we have large numbers of family and friends gathered in the summer, we like to play games like Charades or Fictionary in the evening. Last night, although our numbers are dwindling as summer blazes to an end, we played Fictionary.

Fictionary requires scraps of paper, pencils or pens, and a large (or at least pretty comprehensive) dictionary. One person looks in the dictionary to find a word no one knows. We don't allow proper nouns or slang, although we argue about that last a lot. After we're certain nobody knows the word, everyone writes down a likely-sounding definition and turns it in to the dictionary holder. The dictionary holder writes down the correct definition.

Then the dictionary holder reads out all the definitions twice. My husband Leo always says incredulously, at the end of the definitions, "Is that all?" because he hasn't heard any definition he likes. On the third time through, we close our eyes and vote on the definition we think most likely. (One is not allowed to vote for one's own definition.)

Each player gets a point for every person who voted for his definition; he also gets a point if he chose the correct definition. The dictionary holder gets a point if no one guesses correctly. Then the dictionary is passed on to the next player.

A lot of the fun of the game comes at the end of a round as we all loudly guess who wrote each definition. We each have a characteristic style; Leo and I usually end up guessing each other's definitions, which we find very frustrating.

Fictionary sounds like a great way to build vocabulary. Unfortunately, though, players usually remember best either the definition they made up or the definition they voted for, even if both are wrong.

Last night was a banner night. Here are some of the words:

solera - My favorite definition was Damian's, which referred to the collection of stars just a bit smaller than our sun. The correct definition, though, had something to do with casks of brandy in a cellar. Not a word I'll use! "Oh, Jeeves, go down to the solera and select an appropriate sample, would you?"

gelada - I am fond of my own definition, about the layer of fine-grained soil that liquefies in an earthquake, but it turns out this is a large, maned, Ethiopian primate that lives on cliffs.

sheugh - Here the definition that will live on in our family was "NO!" as in, "Go to bed, dear." "Sheugh!" The true definition was "a ditch or trench."

nasute - Leo and I both made up definitions that contrasted "nasute" with "hirsute" or hairy. Mine was "scaly;" his was "having oily skin." Turns out "nasute" actually refers to a soldier termite with a long snout that shoots out a noxious substance. Now there's a word we'll use every day. (Maybe it will become a family insult.) My nephew Peter, who doesn't like Fictionary, wrote as his definition "devoid of pleasurable games," as in "So far, this evening has been nasute."

wudu - The stress is on the second syllable. I'll leave this one to you. Invent a great definition and post it below!

Jumping off the dock in Maine

Over the years we've developed a tradition that whenever people arrive at our Maine house for the first time that season, they have to jump off the dock into the ocean. Depending on the time of day, the tide, the month, and the weather, that can be a pretty daunting challenge. Last summer a French family we'd never met before visited. When they immediately trooped down to the dock in their bathing suits and jumped, any smidgens of doubt about French fortitude receded.

The dock is actually a stone wharf, with huge granite blocks held in by pilings. At high tide the drop to the water is only about six feet, but at low tide it's more like fifteen. That means a lot of time on the way down to think about how cold it's going to be when you hit. Once you're in and paddling as fast as you can back to the float, a new challenge looms: heaving yourself out of the water without looking too much like a walrus.

The past few summers, though, the water in Muscongus Bay seems to be getting warmer. It's often quite pleasant to peel away from work or cooking or tennis to plunge into the water and get a good salty sinus rinse. We often play the game of "Categories." Just as the jumper takes off, another person calls out a category, and the jumper must shout out a member of that category before hitting the water. Examples of easy categories are "Colors!","Girls!" or "Sports!" More difficult ones might be "Muscles!" "Ice Cream Flavors!" (the jumper has almost hit the water by the time you finish the question), or "Brands of tandem bicycle!"

For Categories, low tide is an advantage.

Every summer we take our old lobster boat out to Monhegan Island, the farthest east of any land in Muscongus Bay, and about ten miles offshore. The water is probably ten degrees colder there than by our house, but the girls still dare us all to jump off the town wharf before departing at the end of the day. It's like throwing a coin in the Trevi Fountain: it ensures that you'll return. People fishing for pollock off the wharf, tourists waiting for the ferry to return them to the mainland, and fishermen rowing ashore from moored lobster boats, all watch with something between admiration and incredulity.

All that attention--maybe that's what the girls are really after.

Lost Property Scam - Money Finders

Recently a group called Money Finders sent my husband Leo a form letter demanding payment for helping him find lost property. The letter claimed that he had signed a contract, that they had located $798.00 for him, and that as a result he owed $79.80. This was his FINAL NOTICE, and if he didn't pay up they would take him to collection and inform the major credit bureaus.

His name, slightly misspelled, was pasted into the letter, which contained some odd grammatical errors ("Please find whom initiated the agreement"). I could find no company website, and the return email address was a hotmail account. These are pretty good signs that a letter is a scam.

Of course Leo knew nothing about any contract. He would have been happy just to throw the letter away, but I was curious. I called the number enclosed in the letter, only to be referred to email. I emailed accountingdep@hotmail.com asking for a copy of the original signed contract. Then I looked up the address of Money Finders, 67 Serenity Court, Franklinville, NJ 08322. I learned that this address has been associated with many different phone numbers and complaints of scams.

To my surprise, the Money Finders folks emailed back, offering to fax the contract if I'd send them a fax number. I responded asking them to scan and email the contract instead, and they responded that they would post it by US mail.

Finally I emailed the writer asking for his name and title and the company's federal tax ID#. I have repeated this request several times with no response.

A few days later I received the "contract" in the mail. Although it was undated, I remembered it from a few years ago. Headed "Account Recovery," it stated in official sounding language that property belonging to Leo had been located and would be returned to him if he signed below and returned the form. There was no mention of a finder's fee. Leo was convinced even then that it was a scam, but seeing no downside I had him sign it anyway and sent it off. The bill,years later, was the only response.

Having received this "contract", I wrote the following email to the sender:

Thank you for the new material you have sent. Unfortunately, it is not a contract. Nowhere on the sheet is there any notice that recovery of the funds will cost money; nor were any funds delivered. Please consider this matter closed.

At this point, all pretense was dropped. Here is the email I received in response:

i guess you dont see the words a 10% fee will be due once you receive your money, people like you amuse you, you scream and holler that nothing was signed than i send and you bla bla me...it will been forwarded to collection on the 1st, i dont care regardless what you do, you obviously are classless and i hope you enjoy be called by collectors and affecting the credit rating

Very businesslike, don't you think?

At this point I filed a mail fraud complaint with the US Postal Service. Perhaps the Postal Service will investigate and prevent more gullible people from being intimidated. Still, I must say, I'm curious about how such a slow and small potatoes scam can succeed.

By the way, this correspondence did inspire me to check for unclaimed property in three states where I've lived. This is easy to do by searching the state government website for "unclaimed property." I found nothing owed me, but did find property including insurance refunds and stock dividends owing to a brother, two sisters, my husband, and both my now-deceased parents. It's worth a look.

Puffball, an Invented Game

Damian has invented a summer game called “Puffball,” a fun, silly outdoor game for family or friends. Two to four may play, on grass, sand, or pavement. Required equipment includes one beach ball, tennis racquets (or badminton racquets) for each player, plus something to indicate the corners of up to four squares. We used old tennis balls.

Mark off a Puffball playing square for each player. The squares should be about eight feet on a side and should meet at the corner. (Or you can set them a bit farther apart from each other. All the rules of Puffball are negotiable.)

The game is similar to four-square. The point is to hit the beach ball into your opponent’s square. Each player begins with five points, and when you knock the ball out of bounds or it lands in your square you lose a point. Whoever is closest to the ball at the end of a play gets to serve the next play. Overhead serves are not allowed, and you must stand in the back half of your square to serve.

When a player’s score falls to zero, that player steps aside until the end of the round. The last player with points remaining in a round is that round’s winner and gets to move the back two corners of his square either forward or closer together. Of course, having a smaller square (now a rectangle or trapezoid) gives the person an advantage in the next round.

A ball that lands on a line is re-played. In our family we have passionate arguments about what’s in, out, or on the line. Some may find it helps to use string or chalk marks to delineate their squares rather than imaginary lines between tennis balls.

Those are the basic rules of Puffball. Of course, you can invent your own embellishments. That’s sort of the point. One of our embellishments is that if you “save” a ball that was clearly going out of bounds and manage to hit it into someone else’s box, making them lose a point, then on that play you also gain a point. This motivates people to go after some crazy balls, and they usually miss.

Enjoy Puffball, or write back with your favorite summer game invention!

Visting the Heron Rookery

Great blue herons nest on Wreck Island, just a few miles offshore. About once a summer, once the most delicate part of the nesting season has passed, we visit the rookery, riding out in our old converted lobster boat, the Granny II. This time we anchored fifty yards off the rocky beach, and the kids ferried us ashore in the round-bottomed dinghy.

The path to the rookery is inconspicuous in the underbrush at the edge of the rocks, but the raucous calls of the herons revealed the way. Soon we were among white-spattered bushes, looking up at dead tree branches spiking toward the sky. One tree had five nests, another three. The nests were a yard across, and in them the adolescent birds sat, hulking and entitled, grumbling loudly as they waited for their parents to come home bearing fish.

On the way home, we saw a minke whale, twenty feet long, arc out of the water. Farther on, twenty harbor seals hunted in a pack. In ominous silence, they slid toward a sloshing patch of water disturbed by jumping fish and jostling gulls.

Reading With Older Kids

We’re all convinced of the benefits of reading to young children, but what about reading with older kids?

When my twins were in fifth grade, they received the following English assignment: Choose an adventure book to read together with one of your parents. As you read, write notes to each other about your reactions, thoughts, and questions. Communicate in writing about the book!

My son Owen and I chose to read Into Thin Air, John Krakauer’s harrowing account of the 1996 Everest climbing season, when the latest in adventure tourism went terribly wrong. Two teams of fit, semi-experienced climbers paid $60,000 each for a “guaranteed” chance at scaling Everest. When a storm howled in, three tourists and two tour leaders perished.

I loved the assignment, and Owen enjoyed it, too. We passed the book back and forth, wrote notes on the computer, and (even) talked about the book. I shared my surprise that the Everest climbers were miserable from the start, beset by insomnia, headache, and hacking cough. Owen shared his sense of the beauty of the mountain and the lonely horror of freezing to death.

Recently, a fifth grade teacher in my wealthy suburban community told me they don’t give that assignment anymore: Too many parents complained.

Parents complained?

Maybe they were too busy traveling for work to read. But couldn’t they use a Kindle on the plane and text their remarks to their children? Maybe they worried the books would bore them. But couldn’t they negotiate with their children for a book that would captivate both of them? Or maybe the parents were afraid of getting a bad grade on the assignment.

As a society, we have embraced the idea of reading to kids too young to read for themselves. Often, though, we forget the value of shared reading experiences as our kids grow older.

I was one of four children, and long after we were proficient readers, we still cuddled on the couch to listen to my mother read to us every night. She didn’t “do the voices” like an actress. She just read in her steady, calming tone; and we listened, learning to pay attention and paint pictures in our minds.

Listening to an adult read aloud exposes children to vocabulary in context, complex sentence structure, and a continuous train of thought. These are all good tools for enhancing children’s thinking, but even better is the shared intimacy of these moments. We don’t have to give them up as our children approach middle school. Even when we don’t read aloud, we can still share bedtime reading, lolling together on the couch or bed, each reading our own book, exchanging comments from time to time.

My father and brother both liked science fiction. Sometimes, on vacation, when there weren’t enough unread books to go around, the first reader tore off sections of a paperback book as he finished them and passed them on to the second reader. I’m not advocating book dismemberment, but what a message about shared enthusiasm!

You and your children can always recommend books to one another. My son Damian’s suggestions have grown from his passionate advocacy of Tony Abbott’s Droon series through his romance with Jerry Spinelli’s Stargirl to his current insistence that I read Here, There Be Dragons by James A. Owen. To tell the truth, I can’t keep up with him, but we do enough common reading that we can always discuss why characters do what they do or how it would be to live in another world. (One friend of mine tells me that the Harry Potter books provided dinner conversation for years.) I reciprocate by saving newspaper or magazine articles for Damian, choosing books from the library I know he’ll like, or sending him links to stories on the web.

By reading books together, we keep communication lines open and share our interests, aspirations, and inner worlds in a way that’s oblique, not too confrontational or embarrassing. Nobody gives us a grade.