Ted, Ted, Ted

Speaking of baseball. Lillian went to her first ballgame last night with Mary and me, using our neighbor Cy’s season tickets. Lillian was able to stay awake until about 10, not a record but an impressive performance anyway. Sadly, she fell asleep just before the streaker, so she missed out on the most exciting on-field action, as they say. He seemed to be having a better time than most of the players or fans.

The game itself was tedious even for baseball, 0 to 0 through the 11th inning, which is when we left (and a good thing; I heard it ended up running an otherwise uneventful 16 innings), but we had a great time goofing around and talking and making friends with the fans around us. People do like babies. I’m not surprised any more when I’m walking around with Lillian and some of the roughest-looking guys give me a friendly nod or a thumbs-up, or even come up and ask about her age and weight. Even at the ballpark. Maybe especially at the ballpark.

We’ve had a little bit of a campathon, going out the last two weekends in a row after not camping for years. The weekend before last we were up in Marin, in a redwood forest about 10 miles from the ocean, with a bunch of families from Laura’s preschool. Last weekend we were in the mountains, about 100 yards from the place where the Donner party gruesomely passed the winter of 1847. There is a nice little museum there now, run by the State Parks people. These pictures are from the Donner weekend. They were taken by Henry, which is why he isn’t in any of them. The blond people are Alisa and John and their sons Hans and Mason; the others are Rosalie and Max, who is Rosalie and Henry’s kid. And you will recognize Mary, Lillian, Laura and me. All by way of saving me the trouble of writing captions, which I do all day at work and it gets old.

Not a dinosaur. It is a pterasaur, which has a common ancestor with the dinosaurs but isn’t one of them. It also is not an ancestor of birds, which are a kind of dinosaur more closely related to Allosaurus and T. Rex and so on. We have been learning a whole lot about dinos, under Laura’s patient guidance. I got this off a page I found through this excellent dinosaur links page.

Auntie Frances just got out of the hospital the other day, and is still required to take it easy. In the meantime Gerry (Mary’s brother) has been having to run things himself, making sure James and Oliver get fed, changed and held and comforted and so on. These are of course the conditions — sleep deprivation, pressure, anxiety, noise — that show you what you are made of. I gather that Gerry is finding out he’s made of heavier material than he suspected. He’s had lots of backup from the family, and some professional child care help too, but in the end he’s had to rely on himself pretty hard, and he has pulled it off with some style so far. I’m one of the lucky dads, the kind whose kids arrive calmly, almost casually, get under way without many big crises, rarely calling on me to do anything more heroic than show up, so I make these observations as if from the bleachers, watching Gerry knock balls out of the park.

Lillian and Laura and Mary and I went to inspect their new twin cousins this weekend, on the same floor of the same hospital where Laura was born, and they (the cousins) look great. Oliver and Jack. Auntie Frances needed some rest after the delivery but was doing quite well when we saw her and expected to be railroaded out of the hospital shortly. She’s probably home by now.

I knew a guy in college who was in love with Stevie Wonder. He could name any tune after the first note or two; he would perk up and say, “That’s a Wonder.” Any little incident in everyday life could remind him of one Wonder or another, which we would go ahead and sing to you, bidden or un. Some of them really were wonders, and some were contractual-obligation filler material, as anyone outside that special relationship could have told you. But he loved them all. The good stuff was so good and so plentiful it was easy to forgive the bad.

I thought I was immune to that particular media-age quirk then. I’m not, of course. Bob has had exactly the same effect on me for a long time. Long ago I figured out (late, as usual) what gibberish most of that oracular-sounding stuff from the 60s was, and how un-earthshaking the non-gibberish portion really was. Who cares. I still love every new album a little more than the last one. (Mary even likes them some.) The first Bob I ever heard was his most reviled pair of albums, Nashville Skyline and Self-Portrait, at the home of a couple of hippie refugees my parents were friends with in Costa Rica, in the 70s. (Maybe that explains it: everything he did after that had to sound good in comparison.) I loved everything about them. Later on I kind of liked his pathetic born-again ditties, I really liked the silly Western soundtrack, I loved the hateful, nasty Infidels album.So here it is Bob’s 60th birthday. A few years ago, at the peak of his powers and doubtless figuring he could do anything he wanted now, he made a couple of CDs of nothing but old folk tunes, with just his own ugly old voice and his guitar with the strings that sound like he last changed them right before the motorcycle accident. This went down pretty big around our house. They became our main car stereo fare. Laura has memorized Bob’s version of “Froggie Went A-Courtin’” and taught it to her preschool buddies. (I’ll put an MP3 of it here when I get a chance.) (You knew there would be a Laura or Lillian tie-in here somewhere, I bet.) Mary is partial to his version of Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times” (which sure sounds a lot realer than the smug, sleek version James Taylor recorded with Yo Yo Ma). Riding around listening to this stuff reminds me of the two boxed LP sets we had when we were little, recorded at one of the Newport Folk Festivals I think, with a whole lot of Odetta, the Weavers, Leon Bibb, Joan Baez, Sonny and Brownie. Each of us had our favorites; I think I leaned toward the long, droning outlaw ballads. If I could find those collections, or even remember their titles so I could do an EBay search, I’d grab them. Kids shouldn’t grow up without that kind of stuff.

In Peru, where things can always be counted on to go from worse to even worse without stopping at bad, people are happy today because one of the lesser links in a long chain of public crooks was brought back from Venezuela for his putative comeuppance yesterday. Here’s hoping this show trial goes better than the last one. Here is a guy who spent many years as a stringer in Peru and now provides a useful weblog on Peruvian events. Reminds me of Konrad Borst, a German we knew when we were kids there. Konrad made a living by clipping the European financial press and providing translations to the local banks. He may have been one of the odder ones, but no third-world country we were in was ever short on eccentric U.S. and European expatriates flying under the radar, having colorful lives minimally connected to the official U.S. presence with its tennis clubs and 4th of July parties at the Ambassador’s residence and so on. Not counting the missionaries, who were supposed to be like that.

You liked the book, you’ll love the band. Thanks to my connections in the Judicial Branch, I am now the president of the Jue-Kuster Household Chapter of the Trout Fishing in America Fan Club. Laura is the vice-president and power behind the throne, and Mary, because she’s not quite as crazy about them as me or Laura or even Lillian, must settle for Minority Leader. Lillian is of course the Sergeant-at-Arms, and, using one of the more obscure powers of the post, commands you, if you have or are a kid, to go get all their CDs right now.

Here is a cool science site. It’s for an age group a little over Laura’s, but she likes this kind of thing anyway.

I vaguely remember spending a lot of nights rocking Laura to sleep when she was a baby. I don’t do it nearly as much with Lillian. Either she sleeps more soundly, or we are better at figuring out what she needs. Still, there are some nights when I do need to walk her. It usually takes the length of one or two songs on the stereo (or more often the computer these days). I’ve noticed that some tunes work better than others. A_Toda_Cuba_Le_Gusta.mp3″>This one provides your basic Cuban-style swing, which seems to settle her especially well, while -_Parranda.mp3″>this one is not Cuban at all, believe it or not — it’s a form called gaita, popular around Maracaibo, Venezuela — but it does a nice job anyway.

There is that famous scene in Stuart Little when Stuart puts on his sailor suit and goes down to the sailboat pond in Central Park, where he has a very salty time racing a stranger’s toy sailboat. Ten years ago I lived very near Central Park and I used to go down to that same pond some summer days to read and watch the boats. I don’t know when I realized that it was the pond E.B. White had written about, but it was exactly as he had described it. At the height of summer, when the weather was just to my taste and everyone seemed to be in a good mood, that was an enchanting place. Roller skaters prancing past, little jazz bands playing on the lawn nearby; I was pretty sure I’d never top it. I thought that until Laura and I went to the big Kite Festival at Crissy Field this weekend. Crissy Field is an old airstrip right next to the Golden Gate bridge that was just reopened after being despoiled by the military for many decades. The National Parks Service has put in some wetlands and vast acreages of lawn. It’s a spectacular public space, and the Parks people have done a fine job with it.Mary and Lillian were away on an overnight trip to Sonoma to take the baths and all that. Laura and I got up late, made some sandwiches and caught the northbound 28 bus through Golden Gate Park and the Presidio. The air was already full of kites when we got there and we headed straight for the kite-flying area, but then we had to stop to watch the old-fashioned airplanes that were doing tricks overhead. The wing-walker, Laura surmised, must have had a lot of practice, although what you would do to practice for wing-walking I don’t know.By noon there were so many people flying kites it looked like a snowstorm up there. The sun was flawless and the wind was precisely right: not too fast, not too soft. I wished E.B White had been there to describe it for us. We wandered into a huge white tent where people were making their own kites. Laura made one. It flew brilliantly on the first try. The whole day was going like that. There are those days when everything falls into place and you feel like you are barely touching the ground. The presence of all those kites reinforced the feeling. We sat on the grass for a while and watched whole teams of serious kite people fly giant kites in weird and intricate designs. There was a 30-foot gecko whose arms and legs seemed to swim through the air, and an even larger dragon that was so massive it needed another kite flying overhead to help it stay up. Later we met our friend Ian and his mom, Gail, and we made stone scuptures to add to the collection that has formed along the rocky part of the restored shoreline. I remembered those summers in Central Park, and I understood that those were good times, but they had nothing on the present.

Here is a small collection of articles some guy put together on what the experts have been saying about play lately. Fun stuff. It made me think of the way Laura’s whole life is one big Pretend game. Fantasy play is of course a pretty big deal when you are five years old. Laura can pretend so intensely, and for so long, that sometimes you just want to say “Can we stop and be ourselves now?” But you don’t.

She has this way of proposing her pretend scenarios, and updating them moment by moment, that is a combination of entreaty and order: “And I was the mermaid, and you were the mermaid’s Dad? and we were stuck in the seaweeds? and we were yelling for help? And then the prince came along?” And on and on for hours. When she is playing with another kid they will bat these statement/questions back and forth until they get a rhythm going, and sometimes it works so well, they are so busy talking about the pretend stories, that they don’t actually get around to playing them. With a grownup it never quite hits that groove, because we’re so much slower and more set in our ways I guess. Obviously we didn’t play enough when we were their age. I could have told you that then.