Ted, Ted, Ted

Lilly is a pretty good shot. Every picture in this set was done by her, except the first one.

It’s cool to be reminded of what a place looks like from a view four feet off the ground.

Lilly was a dog for Halloween this year. Her school has the nice tradition of a Halloween parade around the playground.

Later that evening we walked at least four miles, starting at Kristin and Mark’s place near Guerrero, wending our way up into Bernal Heights and then back over to Glen Park. Our kids are in that Halloween sweet spot, age-wise: old enough to walk more than a few blocks, young enough to want to. We live in a pretty hilly part of town now, so it was a workout.

Lilly’s class was featured in this story in the SF Chronicle yesterday and in this CNN report last night.

The teacher, Angelica Chang, has been speaking exclusively in Chinese to the kids all year. She didn’t even talk to us parents when the kids were around, so they wouldn’t catch on. This afternoon Monika, the mom of one of Lilly’s classmates, said: “Cameron watched it with us. As soon as Angelica started talking, he said ‘I knew it! She can speak English!’”

Lilly’s classmate Xavier was talking about shooting off toy rockets with his dad, and Lilly decided she wanted to do that too. So last week we ordered a kit from Hobbylinc.com and put it together, and today we went out with Xavier, Dan (his dad) and his big sister Guadalupe to a softball field in the neighborhood to try it out. It was beautiful out but a little windy, so Houston, we had some problems, but everything was recovered and we came home with a new hobby.

This is, by the way, the luckiest picture I have ever shot. I was fiddling with the camera when I heard Xavier starting his countdown from five, and I turned toward his voice and shot at whatever. You have no idea, unless you’ve seen it, how fast these things take off. I could have spent years trying to squeeze the button at the exact millisecond, but this one just came out.

Lilly has been participating in a heart health program at her school. She went from two consecutive jumps to 50 at a time in about a week. She’s also been skating, with and without a hockey stick, and has a fine-looking swing with a bat. She spends more time than ever on her living-room trapeze, and she does an hour and half of gymnastics on Saturdays. Somehow she finds the energy to stay up until 10 whenever she can get away with it.

We threw a party for Lilly’s birthday a week after her actual birthday. All the aunts and uncles and cousins came over. The best present was a tablet on which you paint in water and it shows up like black ink, but disappears when the water dries. Her grandfather showed her how to hold the brush and write her name.

Well that was interesting. I was just at Lilly’s kindergarten class for a song-and-snack to mark her birthday. When I walked into the classroom, an African-American boy named Durrell took one look at my gig bag and said, “That’s a five-string.” A five-string what, I asked him. “I don’t know. A five-string.”

After the songs and my little shtick about Africans inventing the banjo and bringing it this land (lifted from this site and translated into 5-year-old), this kid let on that he knows someone who plays one of these in his neighborhood, which is the housing project across the street from the school. I was doubly impressed: this is not a kid who talks a lot to strange white men, plus I had no idea I was going to run into a (potentially) Black banjo player around this ever-whitening town. I was already stoked about getting involved in this school, but this is better luck than I’d expected. I hope I get to meet this person eventually, if he exists. It’s a commonplace in the old-time music world that Black banjo players are all around, we’re just conditioned not to notice them. I know the second part of that is true; I just hope the first part is too.

Lilly calls him “my uncle Peter.” He has certainly become accomplished at the uncle-ly arts, chief among them that of making mere dads look kind of stodgy and lame by comparison. Right, thanks for the clothes, dad. Now uncle Peter, he gave me this cool set of knitted finger puppets that will encourage my creativity and stimulate my intellectual growth. Bye, gotta go play now.

Also for Lilly’s birthday, we saw “Flushed Away,” the animated movie made by Dreamworks with the Wallace and Gromit people. Its one I’ve-never-seen-anything-like-that moment was when one of the evil henchfrogs delivers a live message from his evil toad boss by strapping on a video cell phone so the boss’s face is in front of the henchman’s, and the minion then lets the boss talk and mimes the boss’s body language. I don’t know why this is so funny, but it was worth the price of the ticket right there.

I should say something about the concert we saw last weekend. Mary, Laura and I went over to Berkeley to see the New Lost City Ramblers, who have been collecting and performing old-time, mostly Appalachian music since well before I was born. The leader is Mike Seeger, who is brother to Peggy Seeger and half-brother to Pete. (American royalty.) This was part of an annual old-time music festival that’s been getting bigger and bigger lately; it appears that this is another of those out-of-the-way genres that’s been due for a revival.

The atmosphere was that of a homecoming. These guys could do no wrong with this audience, and they didn’t. In demeanor they remind you a bit of some of those old-time Afro-Cuban players like Guaracheros de Oriente: the material is so powerful and the performance style so calm, almost casual, that you’re surprised when your heart has suddenly been torn out and shredded by what you thought was just a three-minute folk song. They sneak up on you that way.

An autoharp, when played by someone who knows how, can be the most beautiful thing you ever heard. Mike Seeger knows how.

The next day I went back with Laura and Lilly for the outdoor concert part of the festival. There were lots of string bands playing on the grass and we got to see some smoking banjo players (clawhammer style only — I felt like a turncoat for practicing Scruggs picking the way I do), plus a real live gut-bucket. We agreed to try to make one of our own as soon as we could figure out where to get one of those big galvanized washtubs.

Did Rothko have MS Paint when he was a kid?

(Click picture for slideshow.)

Lilly spent the last couple of weeks of the summer going to day camp at Starr King Elementary, getting ready to start Mandarin immersion kindergarten there. (Started now, and going well, thank you.) We had a couple of playground get-togethers to meet the other families in the program. It’s a nice mix of people from the neighborhood (still one of the more diverse parts of this ever-whitening town) and people from all over. Lilly quickly established herself as one the two fastest runners in the class. We’ll see what else she decides to excel at.

Catching up on some of the summer activities: In the middle of August, on an impulse, we grabbed the last empty spot at the Henry Cowell campground up in the hills above Santa Cruz. We spent the weekend there hiking and goofing off, and then descended on the beach boardwalk on Monday for some intensive gut-wrenching. My cast-iron stomach has corroded badly in my old age, but I was able to keep up with Laura almost ride-for-ride.

On the way to the boardwalk, we stopped for a stroll on the UC Santa Cruz campus, which turns out to be just downhill from the campground. We saw a young deer browsing with its mom in the beautiful outdoor ampitheater there. I’m hoping this will have helped dispose the girls favorably toward going to school there, when the time comes.

On Thursday we took an easy (for some people, maybe, not for me) two-mile hike from Emerald Bay up to Eagle Lake. Here’s that, plus the remainder of the pics I came home with.
(Click the picture to see the rest of them.)

We are up in the Sierra Nevada near Lake Tahoe for the week, staying in a big house we rented with three other families we know from preschool. I have pictures, but I sent my camera out with Laura this morning on an all-day hike, so the pics will come later. One of the dads is a scout troop leader and knows exactly where to take kids in the mountains around here.

It’s been magnificent so far. The weather couldn’t be any perfecter. The lake, which can be ice-cold, has had all summer to warm up (at least the top 3 feet or so) to an almost swimmable temperature. Yesterday we took an inner-tube ride down a few miles of the Truckee river, which drains Lake Tahoe out into Nevada. Some of the kids saw a river otter. There are two other kids in Lilly’s age group and four in Laura’s, so no one is sitting around with nothing to do.

My excuse for missing the hike today was that I had to drop Mary off at the train station in Truckee so she could get back to San Francisco in time for work. Teachers and staff are supposed to show up tomorrow to get things ready for school to start next week. I’m sneaking a bit of time at a coffee shop in Truckee to catch up on the chaos at work, which hasn’t died down just because I’m not there.

Mary has been away at one of those professional training things since Friday (the 11th) and it’s not going so badly here, considering. Lilly got a little querulous a couple of times in the first 48 hours, but seems to believe me when I tell her Mom’s return is closer and closer. I think six months ago she would have been inconsolable; there’s been some growth going on.

I’ve had an interesting logistical challenge in getting both of them to their appointed activities at 8 am and retrieving them both at 5 pm. I’ve been enforcing punctuality for Laura’s dropoff in the morning, so that I can get Lilly in before 8:30. Being late is OK with her because she doesn’t like the breakfast they serve at her summer camp anyway, but I want her to get at least some of her RDA of runaround time in. In the afternoon I’ve reversed the order and picked up Lilly around 4 and got to Laura just a little before 5.

It would be a lot harder to pull this off during the school year, when adults seem to get all picky about kids showing up on time for things. Summer is the forgiving season.

Here’s a fine picture of Laura and Lilly taken by Mary. She has this knack for getting pretty pictures from unusual natural lighting.

Lillian started walking (lunging, technically) a week before her first birthday. She has also acquired another skill that may prove just as important, viz., drinking through a straw. She showed it off to Laura and me at the neighborhood cafe this weekend, acting all casual like she’d known the trick all her life but just didn’t elect to use it until this particular banana-strawberry smoothie appeared. She is pretty clearly talking to Laura now (”Wuh wah! Wuh wah!”) and calling for a drink (”A-wah! A-wah!”) and pointing out things she wants (”Meh-meh! Meh-meh!”) and experimenting with a wide range of other sounds to see which ones will get us to do things. Among her best toys are some of spice bottles on the rack behind the kitchen door. You give her one of the noisier ones, like cloves or peppercorns, and she shakes it a few times and breaks into a huge grin.

Mary and Lillian have been in Atlanta all week, schmoozing it up at the American Public Health Association convention. It’s been pretty hard, not for any practical reason — things have gone very smoothly for me and Laura so far — but because I love them both so much and like having them around. Laura, ever in touch with her feelings, has kept me updated on how much she misses them but hasn’t seemed upset about it. We’ve been staying busy. I worked at home Monday and Tuesday so I could drop off and pick up Laura at school, and in the evenings we worked on our big project. (I can tell you about it here without giving away the surprise, because I’m pretty sure Mary won’t be looking at any Web browsers while away from home.) We cleared out my old work space downstairs, which I haven’t used much since I stopped freelancing, and turned it into a nice cozy office for Mary. I moved her computer down there and hooked up the very nice 20-inch monitor, which she didn’t have room for upstairs, while Laura decorated the walls with colorful frescos of dinosaurs, spaceships and girls with bows in their hair. I threw out a few years’ worth of paper, which I’d been meaning to do for a long time. That cleared out a surprising amount of space.

Lillian is so ready to walk, in her own view at least. She spent most of the evening yesterday practicing the trick of doing various unrelated things while standing up unaided, like brandishing a pen or applauding herself. Her feet still stay planted, although at especially bold moments she will try a step or two with just one hand on something. When she crawls, her feet now get more action than her knees. It’s pretty impressive how fast she scuttles along with her butt in the air, straining to hold her head up so she can see what’s ahead. The main trick she learned while she was away with her mom last week was the affirmative nod. She mastered the “no” head-shake a while ago, but didn’t feel it necessary to try nodding until she began to gather that there is some semiotic content to the direction of shake.