Enjoy the books, Marlon!

Way back in December I got an email from Jen on the Moon, who is part of a librarian social group in New York. Their group decided to adopt a school in New Orleans to send books to. The slow pace of recovery in New Orleans is a huge point of frustration. So this group in New York set up an Amazon wish list; the teachers at A.P. Tureaud Elementary School added their desired books to the list, and then anyone who wanted to could choose a book from the list that would get sent to the school. They started with about 250 books on the list, but you know, you can't stop librarians from buying books. I bought three, and all the librarians I sent the message on to enthusiastically ordered books as well. 250 books is not that many, so as they got close to having no books left on their wish list, but there were still plenty of librarians with their wallets out, they added more stuff: classroom sets of dictionaries, books in Spanish, multiple copies of books by Black authors, books about jazz and New Orleans culture. One of the organizers of the New York group, a New Orleans native, went down to visit her family and took some pictures of the school and the area. It is wonderful to see the atmosphere the school has created in the middle of such devastation. (Here's an example of what the kids go through some days.)

The other day I got a lovely thank-you card from Marlon at Tureaud. I think it's Marlon. Could be Marion or Mylan. (I erased the last name for student privacy). On the front of the card an adult had written ''570 books and counting.''

For most libraries, our number one problem is shelf space. There are so many wonderful, useful, beloved books, and no library can hope to have enough shelf space for all of them. For libraries in New Orleans, there are two problems: a rather more severe than usual lack of shelf space (eight public libraries were completely destroyed), and a serious book shortage. We can't do much about the first problem, but we can get all over the second one. As an added bonus, I just found out that A.P. Tureaud himself, an important civil rights lawyer who won all the most important desegregation cases in Louisiana, worked as a library clerk while putting himself through school. It all comes back to libraries in the end.

Super Plus

I am now entering the Super Plus phase of my life.

This realization came to me as I looked in a box of tampons I had bought. It was one of those boxes with various sizes of tampons, but the only ones I had used were Super Plus.

In my forties many things have turned from a trickle to a flood to a positive torrent. Dental appointments, changes in glasses prescriptions, and new grey hairs were once occasional irritants. Now they are regular preoccupations. Not that they are all negative! I am actually looking forward to having more grey hair since I have not been able to dye my hair for years. My hair is too dark to put a colour in the way it is. In younger days I double-bleached it with Loreal Super Blondissima to get it light enough to take a colour (it was still far from blonde). When I found out how bad the bleach was for my skin, I decided to wait for the grey. Now the day is almost here. I am thinking of alternating orange and green as my hair colours. Maybe the occasional red.

This led me to ponder the possibility that I could look on the entire post-40 Super Plus phenomenon as a re-branding opportunity. After all, Super and Plus are both positively-connoted words, as the business world knows.

Those aren't bifocals, those are Super Plus glasses.

The Latest in Machine Translation

The subconscious is indeed a wonderful thing. My shabbes nap produced a very clear image of a voice translation machine. Now someone just has to build it.

Basically, it was about the size and shape of an Etch-a-sketch. The dials at the bottom and the push buttons on the left allowed you to choose input and output languages, using the menu on the right of the screen. Then you spoke into the built-in microphone at the bottom, and the text appeared on the left-hand side of the screen.

In my dream, my real-life Chinese-speaking colleague and I were arguing over the best way to produce Cantonese to Yiddish translation.

This Year at Marienbad

Well, Reader, we have not been the best of correspondents thus far in March. And why not, you ask? We have been Very Busy. I have an end-of-March deadline for a project at work; and Winnifred's been doing a lot of singing with her various choirs and such.

But we decided it was necessary to Relax and Get Away and Get In Touch with the Healing Spirit Within and stuff like that. So here we are, relaxing.

That's Winnifred in one of the outdoor hot springs at Harrison, this morning when it was raining. Personally, I always prefer the hot tubs when it's raining or snowing or sleeting. That way your head is being cooled off and you don't have to get out as often to avoid over-relaxation.

Just to put that shot in context, the hotel is right under a mountain range. Behind the tubs in this picture, you can see the looming mountain, with the fog up above mingling with the steam rising from below.

This afternoon the rain cleared and we got dramatic sun-rimmed clouds (the sun was already behind the mountains). I took this sitting on the patio of our room, where I was drinking a chai latte and reading Out Stealing Horses.

I don't want to leave you with the impression that it's all beer and skittles, Reader. No, we have been maintaining a gruelling physical regimen the whole time we've been here. We have: walked out of our room, all the way across the patio, and into the hot tub (several times); to the lobby bar to buy chai lattes, and back; to the spa for a massage; and Winnifred went out to the end of the dock on the lake across the street, to take pictures.

Winnifred's pictures will shortly be available via the link on the right (where it says "Winnifred's Photo Albums"). Assuming we have enough energy left when we get home to upload them. This relaxing is serious work.

Aunt Rose, of Blessed Memory

Aunt Rose would have turned 100 this month. She died last summer shortly before we left New York. We were lucky to have lived in the same city as she did for the last seven years of her life.

She was too sick for a 99th birthday party, but two years ago for her 98th we joined Aunt Rose, her daughter Sue, and a bunch of Sue's friends (when you're 98, your own friends are dead) at a Chinese restaurant near her old folks home in Battery Park City. I was very glad that I had managed to find her mother's ship-docking record from the Ellis Island records online a few weeks before her birthday. She had forbidden us to bring presents, but she wasn't going to turn down the reproduction of her mother's ship-docking record we brought along! In fact, just about every guest turned up with some sort of non-gift gift that Aunt Rose couldn't refuse.

One of the guests was professor of public health at a local college. She told Aunt Rose she would be reporting back to her gerontology class about having dinner with a 98-year-old. Perhaps Aunt Rose could give her some insight to share with her class about how she managed to live so long? Aunt Rose turned to the professor, gripped her wrist with icy cold fingers, looked deep into her eyes, and spit out, "Bad luck."

A little while later we were opening our fortune cookies. Aunt Rose couldn't read hers because the type was small and the light was low. She handed it to Sue to read out. Sue read out in stentorian tones, "You will live to be 100." Aunt Rose got a horrified look on her face. "It doesn't really say that, does it? You're just torturing me." Sue passed the fortune to me. I concurred. "That's what it says." We strung her along for a while. Finally, we acknowledged it wasn't true. What the fortune actually said was, "Never smell the inside of a hat." That is actually what it said, but by that time everyone thought we were just making things up.

That 98th birthday party was one of the most fun evenings I ever spent in New York.

Miss you, old lady.

Now Officially Cranky and Middle -Aged

I had a genuine old fogey moment on my commute home this evening. I was actually prompted to forgo my Canadian "pretending not to hear what the person beside you is saying in a perfectly audible voice" practice.

Two physics graduate students were talking on the bus, sitting across the aisle from each other in the manner of young men who wish to avoid being thought a fairy by sitting beside--and possibly brushing legs with--another male. As I was sitting down beside one of them, the guy across the aisle said, "And you can't even go study with Schrieffer anymore because he's in jail."

The guy beside me said, "Yeah, I heard that. He got two years for vehicular manslaughter. That's awesome! Well, I mean, not for him."

"No, but it was great for the guy he killed," I said. I honestly don't know where it came from.

"Uh, no I guess it sucked for him too," the kid acknowledged. I pulled my book out of my bag and went back to "pretending not to hear what the person beside you is saying in a perfectly audible voice."

I think the guy across the aisle must have agreed with me, because he said, "Yeah, apparently he had a whole long record of being pulled over going 100 miles an hour, and he would say, 'I'm a Nobel Prize winner, I can do what I want'."

They went back to their topic about where to go after grad school, eventually settling on two post-docs as the most they would take before going into industry. I sighed inwardly. Both those young fellows, should they actually complete their doctorates, will accept not only as many post-docs as they can, but one-year 4-4 teaching contracts and anything else that comes their way. If Schrieffer weren't in jail, they still wouldn't be going to study with him, because his in-box would be full of fawning emails from graduate students at small Canadian universities.

I can't really blame them. They're just young and, uh, young. But I wish they'd either sit beside each other, so I'm not thrust in the middle of their conversations, or shut up. Remember that scene in Star Trek IV where they go back in time to more-or-less now, and Spock uses the Vulcan nerve pinch to render unconscious a guy playing loud music on a bus? No? Well, I think of it often.

Moon Falling Into Earth's Shadow

This evening after dinner Winnifred insisted we go outside to look for the moon. I didn't know what she was on about, but it turned out there was a lunar eclipse underway. Boy was that ever pretty. Red and soft like a water colour. As we watched it got streakier and smaller. It was almost dissolving. We watched for a while from the front porch, and took some pictures. An hour later, when we left the house to go to the gym, the moon wasn't visible. An hour after that, we came out and it was back: whole, white, perfectly undisturbed. As if the whole thing had never happened.