Tally Ho

I hit the SF lion hunt jackpot this afternoon with a sighting of this lion relief from 6BC (during the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar II) on display for a few months at the Legion of Honor.

On the way home we stopped at Tal-Y-Tara Tea and Polo Shoppe (their spelling) to cash in a coupon for a complimentary pot of tea in this bizarre outpost of Tweed and Tack in the Richmond.

I am not planning to write New Year Resolutions, but if I did I would resolve to appreciate the great views in our neighborhood. Ty took this shot of me in a grove of Eucalyptus trees overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.

Branching Out

I went back to the Academy of Sciences yesterday to see the exhibits I missed on our first visit. I thought Monday would be less crowded, but the building was filled to capacity and they were metering the lines for members and ticketholders. I would not have waited in the line except that the weather was nice and the group behind me made for interesting eavesdropping as they schemed about how to sneak three adults in on one family membership card.

Once inside I spent my time in the African room where I searched in vain for the diorama from the old Academy that slowly transitioned from day to night with corresponding animal sounds in the background.

On my way out I stopped to watch a video presentation about the baobab tree, a species I hadn't heard about until Ty started attending Live Oak School. (Each student belongs to a "tribe" made up of kids from different grades. Each tribe is named after a tree and he is a "Baobab.")

I learned that it's also known as The Upside Down Tree, because the branch structure resembles roots; that it's the national tree of Madagascar; and that it is pollinated almost exclusively by lemurs licking the nectar from a flower on one tree and doing the same on others. The tree is oddly broad, and one of the folktales is that the tree complained to the gods that living in the rainforest made it bloated from absorbing too much water so the gods uprooted it and hurled it into a dry environment where it landed upside down and was destined to grow that way.

Back to Nature

The California Academy of Sciences was a favorite destination when the kids were young, but we let our membership lapse when the museum moved South of Market for a few years during construction of a new facility in Golden Gate Park. It finally opened again at the old location, but the high admission price ($25 per adult or $160 for annual family membership) has kept us away.

Yesterday we finally committed to a family membership, reasoning that it's close to home and would be fun to duck in for short visits as we have with our membership to the DeYoung and Legion of Honor.

The museum opened to great fanfare earlier this year and it's still very crowded on weekends -- as we discovered during our 45 minute wait to walk through the 4-story rainforest exhibit. My first impression of the new museum is that the animal habitats haven't changed as much as the human habitat (which is spectacular), but that may be the right priority. If humans are drawn to the place and take more interest in animals, it's bound to help the animals living outside captivity.


Rainforest exhibit

The Matching Game

When Chloe was young, she began a tradition of creating surveys for family and friends to fill out during holiday gatherings. Part of the tradition was that the questions and answers had to fit on one piece of notebook paper. She would write the questions in the left column, names across the top and draw a grid. As participants completed the survey, they would fold the paper accordion style to conceal their answers and hand the questionnaire to the person whose name appeared in the next column.

After many years in hiatus (coinciding with Toe and Lo's move to Indiana, PA?!?) the tradition was revived this year and there were some funny and eerie matches. The funniest answer was Ty's response to "What non-material thing do you want in the next year?" (In contrast to answers like "peace, love, family time, etc." he said "Mario Cart," a populuar video game. No slouch in the vocabulary department, Ty had interpreted "non-material" to be something other than clothes.)

In the eerie coincidence department, Jordan and Ty named the same person in answer to the question "Which actor would you want to play you in the movie of your life?" (Ewan MacGregor) and Adrienne and I used the same questionable word construction in response to "If you could have one quality you don't think you have already, what would it be?" (carefreeness). Chloe is a genius at devising questions that provide the perfect balance of humor and reflection.

First Things First

It's a soggy Christmas morning in San Francisco. We agreed on 9:30 for the opening ceremonies, so I am alone downstairs for a few hours and solely responsible from keeping the cats from chewing ribbons.

The newspaper is full of Best of 2008 lists and "how to spend the holiday" lists. One article suggested making a list of things you did for the first time in 2008. I suspect the kids won't indulge in this type of reflection (unless I introduce it as a dinner table topic), so I will include a few of their firsts in my list.

• This was the first year we started collecting food scraps for the compost bin. It's a nuisance to carry the stuff down to the bin each day, but satisfying to do a green deed and amazing how much it has reduced our regular garbage volume.


• Ty took a solo airplane flight.


• Chloe moved into an apartment.


• Jordan applied to colleges.


• First time attending a movie premiere -- the film version of Jeanne's City of Ember.


• First time reading many wonderful books: Master Butcher Singing Club and Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich; the Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy...


• First time seeing many new and old plays (some starring Adrienne): The Shaker Chair, Fences, Curse of the Starving Class, Death of a Salesman and The American Dream.


• First time riding a jet ski.


• First time camping in November (with summer-weight gear).


• First time watching a season of American Idol.


• First time hiking the Bootjack Trail to Mountain Home Inn.


• First time eating roasted chestnuts (and wild boar stuffing) at MacCallum House for Thanksgiving dinner.


• First time visiting Portland and Mt. Rainier.


• First time seeing a banana slug eating lettuce (during first camping trip with book club).


• I also saw many new lion statues for the first time (to add to my collection of lion sightings). Here is a distinctive fellow from the Seacliff neighborhood.

Pudding and Pie

Phil gives the ministry a good name through his open mind and reverent irreverence. I thought of him when I came across this poem by another Philip on his birthday yesterday. I sent it along and he responded with one in a similar vein. Here they are:

O Karma, Dharma, Pudding and Pie

O Karma, Dharma, pudding and pie,
gimme a break before I die:
grant me wisdom, will, & wit,
purity, probity, pluck, & grit.
Trustworthy, helpful, friendly, kind,
gimme great abs and a steel-trap mind,
and forgive, Ye Gods, some humble advice --
these little blessings would suffice
to beget an earthly paradise:
make the bad people good --
and the good people nice;
and before our world goes over the brink,
teach the believers how to think.

-- Philip Appleman, from "Five Easy Prayers for Pagans"

The Senility Prayer

God, grant me the senility
to forget the people
I never liked anyway,
the good fortune
to run into the ones I do,
and the eyesight to tell the difference.

--Brenda A. Smith

Slim Shady Meets Shostakovich

Ty showed me a slideshow he made that featured 25 of the world's most famous composers set to the music of Eminem. I didn't know how to react. I was impressed that he'd taught himself PowerPoint and that he was interested in classical composers and that he'd thought to juxtapose the old white guys with the young white guy, but the lyrics were a rude education for me... I guess it's good that he wanted to share his creation.


What would Shostakovich do?

The Butter Knife

When Ty got serious about golf, I bought him a set of clubs that were on sale at a local sporting goods store. Three months later, he had snapped the heads off all the woods. I don't know if it was a problem with his swing or with the quality of the clubs, but I found replacements at the local Goodwill for $3.49 each. The Goodwill clubs are still intact, and I still check the sporting goods area at the Goodwill to see what treasures I can find. Mainly I look for wedges because Ty was eager to have every type: lob wedge, gap wedge, sand wedge, pitching wedge, trouble wedge... but I came across a real treasure last week: a 1-iron. I knew they were rare and hard to use, but I didn't know the extent of it until I did some online research. Here are highlights from an article that did not include a byline:

The 1-iron is often referred to as a butter knife, although even some butter knives are more forgiving. It often requires the perfect blend of speed and power, which most players don't have or don't want to risk trying. That made the 1-iron the source of some of the most famous lines in golf.

"The only time I ever took out a 1-iron was to kill a tarantula,'' wrote Jim Murray, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

Lee Trevino once suggested holding a 1-iron when lightning was in the area. "Even God can't hit a 1-iron," he joked.

But the club was responsible for some of the greatest shots in golf, starting with Ben Hogan hitting a 1-iron into the 18th green at Merion to win the 1950 U.S. Open. That remains one of the most famous of all golf photographs.

Holiday Traditions

For the past year we have tried to do more shopping in the immediate area. This is not much of a sacrifice because we have a fruit and vegetable store on one corner, a local market on another corner, a meat market two blocks away, and many takeout options in a two block radius.

Less convenient is our new holiday tradition of Christmas tree shopping near home at a nursery five blocks away. I missed the ritual this year because the only time all three kids were available was 4-5:30 on Monday, so they did the schlepping of the tree and the wrestling of it into the tree stand. They even did the draping of the Christmas tree lights, which allowed Ty to hold back one strand of lights to decorate his room (until Adrienne discovered his ploy and did some rewiring) .

Although Christmas music has been playing in the house and the car radio, I have Phantom of the Opera "inside my mind." Ty and I went to see the play Sunday night and he loved it as much as I did when I first saw it 20+ years ago during a Christmas trip to London. The musical is also linked with memories of my father because his last gift to me was a cassette tape of the musical -- mailed from London shortly before he died.



It is hard not to compare the performance last Sunday to the one I dimly remember with Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman in the lead roles. What struck me then about Sarah Brightman's performance was that she really did seem possessed by the music when she was singing with the phantom. It was a subtle kind of madness that I imagine I can hear even in recordings of the performance. The woman who played the role in SF seemed too mentally stable or something. Still, it was wonderful to share the experience with Ty and he seemed most struck by the special effects.

Rise Up!

One day, out of the blue, a colleague asked, "If you were sure to be successful, what would you do?" My first thought was that I would like to write a novel, but I realized that I was thinking within the range of my natural abilities. His question opened a bigger universe and I found myself thinking, I'd like to be a wonderful singer. I'd like to be a standup comic who was fearless in front of a crowd. I'd like to be a wildly attractive person. What I finally decided and told him was that I would like to be an evolved person who didn't define myself by my accomplishments. Knowing he was a spiritual person frustrated with the Catholic church, I went as far as to say I'd like to be like Jesus. He thought that was a very ambitious goal.

A few days later, I heard Tyson talking to a friend about things he likes to do vs. things he's good at. Somehow it seemed related to Anthony's question and I hoped he would keep doing the things he likes whether or not he becomes "successful."

This play excerpt by Stephen Vincent Benet also seems related. We received it from Lee, who received it in a Christmas card, and now we have it framed and hanging on the wall for inspiration.

God pity us indeed for we are human
And we do not always see
The vision when it comes, the shining change.
Or, if we see it, do not follow it
Because it is too hard, too strange, too new
Too unbelievable, too difficult,
Warring too much with common, easy ways.
Life is not lost by dying! Life is lost
Minute by minute, day by dragging day,
In all the thousand, small, uncaring ways,
The smooth appeasing compromises of time,
Which are King Herod and King Herod's men,
Always and always. Life can be
Lost without vision but not lost by death,
Lost by not caring, willing, going on
Beyond the ragged edge of fortitude
To something more — something no man has ever seen.
You who love money, you who love yourself,
You who love bitterness, and I who loved
and lost and thought I could not love again,
And all the people of this little town,
Rise up! The loves we had were not enough.
Something is loosed to change the shaken world,
And with it we must change!

American Dream

Adrienne plays Grandma in Boxcar's current production of The American Dream by Edward Albee. It's wonderful. Wickedly funny. The staging -- in people's homes around the Bay Area -- gives us a ringside seat for the dysfunctional family drama.