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Armchair Student

By on April 11, 2013 in Books and Authors, Folklore, Marti, Spanish

My daughter went to a school with one of the best biology departments in the country.  She majored in biology, graduated summa cum laude, and went to UCSF for her doctorate.

But her college also demanded a History of the World class that lasted for two years; she chose the school for that reason, too.  History, science, art – she loved it all.

Sometimes I mourn the fact that one has to concentrate on only one thing in graduate school (I’ve been to graduate school too, so I know).  What a pity not to be able to keep taking other subjects…

A few weeks ago, I got an e-mail from her:  “I thought you might be interested in this…”  And a link.  I clicked on it – and what should it be but a class in Egyptology, taught by two professors from the Autonomous University of Barcelona!images

I e-mailed her back:  “Looks fascinating – are you interested?  Too bad you’re completely tied up in science and can’t do some humanities!”  She responded, “It’s a free internet course.  I signed up already.” images-5

Who would have imagined?  I looked at it more carefully, listened to the two professors explaining what they were planning to teach (in Spanish, of course!) and wrote back to her, “OK, you talked me into it – I’m on board.”  I thought she might be sorry she told me, but no:  “Good!  Now if I get confused you can help me.”

Nor was that all – she told me she’d signed up for another class, Greek and Roman mythology, taught by a professor at U. Penn.  I looked at that one, and signed up for it too!   I apologized for seeming to stalk her, but she e-mailed me back:  “Don’t apologize, this will be fun!  Maybe. I dunno. I’m nervous about the Spanish one…”

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I had never forgotten a class I sat in on at Currier House, taught by a brilliant Indo-European scholar, Gregory Nagy, on the Iliad, the Odyssey, Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days.  Now I would have a chance, decades later, to retake the class.  And retake it with my daughter.  All I had to do was get the prescribed editions and wait till April, which is when it’s  scheduled to start.

I was so excited that I called my sister and told her about the mythology class.  I sent her the link, in case she wanted to take it.  No, she was more interested in a class on English common law; she thought she’d sign up for that one.

Then I e-mailed my friend Julia, a native Mandarin speaker and a former software engineering manager who switched to working for an education nonprofit some years ago.  I sent her a link to 6 classes in Mandarin, including one about Chinese opera, which I knew she had a weakness for. images-5

She e-mailed me back immediately:  “I love it!  And that’s just the one short page you sent me.  I can’t wait to be retired so I can take all these classes!”

What is it that makes us want to go back and learn?  My father was a child of the Depression; his father died when he was six.  He was never able to save up the dollar required to become an Eagle Scout then, let alone find the money to go to college in the hardscrabble 1930s.  He worked until he was 63 and then retired.  He started taking painting classes then, and a year before he died, he enrolled in junior college and began taking history classes.  He got an A in images-5his first class, American History, and the professor asked him to become a tutor (American history was a requirement, and many students had difficulty with it).  “They’ll pay you,” she offered.  “I don’t need to be paid,” he said.  “I’m happy to do it.”

So for all of you armchair students out there, listen up.  Here’s the link to the outfit that’s offering my classes:  https://www.coursera.org/about . Full disclosure:  I have no connection to them, except the two courses I’m signed up for.

If it’s time for you to get back to class (in the comfort of your own living room), here’s your chance.  Anything from Constitutional Struggles in the Muslim World to A History of Art for Artists, Animators and Gamers; take a look at the class listings.  I just want to warn you about one thing:  my mythology class starts on April 22, and I’m going to need one of the library’s copies of the Robert Fagles edition of the Odyssey.  If you want to take the class, you can get out the second copy, get another copy on Link+, or you can use the online texts at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/.  And if you don’t know how to use Link+, ask a librarian!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
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Costa Rica – ¡Pura Vida!

By on February 28, 2013 in Marti, Science

My daughter has been nagging us to go to Costa Rica ever since she was there a year ago.  So now we’ve gone and come back, and I have to compliment her taste:  what a wonderful country!

I can’t do show and tell about all the fascinating things we did, but here are a few:

We started at Playa Flamingo in the northwest; lovely beach, no undertow.  Very lazy day, until sunset, under a gibbous moon, we set out to try and find a green turtle laying her eggs.  We actually weren’t fussy; we’d take leatherbacks, too.

It took about 4 hours to find a turtle; we were about to give up when our guide motioned us over.  He’d found one.  Her head was in a sandbank, and she was digging a hole with her hind flippers.  He placed a small infra-red light behind the hole, so we could see, and she couldn’t (her head was in the sand anyway…).

It took the better part of an hour for her to be satisfied with the depth of the hole, stop digging and begin to lay.

And here is what the eggs looked like.  IMG_0492

 

Okay, so it’s not exactly National Geographic quality.  But being there that night and seeing these eggs actually being laid was more exciting than I can say.

 

 

The next day we took a riverboat ride through the Palo Verde National Park.  It’s full of migratory birds, monkeys and crocodiles.

Let’s start with the capuchin monkeys, who were apparently curious about the intruders.

First, a look from afar.  Floating on the river, don’t have tails, which is weird, but otherwise…  Now for a closer look….

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A curious monkey jumped onto the bow of the boat, bounded from human shoulder to next human shoulder, in the blink of an eye snatched a cigarette from someone’s shirt pocket and jumped back to the tree, while his cohorts from the troop scampered around on the roof of the boat.

The one with the cigarette took a taste of it, spat it out in disgust, and threw it into the river.  Sure, it’s littering – but that’s a smart monkey!  We were warned, incidentally, not to try howling back at the howler monkeys – they apparently take the sound as an intruder trying to horn in on their territory, and they promptly begin to mark it as theirs.  You don’t really want to know how they do THAT.

And now for one of the big bad boys of the Palo Verde National Park:  a three-meter crocodile!

crocWith a smile that would make an orthodontist happy…

 

 

 

On the way to our next riverboat ride at Caño Negro, we stopped at a place called Restaurante Las Iguanas.  And here’s why – this is only a little corner of the tree full of iguanas!

180576_10100131463477964_7331209_nBy the way, there used to be a time in Costa Rica when many people ate iguanas, both because it was custom and because they were hungry (iguana is still eaten in many parts of the Americas – but not in Costa Rica).  The nickname for these reptiles is “gallo del árbol” – “chicken of the trees.”

Just one more photo of a river animal, I promise.

When this bird, an anhinga, gets wet in a rain shower, it dries off in the sun and it looks like this – kind of reminds me of Mexico’s pre-Columbian feathered serpent god, Quetzalcoatl… 182479_10100131482370104_7838825_n

I could go on for hours, looking at the pictures and remembering.  What a magnificent place.

Oh, and the title of this post?  “Pura vida”?  It’s supposed to be a flashy way of saying “things are great,” it means something like “the best of life.” Very much native tico (=Costa Rican) slang.  Now used for the tourists to mean “you’re welcome;” sorry about that.  I’m a Spanish speaker, and when I said thank you to a Costa  Rican, they invariably replied, “Es mi gusto” – “the pleasure is mine.”  ”Pura vida” is too slangy to be used to another Spanish speaker from outside the country.

Oh, well – wishing someone “the best of life” isn’t so bad, even if it’s kind of made-up…

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CONCUSSION!!

By on January 17, 2013 in Children's Services Staff, Health, Marti, Uncategorized

The New Year didn’t start out well.

I sat down on my desk chair on New Year’s Day, the cushion behind my back went flying (not well fastened to the chair), the chair flipped over, and I flipped backward until my head was abruptly stopped by a wooden filing cabinet.  OWW!!

My husband heard me yelling and came running up with an icepack, which I kept on the lump on my head for 2 hours.  I made him look at my eyes – nope, pupils the same size.  Then we read for awhile and went to bed.

The next day I was so tired I couldn’t go to work.  They tell me my daughter called me, but I don’t remember. I just kept dozing and waking up for the rest of the day.  Finally my son called in the late afternoon:  “Mom, I got Dad a great birthday present!”  He told me the title of the book.  He was expecting me to laugh.  I didn’t respond.  He said, “Mom, I hear you fell; what happened?”  I said, “Well, I sat down on the edge of my desk chair. . .”  And I stopped.  I remembered exactly what had happened, I just didn’t have any words to say it.  My son said, “Oh, never mind, we’ll talk later.”  He hung up and called my husband and said, “Something’s wrong with Mom.”

17143Yes, something was wrong.  My husband took me to the Emergency Room, where I stayed for the next 24 hours, while they took tubes of blood out of my arm, sent me for MRIs, CT-scans, x-rays, echocardiograms, looking for every awful thing imaginable.  Finally they sent me home and the next day the neurologist called:  it was a delayed-reaction concussion.  Everything else was ruled out by the lack of evidence on all the scans.  Concussions, unless they’re large bleeds to the brain, generally aren’t visible.

I’m all right now – though I sit down gingerly on my desk chair.  I don’t want a repeat performance!

But when I was (reluctantly) watching the San Francisco – Green Bay football game on January 12, every so often a picture of Alex Smith flashed on the screen.  He’s the quarterback who was sidelinedimages-3 by a concussion on November 11, giving an opening to the star of the playoff game against Green Bay, 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick.  Smith has been symptom-free for weeks – but he’s also been sitting on the bench.  Doubtless he won’t play for the 49ers again this season.

My heart ached for him as everyone cheered for Kaepernick – no wonder so many players of all ages refuse to confess to a possible concussion.  Walk off the field and who knows if you’ll walk back on?  Not because you can’t, but because the coach has replaced you – permanently.  And yet when he was taken out of the rotation, Smith was taken out of the way, at least for awhile, of repetitive brain trauma.  Is that a bad thing?  Alex Smith is an adult; he’s the only one who can decide.  But every year, thousands of children end up with concussions, most often from sports, and who makes a decision for them?

For more information, look at Dr. Robert Cantu’s new book, and several important websites:

Concussions and our Kids

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001802/

http://science.kqed.org/quest/audio/stanford-investigates-the-hits-that-cause-concussions/

http://www.cdc.gov/concussion/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Trip to the South

By on December 6, 2012 in Marti, Music and Art, Uncategorized

When you grow up in the heart of Los Angeles, 15 minutes from City Hall, you eventually get used to people from other places saying, “Oh, you’re from L.A.?  There isn’t much to do there but go to Disneyland, right?  I guess you must have gone there a lot.”  That is, you may get used to hearing it, but you don’t have to like it.  And just to be clear, Disneyland isn’t even in Los Angeles County – it’s a whole county away!

Los Angeles is full of fascinating places – but you never see them if you’re just driving down the  freeway to Disneyland (which too many visitors do).  People come to San Francisco and are immediately struck by its beauty:  “Oh, I can’t believe it!  I have to live here!”  The beauty and charm of Los Angeles are there too, but they have to be ferreted out.

Let’s choose four wonders that are within 20 minutes of downtown.

When I was little, I went to Barnsdall Park Co-operative Nursery School. It was at the top of Olive Hill, at the corner of Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards.  We played on swings and crawled through concrete tunnels, and about once a week we were allowed to go to a place we called Fairy Land, a hillside filled with olive trees.  At the top of the hill was something that looked like a half-ruined Persian palace.  We were never allowed to go inside.  It was fenced off anyway.

Now it looks much better than it did then:

And now you can go inside.  It’s called the Hollyhock House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for Aline Barnsdall in 1919-21.  She donated the unfinished house to the City of Los Angeles in 1927; it was finally finished and opened to the public in 2005.

There are other Frank Lloyd Wright houses nearby:  the Ennis House in Los Feliz, the Storer House and the Freeman House, both in the Hollywood Hills. Even if they might not look so comfortable to live in, they’re breathtakingly beautiful.

Heading the other way down Sunset Boulevard, toward downtown, away from Olive Hill, I used to go to Candelas Guitar Shop with my friend Karen.

We would drool over the exquisitely handcrafted classical guitars, vihuelas, guitarrones, lutes and everything else made by the luthiers, Candelario and Porfirio Delgado.  Their instruments have been purchased by some of the most famous musicians in the world:  Andrés Segovia, José Feliciano, Jackson Brown, Theodore Bikel, the Kingston Trio, Pepe Romero… the list goes on. The little shop doesn’t look like much, but the rosewood and mahogany guitars and lutes  just took your breath away.

Right after I graduated from college, I went to work for a lawyer in the Bradbury Building at 3rd and Broadway.  The first time I walked into it, I was stunned by the beauty of the light pouring down through the glazed atrium, and the elaborate ironwork; it just looked like an ordinary brownstone from the outside.  It was a privilege to walk into that building and climb the marble stairs every day (even if the job was miserable!). Ten years later my husband and I saw the movie Blade Runner and I jabbed him in the ribs and hissed:  “Look!  It’s the Bradbury Building!”

Crossing through downtown, you come to the oldest street in Los Angeles, Olvera Street.  And right across from it is Union Station, opened in 1939.  It began as a train station, but is now a transportation hub for most of Southern California. 

It’s been appearing in movies and TV shows ever since it opened.  From Watch on the Rhine (1943) to The Dark Knight Rises (2012), L.A.’s Union Station has been a wonderful backdrop for every kind of movie and TV show.

Oh, yes – and did I forget to mention that people get married there all the time? The gardens and sunshine (you can usually count on it being sunny) and marble and tile floors make it one of the most imposing venues it’s possible to find for a wedding.

There’s so much more to see. Curiously enough, probably the best book to start with is a children’s book by Julie Jaskol and Brian Lewis called City of Angels: In and Around Los Angeles.  Or you could always ask me; I’d be thrilled to tell you about the La Brea Tar Pits, the Griffith Park Observatory, the Silver Lake Reservoir, the Watts Towers…  Enjoy your trip!

 

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Turtles, breadfruit and growing

By on October 18, 2012 in Children, Folklore, Marti, Science

In September we got back from a trip to Kaua’i.  Here are a couple of exciting things we experienced.

We went snorkeling, which we haven’t done in 6 years.  I had forgotten how beautiful the fish are – Moorish idols, cleaner wrasses, and the Hawaiian state fish, the humuhumunukunukuapua’a!

What I really wanted to see, though, because I’d never seen them in the ocean before, were turtles.  So we went on a snorkeling tour, and our wonderful guide Kiley took us to a place where she said she’d seen turtles.

First she pointed out a female turtle (you can tell because of the short tail)  on the bottom of the lagoon.  Pretty exciting!  Then about 5 minutes later, she poked me frantically on the shoulder and pointed. And this is what I saw, swimming gracefully toward me:

A green turtle, as big as my dining room table, looking as if it were winging through the water in my direction.  I had to scramble to get out of its way  – you can’t be within 5 feet of a turtle, they’re protected.  They’re called green because of the color of their underflesh (which I hope I never see), not because of the color of their shell.

What a magical moment!  Seeing an animal in captivity and seeing one in its natural habitat are two very different things.

We also went to the top of Mount Wai’ale’ale  – it’s a mile high, and gets an average of 450 inches of rain a year!  It’ doesn’t really rain all the time, it’s more like mist, but the effect is pretty much the same.

After we’d seen the misty view, we went back down to the rangers’ station/museum, a couple of hundred feet below.  There I bought a beautiful print depicting the discovery of  ‘ulu, the Polynesian food staple, breadfruit.  The print looks like this:

You can see the misty clouds that we saw on Mount Wai’ale’ale – and the waves beneath the outrigger.

There are many Polynesian myths about the discovery of  breadfruit.  This particular one is Hawaiian, about two fishermen who became lost at sea between Hawai’i (the Big Island) and Maui.  The mist became so thick that they were unable to tell sea from sky.  As they wandered, they came upon a mythical floating island, Kanehunamoku.  There was a breadfruit tree there, and the two men dug it up and took it back to Hawai’i, where they replanted it and it took root.

There is a double meaning (=kaona) to this story:  “whenever you come upon fog and confusion, you will always come upon ‘ulu.”   “Ulu” is the verb “to grow,” as well as the Hawaiian word for ‘breadfruit” – so fog and confusion, while sometimes troubling and frightening, can also help us grow and show us new solutions to problems.

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