Musical Rats

 You might start by reading my story of nearly four years ago titled Calling All Vet Techs...

Tonight in a rehearsal with a small orchestra in a hundred-year-old church, our Boccherini was suddenly interrupted by shrill squeaking.  Two large, dark grey rats appeared on a cornice just below the rafters, apparently having come through a small hole in the wall.  The rat who was being chased fell twelve feet to the floor of the sanctuary, and began running wildly under the pews.  The rat who was doing the chasing scurried back and forth just a bit atop the cornice, then disappeared back into the wall.

All eyes in the now silent orchestra were attempting to track the loose rodent on the floor. One of the musicians, who is used to living in the country, walked toward it to try to chase it away from the rest of us.  The orchestra took to its feet, and some of the more city folk took to standing atop their chairs in panic.  

After a couple of minutes, the young, athletic, and panicked rat in question came dashing towards the orchestra.  The second violins, who were positioned on stage left, evacuated to the first violin side with an unceremonious shrieking stampede, followed shortly by the cello and bass section, who moved with more calm and decorum, as the rat ran up the steps of the platform.  The intrepid country pianist followed our furry neighbor through the door to the common area behind the sanctuary, and shut the door behind it so it would not bother us any further.  

It did reappear in our space from underneath another door with a larger gap when the rehearsal was shrunk at the very end to three players...

I was not remotely phased - see previous story.  I tried to help country pianist corner it to see if we could coax it out an exterior door, but it gave us the slip.

Music on the breezes

My kid recently used her saved up babysitting cash plus a forward of future babysitting cash to buy herself an electric guitar....  

(I, of all people, am a major consumer of recorded music, but I always feel so happy when people engage with living music, both as listener and as creator.  My world is full of canned music, such that it becomes mindless - grocery store, beach, car... Everywhere has a soundtrack.  I find it overwhelming at times, because I cannot seem to selectively ignore musical sounds in the environment.  My ear demands I attune to them in some way, often with an analytical motion in addition to the original creator's intended emotion or mood.)

...I recently had the opportunity to sit for a long while and listen to a man singing and playing the guitar to his own compositions.  What a joy that he could pour himself into a creative flow! My own involuntarily analytical ear felt trapped after a while of quiet listening, as all his songs used the same small set of chords and were all about the same tempo.  In order to confirm to myself that I was not imagining things, I pulled out my phone for my practice app, where I was able to clock all of his remaining tempi between 80 and 90 b.p.m.  Despite my own stylistic preferences, I was truly able to enjoy his engagement in the physical and creative world he accessed through poetry and muscles and wood and vocal chords....

...I used to walk by a house a few blocks from home where I often saw a man a couple of decades older than myself set up in his living room with a music video on his TV and his electric guitar in his hands, working at playing along, quite loudly, to music he obviously loved....

...Some weeks ago on a sunny afternoon I was at the neighborhood park across from the library with my two younger kids plus a friend from school, when I saw a middle-sized boy park himself on a bench with a euphonium, oblivious to the world for a portion of an hour in the middle of all the sunny-day, after-school hubbub.  At first his blattings were messy, and I could not make sense of them.  After five or ten minutes of his concerted effort, I was able to start discerning the bassline to the song Seven Nation Army - familiar to our family via the 2Cellos cover.  Suddenly I realized the whole band at the neighborhood middle school must be rehearsing this piece, and I imagined a whole large room full of twelve-year-olds working at figuring out the tune....

(When I sat a few weeks ago to write these musings in my notebook with a ballpoint pen, my middle schooler, who had just learned how to play the Seven Nation Army bassline herself on her new electric guitar, was just below me in her Grampa's office, instructing her younger siblings in how to play it on her Grandma's acoustic guitar and ukelele.)

My favorite vignette along these lines, though brief, comes from a late evening walk in the Autumn with my middle kid on our daily 3.5-mile loop in the neighborhood.  As we passed a certain house, I heard the strains of Mozart's "Ah vous dirai je Maman" Variations coming from an upstairs living room.  I paused for a few moments to listen.  The piano was not perfectly in tune, and the voicing was far from professional.  I smiled deeply as I went on my way, know that a real live human being was sitting in that living room, fully engaged in Mozart's creative masterwork.  I think I might have to go rifle through my piano music and read a bit of that piece (badly) on my own piano now...

What I Did In My Summer Vacation

That is, of course, the proverbial first-day-of-school-in-September essay.

For my own amusement, I kept daily notes on what we did as a family between the last day of school in June and first day of school in August.  

Here is an abbreviated version:

June 24.  Last day of school.  Jared took the kids to the Renton Farmer's Market, and they got ice cream.  Also, the younger two went to VBS in the neighborhood June 23-27, starting the second-to-last day of school.

June 25. Started a massive cleaning project in the front bedroom.  (Newsflash: it was never finished and may be even worse now than then...)

June 26.  Youngest and I combed the neighborhood until we found the Kindergarten bestie's house.  She came home with us for a couple of hours.

June 27.  More cleaning.

June 28. Two of us went to the usual weekly sign holding.  Visit to Seahurst Park on the Sound.

June 29.  Usual music for church.  Youngest trialed a new gymnastics class and then visited Bestie's house.  Eldest went to friend's house and participated in Seattle Pride Parade.

June 30.  Took a kid to a doctor's appointment.  Wrote an essay on paper with a pen while sitting with feet in wading pool.

July 1-2.  Camping at Dash Point State Park.

July 3.  Four of us took the train to the Cubing World Championship in Seattle, also visiting the Seattle Public Library and the Klondike Gold Rush Museum.

July 4. Two of us rode the train to Worlds again, plus Pike Place Market and the Pier.

July 5.  Three of went to the usual weekly sign holding.  Four of us went back to Worlds.

July 6.  Church.  Three of us went to a Seattle Chamber Music Society Summer Festival concert at Benaroya.  We all watched the end of Worlds.

July 7.  Took a friend to a doctor's appointment.

July 7-11.  Group Class Workshop week at our house.  Park concert on Friday.  Kindergarten bestie and her mom came, too.

July 12.  The usual sign holding.  We went to an SCMS concert at Bellevue Downtown Park.

July 13.  Took eldest to the airport early to send her off on a three-week adventure in Texas.  Youngest joined the new gymnastics class.

July 14.  Recorded an update to my daily scale practice.  Major living room cleaning.  Went to the Carpinito farm shop.  Took the younger two back to Bellevue Downtown Park.  Possum sniffed my shoe, and I saw a meteor.

July 15.  More living room cleaning.  My student "U" stayed with the kids while the adults went to a SCMSSF concert at Benaroya.  Visited with Steve Rose.

July 16.  It was HOT!  Walked with the younger two to the library for books and A/C.

July 17.  Popsicles.  Four of us went to another SCMS concert downtown.  Then three visited the Yessler Playground.

July 18.  Rehearsed with a dear friend for her Love's memorial service after spending three days arranging the music for the ensemble.  Spent some irksome hours with Jared updating our 2025-2026 studio policy and calendar information.  The younger two had a friend over for a bit.

July 19.  One of us did the usual sign holding.  The other three of us went to the memorial at the church. SCMS concert at Volunteer Park.

July 20.  Church and gymnastics.  Cleaning and laundry.  Drove to Oregon.  Also, I got a super weird/creepy Amazon shipment, and Jared got to call the police on behalf of a neighbor who was having an altercation in the street with someone else.

July 21.  Our 19th anniversary - posted up our recording of the Schulhoff Zingaresca from the studio recital in November.  Also, the kids played so hard, and someones made and ate a blueberry pie.  In Oregon, of course.

July 22.  Kids played ball, made an "elevator", rode bikes, and splashed in the wading pool.  Eldest sent us goat photos from Texas.

July 23.  We figured out the weird Amazon shipment was fraud on my account, so Jared was on the phone with the bank and Amazon to get it all sorted out.  Kids played ball, elevator, bubbles, Magnatiles...  We drove home to Washington very late.

July 24.  Something died under the small studio, and the odor was... special.  Went to the library again.  "U" stayed with the kids while the adults went to another SCMS concert downtown.  Visited with Jun Iwasaki.

July 25.  Jared helped me rehearse something I would be playing with a violin colleague later.  Went down to the Renton River Days drone show after dark.

July 26.  Jared was quite sick.  Youngest went to bestie's house while the other three went to the usual weekly sign holding.  The kids played at the park across the street.

July 27.  Jared still sick.  So I was in charge of church and gymnastics.  Kids came with me to a rehearsal at a colleague's house.  I lost my credit card on a walk before I got to the grocery, but a kind neighbor found and returned it.  Saw another meteor.  Jared took the kids to the park, and one kid got a wasp sting.

July 28.  Three of us swam at the neighborhood high school.

July 29.  "U" stayed with the kids while adults went to another SCMS concert.

July 30.  Met up with a dear out-of-town friend at a violin shop in town.  Then visited the beach at Seahurst.  The Blue Angels arrived in town.  Sent out our annual lesson scheduling questionnaire.

July 31.  Got my Japan-Seattle Suzuki Institute teaching assignment.  Kids had a friend over in the morning.  Took the kids swimming at Rainier Beach Community Center in the evening.  The Blue Angels practiced twice.  (They do some of the flyovers in our neighborhood.)

August 1.  It was the 13th anniversary of our arrival in King County.  We watched Seafair (Blue Angels plus a lot of other plane demos) from our roof.  All of us attended another SCMS concert downtown.  We visited the brand new Pier 58 playground downtown.  I captured and released the largest spider I have ever seen in our house.

August 2. Retrieved eldest from the airport at the end of her Texas adventure and drove her to Edgewood to the sixth-grade bestie's birthday party.  Unfortunately, we were a week early... The other three went to the weekly sign holding.  The kids all played together, and the adults slept. But were awoken by the Blue Angels.  I walked with the younger two and stopped by the library again.

August 3.  Church and gymnastics.  The younger two visited a retired neighbor of ours and while I tried to run errands without driver's license and credit card.  Oops.  Did some massive photocopy/cut/tape to prepare the 2nd movement of the Prokofiev Duo part for performance.  Watched the Blue Angels from the roof and went to the JSSI faculty dinner in north Seattle.

August 4-8.  JSSI at Seattle Pacific University.  Watched classes with Amy Barston, Ed Sprunger, Lisa Humphrey, Amber, and Gaye Detzer.  Participated in a parent discussion hosted by Ed. Watched three faculty performances (participated in one) and four student concerts.  Had a visit with my brother and some of his additional friends and family.   Went on a walk with my eldest.

August 9.  Took big kid back to Edgewood for the slumber party and got it right this time.  Met brother and family at the Fontleroy Ferry and waited two hours to board.  Rode 10 minutes to Vashon and spent some hours at the KVI Beach.  Some people got ice cream on the island.  Waited an hour for the ferry back to Seattle.  Everyone came over for super late dinner on the patio.  There was a full moon.

August 10.  Church and gymnastics.  The relatives visited for 8 minutes before their flight back to Texas.  LOTS of emails, and I finally did my four-weeks late Suzuki Association of Washington State student graduation evaluations. Eldest came home with a terrible sunburn. 

August 11. Took a kid to a doctor's appointment.  Kindergarten bestie came over.  Cleaning living room.  Jared continued with a several-days sheet-rock finishing project in the bathroom left over from last summer.  Youngest found a free plastic drawer set in the neighborhood, carried it home, and carefully washed the whole thing.  

August 12. More cleaning and sheetrock.  One kid stepped on a tack.  Started transcribing responses to schedule questionnaire and work on the scheduling group classes.  Three of us swam at the neighborhood high school.  Step-on-a-tack came down with a triple ear infection.  I went to bed sick.  Drawer kid organized it in her bedroom.

August 13.  I was still ill.  Jared took ear-infection kid to urgent care in Issaquah.  We created the first draft of the fall lesson schedule.  Researched replacement dishwashers.

August 14.  Took the kids to a small pet supplies shop in Bellevue.  Jared painted the bathroom.  Lots of laundry and baking.  Adults visited a little appliance shop in the neighborhood and learned more about dishwashers.  I ended up on a long walk as an elderly gentleman whose English was rudimentary was lost and trying to find his way home.  

August 15.  Family day trip to Ginko Petrified Forest State Park.  I fell ill again.

August 16.  Usual weekly sign holding.  I took a short walk with each family member in turn in the neighborhood between being ill.

August 17.  Church.  Gymnastics.  Published the fall lesson schedule to the students.  

August 18.  Cleaning and packing.  Eventually left for a one-night camping trip at Teanaway Community Forest.  Trouble getting there due to I-90 closures for brush fires.  Saw firefighting helicopters in action.  Kids had lots of energy.  Saw the Milky Way.

August 19.  Slept terribly due to flashbacks.  Read.  Took turns hiking.  Played with the kids at the river.  Drove home very late.  Saw a giant owl sitting at the edge of the road.

August 20.  My 45th birthday.  Got youngest registered for gymnastics for the fall.  Dealt with other secretarial backlog.  Took younger two to library, Goodwill, and Foot Locker Kids.  Youngest kid had a meet-the-teacher event at school.  Opened some birthday gifts.  Lots of packing and cleaning.

August 21. More packing and cleaning.  Drove to Heart o' the Hills for two nights of camping.  Walked with various kids in the woods.  One of them got two nasty wasp stings and a sprained ankle.  Drove up in the dark to Hurricane Ridge and looked through four astronomers' telescopes.  We saw M11, the Ring Nebula, remnants of a star that blew up around ten thousand year ago, and a 220 million year old star nursery.  The Milky Way was gorgeous, and we saw lots of meteors and satellites.

August 22. Walked in the forest.  Spent the day at the Elwha River.  Painting, playing with kids, solo hike to the 1930s ranger station.  Jared messed up his foot.

August 23.  Solo hike in the forest.  Packed up and spent the day at Dungeness Spit.  Jared got to walk all the way to the lighthouse and back.  Sunset picnic at a viewpoint overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Vancouver Island.  Drove home very late.

August 24.  Church and gymnastics.  Finally made my birthday cupcakes, thanks to a kid who wanted to cook.  Took eldest to buy more hair dye.  Lots of secretarial stuff.  Jared read Poe's The Raven to me over dinner.

August 25.  Took eldest to school to pick up schedule.  Jared spent some hours fixing his bike and we went on the Eastside Railroad Trial (I walked.)  I went to hear the inaugural Filo Rosso Society concert. It was the last day of our two-week teaching vacation.

August 26.  Kids' last day of summer break.  Took a kid to Staples for more school supplies.  Hot.  Younger two had a friend over.  

August 27.  First day back to school.  Afterward, Jared and the two younger kids did the annual family visit to the Henry Moses water park.

That's the basic outline.  

In addition to the workshops, I also taught approximately 120 lessons, plus a few trial lessons (acquiring four new students in the process.)  

I also practiced quite a lot - probably one to four hours a day, most days each week, depending on the schedule.

I also read 18 Nancy Drew books, two Hardy Boys books, I Will Always Write Back, and parts of two other books for myself.  I listened to three audio books and untold recordings of beautiful music.  I finished Through the Looking Glass and The Boxcar Children Woodshed Mystery with Lazarus and started The Mad Scientist's Club with him, not to mention many other picture books in general.  

With very few exceptions, I walked generally 3 1/2 miles a day.

I did take some naps, particularly when there had been some terrible sleeping nights for various reasons.

I had in my mind all summer that I would sit one evening and watch a movie, but I have yet to make time for that... 

A Short Story About Credit Cards

 Last Sunday, I received two packages from amazon. I had not ordered anything, and I wondered aloud if perhaps someone had sent me a very early birthday present?  Jared set to opening it.  No cards or anything.  The items inside were clearly either a prank or were sent to the wrong recipient. We looked through our amazon accounts (which we rarely use), and saw nothing weird. 

Two days later, Jared and I got the bill from the green credit card.  This one is usually used only for small occasional purchases at the neighborhood safeway when I am on foot, but the bill was several times larger than usual.  We opened up the details online and saw close to $700 worth of spending at amazon,  plus Jared got a notification about needing to set up a nintendo account.  Ah, so we are in the land of theft and fraud.  Jared called both the bank and amazon to have the card canceled and the stolen charges recouped.  Not quite sure how the card was compromised...

Yesterday, precisely one week later, I set out on my daily 3-point-something-mile walk after a long and tiring day.  I had in my pocket my grey credit card and my phone with my earbuds.  This was so I could listen to music and audio books.  I listened to the Prokofiev Sonata for Two Violins and 5th Symphony.   I listened to Shostakovich 1st violin concerto.  And just after I passed through the busy park at the eastern zenith of my walk, 3/4 of the way to the grocery and on my way home, I suddenly realized my card was not in my pocket.  It occurred to me that I had idiotically put it in the same pocket as my phone and thus taking the phone out to adjust the music or skip ads must have also pulled out the card and let it tumble to the ground unnoticed.  

I immediately began retracing my steps, carefully noting which parts of the sidewalk and which sides of the road I had utilized, scanning the ground.  It is amazing how many pieces of plastic junk I saw with this careful study, and how many of them were not my card.  I listened to the Stravinsky Violin Concerto.  I walked and walked and retraced my steps carefully all the way home.  As I was dejectedly and very exhaustedly approaching our house, an unknown man in shorts and a T-shirt was leaving our front porch and reentering an SUV in the street, piloted by his hijab-wearing wife.  Simultaneously my phone rang.  It was Jared.

As it turns out, the family who had been to our door had found my card at the park (it must have been one or two minutes after I had dropped it.)  The wife was an agent of some sort who was able to look up the owner and address of the card, and they drove over to return it to us.  The second card issue of the week had a very happy ending, thanks to some quick-thinking and kind neighbors.  So with a glance at my walking app (I was already at around 7.3 miles), I pocketed my newly returned card (NOT in the same pocket as my phone) with wonder and gratitude,  and dragged my tired self to the grocery for the couple of desired items.  I listened to the chamber music I had played at church that morning and the next little bit of my audio book, Madeline l'Engle's The Moon by Night.  It is part of a series which I have listened to many, many times.  I am estimating I am on at least the sixth or eighth go-round.

Proximity to Genius

Also handwritten in cursive in a lined notebook:

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to be in proximity to a person my own age who is considered an absolute violin superstar.  When I was younger, I was judgmental of her playing; I don't know what it is about certain decades... I felt she was too plain - not creative or interesting enough - and her priorities in musicianship were too far skewed towards perfection and away from story-telling.  But here I am at a place in life where I am dominated much more by curiosity and desire to understand than by judgment or the desire to fit the world into my box.  It is still true that my fondest dreams with the violin, even under the most miraculous of circumstances, pull me in a different direction than that of this superstar violinist's own North Star.

Our proximity was completely without interaction and probably without awareness on her part.  It consisted of my seeing her walking backstage between her practice room and the wings, sitting analytically in the audience during the dress rehearsal, and practicing in adjacent practice rooms before the three shows.  She was playing the solo in the Beethoven Violin Concerto, plus encores.  I was not needed in the Beethoven, as it was a reduced orchestra.  I only played in Prokofiev Symphony No. 5.

Classical music is so much better, so much more interesting,  so much more gripping,  when it is in person.   I have spent untold hours of my life perusing recordings,  but the energy in the room is so different when musicians and audience are breathing the same air and sharing the impulses of their heartbeats in the same space.  It is such a joy to be a performer again after so many years sitting in teaching studios.   I have returned to playing with new skill and new appreciation and determination to be in the moment with wisdom and intuition and playfulness, and without judgment.  It is a difficult journey, as I am absolutely my own worst critic and expect (but do not nearly obtain) goddess-like perfection of myself.

Watching the dress rehearsal of the Beethoven, these are some things I observed:

*This violinist has unbelievable control over her body in a way I have virtually never witnessed.  The intensity and consistency of that control set me to pondering how absolutely everything in her life has been, and continues to be, shaped and aimed toward that end.

*That absolute force of nature when it comes to control, screams to me that the way she plays Beethoven now at 45 is identical to how she played it at 16.  Every note every bow stroke,  every finger strike, every phrase decay, every vibrato nuance, each shift, and every left hand extension has been analyzed, measured,  and repeated into absolute submission with complete elegance, efficiency of technique, and precise denouement of phrasing.

*It set me to wondering with great curiosity what innate force of personality (not to mention natural coordination to a degree not often seen in the general population) must be behind that lifetime of absolutely focused intensity of sameness.  Despite my earlier judgments, I found myself in awe, because I am so generally curious about people whose minds (and by extension bodies) are so far to one end of the bell curve.  Also, that sense of technical control and consistency has been a major missing piece in my own playing since the beginning, as I have tended rather to function on abundant inspiration, sudden bursts of focus, and the synthesis of environmental data and hope.

*This person carries a strong sense of self, a solitary pillar of being.  Despite having a career at the forefront of Classical music playing hundreds of times a year on famous stages, she seems to be very private and centered in her bubble of focus.

*I was very interested in how and what she stopped to point out in the dress rehearsal.   I think everyone was more or less expecting a run-through and then a touching up of a few spots.  However, part way through the first movement,  she stopped the orchestra.  From my vantage point in the auditorium, I could hear that she was talking to the conductor about the center of pitch pulling one way in the winds and the opposite way in the strings.  I don't doubt her assessment, but stopping for it surprised me a little.  The problem, while I am sure she heard it accurately,  was so subtle that I had not yet noticed it.  It pointed out to me how central playing in tune is to the life of this violinist.  She stopped the rehearsal one other time as well, and I was unable to discern the reason.

It was very interesting to watch her body language during the verbal interactions with the conductor.  Her level of confidence in what should be done was full and complete.  She was in command of the situation.   She is an in-demand soloist who has been in this sort of work situation weekly for decades. She was speaking with a female conductor her own age who is clear and precise and not fluffy or beating around the bush.  As she spoke to the conductor,  her lower body was leaning in, as if to create privacy and permission for the other musicians.  Her upper body was leaning back with her free hand in a chest-level "don't shoot" posture - a very socialized female way of softening the blow and stepping away, giving the others permission and freedom to disagree and make their own choices.  I was fascinated to see how culturally submissive this force of nature became immediately after delivering precise information. 

(Some criticize females for not standing stronger, and I have too often seen female string teachers beat about the bush with "maybe's" and "try a little's" and "that's better's" when it's not.  Most male string teachers I have watched just tell students what they notice and how to improve, and most are generally kind about it.  I much prefer the direct communication in this way, and I have seen a few females follow this.  Those females are considered "tough", but I observe they are not "tougher" than similarly skilled males. I have occasionally wished more men in authority (and I use that term incredibly broadly) would take the initiative to create space through their communication for those who fall beneath them, to operate from a place of true freedom.)

There was a fascinating and slightly distressing afterward.  On the Friday between the first and second concerts, I was playing with another orchestra in a side-by-side, read-along concert with a few people who were involved in the aforementioned Beethoven and Prokofiev performances.  I sort of joined the outskirts of their backstage circle and listened in on their talk, contributing minor facts to the conversation twice.  They got to chatting about the Beethoven violinist.  Snippets of quickly tossed off, gossipy conversation reached my ears and took on great import in my own data banks.

"The energy was really off in the dress rehearsal.  She stopped to talk about pitch centers.... I mean, the winds and strings do sometimes pull apart, but...."

"...Yeah, some conductors refuse to work with her..."

"....kinda spectrumy or something..."

It is my long-time observation that when people who know fairly little about neurodivergence offhandedly diagnose someone, they are often accidentally astute in their suppositions if not precise in their observations.  I feel that if this last overheard remark were accurate,  it could explain a lot of the amazing things I noticed about this violinist.  Based on certain tones of voices and observed facial expressions of my colleagues at this moment, I wished immediately that people could be more generally open-minded and accepting of people's unique ways of being.

Language Change: Progress or Decay?

Another piece, written on a lined notebook in cursive with a ballpoint pen a couple of weeks ago

As a middle-schooler, I had a large paper-back tome by this title - Language Change: Progress or Decay?  It was given to me as a gift while I was in the midst of a multi-year linguistics research obsession.  Given my inability to focus on anything difficult, I never made it too far through the dense prose, and I have no idea what became of the volume in the intervening decades.  But some thoughts from it which I was not yet ready to incorporate into my world-view at the age of twelve have returned to my mind in the last decade.  It makes perfect sense now.

At that state of my development I was particularly intrigued by the fundamentals of grammar, and I spent many hours writing tables of pronouns, verb conjugations, and case endings in English, German, Latin, and my own invented language Holstenian.  In addition, I spent time looking up and researching cognates to some of the words with the oldest roots in the Indo-European language family.  I used various foreign language dictionaries and was working to trace the evolution of sound shifts across language groupings.  It was all very scientific and tidy.  There were correct answers, and this notion was aided by our daily afternoon grammar text-book study in the sixth grade and the grammar-policing of my own family, which I very much appreciated.

These days, with a a lot more data synthesized from so many areas, I think about language as a social construct.  It has, of course, a primary function as a way to communicate.  I wonder, though, whether anyone's mother tongue is really their native language.  Infants are primed for communication, but before we have words, we already experience the world intensely through sensation and emotion.  We communicate first through gesture and non-linguistic noise, and there are some who spend their whole lives communicating in these ways.

Language is a system of sounds agreed-upon by a community, following a set of rules, also agreed-upon.  But how large is that community in space and time?  And before the advent of writing, how long was our memory?  We have texts spanning fifteen centuries which we call English.  Yet even those from just three hundred years ago are nearly unintelligible to most English speakers today.  Radio and television, and before them, the printing press, standardized English to a previously unexperienced degree.  Yet, if I were to travel in some of the small towns of England or Jamaica or the Commonwealth of Virginia, I would be confronted with pronunciations, vocabulary, and grammatical constructions which would leave me entirely baffled.  Are these things all English?  We affirm that they are, and that their roots are just as ancient as the English I speak.  

I have had the same experience with German.  Our Swiss neighbor tutored me in "broadcast" German.  Yet when she answered the phone and spoke to her mother calling from back home, I could not understand a word I heard as they chatted in their Schwitzer-Tutcsh dialect.  I studied German later with a professor from Munich, eventually touring Munich with her, absorbing the Muenchner accent and manner of abbreviating certain words.  But when we visited a nearby small town in Bavaria and were greeted in friendly conversation by an older gentleman of that region, I could barely catch the gist of his talk.  I have to believe that these people were not "wrong", and the German I had learned was not "right," but rather, those in power had grown up with a certain manner of speech.  That certain manner of speech, through no inherent worthiness of its own, has come to denote power and learning for a time.  

Speaking or writing in this particular way communicates to the listener or reader: I am part of the in-group.  It's a whole additional layer of communication beyond the words, thoughts, and emotional inflections, which is invisible to those who grew up speaking "the King's English" (as I approximately did.)  We only notice when we hear others speaking with equally complex but different grammar and vocabulary.  We either think of them as advanced exotics with a higher status (listen to that beautiful accent!)- forgetting that we ourselves have a peculiar accent -, or as someone quaint but less intelligent ("childlike" or "primitive"), or as someone backward and uneducated.  We are unable to perceive the wicked power dynamics at play or remember that language has never been a fixed monolith, but an ever-shifting agreement between users to communicate in ways that gestures, expressions, and cries are not able to.  Language change is neither progress nor decay - it is merely a shifting reflection of the thoughts, needs, and tastes of the society which uses it.  It is the wobbly mirror of a pond to the clouds in the sky above.

This notion of language as power was driven home to me with great force when I recently sat by, watching my homeschooled second-grader take the standardized California Achievement Test in a version dating from the early 1990s.  When he filled in the bubbles in the multiple-choice grammar test, he got nearly every question correct according to their rubric.  Is this because we have made a special study of grammar?  Or because he is extra smart? Not at all. It is because he read each sentence and asked himself which way sounded like his parents talking.  Because his parents happened to grow up in the subset of educated and power-adjacent people for whom the particular dialect which has retrospectively been titled "the King's English" is their indiginous tongue, he "intuitively" knew what the test writers were looking for.  I was thinking of so many other children, even right in our own neighborhood, who have grown up with other dialects as historically rich and interesting as our own, who would get lots of "wrong" answers on this test, because they did it the same way my son did: by reading the options and picking the one that sounded like how their own parents speak.   And it made me sad to think how those children, in order to appear intelligent to people with power, would need to suppress their own family history and spend a lot of work at academics to get the respect their minds deserved from the beginning. 

These things must be true of all standardized academic and intelligence tests, which are culturally biased.  Human minds are so much more interesting and complex than these make us out to be, and cultures are so much more varied and full of so much more nuance and beauty.

Nancy Drew

 I have been working my way through my eldest's small collection of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew lately.  I read these series, along with the Bobsy Twins, voraciously in my elementary years.  Recently I seem to have looped back around.  Though written and re-edited across a wide swath of decades, they all belong to a set of slower times wherein letters, phone calls on answering-machineless land lines, and "calling on" people were the possible modes of communication.   Nancy frequently consults the phone book to call a stranger or acquaintance, and used the same to find a street address to "call on" people.  I put her old-fashioned methods to good use this week....

My Kindergartener made a Best Friend at school this year.  The two kids created extensive plans to visit frequently over the summer.  Their teacher Mrs. W** suggested the parents trade phone numbers to expedite the process.  In the last couple weeks of school I made a plan to catch the other mother at pick up.  But it seemed that she was always earlier than we were or that a sibling was picking up Best Friend.  We sent a note home with Best Friend hoping to gain a phone number.  My Kindergartener asked Best Friend for a phone number or address as well, but Best Friend didn't remember those strings of numbers.  

After school on the last day (Tuesday), Kindergarten Graduate and I walked down the street she has seen Best Friend depart from school on.... No great clues popped up.  I told Kindergarten Graduate we would go home, but promised not to give up on finding Best Friend.  At home the next evening I looked at the Kindergarten class photo and found the two last names belonging to Best Friend.  I wished for a physical phone book, but I have not laid eyes on such an object in at least ten years....I remembered that online white pages exist, so I looked up the first of the two family names in our town.  I found two addresses associated with that name in the target area of the neighborhood. As I have walked our greater neighborhood extensively in our seven and a half years of living here, I am familiar with the various housing builds and sizes. One target house was a one- or two-bedroom duplex in our 1942 government housing development, and prior data that Best Friend lives with five other family members made that option seem less likely.  The second option was a larger house of at least three bedrooms in a 1980s development atop a former gravel pit, so that one seemed more likely.

Thursday morning, Kindergarten Graduate and I set out walking to this ex-gravel mine address, carrying a pen, a sheet of paper, and high hopes.  Upon arriving at the designated house, we arranged ourselves presentably on the front porch and rang the bell.  After a bit of a wait, a very confused-looking man in his 30s opened the door.  He was clearly not the right ethnicity to be an immediate part of Best Friend's family.  We told him we were looking for a child the size of Kindergarten Graduate by the name of ****.  He did not know her but said he thought some little kids lived next door.  We thanked him but did not take him up on his unconvincing lead.  

As we started up the street, I suggested to Kindergarten Graduate that we could walk around some more of the nearby streets and look for clues.  Kindergarten Graduate then informed me that Best Friend has a large, black dog.  This was helpful data, so we decided if we found a yard or front window containing a large, black dog, we would knock.  After strolling around another four blocks here and there, we rounded a corner and saw a large, black dog in a fenced front yard.  As we approached, we saw that Black Dog was accompanied by a small child, who was none other than Best Friend!  The two kids started screaming in great excitement,  and an elder sibling came out to check on the commotion.  Simultaneously, their mother pulled up in her car from work.  She gave us permission to take Best Friend home with us for a couple of hours, and I used the mitgebracht pen and paper to leave her with the parental names and phone numbers as well as our home address.  So the two small besties are started on their summer play dates.

Upon returning Best Friend home on foot two hours after her discovery, my own Kindergarten Graduate was feeling lots of big things about the end of a fun time, and I was mentally preparing to ride along with caregiving through the emotional storm.  Upon returning to our own alley, I heard the odd honking of a hand-squeeze horn, such as one might have heard on an early automotive or a bicycle from a century ago.  I expressed wonderment at the noise.  Kindergarten Graduate enlightened me right away: it was the woman with the pushccart covered by the rainbow umbrella who sells shaved ice out of her cooler.  Kindergarten Graduate had saved her five dollars, because this cart had frequently been parked under a large tree across from the school, and she had planned to buy herself a treat after school on the last day.  Unfortunately,  the shaved ice cart was elsewhere that day, so this was a perfect full-circle moment for Kindergarten Graduate.   Kindergarten Graduate ran down the alley, into the house to grab her cash out of her backpack, and then out the front door to catch up to the pushcart....

...Along with the old-fashioned methods of Nancy Drew, I first drafted this story in a lined notebook, writing in cursive with a black, ballpoint pen and editing with small scribbles, symbols, and arrows, the way we learned in second grade.  It is my faint hope that this historical method of creation during the process has lent charm to the finished story in some vague way.  I wish I were typing the final draft on a mechanical typewriter like the one we had stored in a case at home during my childhood, but alas, I am typing on this tiny little phone screen with my thumbs. 🙄