“Castanets, right?” the ginger haired boy politely asked David. “I was on cello” he continued. The two had just been part of an extraordinary winter concert at Ballard High School. The choir and orchestra combined with a guest soprano and bass to perform Carmina Buran. If you have never heard this piece, then I urge you to check it out (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmina_Burana_(Orff) as it is marshal music at its best. The performance by high school kids was a tribute to their dedication and that of their teachers who directed them. David is in a percussion class along with thirty other kids at Ballard and about ten of them participated in this performance. His role was to accompany the soloists in a de facto duet with a syncopated castanet part. Between the stand out performance and literally standing out in the back row where the percussionists were visible to all, he apparently made an impact beyond La Famiglia. After a nonchalant grin and a nod to ginger, he was back to perusing the video game aisle and arguing with his brother, Graham.
Call of Duty Modern Warfare is mostly where David’s head is these days. For a while he was a Master Sergeant on his team, but resigned after realizing all the organizational work that was needed. It was quickly back to grunt work for him on the team as this allows him just enough time to slip in mostly A’s and B’s at school. Baseball season came and went with the usual mix of mental fielding slipups of a typical teenager interwoven with stellar backhanded, leaping catches. This came along with last year’s Ichiro-style whacks at bat that got him on base, but kept him frustrated that he could not hit the long ball. Not sure what he will do next year about baseball. Says he wants to play and he has started lifting weights to build upper body strength, but his Crohn’s condition really has hampered muscle development. This will simply take time to correct. Thankfully and amazingly to his GI doctor, he’s in remission. This came after a Summer long struggle that restricted his diet. For now the only remnants of that Cathartic diet are the almond milk he drinks with Hershey’s chocolate syrup every morning instead of dairy and his acerbic tongue that found a new voice in his dietary oppression. His tongue also gets a workout eating all that junk food again that forces him to live allowance to allowance as it were spending every dollar earned on food and hanging out with his mates.
In counterpoint to his brother’s often less than witty chatter and spendthrift ways, Graham has developed a steely cool discourse with words and a banker’s appreciation for a dollar. We all know that there is nothing more irritating than being defeated with a simple twist of words. David never admits defeat, but it is there nonetheless and covered up by his own banter. With Graham’s logic there are few flaws and even when wrong he is commanding seemingly logging somewhere why he was wrong. Listening to those two argue is like listening to a Republican debate where Gingrich yammers on and on cycling from one topic to the next without a break or obvious segue against a calm cool logic like that of a Ron Paul type. I’ve threatened to sign Graham up for the debate club when he gets to Ballard next year. “Life’s not a spectator sport” I like to remind him “and since you quit your music studies, making band in high school a moot point, you’ll be doing some other group activity there. Your choice or mine”, I say.
Graham really is quite a determined young man. For example, in less than a year he saved about $1000 to buy a new gaming PC. Industrious too, as he never takes lunch but always eats lunch. When I asked about this he says that most kids bring more food in their lunches than they can eat. So, he simply relieves them of this excess to prevent it going to waste. A humanitarian in the making perhaps, but I hope he didn’t relieve any of those same kids of cash they don’t need. Probably not, as I would have heard about this by now – right? I mean when he suggested to the girl in second grade who wanted to be in his playground club that the only way to join would be to drop her “pants”, we heard about this the same day from the Principal….. Donna blamed that incident on my instructing the boys in the fine art of “pantsing”….. Anyway, regarding the cash he saved up, he did have a bunch of questions about how to use PayPal. However, I put an end to that when it became clear that what he was planning was nothing more than an illegal scheme – in most countries - to free people from their cash. Another example of Graham’s resourcefulness is his Korean social security number, which he required in order to play on a Korean gaming server. I discovered this after seeing him play the PC game Maple Story (http://maplestory.nexon.net/) on a screen filled with nothing but distinctive Korean script (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_script). While he did learn some about the programming language Python (http://www.tutorialspoint.com/python/) this year, I didn’t think he knew much Korean tipping off this alert parent that something was amiss and forcing the question “why are you playing on a Korean server?” Turns out they get all the new game modifications before anyone else. It all looked legal and safe. So, I let that sleeping dog sleep on for the time being.
T’was more of the same for me and for Donna this year. My role as chair of an advisory board in Scotland at the University of Edinburgh et al. ended with the end of that grant, but a new avenue for collaborations opened up at BioCity (www.biocity.turku.fi) at the University of Turku in Finland. So for the next four years I’ll be traveling more to Finland than Scotland to oversee experiments on diabetes and ovarian cancer (http://www.fidipro.fi/pages/posts/international-expertise-for-research-in-service-innovations303.php). That’ll be a nice change of pace, but a company founded with a colleague in Edinburgh will keep my attention in the Scottish lowlands. Meanwhile on the coast of Croatia the mass spectrometry school (www.msbg.org) had its tenth anniversary this year in Dubrovnik and is on again for 2012. And for the first time in seven years I was back in Korea. This time I visited two of the guys who worked for me at the ISB who now have their own faculty positions. It was good to eat in Seoul again where traditional restaurants have a seemingly never ending variety of fermented roots and spicy vegetables.
Donna was once again slave to the Trustees wishes at church and to the S.H.A.R.E. homeless shelter. This church work mostly involved what I call the removals business. These ‘removals’ included the usual suspects from the naked man pleasuring himself in the back garden to the removal of bed bugs from the homeless shelter to the removal of the drugged out dudes in a street brawl during the weekly Saturday soup kitchen. Her exasperation remind me of the end of the poem in tribute to the martyred Good King Winceslas that reads “Ye who now will bless the poor, Shall yourselves find blessing”. If so, then she has got blessings in abundance waiting for her, but probably shouldn’t wait up for delivery. Fortunately, this year a new couple was in charge of the auction which was relief. Please note that I have nothing to do with the auction, nor any home maintenance for that matter, but Donna who does makes the work of one seem like the work of a couple of (groups of) people. These unwitting surrogates helped tremendously to maintain her physical and mental health into the holiday season.
In the end our hearts go out to all those suffering with under employment or no employment. While Seattle is doing better than most, there is talk of setting up parking lots for overnight accommodation for those forced to live in their vehicles. This, in addition to our tent cities that appear to be permanent fixtures, suggest things could be better here. Like the land rich, money poor ‘dirt’ farmers of the old South, these folk have almost enough to get by. Almost, but at least they have their vehicles’ roofs over their heads. So, we hope the new year brings you enough prosperity to be almost satisfied and that any extra that comes your way will be passed along to those in need, many of whom are working right beside you.
All the Best from the Goodletts in Seattle where our contact information remains the same as in 2010 elsewhere on this blog.
