100 Years of Solitude

I finally read this. This is Jenny’s favorite novel as well as that of a few other friends I’ve known along the way. (Mine remains “Anna Karenina” which I read one summer in college when I was toiling away as a temp file clerk in the basement of O’Melveny and Myers in L.A.)

Wow. He didn’t win a Nobel Prize for nothing. With that blazing literary insight I'll check out.

Boys' Glee

I bought a CD recently of some choral songs by a Cambridge University group. As I listened to it one weekend morning while doing some cleaning up I heard an arrangement of “The Lord is my Shepard” that I had sung in 7^th grade boys’ glee club. I don’t think I had heard it since then but it was really lovely and it brought back memories. The Walter Reed Junior High School 7^th grade boys’ glee club was a strange thing in that it was cool to be in it. All my friends were in it also. After boys’ glee you could do choir in 8^th and 9^th grade. This didn’t have quite the cache, but that was somewhat offset by the fact that choir was coed. The singing thing sort of diminished in coolness after 7^th grade, plummeting in high school. I decided to take computer class in 8^th grade instead of choir, drawn in by the allure of the punch cards that were the staple of junior high computer classes at that time (this was slightly pre-Radio Shack TRS-80s). Anyway, it was a really nice arrangement. I can’t even imagine a public school group in the U.S. singing “The Lord is my Shepard” now. I remember hearing that Mr. Kennedy, the glee club and choir teacher, died of AIDS not long after I graduated from high school. That was not uncommon in L.A. in the mid-80s.

Go Dodgers!

I recently made a quick trip to LA to spend a couple of days and then travel back to Shanghai with the family. On arriving, I checked the Dodger schedule and found there was a game. I thought it would be fun for the kids so I picked a game a couple of days out so we could build some collective excitement and anticipation. The great thing about little kids is that they will get really excited about a lot of things given the right build up. So we started talking it up and took the kids to Target where we got some cheap Dodgers shirts and caps. On the day of the game, we actually arrived a bit early so we had some time to walk around outside the stadium. My dad, Jenny, Abby, Ben and I ended up going, leaving Ethan and my mom back at my parent’s house.

We got to the game and the kids were immediately focused on the hot dogs. As soon as we got in the gate the intensity of the hot dog longing ramped up quickly. I had originally hoped to wait an inning or two before getting some food, but the opposition to any delay quickly became overwhelming. Once I started handing them out Ben got mad because I had put ketchup on his hot dog – a bad choice given that day’s position on the highly variable Ben ketchup desirability/abhorrence spectrum. Luckily I was able to take the hot dog out of the bun, wipe it clean with a napkin and then he ate it bunless and happy. After the first inning the hot dogs were long gone, ketchup was all over the place, there was a big puddle from a couple of drinks that had spilled and the kids were getting sort of bored. The funny part was the absolute foreseeability of it all. We lasted about 4 innings before pulling out, but it was one of those great summer nights at Dodger stadium when the air was pretty clear and you could watch the sun fade away and the lights of the city come on as the temperature cooled pleasantly.