….being to wear People out, we began Saturday, first with a visit to the Y, where they played and I ran and I assisted a large naked black woman who’d forgotten her glasses in reading the scale in the dressing room. 
She’d lost seven pounds and was very pleased, justifiably. Congratulations and gratitude were exchanged and it was off to the next thing, quickly,  before anyone else required assistance.
The next stop being the Botanical Conservatory which was having a Dr. Seuss Day – they’ve brought in a few pieces of Seussy-looking play equipment, had some activities going. Joseph is starting to surprise me because now that his reading skilz are improving, he’s really interested in reading the identification cards on museum and zoo exhibits and today – plants. He insisted on going through the two major rooms twice.
Coolest thing of the day – probably well known to the primary teachers and homeschooler out there, but new to me,  was that amazing mixture of cornstarch and water informally called Ooblek,  more formally known as a form of dilatante. It’s two parts cornstarch, one part water. They had the mixture in a large baking pan and the deal is when you move your finger or hand through it slowly, it’s a liquid, but if you apply any force, it’s solid. It was so weird. Where have I been? How did I miss this one? Unfortunately Joseph wouldn’t touch it. Michael did, but I’m not sure he quite got the point.
Most puzzling point of the day: A 60ish-year old woman dressed up in a pseudo-Cat-in-the-Hat outfit – basically a grey bodysuit w/tail and the hat. No makeup or whiskers. And she was, clearly, a 60ish woman in this getup. And families were lining up to have the kiddie’s photos taken with her. She didn’t look like the Cat in the Hat. I don’t think she was any sort of local celebrity. But many people, now, will have a photo with this gray-haired woman dressed up like the Cat in the Hat (sort of) to keep forever.
(Not that I’m a huge Dr. Seuss fan in general. I tend to harbor resentment against children’s authors who make my job more difficult. And lengthy books with incredibly repetitious text and tongue-twisting neoligisms is not the way to my heart. Especially after 25 years of it.)
Then back for nap and then out to the libary, first stop the large playroom where Michael immediately headed to train table where he spent the next 45 minutes. Because, you know, he doesn’t have any trains at home. Next stop the play area in the back of the children’s room where Michael and Joseph pretended the little enclosed climbing structure was a space ship. Michael could be heard bellowing in his deepest grown-up voice, “BROTHER! Come here! Come back to the ship!”
Besides the Ooblek, the most amazing part of the day was that Michael left both areas of intensive play without crying. In the second instance, Joseph assured me that he would handle it, so he went up the stairs and said, “Michael, the space ship is going to blow up in a minute and then the whole library is going to blow up.” 
A little boy standing there said, “No, it’s not.”
But out Michael trotted, climbed in the stroller, and off we went. I’ll take it.
 Joseph is quickly proving himself to be a child who likes to figure things out, to find patterns and meaning in what surrounds him. Before, during and after our Saturday, he pulled all of this together and marveled several times that “all the things we’re doing today are downtown.”
Yeah. The YMCA, the Botanical Conservancy and the library. It’s like we’re in Manhattan or something.
Some quickie book reviews:
I read Donna Leon’s Acqua Alta because her Venice-centered mysteries seem to be objects of strong devotion by Italy-philes on the Internet.  I didn’t think much of it, and later read reviews that suggested it was one of her weaker efforts, but while I appreciated the atmosphere, I was fairly bored by the mystery. Check that one off.
I continue to be fascinated by John Gardner, although Mickelsson’s Ghosts is a dense bog of a read. The plot concerns Mickelsson, a philosphy professor who’s lost his family and seems to be losing his hold on life and reality. He buys an old house in the Pennsylvania countryside and starts renovating it. There are, of course, ghosts of all kinds. There is a lot of philosophical discourse. There were parts that absorbed me and even, I’ll admit, reading downstairs by myself at night, creeped me out a little (not easy to do). There is no doubt that you are firmly inside Mickelsson’s head,  watching and feeling the disintigration, and it’s painful. I didn’t like the end at all, not because I want sweet redemption and neat resolution but because it just felt wrong and almost like everything he – and the other character involved in the ending – had gone through was for nought. No one had learned a damn thing. Which is not, I hasten to add, an unrealistic stance to take. Simply…draining, with no hint of anything that exists anywhere in the universe to fill up the void.
Hotel is a study of, well, hotels. Specifically the hotel in the United States. It’s an academic work, but not heavily so, and quite interesting, bringing to light factors about travel that we take for granted, but were not always so. The central motif of the book is that the development of the hotel in the United States both provided a standard for the rest of the world and was expressive of important elements of American life: freedom to travel, economic growth and development, expansion, a certain breakdown of class divisions, and so on.  What frames the narrative is the common law of innkeepers – the understanding that an innkeeper had a responsibility to provide certain things – bed and board – for a traveler. This begins the story in the 18th century and it ends it in the 19th and 20th, as Black Americans sought to use the ancient common law as a grounds for breaking down segregation. It didn’t work – for hotel owners and state governments decided to base their defense of segregation on the new development of commercial and private interests – that the hotel was a private, privately-owned space which the owner had a right to control as he pleased. 
Speaking of travel….
Several years ago, we attened the Christian Booksellers’ Association mega-super convention in Atlanta.  As it happened,the National Federation for the Blind was meeting in the hotel at which we were staying. It was a most fascinating experience, being surrounded by the sound of constant tapping, stepping around dogs, and just observing, frankly awed, the blind make their way around the sighted world.
The fact that it was concurrent with the CBA also led to many speculations centered on “What would Flannery do with this?”
It also led to an idle question from me, one that comes up jokingly between Michael and me all the time – it’s become one of those married couple catchphrases.  I wondered, “Why would a blind person travel?”
I honestly didn’t mean it disrespectfully – it was a matter of honest curiosity. It was also born out of my almost reflexive empathetic stance, wondering what I would do in such a situation, if I lost my own sight. What would I do? How would life be changed?
Flash forward a few years to about a month ago, when I was listening to a podcast of Excess Baggage, an excellent program (or should I say “programme” on travel from BBC radio.) The host was interviewing a man who runs an organization centered on travel for the blind.  Traveleyes “is a travel company with a difference. We provide holidays for both blind/visually impaired and sighted travellers, journeying together in a spirit of mutual independence.”
Not only did that segment answer a lot of my questions, it introduced me to a pioneering blind traveller: James Holman, who was quite famous in the early 19th century as, well, the “Blind Traveller.” Holman was born sighted, joined the British Navy at a very young age, developed rheumatism in his sojourns in the Atlantic between Nova Scotia and Bermuda, and in his early 20’s, lost his sight.
After a few years of getting his health back on track, putting himself through medical school in Scotland and establishing a home base and income as a member of the Royal Knights of Windsor, he determined – and got a physician to agree – that in order to keep his health up, he needed to travel.
And so he did – all over the world (he had as a goal to circumvent the globe), mostly completely on his own. It’s an astonishing story, very well told by Jason Roberts in A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became the World’s Greatest Traveler. I’d highly recommend it – well written, absorbing story, and a strong corrective to any lurking temptations to complain. About anything.