Lift Up Your Hearts!

My hearing is very good, probably better than that of many my age because I didn't ruin it in my teens with headphones and loud music.  But I still find that I can understand what people say better if I can see their faces.  Now I know why.

A Canadian study indicates that there is a signficant visual component of language understanding even amongst hearing people.  The four-month-old babies in the study were able to distinguish when adults in a silent video were speaking English and when they were speaking French.

The eight-month-old babies could do the same, but only if they were being raised in a bilingual French/English environment.

Just what parents didn't want to hear.  Apparently high-action video games can improve your eyesight.  (Rochester Review, May/June 2007)

Were it not for the probability of disturbing other library patrons, Li'l Writer Guy would be dancing a happy little jig.  Instead, he allows himself a pleased smile and a contented sigh before getting back to work.

You can see why in the Letters to the Editor section of the May/June issue of the University of Rochester's magazine, Rochester Review.  Unfortunately, you can't yet access via their online archives the issue to which I was responding.

One article in that issue detailed the search for a new logo for the University of Rochester.  I participated in a survey in which I expressed my opinon of various candidates, but I think the whole idea is silly.

Another article promoted the university's commitment to increasing the diversity of its faculty and of its medical center personnel, in order to better reflect the student and patient populations.

The March-April issue, with its articles on the great effort being put forth to improve both the University’s logo and its diversity, disturbs me a little. It makes me worry that the administration is concentrating on superficialities rather than foundations; on how things look, rather than how they are. There’s a possibility—though by no means a certainty—that all other things being equal, I’d feel more comfortable if my professor or my doctor were of my sex and ethnic background. But all other things are never equal. I want my teachers to be excellent in their fields, fair in their judgment, and able to lead their students to a knowledge of and enthusiasm for the subject. As for my health care professionals, of primary importance is that they be highly skilled, followed by compassionate, open-minded, and respectful. That any of them look like me is way down on the list, if anywhere. Let’s go for excellence. If the University is known as a place of highest quality, it won’t matter what its faculty looks like—or its logo.

Blushing slightly, Li'l Writer Guy once again buries himself in his books.

Porter put the bikes on the back of the car again this morning, and we headed off to the Tosohatchee State Reserve near Christmas.  That's Christmas, Florida—we're still much nearer Memorial Day than Christmas.

We knew this would be a different kind of ride.  We knew it would be on unpaved trails through a wilderness area, and we thought we were prepared.  We had sunscreen and bug repellent, emergency bike kit (tube, CO₂ cartridge for inflating same, patches, wrench, and those little thingies for helping you put the tire back on the rim), water to drink, and cell phones.  Knowing we'd be in a game preserve, we also had a monocular and a camera.  We had a change of clothes and a picnic lunch waiting in the car for our return.

"Unpaved trails."  I was expecting something like the crushed-shell-and-sand trail at our local park.  Silly me.

Everything went pretty much according to expectations at first.  They do have an interesting honor system for the park entrance fee:  You put your money in an envelope, slip it through a slot, and don't forget to sign in so we know where to look if you get lost.  We drove a little along a very washboard-y road, and parked the car.  (Florida sand roads develop a series of "washboard" ridges that can shake loose anything not firmly attached:  exhaust pipes, dental fillings, whatever.)

It was after we parked that things began to go not quite as planned.  The trail was wide and inviting, but certainly not crushed-shell-and-sand.  This was more like riding over a not-too-well-maintained lawn.

Make that not maintained at all.  Both of us have all-purpose (cheap) bikes, so they were built to take the abuse.  My body may have originally been built to take it, too—but it hasn't been all that well maintained recently itself.  Although the trail was flat, it required the work of a signficant uphill grade, with no hope of a corresponding downhill.  The really fun parts were where we had to put on a good burst of speed to build up enough momentum to get us through the soggy, wet parts.  You don't want to come to a dead stop in the middle of a boggy place.

Little did I know that this was the good part of the trail.

This trail map gives you a rough idea of our route.  I say "rough" for two reasons:  (1) the map itself is not completely accurate, and (2) because of reason 1 I'm not exactly sure where we were some of the time.  Location A is where we parked. (Just a reminder—the pictures are preview links; click on them for the full view.)

The trails are not well marked.  That is an understatement.  As you can see, we veered off the trail and found ourselves on the other side of the park boundary. Too bad we couldn't stay there, because the going was significantly easier on that side.  But we knew we had to get back into the park, because we could now see the trail, just on the other side of the...barbed wire fence.  Porter wasn't going to let a little thing like that stop him.  He climbed over the fence, then took the bikes as I passed them to him.  I was not at all sure about climbing the fence, so he held two of the wires apart while I squeezed through.

There!  We were back where we should have been.  But doing what's right is not always the easier path....

The grassy trail had deteriorated into a humpy, clumpy much-torn-up (by deer, possibly, judging from the hoofprints) ordeal.  At some point, Porter intellgently and kindly suggested we swap bikes.  His is enough easier to ride to make it worth putting up with the fact that I can barely sit on the seat and reach the pedals.  I was having to ride standing up much of the time, anyway.  When I wasn't walking.  Yes, sometimes I gave up and got off the bike.  Walking allowed me to catch my breath and make progress at the same time.

In choir we've been rehearsing a song that includes the words, "I can do all things in Christ who strengthens me."  It's a lively, repetitive song that's a lot of fun to sing (think gospel meets barbershop quartet), which means it's the kind that gets stuck in your head and won't go away.  This one asserted itself about 4 a.m. and didn't stop until we were on our way home.  At first it drove me nuts, but soon it became a prayer....

We began to doubt again:  Were we on the right trail?  Or was this just a firebreak along the boundary line?  Surely the real trail couldn't be this bad.  I wish I had pictures to show you, but I was incapable at that point of thinking about my camera, and anyway no picture could do it justice.  No doubt for a mountain biker this would have been a walk in the park.  No, wait.  For me it was a walk.  A mountain biker would have ridden straight through.  Anyway, we later concluded we were probably on the right trail, because we saw several others that were equally bad.

After the longest four and a half miles (give or take a bit) of my life, during which we thought we were mostly on the right trail but still had our doubts, Porter found a path that connected with a road.  (Approximately location B on the map.)  I was totally exhausted but this brought me back to life.  Here was crushed-shell-and-sand!  Here I could ride!  Suddenly I felt great!  Porter asked if I'd rather take the road back to where we had parked, instead of continuing on our planned route, but the road had inspired me and I was ready to go on, as long as we stuck to the road.  The road and the trail were one for most of the remaining trip, anyway.  We switched back to our own bikes and were on our way again.

Deceptive road!  After about two minutes of delightful riding—still quite a bit harder than paved road, but worlds better than the trail—it became all sand again. The weather has been very dry, and the road is not well travelled.  This translates to loose sand.  My cousin was a lifeguard at Daytona Beach, and he used to train for his job by running on the beach—because running in loose sand is very hard work.  So is biking in loose sand.  Not only does it require a lot of power, but if you don't keep your front wheel completely straight, you immediately go into a screeching-halt skid.

I still didn't want to turn back.  We again traded bicycles.  Sometimes the road was better, especially in the middle where a few springs of grass had grown up.  Sometimes it was awful.  Sometimes I rode—ganbarimasu!—and sometimes I walked.  Porter managed to keep riding, stopping periodically to allow me to catch up.  Here is the resting point where I finally remembered that I had a camera.  (Location D on the map.)

One of the great things about riding in a game preserve is all the wildlife you can see.  And we did, if you count grasshoppers and butterflies.  Riding took so much concentration it was not possible to look around, so all I saw was what happened to be between me and the road.  Despite the park rules that say that all wildlife is protected, Porter did make up his own real-life video game by trying to run over the grasshoppers.  There were so many he was often successful.  When I was growing up I thought grasshoppers were cute.  Now that I've seen the devastation wrought by our giant Florida varieties, I feel differently.  I did manage to see a vulture, and Porter flushed a wild turkey, but other than that all our wildlife was insectival.

It was a long haul, but we finally made it to Long Bluff road (see map).  There the way really did get easier, as the road was more travelled.  There were still bad spots, but they were fewer, and every once in a while we got up to the dizzying speed of eight miles per hour!  Though it might have been exhaustion that made me dizzy.  :)  At some point Porter also took my backpack.  Neither his pack nor mine were at all heavy, but at that point I was taking all the help I could get.  This road would have been much less of a challenge had I not been so worn out by the first part of the trail.

I'm accustomed to having one bottle of water be sufficient or more so when we go riding.  This time we were at the halfway point on the trail when I realized I was much more than halfway through my water.  Comes from breathing so much with my mouth open (i.e. panting), I guess.  Most of the trails we've travelled have water sources along the way, but not, of course, this one.  So we both decided to be a little more conservative in our drinking.  At some point it was going well enough that we switched bikes once more.  I missed my more padded seat, and the extra seat-to-pedal distance on Porter's bike, combined with the bouncy road, was more than a bit uncomfortable for the, um, more delicate parts of my body.

Finally, we reached the "Praise the Lord!" point:  Power Line Road.  (Location C on the map.)  I could see that it was a much better path, and so did not mind taking a short detour (about six tenths of a mile round trip) to see the St. John's River.  This is where we met up with the first people (fishermen) we'd seen since the beginning, except for one truck that had passed us on the road.  We saw a few more cars before getting back to ours, but no one else on bike or foot.

Muddy, battered, but unbowed

Power Line Road stretched long between us and our car, but we were able to make a steady 7-8 mph most of the time, and the riding was easy enough we could look around and actually see some wildlife.  Birds, actually.  White herons and Great Blues and lots of smaller birds.  We heard a couple of alligator-shaped splashes nearby, but didn't see what made them and didn't feel like investigating.  Alligators can run faster than I could pedal at that point.

Scofflaws that we are, we enjoyed breaking the speed limit by bicycle, crossing two wooden bridges a good two or three miles per hour over the posted 5 mph limit.  We were significantly under the 30 ton weight limit, however.

There was one more bad stretch in the final mile, and I had to walk a bit more, having totally lost my momentum having to pull off the road to let a car pass.  But I finished the trip by bike, joyfully greeting Porter who had already opened the car and pulled out a cold drink.  We ate some grape tomatoes, but otherwise were in no mood for our picnic lunch—we just drank and drank.

It actually was a great trip.  A wonderful feeling of accomplishment.  We're both very glad we did it—though neither of us feels any need to do it again.

On the way home we had another great adventure, but that will have to wait for another post.

It was a scene worthy of one of those funniest-videos shows.  As I opened the front door this morning to take out the trash, I obviously interrupted something.  A lizard skittered frantically away from the door, no doubt afraid of me.  At the same time, a palmetto bug* skittered frantically towards me, into the house, no doubt relieved to escape the lizard.

I'm not all that fond of palmetto bugs outside the house, though I acknowledge that they, like vultures, have an important part to play in God's creation.  But I really don't care for them inside the house, so thus began the amusiing scenario.  I don't recall laughing at the time, but it would have been funny to an onlooker with a camera, who I'm very glad was only hypothetical.

I skittered frantically after the bug, whacking at him with my sneaker.  (It's a good thing we keep our shoes near the front door.)  Alas, I whacked at him, but not on him, or at least not with sufficient strength to penetrate his chitinous exoskeleton.  Through the hall he ran, then ducked into our bedroom.

No fair!  This pushed into the red zone my desire to catch him, as anyone knows who has ever been awakened in the middle of the night by a large insect investigating his belly button.  He ran under a suitcase.  I moved it; he wasn't there.  Ah ha!  He thinks he's found safety in the shadow of the treadmill support.  He's partly right, as there is no way for me to whack at him.  I carefully position the shoe over him and press down, then slowly, gingerly lift it up.  Zoom!  He's out again, unharmed.  There are disadvantages to soft, high-pile carpet, I'm learning.

Now I'm mad.  He's in the open now, and I may run more slowly for my size, but my legs are a lot longer than his.  Whack!  This time I know better than to assume he's dead.  I push down on the shoe really hard, though still with care; one wants to kill the beastie, not squeeze cockroach guts into the above-mentioned soft, high-pile carpet.

Once again, I tentatively raise a corner of the sneaker.  There's an antenna, and it's not moving....  Taking no chances, I grab a tissue from my pocket and use it to entomb the bug, then finish the job.  Bug thoroughly squished, and I mean thoroughly, else I would not have felt comfortable consigning him, paper tomb and all, to the trash bin.

Still, for sheer amusement value, this doesn't come close to an occasion several years ago, when similar circumstances led me to chase one of this guy's cousins under our kitchen cabinets.  I was lying on the floor, seeking him out with the help of a flashlight, when he suddenly re-emerged, zipping past my face, through the neck of my shirt, and into my bra.  He died for his presumption, but I'll leave imagining the scenario as an exercise for the reader.

---

*A palmetto bug is a large species of cockroach common here in the South.  It is thought to have come here from Africa, and may be a kind of karmic return for slavery, much as cigarettes and casinos are for our mistreatment of Native Americans.

On one of our recent bike rides, we came upon a dead armadillo.  Dead armadillos happen not infrequently in Florida.  They may be faster in crossing a road than turtles, but they will dawdle.  Worse, their startle reaction is to leap straight into the air, dooming them even when a car would otherwise pass harmlessly over them.

This one had apparently managed to crawl from the road to the nearby bicycle trail, but not before the vultures got wind of the event.  Porter was biking a little ahead of me, and I saw them beginning to circle as he approached.  A few had descended upon the poor beast by the time he rode by.  His presence more annoyed than scared them.  When I reached the scene there were at least a dozen blanketing the pavement, and I chose to veer off the trail and leave them to their vicitim.

Vultures are ugly birds, and their behavior was uglier:  fighting, shoving, greedily tearing the little armadillo apart.  By the time we came to that part of the train on our return trip, there was nothing left but a dark spot on the pavement.

And that's the point.  Carrion-eaters may be ugly, dirty things, but they are also God's creatures, and their work is important.  They are the garbage collectors of the natural world, and they, too, deserve the more lofty title of "sanitation engineers."  Maybe even more so, because they don't just cart the bodies off to the landfill; they are the ultimate recyclers.

I'd rather see a sandhill crane, or a woodpecker, or an egret on our rides any day.  But if there's a dead armadillo on the trail...Who you gonna call?

...but even I am amazed.  Heather introduced me to Book Collector, and I've been thrilled.  I've long wanted to make an inventory of our books, and had made a few half-hearted beginnings, but the enormity of the project always dragged me down.

Enter Book Collector.  I can use a barcode scanner (borrowed from Heather), read the UPC code on the back of the book, and Book Collector searches the Internet for matches.  It downloads all sorts of information:  cover image, title, author, publisher, summary, and often much more, depending on what is available.

There's one problem:  a large proportion of our books are too old to have UPC codes.  But that's okay, I can enter the ISBN by hand, and then initiate the same search process.

We also have a large quantity of books too old to have ISBN's.  For those the program will search on title and author. 

There's still some of clean up that needs to be done with many of the book entries, and I've had to make liberal use of our scanner, because few of the older books have cover images available online.  However, the process is so much faster than entering all the data by hand.  A little concentrated effort over the past few days has enabled me to finish entering all the books—not that we own, but that are in one room of our house.  The family room.  It probably has the second-largest collection of books, although I won't be sure till I'm done.

But here's the shocker:  I catalogued 263 books in the family room alone!  I knew we had a lot of books, but that astonished me.  I wish I could say I've read them all!  I'm working on it....

I'm not ready to make the half-baked list public, but curious family members can see what I've entered so far via the Library link on our home page.  You won't see all the nifty views and searching and filtering possibilities available in the program itself, but it's fun to browse anyway.  The books (at the moment, anyway) are sorted alphabetically by author.

This post is going to be about our Sunday bike ride, but I have to admit that coffee hour is also a favorite after-church activity, especially on the Sundays when our friend K. is in charge of the food, for she always brings (among other goodies) her famous sausage rolls and infamous monkey bread.  Everyone knows to get over to the parish hall pronto after the service when it's K.'s Sunday, because those items disappear fast.  Not exactly a healthy breakfast, but a wonderful Sunday treat.

And we followed it by a 21-mile, two-hour calorie burning spree. 

We drove to the western end of the West Orange Trail, and biked the South Lake Trail and the Lake Minneola Scenic Trail, along with an unnamed (as far as we could tell) side trail.  I just love the Rails-to-Trails program.  Not all parts of these trails are built on old rail beds, but most are, and it's clear we would not have this wonderful resource if they had been sold off.  One of our favorite trails ends abruptly because we have have Home Depot, Wal-Mart, and other stores sitting where the trains used to run.  It's not impossible to make room for the trail to continue around them, but it's more difficult and expensive.  Anyway, I'm grateful to the foresighted people who made these bike trails possible.

As great as I felt this morning, my body soon informed me that it had not fully recovered from yesterday's 14-mile journey.  I was fine on the level, but today's trails had a lot of hills—for Florida, anyway—and that's where my legs complained.  I normally ride without making use of my gears, but this trip taught me the value of downshifting.  :)

What goes up must come down, and I set a new speed record for this bike (or at least for this speedometer):  27.4 mph.  Funny how that's barely creeping in a car, but felt gloriously, even dangerously fast this way.

The Clermont trail just ends, but some day I imagine it will connect to the General James A. Van Fleet State Trail, nearly thirty miles of rurual, even isolated riding.  It will be a while before we are ready for that one, but it's something to look forward to.

I've given up my search for an organic farmers' market; around here I should be happy with a farmers' market of any kind. So today we decided to check out the Winter Park Farmers' Market.

It's worth returning; it's our own little Marktplatz, with food and flowers in addition to produce. We arrived not far from closing time, so much of the produce was gone, but we did pick up some delicious Georgia peaches. I also bought a pain au chocolat from a French pastry booth, because the vendors were actually speaking French and because the last time I had a pain au chocolat I was eating breakfast with a fairy princess at her château in France. It wasn't quite as good—a little less fresh, a lot less enchanting—but delicious nonetheless. Yes, I shared it with Porter.

Thanks to Porter's foresight, we had our bikes on the back of the car, so we drove to the nearby Cady Way Trail. First we followed it south, to Route 50 and the Fashion Square Mall in Orlando, then turned around and went northeast, experiencing the joy of crossing SR436 on the new trail bridge, which had intrigued me every time I took that route home from the airport. We followed the trail into Seminole County, where it joins the Cross Seminole Trail.

At this point I was very excited, because the Cross Seminole Trail connects with our own Seminole Wekiva Trail, just on the other side of the bridge over I-4! We began right away to make plans to get on the Cross Seminole Trail where it passes one of our churches, and ride south to where we ended today.

Then I came home and looked at the map. Turns out the Cross Seminole Trail has a couple of significant portions that aren't finished, and even when it's done it won't be a simple trip to the Cady Way Trail, because the trail leads through Lake Mary, Winter Springs, and Oviedo before turning back west and south. It will be a great ride when it's all finished—but not a short one.

Today's venture was a bit over 14 miles, with a good combination of sun and shade. The only sad part was seeing the huge amount of development occurring at Baldwin Park, site of the former Naval Training Center.

Or hospitals in general, if you can help it.  I realize they perform a vital service, and I really am thankful for doctors and hospitals.  But sometimes I think they've completely lost touch with reality.

Check out this article about an Ontario woman who gave birth.  In her First Nation (Native American) culture, burying the placenta is an important ritual.  But the hospital wouldn't let her take her placenta home.  In the end, she finally received it, but only after it had been sterilized and passed through the hands of a funeral home!

This woman's complaint has a chance of making some change in the Canadian hospital policies, because of her Native status.  But Native Americans, and Canadians, are not the only ones who want to bury or otherwise use the placenta.  Why does the hospital think it has the right to keep the placenta?  Apparently because we gave them that right.  But if they don't want to drive even more parents to the friendlier options of midwives and home birth, pehaps they should rethink the issue.

Biking after church could get to be a habit.  A good one.  Last Sunday we returned to the West Orange Trail, this time heading east.  (You may recall that the Sunday before we had gone westward.)  We made a late start, having become involved in a good conversation at church.  But it didn't matter—we'd already decided that a little sunscreen would be in order.

We biked nearly 20 miles, round trip, saving the remainder of that leg of the trail for another time.  In general this direction was not as pleasant as the previous week's trip—it took a while to get out of the industrial area and into the shade.  But all trails are interesting if they're new to you, so it was a great ride.  Along the way we discovered something else new:  the Clarcona Horseman's Park, and we stopped long enough to watch some young girls and their horses being judged in a show.  What was especially interesting to me was the names of the various gaits.  The riders were asked to walk, jog, and lope their horses.  Back when I was a horse-crazy young girl, I knew of four gaits;  walk, trot, canter, and gallop.  When did they change?

And something else  has changed.  At the risk of sex stereotyping here, it seems that the horse-craze is mostly a female phenomenon; the male equivalent, perhaps, is cars.  But what happened before automobiles?  I think it was the men and boys who were entranced by all things equine.  I wonder why the switch?  Perhaps men are just interested in going places, and like best whatever is the fastest means of transport they can reasonably expect to get their hands on.  End of gender-biased rambling.

We have been blessed with a surprising number of very bright friends, their talents ranging from math to music, from business to origami, from computing to law.  It was with the last that we had a disturbing conversation recently.  The conversation itself was delightful; what we learned from it was not.

To begin, the background.  Most of my readers are familiar with the following story, which I told several years ago in our family newsletter.  But for the benefit of the one or two who meander over here from random places, I'll reproduce it here, sufficiently altered to protect the innocent and the guilty alike.

At the time these events occurred, our friend Curt was a junior at Swansea High School.  He was a top-notch student (he would later be valedictorian), a phenomenal musician, and as clean-cut as a teenage boy gets:  no body piercings nor tattoos, short hair—but not too short—typically wearing neat, khaki shorts and a white polo shirt.  His family was comfortably upper-middle-class.  Both parents were professionals; his father employed full-time, his mother part-time.

Curt was taking a course in biotechnology at his school; as part of the class he often left school early to do research for the Scopes Cancer Institute, sometimes at home, sometimes at the Institute itself.

One day, Curt was riding his bicycle home as usual, and had made it into his own neighborhood, when suddenly he was stopped by a police car.  The policemen asked him what he was doing out of school, and, when he explained, they responded, “Do you expect us to believe that?”  He told them that if they would call Dr. Hedges, his teacher, he would confirm the story.  Curt never heard the phone call directly, as it was made from headquarters; what apparently happened was that they did not speak with his teacher, but called the school attendance office, which only confirmed that Curt was a student at the school who should have been in attendence that day.  The word came back from headquarters to the policemen:  he’s supposed to be in school.

Curt was frisked, and his backpack searched.  He was allowed to ride his bike home, followed by the policemen.  One of them held onto the the front door of his house (“so you can’t sneak out the back”) while he put his bike in the hallway—he wasn’t allowed to take it to the garage.  Then he was put in the police car and taken to the Swansea County Juvenile Assessment Center (JAC).  There, he was interrogated.  (“Do you have any tattoos?” was one of the pointless, insulting questions.)  Curt is brilliant, but not quick of speech, and his slow responses apparently infuriated the officers.  When Curt said, at one point, “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you,”  the officer yelled, “You’d BETTER hear me!”

Finally, Curt’s mother was contacted.  (The message she received at her workplace was, “Did you get the strange phone call from the police about your son?”  It took ten years off her life, she said.)  She called the school and spoke to Dr. Hedges, who then called the JAC.  Curt's parents immediately left work.  At the JAC they found Curt sitting between two very scruffy-looking boys, with a police officer, arms crossed, glaring at them.  By this time, Dr. Hedges had succeeded in convincing the police of the truth, so he was able to go home.  All's well that ends well?

Not quite.  Curt was a shy child, and this incident shattered both his trust in general and his respect for the police.  One absolutely innocent child abused and terrified, his parents pulled out of work, scared to death—and needless to say, Curt’s cancer research did not make any progress that day.  For what purpose?  According to the county sheriff, the purpose was to prevent crime.  Teenaged boys who are not in school are likely to be commiting crimes, so we stop them before they have a chance to do so.

Does anyone else find that as chilling as I do?  And what if Curt had had long hair, or an earring, or parents who couldn’t be reached, or didn’t care, or were too poor to make a fuss—and was still just as innocent.  Would he have fared still worse?

So that's the story.  Nothing in the intervening years has lessened my belief that the police—and the sheriff—were wrong, wrong, wrong in their attitudes and actions.  Curt was not threatening, he was not running away, he was doing nothing wrong whatsoever, not even anything suspicious.  But here's what I learned in the conversation with our legal friend.  Curt did absolutely nothing wrong—but neither did the police.  All the police need to arrest someone is probable cause, a reasonable belief that a crime has been committed.  There are truancy laws in the state of Florida, and—despite private schools on different schedules, and the legality of homeschooling—the fact that public school students are expected to be inside a school building during certain hours provides probable cause for believing that a teenager riding his bike toward home during those hours is truant, and is therefore committing a crime.  Especially if the school tells the police what they expect to hear instead of the whole story.  The fact that the crimes the sheriff was hoping to prevent were more serious than truancy, and that there was absolutely no probable cause to suspect Curt of any of them, does not change the legality of the situation.

It probably falls into the same category as one of the more absurd motor vehicle laws that were on the books in Pennsylvania when I was studying to get my driver's license:  the speed limit through all intersections was 15 miles per hour.  No one expected it to be enforced, but it was there, and the police could use it as an excuse for stopping someone if they wanted to check the car or driver for some other reason.

I still believe the police were morally wrong in their actions—though I admit my views are biased by my belief that truancy laws themselves are wrong—and especially in the way they treated Curt.  But when a hot-shot attorney who knows criminal law and correct police procedure inside and out tells you that such actions are legal, and not only in Florida, it's smarter to listen and act than to argue.  Even in these days when homeschooling is widespread and well accepted, if my homeschooled child were in a position to be alone in public outside of public school hours, I'd be sure to equip him with a letter, on our school letterhead (thanks be to computers and printers!) explaining that he is not truant.  Not that a policeman who would respond to a reasonable explanation with "Do you expect us to believe that?" would necessarily believe a letter (they know about computers and printers, too), but it might help.  And in fact such a letter did help Janet at one point.  She wasn't in danger of being hauled off to jail, but being forced to miss this particular math class would have been unpleasant enough….

(Memo to self:  When discussing a subject dear to your heart, test your arguments on Janet's unrelenting logic before subjecting them to one of the most brilliant legal minds in the state of Florida.  Better yet, don't argue at all until you can do it dispassionately.)

Having written recently about my love of student recitals, I have to mention that we went to a Florida Symphony Youth Orchestra concert yesterday.  In my limited, and admittedly biased opinion, they are far and away the best student orchestra in the area.  Not perfect:  Depending on whose philosophy happens to be strongest at the time, the emphasis is sometimes more on education than on making music. As most of you know, I strongly believe that real learning more often takes place in an atmosphere of "let's do something wonderful and important together" than in a "Me Teacher, You Student" situation.

Be that as it may, the FSYO is the best game in town for a young person who wants to play good orchestral repertoire, and it's good listening, too. The only reason we don't attend more of their concerts is that there are so many other great things to do in life.

But we went yesterday, because it was the last concert of the season, and we hadn't been to one yet this year.  More than that, we went because the concert included three commissioned pieces, one of which (Mountain Air and Dance) was written by our friend John Dupuis.  Unfortunately, John's composition was for the Prelude Orchestra (third from the top of the four orchestras, one above the strings-only group of beginnners), which for various complicated reasons had not had enough time to practice it.  It was a bit of a stretch for them.  Still, there was a gorgeous melody in the middle, and in the rest I could detect an interesting piece that reminded me of why I fell in love with John's Atlantis many years ago.  (Atlantis, which was written with a particular group of FSYO musicians in mind, was recorded by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and used by Universal Studios for the grand opening of their Islands of Adventure theme park.)

The Prelude Orchestra was interesting to hear.  (They did much better with their other pieces).  My experience with student orchestras has been that the winds are, as a section, better than the strings.  For one thing, the competition is more fierce (fewer positions); for another, good orchestral music tends to have very hard string parts.  But this time the situation was reversed, probably because the strings had a few really good players, and in the winds there's no place for a less confident player to hide.  Playing tentatively is a major mistake for an oboe or a trumpet, and these kids haven't yet learned to "sin boldly."  There was a lovely oboe solo in Edelweiss, however.  (Hmm, I did manage to work a flower into this post after all.)

The Philharmonia Orchestra's commissioned piece (Stephen Foster Song-Suite) was by Joe Kreines.  He may be world famous, but "Mr. Kreines" will always be remembered in our family as the person who came in occasionally to enliven band practice, and who could get more out of an ensemble that any other conductor.  He still can, as today's concert proved.

We don't know the composer of the Symphonic Orchestra's new work (Sojourn), Robert J. Brownlow, but I suppose two out of three is pretty good!  His work matched the ability of the orchestra best of all, I think.  The Symphonic Orchestra itself has been better.  Don't get me wrong—it was still very good, just not up to the standards of a few years ago, when it was absolutely stunning.

Not that I'm prejudiced in this matter or anything—but not one of the orchestras had a decent A to tune to.  I'm a bit particular when in comes to oboes.  Their solos were fine; it was just the A's.  A 440, 460, 415...whatever!

Being involved with student musical groups for so many years, it was impossible for us not to notice the frequent coorespondence between musical and general academic ability, today's Frazz comic—in which Caulfield asserts that we need arts education so the bottom half of the math class can do something for a living—to the contrary.  This year's FSYO graduates are no exception.  Take the assistant principal cellist of the Symphonic, for example.  Valdictorian of his high school, going off to Harvard to major in biochemical sciences, and scored a perfect 2400 on the SAT (on his first try, even).  Hmm, only assistant principal cellist?  The slacker!  Oh, wait, the principal is taking her cello to the Eastman School of Music next year, so I guess the competition was a bit stiff.  She, by the way, is graduating with a mere 4.7 weighted GPA....  C'mon folks, invest a little time and money (okay, maybe a lot of time and money) in your children's musical education.  It'll be great for their brains!

All in all, the concert was a delightful way to spend a Sunday afternoon, and we even ran into some friends we hadn't seen in ages. 

Now I must report on my first dissatisfaction with the Swiss transportation system.  The bus we rode from the airport could not take us back there, because it disappeared overnight!  Fortunately, observant Janet had noticed that the sign was conspicuously missing from the stop.  At first we assumed this was just another of the BaselWorld alterations to the city, but she did some investigating and discovered that that particular run was not popular/profitable enough, so off with its head!  This turned out not to be much of a problem, however, as we were able to take a tram to Basel SBB, the main train station, where we could catch another bus to the airport.

Janet generously accompanied us all the way to the airport, and even waited with us until it was time to catch the last bus that would take her to church on time.  Then we reluctantly said our goodbyes, with heartfelt gratitude.  I do believe being a tour guide takes more out of Janet than performing in front of an audience of a thousand, but she does a great job of it!

We checked in with British Airways, and were able to get boarding passes for the entire trip this time, which eased my mind.  Later we were to discover that two of the three passes were no good, but that did nothing to diminish my relief at this point.

After a pleasant flight, we landed at Heathrow.  (I never can type that without first typing "Heatherow" and having to correct it!)  Once again we faced the long, circuitous walk and the even longer, more circuitous bus ride, followed by security screening and the "one bag only" rule.  This we were expecting.  But going from London to the United States is more complicated than going from London to Basel, probably with good reason.  There was yet another security check at the gate, and we were issued new boarding passes for our next two flights, to replace the for-whatever-reason defective ones we already had.  The process was smooth and we had no trouble, but a connection time of an hour and a half is none too long and in some cases much too short, I'm sure.  We were very glad our flight from Basel had landed a little early.

The next leg of the flight ended in Chicago.  Porter was able to sleep much of the way.  I was not, and distracted myself by watching a movie:  Miss Potter, a reasonably-accurate-for-Hollywood story of the life of Beatrix Potter.  I'd left my book behind with Janet, and I wasn't in the mood for French lessons.

Our connection time in Chicago was two and a half hours, which turned out to be 'way more than we needed, but better safe than sorry.  I've written about our reentry shock before, so I won't repeat it here.  Our passports received their first official stamps of the trip.  There's no evidence there of our time in Switzerland, France, or Germany; not even any evidence that we left the United State.  But we now have proof that we returned!  Going through customs was not a problem.  Our flight to Orlando was delayed, but that didn't matter so much since our only remaining connection was to the rental car Porter had thoughtfully reserved in Orlando—a very good thing, as the buses had long since stopped running for the night, and it was much too late to call a friend outside of a life-threatening emergency.

Then we were home.  All was well, thanks in part to our good neighbors, and we gratefully collapsed into bed—though not until after we'd rebooted the water, electricity, telephone, and computers, and sent off an e-mail reassuring family of our safe return.

For all I dislike about much of our current culture, and fear about the direction our country has been headed for the last half century or so; for all I loved about our visit to Europe; with all my certainty that we have much to learn from other countries and cultures; still, the United States of America is a great place to live, and other countries and cultures could learn a lot from us as well.  Unfortunately, all they're likely to get is the very distorted view of our country presented by Hollywood and the news media.  One thing I got tired of quickly was the assertion, "Americans do/are thus-and-so," repeated all the more emphatically after I've stated that no, we don't do that and neither do many other Americans we know.  I'm more convinced than ever of the value of cultural exchange programs, in which real, ordinary individuals from one country get to know real, ordinary individuals from another—as I've written about here, here and here.  As we discovered in Japan, and again in Switzerland, France, and Germany, there's nothing like good conversation with people from different backgrounds for dispelling misconceptions and dissolving stereotypes (unless we intentionally retain them; see above), and for providing new insights into other cultures—and our own.

It was a great trip!  Danke, danke, Janet!  Merci, merci, our hosts in France (you know who you are)! And to those of you whom we would love to have visited but didn' this trip—there's a good chance that We'll...Be...Back.

Not long ago, a friend was lamenting to me about how tedious elementary recitals are.  Little piano and violin students plunking and scraping away on the same, boring pieces, making the same mistakes you've heard hundreds of times.  I couldn't disagree more.

She has a different perspective, mind you:  she's a music teacher, so no doubt that makes a difference.

But I love music recitals, elementary and otherwise.

Today we made up for our disappointment with the Tuileries by visiting Leu Gardens. It was delightful to wander amongst the palms, bromiliads, wildflowers, camelias, cacti, roses, and other Florida and non-Florida flora.  Especially the gardenias, which take me right back to my grandmother's garden.

Standing by the lake, watching the fish, a turtle, and a white heron—while watching out for alligators and water moccasins—we heard music.  Violin music.  Suzuki violin music.  Talk about natsukashii!  We had to investigate...at the main house there was a luncheon, for which a single violinist was providing entertainment, and she was working her way around the Suzuki repertoire—books three and four, if I had to guess; it's been a while.

Our first live Suzuki contact was made at Leu Gardens; we happened to be there when a group from the Suzuki Music Institute of Maitland was playing on the grounds.  For me, it was love at first sight (sound).  That great music coming from those tiny kids!

Well, that was the beginning for us of more than ten years of Suzuki music.  There were plenty of frustrating times, but one thing I never tired of was hearing the kids play.  I loved to hear our own children practice, I loved to hear all the students—not just ours—play at the recitals.  True, I no longer attend them, now that we've moved on, but truly, I wish the music we heard today had been a public group concert, so I could have heard once again the tiny kids and the old, familiar pieces.  Even Twinkle!