Noah's Ark

Carolyn took Michael & Jack to the Skirball Museum (across from the Getty) for the Noah's Ark exhibit - fantastic! If you visit us, we will take you there. Similar in scale and quality to the educational space/science center for kids we visited outside Paris, but even better. Interesting, lots of play and touch.

I didn't attend, but the pictures sure look atmospheric.

Flood accounts from all over the world.

It's a great story. I've been generally frustrated, teaching Sunday School for the 5-8 yr olds, as the curriculum centers on the same figures (Noah, Moses, Daniel, etc), whose characters are extrapolated into exhibiting somewhat limited traits; moralistic ciphers without more questioning.

Still, the ark narrative kinda has it all. Our next stop will be the La Brea Tar Pits Museum for some prehistory.

February 14, 2004

We celebrated Michael's Coming Home Day in Minnesota, eating gyoza (jiaozi/potstickers); appropriate, I suppose, since the Siping orphanage director treated us to a marvelous banquet of them before we made our way back to the hotel in Changchun.

Looking at these pictures, I wonder if this is why Michael's favorite color has consistently been pink? Incidentally, while in Rochester, Carolyn ran into an old friend from St Paul who happened to be home from Siping, where she has been teaching English for 8 years!

Here we are, exhausted, elated...

Michael, too...(btw, we always loved that jacket)

until he came to, proceeding to entertain.

We think this was a schtick he developed in the orphanage to earn attention? We observed this sing-song, handwaving routine among most children we observed.

Made us smile.

He really loved to swing. Higher, higher, until he would throw-up.

Minnesota!

After a several year hiatus, we visited Rochester, Minnesota over Valentine's Day weekend, seeing old friends and letting the boys play in the snow - a warming trend melted most of it away, but there was enough to go sledding.

Abby helped Michael and Jack get situated.

After that, Jack refused to go by himself - smart kid.
He even refused to ride in front. Smart kid.

Unlike his daredevil older brother.

Aunt Mary introduced M & J to her folk harp, where they transferred their Suzuki lessons.

There were whimsical ice sculptures downtown. A martini-serving penguin.
That's a real glass.

That's a real fish.

And Larry, a friend from old L'Abri days in Switzerland, where we caught up and traded notes on how our mutual buddies have been doing.

Didn't take long after landing to remember the warmth and friendliness of the Midwesterners, although Rochester - home to Mayo Clinic - has a local reputation for kindness, perhaps, due to the presence of many folks all over the world who come hoping to better a desperate medical condition.

For a small-town in an obscure area, Rochester gets an international crowd, due to Mayo's medical school and clinic. Walk through the Kahler Hotel lobby and you are apt to see Arab shieks, evangelical televangelists, US senators, and everybody else. 60 years ago, you might have even seen my father, who was a chick-sexer at a downtown hatchery!

Before running small businesses, my father was a Japanese chick-sexer (Google that at your own risk), which, apparently, was a skill invented by Japanese in the 1920s and exported to the US and Brazil. Likened to chess (or Go?), it is based upon pattern recognition underneath the skin of baby chicks, so is extremely difficult for most of us to ever learn. He did this seasonally in the Midwest (my brother was born in Albert Lea, MN), until settling the family down in LA. I have kept his chick-sexing aprons, certificate card, and remember well the overhead lamps he hung as he worked through the night. I would occasionally accompany him on trips to hatcheries throughout MN and South Dakota, where he worked night shifts. We had baby chicks as pets, and always seemed to have an unusual supply of eggs in the garage fridge.

Chick-sexing died out, so my folks turned to grocery and liquor stores. It was a tough transition, and I recall some embarrassment living amongst other kids' whose folks were professionals of some stripe. Was my dad a migrant farmer? OMG. Still, the back-and-forth crisscrossing between CA and MN - hitting every national park and obscure highway in-between - fueled my imagination and sense of regional belonging (or lack thereof).

odds & ends

Clearing out my cell phone's archive...

Michael and I had a father/son event - LA Opera performed The Marriage of Figaro at the Smothers Theater on campus. Michael loves everything about performance: costuming, singing, staging.
There's quite a bit of children's theater in the area. Michael and Jack have seen Eric Carle's Hungry Caterpillar, Flat Stanley, and The Nutcracker.

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The Playmobil pirate ship has been a hit, although the missing parts to this Christmas present have been slowly trickling in from its New Jersey headquarters. Michael likes integrating various kits; Mary, from the nativity set, rests on the hammock below and above the peering king.

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We also went to the Santa Barbara Z00 - a scaled-down area with a train along the perimeter. Beautifully situated off the beach, it is heavy on reptiles and birds, it seems to me.

I've never been a zoo regular before, but we have been coming here since moving to LA in 2004; long enough to notice the absence of a SB Zoo's celebrity. Gemina, the crooked-necked giraffe, died while we were in Switzerland.

Giraffe feeding.

Michael sled down the hill on the map.

The boys flanked Elle on the choo choo train. It was a perfect day to explore neighborhoods (discovering great parks and play equipment), tour the beautiful courthouse (a wedding allowed us to see otherwise locked interior hallways), and try new things, like a local ice cream stand and Paradise Cafe, a wonderful institution featuring burgers and green mussels on their oak grill. All these places were always nearby yet unnoticed on past trips.

Kathy, Lee, & Kai

I don't have much in the way of family, except three cousins who live in the Asian enclave (South Bay) where I grew up. I miss the cheap food, markets, and beach towns of that area and feel strangely out of town even while in Southern California. LA is so big and messy that it's hard to "own" the entire thing; even in high school, I realized that you only ever knew a local vicinity.

Back to family. Kathy, the oldest, married Lee, a Hawaiian, and introduced us to their newborn, Kai (means ocean).
Michael and Jack were enthused by having a baby in their midst - immediately pushed them up a few rungs in the human ladder. Kathy's father, Hitoshi (youngest sibling to my mom), moved from the village to live with us, as did his sister a few years earlier. They were on their own schedule - working in Japanese town, attending English school - while occupying our extra bedroom.

My folks ran a liquor store, where Hitoshi worked sometimes, and where Kathy spent some time as a toddler, running around the store, being treated royally by my father, who loved children.
Fastforward to a few years ago, when Carolyn, Michael, Jack, and I all traveled to Oahu for a spectacular wedding; Angelenos and Japanese all flew in for an extended vacation. It is the same area where our current president vacations and grew-up, apparently - really odd to think of him growing up potentially eating Japanese-style snowcones and riceballs with spam (a Hawaiian invention). I can and can't relate to him.

Kathy and Lee live in Seal Beach, home to the most mindblowingly delicious Japanese restaurant I have ever frequented.

We gave children's books as late Christmas presents and ate raclette - a Swiss cheese melted and served over potatoes. Easy and tasty company meal which our children love, as well. Given that I didn't really have a lot of children's books in my own house, it's interesting to have so much to share with others now.