A splash of joy

“Wah-hoo,” cries Math Man as he rides yet another wave to shore. He’s grinning from ear to ear, shouting with joy, along with the dozen or so kids riding their boogie boards at the Jersey shore. There are adults out there, too. Clearly having a good time, but none of them are screaming with delight. I would say it’s undignified for the Kenan Professor of Mathematics and chair of the department, but I would argue it’s precisely because of his dignity that he should be should be whooping on the beach. Dignity derives from worthiness. Math Man is certainly worthy as academia measures it, but his human dignity makes him worthy of joy. 

Adults, me included, can be chary of joy. Worried that it makes us seem undignified. So we tuck it in our pockets rather than wrap it round ourselves, we walk it back rather than dance with it. We essay a wan smile while inwardly jumping for joy. But as novelist Léon Bloy wrote in a letter to his fiancée, joy is the surest sign of the presence of God. (No, that was not Teilhard de Chardin, nor was he writing to Jacques Maritain.) If our dignity stems from being created in the image and likeness of God — we ought to be clothed in joy, it ought to trail behind us like a sparkling train.  We ought to shout and leap and grin madly in the presence of our God. Who is before us, behind us, beneath us, within us. And in every wave that carries us to shore. For we are all worthy of joy.

Rose are red, these flowers are not

In the last couple of weeks I have celebrated a birthday, I am currently in my 1,000,000₂ turn around the sun and according to my youngest son, not old at all, “You are so spry!” 

Math Man cooked me an amazing steak dinner (he’s been learning to cook) and gave me a beautiful bunch of red roses. I had to chair the parish council meeting right after dinner, so left the roses on the table in their florist’s wrapping to put into a vase later.

Post parish council meeting, I came downstairs, picked up the flowers, walked into the kitchen, looked down and with a start realized the flowers I held were assorted tones of violet. But I was so certain that I’d been given red roses?!? (This is a sentence that cries out for an interrobang.) I looked again, no sign of roses, just the paper wrapped violet bouquet. Math Man was in his own meeting, so I wasn’t going to get an answer there. 

[a hour later]

When I confessed my confusion to Math Man,  he ducked into his study and came back with the bunch of red roses he swapped for the violet ones. April fool! I laughed so hard, and needed that laughter so much.

Mathematical Morning Musings

It's not yet 8 a.m. I'm in the bathroom washing my face, Math Man is getting ready to get in the shower. He turns to me and says, "So if you take the partial derivative of r with respect to x...well, actually the second partial derivative..." 

"Where r is the square root of x squared plus y squared plus z squared?" wondering if he is really talking to me, or just thinking aloud.

"No, no, just x and y," he clarifies.

Unbidden the chain rule flowers in my brain, 2x times a half...divided by the square root, right and then we'll need the product rule. We don't keep a white board marker in the bathroom, despite its inviting plethora of glass surfaces. I'm not sure why, there's one in the kitchen and in the downstairs bathroom, where math gets inscribed on the panes of glass in the door and on the mirror. We have a glass sheet screwed to the wall in the downstairs hallway for the purpose. But I digress...

"Does it surprise you that it blows up?" wonders Math Man.

"Oh, no...that derivative shows up in some operators."

Sweet talk between lovers in the morning.

1950s Male Academic Privilege

About two weeks ago I declared that I was invoking "1950s male academic privilege." To be clear, not the kind that has been in the news lately (as in here or here or...oh, never mind, that kind of behavior is unfortunately not confined to the 1950s.) What I meant was that I was electing to focus entirely on my writing, not on doing household chores, or fixing dinner. I felt free to stack up books on the floor and turn my back on dishes in the sink. I worked after dinner and early in the morning, my door firmly closed (to keep out the cat). I did draw the line at demanding a tray be brought up for my dinner.

It worked. I made the last revisions on a book manuscript I had been working on for the last year and put the finishing touches on an essay. The talk I'm giving on Thursday is in reasonable shape. My classes got prepped, an exam got written, office hours happened, a teaching plan was made.

But of course, I'm not a 1950s male academic, so all the "1950s faculty wife" things I didn't tend to are now popping back onto my to-do list. Memos to write. A dinner party for a newly minted faculty chair to organize. Books to reshelve and return to the library. A study to lightly tidy — only lightly so as not to disturb the intellectual work of the occupant. Grocery shopping. Laundry. Except for getting a haircut. Math Man called and made me an appointment.  He's the perfect faculty spouse.

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Math Man and I watched The Wife last week. I saw the ending coming a mile away.

Funneling memories

Last week, I pulled out the cheap green funnels I bought at Ikea to re-fill the olive oil bottle, a bridge between here and Rome, where the apartment held an identical pair and where I watched the woman in the cafe next to the market pull out hers to re-fill a bottle of olive oil. I felt connected to cooks in across times and places, and wondered at the memories these very inexpensive utilitarian items held.

Holiday cooking always ends up using nearly every utensil, bowl, pot and pan in my kitchen. Memories cling to so many of them, nearer the surface than usual.

There are the orange Tupperware measuring cups my mother bought me when I started graduate school. The choice that year was orange or avocado green, and when the kitchen is crowded, I'm grateful for the way the orange cups pop on my dark countertops 

The year Tom and I were married, he bought me a sturdy set of glass bowls, a nested dozen. Not all have survived the ensuing decades, the largest shattered and the smallest vanished, and perhaps there's a metaphor to be found in there, but mostly I'm looking for the right sized bowl for Crash to use for the apples he is slicing.

The torus shaped glass pitcher, bought to celebrate a milestone for Math Man. It had us talking shapes at the dinner table: what else is topologically equivalent to a one-holed torus? A landscape with an underground tunnel? For a moment, the glass seems to flow in the sun, the top rim opening like a blossom and stretching to enclose the table with kids and friends and even the cat. With a tunnel at its core. I want to cling to more than the memories.
 

The epitome of epithymy

Dictionary in the library at Jesuit Center in Wernersville.

The son known herein as Crash recently pointed out to me a feature of the online version of my beloved¹ Oxford English Dictionary which I hadn't noticed before.  Words are assigned to one of eight frequency bands.

Bands 7 and 8 are common words in speech and writing, appearing with a frequency of one word in a thousand or more.  Band 4  comprises words that appear less commonly, roughly one word in a million, but "most words remain recognizable to English-speakers, and are likely be used unproblematically in fiction or journalism." Example - bipartisan, which may appear more often these days than one might be led to assume from this.

I'm working on an essay for Nature Chemistry on chemists' tendency to use epithymetic language when talking about atoms or molecules.  Epithymetic is the perfect word to use in this context. It is also in Band 2, which the OED describes thus (emphasis mine)

Band 2 contains words which occur fewer than 0.01 times per million words in typical modern English usage. These are almost exclusively terms which are not part of normal discourse and would be unknown to most people. Many are technical terms from specialized discourses. Examples taken from the most frequently attested part of the band include decanate, ennead, and scintillometer (nouns), geogenic, abactinal (adjectives), absterge and satinize (verbs). In the lower frequencies of the band, words are uniformly strange or exotic, e.g. smother-kiln, haver-cake, and sprunt (nouns), hidlings, unwhigged, supersubtilized, and gummose (adjectives), pantle, cloit, and stoothe (verbs), lawnly, acoast, and acicularly (adverbs), whethersoever (conjunction).

Yeah, no. I won't be using epithymetic anywhere in that piece.

On the plus side, I'm adding some uniformly strange and exotic words to my vocabulary this week. Urusula La Guin's essay on the use of the word f*ck in discourse added swounds and gorblimey. Swounds is a euphemistic shortening of God's wounds; gorblimey, is another shortened oath, God blind me. Swounds is Band 1 - the zebras of the word world.   The frequency band information gave me sprunt, for spruce and smart. My office at home is pretty sprunt these days, after my summer's efforts to clean things up.

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I would like to state clearly that I did not marry Math Man merely to get the two volume OED with the magnifying glass in the little drawer, though it made a very nice dowry (Band 5), I must say.

Epithymetic means "connected to desire, about appetites" - and this piece is about the language of desire, about electrophilicity and nucleophilicity and electron affinities.  See, it's perfect.

Eat me!

The sign at the edge of the water at the Naples Botanical Gardens read, “CAUTION: Preserved wetland systems and stormwater management lakes provide habit suitable for alligators.  The feeding, harrassing or other disturbance of alligators is strictly forbidden.” 

As we wandered along the lakeside path from the Brazil gardens toward the Florida garden, Math Man wondered if the sign was really just to cover the gardens if some alligator managed to sneak in through a storm culvert.  There are no fences, it seems as if any alligator could just wander up and snack on the visitors.  So, really, alligators? Surely there'd be a fence if there really were alligators.

There is a terrace overlooking the lake, for bird watching. There is a large heron wading in the shallows on an islet across from us. It’s bucolic.  Suddenly there is a thrashing in the water, startling the heron, followed by what looks for all the world like a log gliding through the water. Except it has eyes. It sinks into the water until just the eyes are visible, gliding through the water. At last the alligator wallows onto the shore and….sits there.  The kids are agog.  So are we. 

Look carefully on the left hand side of the photo, that log on

the grass is not a log.  The heron doesn't seem bothered.

One bloodthirsty child wonders if the heron will get eaten.  Her mother murmurs under her breath, “Not quite what we came to the botanical gardens for…”  “The circle of life…” hums her father.

Two six- or seven-year old girls in flowered dresses with matching floral headgear, settle themselves on the steps, decorously tucking their dresses under their legs. They are riveted to the scene across the way.  “Eat it!” one of them eggs on the somnolent alligator.

To no avail. The alligator seemed content to nap in the sun.

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Bonus:  Check out these man...or rather gnome... eating plants to crochet

Renewing vows: 9131 days

It's the nine thousand one hundred and thirty first day since Math Man and I walked through the doors of the parish church, processed down the aisle and vowed to stand by each other and cherish each other in weal and in woe.

It's our 25th anniversary, if you don't want to do the math (yes, Math Man included the leap years!).  It's not a prime number, but composite, with a prime factorization of 23 x 397.

Our sons had a life sized photo cutout of us made and restaged the wedding — right where it happened in our parish church. It is an entirely different take on renewing your vows.  They photographed the 'event' and gave us the photos (and the cutout) for an anniversary present.

It seems unthinkable that we've been married more than 13 million minutes, millions seem so large and the time so short.  Other significant dates to come?  On January 22, 2020 we will have been married 10,000 days and on Monday, May 13, 2024 for a billion seconds.  Billions and billions. And yes, these days are on my calendar!

Blood Feuds: The Great Bryn Mawr Bake Off

"Can you search to find what to substitute for glucose syrup?" I asked Crash.  Corn syrup, as it turns out. "It's cool to find a use for corn syrup besides making blood." he mused.

Math Man likes eclairs.  For Father's Day I bought him a book of fancy eclairs (or rather a book of eclair recipes) to browse, and promised to make him some.  The Egg has been home for a few days between a summer of math research and the start of his senior year and binge watching the Great British Baking Show.  Crash is also here for a few weeks between a stint in England and his next stage management gig, and thought to stretch his cooking repertoire beyond Budget Bytes and blood. Hence the eclairs.

Raspberry and chocolate, it still looked like Macbeth in the kitchen yesterday. (See below)

This afternoon we had The Egg making bread, Crash making choux for the eclairs (from Tom's mom's recipe after the book's recipe failed us) and me making braised short ribs for The Egg's departure dinner.  It was a lot like an episode of the Great British Baking Show.  Right down to Chris fanning the chocolate glazed eclairs with the baking sheet.

O Canada

Before I headed off to the Specola for a couple of weeks of science, cappuccino and gelato, Math Man and I went off to Canada on holiday, Cape Breton Island. We were there for Canada Day (the 150th), where Math Man was bemused by all the people wearing red in the little town park, waving tiny Canadian flags.  It seemed so...unCanadian to be so flamboyantly Canadian.  There were fireworks.

I saw a bald eagle, my first ever in the wild, 30 feet over my head on the 5th hole at the Highland Links golf course in Ingonish.

Parks Canada has put red Adirondack chairs out in national parks all over Canada to encourage people to sit and admire the view.  There is a nice view behind Math Man, but he is also facing a gorgeous view.  We are on a small peninsula poking out into the Atlantic.  Some of the red chairs are pretty remote, a couple even helicoptered in according the Park Ranger I met atop Mt. Franey, 1400 hard won feet above sea level.

Speaking of Mt. Franey, I climbed it while Math Man played 18 holes of golf on the course below.  There is a red chair on top of it, which I was determined to sit in. The trail is steep, and after the first half kilometer, quite rough.  I made it to the top, enjoyed the view, sat in the red chair and chatted up the ranger. How did the red chair get up there, I wondered. In pieces?  No, no, we drove it up the road.  Yep, that's how she got up there.  She drove.  (I couldn't have driven up the road, but I could have walked down it.)

Math Man and I hiked on the other side of Cape Breton Island, on the Mabou mine trail.  It follows a track that was used by carts (hard to imagine as it clung to the edge of the steep cliffs) to go from house to house. Not much sign of the houses left, except the occasional rose bush gone feral along the way.

And there was Tim Horton's. A red sprinkle donut.  O Canada!

Factoring in change

The balance of my life is shifting again, neither Crash nor the Egg will be home this summer, one is doing math research on the east coast, the other stage managing a production of Macbeth in the west.  The last time Math Man and I had no children at home in a summer, we'd been married less than a year.  This coming fall we'll have been married for a quarter of a century. So it's been a long time, and things are shifting.

One marker of the shift is the pizza dough recipe, posted at the moment for easy Lenten reference on the hood of the stove.  It has pencilled in amounts  for 1 crust, a version for 2 (the standard recipe), for 4, for 6.  I've made it just for me, living solo, for us as a couple, for a family including teenaged boys, enough for snacks for a party of hungry teens.

It's such a tangible marker, the size of the ball of dough under my hands as I knead it before a quick rise. Like a family, it's a living, ever changing thing.  Growing and shrinking in turns, many possibilities caught in its web of proteins.  I miss the substantial feel of the larger ball, but take heart in knowing that the dough is rising in other places, too.

Engaged in espionage

"I Love You!"

These days Math Man and I are watching The Americans, a series loosely based on an actual Soviet program to place spies in the US disguised as nuclear families.  (This piece in The Guardian describing the experiences of two kids who found out in their teens that their parents were spies is great.)

The episode we watched last night had a spy leaving a message inside a toilet paper roll, which Elizabeth (one of the two undercover KGB spies) discovers because the toilet seat was up in an apartment where a single woman lived.  This morning, as I pulled out a new roll of toilet paper to put in the upstairs bathroom, I joked to Math Man that I had thought about leaving him a coded message inside the roll.  I mimed peering inside to find....someone already had left a message.

Walking down the aisle at Our Mother of
Good Counsel, where we still go to Mass.

OK, it wasn't in code, but still. And then I noticed the toilet seat was up.  "Did you leave it that way to suggest the message?" I demanded.  He did.

I love that I married someone as crazy and goofy as I am. Tomorrow it will be 24 years.

Erdos numbers, itinerant scholars and pilgrims

Students and faculty of the Vatican Observatory Summer 

School, with various members of the Observatory staff on an

outing to Villa d'Este in Tivoli.  

Paul Erdős was an extraordinarily prolific Hungarian mathematician. He wrote over 1400 papers, with more than 500 co-authors; to put that in context, the median publishing mathematician has 2 papers in (all likelihood) his lifetime, with a handful of collaborators, perhaps 5 at most. Erdős was an intinerant scholar, who moved from conference to campus, showing up at a mathematician's door and announcing, "my brain is open." He owned what he could carry.

For most of my visit, I've been packing my backpack for the day and trooping from Castel Gandolfo to Albano, setting up shop on a table in the library, working on my small laptop screen.  I can carry everything I need, including an umbrella in case of sprinkles (or deluge).

As my time at the Observatory this summer comes to an end, I'm thinking about Erdős line, "my brain is open."  This moving to another spot, with different people to talk to, different spaces to work, opens my brain.  "Have you read John M. Staudenmaier, SJ's essay To Fall in Love with the World? Perhaps the introduction would be helpful."  I have now, and it absolutely was helpful.  The lack of screen space, which I thought I might find annoying, has been a gentle nudge to not try to do so much at once.  To leave some room for serendipity.

There is something to walking, to moving, that shakes us up, unsettles us:  am I lost? will I make it to my destination before it gets dark?  before it rains?  before the cafe closes?  To be a pilgrim is to remember that we live in uncertainty.

To be an itinerant scholar is a bit like being a pilgrim in that it's unsettled, but also not quite the same.  It's about figuring out how to enter into community, about finding stability.  With the young astronomers who are here, with the woman at the Pasticceria Al Duomo who recognizes me and knows my favorite sweet roll and who helps my Italian along by making me list my order before I pay for it.  With the group that gathers to celebrate the Eucharist together as we figure when to kneel and when to stand.

My brain is open. Time to go home.

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An Erdős number is the number of edges you have to traverse in a graph of collaborations (where each edge represents a co-authored paper).  Erdős has an Erdős number of 0.  If you were one of the 500 some-odd who co-authored a paper with Erdős, your Erdős number was 1, and so on.  Math Man has an Erdős number of 4, a distinction he shares with about 83,000 other people.  Need to know your Erdős number?  Try this collaboration distance calculator at the American Mathematical Society's MathSciNet, use the button on the right for Erdős.  You can read more about collaboration distance here.

And if Ignatian spirituality is of interest, I highly recommend John M. Staudenmaier, SJ's essay To Fall in Love with the World.  Written for Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits more than 20 years ago, it remains on point, treating of the American notions of individualism.  Read the preface!

Hidden dimensions

"What dimension are we working in?" I prompt the student in my office.  "One." "Which means the Hamiltonian must be..."






I've been talking about "boxes" in one-dimension, three-dimensional vibrational breathing modes — spherically symmetric molecules that expand and collapse like stars going nova — and molecular wavefunctions that sit in four, twelve, or fifty-two dimensional spaces.

But what does it mean to be between (integer) dimensions?  Fractional dimensions are a way of describing the complexity of mathematical objects, such as this Sierpinski triangle being assembled on Bryn Mawr's green.  It has a dimension of log₂3 or about 1.58.

It looks like we are working in 2 dimensions but it's not quite. Where did the missing .42 dimension go?

Math Man has long dreamed of constructing an enormous Sierpinski triangle, math writ large.  All the pieces fell into place earlier this spring and on Sunday the game is on, a 9th level Sierpinski triangle build at the Wagner Free Institute of Science (a very cool space).

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K'Nex donated about half the 30,000 some odd pieces needed.  After the event the pieces will get packed up into kits for teachers.  You can support the project here.

Column: Inconvenient Truths

Refugee tents at Budapest Station

Victor was in Hungary a couple of weeks ago, while the refugee crisis at the train station in Budapest was at its peak.  He felt he needed to respond in some way to those bereft of home.  I'm proud of how he stretched to do so.

In writing this, I read many of the recent Catholic Church documents on migrants and refugees. They speak powerfully of how we ought to respond.  The line that I'm still thinking about comes from Pope John Paul II at 3rd World Congress on the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Refugees:   "It will be necessary to abandon a mentality in which the poor – as individuals and as peoples – are considered a burden, as irksome intruders..."

Given the news from our own country and from abroad, this is a line worth contemplating.

A version of this column appeared at CatholicPhilly on 18 September 2015.

When they were few in number, a handful, and strangers there,
Wandering from nation to nation, from one kingdom to another people,
He let no one oppress them; for their sake he rebuked kings:
“Do not touch my anointed ones, to my prophets do no harm.” — Psalm 105:12-15

“Be prepared to walk three to four miles to your event,” advises one brochure on the papal visit. There are lists of things not to bring: no coolers, no shelters, no large signs. “Grounds open at 6 am.” For an event that will not begin until after noon.

Refugee children at coloring station in
Budapest station

I am immeasurably grateful; I have a ticket to hear Pope Francis talk about immigration on Saturday, and one that lets me stand on the parkway for Mass on Sunday. Yet the more I read about the events, the more challenging the weekend sounds. How long can I stand? How far can I walk? Will I be able to bring an umbrella in case of rain?

While I began to make plans for the World Meeting of Families and the Pope’s visit last week, my husband, Victor, was in Budapest to give a series of talks on mathematics. His pictures of the small dome tents housing Syrian refugees in the train station square made me pause. So, too, did Facebook posts from friends in California, watching worriedly as fires envelope nearby communities. I’m planning for a weekend of wandering about Philadelphia with my oldest son, I’m not fleeing a war or wildfires, young children, pets and my elderly father in tow.

In 2013, under Pope Benedict XVI, the Church offered a reflection on our pastoral and spiritual response to refugees, those driven from their homes by forces beyond their control.

We are reminded that migrants and refugees are first and foremost not inconvenient company, but are a way God points to both our own status as pilgrims in this world and to Christ: “The ‘foreigner’ is God’s messenger who surprises us and interrupts the regularity and logic of daily life, bringing near those who are far away. In ‘foreigners’ the Church sees Christ who ‘pitches His tent among us’.”

The document goes on to remind us that everyone is called to respond personally to the needs of those who have been displaced by disasters. Victor visited with the refugees at the station, joining a group of students helping parents entertain their children, sitting on the ground as they colored, blowing huge bubbles for them to chase. He bought small toys for these children — carefully chosen to be easy to carry and not noisy so as not to add to their parents’ burdens!

It’s harder to see what I am called to do from this side of the ocean, but I can pray. I can allow my own wanderings to sharpen my eyes for the displaced. I can offer up long lines and long walks for those who stand at the borders, hoping for a place of safety.

The pope’s visit will interrupt the regularity of our daily lives in so many ways, even if we are not able to go to any of the events. For a brief moment our lives will manifest aspects of the uncertainty and anxiety of those fleeing catastrophes.Can this temporary disruption remind us of the Gospel’s demand to be ever attentive to the needs of those driven from their homes? Welcome, the Church tells us, is not just a task, but a way of living.

Happy anniversary

Upstairs on the shelf in my prayer corner is a book in a bright binding.  In it, I wrote the order for my and Math Man's wedding. It was the first for Math Man, the second for me.  Celebrated in the parish church on this day 23 years ago.

I wrote the order by hand. The readings, the prayers.  All of it.  It was a meditation at the time, and remains so when I pick it up.

The parish liturgist and I drafted the liturgy, winnowing down the choices for Math Man, who wasn't Catholic.  Not Mass.  Bride and groom down the aisle together.  No video recording (though Math Man's aunt made a surreptitious recording of it, I noticed looking at the photos tonight the camera in her husband's hands as they came out of the church. ) No photos taken during the ceremony. Just around the edges.

At the end of it all, before we recessed down the aisle, Math Man (whose maternal family was Jewish) broke a glass.  I like the rabbinical readings of that tradition that emphasize the intermingling of joy and sorrow, apt for this wedding of a widow, and can still hear the voice of my elderly Jewish colleague call "Mazel tov!"

Many of our choices in and out of the liturgy were about keeping the focus on the sacrament, being present to what was happening and being attentive to the people coming to celebrate with us.  No bridesmaid's uniform, or tuxes for the groomsmen.  Wear something garden-party-ish.  No micromanaging.  Unfancy food and games for the kids a hedge over from the reception, so kids and parents could be where they needed to be.

Flowers?  Ordered the week ahead of time from a florist who didn't faint when I said I needed wedding flowers in ten days time, and didn't care much about color or composition. I still look at the bouquet and think how lovely it was. And Math Man's boutonniere is dried and carefully stored in a jar on my dresser.  We had a wonderful time celebrating with our families and friends, all the more since we let go of many of the details.

As I knelt in the back of the church today for a brief moment, I rejoiced again in the gift of Math Man's love, and the ongoing support of the community of faith we live in and of our families and friends.

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Math Man is away today, the first time we've been separated on our anniversary, many time zones to the east.  He called via FaceTime as I was talking to my dad.  "Sorry, Dad, it's Math Man -- have to go!"  Math Man wondered if my dad minded knowing he was second on my list.  Nope!

The Mathematician's Mistress

I've been thinking about numbers and sequences this weekend on my other blog.  In part because I'm a geek, in part because I read this piece in the NY Times and in part because Math Man has spent much of the last couple of days in his study with his mistress.

Before you get the wrong idea, there is a joke about mathematicians which goes something like this: Ask a mathematician if (he/she/they)¹  would rather have a (wife/husband/spouse) or a (mistress/lover/leman²). The answer is, of course, both. When you leave, the spouse will assume you are off with the lover, the lover assumes you are with the spouse and you can go do your math undisturbed by either of them.

Math Man has been hot on the trail of a new math result, and so has been spending hours with his 'mistress' — the math.  He wakes up thinking of her, he vanishes into his office to look deeply into her...expressions. She has yet to completely yield to him, but he pursues her nonetheless.

I note that the apple (or in this case The Egg) does not fall far from the tree.

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1.  Actually, all the versions of these sorts of jokes I see assume the engineer, the physicist, the mathematician, the whatever are straight cis men, which doesn't completely encompass my lived experience and so frequently annoys me.  Yes, I know, I've no sense of humor about this (#dontaskalice), and perhaps it would be more productive to rewrite the jokes imagining a somewhat more diverse set of scientists,  but in the meantime, I'm annoyed.

2. Honest to heavens, I was reading a modern piece in a magazine which used the word "leman" which I had only before seen in pretty bad medieval romance novels.³

3.  Yes, I'm aware this reveals that I have read bad medieval romance novels.

Reapply after swimming, vigorous activity or capsizing

Yesterday Crash and Math Man dusted off the boats and dug all the rigging out of winter storage (and put air in the very, very, very flat tires of the double-decker trailer). Today, my merry men and I headed off to sail at a nearby state park.

Math Man was coming from his morning golf game, so the boys and I got the boats up there, off the trailer, rigged and in the water.  After all that effort the teen-aged team was hungry, so they went off to get a snack and I slathered on sunscreen and took out the Fiat Lux.

The wind was tricksy, puffing here and pooping out entirely there.  But there was a whole fleet of other Lasers out there racing, gorgeous to behold.  Nigh on inspiring.  So inspiring, I thought I'd give a series of racing tacks a fly.  So my first tack of the season, I pushed the tiller over, pulled in the main sheet and tried to come about without losing my wind.  It was a bit rough around the edges, but hey, it was the first tack of the season.

Next tack, the wind puffs as I bring the boat across the wind.  Uh-oh.  The full sail and I are now on the same side and boat begins to roll.  I scramble for the other side, but too late.  The laws of physics have no sympathy, and certainly don't wait on my necessities.  The boat was going over, and I was going in.  Splash, bang.  I'm in the water.

I haven't had to right a capsized boat in deep water in forty years, and never without backup or another person to assist.  I wonder at my age if I can do it.  I make sure I'm not fouled in any of the lines, swim to the back and hang my full weight onto the end of the center board.  Slowly, but surely, the sail comes out of the water and the boat rights itself. Whew.  OK, now to get back in without letting the boat sail away without me.

I am short.  I am so short that the extra three inches of the personal flotation device kept me from being able to reach the inside of the gunnel.  Argh. I strip off the jacket and heave it into the boat.  Bearing more than a passing resemblance to a beached whale I'm certain, I follow the jacket into the cockpit.  I gather the lines and my dignity and am once again sailing.

It's good to know I didn't have to tread water waiting to be rescued by the lake patrol.  I lost neither glasses nor hat in the mishap.  I had brought dry clothes for the end of the day.  I could put more sunscreen on (having both swum and engaged in vigorous activity). It was, as Chesterton would have it, an inconvenience rightly considered — that is to say, an adventure.  If only the bruises didn't look like they are going to be quite so spectacular...

On the green: US Open and Ignatian Retreats

Last week at this time I was still on retreat, sitting in an Adirondack chair in the eastern cloister at the Jesuit retreat house, looking out over the expanse of lawn that tumbles down to a stand of trees that was (at least this week) the favored hunting ground of the hawk that spent the week riding the thermals up to the top of the hill.¹  Tonight, Math Man is eagerly anticipating some time contemplating expanses of green.  No, he's not going on retreat, but to the US Open which is being held about a half-mile from our house (as the hawk flies).

He's wandering only 120 acres, compared to the 240 I had access to, but otherwise, it's not such a different experience:

• No cell phones or other electronic devices.
• Silence prevails; necessary speech needs to be taken to the fringes (and done in hushed tones) lest you disturb those praying, uh, playing.
• Lots of walking.
• Weather.  There will be interesting weather.
• Companions along the way (25,000 folks for Math Man, 40 for me).

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1.  Don't ask how I know this. All I will say is that Fluffy had prepared me well, and that while the practice of looking up has much to commend it, it pays to watch where you are walking on occasion.

From Phaith: Pearls of Great Price

Philadelphia's Archdiocesan magazine, Phaith, is now being published in an online version. This column appeared in the October issue.

Victor was a bit dubious about this column, worried that he didn't come off very well, sitting in that conference room.  He did his fair share on this project, even relinquishing his favorite part (the tiling) to me.  I love the phrasing, partners in the whole of life. Marriage in my book isn't about going halvies, but about going all in.  Whether it's patios built amid the heat, or children or illness or no lights in a storm...

“Dad says this is your anniversary present,” said Chris as he tipped a wheelbarrow of sand into the form for the new patio. He sounded dubious. Covered in sweat and dust on a sultry afternoon in August, I was piling up 20 pound slabs of stone, while my husband of 20 years sat in a cool conference room at the college, sliding papers around a table. This do-it-yourself project did not look much like the anniversary gifts touted on TV. No pearls?

That is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one body.  I’d been contemplating this line from Genesis since I’d heard it read at Mass the week before while Victor and I stood on either side of our oldest son, Mike, at the opening Mass for his freshman year at college — almost 19 years to the day since we discovered we were to become parents. Bound by our vows, we found ourselves bound up anew in this child. A gift on our first anniversary from God to us.

Through the years we joked with each other that we each did 75 percent of the work of being parents, as Victor paced the floors with a disconsolate Chris at 2 a.m. or I tutored Mike in algebra after dinner. Laundry, dirty dishes, play dates and college visits. Fall hikes, family dinners, water fights and choral concerts. A full measure of challenges and joys nurtured equally by each.

 St. Augustine once said that miracles “have a tongue of their own … let us not only be delighted with (their) surface, but let us also seek to know (their) depth.” So, too, do these sacraments that hallow our lives have “tongues of their own” that speak to us not only when we first celebrate them, but again and again, drawing us into the depths of the mystery that is our relationship with God.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church begins its discussion of the sacrament of marriage by reminding us that it is a “matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life.” After 20 years of marriage — after 20 years as partners in the whole of life — my labors on the patio truly felt as much a gift from Victor to me, as it was my own gift to him. Caught up in this sacramental marriage, we are mysteriously one body. 

Chris’ comment made me think not only about the bond that Victor and I share, but nudged me to seek something of its depths. God dwells in me, and I in God. I have nothing to offer, but what I myself have been given. What work I do is not my work, but God’s gifts, at work in me. God offers to do not just 75 percent, but 100 percent, and calls forth the same in me, in each of us.

Where are the pearls? I have been given them. A string of days, dark and light, each built over time of many layers, knotted together. To have and to hold – and to share –from this day forward.