Milestones

When I synched my iPod tonight it popped up with a "milestone" award -- for the 100 miles of walking I'd completed more than three months ago! April is certainly a milestone month in other ways - both good and bad.

• my 50th year begins
• Crash Kid will be confirmed in the Roman Catholic tradition
• Crash becomes a teen-ager
• my first husband died 20 years ago

No markers have popped up on my screen for any of these milestones!

The Jesuit Diet

I have lost quite a bit of weight in the last nine months, about 25 pounds, and now that spring has finally manifest itself in the Middle Atlantic, I've shed my parka and people have noticed. When my neighbor asked how I did it, I told her I'd been walking 2 miles every day - rain, shine, ice or snow - and that it had been as good for my psyche as my waistline. Walking back to our yard, Crash Kid pops out with, "You should have told her you were on the Jesuit diet." Now I'm perplexed, "The Jesuit diet?" "Yeah, like last Lent!" I finally clue in. He gave up chocolate as a penance for Lent a year ago. He'd asked what I was giving up and I said nothing, but that I was trying to follow St. Ignatius' advice in the Spiritual Exercises about trying to find "the mean which [I] ought in eating and drinking" - simply being mindful of what and why I ate. I actually didn't lose much weight last Lent, in fact, but the habit of mindfullness did stick and in combination with the walking has had its effect.

I think I'm more surprised by Crash Kid's recollection of that conversation than I am by the missing pounds. Like Barnacle Boy, Crash Kid clearly pays attention!

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What? I pay attention!

Barnacle Boy was helping out in the kitchen one evening last week. He was slicing up a warm, crispy loaf of French bread.

"Mom, I broke the bread."

"That's fine, just put the pieces in the basket," I reply (frankly relieved that it's bread that been cut awry, not his finger). He returns to the task at hand, murmuring to himself. I finally tune in to what he is saying:

"...he broke the bread, gave it to his disciples, and said: Take this, all of you, and eat it; this is my body, which will be given up for you."

I stopped what I was doing and he looked up and said, "What? I pay attention!"

He must.

Cardinal Virtues

Riding the ski lifts with my kids has the virtue of being uninterrupted time which opens the door to many fascinating conversations. Barnacle Boy enjoys numbers. He checks out how many chairs are on each lift, and then generally ruminates on interesting properties of that number. There were 173 chairs on the lift we were riding up the other day, which led to...

"Is 173 prime or composite, Mom?"

"Prime, I think."

This conversation quickly led us to think about whether there are more even or odd integers. One theory developed about half-way up the mountain: if the positive and negative odds and evens are paired up, there are equal numbers of each; now throw zero into the mix, which is even. In this way you would conclude that there are more even integers than odd. Given that we have an expert in the house, we consulted Math Man at dinner, who told us that we have Cantor to thank for the solution to this problem of the cardinality or countability of the integers (and other infinite sets of numbers). The set of of even numbers is exactly the same size as the set of odds. The notion is that if you can map one set onto the other, they have to have the same number of members. He then said, there are the same number of even integers as there are integers divisible evenly by 10. This boggles the mind!

The explanation? If you can write a bijective function (that is one that matches each member of set A with a member of set B and vice versa) that connects one set to the other, they have the same number of elements. For example, the set of squares of the integers is not the same size as the set of integers because while you can write a function that takes one member of the set of integers to one and only one member of the set of squares you can't write a function that goes the other way. Each square matches with two possible integers (the positive one and the negative one). The square of 5 is always 25, while the square root of 25 could be either 5 or -5. In Math Man's terms: you can write an injective relationship, but not a surjective one. Hence, the relationship is not bijective! I understand, but I'm still not sure I believe!

Ornamemories

In what was (for me at least) a huge departure from tradition, we decorated the Christmas tree the day before Christmas Eve. More and more, the incursion of secular Christmas into the ecclesial season of Advent feels awkward to me, like I'm continually crossing some weird international date line. B101 is playing Christmas music, while I'm listening to the messianic passages from Isaiah on my iPod. As soon as Christmas arrives on my internal calendar, the Christmas music vanishes from the airwaves and Christmas trees appear at the curb, ready to be turned into mulch. Is it Christmas or not?

The short Advent season this year meant that the celebration of the 4th Sunday of Advent overlapped with the Vigil of Christmas, and I was responsible for proclaiming 3 different psalms at four Masses over three days. So, if the tree were going to be decorated, it was going to have to happen before the liturgical quadrille began. Barnacle Boy and Crash are now full participants in this hallowed event. The Boy enjoyed pulling ornaments and recalling the stories associated with each one. "Here is the one Aunt Barbara made for my first Christmas!" "Oh, Dad, this is your beautiful one from Vienna..." He enjoyed hearing the story of the foil bell which hangs from a black thread that you wrap around the branch. My mother made these for her first married Christmas. She and my dad were grad students, and expecting a baby in few months (me!), so funds for decorations were non-existent.

Chris pulled out an elaborate pink Victorian ornament and demanded its story from Victor. "I don't know that one. Ask your Mother..." Waving the ornament in my direction, I told him that was an ornament without a story...at least until now.