This morning, I read an article in the Kansas City Star about the impending Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act which goes into effect on February 10. The act requires testing of all children's products for lead, including books.
That's right, libraries would be responsible for making sure their children's books do not contain lead, and most don't have the resources available to test books. As a result, libraries may have to pull children's books from their shelves unless the Consumer Product Safety Commission exempts them.
My favorite part of the entire article pointed to the reason this story was even on the front page of the newspaper. When the paper interviewed Crosby Kemper III, CEO of Kansas City Public Libraries, about the reaction to the law, he remarked:
"Librarians turn out to be a pretty feisty group."
Makes me think he'd never been around librarians before. I've known that since I was six years old.
With the "train tracks of peace," you might get the idea that my son is slightly addicted to Thomas.
You have no idea.
Every Monday, Sam goes to Parents Day Out. And every Monday afternoon, he returns home with a sheet detailing what and how he did that day. Usually the messages are benign: "Sam had a good day today," or "Sam enjoyed playing outside on the slide today." Monday's message? "We're trying to help Sam play with things other than the train table." That's right, he's so single minded about Thomas that even his teachers who seem him once a week want to help him learn to play with other toys.
Not to say that Sam only plays with trains. He really doesn't. He has cars and trucks, blocks and legos, books and musical instruments that he plays with all the time. They just don't see the every day play of Thomas.
Just an example of our Thomas attraction: This past week, Sam has taken to calling me Edward and wants to be called Henry and for most of this week has chosen to wear a green shirt as a result. So I'll come home in the evenings not to "Dad's home," but instead, "Edward, I love you!" I'm still not sure what to make of that one.
In any case, Sam does have a small Thomas thing going right now. In fact, I caught this picture of him the other night that pretty much sums up our life right now:That's right. That's Sam in the dark looking at his Thomas catalog by the light of a Thomas flashlight. It doesn't get much more Thomas crazy than that.
In church on Sunday, our pastor preached on peace. Turns out that she and other leaders in the denomination have been invited to Rome, Italy in a few weeks to attend a conference dealing with the theological dimensions of peace. As part of her presentation, she wanted to take pictures draw by the children in our church that represented what peace meant to them. So, for the children's story, Sam's Sunday School teacher read a book on peace and then marched all the kids upstairs to draw their pictures.
During the offering, the children marched back in with their drawings to present them to the church and to God. When Joy and I saw Sam march in with a Thomas train in his hands we knew what might be up and when we glimpsed his picture (which featured what were certainly a set of rails), Joy leaned over to me and whispered, "Looks like Sam drew the train tracks of peace."
We didn't know the half of it.
During the luncheon that followed church, all the pictures were on display, so we went by to peruse them. There was the five-year-old's tree where she went to read and watch the clouds, there was the four-year-old's new puppy. There was the forcefield protecting the intergalactic spaceship, and there was the garbage truck. Yes, in addition to drawing the Thomas the Train of peace, Sam drew the garbage truck of peace as well.
I suppose his drawing has a certain logic. A world where garbage is always picked up is certainly a world at peace. But I think Sam just wanted to draw a big garbage truck and so he did. an next month, the picture will be hanging in Rome.
It's a better debut than any of my pictures ever had.
At long last I've gotten the photos from the past month off my camera and onto my new external hard drive (I knew I'd eventually get around to changing my computer with all the new toys I got for it). So here is Christmas 2008. Click on the picture to enjoy the set!
The other day, I commented on the work John Williams composed for President Obama's Inauguration. Then, yesterday evening, I discover that we didn't really hear them play, at least not live. Two days before the event, the quartet recorded their parts for broadcast. It was an "in case of" recording and turns out that the in case of was extreme cold. Here I was marveling at their ability to play in tune when it was cold enough that brass players were using plastic mouth pieces and Yo-Yo Ma was using carbon fiber cello. Turns out that the Presidents, past, present, and future, along with their guests heard the quartet play live, but everyone else heard a recording.
And those people? Those 2 million or so? Here are some amazing shots of the Mall on Inauguration Day for your Friday amusement. Notice how the crowds are grouped together - one guess as to where all the JumboTrons were.
Over the past month, Sam has become obsessed with words. He's figured out that combinations of letters symbolize things in the real world and so wants to know what every word he has daily contact with is. What does this mean to our life? It means that in the morning when he helps me pour his apple juice, we have to stop and I have to tell him every word on the bottle. It means that as we're leaving the grocery store, he pulls back, rears his head up, and asks about the "Exit" sign, pointing to every letter and spelling "E-X-I-T" over and over again. It means that when we read a book, we have to go through each page of front matter to get to the main story (although, thankfully, he's satisfied with my explanation of "that's the copyright information" so we don't have to read every ISBN and LOC line of small print).
After going through this ritual for a month, he's memorized numerous words that float throughout his life. And typical of Sam, most of those words deal with trains and cars and buses. He has a placemat with all sorts of vehicles on it and around the outside edge are words like "crash" and "screech" and "wham." Wouldn't you know it, Sam knows those words but still has no clue when it comes to words like "the."
I predict he'll have a healthy future as a comic book writer.
Like many of you, Joy and I watched yesterday's inaugural events with a profound sense of the moment's history. But there were some associations that the event triggered in my mind that I knew would not be in most minds. As Yo-Yo Ma on cello, Itzhak Perlman on violin, Gabriela Montero on piano, and Anthony McGill on clarinet performed John Williams's "Air and Simple Gifts," my mind flashed with associations of past inaugurals.
New compositions and inaugurations have a twisted history. Just think back to Richard Nixon's second inauguration, when Vincent Persichetti was commissioned by the Inaugural Committee to write a work for the Inaugural Concert on January 19, 1973. Persichetti carefully chose excerpts from Abraham Lincoln's second Inaugural Address and set them in a work titled "A Lincoln Address." Sounds safe enough. The problem? Persichetti included Lincoln's description of the Civil War as a ''mighty scourge,'' words that the Inaugural Committee felt would be applied to the Vietnam War if the work was played. Out goes "A Lincoln Address" from its scheduled premiere. It wasn't played until the end of that month when the St. Louis Symphony performed it.
That bit of history flashed into my head because of Obama's use of the Lincoln Bible, but Williams's obvious homage to the greatest use of the tune "Simple Gifts" brought an even more pivotal moment to mind. Passages of "Air and Simple Gifts" echoed Aaron Copland's use of the tune in Appalachian Spring, and Copland himself had an awkward history with inaugurations and Lincoln. In early 1953, Copland's A Lincoln Portrait, which also set words from our 16th president, was slated for Eisenhower's Inaugural Concert. But two days before the concert, Congressman Fred Busbey of Illinois successfully lobbied to have the work removed from the concert because, as he said, "The Republican Party would have been ridiculed from one end of the United States to the other if Copland's music had been played at the inaugural of a president elected to fight Communism." That's right, fear that Copland was a Communist (charges he was cleared of in May of that year) led to the removal of a piece celebrating America's freedoms.
With Obama having that a piece played with those overtones at an Inaugural that so prominently featured Lincoln gave me as much hope for our country as anything else. And so, for your enjoyment, here is a short clip of our new president delivering the narration for Copland's Lincoln Portrait:
