25 May -- Just a place holder

Just like everybody I know, I get occasional emails containing cartoons, amazing photos, cute animal pictures, the odd poem. Many get the "burn before reading" treatment, while others, whose contributions I always enjoy, get read and occasionally forwarded (although I try to restrain myself) to close friends and sister.

But I realized this morning that there is an entire category to which I belong, and which I really don't appreciate AT ALL: place holder.

This morning's email was yet another chain letter: "send this to five people within three hours and you will have good luck". Some of these messages -- the ones from friends and other rather frequent correspondents -- I remove without prejudice, knowing that they wanted to play and just wanted to use my address. Most of their correspondence concerns more substantive stuff.

But there are a few from whom I never, ever hear unless it is to be a pawn in the all-too-frequent chain letter traffic. I suddenly realized that they must have a special list, just to make up the three or five or twenty names needed in order for them to follow the rules of the chain letter game. A couple of times I have responded to them directly, but have never had a reply, so I'm pretty sure they don't actually read most of their email. Obviously, I am not interesting to them as a person.

I had a pretty good idea while writing this: I would email all these chain-letter-only people and remind them that email is a source of global warming (because of the energy needed to run the Internet servers). But when I googled this, all I found were invitations to email friends to get them to fight global warming.

I must admit, however, that my email life would be poorer without the occasional gem: chalk paintings, sardonic cartoons -- have you seen the video of the hamster trying to eat the pencil? I can send it to you....

20 May -- Picture Books

Each month during the past school year I have been a volunteer reader at two Head Start classrooms. I pick up a crate containing picture books and a puppet and carry them off to a classroom where I spend a half hour with about 20 wriggly three- and four-year-olds. It's fun to see these little ones month after month -- the difference between September and May is astonishing. By the end of my tour, the children who were just learning how to sit on their space in the circle are chattering and busy and ready for stories and songs.

This project reminds me of my long-time rants about the quality of picture books. First of all, I want children to know the classic books because picture books are the first building blocks to an understanding of literature in English. Many expressions, illustrations, vocabulary words, rhymes, even attitudes come from children's literature, notably Mother Goose. (But don't forget Make Way For Ducklings and Charlotte's Web and Harold and the Purple Crayon. Mike Mulligan and his Steam shovel, The Indoor Noisy Book of Margaret Wise Brown. Lentil. Pooh (with the original illustrations). The Story About Ping. Madeline ("In an old house in Paris/ That was covered with vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines...") The shared experience of having been read to provides connections between children of with greatly different backgrounds.

But keeping this body of work alive becomes harder and harder, as booksellers produce so many new products each year. Many books published a quarter-century or more ago (e.g., Harold and the Purple Crayon) simply don't look as dramatic and rich because the paper and inks weren't available then, or were too expensive for mass market publications. They don't compete on bookstore shelves or in publishers' catalogs with the shiny new publications. In the library the copies gradually wear out. If they go out of print, they are as good as gone forever.

This leads me to the second half of my rant. Too many children's picture books are designed, with a wink and a nudge, to appeal to the adult shopper or borrower. Take "Mary had a little lamp", for example: the child makes a beloved companion of a desk lamp; it's a cute story -- she outgrows the lamp and takes up with a toaster -- but what is funny to an adult is just confusing for a three-year-old, who would also be bewildered by the title's play on a nursery rhyme.

But maybe I'm just becoming an old grouch!

13 May -- The Oldest Warriors Gather

THE OLDEST WARRIORS GATHER *

The oldest warriors gather
In the corner of the room nearest the bar.
Not for them the wine and cheese. They hold adult beverages -- bourbon and vodka.
They share again the stories they have all heard many times.
Learning to pack your parachute.
No parachute for the tailgunner; you were sealed in until you landed -- or didn't.
Jumping out of a perfectly good airplane.
Learning to land on grass, on water, on ice. Building the runway.
We visited Germany last summer; told my wife Last time I was here I was driving a tank.
Baseball caps on bald heads, embroidered with a ship, a unit, a mascot.
An occasional chuckly ripple, or a reflective silence.

The color guard enters.
The oldest warriors stand.
They've changed the law, they reassure each other. It's ok to do this.
They perform the shared gesture of their exclusive club:
In their brown or gray or blue suits, or their jeans and sweaters, fingertip touching eyebrow
They snap a perfect military salute.

* During the ceremony of hoisting or lowering the flag or when the flag is passing in a parade or in review, all persons present in uniform should render the military salute. Members of the Armed Forces and veterans who are present but not in uniform may render the military salute. 2008 amendment to Sect. 9, Title 4, U.S. Code

11 May -- What was my grandfather's name?

My maternal grandfather, Charles Cadwell, was a tall and taciturn man, an engineer who taught at Case Institute of Technology when it was a young and struggling college. Earlier he had briefly mined for silver in Mexico, had been elected surveyor of Ellsworth County, Kansas, when still in his teens (he took the job to pay for his education at Case). He invented Cadweld, an electrical bonding method for joining railway track, and developed a piece of equipment still in use today. He was a formal man, always in hat, white shirt, and tie even when gardening.

Grandpa's grandfather, it turns out, was Irish immigrant Patrick Cadwell, who left Ireland in 1847 and brought his wife Bridget and their five children to this country. Family legend talks about "seven souls in an old wooden boat" who crossed the sea to America.

The search for information about the Cadwells has occupied many months of our family history study. As we learned more about them, we began to understand that the name Cadwell may have been given them only after they arrived in New York State. The best immigration records we have found show a Codale family. Records of a deed signed by Patrick and the seller, improbably named Encyclopedia B Dewey, give his name as Caddle.

Patrick was illiterate, not surprising since he was an Irish peasant. But he made sure that his children attended school, and the three who survived to adulthood all became, at least for a time, schoolteachers. The love of learning and teaching is a strong thread running through the Cadwell family ever since.

So what was Patrick's REAL name? Codale, Caddle, Cadwell? None of them are common surnames. Codale and Caddle can be explained by imagining him earnestly telling a court clerk, or a ship's officer, his name in his Irish brogue. There are Caddles in Ireland, including County Meath near Dublin, where Patrick had lived as a young man. The arrival of Cadwell into the mix is more of a mystery, because of that "w" sound. Did the children, learning American English and wanting to leave Ireland behind, specify the pronunciation? Did they hear of other Cadwells and decide, as children do, that father did not know best?

Of all the stories, of the travel by sea, the Mexican adventure, the intriguing strongly-held belief that Bridget had been a maid for Queen Victoria but quit to marry Patrick, nobody in the family had ever heard of any variation on his name. He was Patrick Cadwell, no question about it.

That may be part of the reason we are reluctant to look further into the name question: Cadwell is just too good a name -- easily spelled, easily pronounced, just uncommon enough -- to give up.

08 May -- The Egrets are back

At least two dozen pairs of egrets have appeared each spring for the three years we have lived here. We are two blocks away from a large lagoon lined with trees and populated by ducks, geese and coots. These egrets, we are told, have migrated from Lake Merritt in Oakland. We must be seeing the second and third generations, because they have returned to the exact tree in which we observed hatchlings and their parents last summer.

Now they are in the settling-in, nest-building phase. We walk past the scraggly tree and hear them making soft plock-plock-plock sounds, while occasionally one lifts off and flies down the lagoon, long legs stiffly trailing, broad wings beating the air. When the flying bird comes in for a landing, there is a flutter among the birds already on the tree.

By summer the birds will begin to hatch and the egret noises will become much more strident; even the other birds seem to notice and keep their distance. The last hatchlings won't be ready to leave the nest until late August or perhaps even later.
Then the sidewalk under the tree will be scrubbed, and the human residents along the lagoon will relax.