Capers With Carroll

(We interrupt the previously scheduled episode recapping my 1972 Coming-of-Age Jaunt through Europe, to interject this Thanksgiving message.)

I am thankful, three weeks before my 73rd birthday, that most of my deadlines these days are self-imposed and freely adjusted. Had I been able to maintain my original plan, this week would have had readers with me in Jerusalem, where I celebrated my 1972 Thanksgiving meal with a jar of peanut butter and the loaf of bread I hoped to stretch for a few more days. Instead, the recap falls short by six weeks and eleven nations. I was still in England, and still thinking I would spend most of my sojourn in France. I anticipated upgrading my high school French and working on my novel. I certainly had no inkling of getting as far as Israel. I had, however, just committed to visiting a new friend in Switzerland.

I give thanks for my God-bestowed but only-recently-acknowledged ADHD. Even as—at this stage in life—unfinished projects challenge me in space and time, the fascinating twists and turns of my distractibility refuse to let me become bored. I am rich in both hobbies and relationships. All by itself, my whimsey in spiders has brought me friendly correspondents on six of the seven continents. My early teaching career allowed me to teach groups of junior high students, and in some cases, my later career brought me their children and grandchildren. Members of each group now show-up richly on my FB friends list. As God supplied me with diverse teaching venues, I once had a class of Cacua-speaking adults from the remote jungles of Colombia. They needed the basics of government and economics to help them pass their (Spanish-language) primary-school equivalency exams. We taught the class tri-lingually. Later, in China, I had three weeks with high school and college students who hoped to improve their English. Over the years, God gave me experiences with both public and Christian school students in California. In the middle, for a decade, I taught a tightly-knit cadre of students in Colombia. Some of those children I had the privilege of shepherding from fifth grade through twelfth, and I’m able to correspond with them now as adults. For all this I am thankful.

I am thankful for the families God has given me, both the family of my birth, and the family I began 50 years ago (next July) by marrying Vicki. In July, I camped with the cousins among whom I grew up. We who could remember our wonderful grandparents and great-grandmother could now see each other’s grandchildren. This week, Vicki and I have three of our five children, with their spouses, and seven of our fourteen grandchildren. My step-counter tells me that in the five days since the grandkids arrived, my daily walking stats double over the average from the previous six weeks. Few gratifications in life can match watching grandchildren grow and their parents negotiating the challenges. The oldest two boys have their voices changing. The younger ones still want to cuddle with Papa and have stories read. I also thank God for the amazing technology that allows me to teleport to Brazil to help homeschool my grandsons there, and then zoom over to England to keep current on the antics of my British grands.

My life puts flesh to the end-time description given by God to Daniel, “Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.” (Dan. 12:4, ESV). Living now, two-and-a-half millennia after God instructed Daniel to “shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the end,” I am grateful to have a storehouse of ‘to-and-fro’ memories from visits to twenty-some countries. I also carry more information through my pocket phone than Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson could access had they owned every book then in print. I am thankful for capabilities unavailable to any previous generation. I am also grateful for the Scriptures that provide a solid place to stand as floodwaters shift the sand from all around us.

As a child born just at the end of two World Wars, I have lived through a Cold War and times of increasingly dangerous proxy wars. I am thankful that both I and my children have been spared the call to arms. Amidst ‘wars and rumors of war,’ I am thankful that, in my call to overseas service, I could carry literacy rather than kill-or-be-killed armaments. I could spread the Word of Life rather than the Kiss of Death. I am thankful to be living in a pocket of peace, the likes of which so many in our world are unable to enjoy. I am not facing a winter without heating, nor the threat of incoming missiles. I have done nothing to deserve these blessings that I enjoy, just as many of the people without them have done nothing to deserve their absence. Even in Colombia, which was struggling with a civil war within our earshot, I could say, as did David, “In peace I will lie down and sleep, for you alone, LORD, make me dwell in safety.” (Psalm 4:8). For this I am thankful.

(A conversation, just now, with my Brazilian son-in-law reminds me how thankful I am to be familiar with the tastes of both the peaches, apricots, and plums that won’t grow in the tropics, and the tree-ripened mangoes, papayas, and bananas that only show up in North American grocery stores with a pittance of their sweetness and flavor. I have tasted avocadoes, sweet and creamy as only the tropics can produce them, but have temperate-zone persimmons in the back yard as I write this.)

I am thankful that though riches and fame were never high on my list of ambitions, God’s plan for my life has delivered for me a modest level of each. I enjoy a nice house, a satisfactory pension, and a yard big enough to entertain my horticultural curiosities. Although—as late as 2016—I entertained no ambition to run for elective office, in 2018, I finished ahead of the Libertarian in my race for Congress, and in 2020, an amazing 42,015 voters marked their presidential ballots for me. I am thankful for each one of you. That total exceeds even the popular votes for George Washington (39,624 in 1788-89, and 28,300 in 1792) and for John Adams (35,726 in 1796). I am thankful that both Washington and Adams performed so well in the strenuous times with which they were faced—as have generations of patriots since—and that my family and I can enjoy the benefits thereof. I pray that those benefits will continue.

Even as God blessed me in ways I never sought, He has also gratified the desires I did entertain. I wanted to leave the world a better place for my having been here. Now, I can look at five grown children who are each contributing to the betterment of mankind. I can look at three generations of students whose lives I have touched. I can see riders lined up to utilize a bus system for which God put me in the right place at the right time to help get started. I can look back at teenagers I encouraged in the 1980s—coming from the pre-literate, indigenous peoples of Colombia—students who went on to graduate from prestigious universities, and who now supervise educational systems they have built from the ground up, on land to which their people now hold legal title. I hear of hundreds now worshipping Jesus among people-groups that had none fourty or fifty years ago. Oh, the marvels I have witnessed! Thank you, LORD!

On this Thanksgiving Day, 2022, I pray that each of my readers will enjoy a time of family and good food. I pray for God’s peace among those, worldwide, who currently feel the weight of man’s free will, expressed as it so often is, as man’s inhumanity to man. Come quickly, Lord Jesus.

I took this picture during a school lockdown in 1994.  In Colombia, unidentified soldiers had stepped out of the jungle within a mile of the school, so we locked down until we could be sure for whom those soldiers fought.  My junior high students sat for two hours before the all-clear, joking nervously and missing lunch.  But we were in a war zone.  There, one understands—at least intellectually—that violence is a possibility.

In California, I once locked down with 4th graders while a funnel cloud just missed us.  Before terrified ten-year-olds, the teacher must be strong, even casual about the situation, and compartmentalized.  But now, even during our school’s annual lockdown drill, I have to stop and consciously gain control over the catch in my voice.

So it is good that I first saw news of the Sandy Hook shooting while I was alone in my classroom during lunch.  As a teacher, a parent, and a grandparent, I cried.  Then I compartmentalized, taught my afternoon classes, and went home to let my four and six-year old grandsons present me with an early-birthday batch of raisin cookies.  Today, I will celebrate that 63rd birthday with a museum trip, and intellectualize.

The violence is common enough—even in elementary schools and movie theaters—that we have rituals for dealing with it. 

One group of us divides into Pro-Gun and Anti-Gun factions.  That is a debate we ought to have, though probably less driven by the most immediate atrocity.  Prudence and self-defense may require that some citizens keep guns, but from scripture I draw the principle that trust in weapons is misplaced (Isaiah 31:1 and 2:7), and the glorification of weapons is idolatry.   I waver over where to draw the legal lines on guns, but as a nation we trust and glorify them,.  For trusting and glorifying, the lines should be at zero.

Another group points to lack of mental health, to the breakdown of the family, to a culture of violent video games, and to hopeless poverty.  Yes, yes, yes, and yes.  Every year I see students who are in need of better help than the schools are equipped to handle.  I see boys—especially—trying to understand manhood when they have no fathers with whom to relate.  This very week, I had several boys excited to show me videos that glorified lone attackers who vanquished large armies.  I also just heard the verdict on a shooting a few years ago in the park around the corner from where I live.  A lone gunman sprayed bullets into a pick-up soccer game, wounding one player.  Charged with 10 counts of attempted murder, he received 500-years-to-life.  The shooter was 16.  Fatherless.  Without a DREAM Act, he was also a boy without a country, and no hope of ever belonging anywhere.  Except to a street gang.

Yet, curiously, the shooters in mass killings like that at Sandy Hook or in Aurora have been mostly white, middle class, and American born; as have been their victims.  The other kind of shootings, kids killed one or two at a time as some gang initiate tries to prove his mettle, probably claim more victims in total, but make fewer headlines.  The spontaneous monument in the photograph below sprang up after three boys were attacked in a yard across the street from where I pick up kids for Sunday school.  One seventeen-year-old died.  He had been a friend of the kids I pick up.  The young shooter, who received a life sentence, was a recent alumnus of the school where I teach.  Easy guns.  Video games that glorify the lone shooter.  Hopelessness and lack of belonging.  Spiritual deadness.  Isolated, one from this list does not create shooters, but together, they will.

So to cope with this, we compartmentalize.  We intellectualize.  We blame-shift.  We look the other way that our drones are killing children in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  We try and hide the fact that, each year, a million American children are denied even a day of birth.  We flee from the knowledge that the stores we frequent support firetrap-sweatshops in Asia or Latin America, and that the chocolate we eat was harvested by child slaves in Africa.  We have met the evil, and it is us.

Psychically we cannot carry these burdens, individually, or as a people.  It is too heavy.  We try to imagine ourselves standing in the way of all this, correcting it, or even absolving ourselves of our complicity in any of this, and we can’t.  It is too overwhelming. 

But it is not too heavy for God.

And God hears our cries.

I am driven this morning to read Daniel 9:4-19, and to use his prayer as my model.

4 I prayed to the Lord my God and confessed and said, “Alas, O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps His covenant and lovingkindness for those who love Him and keep His commandments, 5 we have sinned, committed iniquity, acted wickedly and rebelled, even turning aside from Your commandments and ordinances. 6 Moreover, we have not listened to Your servants the prophets, who spoke in Your name to our kings, our princes, our fathers and all the people of the land.

7 “Righteousness belongs to You, O Lord, but to us open shame, as it is this day—to the men of Judah, the inhabitants of Jerusalem and all Israel, those who are nearby and those who are far away in all the countries to which You have driven them, because of their unfaithful deeds which they have committed against You. 8 Open shame belongs to us, O Lord, to our kings, our princes and our fathers, because we have sinned against You. 9 To the Lord our God belong compassion and forgiveness, for we have rebelled against Him; 10 nor have we obeyed the voice of the Lord our God, to walk in His teachings which He set before us through His servants the prophets. 11 Indeed all Israel has transgressed Your law and turned aside, not obeying Your voice; so the curse has been poured out on us, along with the oath which is written in the law of Moses the servant of God, for we have sinned against Him. 12 Thus He has confirmed His words which He had spoken against us and against our rulers who ruled us, to bring on us great calamity; for under the whole heaven there has not been done anything like what was done to Jerusalem. 13 As it is written in the law of Moses, all this calamity has come on us; yet we have not sought the favor of the Lord our God by turning from our iniquity and giving attention to Your truth. 14 Therefore the Lord has kept the calamity in store and brought it on us; for the Lord our God is righteous with respect to all His deeds which He has done, but we have not obeyed His voice.

15 “And now, O Lord our God, who have brought Your people out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand and have made a name for Yourself, as it is this day—we have sinned, we have been wicked. 16 O Lord, in accordance with all Your righteous acts, let now Your anger and Your wrath turn away from Your city Jerusalem, Your holy mountain; for because of our sins and the iniquities of our fathers, Jerusalem and Your people have become a reproach to all those around us. 17 So now, our God, listen to the prayer of Your servant and to his supplications, and for Your sake, O Lord, let Your face shine on Your desolate sanctuary. 18 O my God, incline Your ear and hear! Open Your eyes and see our desolations and the city which is called by Your name; for we are not presenting our supplications before You on account of any merits of our own, but on account of Your great compassion. 19 O Lord, hear! O Lord, forgive! O Lord, listen and take action! For Your own sake, O my God, do not delay, because Your city and Your people are called by Your name.”

Somewhere in the deep recesses of history, God told man to be fruitful and multiply: to fill the earth.

In the early 6th Century, when Bishop (later, Saint) Arnulf of Metz (582–640) stepped into verifiable history, claiming a possibly-mythical ancestry of Roman senators and Merovingian princesses, the population of Europe stood at perhaps 25 million. Arnulf begat Ansegisel (born c. 602), who begat Pippin the Middle, Mayor of the Palace of Austrasia, who begat Charles Martel, who saved Christendom from the Moors at Tours, in 732. Charles begat Pepin the Short, who reigned (752-68) as King of the Franks.

Pepin begat Charlemagne, King of the Franks from 768, and Emperor of the Romans, from 800 to his death. For his reforms, Charlemagne has been called the Father of Europe, but he was also, biologically, ancestor to every royal dynasty that later inhabited the continent. It is estimated that more than half the population of Europe—maybe fifteen million people—lived in his realms. He personally sired 20 children, by eight women, but conservatively, if we suppose that his progeny only doubled in each successive generation, had there been no intermarriage, his living descendents today would be triple the current population of earth.

Charlemagne begat Louis the Pious (778 – 840), King of the Franks and Holy Roman Emperor, whose daughter Gisela (820 – 874) was likely married to Henry of Franconia and bore Ingeltrude, whose a son Berengar ruled as lord of Rennes until both his land and his daughter were captured by the Viking chieftain Rollo (Old Norse, Hrólfr, c. 870 – c. 932). Poppa converted her husband to Christianity (though Viking habits die hard), and their descendents were known as the Dukes of Normandy: William I Longsword (893-942) begat Richard I the Fearless (933-996), who begat Richard II the Good (970-1026), who begat Richard III (997-1027), who begat Robert I, called variously “the Magnificent” or “the Devil” (1000-1035), who begat William II the Bastard (c. 1028-1087), who shed that moniker at the Battle of Hastings, in 1066, becoming William I the Conqueror, King of the English.

England, with perhaps a million souls at the conquest, grew to as many as seven million within three centuries. A warming trend brought longer growing seasons. Better ploughs and the horse collar allowed more land to be farmed. The rise of powerful kingdoms brought relative stability.

William begat Henry I (c. 1068-1135), whose daughter Matilda (1102-1167) was briefly Empress of the Holy Roman Empire. When her father died, she attempted to rule England in her own right, but was more successful in passing the throne to her son Henry II Plantagenet (1133-1189).

Henry acknowledged paternity of William Longespee (1176-1226), whose daughter Ida (1210-1269) bore Beatrice de Beauchamp (1242-1285), who bore Maud Fitz Thomas (1265- 1329), who bore Ada de Botetourt (c. 1288-1349), who bore Maud de St Philibert (1327-1360). Even while the Black Plague was ravaging Europe, claiming 40% of the population of Germany, 50% of Provence, and 70% of Tuscany, this Maud bore Maud Trussell (1340-1369), who bore Maud Matilda Hastang (1358-c. 1409), each woman married to a knight. Maud and her husband, Sir Ralph (1355-1410) brought forth the first Sir Humphrey Stafford (1384-1419), whose death in France just weeks after the victory at Rouen may have been due to wounds in the battle, but not before he sired a second Sir Humphrey (1400-1450), who sired a third (1426-1486), who sired a fourth (1429-1486), who sired a fifth (1497-1540), whose daughter Eleanor (c. 1545-1608) bore Stafford Barlowe (c. 1570-1638), “a Gentleman of Lutterworth.”

Stafford’s daughter Audrey (1603-1676) first bore a son, Christopher Almy (1632-1713), and then both generations migrated to America, settling in Rhode Island. He begat Elizabeth Almy (1663-1712), who bore Rebecca Morris (1697-1749), who married John Chamberlain, and moved to New Jersey. It is believed the Chamberlains owned slaves. Their son Noah (1760-1840) served in the Revolutionary War.

Noah begat John C. Chamberlain (1812-1866), who begat Samuel L. Chamberlain (1842-1914), who fought with an Ohio regiment in the Civil War, and then walked out on a wife and daughter, Anna Margaret Chamberlain (1875-1956), who I remember meeting once, when I was very small. Anna hailed from Scotch ancestry. The population of Europe doubled during the 18th Century, and did so again in the 19th. At that time, 70 million people came to America, both to the United States, and to places like Brazil.

Anna Chamberlain married Thomas Boyer Reef Kelley and bore Ruth Ella Kelley (1899-1974). They tried to make a go of it on the Dakota prairie, but gave up and moved to be near the shipyards in Washington. Ruth married Howard Vincent Carroll (b. New York, 1898). He was of recent Irish and German extraction, refugees of the Potato Famine. Today, 6.2 million Irish live in Ireland, and 80 million live somewhere else. Howard left Ruth with two sons, including Donald, who has been everything a son could want in a father. Donald begat Brian, who teaches school and blogs on Saturdays. Brian begat Matthew, who has been everything a father could want in a son, and Matthew—already with two wonderful sons—begat Eliezer Carroll, who was born yesterday, in Goiania, Goiás, Brazil.

Welcome, Eliezer, to the family. We are saints and devils, counts and no-counts. There are not quite 7 billion of us. Help take care of the place, be fruitful, and live long.

Photo by his father
Thank-yous to Sally Carroll, Devin Carroll, and Wikipedia for contributing information to these thoughts.

I have been reminded lately that every day is a bonus, and that gifts sometimes come in strange packages.

In January, after I posted a review of Malcolm Magee’s book on Woodrow Wilson, we became Facebook friends and discovered how much we have in common. Recently he noted that next week he will be celebrating the tenth anniversary of an automobile collision that severed both of his legs (doctors were able to reattach one of them) and twice stopped the beating of his heart. From the distance of ten years he writes, “the accident has been a gift to me.”

His story caused me to count back and realize that this spring marked the thirtieth anniversary of a similar experience in my own life. And yes, it was a gift.

In the spring of 1980, I was enjoying marriage and parenthood, but undergoing trial-by-fire at the hands of my junior high students. Combined, my responsibilities left me exhausted, yet I sensed there was something more I should be doing. I just couldn’t puzzle out what that might be.

I decided to fast and ask God for some direction.

For four or five days I took only water. I had fasted that long once before, without distress, but mid-morning on a Tuesday, I began to feel horrible and decided to order the school lunch. That lunch hit my stomach like an anchor catching mud, but I figured I deserved it for so awkwardly ending a fast. I came back to teach the next day, wondering if maybe I had some kind of flu. Midday Thursday I told the kids not to kill each other, and put my head down on the desk. Finally, Friday, I called for a sub.

Over that weekend, I decided to take a full week off. Sunday I drove to school to lay out lesson plans. The copy machine malfunctioned, so I stretched out on the floor to try repairing it, in more pain than I had ever been in my life. Monday I saw a doctor. Wednesday morning I got an X-ray. Wednesday afternoon I got the results: a large mass in my abdomen could either be a ruptured appendix or colon cancer, more likely the latter, as the appendicitis would have already killed me, several days previously. I went into surgery Thursday, thinking I had advanced cancer.

But it actually was the appendix. I suspect I was alive because my fast had shut down my intestines, slowing the spread of the infection. I came home from the hospital to six weeks of forced rest.

They were good weeks for sitting and thinking. To begin with, I had the joy of knowing I had received a powerful and direct answer to prayer. I had asked God for something more, and for direction, and now He was at work to give me that, and to teach me some valuable lessons.

During my three years of teaching, I had banked nearly six weeks of sick leave because . . . well, I would work even with a ruptured appendix. My primary motivation had been fear. I knew what my junior-high students could do, even when I was there. It terrified me what they might do when I was gone. After my surgery, I realized how much I needed to let go of that.

I also tried to calculate how many Sabbaths I had passed over to do school work: probably something near the number of days I was confined now at home. It struck me that God will collect His Sabbaths one way or another.

Magee notes the “odd progression from suffering to hope” that Paul speaks of in Romans 5. Before the accident he had been “wrestling with the conflict between faith and reason,” so much so that the denomination in which he had pastored expelled him. He reports that after the accident, “for whatever reason those two quit fighting in my head.”

I had been looking for that “something more.” We had already been looking for a new church, one that did a better job of teaching the Bible, but with time to sit and talk with my wife, we realized that we needed to accelerate the effort. Once we did find a church we liked, we experienced the greatest burst of spiritual growth in our lives. Our marriage grew stronger. Our parenting grew more effective, as did my teaching. I had already been considering teaching overseas with a mission organization. After my six weeks at home, it became my passion. It took four years to reach Colombia, but the decade that followed provided both the most fascinating and fulfilling years of my career, and the richest family years. By coincidence, Magee’s father had served as a pilot on the same Bible translation center in the years just before I got there, and his sisters had attended the same little school where I came to teach.

In these ten additional years since his injuries, Magee married off all of his children, watched them spread around the world, and welcomed five grandchildren. In my own additional thirty, I added my last two children, raised all five, watched them spread around the world, and sometime in the next week expect to welcome my fifth grandchild. These have been rich years for both of us, every day a gift.

I am trying to be a novelist, and for each of the stories I have in mind, I already know the endings. I also know how my own story ends: Someday I will leave this body behind and step into the presence of Christ, wearing a new body. In crafting a novel, the protagonist often suffers one big set-back about one-third of the way through the story, and a second major setback at the two-thirds mark. Yet oftentimes, these apparent setbacks turn out to be gifts. My appendectomy came at age thirty, and was a gift. This month, at sixty, I have started treatment for prostate cancer. If this is my second setback, I still have a third of my earthly story ahead of me, if not in actual number of days, at least in narrative content.

But even if I have another thirty years, I get them one bonus day at a time. And I’m going to watch and see how God turns this cancer into a gift.

(Note: I have a daughter who works for Joni Eareckson Tada and Joni’s ministry to the disabled. At the same time I learned of my cancer, Joni went public with hers. On her website I found a link to a very helpful article by John Piper, “Don't Waste Your Cancer.”)

I’m vegging today after what has seemed like the most intense summer since 2000, when we pushed for seven weeks through Uzbekistan and eight countries in Europe. This summer, we drove some six thousand miles, going north to a family reunion in Wenatchee, WA . . .



. . . and south, to San Diego, for part two of the wedding that began with part one in China, last October.

Since the last time we had the whole family together for a picture, we’ve added six members.

Along the way, we enjoyed delightful visits with family and friends, some of whom we hadn’t seen in over a decade.


(Product review: The success of this summer was made possible by my Toyota Sienna, which will be ten years old this fall. It flipped 158,000 miles on Monday. During one, three-day, one-thousand-mile segment, it carried five adults and way-too-much luggage. It had all the power I needed going up steep grades, and comfortably handled curvy Highway 101. Thanks to Bob and Jim at The Auto Shop, the Sienna has never suffered a breakdown, or needed a tow. With the removable seats out, the Sienna has moved my children in-and-out of multiple apartments. With the seats in, it has carried countless kids on field trips or to Sunday school. What a blessing this car has been. Thanks, Vicki, for buying me this car, and for riding around with me all summer.)

So yesterday and today I’ve been moving kind of slow. I’ve pulled a few weeds, run some laundry, and started to think about school starting in ten days. I’m also trying to make amends to a blog that has been feeling abandoned.

A few thoughts:

• We live in a big, beautiful country. We saw parts of California, Oregon, and Washington that I hadn’t seen before, and revisited some places that were familiar. If I had stopped to soak in every vista that tempted me, I would still be on the road.


• Family is a tremendous blessing. This summer I got to spend time with my parents, the aunts and uncles who helped raise me (all now in their 80s), and with the cohort of siblings and cousins who grew up with me (and have grown with me now, well into middle age). The nieces, nephews, and cousins-once-removed pop up as spitting images of the previous generations, but with the twist of their own generation’s unique personality and outlook. I got quality time with the children I raised, the spouses my children have married, and my grandchildren. Pretty amazing.


• I need to learn more Portuguese. With Brazilians as son-in-law and daughter-in-law, and now a nephew with a Brazilian girlfriend, I listened to a lot of Portuguese this summer. I over-heard my Chinese-born daughter-in-law encouraging my son-in-law to “Speak only English!” His English is coming along, and we had several conversations we could not have had last time I saw him. My grandsons, also, are progressing as bilinguals. Yet there were times this summer when I wanted to follow a conversation, and couldn’t. I have been working recently on Chinese, but I need to redouble my efforts toward Portuguese.


• While I was gone, hundreds of luscious figs fell on the ground. Pity. I must redouble my efforts to see that no new figs go unappreciated while the season lasts.


• I went the summer without getting any writing done. (Okay, three paragraphs on my novel.) Now I will need to write at the same time I am teaching. I find that very difficult.

So, here’s to a wonderful summer. And now on to the challenges of a new school year. Life is good.

I was slow going digital with my photography. As late as the summer of 2000, I dragged forty roles of slide film and my Nikon SLR for seven weeks across Europe and Uzbekistan. I still hadn’t organized and viewed all those slides when I bought my Canon G3 during the summer of 2003, and now, of course, when I want to use one of those European shots, I first have to digitize it. My G3 has been twice to China and twice to Brazil. It has recorded weddings for my five children, gotten me nearly three years into grandfatherhood, and illustrated these first five years of Capers with Carroll. On a single day in Yunnan, I shot 600 keepers from a bus window. In Pernambuco, I captured 120 images of one male Frigga sp. to get the picture I use at the top of this blog. That would have been a prohibitive four 36-shot rolls of film. I love my G3.

However, in September, I spent some time in the camera section of a big-box electronics store, helping a visitor from China choose a pocket-sized digital. Suddenly the G3 felt pretty bulky. My favorite shirt is a guayabera with four pockets. They will hold the G3, but it’s awkward to maintain for more than a few minutes. I usually carry my camera on a belly strap, but that creates other problems. Whether I’m photographing urban wildlife or grand kids, the key to success is to have the camera perpetually at hand. Even as a junior high teacher, whether I want to record evidence against a graffiti artist or a cute candid shot to forward to the yearbook, a camera in the pocket is worth two in the closet.

My grandmother (nee Watson) felt a special attachment to the Watsonia, and nurtured a healthy patch of them in her yard. My sister had the foresight to gather some of the corms. She’s moved several times over the last decade, but a colony of those Watsonias moved as she moved. At some point, she passed a couple of starts to me. Rushed for time, I put them into a poorly-chosen patch of ground, not knowing where I might eventually place them. In part, I stuck them in a patch of yellow oxalis (O. pes-caprae) because this was another plant I associated with my grandmother’s yard.

That must have been, what, six or seven years ago? I wish I could say these plants were thriving. (Well, the oxalis is: no matter how pretty it may be, it well-deserves its reputation as an aggressively invasive weed.) Recent research tells me Watsonias like loose, well drained soil that doesn’t completely dry out in the summer. Unfortunately, I have them in heavy soil, beyond where the sprinklers reach in our 110° July. Under the circumstances, I’m thrilled that after all these parched summers, the Watsonia still manages to send up its annual stalk of orange blossoms.

Wikipedia tells me that Watsonias are out of fashion in a nursery industry that wants to fill that niche with its near-relative the gladiola. I suppose the gladiola is showier, with a dramatic spray of bigger flowers. I do enjoy a gladiola when I see one. But the Watsonias carry me back 50 years to my grandmother’s yard.

It is difficult for me to believe that this year will mark the 20th anniversary of my grandmother’s death. It is remarkable how much she is still with us. My brother recently digitized old recordings of her playing ragtime piano. That reminded me that someplace I have several hours of interviews on reel-to-reel that I want to transfer to CD. This week, however, it has been enough to watch the symmetrical rows of orange trumpets catch the sun, and enjoy my grandmother's company as I admire them.

As a dedicated fadoclast (for example, I have never watched a Superbowl), I will not be doing one of those Facebook 25 Things Lists, though I have been tagged twice. I don’t foresee enough time for making lists anytime soon. I have my thesis due to the committee in ten days, an important speaking engagement (sidebar) next month, a daughter’s wedding in early April, the daily-ness of teaching junior high, and a myriad of unexpected demands on my time. Take today, for example. I brought the love-of-my-life to L.A. so she could spend a day with our soon-to-be-married daughter and take advantage of Disneyland’s current offer of free entrance on a birthday.

In L.A., I have a son attending seminary and two grandsons. By watching the eldest for the day, my son could get off for some research for a paper he has due. For me, the height of delicious decadence is a bug net, an expanse of foliage, and maybe a child or two to share the discoveries. (I’ve never met a youngster who couldn’t get excited about a bug net. That’s an experiment I’ve conducted on three continents.)

Catching bugs has nothing to do with my employment, or getting my novel written. It is totally frivolous. I constructed my first bug net when I was 25, after graduating UCLA with no more biology than the lower division Intro course. That’s why it tickles me that my little bug-net excursions find occasional mention in the scientific literature, like this one in the journal Biota Colombiana. (See pages 2 & 3, and Tatepeira carrolli listed on page 5.) I even had the privilege of editing the English abstract (not yet on-line) for the Chinese PhD. thesis from which this gallnut article was taken.

With all this as background, this morning Natu and I took off looking for some spiders. Unfortunately, it was chilly and damp, and the spiders didn’t come out to play. We had to content ourselves with other diversions.

I like to crumple fresh bay leaves and hold them to my nose. I like turning over rocks, to see what scurries away. I like watching a little boy’s eyes get big at a sow bug.

Whaddya know, I’ve said 24 random things about myself. I probably won’t finish, though. I live under a cloud of unfinished projects, but hey, there are so many delightful distractions.
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#26 - One of my favorite songs is a tune by Bob Dylan. The only lyric goes, "All the white horses in the sun, how'm I s'posed to get any writing done?"

Natu found me eating breakfast in my stockinged feet and brought one of my big shoes, lifted my foot to maneuver it into place, and then ran off to get the matching partner. Pretty ambitious for a 28-month-old. Once my shoes were on, he went to the front door and stood beckoning. We located his shoes and a sweatshirt, and I put on my hat. Natu raced off to find his chapéu. His Portuguese-challenged grandfather defaulted to the chapeau of other-wise forgotten high-school French, which his grandmother corrected and sent us on our way. With chapéu, there is no conflict between Natu's Portuguese and the sombrero of my wife’s Spanish, and only a rough resemblance to her Italian cappello. As we race to keep up with our bilingual grandson’s Portuguese, it intrigues me that when the Portuguese varies from the Spanish, its cognates sometimes run after the French, and other times bow to the Italian.

Photo by Natu's Grandma

On our walk, Natu and I saw an “avião up in the sky!” (Which I heard as the Spanish avión, and no doubt confused him as I repeated it.)

He gets excited by the Christmas lights that are still up and is working hard on his colors. He nails yellow pretty consistently, but confuses blue, red, and green. Of course, with his mother they are azul, vermelho, e verde.

Over our heads, it was “Squirrels dançando!” while at our feet it was “Pinecones swimming!”



We stooped and I introduced him to water-logged acorns. He took one in each hand, “One acorn! Two acorn!” The numbers are also coming in both languages. I showed him how acorns have chapéu. He met that with the glee that only a two-year-old can muster.

“Acorn, chapéu!” we volleyed back and forth.

Natu and Papa both understand the first rule of language learning: ‘Put every new word to immediate use.’

At our grandsons’ ages, six weeks of development equals a full year of coursework at a major university. Sometime since our last visit, Nilo (now three months) learned to return a smile, and Natu (at twenty-three months) had both picked up names for all the other members of the family and begun to group words into phrases. As fast as I offered him new words, he took them, repeated them a dozen times, and made them his own. On a walk together, we studied the web of a Metepiera sp. in a rosemary bush and watched the spider hide under her protective tent. Then we continued on and played with Agelenids, Uloborids, and a Holocnemus in their webs. We saw a line of ants on the sidewalk and he got down on his stomach to watch them closely, repeating, “Ants, ants, ants, ants.” Then on our return trip, he ran to the rosemary bush, calling out, “Spider house! Spider house!”

This visit, for the first time, he called us Grandma and Papa.

Of course, this means I am now labeled. When Natu was born, my wife asked me what I wanted my grandchildren to call me. I wasn’t sure. It isn’t often in our culture that we get to choose a name for ourselves. I had a Grandpa Lynn and a Grandpa Howard, but somehow Grandpa Brian never seemed right. My mother’s grandfathers were Gramp (yeah, I could be a Gramp) and Grandfather (well, that might be a little too formal). I had second cousins whose grandfathers were Pa’s Pa and Ma’s Pa, which tickled me but didn’t fit me. When I spoke to infant Natu in the third person, I found myself using Papa, the same name my children called my father-in-law (though I’m not sure whether it came from Spanish or Italian, each an influence in my wife’s family). In Natu’s bilingualism, the first vowel has elongated to be a more Portuguese PAA-pa. (In contrast, Natu’s father is Pa-PA-i.). His grandfather in Brazil will have a name altogether different.

However, as my family grows, we are about to leap beyond our European linguistic influences. Early next year I expect to add a Mandarin-speaking daughter-in-law. I am very pleased with that thought. It was an early personal goal that all of my children would grow up as polylinguals and world citizens, and by the grace of God, they have. So at a new stage in life, as I have the opportunity to pick a new name, that aspect of my life could be part of the mix. I asked Middle Son how to say grandfather in Mandarin. The choices seem to be YeYe, or Lao Ye. Lao by itself is an honorific that might be used as a means of address between two longtime friends, such as “Lao Wang” and “Lao Chang,” to be translated as “Old Wang” and “Old Chang.” That kind of appealed to me. I began to think about Lao Papa.

But it may be too late. Natu already has me labeled, and the pattern he sets will be followed by all the grandchildren I hope are yet to come. And you know what? In my grandson’s voice, it sounds pretty good.

Well, there he is, two weeks after his birth, but still a few days shy of his due date. At least in my presence, he's been pretty mild mannered. One of his first accomplishments, of course, is making Natu look much older than he was even a few days ago. At twenty-one months, Natu is mostly interested in cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles, and bicycles, but the word this evening is that Natu has added 'Nilo' to his vocabulary.



An update on Monday’s post: I also have word this evening on Angel, my five-year-old friend in the Pediatric ICU. Doctors have now kept him stable since Sunday, with his temperature and swelling less than they had feared. There has been none of the organ failure they had anticipated. He's still a very ill little boy, but at least the news is encouraging.

These past two weeks I have been following the progress of two different children, in separate ICU’s, and with opposite prognoses.

Since his birth twelve days ago, my grandson Danilo has been in the Neonate ICU at a hospital about three hours south of us. Every day he’s gotten stronger. For several days he has been breathing on his own, without supplemental oxygen, and his parents were able to take him home today.

Over the same period, Angel, the five-year-old son of friends, has been in first our local hospital, and now the Pediatric ICU of a hospital about an hour north of us. Some of what I’ve heard came from his father, in a Spanish I couldn’t completely understand, but for some reason, Angel’s was not a routine appendectomy. As we watched him, it was obviously not a routine recovery. After twelve days, they moved him to the second hospital, for a second surgery and care under a team of specialists. Not only is he on oxygen, but there is a tube for each of the other substances that need to enter or leave his body, and electrodes monitoring at least seventeen separate conditions. After seventeen, I lost count. I was with the mother yesterday when the doctor explained that—for the moment—they had Angel stabilized. However, they fully anticipated that as 24, 48, or 72 hours passed, a series of crises would come. After Angel’s second surgery, the toxins are so widespread in his body that the doctors expect his blood vessels to begin leaking and his organs to begin failing. When that happens, they will do everything in their power to get him through it, but they can only promise skill and effort, not outcome.

We are fearfully and wonderfully made, says the Psalmist (139:14). Perhaps the best demonstration of both the fear and the wonder comes simply from the list of things that can go wrong. I am sitting here with a swollen jaw from an abscessed tooth. By weight, it is a very small amount of infection, but it makes it too painful to chew even soft banana. Fighting the infection has caused swelling in the glands in my neck, so much so that I don’t feel like doing much besides writing this post and wondering how the human race survived the millennia it took to stumble upon antibiotics. It misses the point to argue over whether life could begin without God’s intervention. In a world prone to accident, earthquake, and infection, I do not believe that life could have continued without God’s constant benevolence. In the natural world, there are simply too many things to go wrong, and too many ways to snuff out life.

Yet life in these circumstances goes on more-or-less smoothly and moves from generation to generation with such ease that as humans we are prone to take that for granted, and to consider such survival an immutable law of nature. It is therefore the purpose of the accidents, earthquakes, and infections to remind us how flimsy is our hold on life, and where our dependence lies.

Selah.

PS. Angel’s mother reports he has made it past the 24 hour mark without any crisis. He is sedated, and on a respirator, but there has been no organ failure. We covet your prayers.

I have just come from an introductory meeting with my second grandson. We didn't actually speak much. I shared a few soft whispers with his grandmother, while I held one hand against the top of his head, and the other against his little feet. He's still having a little trouble breathing, which explains all the tubes.

We expect him to grow out of the breathing problem, and he looks good in every other way.

Mother and grandmother are doing well.Father is trying to keep all the bases covered. Big brother is entertaining his grandparents.

Welcome to the family, Danilo.

From six thousand miles away, Vera asked for pictures of my garden. Vera is majoring in Quality and Safety of Food, at Shandong Normal University, in Jinan. We have been IM’ing about fruits and vegetables. Fortunately, my grandson was visiting to help me give the tour.

We started in my sun room. The tank holds Piume, the water turtle. The white pots have sweet granadilla seedlings. The black pot has a young Yellow Pitaya (Hylocereus megalanthus). Its close cousin, the Red Pitaya (dragonfruit Hylocereus undatus), can be seen at the very back of the room. Neither the pitaya nor the dragonfruit has ever blossomed or fruited for me.Avocados are not common in China. Vera once saw some in a supermarket. “They said they came from the USA, so the price was extremely high.” I have two small avocado trees. This year, for the first time, I have about 15 small fruit, which will probably ripen in late fall.The big tree at the left is a Fuyu persimmon. It gives me a large crop every year. I love to eat them fresh, and dried, they are like candy. The little tree is a Babcock peach, new this year. Behind it is a prickly pear cactus. At my feet are potato plants. In the next week or two, Nathanael will graduate from being a baby to being a big brother. That’s his mother in the center.The tree is a tangerine. I get a heavy crop every year. What I can’t eat fresh, I peel and freeze, to eat like popsicles the rest of the year. The red flowers are roses, and the light green leaves are melons I call dinya, which is the generic name for melon in Russian. I found these in Uzbekistan, but they are similar if not identical to the Hami melon I saw in China (哈蜜瓜, but more oblong, and whiter flesh than a canteloup).These grapes are Thompson seedless, and will be ripe in July. My bilingual grandson calls them uvas, which is the Portuguese word. I also have two varieties of red seedless grapes. Behind Nathanael are Italian Honey Figs (Lattarula). They give a short crop in June, and then, after a few weeks, a longer, second crop that lasts until the cold weather hits. I dry them, freeze them, and eat them fresh.The red flowers are pomegranates, and will be ripe in November. The purple flowers are artichokes. By the time they bloom, it is too late to eat them. We ate some, but the flower is so beautiful we like to leave some to feast our eyes on.Ooh, the apricots should be ready to harvest in a couple of weeks.Vera tells me the most Vitamin-C rich fruit is the kiwi. My kiwi vines are two years old. I hope to have fruit next year.I enjoy keeping my garden full of growing things.