Author: Dr. Holmes

Many, many years ago, a fellow in my college dormitory by the name of Stan Grove tried to persuade me to like the music of Arvo Part.

[Brief digression:  It is customary to put an umlaut, which is like a sideways colon, over the letter “a” in Part, because this is how his name is spelled in his own language.  I do not think it necessary in English, since I can write Jackie Chan without drawing whatever Chinese figure stands for Jackie’s last name.  The “a”-with-umlaut is not an English character.  And anyway, I don’t know how to make my blogging software do it.]

Stan and his roommate, Owen Sweeney, would gang up on me and my roommate, Joseph Susanka, to introduce us to more daring forms of tonal (or atonal!) beauty.  At the time we were having none of it.

But now Stan Grove is a teacher on the faculty at Wyoming Catholic College, Owen Sweeney is the admissions director, and Joseph Susanka works in the fundraising branch, so it’s like a big reunion.  And today Stan brought up the subject of Arvo Part again.

Perhaps many years in the world have given me an open mind; perhaps those many years in the world have eroded my sense of absolute truth.  But whatever the case may be, I told Stan that I would buy Arvo’s setting of the passion of Christ and listen to it for Holy Week.

But I think I’ll leave the Mongolian chant alone.  That was just strange.

Long interested in the history of punctuation, I was fascinated as a boy by Victor Borge’s idea of phonetic punctuation.  As I became more aware of the world of computers, I learned about the emoticon, a strange new development beyond exclamation points and question marks.

And yesterday, for the first time, I was introduced to the phonetic emoticon.

Teresa the five-year-old and Tina the three-year-old have each begun adding a tongue click sound to the end of happy sentences.  Teresa:  “I’m doing three pages of math today [click]!”  Tina:  “Can you give me some raisins? [click]”  Really, really happy paragraphs will have as many as three or four clicks.

It seems to function more or less as a vocal smiley face–always accompanied by a visual smiley face, of course.  Now that I think of it, children have for many ages had the vocal equivalent of 🙁 and :-O.

Tina the three-year-old:  “Teresa and me are paying a dame!”

My reaction:  Paying her for what?

[English translation:  “Teresa and I are playing a game!”]

As Jacinta brushed Tina-the-three-year-old’s teeth tonight, Tina explained that “I have spiders in my mouth.”

This matter-of-fact pronouncement was startling and indeed alarming–at her age, she might well have done the unthinkable–until her sister provided the backstory.  Teresa the five-year-old had explained to Tina that we have to brush our teeth to get rid of the bugs in our mouth.

And for Tina, bugs = spiders.

As I reviewed Latin with the kids tonight, the following sentence sprang into my head and made me grin:

Is pedes magnos hobbit.

Regina the seven-year-old lamented, “I’m bored!”  Her mother responded, without a lot of sympathy, “Then clean your room.”

Some time and many sighs later, Regina slouched in the living room, staring morosely out the window.  “Did you finish your room?” her mother asked.  Regina nodded.  “You still look bored,” her mother commented.

“I’m not bored!” Regina objected quickly: “I’m watching the trees!”

Yesterday morning, Kyle Washut sent me pictures of the bull moose he saw in his Lander back yard.  He is a never-ending source of weird happenings and funny things.

We ended up having dinner together last night, and of course we chatted about the local news.  The big debate in town has been whether to change the Lander ordinance that prohibits the sale of alcohol on Sundays before noon.  Advocates of the change point out that Wyoming’s state law allows the sale of alcohol earlier, and they argue that the special rule on Sunday is a law favoring the Christian religion.

Kyle explained the real backstory.  In away, the advocates are right:  the law was introduced because of religion.  Specifically, the Catholic Church in Lander used to be downtown, and folks at Church could hear the cowboys brawling in the local bar during Mass.  So the city passed an ordinance making it illegal to sell alcohol before a time when Mass would be over.

Nowadays, the law really is irrelevant.  A bold pastor won a big plot of land at the edge of town on a poker bet, and the Church moved out and away from the bar.  That’s why Our Lady of the Holy Rosary Parish has a big hayfield out front:  it was included in the bet.

The Lander Journal announced this morning that the ordinance about the sale of alcohol on Sunday has indeed been changed, but probably not much will change:  the guy who wants to sell alcohol is a restaurant owner who wants to serve mimosas with Sunday brunch–hardly a cowboy drink.

David the ten-year-old was a terrible speller.  He would take weeks to finish a spelling lesson that took his older sister only days to master.  And yet in other areas of life, he has the most phenomenal memory in the family:  if anything is lost, we ask David, because he can search his visual databanks and pull up anywhere he has seen it.  He can see something once and later reconstruct it in legos.

It finally occurred to me that maybe his 3-D memory is better than his 2-D memory.  So I began having David build his spelling words out of legos first, before trying to write them out.

The result?  Overnight success:  David mastered his next spelling lesson in one day.  The next lesson took only two days.  He tells me that he can not only spell the word, but he can picture in his head the different colors of the legos that went into each letter.

Weird.  And neat.

[By the way, I did screen him for dyslexia, and he turned up negative.  I don’t really know what goes on in his incredible brain.]

Teresa the five-year-old lost her second tooth a couple of days ago.  To prevent it from slipping away and getting lost under her pillow, she put it in a small, clear plastic case (originally the case for an SD card).  After night prayers, she stood distractedly, nervously chewing on the clear case.

“Teresa!” I scolded, “Stop chewing on your tooth!”

And then I had to laugh.