On DC Street

Actually, several streets: We were in full-tourist mode, making our way from the Mall to several Smithsonians to the White House, before heading out for Georgetown in search of a cupcake place Liz saw featured on TV. Joining us in the sweltering fun were the aforementioned aunt and my mother-in-law.

Maryland = Land of Merry

It’d been two years since we’d seen Sarah—Beni’s good friend from college—and her family. They live in the greater Baltimore-D.C. metropolitan area, and they’ve been terrific hosts for our occasional excursions to the nation’s capital. Our kids were treated to a visit to the Maryland Science Center at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, where they happily played paleontologist and magician’s assistant.

Enter Sandman

Pickup Artist

Gwendolyn Oxenham was a college soccer player of consequence: She was a starter and leading goal-scorer at Duke who had a stint playing professionally in Brazil before getting her MFA in writing at Notre Dame. She also wrote a book I would have loved to have written about experiences I would have loved to have experienced. 

Oxenham and her boyfriend—himself a former Division I soccer player—traveled to 25 countries over three years searching for pickup soccer games. Their search took them from Caribbean beaches to Bolivian prisons, from pavement games between Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem to rooftops in Tokyo, and from the slums of Nairobi to many other locations in between. They also filmed their excursions for a documentary, which I’ll later watch and review.

Fair-Weather Fans

The air temperature was positively kiln-like during the local art fair, and so we spent more time sampling cool treats than artistic creations.

Brown Out

Write Knuckler

R.A. Dickey is an accomplished pitcher for the New York Mets whose big-league career has fluttered and progressed as slowly as a knuckleball, his signature pitch. In fact, he didn’t make a regular rotation until 2010 at the baseball-ancient age of 35. He has been nearly unhittable this year, going 44 1/3 innings without allowing an earned run. In that stretch, he threw back-to-back one-hitters, and his hot start earned him his first selection to the Major League All-Star Game.

Dickey’s unlikely rise to prominence in the baseball world would have made for a compelling read alone, but the fact that he’s a humanitarian whose causes include raising awareness and funds for the victims of human trafficking and providing aid for impoverished Latin American communities—issues typically outside of the purview of professional athletes—make his life story that much more intriguing. His empathies are informed, undoubtedly, by his own experiences with sexual abuse as a child, all of which he courageously chronicles in this book. It’s also clear that he’s a man of deep religious conviction, and he credits his faith for his success and with getting him through his darkest moments.

Given all R.A. Dickey has gone through personally and professionally, you can't help but root for him—even if you're a Yankees or non-sports fan.

Disguise the Limit

Along Came Polysemy

Polysemy [pol-ee-see-mee] is the linguistic term for a diversity of meanings for a given word. Bow, table, and jar are polysemous words, as is the example below.

play
noun 
          a dramatic performance, as on the stage: The girls collected autographs of the stage actors after a dress rehearsal of a Shakespeare play.

play 
verb 

          to exercise or employ oneself in diversion, amusement, or recreation: Reed likes to play on the swings with his dad.

Scattered Shots

As the sun continues to dry our parched lawns and used-to-be-green-spaces, here are some sundry pics of the kids out and about today.

By the Book

Going to our local library and reading in bed are two of our most favorite activities.

Game-Time Decisions

 

The kids often opt for the king—and queen, rook, bishop, knight, and pawn—of board games (Reed calls it "chest"), while I prefer the letter-perfect word game of Scrabble, the electronic version of which saw my player rating creep north of the previously elusive 1800 mark for the first time today. This means nothing to anyone but the most ardent Scrabble enthusiasts, and even they would contend that these ratings are inflated because of an on-line player’s access to dictionaries, best-play tutorials, and unlimited attempts at finding playable words—all of which are not found or allowed in traditional tournament play. But alas, this sort of thing means a lot in my circle of hard-Scrabble friends, and I consider this recent achievement to be tombstone material.