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.

How Art Thou Fair?

Fair-ly good, I’d say, although it felt as though we were in a giant pottery kiln.

We stopped by the expansive Ann Arbor Street Art Fair, where we sought various forms of relief from the hot and humid conditions.

Fared Well

This crew is no worse for the wear after their week together. Many thanks to G and Aunt Liz for watching our lovely and lively children during our ten-year anniversary vacation.

Jump Street Knowledge

This movie is crude, full of juvenile humor, and extremely raunchy. In other words, it was the perfect date-night choice for me and Beni. (She wants me to note that Channing Tatum’s starring role might have played a major part in her approval of the film.)

American (Girl) Dream

Olivia asks to visit American Girl stores the way I imagine my younger self pressed my parents to stop by Hard Rock Cafes during our family vacations. I remember the cachet those logo tees held. Rocking one of their shirts at school after a recent trip to a big city netted you some coolness points, and owning several all but ensured you a place high in the social strata. (Unless, of course, you wore a bootleg version purchased from a street vendor by the convention center.)

I’ve never owned a (real) Hard Rock shirt in my life, but my parents deserve no blame for my uncool schoolboy status as a result of their refusal to pay what was clearly an exorbitant markup on a plain tee that bore the logo of a restaurant in which we’d never dined. So why can’t I practice my parents’ brand of fiscal discipline when navigating an American Girl store and their life-size prices?

Maybe it’s that I’ve bought into the notion that children can discover and love the subject of history through their interactions with these dolls and their backstories. Or maybe I’m a giant pushover.

Either way, I’m glad that I’m not the sole financier of this pricy operation. Olivia’s grandmothers have been very generous toward her efforts to build up her doll collection. On this super-hot summer day, my mother-in-law scored some major cool points with her granddaughter after treating her at the American Girl store in St. Louis.

Fine Art-ist

The Artist was my final selection of a triad of movies I was determined to get through on our flight home from Hawaii. It needed to keep my attention, which is a tall order given my general vacation exhaustion and specific sleep-disorder affliction. The odds were steep—steeper yet when you consider that the film is bereft of color and sound—and so one measure of The Artist’s greatness is that it kept my somnolently inclined self from sliding into a slumbering state. This film is a true masterpiece.