Small Objects, Big Challenges

I found one tiny acorn today. It was perfect. Small birds swarmed into my naked apple tree. Despite the fierce, hurricane winds that blew in through here earlier this month, somehow a quantity of dried apples still cling to their branches. They must not have much internal moisture left, but birds still pick at them gingerly. The bird who sips too much fermented apple juice will fly away wobbly.

Eying these birds today was our frequent visitor, Oliver the cat. I greeted him, but unlike one of the main characters in Murakami's brilliant Kafka on the Shore, I cannot understand cat language.

The book continues to pull me apart from the "real world," and toward the land of mysterious spirits. I've come to the conclusion that there is no greater novelist writing today anywhere in the world. Few are the contemporary novels that can transform a reader's day from the blur of mindlessness to the acuity of mindfulness, but this book is one.

I can only handle a few chapters each day; then I must set it down and immerse myself in the New York Times or CNN, or some other, less challenging purveyor of information.

The small things, the details.

Too often, we overlook them. Yes, the devil is in the details, but so is the answer you've been seeking. The objects at the top of this post are what I used in working with my nine-year-old tonight on her math homework. She's the kind of kid who loves the parts of math that come easily to her (adding), hates the parts she finds hard (subtraction), and fears the parts that (despite her parents' urging) require practice, over and over, if she is ever to commit them to her memory, i.e., multiplication.

(Let's not even consider what teaching her division will entail.)

So tonight, as she hung her head in despair, I got out my boxes of stones and seaglass and coins and slowly, piece by piece, explained how to understand the business of multiplying numbers. I am not and never will be a great math teacher, but this palpable, real-world collection of objects often seems exactly what a third-grader needs as she encounters these strange new permutations of arithmetic conventions like multiplying and dividing.

Math is a great tease, enticing you in with the pleasure of early conquests, only to torture you whenever you hit one of its many invisible walls. Much like the opera.

In any event, there are other numerical reports to give passing mention to tonight. Romney finally won a primary, in my native Michigan, so the Republican race remains muddled. National polls indicate Obama and Clinton are in a tight race, but the next set of critical primaries should reveal just how tight it actually is.

We're reaching the point in the primary races where money may dictate who survives and who withdraws. Super Tuesday, including the incredibly delegate-rich Democratic states of California and New York, looms three weeks from now. Our California Voter's Guides arrived today.

Stay tuned. I'll analyze the polls and the primaries up until the point both major parties have a presumptive nominee...

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