Before her untimely demise, Jeannette looked something like this:

She was a lovely little snake, with a nice yellow stripe down the middle of her back. She was about 10 inches long. We don’t think she made it to full adulthood.

My children gathered with their neighbors (also 8 and 6) to put Jeannette to rest. First, they determined she was a girl. Then they named her. Then they chose a resting place in a flowerbed. Then, while wailing loudly, they gathered flowers and other decorations to mark her gravesite.

Finally, they added a headstone with her initials on it:

After that, they went inside to eat and visit, which is what one always does after a funeral.

Rest in peace, our reptilian friend.

Anyway, today’s lecture started off about recognizing patterns in series of numbers added together. I knew (half my life ago) that there was a shortcut, but I never knew what it was or even thought about it after high school.

Professor Arthur Benjamin* showed an example series. Say you want to add up consecutive odd numbers starting with one. What’s a quick way to determine the sum without physically adding them all? You try to find the pattern.

1=1

1+3=4

1+3+5=9

1+3+5+7=16

1+3+5+7+9=25

and so forth.

If you were to assign the number n to mean the number of numbers (sorry if that’s confusing) in the series, you’d start to see a pattern:

if n=1, then the series is 1=1, which is the same as 1=1²

if n=2, the series is 1+3=4, which is the same as 1+3=2²

if n=3, the series is 1+3+5=9, which is the same as 1+3+5=3²

and so on. So we figure out that if we add together n consecutive odd numbers starting with one, the sum will be n².

Let’s say we have the series:

1+3+5+7+9+11+13+15+17+19+21

We can count all the numbers, and we see there are 11. Eleven squared is 121, so the sum of that series is 121.

But what if you have a series that’s super long, and you don’t want to count how many numbers are in it? You find the pattern for the last number in the series and how it relates to n.

Again, the series:

for 1 , n = 1

for 1+3, n = 2

for 1+3+5, n = 3

for 1+3+5+7, n = 4

so,

when n = 1, the last number in the series is 1

when n = 2, the last number is 3

when n = 3, the last number is 5

and when n = 4, the last number is 7

If we puzzle it out, we’ll notice that by doubling n and subtracting 1, we’ll get that last number. So, for example, when n = 4, we get the last number, 7, by doubling 4 to make 8 and subtracting 1.  The last number is 2n-1.

So now we can write the series this way:

1+3+5+7+…+(2n-1)=n²

I now have the shortcut. If I want to know what the sum of all odd numbers up to 99 are, I don’t have to write them out. I can say, “I know the last number is 99, so 2n-1 is 99. I can add one to make 100, divide it by 2 to get 50, and now I know n is 50. So the sum is 50 squared, which is 2500.”

I determined to figure out on my own the pattern for summing consecutive even numbers starting with 2, and in about 15 minutes of drawing it out, I did it! The answer is:

2+4+6+8+…+2n=n(n+1)

If I want to know the sum of all even numbers up to 100, I know that n=50, which makes the sum 50 times 51, or 2550.

I’ve never figured out a mathematical pattern by myself before, so I just wanted to share. It was kind of exciting!

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*Arthur Benjamin is a wonderfully enthusiastic teacher. You can check out his “Mathemagician” web page here.

During the summer there was an episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition where young country music star Miranda Lambert sang her #1 hit “The House That Built Me” to the people who had just received their dream house, mortgage-free. It’s a sentimental song, but she sings it with genuine emotion, and it’s a song that, if it catches you in the right mood, will leave you weeping.* These people sat on a couch watching her play the guitar and sing. They looked absolutely miserable. They had wept when they saw the house, wept again as they walked around it, but now they sat dry-eyed and looking like they couldn’t wait for the moment to end.

It was sooo uncomfortable. And I think I know why.

Art conveys emotion to its audience. When that art is something static, like a painting, we can absorb the feeling without self-consciousness. We know that it moves us, and we enjoy the experience because we have no expectations that the painting is watching us watching it or that the artist is nearby waiting for our reaction.

Performance art is different. When it’s you one-on-one with the performer, it feels like all of the emotion is directed at you alone. It feels personal, and that’s an intimacy that’s too intense to handle most of the time. You become self-conscious that the performer has expectations about a reaction from you, and you start to worry that you’re not conveying the correct one. That self-consciousness takes you out of the moment. I think we need a co-audience to deflect some of the emotion so that we can actually appreciate performance art.

I think if you re-did the Joshua Bell experiment and planted a small crowd in front of him you’d see a completely different reaction from passersby. I’m curious what y’all think.

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*This song always catches me in the right mood. It’s embarrassing, actually.

Today I stumbled across this fascinating old article from the Washington Post about virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html

A reporter challenged him to play in a Metro station as a street musician to see what would happen. Would commuters on their way to work recognize the transcendent beauty of his playing, or would they hurry on by?

Bell had sold out Boston’s Symphony Hall three days earlier. Tickets for okay seats ran $100 each.

As a former commuter to work, I suspected I knew what would happen. The one and only time I stopped on my way to work in six years was when I saw a pedestrian get hit by a car. A marching band followed by a parade of elephants wouldn’t have slowed me; I was never an early arrival with time to spare.

Some folks worried beforehand that L’Enfant Plaza would have a crowd control problem on its hands with Bell playing, but out of nearly 1,100 commuters that passed by him in the 43 minutes he played, only one recognized him. And a crowd never gathered.

It’s been theorized that beauty is contextual, and I can agree with that. A sunrise when you’re running late getting the kids to school is nowhere close to as lovely as one that arrives after you’ve spent the night in restless sleep wishing the day would come. Especially if that restless sleep is a result of nightmares about evil, supernatural nocturnal creatures coming after you.

I have weird dreams. But that’s beside the point.

I think being in the right frame of mind for beauty is important. As a museum curator in the article pointed out, it’s easier to appreciate a great painting in a museum than to appreciate the same painting reframed and stuck in a coffeehouse with a $150 price tag slapped on it.

But I think that’s only part of the problem. Another part is recognition by others. I think we have so many stimuli coming our way that one way we filter them and decide to stop and pay attention is if other people are already paying attention. Who looks at the sky unless someone is pointing?

Think about paintings again. What painting commands the most attention and respect in the world?

It’s a great painting, sure, but the personal experience is far from transcendent. It’s just you and 100 jostling other people behind a velvet rope 10 feet back looking at a painting through bulletproof glass. But people want to see it because they know it because everyone talks about it.

My favorite paintings are at the Prado in Madrid. But again, this is not original. I was primed for them because at 19 I desperately wanted to go to Europe and I had taken art history and my best friend in childhood had a copy of Velazquez’s Las Meninas hanging in her house. And they’re in an art museum, not a coffeeshop.

I also like this one in the Prado by Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son:

Did I mention the nightmares?

Going back to the subway station, if no one else were stopping to listen, would the music penetrate your consciousness to the point that you’d stop, especially if you were in a hurry?

I’d bet not. But if a huge crowd were gathered, you’d probably stop to look and ask people what was going on. And when they told you a famous musician was playing, you might stick around.

It’s an interesting article, and has video attached. Check it out.

EDIT:

The Big M reminds me that another reason that people aren’t stopping is that it’s uncomfortable to stand close to street musicians, who are just on the edge of panhandling. If it’s just you, you feel weird. If you’re part of a crowd, you don’t. Case in point: note that the only person who stood front and center to watch Bell was a woman who recognized him and knew he wasn’t really a street performer. Even the man who recognized his talent (if not him) and was enthralled by it stood away against a pillar out of the direct line of sight. When he had to get to work, he snuck in to drop money in the violin case and scurried away again as quickly as he could.

My six-year-old stopped me after the first line. “Who is Constance?” she asked. I explained that she was the character we had just read about.

She looked shocked. “My God!” she exclaimed, “she sounds like that?!”

After I stopped laughing, we worked together on an acceptable voice. So much for creating characters on the fly.

He plays Angry Birds on his iPhone and listens. Or surfs Craigslist for Corvettes. And listens.

He can multitask. I’m bad at that. I can’t even listen to the radio while I drive.

Reading to the kids used to bore the heck out of me until several years ago when I got smart enough to dump the repetitive picture books and pick up children’s novels instead. I do very theatrical readings, which is ironic because I always sucked at theater. (Is that ironic in the Alanis Morissette sense or in the literary sense? I always get those confused.)

Children’s novels are a good fit for my style. They’re generally not very subtle. Over-emoting is encouraged.

Here’s the weird thing, though: after interpreting characters on the fly for years (I never read ahead because then it would be boring) I’m becoming good at it.

I’ve had my challenges this summer. Make up melodies for the written lyrics that Pa plays on his fiddle in Little House? No problem. Alternate between a male American narrator and a female British narrator in Rick Riordan’s The Red Pyramid? Nailed it. Keep 20-odd characters in that novel straight,  including accents from the American South, the Middle East, Germany, France, and Russia? Exhausting, but done. And trust me, if I miss one, the kids call me on it.

We’re reading this one now, a book I picked up purely because of its cover:

I’m a sucker for any children’s book that reminds me of Edward Gorey, the brilliant 20th century Gothic illustrator. This one has the added benefit of being a puzzle book, á la The Westing Game, a childhood favorite of mine.

It’s so much fun. We’re three chapters in, and we’ve got a mysterious and quirky puzzle plot that has all four of us guessing, plus five distinct characters to voice so far. (Sticky Washington is my favorite to voice — my version of him has a slight Spanish accent that’s soft and lilting and makes every statement into a question.)

The kids hang on my every word, and even though I know it’s the story that rivets them I feel like I’m a part of it too. I get to inject my own creativity into each book. That’s really gratifying.

One thing I’m learning as an aspiring writer: reading aloud exposes bad dialogue very quickly. Luckily we’re not having that problem with this novel.

I love this sign. It’s outside the full-scale replica of the Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee. What would Socrates say?

P.S. Am looking through vacation photos now that the kids are in school. I’ll eventually write about The Bath.

I’m so glad they did. I had forgotten how delightful this book is.

We finished re-learning about how Ma made cheese and how she prepared hominy (which she called hulled corn) and how Pa convinced all his neighbors in the Big Woods of Wisconsin to hire an eight-horse-powered (literally horse powered) threshing machine that could do three weeks of work in a single day. In the end they are ready for winter, with their ample food stores in attic and cellar, and Pa plays his fiddle, sending us out to the strains of Auld Lang Syne.

When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, “What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?”

“They are the days of a long time ago, Laura,” Pa said. “Go to sleep, now.”

But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa’s fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the fire-light gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.

She thought to herself, “This is now.”

She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the fire-light and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

That’s the end.

I found myself having to stop and take breaks reading this last bit because I kept choking up. Maybe it was Auld Lang Syne that set me off. I have a pre-existing weakness for that song because it’s what George Bailey sings when he’s reunited with his family and friends after he realizes that his life is worth living.

More than that, though, it was the understanding that Laura wrote this book in her 60′s, looking back on a way of life that by then no longer existed. I’m reading this book about a time more than 130 years ago, and little Laura thinks, “this is now”, and I’m looking at my own “now” and seeing how different it already is than the “now” of our last reading this book together, and I know that in a blink I’ll be in my 60′s and today’s “now” will be a long time ago.

What can I say? I’m a sentimental fool.

But now that I sit and think it out, I realize that I was this sentimental last time I read the book. And as much as I loved being with my 3- and 5-year-olds, I wouldn’t trade today’s “now” to go back to then. I’m enjoying today too much.

So I feel better.

Mostly.

Just trying to be honest.

“How about PB and banana?” I asked the kids. “That was Elvis’ favorite sandwich.”

“Who’s Elvis?” they wanted to know. Which was a better response than the expected, “Yuck!”

So while I slapped together the ingredients, I told them. “Elvis was a singer. He was one of the most successful singers who ever lived. He brought the blues to rock and roll.”

“What are the blues?”

This question caused me to bust out in my own blues riff about being out of jelly and having to make peanut butter and banana sandwiches. They weren’t impressed.

“You don’t sound very sad,” my boy told me.

So then I did my best imitation of Big Mama Thornton singing Hound Dog. It’s sort of mid-tempo, and she’s disgusted with the guy she’s singing about. They seemed to like that one better.

“Elvis changed it like this,” I said, and I did my rendition of him. I’m two lines in before my girl starts dancing. So then I pulled out my laptop and we listened to the real Elvis. They forgot all about sandwiches and started rocking out to The King in the kitchen.

“Y’all have no idea how radical this music was. When Elvis first came out, this was the kind of music people listened to…” On my computer I pulled up a bunch of doo-wop and mid ’50s rock. We listened to it in all its chorale earnestness and sleepy tempo.

“This is really boring,” my girl said.

“Now Elvis.” I put Hound Dog back on, and they were rocking out again. We danced to All Shook Up, Jailhouse Rock, and Don’t Be Cruel. They wandered off to the living room when I put on a ballad, so I took that opportunity to finish assembling lunch. Afterward, we watched this YouTube of Elvis’ breakthrough performance on Milton Berle:

“Elvis looks like a scientist,” my boy said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“He’s wearing a white coat. He looks like he could do experiments when he’s not singing.”

I thought that was pretty funny.

As it turned out, the experimental sandwiches were kind of yucky. But we had fun.

Our boy has been very involved in the process. Every time Dad takes out his wallet, an eight-year-old voice pipes up. “Dad, is that the Corvette money?” On the rare occasions that yes, it is some of the Corvette money being spent on a necessity, Dad must endure the wrath of a small boy.

It’s been a lot of fun watching the two of them search Craigslist together for dream cars and daily drivers. They discuss options and colors and condition quality ad nauseum, and I’m glad to let them do it.

Our kid is very opinionated, and very interested in making his opinion heard. When Dad decided to buy a particular daily driver that the boy didn’t like, he let his father have it. And when Dad cut off the audio assault, he moved to a written one. Here it is:

I don’t know if I find the assertion that “it smells weard” funnier or the line about “it had ants so it creaped me out.” Or maybe the fact that he split up the word “truck” so as to stay within the margins.

To bolster his argument, he got his sister in on it:

You’ll have to insert “The Boy” into the blank part. But he had her sold on the windows not rolling down part.

Alas for those two, their dad bought the truck anyway. It seems for now that he has rid it of ants, and he figured out how to replace the window motors so that they now roll down. We’re hoping it will be a reliable daily driver while he searches for his dream car.

Happy Friday.