The Miracle of Every Day

I'm going to break with tradition in this blog and go personal for an entry.  I had a timely experience that queued up in my mind something I felt ought to be communicated, and it just happened to be personal.  So there.

This morning I walked my kindergartener to school.  We had a conversation that went like this:

Son:  Mommy, I really wish I could have known my great, great, great, great grandfather.

Me:  I understand, but I didn't even know him.  He died before I was even born.  But I knew one of your great-grandfathers.  The one who was my father's father.  My mother's father had died before I was born.

Son:  Tell me about him.

Me:  Well, he lived in Russia and he came to America.  He married your great grandmother and they had four kids.  One was your grandfather.  He had the same name as you. 

Son:  I wish I had known your mommy and daddy.  What were they like?

Me:  I wish you had known them, too.  My mommy was such a wonderful person.  Everyone loved her.  I sometimes joked that my friends loved my mother more than they loved me.  She would have loved you so very much.  She was very loving.  She was kind to everyone she met, and she was kind to all living things.  She was also very smart.  You could ask her anything and she would know the answer, or know where to find it.  And she was very funny.  She made people laugh and enjoyed making them laugh.

Son:  What about your daddy?

Me:  He was very smart and loved his work.  He was very good at what he did; he was a scientist, a professor, a writer.  He taught me a lot.  He took me to his lab and I learned a lot just by watching him, so I was very good in science later on.  And he played ball, and card games and chess with me.  I don't think he remembered a lot about how to play with kids by the time I was old enough to want to play, but he tried.  And he came to my plays when I was acting in high school, and all my graduations.  And he wrote me letters when I was in college and law school.  He wasn't easy to be close to, but I know he loved me and he would have loved you.

Son:  I wish I could know them.

Me:  I wish you could, too.  You can't know them as living people, but I have videos of them and tapes of their voices, and pictures you can see.  And I can tell you about them. 

This is the hardest part of being an older parent.  Lack of grandparents.  This is the hardest part of being an outlier from the rest of the extended family.

What's the answer?  I don't think there is one.  And I'm sad about it, but I refuse to view myself as lacking as a parent somehow because of it.  I never knew one of my grandparents, and one died when I was one.  Even though the other two shared a good bit of my life span, they lived far away and I didn't see them much.  So if my kids only have a single living grandparent, and see her sporadically, it is what it is.  It is not optimal, but it is what it is.

But the miracle of every day life is that despite the lack of a continually or even frequently present extended family, my kindergartener is developing a sense of personal history.  He is becoming a person with a history, and that is, to me, miraculous.  May he have a grand and worthy history, that, as he comes to know it and to build it for himself, will serve him well.  I hope that thanks to his brother, he will always have stability and continuity in that history.  Having lost both parents prior to having my own kids, and having no siblings, it was very important to me that mine have at least one other person bound to them through immediate family ties that they could turn to, always.  And the bonus is, I'll have that, too.   

**Morgana**

Tea Update: It's Not a Problem So Much as an Issue...

Since when did we decide, collectively, that we were all so perfect we couldn't have problems anymore?  Instead, we have "issues."  Daddy issues, work issues -- nothing is ever a problem.  Problems are things that used to mark us with character flaws, or render us incompetent.  Issues are things that might or might not be problems depending on how we address them (or successfully distance ourselves from them).  Issues are things that our very California-inspired, passive-aggressive collective consciousness can deal with, no matter what.

Perhaps the idea is that language is power and if we call something a problem that will most assuredly make it definitely a problem; whereas if something is a more gentle sounding "issue" it might or might not be a real problem.  We're not sure.  If it is, though, it isn't because of our character flaws or incompetence.  Most likely it's because of somebody else's "issue."  So his or her head should roll, not ours.  I agree that language is power, but the problem/issue thing seems to me, as you've likely gathered, to go way too far.  And, it seems, I'm not the first to have had this thought.  For musings after my own mind, take a read here.

Lest it begin to sound as though I'm in William Safire mode (who also apparently wrote on the problem/issue point though I couldn't dig it up quickly online) today, let me step down from my soap box and talk some more about tea.  Specifically, my rapid evolution as a tea drinker over the last week plus.

I have learned so much in the past twelve days I'm more than a little embarrassed at the naivete I displayed in my February 5 post.  In particular, I have learned how to correct myriad tea problems, or at least reduce them to being mere "issues." 

For one thing, though I went out and bought a ridiculous number of different types of tea bags only a week or so ago to begin my tea tasting adventure, I have now become convinced that I must move on to loose tea sooner rather than later.  To that end, after researching the various methods of keeping the loose tea from becoming dental floss when one sips, I have settled upon the Finum Teeli filters as my initial method of choice.  Tea balls, I've read, compact the tea too much.  One must give the leaves plenty of room to unfurl.  I have also ordered a set of tasting samples to try out my new filters.  I may have reached a bit high for my first try as I went with Oolongs from Upton Tea, but we'll see. 

I've stopped using water from the tap, and have been experimenting with either using the bottled water I have delivered every two weeks or tap water passed through a Brita filter.  Both seem to work better than pure tap water.  And the piece de resistance is my brand spanking new Zorijushi water heater/boiler.  I made (bagged) green tea with it today at both 140 degrees and 175 degrees, and for the first time, I understood the appeal of green tea.  I can only imagine the heavenly result when I graduate to fine, loose tea.

Additionally, I've read a couple of books about tea, which I've added to my Read on the Spot list in the sidebar, and I've bookmarked a number of online tea sites as well as becoming a member of Steepster just for giggles (I've already been so bold as to offer some opinions on teas there as well, where I am __Morgana__ as they don't permit user names with asterisks).  Here are just a few of the sites I've been enjoying browsing:  Upton Tea, American Tea Room, Todd and Holland, The Necessiteas, Harney & Sons, The Tao of Tea, Adagio Teas, and Rishi Tea.

The search for the perfect cup of tea is fast becoming something of an obsession to me, but at least it's a relatively healthy one that adds to rather than taking away from other enjoyments and commitments.  It isn't my intention to inject my novice palate into the already rather crowded world of tea blogging to the extent that Morgana's Spot ends up being completely hijacked, but at the same time I'm enjoying my tea adventures so much that I have a feeling this won't be my last word on the subject.

**Morgana**

On the Problem of Tea

Let's begin with a confession.  I am a coffee drinker, and have been virtually since birth.  I was born in Chicago, without the hot chocolate-loving gene.  So from the time I was a wee tot, my mother heated me up on winter outings with my preferred beverage -- coffee.  Cream, no sugar, just the way she liked it and so I came to like it, too.  I acquired a taste for hot chocolate later in life (for all its relevance to this discussion, which is to say, not at all).

From time to time, I've tried to become a tea drinker.  Not to supplant my coffee addiction, but to supplement it.  Typically, the desire is whetted when I have a really wonderful cup of tea and wonder why it isn't a greater part of my life.  Then I remember.  Most of the time, the tea I make has at best no taste I can discern, and at worst, tastes simply like hot water, or the vehicles by which it entered the hot water:  paper or metal.

This begs the question of whether it is simply that my tea-making skills suck.  This could well be.  In my recent foray into tea drinking, I actually read the packaging and discovered there is a preferred hotness of the water (sometimes boiling, sometimes not) for pouring over the bag or leaves, depending on the brew.  And a preferred steeping time, also depending on the brew.  I paid attention this time and I have improved my results.  More on that later.

I should also say that I don't use condiments in tea.  My father drank it with lemon, but most tea with lemon tastes like weak, hot lemonade to me.  Pretty gross.  So unless the tea is a lemon tea to start with, I've passed on the lemon.  In college, I had a roomie who drank tea with honey.  So I tried that as well.  Every tea I tried that way tasted like honey diluted with hot water.  Where was the tea?  And then, being an Anglophile of sorts, I tried drinking tea with milk and sugar for some time.  When I did, I tasted hot water, sugar and weak milk, but no tea.  I stilll drank it that way until my recent foray, though, just to look worldly.

If it hadn't been for the really stupendous cups of tea I happened on from time to time, I might well have concluded that tea was a sort of placebo:  that it deludes people into believing they are drinking something more flavorful than hot water, through various ruses like color and aroma, and a statistically significant group of them claim actually to like it.  One of my major complaints about teas is that many smell wonderful, but the smell doesn't translate into taste -- I know the two senses are biologically related, but I feel it a sorry second if the primary enjoyment I get from a beverage is smelling it rather than tasting it, and often aromatic teas again simply taste like hot water to me no matter how wonderful they smell.

If you are a tea aficionado, you might, at this point, question my tasting mechanism.  Is it possible that seven or so years of smoking, which ended about 14 years ago, dulled my taste buds?  Or that the stronger, richer, fuller taste of coffee has undone my ability to taste subtlety?  (Is tea supposed to have more subtle flavoring than coffee?  I don't know.  It does to me.)  It may be, but I don't think so.  I can taste subtle flavors in foods and in wines.  So why not teas?

Maybe I haven't tried hard enough.  My usual tea phase starts with a decision that I should get to know tea, a purchase of several types, along with some supplies, such as tea balls or strainers.  I taste hot water and clog my drain with tea leaves, so I let it sit in my pantry until the next time I get moved to convert.  If I go back to it, it's probably stale by that time and so not fair to judge.

My latest tea attempt was fueled by my weight loss efforts.  To put it mildly, I'd been drinking a shitload of Diet Coke and chomping a shitload of sugar free gum.  When my consumption went up to about eight 20-ounce bottles of Diet Coke and a pack or so of gum a day, I thought perhaps I was entering lab rat territory on the Aspartame front so decided there had to be some other low cal beverage I could put into the mix that would calm my orally fixated self.  Tea seemed the perfect fit.  I just needed the right tea to start with.  In the past I'd done Twinings and Bigelow, so I got some of that -- mostly the old favorites like Constant Comment, Earl Grey and some herbal ones.  But I was pretty curious about Tazo.  I'd seen it in Starbucks forever, but never tried it.  (And I'm not being paid by any of these companies.  Oh would that it were.  I can use any additional money I can get these days....)

I took myself over to one of my four local Starbucks -- don't get me started -- and found the Tazo section.  I discovered that Starbucks had recently commissioned Tazo to do a full leaf version of its teas in what they call "sachets" (which makes me think of the little do-dads my mother always stuck in my underwear drawer); tea bags that are made of fabric rather than paper.  This was apparently big news when it happened, though I learned of it months later from the 20-something Barrista I'd asked whether the cool-looking tins contained loose tea that would require the purchase of tea-making accoutrements.  I bought a few kinds and went home to try one.

I got really lucky on the first one.  Wow.  With Vanilla Rooibos I was finally able to replicate the experience of an awesome flavored tea at home.  This gave me courage.  I tried Calm, Passion, Awake, Chai and Orange Blossom, and all of them worked to some extent.  In any case, better than I'd recalled with other brands in other times.  The better ones were actually the herbals.  The teas themselves had less impact, but it was still a much better experience than it ever has been in the past.  Though the Bigelow I Love Lemon and Peppermint came out nicely as well.  I still can't really get Green Tea to work, though I've not tried a Tazo version as yet.  The Twinings was disappointingly weak and flavorless.

Why might my tea experience be improving?  First, let me say I am being very anal about tea preparation.  I follow the directions, as mentioned before -- I set a timer for steeping and don't let it go one more, or less, second than it is supposed to.  But it may also have something to do with the state of my body in general. 

I've written about my weight loss efforts before, and I can say now that I have made an honest drivers license of my driver's license.  It says 140, and so I am; give or take.  I was down to 139 the other morning and up at 143 the next, and I just got back from a week long convention-type business trip that is bound to have wreaked havoc with my body.  They even joked during the last session about the week of caffeine, sugar and alcohol, and yes, I was one of those who succumbed.  But I'm still in much better shape than I've ever been and I've resolved to get back on track tomorrow. 

Getting here has been, as Shay of biggest loser fame would say, "a journey."  I'm on month 7+ of weight loss, probably the longest time I've gone where I've really eaten almost no junk and have exercised like a machine.  I'm also older than in previous tea-loving attempts, and probably entering "the change" slowly but surely.   It seems plausible to me that a palate unhindered by too many bad fats and simple sugars, and in hormonal flux, could be a tea-loving palate.  I think about the tea lovers I know, and they are generally pretty healthy folks, and older folks.  Anecdotal, I know, but it's what I've observed.  And tea itself is touted as a healthful beverage.  Coincidence?  Which is the chicken and which is the egg? 

In any case, as you have gleaned, I'm giving tea another try.  I once said to someone I'm willing to try anything once.  Fortunately for me, he did not hold me to that.  Tea has gotten a lot of passes from me on the try anything once front, and somehow I think it will eventually be worth the repeated attempts.  I'm already tasting the difference.

**Morgana**

Can't Stop Saab-in'

I never thought I'd be sad to hear of the demise of a car brand, particularly one of a car I've never owned.  But the death of Saab is making me surprisingly melancholy.

I've only driven one Saab, once.  It was about fifteen years old and had had several previous owners, but it was still a powerful, liberating experience.  The feeling was hard to describe.  The closest I can come is to say it is the same feeling I have when I step off a plane in a country I haven't visited before:  one of adventure, of appreciation for something foreign yet familiar, of the potential for something interesting, cool, and memorable to happen at any second.

My dream sports car for years has been a Jaguar XKR, but once I had kids I realized that was likely to stay a dream for a long time given its price tag -- absent a best-selling novel, a winning lottery ticket, or a wealthy, distant relative randomly deciding to leave me everything and then kicking the bucket, all of which are about equally probable (which is to say, not at all).  Next in line was a Saab 9-3 convertible.   Though I bought an SUV when kid number two arrived, I kept my ten year old old Acura Integra since it had (1) been a gift from my mother and (2) no trade in value anyway, with the depression-era thought that in another 14 years or so I could hand over the keys to kid number one, thus saving the used car shopping angst.  Still, I nurtured a secret fantasy that if the Acura ever died, I'd replace it with a brand spanking new Saab 9-3.  Thanks, GM, for dashing another of my increasingly few secret fantasies into teeny, tiny fragments.

Apart from its style and the fact that its cars weren't a dime a dozen even on the luxury car clogged freeways of California, one of the coolest things about Saab, to me, anyway, was its origins as an aircraft builder.  Come to think of it, maybe that's why the feeling I had while driving one was one of descending an airplane into new territory.  And that's probably what the fantasy is all about at its root anyway:  freedom, adventure, and possibility.

**Morgana**

Fear Itself?

What the hell is wrong with the Democrats?

Why must they waste the amazing opportunity they have been given -- majorities in both houses of Congress and the Presidency – by not passing health care legislation that is truly universal?  It sure seems like this is what is happening, though I still hold out hope for a miracle.

Are they so beholden to the insurance lobby that they are simply paralyzed, and can only mumble something about how much it’s going to cost (while voting for innumerable other costly projects that are not nearly as important to peoples' lives) because they’re afraid to say their real concerns:  they need that insurance lobby money to get reelected?  My boyfriend, a far more paranoid individual than myself, thinks this is about more than money and reelection.  He thinks it's about insurance industry corporate henchmen, mysterious disappearances, apparent suicides that aren't really suicides, the stuff of movie thrillers.  He may have a point, but I think it's more likely insurance companies would retaliate by simply waiting until their enemies have life-threatening illnesses and then denying their claims for care on the basis these people had acne as teenagers and didn't disclose it when asked about preexisting conditions.

But whatever the origin of the fear, can this really be just about fear? Until now I’d refused to believe the so-called "Blue Dog" Democrats are fundamentally incompetent or unprincipled to a person, but if this isn’t about fear, perhaps I should rethink that. Otherwise there is simply no excuse for not adopting health care legislation that includes a public option.

What the hell is wrong with the Democrats?

Mostly I blame President Obama for not stepping in quickly enough to take charge of the debate instead of letting it flail and languish while doubt was cast over every portion of the bill that made any sense if what you care about at the end of the day is making sure there is universal health care. Then muddying the waters with the diversion of the Afghanistan strategy before the health care vote was even had.

I voted for Obama in part because I thought he had chutzpah, and I thought he had principles. I thought he cared more about those principles than reelection. What I wanted to see him do with health care is go knock heads together and get a public option passed; and, by the way, why should he even have to knock heads together since there’s a Democratic majority in Congress?

What the hell is wrong with the Democrats?

I wanted to see President Obama stare into the face of the fear that demanding his party pass legislation including a public option would mean he wouldn’t be reelected – and do it anyway. I wanted to see him bet his Presidency on this, because he believed in it. Somehow, I think if he had done so, his approval ratings would have zoomed through the roof for one simple reason.  It would show he was not afraid. Not being afraid would make him different from every other politician currently in office in this country. What is the point of being elected if you’re too afraid to get the job done once you’ve gotten elected?

The tragedy is there is an opportunity here to make a statement that every person is entitled to health care as a fundamental human right. Once you accept that health care is a fundamental human right, you can’t let concerns about money get in the way. You have to find a way to make it work for every American. This is the lesson from the Medicare experience – get the bill passed and then find a way to pay for it. And watch it become one of the most popular US government actions of all time.

We all know people who say it’s not a good time to have kids, buy a house, you name whatever the dream may be, because they’re afraid of the financial commitment. The fallacy is, if you have those fears, there will never be a “good” time. There is no good time, there’s just the time you decide to take a bold step into fear because it is worth it to do so.  And a good many people who do, when they look back on that step, can't imagine not having taken it because their lives are so much better for it.  What makes it even sweeter is the knowledge that they conquered their fear in taking the step toward what they now feel is the best thing they ever did.

It’s astonishing and more than a little nauseating to think that though the United States is the only superpower, we’re unable to provide affordable health care to all our people. So many other countries that are nowhere near superpower status have made this commitment. Why?  Because it is the right thing to do.  And the stakes are incredibly high here if we don't do the right thing.  They are, literally, a life and death matter.

(By the way, the number 2 son decided to be a skeleton for Halloween this year after striking out on finding a snake costume.  Scary, isn't he?)

What the hell is wrong with the Democrats?

My father was a medical academic. He devoted his life to research to enable others to heal, and teaching others to heal, because although like everyone else he needed to make a living he couldn’t stomach accepting money from sick people to make them well. Instead of making the sort of money doctors in private practice made, he made a lot less, but he adored his work and he viewed provision of health care as a noble calling.  And he viewed health care as a right every human has, just because they are human.

I am certain that he would have expressed the same sentiment I’m going to about my own political party, though he’d probably have used the phrase “they stank it up.” In my view there’s only one phrase to describe the Democrats when it comes to health care: They’re all a bunch of pussies.

And shame on Joe Lieberman, too.  So much for tikkun olam.

**Morgana**

Three Things Restaurant Staffers Should Always Do

During my workout a couple of weeks ago, I was listening to NPR when I heard a piece on a post in the You're the Boss blog by a fellow named Bruce Buschel called 100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do (Part 1).  I wondered whether he'd cover any of my particular pet peeves in Part 2, but I just took a gander at 100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do (Part 2) and it seems not.  So I hereby append the following to Mr. Buschel's list.

Here are three things restaurant staffers, in particular wait-folk, should always do when the party has one or more small children in it.  There's a theme here:  the sooner you start bringing things to the table, the more money you are likely to make, and the sooner you'll get rid of the noisy, melt-down-having children (who will be noisier and more likely to melt down if you don't start bringing things to the table as soon as humanly possible).

One:  Don't Wait to Bring the Kids' Food Until the Adults' Food is Ready

Experienced waiters or those who are parents frequently do this without prompting, but it should be written in the rule book.   If there are kids under, oh say, seven or eight at the table, you should offer to take their orders first and get their food started, then come back for the adults' orders if they're undecided.  You should then offer to bring the kids' orders to the table as soon as they are ready, and you should be sure that they are ready a reasonable time after the order is placed.  There's no excuse for chicken nuggets not being ready before pretty much anything an adult could order except maybe the soup du jour.

Here's the rationale.  Generally, parents have to do some helping with kids this age, which can range from cutting pieces of meat for older kids to spoonfeeding toddlers. If all the food comes at the same time, the adults don't get to eat theirs before it gets cold.  It also gets in the way while the adult is playing the helping role, and it can't be enjoyed until the kids are set up and chowing down in any case.  Also, in my experience, kids who are young enough to have a hard time sitting still anywhere aren't going to be better at it at restaurants no matter how many crayons or toys they have with them.  Once the sights and smells of food are passing by them to other tables, they're ready to eat and feeding them is the best hope there is of keeping them occupied for any length of time.

Two:  Be Attentive To The Status of the Mom's Wine Glass

When I waited tables in college, the conventional wisdom was that alcoholic beverages were the key to bigger tips.  Get people ordering refills of these high margin products and the bill went up quickly and by multipliers that just couldn't be replicated through food orders.  Bigger bills meant bigger tips.  Bigger tips were good.

And yet, somehow that wisdom has been lost or deemed inapplicable to mothers of preschoolers.  I can't tell you how many times I've only had one drink with dinner though I was entirely willing to have two, or, once in a great while, maybe even three.  Typically it goes like this:  it takes forever to bring the first glass of wine, then after the wine has been consumed the glass sits empty with no waiter in sight until it is too late to drink another one because the kids are melting down and we have to leave.  That waiter just lost somewhere between $8 and $33 added to the bill which could have meant up to $7 or so in additional tip (or more if others at the table are in the same boat), and I just lost one of the temporarily mellowing benefits of the increasingly seldom times we eat out.  We've actually requested that we not be seated in certain waiters' sections at our local haunts for this very reason.

Three:  Be Quick and Efficient, or Be Poor

This is the logical extension of two and three above.  Kids under eight can't be expected to sit still for two or more hours at a time in a restaurant.  They have about 40 minutes of good behavior in them and another half hour of acceptable behavior.  If it takes 20 minutes to take the table's order, or 30 minutes to bring the kids' food, it's unlikely there will be time for dessert.  Not just for the kids, but for the adults too.  Or for dessert wine.  So there's another $30 or more that isn't going to get spent, and upwards of another $6 in tip that won't be left because the behavior will have deteriorated to the point where the only choice is to leave.

It's astonishing to me how many times waiters have left money on the table because our party, quite literally, hasn't left on the table all we'd have been willing to leave.  Instead, we had to high-tail it out of there without ordering additional drinks or dessert.  More food also typically means more mess, and I know a lot of parents who will bump up tips if a kid's place at the table (or the floor underneath) is a mess at the end of a meal even though it probably doesn't take that much additional time to clean up if you're wiping down a table or changing a table cloth anyway.

So let this be a lesson in enlightened self-interest.  We parents like it when you engage with our kids, or at least don't spurn them when they ask you a question -- but we're unlikely to give a bigger tip for that alone.  We'd much rather you be as attentive to our table as you are to the one with the quiet, young, low maintenance couple that is occasionally throwing us amused looks from across the aisle.

**Morgana**

Music to Learn By

It's been 35 years since my eighth grade English class, but I still remember the following little ditty we were required to memorize:

Am, is, are, was, were
Be, being, been
Have, has, had
Do, does, did
Shall, will
Should, would
May, might, must
Can, could.

Our teacher, the much loved, much feared, master of the eighth grade advanced English classroom, would bang out the beat with the flat of his hand on a metal filing cabinet while we all recited these "helping" or "auxiliary" verbs.  We memorized poetry in his class as well, but I only remember the first few stanzas of "The Highwayman" (which we recited with hand motions to signify where the French cocked-hat and bunch of lace were located) and "Paul Revere's Ride," while I've retained this list of words and likely will remember it until I die.

My mother became a substitute teacher at my junior high school when I went to college, and once when I was home visiting she decided it would be funny if I came over to the school and recited "Am Is Are Was Were" for my former teacher.  I humored her, and I was glad I did.  He truly seemed touched that one of his students had retained this tidbit of knowledge for what was then only about ten years after leaving his class. 

If only he were still alive today to witness the conversation on Facebook among many of my former classmates, all of whom,
amazingly, still remember this verse 35 years later.

Although this little poem wasn't set to music, the almost magical way in which we all managed to remember it got me to thinking about the value of lyrical repetition in the experience of learning.  It can't be accidental that one of the first songs we learn as English speakers in America is the ABC song.  My three year old can sing it, even though he can't identify all the letters in the alphabet yet.  When we read an ABC book together, I try to show him how he can propel himself from a letter he recognizes to the next one he doesn't by singing the song.  (An aside:  I'm still amused by the musical identity of ABC, Twinkle, Twinkle, and Baa Baa Black Sheep, which a childless, gay male friend of mine pointed out to me about ten years ago.  If I'd been a mom by then I would doubtless not have missed the connection, since Sesame Street has put all three of them together in the "Alpha Baa Baa Twinkle Song," a preschool favorite.)  As an adult, I took a beginning Hebrew class and my instructor taught us a Hebrew equivalent of the ABC song.  It appears that other alphabets have been set to music as well.  Here's a Russian alphabet song, a Chinese one, an Arabic one, a Thai one, a Japanese one, a Hindi one, a Greek one and even a Yiddish one (sung by a guy in a Spiderman costume and a ushanka -- take that, Debbie Friedman!).

Though I can't say they're part of my repertoire, I found a number of songs on the Internet designed to help remember long lists, such as all the states in the United States, the US Presidents, and the books of the Christian Bible.   And though I'm thinking Tom Lehrer had humor rather than pedagogy in mind when he wrote The Elements, it's out there now on school sites and chemistry blogs for the hard core. 

The success of such songs has not been lost on the business of education.  I found a site for a business devoted to peddling geography lists set to music.  Their slogan:  "You never forget what you sing."  I have to agree -- though the tunes have to be catchy, the lyrics clever, and the main ideas distillable into memorable bites.  I'm not so sure the geography list songs do any of this, though to be fair I haven't listened to anything more than the short samples at the site. I also wonder how successful some of these other  "long list" songs really are at aiding memorization.  Though I only remember "The Highwayman" through "plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair" I remember the whole of "Jabborwocky," another poem we learned in eighth grade English which was (1) much shorter than the others we had to memorize, and (2) the subject of a song in the Disney film, Alice in Wonderland, by means of which I'd already learned the first and last stanzas (which are identical) when I was about seven through repetitive listening to the soundtrack album.  It had a catchy, clever tune in addition to being short.

Catchy and clever songs with focused sound bites definitely stick with.  Potentially forever.  To this day, if I'm called upon to write the word "encyclopedia" I hear Jiminy Cricket singing "Ennn - Cyclopedia, E-N-C-Y-C-L-O-P-E-D-I-A" in my head; it's how I learned to spell the word in the first place.  I'll never forget the Twelve Tribes of Israel, thanks to the "Jacob and Sons" song from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat or the Girl Scout Laws in effect when I was scouting, thanks to a song that I can only find a Girl Guides version of on the web (it was sung to the tune of something that is some college somewhere's school song; my mother knew which one, but I wasn't able to find out which as I'm sadly remiss when it comes to searching for tunes by googling).

Then there are the songs that are more conceptual, like the old School House Rock titles.  "Conjunction Junction," in case you don't remember or hadn't guessed, teaches the grammatical function of conjunctions, and "I'm Just a Bill" teaches how a bill becomes a federal law in the United States.  It's a testament to these songs that at least the choruses stuck with me, and so did the general idea of the chatty parts, even though I didn't have a recording of them and so couldn't listen to them repeatedly.

But the songs I'll remember forever and that I really learned from -- I mean, sitting-in-a-test-singing-to-myself-to-remember-how-to-answer learned from -- are in a class by themselves.  These are from the late 1950s/early 1960s recordings known as the Singing Science Records, which I just can't say enough good things about.

I inherited these records from the three girls who lived across the street (I had all the titles except Experiment Songs, the weakest of the bunch; though at one point one of the girls asked for Space Songs back so now, forty years later, I only have four on vinyl).  I was delighted to find that someone has preserved these long-out-of-print gems on the web.  It saved me the trouble of having to digitize these treasures among children's educational records myself, so my kids could listen to them in the car.  These records were in no small part responsible for one of my earliest ambitions (as an eight-to-12 year old) to be a meteorologist, and the knowledge I gained from repeatedly playing them until I feared I'd wear the grooves out served me well in every introductory science class I ever took.

I know that sounds like an exaggeration, but it's true.  I'll never know which was more instrumental in getting me As:  the basic knowledge from the songs, or the fact that having the basic knowledge from the songs already, I could focus my efforts on learning more advanced concepts.  These songs cover pretty sophisticated topics for their target elementary school audience.  Weather Songs, for example, is worth the price of admission just for the three songs, "The Water Cycle Song," "How Clouds are Formed" and "Stratus and Cumulus," which build upon each other nicely and together explain and help kids identify the basic cloud formations through catchy, very sticky, tunes, and lyrics that hone in on fundamental concepts and use rudimentary scientific terminology to convey them.

I could easily identify by name stratus, cumulus, cirrus, and nimbus clouds and their variants (e.g. strato-cumulus, cumulo-nimus, cirro-stratus) by the time I was around nine, largely because of these songs.  Years later, in college, I took an introductory physical geography course taught by a climatologist.  You guessed it:  we had to know the nomenclature of cloud formations, and I'd already known it and committed it to long term memory through the medium of music years before. 

Though as Jef's site indicates, these records are very "atomic age" in their orientation, the basic science hasn't changed a whole hell of a lot.  Sure, there have been advances in physics and other sciences since these songs were written.  But though I'm no expert, I'd guess the basic physics concepts in "Kinetic and Potential Energy" (which I sang to myself during a test in junior high science to help answer some of the questions), "Jets" and "What is Chemical Energy" are just as valid today as they were then.  Perhaps, were the Singing Science Records to be recorded today, we'd have songs about string theory, too.

Indeed, some of the material is surprisingly timely.  If you want to teach a kid about why global warming is happening, there's a song called "What Does the Glass of a Greenhouse Do" that will accomplish just that (though you'll need to fill in a few blanks after "warm up the earth on cold, cold days").  The messages of the Nature Songs and More Nature Songs albums are decidedly ecological.  I teared up the other day while listening to "The Conservation Song," and it's exhortation to "study conservation, and practice conservation, there's no doubt that it will keep our nation strong" -- it made me realize that this message has been around for my entire lifetime (and before) and we're still, as a nation, struggling with this fundamental truth.

  
Another song that never fails to make me tear up is "The Balance of Nature," and its message that the natural world hangs in a delicate balance that can all too easily be upset ("the balance of nature should be understood; if the balance of nature is ever unbalanced, whatever will happen will not be good").  This is an excellent jumping off point for discussion of rainforests, which were, interestingly, part of my older son's pre-K curriculum.  It also aids discussion of the ecological impact of natural disasters, and as well helping to discuss some of the things that puzzle and terrify young kids.  Like, "why are there bugs?"  And, "why do the bugs have to get eaten by birds?"  Or, "Why do lions eat zebras?"  For the next part, "I don't want the zebras to die," you'll need to improvise a bit.

Nature Songs' "What is an Insect?" teaches that insects all have six legs, antennae, and three parts to their bodies.  "What is a Mammal?" does the same for the mammalian world with a drumbeat that gets the warm-blooded among us ready to pound along :  "Why anyone can tell you what a mammal is, anyone who understands:  they're warm blooded, have hair on their bodies, and suckle their young from mammary glands."  Good for the multiple choice quizzes to come down the road, and entertaining to have your grade schooler sing to uptight dinner guests to see who snickers at the mammary glands line.  Though now that I'm a parent rather than an adult with a memory of being called upon to perform this song to an assembled dinner table crowd as a child, the snickering could simply be because of the undeniable cuteness factor that comes with small children using big words -- particularly those that they obviously understand.

Though my kids are a lot younger than I was when I first started listening to these records, I've already found opportunities to introduce them and make them relevant.  "What is an Animal" and "What are the Parts of a Tree" have already come in useful, as the newly-minted kindergartener is currently studying trees and plants in school.

When I think about the use of meter and rhyme with or without melody for educational purposes, the Singing Science Records will always be the gold standard.  You can still find copies occasionally, at alibris.com or on ebay, so keep looking.  I commend them to you, with love, and with more than a little awe for the lasting role they played in my educational life.

**Morgana**