Almost Magic

A couple of weeks ago, Iain was on fall break, and he and Tom went to Florida to kayak a couple of rivers.  I took several days off that week, including the two days they were gone; I thought I'd get some things done (I did, although not much) and look after the dog, who is not used to being home alone all day.

One of those days I was home by myself with the dog, I was sitting at the dining room table doing something on my computer, and heard a rustling sound from the kitchen.  It was not a loud sound, just a plastic bag changing position.  The first time it happened I thought it might be happening on its own - a draft or gravity or something, not anything that meant anything.  When I heard it again I only had one thought, that there was a rat in the kitchen.  We have had rats in the house before, and I found this a quite upsetting idea.  I looked; I didn't want to, but I felt that I had to, and I didn't see anything.  Relieved, I went back to whatever it was I was doing.

A little while later, I heard it again.  There definitely was something moving around the plastic bags with produce in them that were on the kitchen counter.  It did not sound big enough to be a rat.  Maybe it was a mouse, but it was something.  So I looked again, and saw a lizard that was just starting to make its way up the wall.  So I grabbed a plastic container and caught it.  It wasn't happy.

It was a green anole,  Having pursued many small lizards in the wild over the years and failing to catch them, I figured I could keep this one for a little while, given that it had intruded into my kitchen.  So I went to Pet Supplies Plus and got a plastic terrarium and a dollar's worth of small crickets, and put some dirt and a plant and the lizard it it. 

The lizard spent most of its time immobile on the small plant or on the sides or top of the terrarium.  Green anoles change color.  Sometimes they are green and sometimes they are brown.  This one was brown most of the time but one evening I couldn't find it when I looked; it was green, and sitting on a leaf, was so well camouflaged I didn't see it for several minutes, even though I knew it must be somewhere in that small container.  

Caroline came home over the weekend.  She had had a pair of green anoles as pets for a time and pointed out that this one, lacking the characteristic dewlap that male anoles have, was a female.  By then Iain was back from Florida and he noted that the lizard was molting.  We didn't know that lizards molted but that is what this one did, that first weekend.

The terrarium eventually got moved off the dining room table onto a shelf.  There were still crickets and I figured I'd turn it loose when the crickets were gone.  Every day I misted the terrarium, but I was getting ready to go out of town for a week and I didn't want to ask Tom to take care of it, so last weekend I figured it was time to let it go.

So I took the terrarium into the back yard and took the lid off of it and watched.  I thought the lizard would make a run for it immediately, but it didn't.  

It was immobile, except for its head; it looked around from its perch on a philodendron leaf.  

Over the next several minutes, it turned nearly completely green, starting from its armpits (if a lizard can be said to have armpits).

Only then did it move from the philodendron leaf, to freedom.

Since then I've read a little about color changes in anoles.  There is less known about this that you would think there might be.  Color changes in anoles are thought to have less to do with camouflage than with level of stress.   According to Wikipedia, the green anole (or Carolina anole, in this article) has three layers of chromatophores in its skin that account for the color changes.  

But watching it last Saturday morning it almost seemed like magic.  

Riding a Bike, Again

My first ride on my first bicycle was not particularly auspicious.  The house we lived in when I was a small child had a steep driveway (at least that's how I remember it).   The first time I got on my new bike, I went rolling down the driveway and my mother screamed as I went sailing across the street, and then I crashed into the curb.  I do not remember being hurt but the tire didn't survive the collision with the curb.

When I was about to go off to college, I told my parents one night at dinner that I thought I needed some wheels to take to school.  They were relieved when they realized I meant a bicycle, and I got a 10 speed Schwinn that I rode all through college.  I didn't ride it every day but the two years I lived off campus I did ride it to class some of the time.  I never had a car when I was in college.

I didn't have a car in medical school, either, and at some point I bought another bicycle which I remember riding to the hospital the month I did a rotation at the Roxbury VA Hospital.  When I lived in Boston, my primary modes of transportation were walking and public transit, but I did ride my bike some.

One summer during medical school I did my obstetrics rotation in Dublin, and after I figured out that they didn't care if we were there or not, started taking three- and four-day weekends.  I made three different trips to three different parts of Ireland.  I rode the train somewhere, and then rented a bike and stayed in bed and breakfast places along the way.  One night I stayed in a bed and breakfast place run by an older lady who was very eager to find things for me to do.  She told me I should visit the beach.  I asked her where it was and she gave me very complicated directions involving lots of turns and climbing over some fences.  I told her I thought I'd have trouble getting there and would probably get lost.  She said she'd have her dog Joey take me there.  She called the dog, and said, "Joey, take her to the beach," and the dog headed to the end of the driveway and turned to the right.  There seemed to be nothing I could do but go with him, and he took me to the beach.  This was a rocky beach and as I recall it was an overcast day; this was not the kind of beach where you sunbathe, but the kind where you wear a sweater and walk around with your hands in your pockets and think about death.  So I was glad to be there with the dog for company, and when I was ready to leave he got me back to the house and I had salmon for dinner.  That was the summer where I learned about topographic maps and if the lines were too close together, it was difficult bicycling.

Later I lived in Durham and used to ride my bike around downtown in the evening, although by then I did have a car.  It was the same when I lived in Nashville and Baltimore -- I didn't ride a lot, but I did ride sometimes.  I knew where to go and what times of day would feel safe for riding.  Then, I moved to Atlanta, and I stopped.  It didn't feel safe, so I just didn't ride.  That was 25 years ago, and I didn't ride a bike again.

Of course in recent years some things have changed.  There's the Beltline, and the new extension of Piedmont Park to Monroe, very close by, and finally the light installed that stops the cars for a safe crossing to the park.  Before each of the last several Streets Alive events, I thought this would be the one that I would finally do on a bicycle, but I didn't.  Last year I looked at bikes at a bike shop a couple of times, but I never rode one.

Last weekend it was beautiful weather, and we wanted to get out of the house on Sunday afternoon.  So Tom dropped Iain and I off at the Beltline on Irwin Street and we walked back, all the way to Ansley and then home from there.  It took a couple of hours.  The Art on the Beltline installations are still up, and they were fun to see, but this is the thing we saw that impressed me the most:

This is at the Elizabeth Street access point to the Beltline.  I'm not sure where all these people came from, but they were probably having a late lunch in one of the restaurants nearby. 

Atlanta Streets Alive was on Highland weekend before last.  We were on our way home and saw there was a new bike shop that had opened up in Virginia Highland, between George's and Moe's and Joe's.  We stopped in and chatted and I looked at a couple of bikes, but I didn't ride any and we headed on home.

Today I'd taken the day off and Tom and Iain are in Florida.  So after I'd walked the dog I headed back there this morning.  I rode a couple of bikes in the parking lot next to Highland Hardware.  I haven't ridden a bicycle in 25 years; I'm glad no one was paying any attention, those first couple of minutes.  I bought a bike, and after lunch, rode from our house to Piedmont Park to 10th Street to the Eastside Trail on the Beltline and then on down to Irwin Street and then back.  I'm not sure what time it was when I left, but I think it took a little over an hour (including walking up the last couple of hills, close to home, on the way back).

Dinner somewhere on the Eastside Trail?  Totally.  I'm in, just let me know when and where.

Atlanta Streets Alive -- North Avenue Edition

Last Sunday was Atlanta Streets Alive, the wonderful open streets event organized by the Atlanta Bicycle Coalition.  This time the route was from the intersection of Virginia Avenue and Highland Avenue south on Highland through Poncey-Highland into the Old Fourth Ward, then north on Boulevard to North Avenue, then past the Ponce City Market and Historic Fourth Ward Park back to Highland, in a lower-case sans serif "d" shape, 4.5 miles in length.

I volunteered for the early shift to help with tactical urbanism projects.  We met on the stretch of North Avenue between the Historic Fourth Ward Park and Ponce City Market.  Our first task was spray painting the slates of some wooden shipping pallets, repurposing them as mobile blackboards.

Next, we constructed protected bike lane in along the Ponce City Market-side of North Avenue, with plastic bollards, plants, and sandwich board signs.  A man with a leaf blower came when we were done and cleared debris from the pavement.

Once that was done, I got a taco from Tex's Tacos food truck.  

The young woman who took my order said it was her boyfriend's truck and this was his third week of operation.  She recommended the chicken taco and I got one of those and one carne asada.  They were both terrific.  (Business must have been ended up being good because when I came by with Iain later, they were out of carne asada.)

I was still on North Avenue when the bike parade came through, with the famous huge flying phoenixes.  I think that's Chantelle Rytter in the lead.  

By then Iain was on his way home from mock trial, so I went home to meet him and then we walked the route on foot.  I took lots of pictures, and if you weren't there, I'll show you a little bit of what you missed.

There were people.  I think this couple was on Highland.

There were lots of children.  Before I took this photo I asked a woman standing nearby if I could take it.  She said "sure," and as I was taking the picture, she hastily added that this little girl wasn't actually with her.

There were friends and neighbors.  We saw Mia at Java Vino.

Even the APD officers seemed to be having a good time.  This was at Highland and Ponce De Leon.

There were dogs.  This one was near Ponce City Market, and the one below was near Blind Willie's.

This faux dog was spotted on Boulevard, on the back of a bicycle.  I think I'd seen the rider-bike-mannequin without the dog head previously at one of the Streets Alive events on Peachtree.

We spotted this pup at Java Vino and Iain and I were both struck by how much he looked like a younger version of Leonard; he has the same longer hair on his ears that Leonard does.  We told his owners that he looked like our dog, a Labrador retriever-Australian shepherd mix.  They were surprised and said their dog was also a Lab-Australian shepherd mix.  And it doesn't show in the photo, but he also has a patch of white on the chest and long white coarse fur at the tip of his tail, just like Leonard has.  So I bet this is what he looked like when he was a puppy.  If he ever needs a picture of himself as a pup for a project at dog school, I'll just use this one.

There was music. There was blues at Blind Willie's.  (There also was jambalaya, which Iain got for lunch before he had the taco.)

There was zumba at several points along the route.  This was near Highland and St. Charles.

There was a marching band.  We saw them later, performing at North Avenue and Freedom Parkway.

There was dance music on Boulevard.

And this trio was performing on North Avenue, near Ponce City Market.

There were plenty of other things to see and do.  There were people playing bicycle polo and a little kids' soccer field on the parking lot on Highland across from American Road House.  Iain and I played a couple rounds of corn hole; neither of us did very well.  On Highland, there was ping pong.

On North Avenue, there were acrobats from the Imperial Opa Circus.

The poets from Free Poems on Demand were set up on Highland.  As we always do, we requested a poem -- this one about the Braves moving to Cobb County -- but we didn't wait for it and were unable to circle back by to pick it up.  I need to follow up with them on that, as this is always one of our favorite Streets Alive activities.

This wonderful collection of portraits (part of this year's Art on the Beltline) was on North Avenue.

There were a couple of large constructions on Boulevard that were created by architecture students at Southern Poly State University.  This is one of them.

 And there were the other tactical urbanism interventions along the route.  The blackboards we had painted were all along the route, and cross walks had been decorated with sidewalk chalk, in a sort of temporary intersection repair-type intervention.

 This one, on Boulevard, was set up as a participatory color-by-number activity.  Iain and I colored in one of the large red squares before we moved on.

And here's the protected bike lane that we'd constructed earlier, when we came back by later.

It was a great event, and I'm so glad we went.  There were a couple of disappointments, though, besides not getting back by the Free Poems on Demand table to pick up our poem.  The commercial areas of Highland were totally packed with people and bikes and activities, but Boulevard seemed underutilized.  Atlanta Medical Center should have had displays and health screening in front of their facility, but once again they were completely missing.  The only sign of life we saw in that stretch of Boulevard was this stethescope-carrying guy in scrubs who was on a cigarette break.  

There also was nothing going on this time at Fort Street United Methodist Church.  One bright spot on Boulevard was a lively scene at Blueprint Church, near the color-by-numbers crosswalk, 

This was the last Streets Alive event of the year; already I'm looking forward to the next one.  And if Atlanta Medical Center needs any ideas about what kinds of activities they should have, the next time Streets Alive is on Boulevard, they should feel free to get in touch with me.  And maybe they could include some information on smoking cessation.

Addendum from October 6, 2014:  I got the poem by email!  Thanks to Zac Denton for writing it and Jimmy Lo for emailing it.  Here it is:

#deafeningsilence

The email came on Thursday, with the subject line "ASO Concert Cancelation Reminder" (their spelling, not mine.)

Dear Valued Patron,
This is a reminder that all ASO concerts scheduled for this weekend are canceled. We will continue to update you each week, however up-to-date information can also be found on our website at www.aso.org.
Questions?  Subscribers, call 404.733.4800.  Single Tickets holders, call 404.733.5000.
Thank you for your support of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra!

There is nothing in this email that conveyed *why* the concerts are cancelled; it might have been a problem with the HVAC, or a nasty outbreak of norovirus in the string section.  The fact of the matter is that Woodruff Arts Center leadership has locked the players out for the second time in two years.

The last time, the players took large pay cuts, 10 weeks were cut from the season, and the size of the orchestra was reduced, from 95 to 88.  Now Stanley Romanstein, the President of the ASO, is asking for increasing contributions by the musicians to health insurance costs which will mean further reductions in salary and -- more alarmingly -- the final say on whether or not vacancies in the orchestra will be filled.

So far, the musicians are winning the public relations battle.  On Facebook, the ASO has resorted to deleting and disabling comments.  Bloggers, including Minneapolis blogger Scott Chamberlain, has done a great job of covering events in Atlanta.  In the last few days both both music director Robert Spano and principal guest conductor Donald Runnicles have made strong public statements in support of the musicians and expressing their fear that Atlanta is at risk of losing its world-class symphony orchestra.  Last Thursday, on what should have been opening night, a large protest occurred across from the Arts Center.

Two years ago, the musicians made major concessions.  I thought -- and clearly the players thought --  that with those concessions management would do what they needed to do to address the fiscal issues by increasing revenue.  In 2012 Romanstein told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that "the ASO can't raise more money through donations until it balances its budget. Donors have made it clear, he said: Fix the finances, then talk to us about increasing our support."  This seems to be the playbook.  As long as the orchestra is in the red -- and it is reportedly still running a 2 million dollar deficit -- the onus is on the musicians to make concessions until the orchestra is in the black.

The problem is, by then, I don't know what will be left.

Symphony orchestras need financial support, and Stanley Romanstein et al. should have been working on that for the last two years.  Their failure to do anything of the sort suggests that maybe the symphony and the Arts Center need to think about the quality of leadership at the helm.

I know Romanstein et al. don't care what I think, but there are people in this city who they do care about, and I hope those people are paying attention to what's happening.  This city was outraged with the Atlanta Braves decided to become the Cobb County Braves, and we're supporting the building of a new football stadium for a very wealthy NFL team owner.  Will we let the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra be lost?

This is a defining moment for out city.  I'm hopeful that the people who can do it will do the right thing, and in the end, I think that will have to include new leadership that sees their job as strengthening the symphony, not decimating it.

Congratulating Ourselves for Being Us

All three of our children left the Atlanta Public Schools after 5th grade; Iain is now in 11th grade, so I've been watching the agony that has followed the APS cheating scandal and the angst about redistricting as an Interested and Concerned Citizen, not as a parent of children who were directly impacted.  I've had the same response to more recent news outside of Atlanta about struggles over textbooks and the battles over the Core Curriculum, being grateful that whatever issues my kids' middle and high school might have had, they weren't *those* issues.

But I do care about public schools, and so I was interested to see this graph in the MLPA Newsletter that arrived yesterday in the mail.

The accompanying text identified Morningside Elementary School -- our neighborhood elementary school -- as the highest scoring APS elementary school on the 2014 Criterion-Referenced Competency Test (CRCT), and Inman Middle School as the highest performing middle school (see below for a close up view of the upper left corner of the graph).

Of course, that's only the Y axis part of the story.  The label on the X axis is "Avg. FRL Rate."  FRL is not defined but I am virtually certain it is "Free and Reduced Lunch," the usual measure of socioeconomic status in public school students.  And the stunning thing about this graph is not that our neighborhood elementary and middle schools have higher test scores than other elementary and middle schools in APS, but how strongly correlated CRCT scores are with the percentage of children eligible for free and reduced lunch.  

The newsletter says "Morningside Elementary School (MES) is the highest scoring elementary school in APS and 3rd highest in the state!  Congratulations to our students, teachers, staff and parents for their combined hard work and commitment to our success."  I do not question the hard work and commitment of all of the above (I recall many hours constructing dioramas when our kids were at Morningside, and I am sure families of current students are doing the same), but really -- what this graph shows is that it isn't "hard work and commitment" that really matter but the socioeconomic makeup of the student body.  We are congratulating ourselves for having hardly any poor children in Morningside. 

There's a very famous and often cited study done by Betty Hart and Todd Risley, that looked at how families talk to their young children.  Their book, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, was published in 1995.  The researchers made audio recordings of how parents of 42 children interacted with their child from age 10 months through 3 years.  The children were from professional and working class families as well as families on welfare.  What they found was striking.

"The longitudinal data showed that in the everyday interactions at home, the average (rounded) number of words children heard per hour was 2,150 in the professional families, 1,250 in the working-class families, and 620 in the welfare families...By age 3 the children in professional families would have heard more than 30 million words, the children in working class families 20 million, and the children in welfare families 10 million."

This gap in exposure to language results in differences in acquisition of vocabulary that become apparent before age 2.  

(data from Figure 2 in the book, redrawn here.)

According to Hart and Risley,

"We could see in the professional families the American dream:  parents adding to and handing on to their children the advantages their families had given to them.  We saw the daily efforts of these parents to transmit an educationally advantaged culture to their children through the display of enriched language; through the amount of talking they did and how informative they were; and through the frequency of gentle guidance, affirmative interactions, and responsiveness to their children's talk."

By age 3, the poor children in the study were behind on many measures, and preschool was not enough to make up the difference.  

"We saw poverty of experience being transmitted across generations.  The welfare children, like the other children after the first 3 years of experience at home, had become like their parents.  We wondered that we could have thought their accomplishments at 3 would be other than similar to those of their parents.  We could see too why a few hours of intensive intervention at age 4 had had so little impact on the magnitude of the differences in cumulative experience that resulted from those first 3 years."

Most of the students who attend Atlanta Public Schools are poor, and many of them start school with these kinds of disadvantages.  I don't believe that parental involvement or the quality of teachers or school leadership accounts for the differences in test scores among students at these schools.  All the pressure that Beverly Hall and her team put on principles and teachers couldn't change the experience of APS students before they started school; nothing the schools could do could fully compensate for this, so many schools resorted to cheating.

So, fine, congratulations to Morningside Elementary School and Inman Middle School for their vertical distance above the diagonal line.  That's all I'm willing to grant them; the rest is just demographics.

A Dog at Home

It's Saturday morning and it's quiet.  Iain isn't up yet and Tom has headed off to Lake Allatoona for the day.  I just got back from walking the dog.  it's a lot easier than it used to be.  Leonard has gone from being so agitated on a leash that we were afraid he would be injured to being the kind of dog that strolls on a leash and does lots of sniffing but not a lot of tugging.  He still sometimes gets agitated when he sees people and other dogs -- especially people who are running -- but this doesn't seem to be aggression.  He actually does fine around most dogs -- he has uneventfully been introduced to several of the dogs on the street -- and is fine with strangers walking up and petting him, even when I tell them to move slowly and they don't.  But he really does get worked up when he sees people running or children playing.

The dramatic transformation of Leonard from terrified and agitated to mostly calm started with using the harness instead of the collar (thank you for that advice, Dr. Fiorillo), and I'm sure the fluoxetine has also helped (that's generic for Prozac, and thank you for that too, Dr. Fiorillo).  And it's been a couple of months now, and I'm sure that the passage of time has also helped.  He's mostly settled down and is acting like a pretty normal dog, except for really not wanting to go into the back yard.  He's still on exercise restriction because of the heartworm treatment, so we haven't pushed that, but once he's not we'll have to figure out how to get him back there enough that he'll get used to it.  He is wonderful at retrieving a ball, and we haven't been doing that either, because of the exercise restriction.  So that's something left to work on.

But why the excitement when he sees people running, or children in the church parking lot playing baseball?  He no longer is afraid of airplanes overhead or bags of yard waste; this, along with his aversion to going into the back yard, is pretty much all that is left in the category of Leonard's inexplicable behaviors.  We did get a DNA test on him to try to ascertain his non-Labrador retriever ancestry.  According to Mars Veterinary's Wisdom Panel, he's a Labrador retriever-Australian shepherd mix.  (This figure makes it looks like he might be a purebreed Lab, or equally likely to be a Tibetan mastiff-Lab mix, but I don't think that's right, and it's not how Mars Veterinary interpreted it.)

I don't know much about Australian shepherds, but what I have learned since we got this result is that they are herding dogs (that's the "shepherd" part), and so his watchfulness may not be nervousness but just his nature.  And maybe that's why when he sees people running, especially children, he really wants to go after them.  They are loose, and they need to be herded up.  

Last night when I was walking him we saw a large possum crossing the street.  He really wanted to go after it.  I didn't let him, as I didn't think it would likely end well for either Leonard or the possum, but you never know.