Wednesday, July 25, 2007

G and G










Perhaps "Grandmother and Grandfather" was too much of a mouthful for little ones, so my parents came to be known as "G and G" or, sometimes, just "the Gs."


We like to welcome these two native Texans to our northern abode with a front-porch tribute to their heritage.









G, aka my dad, knows how to take apart a clock and make it work again. Since my clock wasn't ticking, he gave me a tour of its vital organs, including a mathematical discussion of pendulum length---note his scribbled algebraic formulas on the newspaper.





























When I was in high school, I might ask Dad for help solving for x, and wind up with a dissection of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. My dad can turn a watermelon seed into a calculus problem and then show you fifteen ways to solve it. This is not a useless skill; he might decide to write you a computer program, fix your broken step or rewire your basement, all because he sees every practical problem as a series of fascinating mathematical relationships. Each one is a siren song to his numerical brain.

The other G doesn't see everything through an algabraic eye. She and I turned a lug of apricots into jam one evening. We gave an absent-minded nod to ratios, temperatures, heat conductivity of metals, and the properties of a vacuum, but were more focused on the senses....taste, smell, color.



























I think we'll get Dad on our team when we open the first jar.

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