Free family concert

As the article said, the Festival is an unusual event: All orchestral music, all by composers of our time, most of it never heard before, much of it by really truly young composers.

But that’s not why my kids care about it. They just think it’s fun!

There are three reasons why I think families — whether in Santa Cruz or within drivable distance — should make this festival part of their children’s lives.

First of all, there’s the street fair. This is an easy part of the festival to enjoy. You come to downtown Santa Cruz on a Saturday or Sunday, enjoy the open air music, the variety of food, the crafts, and the kids’ art area. The music, the crafts, and the art are free; the rest will empty your pocketbook if you don’t watch out. If you’re on a budget, bring a picnic! We always try to make sure we see Zunzun and Watsonville Taiko, and there are always other great musicians on the schedule.

Second, families are invited to the free family performance on Sunday, which is a real treat. (To go, you need to have a ticket, which is free. Either you can order tickets to paid performances and get tickets for the family concert sent as well, or you can walk up to the box office at the Civic Auditorium and get them free of charge. But do it before the day of the concert, because it pretty much always “sells out”!) This concert is truly geared toward kids, with a “petting zoo” of instruments (don’t think you’re just going to be sitting there — this is an interactive event), exciting musical selections that are short and dazzling, and usually a young conductor or composer in residence to make sure your kids know that classical music isn’t only fit for grey-hairs. Director Marin Alsop, a mom herself, makes this a really special event.

Third, and probably least well-known, are the open rehearsals. I take my kids every year. If you have a child who can refrain from screaming, you’re probably OK to go to the rehearsals. They’re pretty busy, with people going in and out, musicians playing, arriving, and leaving. The orchestra and Alsop are amazingly focused, running through bits of music and also entire pieces without much of a nod toward the audience. It’s a great learning experience for kids, whether they are studying an instrument or not. It’s such a revelation that huge groups of people can all work really hard on their own, then come together for a few weeks a year to do something amazingly complex and exciting.

If you have a teen, there’s another free event I’d recommend: The free “In the Works” concert on August 4 features music by young composers with young conductors leading the music. My almost-teen is interested in music composition, so of course we’ll be there, but even if your teen isn’t interested in composition, per se, it’s a great lesson in what can be done by young people who set their mind to something.

My blog’s name was influenced by my love of avant garde music, and I am thrilled to be in one of the centers of it, even though at the moment I am too busy with parenting to even think about writing music. (OK, I do still think about it, but composing requires long periods of silence, which I never get!) But even if you aren’t into New Music at all, this festival offers so much to entertain, dazzle, and excite the neurons in those little growing brains in your household.

Penrose

In the case of story-based math learning, it was a process of being nagged, over and over, by a continuing refrain from the chorus. On every “great math resources” list I’d come across one. Or a friend would mention one. Or I’d see a recommendation on an e-mail forum.

Then one day I typed “Sir Cumference” into the library’s online search engine, and we had a revelation.

Math stories work!

I need to distinguish math stories from that dreaded staple of math textbooks and standardized tests, the story problem. Math stories are to story problems what sugar is to saccharine, or hiking a beautiful mountain trail is to look at photos of a beautiful mountain trail. Saccharine, photos, and story problems assume that the goal is the answer. But what’s important here is the actual experience.

The first math stories I brought home recently were the Sir Cumference books. Our local library had two of them, so I ordered them and placed them on the table by the couch where we keep our books in progress. My daughter was immediately drawn to them — she loves knights. The titles are wonderful: Sir Cumference and the Dragons of Pi; Sir Cumference and the First Round Table. She devoured the two I had ordered that day, all by herself.

That evening, after the kids were in bed, my husband told me something with awe on his face: “Do you know that our daughter explained to me the relationship between the number of vertices and edges in a geometric solid?”

“Sir Cumference,” I answered.

“Sir What?”

In each story, the characters (charmingly named things like “Lady Di of Ameter”) take part in solving a mystery involving math. I am sure that my daughter had no idea that she was “learning” anything of any use, but she was clearly retaining concepts, some of them much more advanced than the math she is able to do on paper. The next day I went to the Bookshop and got the whole series, since the library doesn’t have it. They’ve been in constant rotation ever since.

Recently I was at a meeting and recommended these books. Another mom recommended a book that she’d recommended before, but now that I’d had the Sir Cumference experience I was starting to get it. The Adventures of Penrose the Mathematical Cat starts with an introduction about the real Penrose, and it has his actual photo. Then the story immediately dips into fantasy.

The real Penrose likes to sleep on his mistress’s math papers and books. The fictional Penrose interacts with characters from those papers that come to life and pose him questions he (and your child) had never considered before. The topics covered, as in Sir Cumference, are often rather esoteric, but they lead to deep understanding rather than a shallow attainment of a skill. My daughter loved the chapter about creating stars within other shapes. The chapter on base 2 led her and her brother to spend some time trying to stump each other with bigger and bigger base 2 numbers to translate to base 10.

Another example of math stories is recommended Heddi Craft: the Life of Fred series. As the publisher describes it: “In his everyday life he first encounters the need for each new part of mathematics, and then comes the mathematics.” Each chapter presents Fred with obstacles that can be overcome with math, and ends with a small number of math problems related to the text. Heddi says that the beauty of it is that it’s not a textbook chapter with 20 questions of each type, but rather a simple quiz that makes sure the child gets it, then moves on.

These three examples are all rather different in their form, but their aim is the same: If you create a world in which math matters, kids will learn it. And all three of these worlds draw kids in, sometimes without their knowing that it’s the least bit educational. And they will acquire a deep understanding rather than a superficial skill that they can easily forget over summer break.

The knowledge kids acquire depends on the child, his or her math skills, and — I think this is key — the involvement of the parent or teacher. I have seen this quite clearly: Sir Cumference was just left strewn about our house. My daughter reads them, but we have never actually sat down and done any math associated with them because I was just enjoying how much she was enjoying them and talking about the concepts she was learning.

When she saw Penrose, however, she refused at first to even look at it. “That’s boring,” she said. No knights. No color pictures. Lots and lots of text. So one night when she was drying off from her shower, I just sat down and started reading the first story out loud. My involvement, this time, led to a very different type of interaction. She was not only interested in the book, but willing to do some of the exercises with me, and then inspired to go off on her own and do more.

Last year I attempted to do the “leave it lying around the house” method with Life of Fred, and got the same “that’s boring” response. I think what she really means is, “I’m going to need your involvement here,” so when we’re finished with Penrose, I think I will once again start Life of Fred and see what happens.

If you’re interested in these books and more, check out Living Math, a wonderful math resources website. She doesn’t have a page specifically for math stories, but many of the books she recommends are in story form.

That girl is just so darn happy. And no wonder: In school, you have to conform. Camp is about expressing yourself. In school, they try to get rid of your bad habits. In camp, they put up with them or turn them into art projects. In school, they tell you what you’re learning will be useful someday. In camp, what you’re learning is useful right now!

She has had two great camp experiences this year, and I wanted to write about both of them because we have a whole month left of summer (those of us who don’t attend PVUSD), so don’t give up on camp yet.

When my son was six, I read about Renaissance Camp and talked to a very happy parent, and we decided to try it out. It was fabulous, and he went for two summers. Luckily, the very happy parent warned me about the waiting list. She said, “Call them and find out which day and time registrations open online. Then put that on your calendar and register right as soon as it opens because they always fill.”

Renaissance Camp is all about hands-on art and science. Younger campers are joined by camp alumni who work as teen counselors. The staff is fabulous and they take amazing fieldtrips. This summer my daughter went to the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. My son’s group went to the Exploratorium. All expenses are included in the camp fees. You get a really great calendar each week telling you what they’re going to do. Your child comes home brimming with new ideas and insights. I have absolutely no complaints.

This year, however, things were different. The camp didn’t fill. The director was put on furlough so she couldn’t be there full-time. None of this affected the campers — they were happy as clams. But I noticed it. There was a sign up informing parents that there was space in all three sessions still. (The third session starts Monday, and I bet they still have room…) The staff seemed particularly interested in having us fill out evaluations — the County, of course, is looking for any way to cut funds, and a program for kids that didn’t fill this summer might look like an easy target.

After Renaissance Camp, we took some time off camp to travel and relax, then she was back at it with Santa Cruz Soccer Camp. Again, I have not one complaint to lodge. Like last year, the program was lovely, my daughter was very happy, and she learned a whole lot more than just soccer moves. I wrote an article about Santa Cruz Soccer last year and also blogged about it.

Like Renaissance Camp, Santa Cruz Soccer is also experiencing great declines in enrollment. It runs on a weekly program, with new sessions every week, so you can sign up anytime during the summer. Unlike Renaissance Camp, SC Soccer is not a County program. They can only function if they get enough money, and most of that comes from enrollment. And most of their enrollment comes from word of mouth (or in this case, fingers!).

It’s a hard time now for everyone, and one of the hardest things to judge is this thing they call “Consumer Confidence.” Even people who haven’t seen a decline in their income are starting to think twice about spending. The problem is, when confidence goes down we start to get a snowball effect: Those who have enough money start spending less, which results in fewer jobs and less tax revenue. In a county like ours, that means that services we have known and loved for years start to disappear. And once they disappear, they don’t necessarily just pop back into place when the economy starts up again.

In my own mind, I have to fight with this lack of confidence. When I spend the money on a camp, I remind myself that not only does it make my daughter extremely happy (camp all year round!) but it also supports our local economy and continues programs that I support. I’d hate to think that these wonderful experiences won’t be here for future Santa Cruz kids. The people providing these services lose their jobs, move on to something else, somewhere cheaper to live, and their accumulated experience can’t be replaced.

I’m fine with change, but not that kind of change!

So I guess my message for the day is this: If you have the money, camp is a great experience, and your choice of camps is out there this summer. These two camps are just two that I know have room, but I’m guessing most of them do. And many of them are probably offering discounts. And if you’re not in Santa Cruz, I’m sure this is happening communities across the country, too.

We’ve got one month left of time to offer your child the experience of taking joy in creation, movement, and invention.

As I told the owner of Santa Cruz Soccer, the most precious thing to me about the camp is that I see my daughter shining with success. She’s not always successful at other things she needs to do in life, but camp is all about success. And that’s a gift I’m happy to give her, each summer until the money dries up!

But still, we had a mold problem. Years came and went, and shoes we didn’t wear would start to fuzz. We’d say, boy, we really should deal with that mold problem.

Suki/Siouxsie in her lime green skirt when no one yet knew what "green" would mean!

Then came the Summer of Getting Rid Of (which follows the Winter of Getting Rid Of). I called our friendly painter (shameless plug: T. Paul Sek and his wonderful wife Debbie, who do all the research we don’t have time to do, who tackle other people’s mold problems, their allergy problems, and their irritation with nasty-smelling paint with cheer and Certified Green weaponry). We set a date, we started to unload the closets. And unload. And unload.

The kids and I were about to take off on five days up in the Sierras with a friend, and so I demanded of my husband: Don’t put anything back in until we decide what to Get Rid Of! I returned to find the enormous pile in intact. Secretly, I’d hoped that he or some kind faeries would have taken care of it, but no such luck.

The closets were gorgeously clean, and coated with some stuff that mold doesn’t like the feel of. It was almost a shame to put anything back into them, but we attacked the pile.

On top were the things that we knew we were probably going to keep. The everyday clothing that we’d been wearing regularly went back in, though I managed to grab some frayed, stained, and unwanted items as they made their way back into the closet. I was ruthless with my own stuff, removing all the socks I don’t really like, the t-shirts I really don’t wear anymore, the shorts I’d always hated. Goodbye, clothes, hello, Goodwill!

Then came the dressy clothing that we wouldn’t wear very much anyway, but you just don’t want to replace. My husband has fewer than one occasion per year to wear a suit, but who wants to buy a new one? Back in they went. I stopped a few pieces of my own nice clothing that I’d never really liked and put it into a separate pile for the Daisy Store. (Have you been there? Fabulous! Around the corner from OSH on 41st Ave., and all their proceeds go to the Family Services Agency.)

Then came the loads of clothing I was keeping for various reasons, all of them unrealistic and sentimental. Clothing that doesn’t fit me anymore and is already out-of-date. Even if I lost those inches around my middle, would I wear them? Clothing that I was saving for my daughter. I have fond memories of my older sister and me dressing in my mother’s old fancy party dresses from high school. We loved them so much — we felt like princesses in them. My daughter, however, has decided not to wear girls’ clothes at all, much less princess outfits. When she plays dress-up, it’s in knight gear and as a samurai warrior. Is she really going to wear that stuff? And then there were the pure sentimental items: the dress I was married in didn’t get sent to the Daisy Store pile, but that suede dress I’d never wear again did.

Years and years of stuff I was keeping because “you never know when you’ll need it” went straight into the Goodwill pile. That which had visible mold on it went straight to garbage.

The haul to the Goodwill was easy. There was nothing in there that I will remember enough to miss. The Daisy Store pile, however, is still tossed over the couch in our bedroom. I feel like there is a lot of my history in there. Can I really get rid of the lime green miniskirt that I used to perform in? I have a picture of me with my thick bangs and eyeliner performing outside the student union at Stanford wearing that skirt. It’s hard to give up pieces of my past that bring back such memories like nothing else.

On the other hand, someone else without a mold problem might actually wear it. I’d like to think of some other skinny teenage girl finding my lime green skirt and thinking, Wow, this would be perfect to perform in!

Then again, she’d probably look at it and laugh. This is one of those relics like my mom used to wear in those old photos of her in her college days…

But I won’t think of that. I’ll remember that I don’t need these things, and someone else might. Our closets are now airy and newly painted. We installed a better fan in the shower room, and the drolly named “Dri-Z-Air” in the wettest closet. I may be down one lime green skirt, but on my last visit to the Daisy Store, I found a fabulous, shimmery red dress to wear in the evenings when I go out…

…out with the lime green, in with the shimmery red! Now, that’s progress.

My Ledger sheet

So it’s probably understandable that I haven’t done much bookkeeping with my kids. They get their allowance every week, they get paid for various extra tasks they do, and sometimes they get incentive payments for behavioral issues. They’re expected to keep their money in one place, keep track of it, and spend it on things that they want that we don’t want to pay for.

That system, however, had some problems.

First of all, I would shrug when our son mysteriously had another $10 to give me to buy him yet another iTunes gift card. (What did kids of our generation spend their money on? Oh, I guess we were always wanting to go down to the record store, but there was the fact of working out how to get there, so I’m guessing we spent a lot less, or at least a lot less often!)

“Where did that money come from?” my husband will ask. Uh, well…

The kids could also exploit my leaky memory. “You didn’t give me my allowance this week!” my daughter would exclaim, and search me if I did or didn’t.

And then there were the arguments: “She stole my wallet!” “No I didn’t!” “I’m sure I had $20 in here and now I can’t buy that software I’ve been saving for!” Et cetera.

So I got on the warpath, the only time I ever really get much done. I stormed upstairs and looked for a ledger sheet to download. Nothing. Just software, which we have. But software can be much more easily altered than a piece of paper! I wanted them to write down those numbers, add, and subtract so they could actually see where the money went.

I tried printing from Excel, but if you don’t have anything in the fields, the boxes don’t print. I tried buying a ledger book, but they were horribly expensive online, and nonexistent at the office supply store.

Finally, I thought, OK, I am a graphic designer, after all. We bought them report folders that would hold their ledger sheets, and came home. By then, it had occurred to my slow-moving brain that I could probably figure out the Excel thing. So here’s the trick: I did try all the various preferences and options, but really, the easiest way to do it is just to insert a space in each cell so that Excel prints the outlines of all the cells. I made the cells big enough for a 7-year-old’s handwriting. Then I PDF’ed it, and voila!, a perfect kids’ ledger sheet.

You may have it, free of charge (click here).

Will this solve the problem? Well, we still have the problem of my leaky memory. I really have much more important things on my mind than my kids’ money, like what to have for dinner and how to solve all the world’s problems. My fix for that is that they’ve been informed that any money that mysteriously appears in their account will be taken away. Every deposit and withdrawal must be initialed by a parent.

And we still have the problem of wishful thinking, which I guess will just be solved the next time my kids say they want to buy something they can’t afford. It used to be that they’d immediately accuse the other child of taking their money, or me of not giving them allowance, or something like that.

Once you start keeping track of your money, you have to face the cold, hard facts.

Hey, maybe that’s why I don’t like bookkeeping!

They’d want to get their website “perfect” before it “went live.” I knew they’d be shocked at how often they’d want to change it, or their customers would want them to change it. I tried to warn them. Some of them got it.

Fast forward to these days, and print is positively last century. My husband and I did a lot of soul-searching before we canceled our newspaper, a huge deal for us. We love print. We love paper and ink and having books on our shelves.

But as a writer, I’m very happily in the digital age. Every time a piece comes into print, I start thinking about how I’d change it, what I’d add, what I’d leave out. But there it is, sitting in piles outside your favorite local kids’ clothing store. I have to let go, and let go I do.

But then again, I have a blog! I can fix things!

First up, my article about sunscreen in this month’s GUISC. Right after it went to print, I realized that I forgot The Whole Point that I should have been making. Oops. Sometimes we forget things.

It has to do with what was going on in my life three weeks in June: I sent my pale, obstinate, little wonder-child off to day camp. Pale: she needs sunscreen. Obstinate: she decides when she wants to do pretty much anything. Day camp: a place where they like to have fun and not be School, which is where they Make Kids Do Things.

Thus: I’m guessing your child’s camp is like my child’s camp. As I was writing the sunscreen article, and telling the world of Santa Cruz Parents how important it is to reapply it every two hours, it occurred to me that I’m a major offender in that category. I dropped her off one day and asked, “So, do you have a sunscreen reapplication time at noon, since you’re outside so much in the afternoon?” The camp leader looked at me thoughtfully, “Now that’s a good idea,” she said. “No, we don’t.”

I didn’t get the sense that today would be the day they’d start. Let’s face it, getting one obstinate child to apply her sunscreen sometimes ends in a battle of screaming, head-tossing, and occasional nasty language. Doing 30 of them? At summer camp? Gimme a break!

So here’s what I should have said in my article: It’s a great idea to ask your child’s camp whether they have sunscreen re-application time, and remind them that all sunscreens, regardless of variety, degrade in the sun and heat and need to be reapplied every two hours.

[Yes, the cynic in me is saying, Good idea: Fat chance!]

A few days later, a homeschooling friend sent a link to this blog about the various unknowns and partial-knowns about what a good sunscreen is and the possible dangers of ingredients in the sunscreens we use, and this website with recommendations of sunscreens that don’t have these possibly dangerous ingredients.

This is something I would have taken longer to decide whether to commit it to print. As you may have noticed, I don’t jump on every single bandwagon that rolls by. A lot of those bandwagons are driven by people who just love to drive bandwagons! They hear about a new supplement and they just want to be on that bandwagon! Then they hear about a dangerous pesticide and they want to be on that bandwagon!

Like anyone, I’d be pleased to have been in the right, say, when European doctors were prescribing thalidomide to pregnant women and American doctors said, Wait a second, we’re not so sure about this. But I also know that I didn’t jump on the bandwagon that was trumpeting a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism, which has now been soundly disproven. (This may be a cartoon, but this is the very best summary of the whole thing I’ve read.)

So, you may freak out when you read that an ingredient in sunscreen is suspected of encouraging certain cancers. I, the daughter of a scientist, am rather more cautious. So about that I would say: consider keeping current with the recommendations about the types of sunscreen to use. For now, the Skin Cancer Foundation knows more about it than you or I do, and they’re still saying sunscreen is safer than repeated, blistering burns.

Feels better, too.

I say this as a card-carrying member of the highest skin cancer risk group. Not only do I have pale skin that pretty much never tans, and I get freckles, and some of the freckles have become darker and raised up in recent years, but as a child I knew nothing about sunscreen. I lived in Michigan, where I felt victorious if I could get a sunburn after a whole day being outside in the sweltering heat “laying out” with my friends (who always got beautiful tans, of course!).

When I was in high school, I went on a school trip to Mexico. It was a mind-opening experience, and I loved it till our last stop: a beautiful island off the coast near Cancun. There I sat on the beach and giggled when a Mexican boy sat down next to me and said, “You and me? We kees?” and I smeared on a little of whatever cream someone in the group had brought.

That night I was in agony. The next day on the plane, I was ill. For the next week, my body was in revolt, not from Montezuma’s revenge but from the second degree burns all over my body. My mother, not usually squeamish, enlisted my older sister to peel the skin off me in sheets. I was left with a lot more freckles, and a new statistical likelihood in my future.

In other words: Protect your children. Keep a watchful eye on what comes next in sunscreen research, but until then, do what is better than letting them burn.

That’s my edit for the day.

My blog got featured in this week’s Homeschooling Carnival. It looks like there’s lots of interesting links there, so check it out!

Each time we do something to the house, we’re trying to be conscious of balancing how “green” our choices are with the realities of life. It’s amazing to me how much our consciousness of these choices has changed since we bought our house in 1996. Then, it didn’t occur to me that living at the top of two very large hills might make it less likely that I’d ride my bike to the store rather than drive. Now that I have kids, no way am I going to race down the hill on our bikes if we need to haul a gallon of milk back up.

Similarly, back when we bought our house, solar technology existed but didn’t even enter my thoughts as I looked at the gorgeous redwoods and cypress that surround our house. I was appreciating the green… trees! Not noticing that the lack of sunshine hitting our roof meant that we couldn’t be green: no chance that solar panels would ever pay off, or even pay for themselves before they had to be replaced.

Back when we bought our house, we were charmed by the very high ceilings and the airiness of the house. Now, I shudder at all the money we spend heating up that air with our forced air heating system. When we bought our house, I was annoyed that there was a large front lawn, but I watered it anyway. Now, we just let it die every year. As someone said to me, they let their lawns die on the East Coast for months at a time…during the winter! Ours is lush and lovely during the winter, and bit by bit I’m getting rid of it through less thirsty landscaping.

We have done some very good things to make our house more efficient. When we did a big remodel (before we had kids, of course!), we replaced all the leaky windows with high quality double-paned ones. We try to keep all the doors well-sealed. We have programmable thermostats and as we get hardier, we keep lowering the temperature they’re set at. We have all low-flow toilets and showerheads, of course, and have replaced all the light bulbs we can stand to replace with compact fluorescent.

So we had our AMBAG audit, and our interviewer said that we’d probably done almost as much as we could. The big payoff of doing the audit, it turns out, is that we are going to be part of a huge survey of local homes, to find out what people are doing and what things they haven’t adopted yet. This will help set policy and make decisions about how best to create more energy-efficient homes.

Our interviewer said he was impressed by all we’d done, though I always feel like we haven’t done enough. He promised to get us some answers to our questions (such as, what’s the best way to save money on heating, individual electric baseboards in our rooms, or continue to use the natural gas forced air heating that heats the entire house?), and he gave us some ideas for which changes make the most sense now vs. later. His major point was that making changes that don’t pay off (such as installing solar panels that will end up not saving energy because of our shady location) just doesn’t make sense, so I’m supposed to stop worrying about it. (Fat chance.)

But mostly, he said, by taking part in the survey, our house and habits are going to be part of a fact-finding mission that will hopefully result in all of us finding out how to make our homes more energy efficient. If you’re interested in adding to that database — whether you consider your family a model of green living or happy energy hogs — call up AMBAG and get an appointment.

They might be running from the stench.

The stench of what, you might ask? Well, as they say, whaddya got?

It starts like this: The husband gets up in the middle of the night, feeling restless. As he sits in the living room, he sniffs. What is that… awful smell? Soon he goes back to bed and back to sleep. In the morning, the smell seems like a dream until he walks into the living room. There it is again, stronger.

He goes back to tell his wife about it. Long-suffering wife of a man with a highly sensitive nose, she offers some sympathetic words. When she goes out to the living room, she can certainly smell something off, but nothing to get upset about.

The day wears on. As it does, the smell seems to migrate. When the mother and son come home from an appointment, now it seems like it’s in the stairwell. What gives? By dinnertime, it’s strong, and it’s nasty. Luckily, it hasn’t rounded the corner into the kitchen area where they eat.

By the next morning, it’s a definite stench, and they start to take measures. They’re sure it’s probably something that died in the crawl space. Mother and son walk the perimeter of the house, checking all the screens. They’re all secure. They go behind the house and toward the door into the crawl space. Son decides it’s really very important for him to play on the rope swing at that exact moment.

“Please? I need your moral support!” the mother pleads.

No way. She’s gonna have to be the adult this time. She gingerly takes the cover off the entrance to the crawl space. She’s armed with a large flashlight, which will both illuminate what she doesn’t want to see and clobber anything else that makes a run for it.

The smell that wafts out of the crawl space is musty, earthen, and dark. Perhaps even a bit dank. But definitely not the smell in the house. Nothing like putrid. Nothing like something dead is slowly starting down the road to decay. Hmph.

In the day that follows they check everywhere else. They check under all the furniture. She remembers the smell of her car when the son’s sippy cup full of milk rolled under a seat on a hot summer day. They start wondering, can the smell be coming down from above? They’d had mice in the attic space. Perhaps from there?

Another day passes, the mystery still intact.

The wife has lunch with a friend who’s the wife of a contractor. She offers the sort of sensible advice that the wife of a contractor has heard before: “Well, this is a problem that will eventually take care of itself, you know.”

Big help you are. Some friend.

The smell becomes nearly unbearable. Incense is burning all the time they are in the house. They try fans. They try opening up the upstairs to get more air circulation. That results in their shared office becoming filled with the putrid stench of death.

She starts to become irrational, at home alone with the kids. Nothing the poor daughter (who is missing most of this due to day camp and who swears, in any case, that she can’t actually smell anything bad) does is right. The mother is irritated. She hates this house. She hates mice. She hates her cats, who perhaps killed the thing that is now causing the stench. She corners the cats one by one: “Did you do it?”

They don’t answer.

The family gets testy. They all have low-grade headaches from the incense-filled air. The stench hovers below the smell of the incense, gnawing at their nerves.

Then one night, they’ve just had enough. Each grabs his or her most important things, his desert island disks, her computer that holds the records of all her thoughts and desires. The son always travels light, with just an iPod and his trusty stuffed rabbit. The daughter protests, “Really, guys. What’s the big deal here? It’s not even a bad smell, really!”

They all consider leaving her behind, but that would be too cruel, even if she is pretending that she doesn’t notice the stench. Seeing the desperation in their eyes, the daughter packs a large duffel of her most important things, including three different types of tape, the entire rag bag from the hall closet, and her knight costume.

This motley crew strikes out down the road, leaving the cats behind, confused. “Was it something we did? Something we said?” asks the orange cat.

“No, stupid,” hisses one of the black cats. “We don’t talk to them, remember? They think we don’t understand English.”

“Yes,” confirms the other black cat. “They think we’re too stupid to know that they’re stepping out on us. I bet they went and got the house repossessed by the mortgage lender. That’s happening a lot these days. It’s always the cats who pay in the end. Always the cats!”

The family walks desperately down the street, peering into windows that are lighting up, displaying happy families, couples young and old, and the occasional single person eating ramen. Who will take them in? Who will believe it could be so bad?

Who will save them from the big stink?

I did my usual few steps: First, check the Santa Cruz Public Library. This is where I always go first, because why buy something before you know if your kids are going to like it? And besides, we just love our library!

Manga guides let your kids learn things from bubbles rather than paragraphs!

The library did have the book, but only as an e-book. This is a great option for many books, especially technical books that will go out of date almost as soon as the library can shelve them. The library also has a wonderful e-book service called Tumblebooks, which my daughter still loves even though she can read just fine. Tumblebooks are animated books that are read out loud to the child. As the words are read, they are highlighted so the child can follow along. It’s a fabulous thing for emerging readers.

An e-book of manga, however, is a lost cause. First of all, they can’t fit an entire page on my screen, so I have to scroll to read the book. Second, I can’t just leave an e-book lying around for my kids to discover. This is one of my most successful ways of teaching my kids. I call it accidental learning, but I do it on purpose!

So my next step was automatic: Type Amazon.com. It’s easy, straightforward, and beautifully executed. (OK, I would believe it’s beautifully executed even if my husband and I weren’t friends with the guy who built their system!)

It is, however, the very opposite of shopping local, which is what I keep telling myself (and everyone else) to do. Even when it’s not quite so convenient. Even when it costs a bit more. Even when my hands type “ama” and the link comes up in my browser. So yes, of course, Amazon had the book. And if I added the Manga Guide to Molecular Biology (which my son wants to study), I’d get free shipping, tax-free, to my house.

Ah, temptation.

However, I recently had a very nice conversation with Neal and Ryan Coonerty. Santa Cruzans and those who follow the plight of independent bookstores need no introduction to the Coonertys. Neal and his wife Candy motored into Santa Cruz in 1973 and bought Bookshop Santa Cruz from its previous owner. They proceeded to turn Bookshop into not only a popular store, but an anchor of downtown Santa Cruz. I remember before I lived in Santa Cruz I came here for two reasons: Bookshop Santa Cruz and India Joze. India Joze is long gone (though I had Joze’s cooking at the Avant Garden Party recently), but Bookshop is still going, now under the leadership of Neal’s daughter Casey. [Read my article here.]

Independent bookstores are the anchors of many a community, but they are dying a slow, agonizing death. First, it was the chain stores, which used their buying power to be able to offer books at lower prices and artificially inflated large inventory. (Ask me about my experiences as a publisher with Barnes & Noble sometime!) Then, it was the Internet.

Amazon.com poses two problems to outfits like Bookshop: First, they can offer things at lower prices. But this is always true of big guys vs. little guys. Bookshop outlasted Crown across the street (in fact, Crown went belly-up after their attempt to put Bookshop out of business). They are co-existing with Border’s down the street. (Hey, Border’s was my local bookshop when I was a kid!)

But Bookshop can’t get away from the tax problem. Yes, as a local bookstore, they have to charge sales tax. And these days, that’s about 10% of your bill. Amazon.com, as a Washington-based company, argues that they don’t have to charge sales tax. And so they don’t. And no one seems to care.

Except Neal and his family. And all the other independent booksellers who are attempting to compete fair and square with a competitor who not only can offer everything, but is being allowed to do it tax-free.

So here’s the thing: I went to Bookshopsantacruz.com. I searched for the book in question. They had Biochemistry on the shelves, and said they could get Electricity in 1-5 days. I ordered them both for free shipping if I pick them up a the store. Their software, yes, is a bit idiosyncratic. (Our friend who designed Amazon.com’s software makes sure that nothing he does is idiosyncratic. It works. You don’t notice it. That’s why he got paid the big bucks to do it.) But their software worked, and my order got submitted.

Within seconds, I received a nice e-mail:

Thank you for your web order. We currently have Molecular Biology on hold for you at the Information Desk. Manga Guide to Electricity has been ordered and should be here late Friday afternoon. We will call you when it arrives.
We REALLY appreciate your support!
Clytia
Bookshop SC

And they really mean it! How do I know? Then I got a phone call. I don’t know if it was Clytia, but she was very nice and she told me that my book was in (the one they had on the shelves). I pointed out to her that a second book was on order. “Oh, yes,” she noticed. I told her I’d pick them both up when they were both there. “Cool!” she said.

The Santa Cruz experience. No one at Amazon.com is going to call you up. They aren’t going to say, “Cool!” as if you just executed a rad move in the surf.

We live in a place. We chose this place because of the place it is. In order to keep it the place that it is, we have to do a few things. One, we need to pay a little bit more to the people who own our local businesses. Two, we have to deal with a bit of idiosyncrasy. Three, we need to love our idiosyncrasy.

As the Bookshop Santa Cruz t-shirt and bumper sticker says:

Keep Santa Cruz Weird

And, I would add, Keep Santa Cruz Local.