The Discreet Joy of Having a Grand-Daughter in Seattle

12/2/2013

Photo by 3/5

Nobody likes getting a call at three in the morning. Too many bad options.

I heard my cell phone rattling on the nightstand, the night before Thanksgiving. My wife was next to me, but the question remained: What?

It’s one of those old clamshell phones. (I cannot figure out Mr. Jobs’ gizmos.)

I clawed it open.

The message was a photograph of a flower in the frost.

It was from Grandchild 3/5. Given the size of this great land of ours, I don’t see 3/5 that often. A message is welcome.

I pecked out a response: Where?

She has a much faster keyboard than I do.

Discovery Park, she replied.

You have a good eye, I typed.

Thanks, Pop.

By now I was actually awake. She had outlasted everybody in her household, residents and visitors, and besides, she is something of a night owl. I thought I would toss out a subtle reminder of the situation.

You know it’s 3 AM here.

This did not seem to faze her.

Yeah, she replied. It’s 12 o’clock here.

I liked her style. It reminded me of six years ago when I received a call around 4:30 in the morning from Sebastian Newbold Coe, Baron Coe, CH KBE, the great runner who was head of the London Olympic Committee for 2012. Lord Coe had come into the office bright and early and asked his assistant to get me on the phone, which she did. He had a lot on his mind. He was abashed, but we conducted business, no problem, and when we finally met in Beijing in 2008, he apologized again. I thought it was very cool to be able to joke with a lord about an early wake-up call.

Grandchild 3/5 did not apologize. Time zones or not, she can text me any time.

Plus, she has a good eye.

Drawing by 3/5

AlanRubin link

12/2/2013 09:22:05 am

George

Grandparents/grandchildren operate with a special set of rules which function better when not interrupted by parents. I do not see anything unusual with 3/5's call.

You might want to take the technical leap to a smartphone if for no other reason than texting with the grandkids, is less noisy than a conventional phone..

Two years ago when our 3/3 was 11, I received a text that she was made goalie of her soccer team and could I come out to give her some instruction. She even set up a weekend clinic for a few of her friends who were goalies on other teams. When I spoke to my daughter to clear the weekend, she knew nothing about it.

I was teaching my OLLI soccer class, which was Friday mornings. I caught a 2 PM flight from Albany, NY to Madison, WI.

It looks like 3/5 gets her artistic skills from her grandmother.

My Park Slope based 2/3 is also artistic. I'm a member of the Berkshire Museum Camera Club in Pittsfield, which holds monthly contests for B&W and color prints and digital images.

Olivia joined last year as she was getting into photography. Since she does not have a photo editing program, I prepare her images to the clubs requirements. I'll crop her images several ways and she makes the final choice.

I figured that this would be a good way for her to improve her perspective, and to develop a common interest. I did not expect her to win "best image of the year" in the regular category, but I was not surprised.

George Vecsey

12/3/2013 12:45:44 am

Alan, you are absolutely right. It's a nice relationship. See you Wednesday? GV

Suzanne

12/2/2013 12:15:02 pm

I follow 3/5 on Instagram and I agree, she really does have a great eye for beauty.

George Vecsey

12/3/2013 12:44:09 am

Suzanne: What is this Instagram? G

Diane Tuman link

12/4/2013 08:25:30 am

I think I like this new nickname that seems to be forming: "3/5".

Ed Martin

12/5/2013 05:50:48 am

I was able to post the lovely photo and article on my Facebook newsline, where the link picked up additional admirers. Ciao

George Vecsey

12/5/2013 06:59:35 am

Ed,, thanks, I don't do Facebook but a few of the usual suspects on this site surely do.
GV

Andrew Tansey

12/6/2013 11:25:12 pm

1. Great photo!

2. I love the conversation. "Yeah, It's 12 o'clock here." At least she said "Yeah." Some of my correspondents might've said "Duh!"

3. In my line of work, there are no particular time limits for being productive. When we first started using E-mail, it didn't matter when a message was sent. I might get a comment the next day from someone who read the sending time about my odd hours, but that was all. Then I began to realize that people with smart phones might hear my message arrive. I would never make a phone call after 9:30 p.m. My mother would ground me! Now I wonder whether the etiquette is not to send E-mails after hours because the recipient's phone might chirp, buzz, bark, play a riff or rattle. I've been assured by my smarter phone correspondents that there's no such etiquette; they can set their phones to stun or turn them off. Nevertheless, now I usually save my latest thinking in draft and send it the next day - or whenever I find it in my saved drafts.

4. "Clam-shell." I call mine a "way-cool flip phone."

George Vecsey

12/7/2013 12:33:28 am

Mr. T, nice to hear from you.
That sounds like a case for the NYT Ethicist.
But I think whoever is advising you in these grave matters is on the right track.
GV

Chemicals Manufacturers link

1/9/2014 01:29:44 pm

It is also useful to maintain a back-up US supplier.

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

The Discreet Joy of Having a Grand-Daughter in Seattle

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