Phthursday Musings: Fishy Fragments

My first-born has spent this week at a day camp focused on wetlands at Morton Arboretum. I haven’t gotten a lot of high quality information, but apparently they’ve taken river samples, they’ve used a net to catch fish including a large carp, and aside from it being hot and involving a lot of walking, it’s been pretty good!

Even if you’re not familiar with Morton Arboretum, you won’t be surprised to learn that there are lots and lots of trees; but you might be surprised to learn that there are 1,700 acres in the middle of what’s otherwise densely populated DuPage County, and annual admission is over 1,000,000 visitors. It is such a nice place to be, remarkably clean and well-kept.

Morton also happens to be about a half hour from the house, which is not ideal for going to a day camp. I’ve handled this though by spending three days this week decamped in the visitor center outside the Gingko Cafe, where as it so happens, I’ve been remarkably productive, and have an outrageous 750-line SQL query to prove it.

So I spent a lot of time sitting around Morton, passively observing a lot of people coming through, and frequent groupings were:

• Mothers with one or two young children

• Grandmothers with one or two young grandchildren

• Women 50+ in groups of two to four

• Older couples of retirement age

As it so happens, a lot of school districts were back in session this week, so there weren’t a lot of school-aged children. This also meant there were only four camps going instead of the regular sixteen; our school district starts back up next week.

The grouping that most interested me was the grandmother-and-grandchildren grouping. These women seemed to be, on average, more than 60 years older than the children, and frequently they were having a hell of a time managing the situation. It’s not that the young kids weren’t liable to be crazy for whomever they were with - one time I got up from my table, and went I went back, there was a two-or-three year old jammed bizarrely into the glass corner near my table, his mother gently explaining that that wasn’t really a place that one is supposed to be. But it was all interesting, because I never really have occasion to be around all of these kinds of groupings, and I especially never seem to be around grandparents and grandchildren without the middle generation present.

If it takes my son as long to have a child as it took me, I’ll be 74 when a grandchild arrives, which seems like a wild thing to consider, but is actually a critical driving factor in how I approach the world. When that kid is 3 and smashing herself awkwardly into a corner, and I’m 77 and have to deal with it, I’m going to do my very best to be spry enough to actually deal with it. Easier said than done, but that’s a way I’ve chosen to organize my existence.

For that to work out, though, I’ve got to become better at recovery. I have a terrible tendency to work myself too hard too often and not set myself up well for recovery. As I’ve tried to become more aware of my physical and mental and emotional states, over the evolution of my thinking on exercise, I’ve come recently to understanding that recovery and relaxation are related but not quite the same things. I’ve just finished a book on physical recovery - The Athlete’s Guide to Recovery - intended for, ahem, more serious athletes than me, and there’s a lot of good things in there about physical and mental recovery without it drifting off into wellness nonsense.

And as it so happens, Morton Arboretum is sort of an ideal place for a different kind of recovery. And it needn’t be such a well-manicured place either. As we start to move into fall, I’m starting to thinking about how to balance running with walking, and having that walking be more in the forest, and then there’s also the question of how much else I want to clear my thoughts in the forest. Should I not bring music with? Should I try and shift toward more, ehh, calming music, instead of what I tend to listen to at the gym?

My hope is that doofus the child gets a lot of good things out of learning how to take mud samples and talk to carp and whatever else exactly he’s doing this week. When we signed him up I knew it might be a difficult week logistically but I thought, hey, maybe I’ll just sit outside the cafe for a few hours a couple of days. And I did that, and I think it’s gone remarkably well.

I’d mulled over trying to write some about what’s happening to America. I find that I come up with ideas but then as I try to think them through they don’t go anywhere. Now maybe most of what I write doesn’t go anywhere but… this is a different kind of nowhere.

I think that’s what a lot of us are feeling generally. We try to think through things and we wind up at the bad kind of nowhere.

I’ll put this out here though. If people want more of that kind of writing, and it’s something where I think there might be more engagement, I’m game, because the engagement becomes the destination. And I think we do need to engage, we need to have ideas about how what it might look like when the opportunity comes to put some things back together.

It was nice this week to be around more human beings than usual in a positive environment, but I suppose I wouldn’t call that much in the way of engagement, aside from smiling at the kid crammed in the corner.

This week’s Phthursday flag is that of Tihany, Hungary:

This was brought to my attention by my buddy Rhumaro. I asked where he came across this and I was told, and I quote, “it started with paella”. As things do.

Tihany is not a place I am familiar with. It is a small place, population 1,338, located on a peninsula of Lake Balaton. It formed around a monastery and today purports to have the highest per capita income in Hungary. None of this explains the flag.

Ordinarily I would not link to an Amazon page, but I make an exception here because you can apparently order your own Tihany flag for $69.95, and the page suggests you might do this because [t]he flag of Tihany gracefully displays a harmonious blend of colors, featuring a serene intermediate blue that envelops 59% of the canvas, complemented by a gentle light grey that softly occupies 20%, while bold splashes of vibrant red at 13% add a striking contrast, alongside rich dark yellow accents that elegantly contribute 7%, all framed by a subtle touch of black at 1% that grounds the design.

To put it another way, AI is happy to provide a breakdown of the coloric content of a flag, but isn’t smart enough to observe that the flag prominently displays a two-tailed lion apparently using a sword to conduct a school of four fish. I’ve managed to figure out that they are garda, otherwise known as sabrefish, sichel, or ziege. I have not yet figured out if you can make a good paella with it, but there’s an annual festival in Tihany around the garda, and I’m sure someone there would be happy to give it a go.

Nevertheless there remain several questions. Why are there four fish? Why are they in four red blocks with four gray blocks to match? Why does the lion have two tails? Why does the lion need a freaking sword to deal with these fish, isn’t he a freaking lion??

I for one am impressed that such a small town even has a flag. According to the 2020 census, the two Illinois municipalities closest in size to Tihany are Divernon and Louisville, and they don’t have flags. They probably don’t even have paella!

Rhumaro also separately brought this to my attention:

So even though it’s blatantly obvious what’s happening here, it’s also completely obscure as to what’s happening here. The thing is that when I clicked on the link and started watching it, with no up front context, my first thought was:

Hey, why is that guy mimicking the Tihany lion?

And at some point when things picked up in this video, it didn’t matter, this whole thing was just about catching fish out of Lake Balaton. I fully expect these guys to make the trek from Tokyo to Tihany for the next garda festival.

I’ll have a couple of longer offerings the next couple of weeks, maybe, a summer baseball recap, and something more music focused. And hey, if there’s popular demand, I’ll even dig deep and write about the chances for democracy in the long run.

Anyway, here’s a picture of a garda, or I guess a ziege, or whatever: