The Electron comes to you this week from my old home place in the western suburbs of Boston. I spent last weekend at a meeting of my religious group, held at a rustic retreat house in northwest Connecticut. We usually connect with each other by Internet mailing list, as a "virtual" religious order, but once or twice a year we are able to meet each other face to face at retreats or conventions where we have educational, devotional, and ceremonial activities as well as lots of friendship and laughter.

Here in New England it is like turning back the calendar almost a month. It has been chilly this spring and the plants are on a slightly delayed schedule. The flowering trees are just coming into bloom even though back in my Washington-area home the treeflowers are long gone and the leaves are out. I was expecting to see migrating birds including warblers while I was in Connecticut but in the higher hills where we were, many trees were still leafless and there wouldn't be any warblers for weeks. The only migrant I heard was the saucy Phoebe flycatcher, who is the very first migrating songbird of the spring here on the east coast.

I am here to help my parents do various things and to spend time with my relatives. On Sunday night, shortly after I arrived from Connecticut, I was treated to a string quartet concert at the local arts center (the same arts center where I had my show last fall.). They played Mozart and Haydn, and a Schubert quintet with an extra cellist. Monday I helped my mother re-arrange some furniture in her art studio and hang some larger pictures for an upcoming "open studio" show. Later we hope to visit the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. I'm right back in the lofty cultural milieu I grew up in, where just for a few days, I don't have to hear the howling and screeching of pop soundtracks.

I have my math with me and I hope to do at least some studying while I am here. I'm currently pondering the idea that functions can be added, subtracted, divided, and multiplied. That is to say that not only numbers (which are rather like stable "things" i.e. constants) can be worked on this way, but processes can be treated mathematically. And as for physics, there's nothing like the parabolic trajectory of a home run hit by Red Sox slugger David Ortiz in the eighth inning, as they beat the New York Yankees.

Posted at 12:14 am | link