Lazy Sunday

It is a beautiful, crisp, clear day, and the children are off on their various adventures, and I've got the place to myself. Still, Spongebob is on the tube--L forgot to turn it off before he ran out--and I suddenly realize, thinking back on years of leaving PBS's Arthur on after the kids had left for school, that I've got a somewhat irrational tendency not to undo what they've done until they're back home, whether it's a dirty dish or a piece of paper on a table, or a cartoon on the tube. The connective thread. What strange creatures we are. No wonder all the superstitions of the Middle Ages.

I met a man this week who has met almost all the leaders of the world--corporate, governmental, religious. He's made it his business, literally, to do so. In his offices, photographic evidence, and treasures. Everything is remarkable: the painting behind his head a gift from Indira Ghandi; the tapestry to his right a gift from the Dalai Lama; the circular painting of a mother and child a fer-real Botticelli. I wanted to have an hour to just look at everything in private--and then another hour to negotiate his adoption. Of me.

Which might seem an odd segue to our latest find: the kids and I have taken up letterboxing--tipped off to it by a work colleague. It is SO FUN! It's essentially a national treasure hunt, except that the treasure is a box with an ink stamp and a book inside it, and when you find the box you stamp your own book with the stamp you found, and stamp the book in the box with a stamp you made yourself. Anyone can make and hide a letterbox, and then leave clues to its location on the letterbox site (letterboxing.org). Some clues are very specific, and others are poems with clues elusively embedded. And in some locations--like Gillette Castle, just upstate a bit from me--there are dozens of boxes hidden around the grounds, and even one, I'm told, behind a certain loose stone in a certain castle wall. There are similar gigs in the national park system--passport boxes scattered throughout the parks, and people find these boxes and stamp their "passports." It's a way for the park service to get visitors deeper into the parks. Letterboxing has no such overarching motivation. Pure fun.

Go forth.