Arriving at Dad's house today, he said to me, "can I get you anything?" "No," I said, "I'm just putting my hair back." Dad looked surprised "You have special hair to put on?" "No, I'm putting back my regular hair, in a pony tail, with a rubber band."
This picture is from the early 1980s - it's Dad on an expedition in Copan, helping to sort and re-assemble Mayan ruins.
Dad was always interested in archaeology. He used to build large, elaborate sand-castles that were more like sculptures, in the shape of Mayan temples. He had me, at the age of six, holding flashcards while he learned Mayan numerals, and he decorated my mother's freshly-baked cookie cutters with mayan themes.
When I was 13 or so, he started paying me to tape record the more technical magazines he subscribed to, the ones the Library for the Blind didn't record. I was probably the only pre-teen reader of Archaeology magazine. It was excruciatingly boring, and my voice on the tapes was punctuated by yawns. Sometimes my voice would trail off and start to slur and then turn to snores on the tape, but Dad paid me for recording for years, and when I ran into his neighbor on the subway platform he told me he was used to hearing my voice through the walls.
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