I imagine that Taylor Swift’s proud mum posted a grainy video of the young Taylor captivating the crowds with a song when she was three at her friend’s bar mitzvah (oh my, how pretty – don’t tell me that was an iPhone 7! Makes me feel so old). This is just like that except that Evan isn’t three or singing.
Enjoy a short video where Evan chats about the Bose-Einstein Condensate, the fifth state of matter. I believe he is available for the bar mitzvah circuit.
Vivian crawls into damp dark places.
Vivian’s school offers a nice range of respectable sports. She can play hockey or soccer or beat people up at lacrosse or run around a basketball, volleyball, or tennis court. She can run track or cross country and do yoga or swim. But she picked caving and climbing. So she goes off into holes in the ground with her other caving people and a very well regarded caving instructor who doubles as their English teacher and comes back filthy and without her headlamps (it’s easy to shop for Vivian – just buy her a headlamp because she has usually lost hers and mine).
Last year she became one of the co-captains of the caving team and says it is a job with responsibility. When she checks a newer caver’s knots and signs off on his belaying it is a big deal. The school organizes multiple caving and climbing trips through the year and they sound amazing.
This last Christmas Vivian gave me a caving gift. Three days after Christmas we drove for about an hour and a half and met a guide at the entrance of a cave. Jo had already surreptitiously measured me to make sure I was of less than 51 inches in circumference which meant that unless I did something very stupid I wouldn’t be stuck in the cave and need a rescue. Vivian had reminded me to bring a trash bag for dirty clothes and a change. Down we went.
We emerged three hours later, having belly crawled, climbed, stooped, and dropped through tiny openings in rocks. We sloshed through knee deep ice cold dark water. We stared at veins of white crystal deep underground and at stalagmites and stalactites that glowed vividly under UV light. We came face to face with tiny sleepy solitary tricolor bats hidden in crevices. We even stopped for a snack break underground.
I liked the caves but I wasn’t unhappy to I look up and see the sky afterwards. Vivian, thanks and happy to do it again.
Back some time last fall, a group of parents and kids met at the front steps of Grace Garden to take a picture and make a donation. Half of these kids are high school juniors. The other half are 8th graders. More than a decade ago they used to walk up these steps every morning and through the doors behind them into a world of love and caring and friends and fun and teachers and learning.
Coincidentally or through some Bene Gesserit-ship, the older kids from the fours families are the same age (Vivian and one of the tall boys in the back were born a day apart), as are the younger kids. The families have travelled, hiked, camped, dined, and hung out together through the years. There is zero overlap in the schools these kids attend and perhaps because of that the kids aren’t close. But they all know each other well and are happy to chill together when they are thrown into the same physical space.
A few weeks after this photo op, I went for a friend’s birthday party to Thailand. I’ve known Sharath since the beginning to time. Vivian went with me. I think she appreciated the bonds between old friends. May be some of these people will visit each other in a few decades. Wouldn’t that be something?
If you know your Ted Lasso (my first quote from a TV show in the 17 years of this blog), you are familiar with Dani Rojas’ smiling face and “Football is life”. Outside of going to school or playing video games in his room, Evan plays soccer. Hence the American version of Dani’s quote.
Evan has been playing soccer since he was big enough to kick a ball, starting with Soccer Shots at Grace Garden and the Russian coach at Magellan in the early years. He spent most of his club soccer years at Lonestar with some amazing coaches like Coach Stevens, Coach Luis Papandrea, and most recently, Coach Jason. Stevens famously crept up on his young players and pushed them so they learnt to fall gracefully and get back up quickly, a skill Evan highly values even today. Stevens used to yell “There’s no walking in soccer.” When the season finished we made a t-shirt for him that said that. Papandrea used to look up at the sky and yell a player’s name from the sidelines during matches. That was all the communication they ever got but that was all they needed to jolt them into a higher gear. Papandrea moved Evan to defense, and Evan has been a central defender since. Jason joined the team when a previous coach left abruptly after telling parents to not expect much from the boys. Jason promptly took the team to multiple tournament finals and a championship.
The last one is his school team from 7th grade. They were undefeated for most of the season but then lost in the play-offs. There is boy in this photo who has played with Evan for many years. And 3-4 other boys who used to be at Magellan but have continued to be friends and play on the same soccer team. For a few years back there, from early spring onwards several of us parents (ok, dads) would conspire to keep the key group of friends together for another soccer season.
We parents traveled a bit with the kids for tournaments, ate ice creams after games, and saw each other on weekends and practice at the sidelines. The kids horsed around in hotel swimming pools or on one occasion took over an entire hotel for a game of hide and go seek. Sometimes, outside of my family, this soccer family is the most familiar and frequent visitors in our lives. As soccer parents go – we are pretty chill. We’re there to encourage our kids and have some fun. As you can see, for the first several years of Evan’s soccer career, the only photos I have of him are smiling with a medal after a tournament. Contrast that with the lovely action photos below and those in a previous post (Memphis and Mesa). Last year Evan and four boys moved to a new club based out of San Antonio and promptly doubled the number of games they played. Evan was suddenly in practice three nights a week and had to be driven to San Antonio for Saturday and Sunday games. And occasionally to games at cities like Memphis and Mesa. Thanks to a player’s mother I got some great photos of Evan in action. Soccer is life!
Till one day late last year when Evan had enough. He wasn’t having fun and I was burnt out from the driving. With bittersweet emotions, he gave up the rest of the club season. Evan still hopes to play school soccer this season and will most likely tryout in high school next year.
Jo and I didn’t expect Evan to go to college on a soccer scholarship. We just wanted him to do something fun. He went further and played harder and better than we expected. When he was on the pitch he was fully committed. One of my favorite pastimes in the last two seasons has been to see Evan defend. Someone with the ball jukes Evan or one of the other defenders and suddenly he is free and heading towards the goal with the ball. The fans of the other team start cheering him on. Evan turns around and gives chase. Our parents know what is going to happen. Evan runs like a dart. He makes himself pointed and sleek and moves faster and faster. Most of the time he catches up with the player and takes the ball away. The player looks around incredulously wondering how someone caught up to him. After the game a parent usually asks me how he trains. I tell him that he lays in bed whenever he’s not at school. What does he eat? Uh, ramen noodles. It’s the truth.
Evan had a great group of friends at soccer. He will miss seeing Adrian, Niko, Sevi, Vincent, and Roshan four or five times a week. I will miss hanging out with their parents. We had fun. Evan learned a lot from soccer. He learned being in a team, contributing to the team, winning with grace and losing with a smile. I hope some of these lessons and friendships stay with him. Me – I have my weekends back. Last weekend I camped with friends at Enchanted Rock. This weekend I went skiing with Vivian. Evan’s old team had tournaments both weekends.
Soccer is life. But life goes on, actually pretty nicely.
It is time to bid farewell to 2023 (good riddance, some might say).
Jo and I celebrated 19 years of wedded bliss—or something like that : – ). Vivian and Evan are growing faster than weeds in a summer garden. Vivian, our Renaissance teenager, dabbled in art, crocheting, caving, cooking, hanging out with friends, and devouring books like they’re going out of style. She did a pre-college summer stint at RISD with a lot of help from Uncle Alu and Aunt Michelle.
Evan, the soccer player and science buff, is gearing up for high school. When he’s not defending his goal or dissecting the secrets of the universe, he’s busy breaking the Shin Ramyun consumption record and exploring the virtual realms of computer games. Oh, and we can’t forget our animal crew—Zeus, Ouiser, and the newest addition to the family, Phineas the kitten, who has turned our home into a feline playground-nightmare.
We managed to squeeze in some family adventures, too. While Vivian was honing her creative skills at RISD, the rest of us went off to Sardinia to sail along the Costa Esmeralda in a 46-foot cat with Jen and Gegg and his two boys. It was a blast—aside from the day of the ten foot waves.
Jo and I racked up our fair share of travel miles, both separately and together. From Alaska to Barcelona, Big Bend to the Finger Lakes, Utah to Nebraska—we covered some serious ground. Evan and I ventured to Memphis and Arizona for soccer tournaments. And there were weddings in New York and Bangkok and birthday parties in Florida, Thailand, and California. We partied like it was 2023!
On a more somber note, 2023 wasn’t exactly a banner year for the world. Wars, economic turbulence, and environmental missteps* took their toll. We’re crossing our fingers that 2024 brings a much-needed dose of peace. Ah, but there is the Trump dilemma—will he win the elections or rise by insurrection? One way or another we’ll know before I write the 2024 Christmas letter.
As we turn the page on 2023, we’re sending our warmest wishes for a joyous and peaceful new year. May it be filled with love, laughter, and peace.
-chatGPT and others (99% of this post was generated by prompts to AI tools)
* my word was “fuckups” but AI toned it down – ac
While I was on the east coast with Vivian back in Fall, Jo and I reached a milestone of being married for 19 years, a nice round number in base 19 I suppose. Jo and Evan were back in Austin. I called a good florist in Austin who was willing to go through a bouquet flower by flower. I replicated the colors of our wedding centerpieces and made sure that there were no lilies. This is the photo they sent when they dropped it off reluctantly at our doorstop (“Sir, it’s 76 degrees and sunny in Austin and the flowers shouldn’t be outside for long”).
It has been a good 19 years. For the first two, Jo and I travelled a lot. The next 17 were keeping the kids alive. Somewhere in there we spent two different years living or traveling abroad. My dad lived with us in Austin for one year. For the last year we have been involved in a back-yard redo. We’ve made it through that and are still mostly nice to one other. Two years ago I got back to working for the first time in our marriage and Jo hasn’t yet flipped. But she 100% oversaw Evan’s high school application process, is the adult in the room for Vivian’s college apps, keeps the fridge and pantry stocked for their lunches and snacks, and plans all the travel. I occasionally count ‘em to make sure we still have two kids.
When we met 19 years ago I changed the oil in my car and mowed the lawn. I couldn’t tell you where the oil filter is or has been in the last half a dozen cars I’ve owned. Things change. But as I finish this post that I started six months ago and watch Jo and Vivian and Evan discuss playlists over an outdoor lunch in El Valle where we are for spring break, I do know a few things that thankfully haven’t changed.
Here’s to the next 19, sweetheart. Happy belated anniversary : – )
Last month we welcomed the newest member of the fam, the first of the next generation among all six Clark and Chatterjee siblings, Quinn and Noah’s lovely baby B. He is the chillest kid ever and he even snuggled up to my belly. The last baby in the family was 13 years ago. As you can imagine, the ladies are bonkers over the handsome fellow. Carol is officially a great grand mama and Jo is a great aunt. Nicolle and Michelle are very proud grandmas. Vivian and Evan had fun meeting their second cousin, and in approximate Hindi/Bengali-to-English family naming schemes, their nephew, B.
B – welcome to planet earth and the family.
Over the last couple of months the kids and I have travelled one kid at a time a few times. Vivian and my trip to Brooklyn was sandwiched between two trips with Evan for soccer, the first to Memphis, and the second to Mesa. Jo and I aren’t particularly rabid soccer parents. Evan isn’t a bad soccer player. He tolerates playing the game. But he has no interest in soccer outside his play – he would not be able to pick Messi in a lineup. Till this year we and Evan’s friends’ parents had opted for a local league. Most games were in Austin with occasional matches in San Antonio and tournaments in Houston. For completely accidental reasons that I am to blame for, this year Evan and a few of his friends have ended up in a team that plays in the local league in San Antonio and a regional travel league. Which is why we are on our way to Mesa. I am secretly hoping the boys bomb so we don’t have to travel to California for the nationals next. Odds are in my favor. This is a new team and needs to play together for a bit to be less sucky. They are beating every team in the local league and getting their asses handed to them in the travel league. A teammate’s mother has taken it upon herself to be the team photographer. She is pretty good. Thanks to her, here are some of Evan’s antics from the field.
Mesa was a blast. Not because they won. In fact they lost every game. But we were there to have a good time. Some of these kids were together at Magellan years ago. The parents meet at the sidelines often twice a weekend and three times at practice so we know each other well. Evan and I had gone to Milan last year with one of these boys and his dad.
One night the boys celebrated a birthday with a zombie escape room experience. Then we went out for a super cheesy fun dinner at Beni Hana. Yes, they still do the volcano and the Japanese egg roll. We saw The Marvels in Imax and then cruised a retro mall (I don’t think they knew it was retro) till closing time. The kids raced RC cars and bought retro (by design) clothing from an Adidas store.
The Phoenix area is a sprawl in the desert. Highways and malls and big box stores and single family developments stretch in every direction. I managed to get out one morning and hike in the South Mountain Preserve. But we mostly drove back and forth to the tournament facilities and ate and drank and chatted. I dare say Evan enjoyed himself.
I’m sitting in the cafe car of Amtrak NE Regional 82 making its way from New York to Providence. Earlier this morning after a fabulous brunch in Brooklyn (the American breakfast came with a bowl of daal- that’s Brooklyn), I gave Vivian a kiss on the top of her head and told her I’d see her in three days. I took a couple of subways to the new Moynihan Train Hall in mid-town Manhattan and hopped on my Amtrak. Now I am watching the city scape slip by in the distance. The bustle of New York is soon replaced by the coastline of Connecticut. Fall colors on one side. Marshes, small harbors, occasional views of the Atlantic. At this moment the train is rumbling over an ancient bridge that was built by people on the Mayflower.
I spent the next three days with Alu and Michelle at their lovely home, visiting the beautiful Rhode Island shore, and eating fresh local seafood. It went by quickly. On Monday Alu and I sat upstairs and downstairs nursing our zoom calls. Alu and Michelle dropped me off at Kingston station and I reversed my steps back to Brooklyn in time for supper with Leela and Vivian at the neighborhood taqueria (very good for so far from the border) set between a Colombian piqueteadero and an Ecuadorian coffee shop. The sidewalks were full and Leela seemed to know everyone. Except the fentanyl users sitting on dairy crates across from Wyckoff Heights medical center – the literal ground zero for Covid in the US.
The day before Vivian and I left for Brooklyn, JoEllen and I were at St. Stephen’s for Parents Day. Her English teacher did a close reading of a couple of pages of the Great Gatsby, extracting insights from students like I never got from reading Norah Burke’s Jungle Picture under Ms. Christian’s watchful eye at HPS. In Physics, the students paired up to do an experiment to determine the coefficient to static friction (we probably did this in a couple of grades before in India). For history, the students discussed the claim “Economic crises make fascist government more likely” in the lead up to WW II but a highly relevant topic today. In the math class, the teacher rolled 60 six-sided dice and removed all the sixes. He asked student to formulate and solve an equation for how many tries it would take on average to have just one dice left. The students joined in groups of 3 or 4 and searched for an equation and solved it (in this case, solve for n where 60 x (5/6)n = 1). The teacher kept up with the dice and plotted his results after each try. An overhead camera showed his experiments next to an online graph of his results. It took him 23 tries. The theoretical average is between 21 and 22, which the students computed about the time the teacher was done. Not bad. Then in Chemistry they placed samples of salts in a Bunsen flame and recorded the color of the flame. They were given Planck’s equation and his constant and the approximate wavelength of different colors of light. Vivian and her friend observed strontium chloride’s flame and calculated the energy of a single photon of the brilliant red light emitted to be equal to 2.97 x 10-19 J. Then they had to explain the basis behind Planck’s quanta and the experiment. I was duly impressed. We were doing far more complex experiments in Mr. John Mathai’s chemistry lab in our 11th grade. But we were rarely tying it back to advanced theory like this.
The atmosphere was relaxed. The kids had all handed in big projects the evening before. Parent’s day is a compressed half a day class schedule followed by a long weekend. Students and staff would be back on campus on Tuesday. Everyone was exchanging holiday and travel plans. When Vivian was asked what she was doing, she said “I’m going to visit my cousin in New York”. Which caused my left eyebrow to rise by a millimeter but I didn’t question it. We skipped school lunch because we needed to pack and get to the airport. On the way to the airport I asked Vivian about the cousin bit. She said – “ok, next time you can explain that I am going to visit my dad’s childhood friend’s daughter”. Jo and I agreed that “cousin” was a very good substitute.
So next morning when we met Praveen and Leela for breakfast in Brooklyn at the place with the daal, I told them how Vivian had made Leela her cousin for purposes of explaining her travel. Leela said “Oh – I’ve been telling my friends for the last week that my cousin is coming to visit”.
Indian cousins.
Time seems to be flying by. Jo has been in Nebraska twice in the last two weeks and has probably crossed back over the Red River sometime this afternoon. Vivian is enjoying her first weekend alone at home. I’m sitting at Memphis airport watching Fedex planes take-off every few minutes (about 400 planes loaded with overnight packages go through FedEx’s Memphis every day). Evan is sitting across from me, computer on his lap. He’s supposed to be working on his Mandarin homework but he could be playing video games. He is here for soccer and had two hard games with zero subs yesterday and today, so he claims he’s a bit tired. Earlier in the morning we had a nice brunch at Paulette’s. From our table outside (74 degrees) we see the giant cottonwoods on this bank of the Mississippi and bits of the double arches of the I-40 bridge to Arkansas. Large swaths of sandy river bank are visible on both sides of the meandering wide river.
On Friday night Vivian had three friends over and I dropped them off and picked them up from the Arctic Monkeys concert at the Moody Center (dad/climate change joke that made them all groan “so, y’all are off to see the tropic monkeys?). They seemed to have had a great time without involving alcohol or other substances, which is good, especially given that she is going to have free reign of a home and car for the next two days.
We get back home on Sunday night and everybody is back together again. Ouiser is the most excited by this. The kids have whiled away another perfectly good weekend and get down to finishing up homework around the dining table which is rare. They have entered a new phase in their relationship. Vivian now sees Evan as more grown up. They have an easy chit chat about teen fashions and language and chemistry experiments. Vivian occasionally asks Evan for help with a word in Spanish. Or a question about nuclear waste. He is happy to prove that he’s up to snuff. Jo grabs her book and heads to bed after a long 12 hour drive. I drag my computer upstairs to stare at data. “Don’t stay up too late.” “And turnt out the lights”.
They are almost grown up. Yay and Ugh.
Notes from Dad 