So much has happened since my last entry. Thankfully for any readers still left, I can't recall most of it. A trip to the United Stated Military Academy at beautiful West Point, NY to talk about how to make robots talk. Lots of time at the city pool helping Sara learn to be a confident swimmer. And now - preparing for our one beach trip of the summer. Used to be, we would just look at each other over dinner and one of us would say "how about a trip to the beach," and we would leave. Now we plan for months, make reservations (non-refundable except in case of an official hurricane warning), and stash away a small fortune. Why, for what we are spending on this beach trip, we could buy several tanks of gas for the Tahoe. Which we have to do anyway. Hmm.

Sara and one of her little friends have been working on a "clubhouse" all summer. This is mainly a figment of the very fertile imaginations of two young girls, but it has taken on dramatic proportions. There is no real structure, just a location in the yard near a tree that has potential. They collect things "for the clubhouse," and they invite, or dis-invite, various playmates to join depending on the current state of their pre-school politics. They go wild with imagined decorations. If they actually installed all the things that have designated as clubhouse-bound, they would need Buckingham Palace in the backyard. Sara is presently tasked with bringing back "about a hundred zillion" seashells from the beach. I absolutely love being a Daddy. There is no ego involved in this- it's not because I'm viewed as supremely perfect in every way (although there is some amusement in that), but because of the way I get to see the world all new through my daughter's eyes. I used to dread being around small children (I'm sure most non-Daddy males feel this way), but now I treasure the opportunities. I have learned most of what I know about nurturing young children from my sister Meredith, though she likely doesn't know it. When I was a teenager, I sporadically observed her raising her daughter and interacting with her friends. Although those moments were few, They affected me deeply. I even imitate her mannerisms and inflections when I read to Sara.

Reading, incidentally, is something I've spent a few moments thinking about. We seem to know it is crucially important for children, and we're bombarded by TV ads featuring all kinds of dubious Hollywood characters telling us how often we should read to our kids. There are any number of scientific studies that show the benefits of reading to children. But I just wonder if this isn't a reflection of something deeper. Recently, I heard a curious interview on NPR's "The Infinite Mind" with a fellow at Emory (I think) who is a primate psychologist studying the role of empathy as a deep-level, instinctive survival behavior. He recounted several remarkable examples of primates exhibiting empathy. (For example, an adult male orangutan observed the zookeeper opening a valve to fill his moat with water. He began gesticulating wildly and screeching. Turned out there were four young orangutan's playing in the moat, who would have drowned.) So the connection, I'm thinking, is this: reading is an extraordinary adventure in empathy, unlike almost any other experience. The reader, besides simply reading the words, also imagines the listener's perception of what he is saying; the listener must not only empathize with the characters in the story, but also tries to determine how the reader feels about it, another level of empathy. A key thing that makes this different from watching a movie together is the intimate relationship between the reader and the listener, in which the story is only the backdrop to what is really an interplay between two minds at a most fundamental level.

Robots may talk one day, but lets see them do that! Famous last words?