Crew

For book club, we're reading The Boys in the Boat, which is a biography of one of the members of the 1936 University of Washington crew team, which took the gold medal at Hitler's Olympics. Naturally he's rising out of economic adversity and a difficult childhood. The book won lots of awards, and it's a pretty compelling read... but it also makes me glad that D's friend's mom didn't manage to enlist him in her project of becoming the coxswain for his high school team. Her own son dropped crew after a while, so it's really just as well. It sounds like such a grueling pastime, regardless of the transcendence of a really good competition.

It would have been really hard to juggle D's music, academics, and recreation, if he had an all-consuming athletic passion to add to the mix! Meanwhile, his mid-trimester report card was all A's, with the algebra teacher telling us he has "a great mind for mathematics."