Row, Row, Row Your Boat

Seattle considers itself the boating capital of the world. And it should be, with 200 miles of shoreline on Puget Sound, Lake Washington, Lake Union and Green Lake. If you need proof, come to the Opening Day of Boating Season on Saturday, May 3rd. An annual tradition since 1920, the festival is sponsored by the Seattle Yacht Club, with a 2008 theme of “A Three Ring Circus.” The highlights of the day are the Windermere Cup crew races, which pit the University of Washington crew against crews from Australia, Poland, and the U.S. Naval Academy, and the Grand Parade, in which over 100 boats and yachts, many decorated, make a procession through the Ship Canal from Portage Bay to Lake Washington. Boaters can tie up to the log boom, while landlubbers line the shores of the Montlake Cut to watch the action. Also on the agenda for the day are a dragon boat exhibition race, a U.S. Navy band concert, and a U.S. Army drill platoon performance.

To help you get on the water yourself this summer, there are local organizations for every kind of boater – Seattle Yacht Club and Queen City Yacht Club, Seattle Sailing Club and Sail Sand Point, Lake Union Crew Rowing Club and Lake Washington Rowing Club, Seattle Canoe and Kayak Club and Washington Kayak Club, and for traditionalists, the Center for Wooden Boats. Look for my wife and I to be renting canoes from the University

Healing the Mind

Stroke. Brain Damage. Strong words we hear more of these days, with an aging population and engagement in a difficult war with injured soldiers returning to everyday life. Words that call up terrifying images of darkness and loss, for both the injured and their loved ones. Images of diving into the healthcare system like entering a second level of reality, cocooned from the outside world, caught up in the processes of treatment and healing. Once one has stepped into it, a fascination takes hold, a seeking for ways to understand the experience. If you have recently gone through such an experience, or know others going through it, two recent compelling first hand accounts can be found in the library collection.

Never Give Up: My Stroke, My Recovery & My Return to the NFL by Tedy Bruschi with Michael Holley would never be called high literature, but it is a sincere heartfelt account of Bruschi’s unusual stroke-he was a healthy linebacker in his 3o’s when he woke up in the middle of the night with numbness in his left arm and leg and a wicked headache. Thinking he had slept on his arm wrong, he stumbled back to bed and tried to fall asleep-even as he