Preface: Many wonderful things were mentioned about Elisa at her wedding to Ben Lubin on June 14, 2003
at Woodside's Thomas Fogarty Winery. Ben said that despite Elisa's many talents she's always
humble, never calling attention to herself, always lending a helping hand to others. Over the
years, I've never seen Elisa with a temper, how she's so generous to everyone around her. One
of her school teachers tells me that Elisa is the brightest student she had in her class in
25 years of teaching. If Elisa's wedding seemed like a fairy tale, it's because Elisa has composed
one beautiful story after another all her life, filled with music, art, and poetry. Here are some
of my fond reminiscences about Elisa, the wonderful moments she shared with me which I love to
share with others.
Learning to Read
When I came to California from Boston for Dad's 80th birthday celebration in July 1981,
Elisa was four years old. We played "War" card games using Sesame Street characters.
To my surprise, Elisa's favorite card was not Big Bird or the Cookie Monster, but Dracula.
She made up the rules— that Dracula was the top card and could eat up all the other cards.
Finally I had to change the rules, trying to convince her that my King was higher in rank than
her Count Dracula. But Elisa would change the rules again, saying her Kermit the Frog turned
into a Prince and overthrew my King. We had lots of fun reinventing the game as we played.
Elisa would wake me up early in the morning: "Wake Up Uncle Peter— Sleepy Head wake up!
Would you like some green eggs and ham? You won't get any unless you say— Sam I am!"
Later on, when David & Margaret were driving with Elisa and I in their backseat, Elisa
read to me her Dr. Seuss books. When I mentioned that Elisa could read, Margaret said,
"We read the book to her so many times, she has the book memorized by now. Just turn
to any page not in sequence and see if she can read any line you point out to her."
I did so and Elisa read the sentence clear as a bell. When Margaret saw that it was
true, she told David excitedly: "STOP THE CAR! PULL OVER! STOP THE CAR! ELISA CAN READ!"
David pulled over the curb on a highway and we watched Elisa turning page after page
reading all her Dr. Seuss books perfectly! When Elisa gave an
eulogy to Grandpa (Gung Gung)
19 years later at his Memorial Service, and realized that her love of reading came from him,
I was deeply touched, recalling that I was present when Elisa first learned to read.
Mosquito Story
At the breakfast table, Elisa showed me that her arm was bitten by a mosquito during the night.
When I told her that the mosquito didn't bite me, Grandpa and Grandma, and asked her
why the mosquito picked on her, Elisa whispered in my ear "That's because my skin is
soft & tender." I burst out laughing and when Dad asked me what's so funny, I repeated
Elisa's story. Dad had a great laugh too. But a little foot was kicking at me under the
table. Elisa was embarassed, realizing that her comparative remark on her tender skin
would hurt Grandpa's feelings. At that moment I realized how sensitive she was at four years old.
Reading Homer's Odyssey at Eight
When I moved to California in May 1985, Elisa was eight years old. I noticed that
she was reading Homer's Odyssey translated by Richard Lattimore, the version
I read as a freshman at Columbia. When I suggested that Elisa should read the children's
version first, she told me "I already did that. Now I want to read the unexpurgated edition."
Then I flipped to a random page and asked Elisa, "What does ambrosia mean?" She said
"Oh, that's food for the Gods." Apparently she was able to understand a college-level book.
Once Margaret went shopping and told Elisa, "Don't bother Uncle Peter. Read these books
on Bach and Beethoven, I'll test you when I return." After an hour, Elisa came over to
talk to me. I reminded her what "your Mom told you, finish reading your books." But
Elisa had finished them already. When I tested her on the vocabulary & spelling in
the books, she got them all right. Then I said "These books are too easy for you.
Did you tell Mommy about it?" Elisa whispered, "Shh! Mommy likes to quiz me on
these books when she leaves for some chores. I finish them quickly, then I read
the books I want to read!"
Elisa's Double-Bind Experiment
When Elisa was eight, she asked me whether there's a Santa Claus. When I turned
the question back on her, she told me her doubts. Last Christmas, she wrote a
letter to Santa Claus at North Pole for some toy and got it in her Christmas
stockings. But her Dad David mailed the letter for her. This time Elisa confides
in me, “I'm going to do an experiment. I'll write two different letters. I'll mail
my real wish to Santa myself and give my second choice of toys letter for Daddy
to mail. If I get my second choice at Christmas, Daddy is playing Santa all along.
If I get my first choice, then there is really a Santa Claus.” Some time later,
I told Elisa about a girl her age, Virginia O'Hanlon, who wrote a letter to
New York Sun asking the Editor "Is there a Santa Claus?"
And this is his reply.
Two Poems Inspired by Elisa
I attended the Squaw Valley Poetry Workshops with Galway Kinnell, Robert Hass,
Sharon Olds, and Brenda Hillman in July 1989 & July 1990. We had to write an original
poem each day to be critiqued at the next morning's workshop. Many poets would
stay up late at night to complete a poem. I found myself recalling moments with my
niece Elisa and transformed them into poetry. Here are two poems written during
the Squaw Valley Poetry Writing Workshops:
Baseball Memories and What Are Little Girls
Made Of?
Elisa's Mathematical Insight
In the summer of 1985, I told Elisa about the triangular numbers: 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, 28...
The 4th triangular number is the sum of the 1st four numbers = 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10.
I asked Elisa "What is the 10th triangular number?" With a calculator, Elisa added
the first ten numbers, and said "55". "Can you figure out the 100th triangular number?"
I challenged her. Elisa started punching the numbers on her calculator, but her finger
would miss a key and she sighed "I got to start all over again!" Then I told Elisa,
"There's a shortcut, a secret formula to get the answer quickly." At the word formula,
Elisa's eyes lighted up! "What formula? Tell me! Tell me the secret formula!" I've never
seen an 8-year old child so excited before. "Elisa— the formula for calculating
triangular numbers is n(n+1)/2" Elisa quickly substituted n=100 into the formula and
announced triumphantly "5050". As a reward, I gave Elisa my computer printout of the
first 100 triangular numbers. Elisa studied it for awhile and said, "I know what's
the 1000th triangular number." I said, "It's not printed out on the sheet." She said,
"It's 500500" without even using the formula. Elisa saw a pattern, 55, 5050, 500500,
50005000 for the 10th, 100th, 1000th, and 10,000th triangular numbers. I was overwhelmed.
My niece is a mathematical genius! That summer, I would teach her the Fibonacci numbers,
perfect numbers, amicable numbers, binary numbers, and other mathematical novelties
from Martin Gardner's math columns in Scientific American.
A Summer Together with Elisa
During the summer of 1985, my sister was selling their house and moving into a new one
in Palo Alto. It was a hectic time, so Elisa stayed over often with her grandparents,
where I had just moved in from Boston. Elisa and I would go to the Mitchell Park Library
where we learned the desktop computer together. When I learned PFS Write to do
word processing, I didn't use the business form letter for typing practice. Instead,
I found the addresses of a dozen State Lottery Centers and sent each a questionnaire.
"What's the size of your Jackpot MegaBucks? How long have you been running your
Lotto Numbers game? List of winning numbers. Please send samples of your scratch-off
tickets for pictures in my book Lotto Fever USA. Any interesting stories of
Lotto Winners on methods they used in selecting winning numbers." After typing one letter,
all I had to do was change the address of each State, and presto went out a dozen letters.
Elisa was impressed at this efficiency. And in a few weeks, giant manila envelopes
were coming in from New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois,
Connecticut, Arizona, and Pennsylvania. Elisa loved opening them up and
scratching off the Lotto Cards to see if we got an instant winner.
After I told her that these are sample cards and I needed them
for illustration purposes, she stopped scratching them. The most interesting story
we got from the Lotto Centers was a woman from Illinois winning a multimillion jackpot
by picking 6 numbers her dead father gave her in a dream. Elisa told me "That's a
great opening story for our Lotto Book." I looked at Elisa in surprise,
"When did you become my partner in writing this book?" She said "Just now!"
Then she said "Want to join my secret club?" I asked "What kind of club is it?"
Elisa told me that she has just three of her girlfriends from school in her club.
"Does your teacher know about it? Do Daddy, Mommy, Brother André know about it?"
I asked her. "No. No. No. No." she replied. "Then why are you telling Uncle Peter about it."
She whispered, "Because you are my best friend."
Elisa's Secret Code
I gave Elisa a notebook that summer of 1985 to keep a diary and journal so she
could write in her favorite quotes, interesting stuff that she has read in books,
and math lessons I taught her. One day after telling her about the Bronte sisters
and how to use a Thesaurus, Elisa told me that she'll never forget about them.
When I asked her how, she said "The magic word is brontosaurus— I've linked
Bronte with thesaurus together!" I just laughed at Elisa's goofiness. "You're
just pulling my leg, aren't you!" Then Elisa noted a teddy bear on Uncle Jimmy's
bed. She asked me, "Does Uncle Jimmy sleep with a teddy bear?" I told her "I don't
know. Why don't you check before he wakes up tomorrow?" The next morning Elisa
rushes to wake me up, "Uncle Jimmy does sleep with a teddy bear. I saw it before
he woke up." Soon Elisa was writing up her discovery in her journal. When she
showed it to me, I said "Elisa, Uncle Jimmy is a medical doctor. If people read
about him sleeping with a teddy bear in your journal, he may be embarrassed,
and parents may not send their kids to see Uncle Jimmy. What Elisa did next
was amazing. She erased her original story and replaced it with a coded one,
where each letter of the alphabet was substituted with another. She had found
such an alphabet conversion code in one of the books she had read. She gave me
the code, saying "Now only you and I know that Uncle Jimmy sleeps with a teddy bear."
At the Library with Elisa
In 1985, Palo Alto's Mitchell Park Library had a summer reading program for
Hoover Elementary School 3rd grade students. For each fiction & non-fiction
book read, the Librarian would paste a gold & silver star under the student's
name on a wall chart. When I asked Elisa how come some of her classmates have
so many more stars than she did, she said, "Oh they read the skinny books so
they could get more stars. I want to get more learning reading the really
interesting books, and they're usually thicker and heavier." When Elisa
asked me whether a book she was reading on the Trojan War was fiction or
non-fiction, I told her "Look up
Heinrich Schliemann in the Encyclopedia."
After a short while, Elisa rushed up to me with much excitement,
"Uncle Peter— It's true! It's true! the Trojan War is non-fiction!
Homer's stories are real!"
Birthday Number Poems
For Elisa's 26th birthday, I sent her my web page on the
number 26.
Despite her heavy schedule as a first year Harvard Medical School student,
Elisa responded promptly, "Thanks for the b-day greetings!
I still remember when you gave me a card on my 5th birthday
with all the great things connected to the number 5—
it's a great tradition. :)" I had forgotten those birthday
number poems I had made for Elisa. Did I start at age 5 or 6?
Or maybe it was 4— with 4 seasons, 4 phases of the moon, etc.
Today, I found a photo that my sister had sent me showing
Elisa wearing her 5th birthday hat and her brother André
holding up my card. What a memory! Elisa remembered that card
illustrated with Hello Kitty stickers I made for her 21 years ago!
From the photo, here's what I wrote back then:
Dear Elisa:
5 days in a week for school
Study or you'll be a fool
5 petals on a flower
5 o'clock strikes the hour
5 letters in your name
5 cards in a poker game
5 fingers in each hand
5 senses to understand
5 points on a star
5 years old now you are!
5 is the month of May
Have a Happy Birthday!
Today you're exactly 5
It's so good to be alive!
With Googols of Love,
Uncle Peter
2/27/82
I continued this trend for Elisa's 6th through her 10th birthday,
writing "10 Spiritual Stories About 10". Elisa's favorites were
the Pythagorean Decad and Plato's 10th Book of The Republic
on the Myth of Er. Somehow my ideas ran dry at 11, and I didn't
write anymore Elisa birthday # poems. Elisa liked to look at the
number file I kept in a wooden box. Her favorite was a card for
one trillion: "I kiss and squeeze you 1,095,060,437,082 times
and am ever your most faithful husband and friend." — W. A. Mozart
(letter to his wife, Dresden, 16 April, 1789). When Elisa was 10 and
came back from a trip to Europe with her family, she added the number
256 to my collection: "It's the number of steps to the top of the
Leaning Tower of Pisa." I thanked Elisa, telling her that when
her Dad & Mom & Uncle Peter went there in August 1972, we were
short on cash to pay the fare to go up the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
When I began posting some of my
number collections on the web,
I sent Elisa the numbers for her 24th-26th birthday.
Warriors of Light
When Elisa was 8, she asked me about tesseract in a book that
she was reading— Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.
She was fascinated by the pictorial representations of the first,
second, and third dimensions as a line, a square, and a cube.
The book proceeds and "call the fourth dimension time" and
"the fifth dimension is a tesseract." Being an avid reader,
Elisa's precocious mind was already wondering and imagining
the higher dimensions. The book tells about the great souls
of the earth engaging in a cosmic battle with the evil of darkness.
The 16 warriors of light mentioned were Buddha, Euclid, Christ,
St. Francis of Assisi, Leonardo da Vinci, Copernicus, Michelangelo,
Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Bach, Beethoven, Pasteur, Marie Curie,
Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, and Einstein. I found postage stamps
of them and 20 other heroes quoted in the book and
compiled a quotation book Warriors of Light (A Selection
of Spiritual Reflections gathered by the Souls of Light from
Planetary Earth) in time as a Christmas gift for Elisa.
She gave me a copy of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time,
which has become her favorite book. While visiting my college
friends in New York in October 1986, I phoned Madeleine L'Engle,
who was also the Librarian at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
I told her about Elisa's love for all her books, and whether I
could visit her to get an autograph for Elisa. She told me that
her long-time husband Hugh Franklin had just passed away.
She was observing a period of mourning and couldn't see me.
"But please pass on my best wishes for your niece Elisa,"
she told me. And Elisa was thrilled that I had spoken to
her favorite author
Madeleine L'Engle.
Prize-Winning Poster
When Elisa was 10, she won the Book Poster Award from the
Libraries of Santa Clara. On her poster was the large slogan
"Reading Opens Your Mind" with many interesting sketches—
a pirate ship with the banner "Sail into Adventure", a mirror
with the words "Thou art fair, but thine book is fairer!"
At the lower right hand corner was a fairy tale book opened
to the ornate lettering "ONCE UPON A TIME there was a girl
named Elsa. She was the most beautiful girl in the village.
Elsa visited the tailor's shop to have a gown fitted.
The tailor fell immediately in love with her, and
thought Elsa loved him too, since she came to his
shop often. But Elsa was in love with his assistant..."
Here the page is curled up, and the reader is left in
suspense, yearning to read on. I was amazed that my
young niece has mastered the story-telling art of
Scheherazade and her 1001 Nights! When Elisa
got the poster back after it was on exhibit for three
months, she gave it to me as a gift. I placed it on my
desk for inspiration since I had at the time changed
my career from biochemistry to poetry. And here's my
niece writing with such effortless ease and exuberance.
