This is Caleb Cook-Kollars. Caleb is an old New England name, and also a biblical name, which we chose because it's not common.
He soon outgrew babyhood and was old enough to enjoy playing in the snow. Except there wasn't too much snow that winter. He was lured outside when spring came. Outside had a sandbox, trucks, swings and slides, growing plants, bugs, in general lots to entertain a little boy. Caleb attended Christ Church preschool for two years, the second year four mornings a week, then Paul F. Doyon Elementary, one of the schools in Ipswich, then moved on to Ipswich Middle School, then currently to Ipswich High School.
He used to do a lot of things together with his older sister before she went off to college, including hanging out at the climbing wall in the gym and around the stage lighting. He of course still does things with kids he knows from school. For example at one point he was part of a kids-only expedition that paddled kayaks through a marsh to primitively "camp" on a deserted island that was totally wild (even though it was actually less than a mile from some regularly travelled roads).
As a young child he was interested in all kinds of building sets, including Lincoln Logs, Brio Mec, Giant Lego, Tinkertoys, K'nex, Zoobs, and Robotics. focussing in on just K'nex as an older child, probably because nothing else could easily build something six feet tall. He's also interested in taking old broken things apart; for which he uses a hammer less freely than in younger years. He and I built a "robot" that moved under its own power (batteries) and was controlled remotely by radio buttons (garage door openers).
He was quite interested in "board games," not just simple ones but also difficult ones like Go and Backgammon. He even had an interest in Chess. Several years back I thought Caleb was clearly too young to be playing Chess, until I helped monitor a chess tournament here in Ipswich for contestants under ten. There were quite a few entrants, and they played much better than I expected. Back then I got him a computer chess game, and set its play level as low as I could at the time (only 1-ply look ahead, no think ahead, and no use of an openings book). But Caleb still thought it was "too hard." Anything that never made a mistake was beyond him. We later picked up the old row game packaged in a distinctive red tube Pente (a lot like Go-Moku), and he understood the game instinctively so well he frowned at silly play situations that I didn't even recognize, and beat me so easily and regularly that too has passed.
In August 1999 he got a Pokemon cartridge for his GameBoy, which was the beginning of his being lost in Pokemon. In early December of that year he "beat the game" by capturing (all) 150 Pokemons. The game then started itself over. Next he figured out how to link GameBoys and play against other people or trade Pokemons (or clone one into two by cheating just right) and remained enchanted with it. Then he moved up to a GameCube and "borrowed" games either from friends or from the local store, still sometimes exploring games that had Pokemon characters. Now he's moved on again to a WII. He's quite proficient at playing these video games, solving and responding to puzzles and situations much much quicker than I can even comprehend them. With so many beckoning horizons in high school though his video game time has been a little less than it used to be.
He had the boundless interests and curiosity of a young boy, and sometimes wondered about things that seemed beyond his years. Several years ago he asked me what makes a magnet sticky. After my hand-wavy explanation about spins he asked "what does it mean to have the spins line up?"
He learned to play the saxophone and likes it very much. He mostly plays the alto saxophone, although he's picked up a soprano saxophone a few times. It's been amazing to watch him go from complaining about carrying the large heavy instrument as he did at first to being a more senior member of both the regular band and the jazz band at school, as well as the "saxophone quartet" that's sort of part of the jazz band and sort of an independent entity. He is quite fond of jazz, recognizing pretty much everything in my CD collection that matches a track in his iPod collection. When his older sister Jennie added the oboe several years ago, he also picked up on the oboe (using a separate reed). He says it was fairly easy as the fingerings were quite similar to the saxophone., It didn't stick, but I'm amazed at how even for a short time he played the difficult double reed instrument so musically with only very minimal guidance.
For a while his main interests were "dart guns" and RC (radio controlled) vehicles. Thank goodness for recharcheable batteries. He used both a tiny Zip-Zap, and a larger truck that did wheelies (and jackknifes). He also has one of the Twisters, but doesn't use it so much because it's too hard to control (the front wheels flip over instead of turning). The control difficulty is probably why the demo had the cars running in a sort of small corral rather than completely free, as in a corral, every edge was a potential backflip or twist or ricochet.
Recently I almost passed him by when his back was turned because I thought such a tall person couldn't be him. But it was; he's taller than me now.
He's part of the Kollars family.
Here's another picture.
|
Location: N42 40.86' W070 50.35'
(North America> USA> Massachusetts> Boston> North Shore> Ipswich) Time: UTC-5 (USA Eastern Time Zone) (UTC-4 summertime --"daylight savings time") Email comments to Chuck Kollars |
|
All content on this Personal Website
(including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works),
unless otherwise noted,
are available to anyone for re-use
(reproduction, modification, derivation, distribution, etc.)
for any non-commercial
purpose under a
Creative Commons License.
|