It wasn’t all bad
■ Blas Omar Jaime, an 89-year-old Paraná, Argentina, native learned the ancestral, throaty language known as Chaná from his mother, who believed they should keep it secret. But when he retired and started looking for other speakers, he found the language was thought to be extinct. Over two decades, with the help of a linguist, he compiled a dictionary of approximately 1,000 words including “vanatí beáda,” which means “tree,” and “yogüin,” fire. Now he has taught it to his daughter Evangelina. “It’s generations and generations of silence,” she said, “But we won’t be silent anymore.”
■ To celebrate her 80th birthday, Donna Holmes decided she wanted to learn how to surf. Helped by Brisa Hennessy, her pro surfer Costa Rican granddaughter, Holmes started the day with some yoga exercises to warm up the body before hitting the tropical waters of Fiji. In a video posted by Hennessy, the octogenarian can be seen standing up on the board, surfing the waves as Brisa watches. The video, featuring Madonna’s “Holiday,” garnered dozens of supportive messages praising Holmes’ feat. Hennessy says that Holmes is an adventure seeker who never holds back. “This is 80 !!!! It’s never too late to catch a wave,” Hennessy wrote on Instagram. “So special sharing my happy place with my grandma.”
■ On a street in Takoma Park, Md., you can find a now-rare pay phone— except instead of making calls, it plays birdsongs. David Schulman, a violinist, created it in 2016 as part of a public art project competition, rewiring an old pay phone so that it played different birdcalls. To get the avian sounds, he contacted the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, N.Y., who sent him recordings of native birds, and he even added voice instructions in a range of languages, including Spanish and Amharic, the chief language of Ethiopia. Each button on the phone plays a different call; No. 1 is reserved for Schulman’s favorite, the night heron.