dear friends

Ethan: the brother I never had. Or, more accurately, the brother I DO have, though we weren’t technically born of the same parents. Last night was the formal celebration of Ethan’s dad’s receiving of the French merit d’agricole. We had such a lovely time at the Fly Club drinking all kinds of absurd wine.
Ethan and I met when I was 3 weeks old and he was 7 weeks old. Apparently we hit it off and we’ve been dear friends ever since. He was in our wedding, he’s Whit’s godfather (at right on the christening day with last week’s bride, Gloria – in fact we were all classmates at Exeter), and he’s my oldest and dearest friend. “We were ring around the rosy children, we were circles around the sun” – James Taylor’s Never Die Young has always made me think of Ethan. 32 years of memories, impossible to even make a dent in them here. We were only in school together very briefly – for 6 months at BB&N in 7th grade and for 2 years at Exeter for 11th and 12th. At our Exeter graduation we had a picnic with all EIGHT of our grandparents in attendance – that’s on the short list. I have Ethan in mind a lot as I think about raising Whit -he’s the closest experience I’ve had of a boy growing up, but more importantly I think he’s peerless: he combines intelligence, sensitivity, humor, great compassion, and an incredible artistic passion. Ethan and Tyler’s lives have been intertwined with Hilary’s and mine from the beginning. When I watch Gracie with James and Charlie I think of the Vogts, and of the extraordinary gift of “family friends.”

Ah…. my Princeton girls. I am missing you all today. Thank God for you! The ladies who will always be the touchstone. Our roads have diverged but it always comes back to this. What I love is that each and every one of the Princeton girls who’ve had a child has had a boy … there’s Tate and Wilder (Courtney), Cade (Allison), Whit (me), Pit (Newman), Thacher (Quincy), Roscoe (Schuyler), Dylan (Catarina), and baby boy-to-be (Connie). The most amazing and brilliant women I know will be raising a fabulous generation of men. I can’t wait to have the picture I know we’ll take someday, of those boys all dressed up in Princeton duds and lined up on a couch (though by the time we get them together they’ll no doubt be too busy to sit in a lineup). We’ve always joked about how it takes a special kind of man to choose a woman like one of us … and now we get to raise some too. How lucky these boys will be to have mothers like you all … there really isn’t a day when I don’t marvel at how lucky I am to have each of you in my life. What extraordinary role models and companions you are! We’re all making – and will continue to make – different and varied choices, and I trust that we’ll continue to respect and honor each other no matter what those choices are. This kind of implicit understanding is rare and special, and the further I travel away from Princeton the more convinced I am that the friendships I made there will be the most enduring of my life. There will be and are other incredibly special friends, but as a community you all are ground zero: yardstick and safe haven, the people who knew me when I was becoming who I am. Your importance grows clearer every day. We ought not hesitate to say how we feel, because as my idol Catherine Newman says, the lesson of death is that we are living, today (and that is all we know). So, with so much love, thank you, thank you, thank you!

“From the first he loved Princeton – its lazy beauty, its half-grasped significance…” – Fitzgerald