family

2012: September

We celebrated my grandfather’s life over Labor Day, and marked the end of an era.  A whole generation turned forward on life’s ferris wheel.

I marked both the twelfth anniversary of Matt’s and my wedding and the sixth anniversary of this blog.

My favorite blog post: Nostalgia Like an Undertow.

I read Those We Love Most by Lee Woodruff, Motherland by Amy Sohn, and other books I cannot for some reason remember.

Whit lost three teeth in 24 hours one weekend.

An Acela ride home from New York one evening during a storm took me 8 hours.

I spent a weekend at the shore with my dearest friends from college, and was reminded yet again of the vital importance of these friends, these women who knew me when I was becoming who I am.

The creative is the place where no one else has ever been.  You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition.  What you’ll discover will be wonderful.  What you’ll discover will be yourself. – Alan Alda

Holiday cards

I love holiday cards.  I always have.  My parents sent a picture of Hilary and me every year, religiously, so I grew up with the tradition.  The photographs from each year of our childhood are all displayed, framed in my parents’ kitchen now.  I start thinking about my annual card in the summer and feel rising excitement as we get closer and closer to the season when the mailbox is stuffed with pictures and updates from around the world.

I suspect that part of why I love the tradition of sending cards is how disparate my friends are; people I love are scattered around the world, from my childhood in Europe to my sleepover camp days to my college friends who are not nearby.  I spend hours choosing the photograph(s) for our card, but I’m equally as interested in the words that accompany the images.  The other day I pulled out the box I keep copies of each year’s card (and birth announcement, christening and birthday party invitation, and Valentine card, and so on).  It was wonderful to leaf through them, to remember where I – and we – were each year, to trace Grace and Whit’s astonishing growth.

2002 – With a photograph of an infant Grace, Matt, and myself, I included James Baldwin’s lines: “Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.”

2003 and 2004 – I just used a single picture of Grace, and a simple card that said “Peace and Joy”

2005 – I began working with an outstanding designer, of Beaumont Design.  The cards from now on always had several pictures.  This year it said “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.”

2006 – “Throw your arms around the world at Christmas time”

2007 – “Dona Nobis Pacem” (inside, the translation: grant us peace)

2008 – “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.” (the only phrase I’ve ever repeated, and that’s mostly because I believe it so fiercely)

2009 – “Love came down at Christmas, love all lovely, love divine.”

2010 – “May the wind be always at your back.” (from one of my favorite prayers, which begins “may the road rise to meet you“)

2011 – “Happy Everything”

2012 – Another of my most beloved quotes.  Many of you will receive it soon.

Do you send holiday cards?  Do you like the tradition?

 

 

Thanksgiving

Grace meeting my maternal grandfather, Ba, for the first time.  Her middle name (and my mother’s, and mine) is his name.

Today we are celebrating Thanksgiving with my father’s family.  It will be our first Thanksgiving without Pops, who for many, many years presided over a table groaning with 2 turkeys and circled by well over 30 extended family members (and the odd random – I love them, Mum, I really do!).  I actually can’t imagine the meal without his saying grace first, his voice halting and cracking, his eyes filling with tears.  We will miss him acutely today.

But it is the Thanksgiving 10 years ago that is on my mind.  On November 28, 2002, Matt and I drove the hour south to my parents’ house in near-silence.  Matt’s father was still in a coma after his heart transplant two days ago.  I was deep in the darkness of my newly-diagnosed postpartum depression.  The economy was in freefall.  In those days, we both walked gingerly, wondering if the earthquake was finished, hoping the roof over our head was sturdy, trying to find our balance.

In those shaky hours, my head swarming with questions and my heart galloping with anxiety, I was able to recognize the abundant good.  Both of my grandfathers held my brand-new daughter.  In the evening, we visited my father-in-law in the hospital and heard that he was beginning to wake up.  We were suspended between then and now, between birth and death and the infinite shades of gray that exist in between.  My gratitude was almost – but not quite – smothered by bewilderment and fear.  This is the lesson I remember today: there are always miracles, and there is always beauty.  Always.  We just have to look carefully.

with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you…
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

-W. S. Merwin

Make peace with the quest

In the summer of 1992, my father gave me a document that he’d written for me.  It was called Advice for a College Freshman from her Father, and I still have it.  The advice was all wise, the writing, as usual, crisp and perfect.  But this right here is my favorite line.  I don’t know how many years ago I cut it out and put it on the board in front of my desk, but it has greeted me every single day, at eye level, for a long, long time.

I sit down at my desk and I glance up and I see this.  Every morning.  Have I made peace with the quest?  I don’t know.  I have been asking myself that.  The quest continues to be mutable, its fluidity confounding.  Just as soon as I think I’ve figured out how to be in the world, that certainty cracks open.  As soon as I grab the brass ring on which I’ve focused all my attention, it dissolves and another distant one takes its place.

What I do know that I didn’t know 20 years ago was that the quest is all there is.  I suppose that is what my wise father meant, in fact: make peace with the fact that the quest is your life.  Live in the quest rather than for the destination.  Such a cliche but also, of course, such an unbearable, unavoidable truth.  Dad would never disavow goals or ambitions, I know that for sure.  And it is important to remember that there is great value in having dreams and goals and in aiming for them.  I would never want to raise children who shy away from ambition and achievement.  I just don’t want that to be the only thing they care about.  What I’m learning is that ambitions and achievement can coexist with a peaceful submission to the process, with an embrace of the journey from here to there.

As it often does, my mind skips, just like the rocks my father so skillfully skips into the sea, to the words of another that I know by heart:

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” – Ursula LeGuin