family

You must always remember this: what you’re doing matters

This is so, so wonderful. Thank you, Katherine Center.  Watch this.  Please.  It’s worth it.  I’m sitting here with tears running down my face.

You have to be brave with your life so that others can be brave with theirs.

The truth is, being a woman is a gift, tenderness is a gift, intimacy is a gift, and nurturing the good in this world is nothing short of a privilege.

That is why I have to love you this way. So I can give what I have to you, so that you can carry it in your body, and pass it on.

You are writing the story of your only life every minute of every single day.

And my greatest hope, sweet child, is that I can teach you how to write a good one.

January 2009


Lots of outside skating because the weather is cold. Lots of pink cheeks and runny noises clomping into the clubhouse on their skates in search of chocolate chip cookies.

Whit is the star of the week and I am irrationally proud that I was able to download the LEGO font and use it for his name on the poster.

One Saturday Grace, Whit and I bundle into full snow gear for an outing on the T. We ride to the Common, play on the snowy and tongue-stickingly cold metal climbing structure until we are too frozen. Then we go to Starbucks for hot chocolate. Somehow seeing Grace walking down the street holding her own Starbucks really gets to me.

Whit’s 4th birthday party – a way to combine a robot obsession with freezing cold weather – aha! Robot bowling. All the children received tee shirts with an (adorable) orange robot printed on the front

Grace’s dream for MLK day: That everyone has food

Celebrate Whit’s 4th birthday by watching the Inauguration on TV with my Dad and my children. I cried when they played Simple Gifts, remembering as I always do, my dear grandmother Priscilla who loved it.

I write a letter of apology to Grace and Whit after suffering from my first migraine and losing an entire weekend. I didn’t want them to have to see me in pain, didn’t want to seem weak or to have them doubt my health and continuing presence.

The video of Rosa Sat was widely circulated, and made me cry every single time I heard it.

Visit to the ER to have Grace’s face glued shut where Whit broke the skin by throwing a robot at her.

HWM

Hilary and me with each of our first-born children, spring 2006.

This is not my first love letter to Hilary, nor will it be my last. Hils has been on my mind this week, as she celebrates her fifth anniversary and as I reflect on even-year Thanksgivings in Marion with our entire family. My mother is a professional at Thanksgiving: two turkeys, over 20 people, etc. And always with aplomb and a complete lack of stress. How? I don’t know.

Anyway, back to my baby sister. I don’t think I’ve ever said it better than I did in May 1996: Hilary is the world’s only older and wiser younger sister. And I am more grateful every year that she is my older and wiser younger sister. Hilary is home: the only person who can understand the world I came from and whose terroir is largely the same as mine.

Yesterday I finished two of the three books I brought to Florida. I started the third, a book I’ve dipped into on and off throughout the years, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. It’s a gorgeous book, one whose words are swarming around in my mind, but it’s dense and not something I am able to sit and read cover to cover. So, from my seat by the pool (don’t be too jealous: I was wrapped in towels against the cold) I emailed Hilary and asked for her views on a couple of books I was considering.

She answered immediately, with a thoughtful perspective on each one. Of course she had read them both. She also chimed in that she had written her college application essays on Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which I had not known though I’d have picked Annie Dillard as one of her favorite writers. I do know that Hilary’s book recommendations are always excellent. And I know that her writing is lucid and wise and beautiful. “A two star hotel far from the center of town” … I think not.

I thought about how that exchange epitomized many things about Hilary to me. She is well-read, she is generous, she is responsive, she is thoughtful. Hilary is one of probably three or four people in this world who I would genuinely call brilliant. I am in awe of her intelligence. She’s the one who called me on how I missed a major sub-plot in Middlemarch because I skimmed so aggressively (aside: Dux did the same thing re: Vanity Fair and my skimming – I think there’s a theme here with me and enormous Victorian novels). She’s modest, so you might never know, but she’s read everything Jane Austen ever wrote, and a whole lot more besides. She inhales literature and has an educated point of view on all sorts of political and legislative topics that are totally foreign to me. This may be the difference between reading NYT.com and only twitter.

Hils is also profoundly committed to the things she cares about. She and T live more in accordance with their values than anyone I’ve ever known. I admire that deeply. They are educators first and foremost, committed to both the craft of pedagogy and to the larger administrative and leadership issues around education, broadly defined.

She is a generous and loyal friend. Everybody I’ve ever gotten to know through Hilary has been absolutely wonderful. I really don’t say that lightly. She does not become close to people who are not bright and genuine, open and honest. It is my privilege to have met some of these people. I could name some of you bloggers, but I won’t. You know who you are! 🙂

Hils, thank you. Thank you for the ways you make me feel not crazy, not alone, not so sad. Thank you for your example of a way to live a life of integrity and purpose. Thank you for your wonderful, patient mothering. Thank you for having shared Q kamir and ADC and the tadpoles on the Berlin wall chunks with me, and for the way those joint experiences allow you to understand the soil we both grew in as nobody else does.

I’m looking forward to seeing you over Christmas, and to seeing our children together. I love you.

Physics, MIT, Poetry, and Vietnam. All in one man.

Sea of Clouds

The time has come to brave the sea of clouds,
To bear away though aching young and hardly made,
Rolled down in dark and brooding seas.

Soon gone from sight, our faces lost in waves,
Our cries no longer heard,
We finally slip into a wind-blurred far away.

Till we are gone – a small and slanted line
To bravely cut that endless edge,
Where dark and boiling clouds wedge down
To meet the sea.

– Kirtland Mead

Preface to Finding Pete: Rediscovering the Brother I Lost in Vietnam, a new book by Jill Hunting. Peter Hunting was a fraternity brother of my father’s at Wesleyan. He was killed in Vietnam in 1965. After Pete died, my father wrote a letter to his parents expressing his condolences and included the poem above.

Jill believed that her brother’s letters were destroyed in a house flood. Many years later, Jill found 175 letters from and about Pete. The letters and recollections inspired a dedicated search for her brother’s memory: she reached out to the friends from the letters (including my father) and she travelled to Vietnam in search of strands of his story. The book is the result of this odyssey, and she apparently asked my father if she could use his poem as the preface.

I am blown away by everything to do with this story. Not least by the fact that it was not dad who told me about this, but a man on my Planned Parenthood committee. By the idea of my college student father having the sensitivity and thoughtfulness to write a letter to the parents of his tragically dead friend, to pen this poem in the first place and to send it. By the beauty and subtlety of the words.

My father. The man who has a masters degree in Physics and a PhD in Engineering. Yes, I’ve always known he loved the written word. He reads voraciously, in English, French, and German. Usually he reads non-fiction books that I would describe as textbooks: thick and dense and academic. He also reads substantial classics (the ones I think of as particularly user-unfriendly) like Dante’s Inferno and recently transfixed me with a discussion of the Bible as a literary work. Because he was reading it. Now. One of my very favorite images is of my parents reading to each other from the Norton Anthology when they were dating and newly married.

Still. I find it astonishing that the same man who has a binder of hand written ( always in fountain pen) mathematical derivations (for example, the angles between the streets in the Arc de Triomph roundabout) could also pen that beautiful poem. I’m touched by the maturity and generosity of spirit he showed way back in 1965 when he chose to reach out to Pete’s family with heartfelt condolences. I’m reminded, again, that my Dad is an engineer with the heart of a poet. I’m proud, Dad. Actually, I’m in awe.