Friday afternoon. (picture is from spring 2002 in Bermuda – random, and wow do I look young) Today I’m camping out at Mum and Dad’s because they are putting new windows in our 3rd floor and scraping the house for re-painting, and there’s lead paint dust everywhere. So, Whit and I had a lovely morning driving around. We had breakfast with Mum & Dad at the Watertown Diner, went to Bloomingdale’s looking for a dress for Gloria’s wedding, and then played with Christina and Will at 17 Devon Road for a while. We had a Hi Rise picnic at Raymond Park with Daddy for lunch. Whit’s now screaming in Hilary’s room at 33 Lex while I sit here and listen. Week has flown by. Intrigued by Providence. Will know more in a few weeks when I go back down there for a whole day. Have had great chats this week with Hadley, Jessica, and Quincy, so that’s a good week in my book! Matt’s off to India tomorrow for a whole week again (well, India-Dallas-New York). He will swoop back into town just in time for our big TPT dinner next Friday night.

So, as promised … a few thoughts on songs and who/what they remind me of:
Maybe I’m Amazed – Matt
No Woman No Cry – QB, midnight drive from Hamptons to Bay Head, spring 1996
One – Allison Engel
Like a Prayer – Leigh Danforth
Killing me Softly – Bouff, Ivy ladies, senior spring
Sister Golden Hair, Man in the Moon – Jesse Johnson
any Shawn Colvin – 402-403 Forbes; Courtney, Kendall, Charlotte
Hips Don’t Lie – Robert Wood, Kiawah April 2006
Leather and Lace – Kennedy Cosgrove

Ahhhh … I could do this all day! The tip of the iceberg. I love road trips mostly because the random song assortment takes me on a wild trip through time. 32 years have been rich in memories, that’s for sure – who knows what lies ahead.
Thought for the day:
“We can choose whom we live with, whose hand we shake, whose cheek we kiss, but we cannot choose who in this wide world, out of the millions, we truly love. Our emotions ride air currents whose sources we cannot name. Love is an infinite feeling in a finite container, and so upsets the intellect, frustrates the will.” – Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay’s Dance (one of the great books on parenting, to my mind)

And on that note, Whit’s finally quiet….. off to start The Emperor’s Children.

Hairtrigger

That’s Hair Trigger on the right. Once again, Catherine Newman is writing about my life. Living with Grace right now is like walking in a minefield. Tonight, for example. She decided she needed a band-aid, and when I inadvertently pressed one of the sticky sides to her foot she just lost it – she wanted to do that her own self. Or, the other day, when I blithely buckled Whit into his carseat before she was finished buckling. My God. Who knows what tiny things set her off? Poor girl has the worst of both of us: my incredible OCD tendencies with Matt’s fiery temper. It’s a pretty incendiary combination, and I am not particularly looking forward to adolescence.

Christening readings

More tomorrow about the fabulously moving christening of Miss Hannah Mead Gilheany, but I wanted to post parts of two of the readings which I just adored. Each godparent chose a reading, and Alison and Launa’s were both from poems I love and had forgotten about. Excerpts from each:

“The Writer” by Richard Wilbur (Alison Lobron)
…In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.
I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwhale.
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it is heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

“You Begin” by Margaret Atwood (Launa Schweizer)
This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.
Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.

Hilsy


That’s my baby sister, Hilary – we are going to attend the blessing of her daughter, Hannah, this weekend. A friend told me something recently that I was astonished I didn’t already know: Hannah means Grace in Hebrew. How extraordinary that we were drawn to the same idea in naming our daughters. It is so powerful to me that my sister and I both have daughters. It has been such a joy to watch her come into her own as a mother; she’s (obviously) such a natural and her little girl is just delicious. My children are both wildly in love with Hannah (see below). This weekend will be terrific fun. I’m also very impressed by Hilary’s delivery of Hannah in a birthing center in Delaware, and her return home with an hours-old newborn. I really do think it says something about our mother that both her daughters chose to have drug-free childbirths. It tells me a lot about the role model she was; clearly we both picked up great confidence in our own strength, physical and otherwise. I am deeply indebted to this example, and think on a daily basis about how to replicate it for my own daughter. I want to raise a girl who feels powerful, brave, comfortable with her place in the world. I want Gracie to be unwilling to settle for grey but to seek out a life of color, challenge, excitement, contribution.

Instantaneous blossoming

“We have some happy days and some unhappy days, some great loves and barren spaces. We have this life, this instantaneous blossoming. Will I ever learn not to choose among its moments, will I ever learn to walk both its hollow and hilly lands?”
– Ellen Gilchrist, Starcarbon