Every month or two, my mother appears with some age appropriate object for Eamon. The object generally comes from a trunk, and it sometimes looks familiar to me. Some of the objects have a story, though vague.
A sweater knit by my grandmother - or was it my great-grandmother? - for my mother's younger sister.
Booties knit by my grandmother - for whom?? - using yarn mixed with raw wool from her sheep.
Though I am a believer in using hand me downs, and heirlooms in general, there is something anxiety producing about putting a newborn in a tiny sweater that is over 60 years old. Yeah, Eamon never wore it. And I think he might have worn those wacky, sheepy booties maybe once.
When my parents came up for Eamon's birthday, they brought another heirloom, though one slightly newer. Here it is when it was brand new, 35 years ago.
Yeah, that is me.
A few other kids have used this rocking horse since my father made it for me all those years ago. When I had it, it was painted a solid orange color. Since then it has been repainted and had a real horsehair tail attached.
Eamon loves it. He can't get on it by himself yet, but he stands next to it and grunts excitedly until we put him on. And then he rocks, so proud of himself. And tonight, when we were reading a book that had a picture of a horse, he turned and pointed at the rocking horse. (he is a genius! Let me tell you!)
Please excuse the mess!
This an heirloom I am not afraid of breaking; this is an heirloom for using.
Last night we had our first New Year's Eve as parents. We went to an early evening, kid-friendly party and were home by 7:30. Eamon was asleep by 8 (an hour later than usual) and Christopher and I cooked some mushroom-barley soup while waiting for midnight. It was chill, stress-free, calm.
It gave me time to think about New Years' past, and how each one is reflective of my life as it was at that point.
High school: watching a friend get drunk at her parents' New Year's party and being frightened that she would die because she had a headache. (clearly the drug education class we took in 8th grade made its mark on me.) College year abroad: wandering the Champs Elysee with my French-American friend, drinking wine and wishing all who passed us a happy New Year. Such a happy memory.
Sometime after college: spending New Year's Day happily alone, wandering Soho and taking a yoga class.
While dating Christopher: after having Austrian fare in Park Slope, we wandered into Prospect Park in time for the fireworks at midnight. The glory of being in a dark, cold park surrounded by tons of families all enjoying the display.
Last year: exhausted from the pregnancy, I begged to leave the party we were at (and had been at for many hours), we were home by 11:30.
I've never been a fan of New Year's Eve, or its bashes. The event never seems to live up to the hype, the feeling that you should be having a GREAT TIME! For me it has never as exhilarating as it is supposed to feel. So being home and having a comforting meal with Christopher? It feels right for where we are right now, even if it doesn't seem exciting or fantastic. And Eamon slept from 8pm to 6:30am, which felt great, even if I didn't go to sleep until 12:30.
Happy new year to you all! I hope to blog more in 2011!
I kind of hate end-of-year summations. In fact, when the New York Times ran their "decade in pictures" feature at the end of December, I skipped it. I just don't like the sentimentality of it. I don't like how those things make me feel, or how they are supposed to make me feel.
Seeing them, and hearing people reflecting on the decade on the radio, did make me think back to my own life in the past decade, however.
In the fall of 1999, I was just finishing my first semester of graduate school. It was a new beginning for me. And now, here at the beginning of 2010, I am expecting my first child, another new beginning.
Some things have stayed the same in the past 10 years: I am still in New York. I still work in theater. I don't feel that much older, and I still take myself and my work as seriously as I did as a grad student.But some things are different: I have a home as opposed to a perch. I sleep on a mattress with a bed frame and not a loft bed a few feet from the ceiling. I am married. I have a cat (though Dinah has been with me since the spring of 2000, so she only just missed sharing the beginning of the decade with me). I lost some innocence by living through 9/11 and its aftermath, and I lost more when Christopher was attacked last year.
I am curious what the next decade will bring. Of course, the first milestone is very clearly in front of me: motherhood. I know that having a child will change my life irrevocably, but I also hope that I won't be giving up the other things that are important to me, namely my relationship to Christopher and my interest/need to create and work.
I hope you all have a wonderful new decade, and of course a happy new year!
Back in 1995, when I was a college student, I spent a summer interning at Glimmerglass Opera. I was on the stage crew, along with 6 other interns. Glimmerglass is a professional summer company that runs in rep, meaning that every day they do a different opera. The summer I was there we did 4 operas, all appealing to very different tastes: Don Giovanni (Mozart), Paul Bunyan (obscure 20th century Britten), Yeomen of the Guard (Gilbert & Sullivan) and Tamerlano (Baroque/Handel).
This experience was huge: it confirmed that I wanted to spent my life doing theater. Everything there was exciting, new and big.
And I also formed a very important friendship with Joanna (aka Jojo, though at the beginning of the summer she was still Joanna). She and I were the only women in a group of rowdy and somewhat lewd college boys. (To be fair, there were some women on the crew, but they were not interns and therefore had more responsibility than us.) Neither of us were particularly rowdy. Joanna had recently moved to the US, having transferred from a French university the year before. She had listened to all of the operas before she got there that summer, and during the operas she would let out a little sigh or coo every once in a while, when the music was particularly good.
She was also rather outgoing, and became friendly with some of Tamerlano cast. I remember us having breakfast with one of them at a coffee shop in downtown Cooperstown, and another time the soprano invited the crew (through Joanna, of course) to the house where she was staying for brunch.
Since we both were staying at the same residence, had similar work hours, and had only one car between us, we frequently went to work together or came home for lunch together or went grocery shopping together. Basically, we were inseparable.
The operas. In the case of this blog post, there is only one opera worth discussing: Tamerlano. I don't think I was at all familiar with Baroque opera before that summer, but I was blown away by it. So soft and lilting, so unexpectedly beautiful. As a crew member on Tamerlano, I spent the duration of the opera behind a very tall gold folding screen with 2 other crew members. At certain musical cues (once each act, I think), we moved the screen. Otherwise, we played cards or napped. On stage. I am serious.
There were two musical parts that we would wake up for and listen to intently. One was David Daniels' aria. The other was the show finale. I've found a YouTube clip of some other singers singing the finale and strangely they are wearing the same costumes as our production. (Looking at the credits, it has the same director, Jonathan Miller)It's not very long, and it is beautiful. Listen!
That fall, I went to study in Italy. My college had a very intensive, immersive junior year abroad program in Florence, where I studied art history and Italian language. It was very hard, especially going from Glimmerglass (where had I finally found people who loved the same things as I did) to a country where I barely spoke the language and didn't know anyone. How I got through that year is another post (and I did get through it, and loved it), but I have to stick to my story. Joanna (who had by then been nicknamed Jojo) sent me a ton of letters. Along with being a great friend, she knew about culture shock and she knew Europe; she understood what I was going through. And she sent me things, tapes of music she'd gotten out of the library: Purcell (Dido and Aeneas) and Bach (St Matthew Passion), to be exact. And I listened to them on my walkman, laying in on my bed writing letters or walking the Sede for class. The music was so surprisingly different from Handel (unfortunately I have little music education and have no way to discuss this. I can just tell you that is very modern to me.)
Years passed, and I stopped listening to my cassette tapes. I met Christopher, and was surprised when one day he put on the St Matthew Passion. Apparently when he was in a chorus in DC they sang it, and he loved it. He plays it regularly, and I always think of all of these things when he does.
A few weeks ago he sent me an email while I was at work. A staged version of the St Matthew Passion is being done at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and he wanted to get tickets. He had been listening to the director, Jonathan Miller, on the radio and it sounded really exciting. Jonathan Miller! The same guy who directed Tamerlano! St Matthew Passion! Needless to say, we got tickets to see it, and went last night.
It was beautiful. I guess the piece is usually performed as a choral work, very staid. Miller made it a little more dramatic, separating the two choruses and orchestras so that they each faced each other in a loose sort of circle, leaving the center open as a performing space and for the conductor. Musicians would enter the stage for solos as well, and everyone was in street clothes.
I found a YouTube clip of an older version of the production, and it just doesn't do it justice because I think the spacing is so important. I suppose you can hear the music though. It's interesting to me how connected I feel to this music. Listening to it last night brought back so many memories of different times in my life. Times that are pretty far in the past...
I've left New York for the holiday, taking the bus to Philadelphia this morning with a promise to go through my old closet and throw things away so my parents could have a little less clutter.
I got here ready to do some major closet cleaning, but it wasn't so clear what I was supposed to sort through, and my mom was at work, so I spent a few hours rereading letters I'd received from friends when I was in college. What's most interesting about these letters is that they were written right on the cusp of email-- one friend tells me that she has a new account that she's sharing with a friend-- and there are no letters from friends who did have email. There are also some really sweet and funny notes from my grandfather, who had just turned 90 and was designing and building a secretary for me. It's nice to remember that he was so sharp and witty; he was so frail and grumpy his final few years. (He lived to be 99 and a half, if you're wondering.)
I'm currently waiting for my mother to get home from teaching. Christopher is coming tonight and my dad is also flying in from his vacation to India (yeah, I know). My father is a major DIYer, and sometime this summer he disconnected the heat vents in order to do some maintenance (perhaps he was going to install an AC unit?), and never bothered to reconnect them. It wasn't so bad throughout the fall, but the last few weeks --weeks when Dad was in balmy India-- my mother has been freezing here. The house is very drafty and has 14' ceilings, so it's also not so easy to just cuddle up with a space heater. Hopefully this will be solved before Thursday, but in the meantime I'm cold. It's almost paralyzing. I am baking some sweet potatoes in hopes that the kitchen will warm up a few degrees, and I have on my hat and a heavy wool sweater and a blanket wrapped around my shoulders. I wish I had my fingerless gloves...
My mother called early this morning and told me some sad news. One of their oldest friends, someone I've known my whole life, died very suddenly last night.
The whole event is very hard to wrap my head around. Anne (and her husband Joe) have always had a strong and intimate presence in the life my parents (and I) have in Philadelphia-- at Christmas dinners, our wedding, birthday parties (though not mine), dinners at various people's homes. She and her husband hosted a brunch the morning after our wedding and when I was in third grade I interviewed her about her memories of the Civil Rights Movement. And a few years ago she invited me down for brunch when her young Austrian cousin was visiting. It was a friendly and fun meal, and the only time I remember spending with her without my parents around. This is Anne with her husband Joe at our wedding.
Anne also had a very public life, which makes her passing somewhat more abstract than other deaths. She was the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. All day I've been scanning the web for obituaries. There's not much yet. The NY Times has a blurb from the AP wire. The Philadelphia Inquirer has the most in depth article, and it's not very long. So far the best article is actually a puff piece from the NY Times written in 1996. It captures her beautifully.
Last weekend I went to my high school reunion. 15 years. It's really hard to think about and really get a handle on what has happened in that time. I mean, a lot has happened. A lot of good things, things that have steered me in the right direction and to the life I lead now.
College. Internships. Struggling in New York. Grad school. More struggling in New York. Meeting Christopher. Getting my own apartment. Moving in with him. Struggling some more in New York.
Things have really come together in a way that I couldn't have anticipated 15 years ago. When I was in high school I worked very hard not to be noticed, to blend in. I was so, so, so self-conscious. I raised my hand only in the most dire situations. It's taken me a long time to trust my own opinions and aesthetics. (Grad school was a huge help in helping me understand that what I made and liked was often much more successful than something I created to please a professor.)My closest friends from high school didn't go to the reunion, and for a moment on Saturday afternoon I was seized with silent panic as I greeted people who I had barely spoken to in our 13 years as classmates. But I relaxed, and people were friendly, and more and more classmates arrived.
There was so much to catch up on! Pregnancies, children, careers, family. And there were memories to hash out. By the end of the afternoon I was wandering around the school with two women who I had barely seen since graduation, talking about elementary school and various events we we remembered each other being involved in. It was really fun. That evening we all met at a bar in Manayunk and I spoke to another woman who I had been close to when we were in elementary school.
Throughout this all, I was struck by how much we remember from so long ago, things that were so serious and helped mold us into who we are now. Fifth and sixth grades are so horrible, with puberty and kids forming alliances and some kids just developing at different speeds than other kids. (In case you couldn't tell, I was one of the slower ones to catch on to fashion and cliques.) There's also this feeling at that age that everyone else has it together, and I remember feeling so alone, lost and vulnerable. And I thought I was the only one who didn't have it together. Talking to these women gave me a whole other way of understanding what was going on. Clearly we had all had a hard time, and we had all found different ways of coping with it (and talking about our fears with each other just wasn't an option. Interesting since that's how I deal with stress now).
Ok. Here's the revelation, and why I've been dwelling on this all week: no one is as perfect as they may seem. This isn't really news, but knowing that I wasn't the only one with self-esteem issues growing up (even if I thought certain people had it all together) changes the way I felt like I fit into this group. Suddenly we were all flailing around, not just me. And this week the world (and how I fit into it) just feels different.
One of my oldest, dearest friends has just published her first book! Manya and I were in kindergarten together; we've been good friends since. We were both sort of awkward, odd, arty kids growing up, and she's the one I call now when I am feeling down about my career or need some design advice. We're both trying to make this job-in-the-arts thing work, and she's well on her way!This is a photo of us at her house, in about fourth grade. I am wearing a dress that had belonged to one of my parents' friends when she was a girl.
Yuki's Ride Home is an illustrated story about a girl who spends a day with her grandmother and then must make the journey home on her own. It is a wonderfully illustrated first glimpse at Japanese life, as well as being a really sweet story. (Plus, Manya is my friend and am super proud of her!)Anyway, Monica Wellington did an interview with Manya, which I thought was really interesting. I am posting a link here.
Do you remember my post, way back in July, about the Night Blooming Cereus? Well, my father just sent me this, photographic evidence of the night I described.Yes, that's me.
I must have been about 11, and I am indeed wearing my nightshirt. If I remember right, that was part of my super cool new wardrobe, which meant that my clothing had patterns of cute objects all over them. My new look was supposed to have the magic powers of attracting friends and making me more "in," but I didn't realize that probably wasn't that cool to make your own clothes, which is what my mother and I did in the case of that nightshirt.
Interestingly, my attitude about making one's own clothing hasn't changed since I was 11 (even if it's not cool, I like wearing what I can make). Too bad I'm not a better seamstress!
