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Happy Birthday, Copper!

Happy Birthday, Copper!

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Ten years ago today we threw caution to the winds and bought a puppy. He was a whirling dervish of an animal, full of life, completely unhinged.  One of his first antics was to jump over the back of the couch and land on my mother’s lap when she was visiting for Christmas. Mom, who was a little shy of dogs, was holding a glass of red wine at the time.

Copper was Claire’s Christmas present in 2006. Claire had been dreaming of dogs and pestering us for one for years — but she would be off to college in two-and-a-half years.

Yes, I know. What were we thinking? Here we were, almost in the clear — and then … not.

The child gate went up at the bottom of the stairs. The doors to bathrooms were kept closed so he couldn’t rifle through the trash. Shoes, socks and anything else chewable had to be stowed away.

Of course, you know how this story ends. It’s the oldest cliche in the books: Dog arrives, steals hearts, never lets them go.

And that’s exactly what happened — so much so that no one really wants to talk about his birthday or how many years we’ve had him because, well, we can’t imagine life without him now.

Nutcracker, Redux

Nutcracker, Redux

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Suzanne took me to the Nutcracker at Kennedy Center yesterday, and what a Nutcracker it was! A fizzy, funny production with tumbling sprites, flying Drosselmeyer and a stunning pas de deux.  There was enough of the traditional ballet to suit purists but enough site gags (a leaning cake, two harem dancers fighting over their man and silly prancing poodles) to keep the audience guessing — and laughing.

When Suzanne and I went to the Nutcracker years ago, I would be in the audience and she would be on stage in a progression of roles — mirliton, polichinelle, party child — as her ballet skills improved.  We reminisced about those days, about personalities in the ballet studio, including the earnest Mr. Ben, husband of the studio owner, who was pressed into service each Christmas as leading man and whose lifts looked ever more shaky as the years wore on.

And there were stories behind this production, too; we just didn’t know them. We were, instead, caught up in the illusion, a gasp as the curtain rises, a sigh as it descends.

(Above: The Nutcracker’s original performance in 1892.)

The Morning After

The Morning After

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This is no “morning in America.” This is more the way you feel when you learn that someone you love has been hurting more than you possibly thought they were. Why didn’t you tell me, I feel like saying. How could things have been this bad, to produce this end?

But they were telling me, telling us, and we wouldn’t, couldn’t listen. Because listening across party lines is not something we do much anymore.

The great rift exposed by this election has been a long time coming, and it will take a while to repair. I’m not a politician, but it seems to me that the best way — maybe the only way — out of this is to pull together. Unfortunately, the campaign has eroded our ability to do the very thing we need to do for our recovery.

In my office now there is much gallows humor, talk of relocating to Canada or some tropical isle. It’s a good time to leave for Indonesia and Myanmar (which I do on Friday). But I’ll be back soon. How much will this have sunk in by then? How inured will we be to this new reality?

Ghost Land

Ghost Land

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The streets are deserted, the high-occupancy vehicle restrictions lifted, and I am abroad in a Ghost Land. The buildings are still here, the air system hums as it always does. But gone are the suits on the eleventh floor, the officers in camouflague gear, and most of all, the bustle of a busy work ‘hood.

We are suspended in our glass house while wind whips the yellowing trees and stirs the Potomac into ripples and eddies. We are here where the coffee machine punctuates the silence and voices I’ve grown to recognize call from distant corners.

When you work in a company town, you accept the company rhythms. But today, I’m cutting against the grain. It’s Monday, it’s Columbus Day, I’m in the office.

After Labor Day

After Labor Day

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How quickly one gets used to the unregulated life. Even though last week’s wedding preparations kept me crazy busy I was able to complete the tasks on my own time and in my own way. The work world demands a regimentation I’ve taken great pains to avoid.

It’s why I became a teacher after college graduation. I figured out that I could stand nine highly regulated months if I could have three highly unregulated ones to make up for it.

Today I feel the back-to-work burden in my soul. Maybe it’s because I’m still half-exhausted from the wedding. Or maybe it’s because on the day after Labor Day, the traditional back-to-school day, regimentation is in the very air we breathe.

Since I just completed a major project it feels like this should be at the beginning of relaxation not the end of it.  But when the work engrosses, these feelings pass. And it will. I just have to give it time.

The Wedding

The Wedding

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I didn’t give a toast on Saturday night. But this is what I would have said if I did. I would have riffed on the saying “it takes a village to make a child.” I would have said that it also takes a village to make a wedding. Everything from the rehearsal dinner on Friday to the dog watching and wedding photography on Saturday was provided by friends or friends of friends.

The marriage itself, of course, is up to the two people involved. But a community has now witnessed Suzanne and Appolinaire’s vows. And I could feel the love and support of that community swell up behind me as I sat in the front row watching my daughters, all three of them, walk down the aisle of mulch that we laid only a few weeks ago (again, with the help of family and friends). That love and support is like money in the bank for the young couple, something they can draw on through years of life together.

There is much to say about all of this. Too much. My heart is full right now.

But while the tent is still up (the rental company comes for it today) and the magic is still fresh, let me just say that the backyard will be forever transformed by the presence of those we love who came (some from as far away as Paris) to celebrate with us. Dear family, neighbors who watched Suzanne grow up, friends from high school and college and work and childrearing. Appolinaire’s best man Fidel, who grew up in a village not far from him and speaks the same mother tongue.

The big events of life rise up like tall peaks through the fog of daily living. You plan for them, work for them and often wonder if they’re worth the effort. But once they happen (and even as they’re happening if you’re lucky, in moments or snatches of moments), you know they’re worth every penny, every hour. Because they stop time; they define and sanctify the everyday.

The wedding is behind us now. But it’s all around us, too. And it always will be.

The Errands

The Errands

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It’s been a long hot summer, and September has dawned cool and rainy. The plants are lapping it up. The parched soil is getting a well-earned dousing.

The mums I’ve stored in the basement are up on the deck now, awaiting final placement but getting sprinkled with the real thing rather than a cup of water.

And here at Wedding Central, we’re about to run a zillion errands. Homo Errandus, the errand-running human. In and out of the car, in and out of stores, always with the list in hand. The bible. Crossing things off, blessed relief.

Here we go.

Olympic Teamwork

Olympic Teamwork

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Yesterday at work we had an Olympic trivia event. I guessed at every question — a testament to how little of the coverage I’ve watched so far. But last night I made an exception. I stayed up way past my bedtime to watch the women’s gymnastic team claim the gold.

It was worth the lost sleep. To see what body, mind and heart can do when working together was inspiring and humbling. 
Amplifying my Olympic frame of mind is the book I’m reading. Daniel James Brown’s The Boys in the Boat tells the story of the University of Washington men’s rowing team as they prepared for and competed at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. One passage stood out to me this morning: 

“The boys in the Clipper had been winnowed down by punishing competition, and in the winnowing a kind of common character had issued fourth: they were all skilled, they were all tough, they were all fiercely determined, but they were also all good-hearted. Every one of them had come from humble origins or been humbled by the ravages of the hard times in which they had grown up. … The challenges they had faced together had taught them humility — the need to subsume their individual egos for the sake of the boat as a whole — and humility was the common gateway through which they were able now to come together and begin to do what they had not been able to do before.”

Small Flags Flying

Small Flags Flying

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Last week I drove through the neighborhood in the slanting late-afternoon sun to see small plastic flags flying at the foot of every mailbox. They hadn’t been there when I left in the morning but there they were, a full week before Flag Day.

Turns out they were a gift from our representative, but that’s not what struck me about them then or now.

What I’ve been noticing is that, although they all started at the same place they have ended up all over. Some are hanging from the mailbox, others are attached to the lamppost or planted near the house. Mine is in the fern garden.

They have, in short, been individualized. How very American of us. It’s what we do best.

I thought of this idea last week, and planned to use it to celebrate our individuality. But now, flags are flying at half mast. Now I’m once again thinking about how the push for independence and autonomy that makes us strong has also made us vulnerable.

The flags are still flying, in all their unique positions. I hope they always will.

Double Memorial

Double Memorial

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Some of us remember that this year the national holiday falls on the real Memorial Day, May 30.

But the double I’m thinking of is at Camp Nelson, the veteran’s cemetery nestled in the rolling hills half an hour south of Lexington. There Mom and Dad lie together. A hero’s grave.

I commute now through Arlington Cemetery, and I look up from my newspaper when we briefly come above ground there. I see the orderly stones, the tidiness of death at a military burial ground.

Life is so messy — but life is what we remember. And the least tidy lives we remember most. The passions and the excesses and the outbursts and the love. These can never be contained in measured plots and structured rows. 

And on this double Memorial Day I’m feeling doubly this way.