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A Mother, Driving

A Mother, Driving

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A woman who can have breakfast with her mother and dinner with her children is lucky indeed. But for me to pull this off required a 525-mile drive.

It’s not as odd as it seems to spend Mother’s Day driving. In fact, I’ve done much of my mothering from behind the wheel. I’ve soothed tempers, given pep talks, supervised fights, hammered out college choices and discussed everything from God to boys to algebra (though not necessarily in that order).

Like talking and walking, talking and driving offers great freedom of conversation. You are both looking forward, not at each other (at least for the child riding shotgun), and that frees people to say what’s really on their minds.

I was recalling some of those conversations yesterday — not just the ones where I was the mother, but the ones where I was the daughter, too. My mother and I have solved most of the world’s problems on long drives. And in the recollection of all those words flying lies great peace and strength.

So on Mother’s Day I celebrated not just the bonds between generations, the mother I have and the mother I hope I am, but I also honored that unsung vehicle of mothering, the vehicle itself.

One Thousand

One Thousand

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If it was a year it would be medieval. If it was a jackpot it would be negligible. If it was a score it would be … well, high. (Can’t seem to find a sport where 1,000 is even possible, let alone perfection.)

This morning, one thousand (1,000 in the Associated Press style to which I am accustomed but which I don’t always follow here) is the number of blog posts I’ve written since February 7, 2010. 

Not perfection, not even close, but a tidy sum — about 900 more than I thought I would write.  Because I seldom write on Sunday, it will be an even one thousand for two days running.

So today I’m savoring a number: One thousand, or even better, one thousand and counting.


(There are many more than one thousand grains of sand on this beach.)

Earth and Water

Earth and Water

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It’s Earth Day, and I’m thinking about water. More specifically, about a presentation I went to last week at the law school where I work in which students discussed the human right to water. This is new terminology for me. A human need, yes. A human right, well…

But I’ll let that pass for the moment as I think of my far-flung child, my oldest, living in a place where water — and lack of it — is very much on people’s minds.

The other night she called, and it was a bad connection. “I think it’s because of the rain,” she said, voice jubilant. The rain, which was finally falling there on the edge of the Sahel. The rain that hadn’t fallen in months as the temperature soared. “It’s good for the plants,” she said, understated as usual since it’s also good for people, whose wells won’t go dry, who no longer have to choose between cooking or washing their clothes, who now have enough to drink.

One day a year we honor the planet, with all its strengths and all its frailties. But this is hard to do in a land of plenty. Where resources are scarce, every day is Earth Day.

Lockdown

Lockdown

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As I write, the entire city of Boston is on lockdown. All businesses, offices and schools are closed. No public transit, no street life. Seven and a half million people told to stay inside as police comb the streets looking for the second suspect in the marathon bombings.

Across the country, a town leveled by a fertilizer explosion searches for victims and buries its dead.

And finally, an Elvis impersonator who struggled with mental illness is accused of sending Ricin-laced letters to the president and other officials.

Try putting this in a novel and your editor (if you had one) would protest. Unbelievable! Too much! Take some of it out!

But this isn’t a novel.

Post Boston, Post 9/11

Post Boston, Post 9/11

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The Saturday before 9/11/01 I went to the National Book Festival. We milled around the Capitol grounds, soaking up the literary ambiance. Books and book lovers as far as the eye could see. Paradise!

Two days later the world was a different place. I thought to myself, there will be no innocent crowd scenes again. No more National Book Festivals — or anything like them. Gatherings will take place, but we won’t participate in them the same way. We’ll always be looking over our shoulders, bracing ourselves for a pop or a crack or a boom.

The reality has been far more complicated. I’ve gone back to the book festival and many other happenings on the Mall. Just last weekend I was standing with throngs of others at the base of the Washington Monument as Claire completed the Cherry Blossom 10-Miler. I plan to be waiting for her at the finish line of the Marine Corps Marathon in October. It’s been 11 and a half years since 9/11. Sometimes I forget.

But the Boston Marathon bombing has made us remember all over again, remember that we live in a different place than we did on September 10, 2011; remember the silent, cloudless sky, the Twin Towers incinerated, the Pentagon on fire.

Remember that innocence, or what we had left of it, is gone forever.

March Sadness

March Sadness

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This isn’t my headline. I purloined it from an article about how March Madness isn’t what it used to be, how a combination of big money, “one and done,” the glamor of television and its preference for the slam-dunk over the mid-range shot — most of all the steady encroachment of the spectacle that is football — how all of this is changing the sport.

But that’s not why it’s March Sadness for me.

It’s March Sadness for me because the University of Kentucky isn’t in the NCAA tournament.

How’s that for entitlement? But it’s worse than that. Not only do Kentucky fans expect to be in the “big dance” — they expect to be in the Final Four.

It’s good that “Selection Sunday” was also St. Patty’s Day. Thinking green helped us not to feel blue.

(A view of Lexington from the University of Kentucky Library.)

New World

New World

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This was going to be the day I wrote about math. 3/14. Pi Day.

But then there was some news from Rome, and now it seems silly to write about math when I could be describing a small man on a high balcony asking people to pray for him. A man who didn’t take the papal motorcade back to his residence last night but hopped on the bus instead.

I looked at the crowd of faithful in St. Peter’s Square yesterday and thought about what a global phenomenon the papal selection process has become. The puffs of smoke. Habemus papam. The red shoes from Gucci. Everyone in my office crowded around a small TV.

The first pope named Francis. The first pope from the Western Hemisphere. First Jesuit, too. Conservative and progressive. New World and Old.

The looks on people’s faces as they heard the news. There was excitement, of course, and something else. I think it was hope.

A Day for Love

A Day for Love

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Woke up this morning thinking about love, all types of love, romantic and filial and maternal. Of the love of friends and the respect of colleagues. Of the love we’re supposed to show the stranger but (at least I) so often do not.

I thought about how hard it can be to love, and how easy.

And then I thought about having a day that celebrates love. Without expectation of belief or  patriotism. Surely unique among the holidays.

Just a day for love — and the expression of it.

“If this is coffee…”

“If this is coffee…”

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In honor of our 16th president and his February 12 birthday, a quotation. Not from the Gettysburg Address or the Second Inaugural. In fact, no one is sure exactly where it came from, or even completely confident that he said it. Though it has always been attributed to him, it is not an especially well sourced remark.

But still, it is funny and practical and about real life. A break from the ponderous union-preserving tasks with which he was shouldered. A witty aside the man might have tossed out into the world without expecting it to go very far.

“If this is coffee,” he said, “please bring me some tea. But if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.”

So much for uniting the North and the South, those who sought to preserve the Union and those who clamored to divide it.

With one sentence this man could bring together  — with humor — those who love coffee and those who love tea.

Now that’s saying something…

The Lincoln Cottage in northwest D.C., the president’s summer home, where he undoubtedly had a cup of coffee … or maybe it was tea.

Inauguration Day

Inauguration Day

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Lately at lunch I’ve taken to walking around the Capitol. It’s only a few minutes from my office and I can stroll around it in 20 minutes or so, perfect if I don’t have much time.

The place has no bad angles. It’s grand and imposing no matter how it is viewed. The dome (finished 150 years ago; its completion of great importance to President Lincoln, a metaphor for uniting the divided country) is at its best against a blue sky. But even on cloudy winter days the building has its charms.

In the last two months I’ve watched as the West Front platform has been built, the fences have gone up and the chairs been arranged. The people’s place? Not exactly.

I’ll be glad when the inauguration is behind us and ordinary citizens can walk around the Capitol again.