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Virtual Shower

Virtual Shower

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Today, we make one more notch on the digital belt, as we hold a virtual baby shower for Claire. With two expectant mothers in the family, we thought it best to forgo a real party.

By now most of us have been to Zoom happy hours, Zoom meetings, Zoom family reunions and all other manner of screened gatherings. We have grown accustomed to the squares on a screen.

So today, there will be more of that. There will be virtual games and present-opening. But the gifts, the decorations — and most of all, the love and good wishes — will be most emphatically real.

A Repost for Father’s Day

A Repost for Father’s Day

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For today, a repost from 2011, when Dad and I spent Father’s Day touring his old neighborhood, which he liked to call the “culturally deprived North Side.” Reading it now makes me miss him even more.

Sometimes the old brain is too full to process what it has stored. Today is one of those days. A high school reunion, the wedding of a dear friend’s son and now Father’s Day have all run together this weekend to create a mass of memories, thoughts and impressions. Should I write about dancing last night with people I haven’t seen in decades? Or the tears that surprised me as I watched Jean’s son kiss his bride?

A second ago I showed my dad photos of his father that my cousin had posted on Facebook. The kitchen of my Dad’s boyhood home on Idlewild Court — a home we’re about to see on a sentimental journey through the streets of Dad’s past — came alive again in one of those pictures.

The multiple layers of meaning in that event — layers of nostalgia, wonder and mystery — are about as close to depicting this weekend as I can muster.

June Afternoon

June Afternoon

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An afternoon walk on the W&OD Trail puts me in the very middle of summer. That ribbon of asphalt is a former railroad line, after all, and is as open and sunny as you would expect it to be, bright and straight. 


The trail is edged by tall grasses, daisies, Queen Anne’s lace and a tangle of other weeds and wildflowers that hang their sweet heads over the paved path. This time of year, it’s honeysuckle-scented, too, and the combination of sound and scent makes me feel like I’m eight years old and wading through the clover-filled empty lot behind us in the old-old house. 


What is it about summer that brings out the kid in us? Is it that when we’re young we practically eat summer up, sucking sour weed, whistling through a blade of grass, rolling down a hill? In summer we’re skin to skin with the natural world, we breathe it in and it becomes part of us. And every summer thereafter we live on that stored fuel. 


George Eliot said, “We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.” To which I would add “ — and no childhood summers.”  

Reflections on Race

Reflections on Race

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We were given today off to reflect and recharge, a generous gift of time that I (as always) struggle to use as wisely as possible. The day is meant to mark a pause in the tensions that have roiled this country over recent instances of police brutality against African Americans. 

I’ve done some reading to mark the day, but for me race relations are a lived event. Because both the grand-babies I’m waiting to welcome will have brown skin, I think often about the world they will inherit. What kind of prejudices will they fight? What kind of opportunities will they have? Will they be roughed up by police because they happened to be jogging in the “wrong” part of town? 
Suddenly it is not “the other” — it is flesh of my flesh. So whatever I think is no longer a matter of mind only, but also of heart. Which makes me wonder … is this what it will take? Will things truly improve only when most marriages are mixed-race and most families blended? 
I certainly hope not; I certainly hope it happens much, much sooner than that.
The Luckiest Generation

The Luckiest Generation

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Dad would have been 97 today, a most beauteous day, as many of his birthdays were. I’ve been thinking a lot about Dad’s generation, often called the “greatest.” I think you could make a case that it was one of the luckiest, too.

Born into a Depression, members of Dad’s generation were schooled in poverty and deprivation. They learned early to rely on themselves. Families were close then, and many were multi-generational.

Dad joined the Air Force before he was drafted, and thus began the most romantic and far-flung chapter of his life. He was a preacher’s kid from Kentucky who was suddenly touring European capitals (albeit from 25,000 feet while scrunched into the tail gunner’s seat of a B-17).

Afterward, Dad’s generation returned to sweethearts and GI loans and one of the greatest economic expansions of all time. They came back to joy and acclaim. They had saved the free world, after all. That’s a lot to do before the age of 30.

Medicine matured as they did. They lived much longer than they would have had there been no antibiotics or bypass surgery. Which is not to say they did not suffer. But most of them lived lives neatly tucked between the 1918 Flu and COVID-19.

Which means that, world-events-wise, Dad’s generation suffered more at the beginning of their life span than the end. They came of age expecting little and left this world with much. They didn’t have it easy, but they did have it early. One of the greatest generations? Absolutely. But one of the luckiest, too.

Mothers and Daughters

Mothers and Daughters

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I’ve been missing Mom more than usual lately, not just because it’s Mother’s Day but also because of what I’m reading and thinking, because there is so much to tell her, and most of all because not just one but two of my daughters are soon to be mothers.

It’s a joy and a privilege to watch your child become a parent. It’s role-bending and life-affirming. It’s an excellent counterbalance to a worldwide pandemic. And it’s the sort of experience that makes me wish my parents were still here to share it with (putting aside for the moment that I would be worried sick about them if they were).

So today I will just have to share it virtually, as we do so much these days; share it by saying here how thankful I am to be not just a mother, but a mother of daughters — and of daughters becoming mothers.

The Land of Other

The Land of Other

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Yesterday I escaped home and yard for a brief sojourn in the Land of Other. The Land of Other is not some mythical place far away. It is simply any place other than my own.

I hadn’t been in this land for two weeks, and it felt good to be there. It’s not that I mind being home all of the time. Mostly I don’t. But as the weeks wear on, and family members remain tantalizingly close, I can’t help but visit them.

Interactions were brief and mostly took place outside. There were two long walks, three frisky dogs, a daughter, a brother and — at the end, a box of take-out fried chicken.

Simple pleasures, deeply enjoyed. The Land of Other — it’s still out there. And knowing that makes me uncommonly happy.

More Fragile

More Fragile

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On this day I will always associate with Dad (six years today), I think about him and his generation, what they had to deal with — a depression, a world war, polio, scarlet fever, random infections which could easily lead to death in those days before antibiotics.

It was a more fragile world but not a worse one.

Where will this worldwide pandemic lead us? Right now it’s to confusion and panic. But where will we be, what will we be like, when the dust settles?  Will we let fear transform us to meanness? Or will we become wiser, kinder, more prepared, chastened to a greater compassion?

For us, too, a more fragile world could, perhaps, be a better one.

A Milestone

A Milestone

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This is Tom’s last day of full-time work as a senior economist. He officially retires today after more than three decades of government service. The fact that in two weeks he will begin working again for the same agency is important, yes, but today still marks a milestone in his life and in the life of our family.

There are several reasons why Tom is becoming what the government calls a “reemployed annuitant.” Some will benefit his agency and others will make our life a little easier. But what it ultimately means is that he will tiptoe into retirement, will wade into it gradually rather than diving into the deep end.

Which is not to say he couldn’t handle an immediate plunge into a life without his three-hour roundtrip commutes. He could, and in fact he will, since his new gig will be mostly telecommuting.

I’m the one who likes the gradual approach. I liken it to what the racehorse world calls “walking hots” — making sure thoroughbreds don’t suddenly lurch from 60 to 0 and sicken themselves in the process. (This is something you learn when you grow up in Kentucky.)

Retirement is a word I never used to think about but has now come out of the closet.  I’m not ready to contemplate it for myself (do writers ever really retire?), but when I do, the gradual approach that Tom is about to experience looks pretty good to me.

The Other Green Chair

The Other Green Chair

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When the children were young and misbehaved they were sent to the green chair. It’s a nice chair as chairs go, roomy, upholstered in leather (or some leather-like substance) and situated beside a window. True, it does sit in a corner — but it faces out not in.

It’s been many years since the green chair was used for time-outs, though sometimes I sit in it myself when I really, really need to finish writing an article.

But lately, there’s a new green chair in town. It’s a small, quaint, upholstered in green velvet, and curiously enough, sits right across the room from the original. It’s a corner chair with tufted armrests and a funny pie-wedge shape that would be uncomfortable to sit in even if it was refurbished. It’s here because it belonged to my mother’s side of the family and has meaning.

When we finally got it in the house, I was puzzled about where to put it, but when I found this corner I knew it was supposed to be there all along. You can sit there and look at the other green chair. Or you can look out the window — not for long, of course, because your back would start to ache. But during that time you can ponder what strange creatures we humans are.

Sentimental furniture: can’t live with it, can’t live without it.