A Walker in the Suburbs

Our youngest daughter, Celia, was born 16 years ago today, and by preschool she was already exhibiting a sense of style, a certain flair. She did not inherit these traits; they are her own through and through.

Celia loves to shop — and I shop as little as possible. In the last year we have reached a tentative truce. She shops with friends and easily doubles or triples the amount of time I spend in stores. But sometimes we shop together. And then the fun begins.

“Oh no, Mom,” she says when she sees me eying something for myself. “Why do you always pick out the most shapeless dress?” Sometimes her only comment is a single arched eyebrow. I am relearning through Celia to put the fun back in fashion.

A youngest daughter is a link to the future, a push to the present. She is a sweet reminder of youth.

Happy birthday, Celia!

A holiday is like a wave; it races up from afar, engulfs and buoys us, then retreats. When family is scattered, traveling is the best way to stay close. So we traveled, and we celebrated, together. Now the wave has receded. We are all home.

But we have the memories of being together. The yellow building on the right is where we went for lunch on Saturday, just the five of us, sitting at a tiny table meant for four in a cramped place that accommodates 30 at the very most. It reminded me of our dinner table on a good night: the inside jokes, the rolling of eyes, the togetherness. I miss it already.

We’ve never been a family that goes around the table and says what each is thankful for. But if we were, I would say today that I am thankful to have all these people I love under one roof: my parents and husband and children, my brother and sister, my nieces. A few people are missing, but all in all a good turnout.

So pass the turkey and the stuffing and the pumpkin pie. Family is the bounty that blesses us best.

When our girls began looking at colleges, one of our rules was that the school be no more than a day’s drive away. Of course there were questions: Why just a day? And what do you mean by day? We explained that we didn’t have a 24-hour marathon in mind. Just a normal seven- or eight-hour drive. When you live where we do, this covers a lot of ground. From Boston to Charleston to Ohio — and plenty of places in between.

I was thinking of this yesterday as I drove to Kentucky to help out my dad, who had fallen the night before and broken his shoulder. I could leave Virginia at noon and be in Lexington by dinner time.

Air travel has changed our view of space and distance, has made it possible to stay close to friends and family in a way that would have been impossible a generation or two ago. I know that jobs, education and other circumstances of life may not always allow for such proximity. But I do know that yesterday, I was glad to be only a day’s drive away from these people I love.

Yesterday 70 of us gathered in an old monastery boarding school to visit with people we barely knew or didn’t at all know, first cousins, second cousins, third cousins, with many degrees of “removed.” People connected by the slenderest but strongest of threads. Family. We came with covered dish and grandma’s jam cake, with old photographs and family trees, with stories and reminiscences. There were many pairs of dark, deep-set eyes. So many of us have them that they must be a family trait.

Afterward I looked at Dad’s photo album, a gift from his sister, my Aunt Dolly, gone now. Inside were pictures of two of the cousins I had just seen, only instead of 75 and 70 they were 12 and 7 — a long-legged boy, a pigtailed girl — all their lives ahead of them. And seeing both in one day, the real people and their younger selves, was a punch to the gut. Because people, even the best ones, do not live forever.

“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.
Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted,
And human love will be seen at its height.
Live in fragments no longer.
Only connect…”

–E.M. Forster, Howards End

Before the sweltering summer of 2010 was the sweltering summer of 1991. But early one morning, the last Sunday in the month, the heat broke. The morning sky was swirls of color and the air was clean and clear. The weathercasters said: “This is the most beautiful day of the year.” It was July 28, 1991, the day our daughter Claire was born.

So today’s post is for Claire — daughter, sister, friend; college student, daycare assistant, giver of big hugs. When I started this blog in February, Claire cheered me on more than anyone else. Happy Birthday, Claire!

As we were growing up, my mother quoted Shakespeare to us, one line in particular: “This above all, to thine own self be true.” My mother didn’t raise my father, of course, but this line could have been written for him. A man so aptly named Frank, my dad has always been true to himself. He is friendly and fun and as good as they come; he extracts joy from daily living.

When he was a tail gunner on bombing raids in World War II, he took a milk concoction into the nether regions of a B-17 bomber so that he and his buddies would have ice cream when they landed back in East Anglia. Sixty-odd years later, when he was being honored as a D-Day veteran by his hometown, he told the Lexington City Council that its downtown reminded him of London during the blitz–his way of protesting the demolition of yet another city block. He even made us laugh when he was facing serious surgery: Instead of taking the revolving door into the hospital, he took it all the way around so he was back outside.

But of course, it was all in fun. He went back in; he did what he had to do. But he did it with a smile and a quip. People like my father make life worth living. Happy Birthday, Dad!