A Walker in the Suburbs

Blogs come in many shapes and sizes. Some are intensely personal; others are not. I haven’t decided exactly how personal I want mine to be. But I can’t not write about what has been happening this week, how as we’ve been counting down the days to our trip, Tom’s Aunt Mary Ann, who raised him and his sisters since they were young children, was in ever more frail and failing health. Yesterday, as Tom went through the airport security line on his way to see her, his brother and sister called. Aunt Mary Ann had passed away peacefully. Tom turned around and came home.

His family is scattered: Portland, Spokane, Missoula, Chicago, New York, D.C. The service will be in Indianapolis in early June. So we are in limbo: grieving and packing. Still going away (she would have wanted us to, Tom says), but with heavy hearts.

So this post is for Aunt Mary Ann (pictured above with some of her grandchildren last summer), a woman who didn’t know how to quit, who even in her late 70s strode three paces ahead of her walking companions. Who came into our house like a whirlwind every time she visited and immediately began scrubbing and baking and sewing. She was a brave and determined person who lost her husband, Uncle Bud, much too early but who carved out a life for herself after he died as docent and grandmother and frequent flier. She raised seven good people in a house as full of fun and chaos as any I’ve ever experienced. Though she spent the last year and a half in Montana, she was a Hoosier through and through. She will make that final trip home soon.

For a large chunk of my professional writing career, I wrote about children. I interviewed experts on crawling and sleeping and temper tantrums. I shared what I learned with the readers of Parents or Working Mother or some other magazine. Then I wrote a book about how too much expert advice can make us crazy. Suffice it to say, I didn’t write as much about child rearing after that! But I think about children every day because I have three daughters and because creating a family with Tom continues to be the great adventure of my life.

So this post is about glee. It’s about the soundtrack of the TV show Glee, which blared from the car stereo when I drove to Maryland yesterday. Celia and I listen to this when we’re driving together, and I’ve come to love it for that reason. The night before, at a crazy busy restaurant in Herndon, we bought a schmaltzy Austrian accordion CD because we sat next to the Viennese accordion player – and Suzanne is studying in Vienna. And last but not least, as I drove back yesterday from Maryland, I listened to the U.S.-Canada Olympic gold-medal match, because Claire has gotten me excited about ice hockey.

When our children are young, we guide them and shape them; we are their world. As they grow up, they take us into worlds we could not have imagined. They remind us what life was like when we were just coming alive to it. And that, in itself, is reason for glee.