Bending the Knee

Bending the Knee

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Attending two college graduations within a week has made me think about endings and beginnings, about markers. There are the organic ones — births, deaths, birthdays. And there are the ones that celebrate a decision or an achievement — marriages, graduations, retirements.

Two nights ago, at Claire’s graduation, we also saw the hooding of  Ph.D. candidates. For some reason, the professors doing the hooding were always shorter than the newly minted doctors of philosophy being hooded. So the latter were often bending their knees, lowering themselves to make it easier to slip on the doctoral hoods.

It was an odd ritual, vaguely feudal in feel, akin to kissing the pope’s ring. Though it had a practical explanation, it felt like a sign of homage, almost a genuflection to the educational powers bestowing the degree.

Since there is little anymore that is held in high esteem, I found this ceremony both comforting and inspiring. It’s a good way to begin a new enterprise, with a sense of awe and respect. With a pause, a salute, a nod to all who have gone before.

Happy Graduation!

Happy Graduation!

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Tonight my daughter Claire graduates from George Mason University.

I’m pausing a moment to let that fact sink in.

Not that it doesn’t seem possible. I know by now how quickly it goes. But still, a momentous occasion. A marker. A passage. A time for parental pride.

Claire has studied hard, worked at least one job throughout college, helped conduct experiments in labs and written a thesis. She graduates with honors and will start a masters in social work program in the fall.

When she graduated from high school I could find Claire by spotting her hot pink sandals. Tonight when Pomp and Circumstance begins to play I’ll strain to see if I can pick her out again. She’ll be wearing green and gold this time, not maroon. And she’ll be older, wiser and more mature than when she went in (of course). But she’ll still have that killer smile. And she and I — and the whole family — will know all that went into this. 

Happy Graduation, Claire. You did it!

Quarter Century

Quarter Century

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I had a reference point, so I looked it up. Mother’s Day, 1989, was May 14. That’s the day we moved to northern Virginia. Suzanne was six months old. We planned to stay “a couple of years.”

But two years passed, then four, eight, twelve; they passed in a whirl of babies and toddlers and deadlines and milestones. And when I realized what was happening, that I was settling in a place I never intended to stay, I chafed at that fact.

It wasn’t the house itself or the immediate neighborhood that rankled, but the suburban experience. The tidy lawns and mulched trees, the lawnmowers and snow blowers that seemed always to be whirring. The traffic, the homogeneity, the “placelessness.” The influx of affluence that led our children to ask us why they couldn’t live in a house with a two-story foyer.

But a few years ago (yikes, almost ten!) I began to work downtown. I explored the neighborhoods of D.C. — Brookland, Capitol Hill, Penn Quarter. There was an energy and a discombobulation that felt new and familiar at the same time. There were long city blocks where I could stretch my legs. Without intending to, I began to soften toward the place.

This is good, because what’s happened in the last quarter century — what’s happened when I haven’t been looking — is that northern Virginia has become our home. I still may thrash at its limitations, but it’s where two of my children were born and where all of them grew up. This is their place, where they’ve come alive to the world.

A lot can happen in a quarter century. A lot has.

En Plein Air

En Plein Air

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Never use a long word where a short one will do. Never use a foreign phrase if you can think of an English equivalent. I looked up George Orwell’s rules for good writing when I thought of this title.

Yes, “en plein air” is longer — and more French — than “outside.” It may seem like an affectation. A highfalutin phrase.

But it seems more appropriate than “alfresco,” the other choice. “En plein air” is the French term for “in the open air” and used primarily to describe setting up an easel and painting outdoors.

Writing was my “en plein air” activity yesterday.  And the French phrase captures the deliciousness of it, even the setting-up-the-easel of it. Yesterday I gathered paper, pen, laptop and phone and moved them all outside to the deck. Suddenly my work was part of the larger scheme of things, no longer crabbed and shallow but open and expansive.

Or at least it felt that way. The first warm days of spring have a way of turning one’s head.

Remembering Dad

Remembering Dad

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Today would have been Dad’s 91st birthday. And I’ve been seeing him everywhere. In the graduation celebration we just had. In the new spring leaves. In the finally warm, “not-a-cloud-in-the-sky” day.

Where I’ve not been seeing him is in the arm chair where he used to read. Or the corner of the couch where he sat to watch TV. Or the McDonald’s where he hung out with his coffee buddies. It’s still a shock that he’s not in all those places, not alive and laughing in the world.

“Come on, Annie,” he’d say to me during episodes of childhood drama. “You’re living your life like it’s a Greek tragedy.” At the time it bothered me. Did he not appreciate the full implication of having bad hair on picture day?

Somewhere along the way, of course, I realized that he did. But he also knew how to swallow hard and move through life’s sorrows and disappointments. He knew how to make the best of things. It’s a valuable skill. One I’m nowhere near mastering.

Luckily I have his words and his example.  And I think of them often — especially today.

Commencement

Commencement

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Two college graduations in a week. One for my daughter, one for my brother. The latter happened yesterday. It was a special one, long delayed.

Not many of us go back to school for an engineering degree in midlife. But Phillip did. He solved problems, wrote papers, took ever-more-difficult classes. And life being life, he also worked, took his parents to doctor’s appointments, and, just a few weeks ago, said goodbye to his father.

That’s what I thought about most as “Pomp and Circumstance” swelled and the students students processed in. I kept thinking of one of my last visits with Dad. “If I’m alive,” he said, “I’m going to see your brother get his diploma.”

He almost made it — but not quite. So the rest of us were there for him. That’s how it works, I guess.

Road Trip

Road Trip

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I take a lot of  these, but usually alone. I listen to music, chew gum, sing along to musicals, daydream.

Still, eight-and-a-half hours is eight-and-a-half hours.

This time I’m traveling with my sister. Words make the miles fly. 

Slow Dawn

Slow Dawn

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There is something so companionable about waking up with the day. As my eyes open, the room fills with dim light. Shapes are still shadowy and bird song tentative. But the deck railing and rocking chair have already revealed themselves.

It is the perfect way to leave sleep behind. Dim, still, nothing expected of me. No loud jangly noises to make my head spin. The lights of a car on a distant road all the illumination I need — that and the light of this screen.

Only one thing could make this better.

I’ll walk to the kitchen now and pour myself a cup of tea.

Bouncing and Bierstadt

Bouncing and Bierstadt

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Last evening, a late-in-the-day bounce on the trampoline. I’ve jumped at this time before but had forgotten how transcendent it is.

The sun was low in the sky but not yet setting. From my vantage point the trees in the front yard were shining. And though I knew it was a reflected gleam, I could not shake the belief that they had generated that light themselves. Beyond the leaves was the sky — and it was the shade of blue it turns before going out for the night — a radiant hue.

The landscape had the sentimental, heroic scale of a Bierstadt painting, which was no doubt caused by exhaustion and bouncers’ (instead of runners’) high.

But it was as real to me as any humdrum scene, as real as the pale dawn now unfolding outside my door.

(Albert Bierstadt, Forest Sunrise)

All Aboard

All Aboard

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It doesn’t always happen this way — in fact, it usually does not — but today I didn’t so much ride the train to work as float here. I opened the novel at West Falls Church, left it out of the bag to read while waiting for the Red Line at Metro Center, and only reluctantly tucked it away when I exited at Judiciary Square.

It’s not the book itself I want to write about here, but the act of reading.

Sometimes I’m the person staring into the tiny screen of a smartphone or tapping on its keyboard. And the newspaper also has its allure. But books are the best commuting companions. They are the ones that blur the miles, that stitch home to office most deftly.

But just as books are good for commuting, commuting is good for books —100 minutes of almost uninterrupted mind space (round trip) — time to lose myself in even a boring tome, to say nothing of a moderately engrossing novel.