Tatum has been waiting to turn 18–freedom!—since she was still playing with dolls. I remember the last day she played with dolls: it was a Friday afternoon in early September 2018. She was in sixth grade. That was the day we learned that middle schoolers in Maryland are way too busy to play, unless it’s on an organized sports team.
Moving from Jakarta to DC wasn’t easy and was made worse by the pandemic 18 months later, but there’s a spark in Tatum that always wants to become fireworks, free and mesmerizing—the very definition of sparkling. This idea was encapsulated by being a bonafide grown up.
So it was a bit of a surprise when, about 3 days before her birthday, Tatum seemed down. When I asked how she was doing, she laid down on the kitchen floor and before I knew it, she was crying. “How am I going to buy my own shampoo and do all those grown up things?” she asked sadly.
I laughed until I rolled and then we were both lying on the kitchen floor. While the march towards graduation has been anything but steady, even this semester, she is definitely ready to be a grown up. She’s so competent, aware, decisive and efficient.
Most importantly, however, is this: “Tatum is the kindest person I know.” This was said about her onstage by a fellow student during remarks after her debut last week on the stage (not counting Annie in third grade), where she played a nun in The Sound of Music. She is so kind. Kind and competent is an amazing combination.
She’s still that little girl playing with dolls, dancing to Shake It Off in the JIS talent show, hugging orangutans, and flipping off a boat into the Indian Ocean.
In fact, she still takes crazy leaps; to celebrate Senior Skip Day last week, she went cliff diving with friends. She’s still that sparkling girl in Indonesia. We feasted on Indonesian food for her 18th—with a splash of champagne and a Quality Street chocolate—with her beloved Aiden, Sophia, family, friends and a surprise appearance from Kyiven.
Next up: AP exams, prom, graduation and The University of South Florida. The Taurus becomes a Bull!
How lucky am I? One minute I’m sitting on my balcony overlooking the antique car collection in the Alsace room of boutique hotel La Varangue, watching a tiny, bright orange bird dart close and away again; and the next I’m being serenaded by a classroom of Malagasy four-year-olds who are alternately shy, exuberant and dazed.
The World Bank hired me to design a national strategic plan to implement a high-quality preschool system across Madagascar, and I work with a counterpart at UNICEF. After a week of back-to-back meetings last month with high-level stakeholders like Ministry officials and donor agencies in the capital city of Anatanarivo (Tana), I was ready to go into the field—which entailed about 6 hours on the road and was still not too far from the interior, nowhere close to the coast.
And by field, I mean mud. It being rainy season, February offered a few pounding rain storms while I was there. I don’t remember the storms in Jakarta lasting as long as these did. The first night in Tana, as predicted according to multiple cyclone warning alerts, the rain thundered down unrelentingly for hours. Madagascar is on the forefront of global climate crisis damages, hit by both droughts and flooding.
Despite having gorgeous and abundant natural resources, such as minerals, coastal beauty and funky wildlife like fat-tailed lemurs, it’s one of the top ten (top two?) poorest countries in the world. It was hard to be there when Trump shut down USAID programs suddenly. I had one government official ask me at the end of our meeting whether the water supply at his church would be cut off…and I had to answer with some shame that it was likely and I was very sorry.
Even in the government offices—for example, in the regional director’s office, the equivalent of the head of the state department of education, there was no office laptop or printer. But that didn’t matter, because there was also no electricity. I finished taking notes at 6:00 pm on paper by the flashlight on my phone. Bizarre. The bathroom (squatty potty) for that office was also among the worst I saw, even relative to the schools.
The preschoolers often squatted outside, and even at the nicer private school, supported by the church, the latrine had a hole in the roof, was far from the classrooms and required crossing a tiny bridge, not easy for a preschooler. I didn’t see a bar of soap anywhere. Sanitation and clean drinking water remain big problems for these small human beings. The rate of stunting—irreversible physical and cognitive impairments caused by chronic malnutrition for children under age 5–stands at over 40 percent.
Despite the challenges, I can’t tell you how much I loved it there. Madagascar offers a charming blend of African, Indonesian and French cultures. This island nation, the fourth largest in the world, was actually explored and settled by intrepid Indonesian oarsmen before Africans. And while colonialism can’t be recommended, I can’t say I didn’t love the French fare at my hotel’s open air restaurant. The French ambassador and his wife and another couple dined next to me one evening.
In the mornings, I’d start over with dragon fruit or papaya and passion fruit juice, and a café au lait, that made me feel right at home as well—I could practically hear our beloved Indonesian housekeeper Ibu Nengsih singing “selamat pagi” as she walked by, barefoot.
The field visits for work included extremely long days with meeting with teachers, principals, officials and parents, and of course visiting classrooms for children ages 3 through 5. Preschool teachers sometimes work for free or, in the best cases, earn perhaps $43-$73…a month. I think I paid that much for dinner one night. The parents I most wanted to meet were those we didn’t meet, because they can’t afford the 50-cent monthly fee required to send a child to preschool. Mostly, in the area we visited, the parents were charcoal farmers.
There’s something magical about Africa and whether that’s in spite of the poverty or because of it, I don’t know. People were warm, patient and welcoming. I needed all of that because my head was dizzy from meetings being held in three languages—French, English and mostly Malagasy—and I just couldn’t pull up French from my brain. Everything wanted to come out in Indonesian, which was not helpful.
The mud, smiles, dusk-time drumming, smoke in the air, pounding rain, bare feet, babies wrapped on backs, sugar cane coca-colas, and scorching hot red dirt made me feel right at home. Next time I hope to see one of those fat-tailed lemurs for myself.
Author’s note: I drafted this on January first on the train from Brighton back to London and I’m posting it more than a month later…from Madagascar, which will definitely be a highlight of 2025!
Tatum
Coming home from Stuart Hall; Costa Rica; Deep Creek for the Fourth of July week; Leah’s birthday party; meeting Aiden; getting into college; getting my driver’s license.
Clara
That steak I ate last night. Emins and likes. Costa Rica with Dad. South Africa.
Finn
Getting the Sunny D; going to Nationals; Costa Rica; getting the backflip; staying at John’s house for a week to be a camp coach.
Heather
Seeing our Jakarta cousins in Kraków; seeing London with Brooks; pints with Hugh and a visit to book and map store in Covent Garden, London; Tatum coming home for her senior year; Clara’s phone call from South Africa saying she wanted to go to McLean School; having all the kids in one school; walking in the beach at dawn with Noelle and Josie; going to my second-ever Pomona reunion with my mother and my daughter; Tatum’s college trip down the coast of California in February and receiving seven acceptance letters before the end of the year; having my book club friends over on our new porch with merlot and a moonrise.
Hugh
Going to Africa for the first time in 45 years; hanging out with the Tomlinsons in London; being published in the desert book anthology; getting my first short story published; meeting Saffron the cat; training secondary school teachers in Jordan.
Kevin
Clara’s successful transition into McLean; having all three kids together in a good school; getting the porch built; Finn going to Nationals; being together in Costa Rica; the immersive 1605 gunpowder plot experience in London.
Happy new year, world! I was listening to The Moth Radio Hour yesterday and the first story, amazingly, happened to be told by His Majesty the King’s Royal Raven Master, who lives at the Tower of London where we visited just about two weeks ago. He told a story about his first day on the job years ago and losing one of the six ravens. Legend has it that the ravens protect the Crown and kingdom and if they leave, the kingdom will fall. The Raven Master said in his story yesterday that for the first time in history, there are now eight ravens “because things in the kingdom are a little bit dodgy these days.”
I laughed out loud, and I thought about Brighton. The Tomlinsons found Hugh in the theater district in London a few days after Christmas, had a pint in a pub and caught the train south to create some Brighton beach memoirs at New Year’s.
Piling off the train, we walked from the train station to the flat and saw vape stores, run down touristy shops with burnt out lights, and teenagers banging on bus doors and yelling at the driver to be ignored as the driver pulled away. Indeed, things seemed a little bit dodgy and even drab—not helped by the relentlessly gray sky.
We dropped off our bags Ina shockingly cerulean apartment decorated a large David Bowie print and walked out on the pier. There, the colors were a gorgeous aquamarine blue deepening to teal under a moody dark sky. It was then easy to see why the location has long been a draw for Brits and foreigners alike. We ate more fish and chips (Finn) and mussels (Kev) at a slightly kitschy restaurant that reminded me of Ocean City.
Walks along the coast were so cold and blustery that we couldn’t talk much, and I wondered if the weather makes it difficult to maintain a shiny glow on the peeling-paint hotels and apartments. Hugh said Brexit has brought harder times to the whole country and I could see it.
The drab is irrelevant, however, at 6:00 am when it’s still black outside. When Finn knocked on the door telling Kevin he was ready to go down to the water, Kevin told him to go back to bed. At 7:00 am, in the misty dawn, Finn went…swimming. Yes, in the English Channel. The water was rough and the beach is all pebbly rocks and the water was as freezing as you would imagine. Finn embraced and loved it. The only thing I embraced was my hot cup of coffee.
Despite the beach beauty, I was less than inspired by Brighton’s run down vibe; but then Hugh and his friend Richard Hutt led us into the pretty parts of town, and everything lit up. Richard is a friend of Hugh’s and the family’s from our days in Ghana in the 1970s, and I basically haven’t seen him since, so it was quite something to have a cocktail with an old friend and editor of GQ (Gentleman’s Quarterly magazine).
His work had sent Hugh and I on a quest to a bookshop in London to find a map of James Bond’s London that Richard published, a favorite evening of the trip. Moreover, Hugh gave Finn a book Richard wrote on etiquette for men that Finn poured over on the train and airplane home. Sixteen is a good age to be influenced by the best.
In addition to the Instagram-ready restaurant on New Year’s Eve, where the cocktails, sparks, sequins, feathers and over-the-top flowers lit up the space, Kevin, Finn and I found some fabulous art. Some were in galleries at The Lanes and some were on walls outdoors. That morning of exploring brought some spice and pop-color to my impressions of Brighton.
One of my favorite moments from the trip was at the exact turning of the year. We stayed in a “stylish” but kind of weird, slanted apartment a block from the pier. Across from us was a gay bar that provided lots of good cheer to its customers and a drag show that Kevin watched on for a few minutes. The area was externally festive at midnight…but our whole house was asleep except for Tatum and myself. So the two of us, from her bedroom window, watched the fireworks popping into the sky over the English Channel and hugged each other—and I already felt like lots of hopes and predictions had come true. The future is bright.
It’s pitch black in the closet and there are five people—myself and four strangers—squeezed into a tiny closet that’s from the outside. It’s my nightmare as a later-in-life sufferer of claustrophobia. It’s made worse by the fact that if someone coughs, the dogs and king’s guards searching aggressively in the other side will find us immediately and we’ll be hanged. Poor Anne on the other side of the door in the dark, damp room alternately seems angry and frightened as she denies to the men that anyone else is in the room with her. There are 12 of us stuffed in various hiding spots. The Catholic priest coughs on purpose—gives himself up—and the search is called off as he is hauled away…to the gallows. Now we are 11.
The year is 1605 and the Roman Catholics are done with the decades of oppression under a series of conveniently Protestant kings of England. Guy Fawkes masterminds the plot to load barrels of gunpowder under London’s parliament building and do away with it in one massive blow—along with the king’s men and hundreds of innocent people in the surrounding market. What do we do: support Guy Fawkes, Anne whose brother was hanged for no reason other than faith, and the other Catholics at wit’s end, or stand staunchly with King James and the other Protestants who have bought up all the land, power and dignity of the people?
Victors wrote the history books and set the holiday schedule, and so Brits around the world celebrate the stopping of the gunpowder plot every November 5 on Guy Fawkes day. My dad remembers celebrating this as a child living in a British colony. I’m so glad innocent people didn’t die that day when the plot was foiled, but it was amazing to learn about both sides during an immersive experience next to the Tower of London last week.
Using virtual reality, live and interactive actors, and a staged underground set, we could smell the smoke and feel the damp and (with the help of technology) glide high above the Thames on a rope to help the priest try to escape and feel our row boat almost tip into the river later, as old London burned in the distance. Clara pointed out that the actor in the (virtual reality) boat talking directly to us and appeared to be only feet away was the actor who played Draco Malfoy.
In the end, the king’s men detected and averted the plan in the nick of time, and we celebrated the victory with a modern day feast of fish and chips. The night prior, we dined on popcorn and mochi watching the live performance of Wicked on West End, and one day we ate the national food of the UK, tikka masala.
Our favorite meal, however, was on Christmas Day. Throughout the service at Westminster Abbey, Kevin was sliding through restaurant options that might have any remaining 11th-hour openings. My only request a month earlier was, “Let’s have a proper traditional English dinner on Christmas—you know, like beef Wellington, Yorkshire pudding, lamb, sticky toffee pudding for dessert, that kind of thing.”
So while the priest is reading the gospel, having stopped right in front of us and waving the immense wand until Brooks about passed out, Kevin leans over and whispers to me, “Italian or Peruvian?” We went with Italian.
Walking to the restaurant through throngs of people started to hurt Tatum’s feet in heels. I swapped shoes with her but it was still a miserable walk under the cold sky and we were going to be late. So Tatum, Brooks and I hailed a cab and Finn, Kevin and Clara walk-ran to the restaurant. We didn’t want to cancel as we risked losing a large deposit. Those of us in the cab arrived first and we stopped before entering.
We had arrived in front of a door in a dead commercial area near the Tate Modern that seemed to lead to a deli. We deduced this from the shelves lined with goods for sale, and the fact that there were only two tables in the tiny place. And the writing on the door that read “Italian Deli,” which was a strong clue. To get away from the cold, we entered but weren’t sure what to do. This was not the place for a very pricey dinner and heels. Kevin by phone assured me that this was the correct address at least.
They arrived and we sat down wondering if we would be eating very expensive salami and mozzarella paninis. But no, not the case. Our set menu included the following offerings: ox tongue, fois gras, pork cheek, anchovy paste on fried cheese and, my favorite option, pigeon wellington. Brooks was perplexed by the options but happy to see a beef filet on the list of starters—until Tatum advised him against it as would arrive tartare. Brooks wasn’t up for raw meat on Christmas.
The meal was delicious and very passionately presented by our young Italian fellow, but the whole experience was cultural in a way we hadn’t expected. Dessert included two mini birthday cakes presented to the official 16-year-olds. They even let us sing to them (one of them).
We went home to our quirky arbnb flat by the Chelsea football stadium and watched a lot of Harry Potter movies. That was a great antidote to all the walking, learning and dining, especially since we were able to visit the infirmary where Harry had his bones regrown, also serving as a chapel at Oxford University.
I loved our long walks to and through Hyde Park, where we saw tiny elves in trees and shops full of English roses. It’s hard to know what’s real sometimes, between claustrophobic closets centuries ago and magical dimensions that muggles can only imagine. That’s the great thing about travel; you don’t have to choose just one answer.
It’s amazing to see a 9-year-old who’s taller than you by a mile, as Lloyd now is. Okay, he might actually be 17 now, but in my mind’s eye, he’s still a fourth grader who makes fantastic structures given a box of magna-tiles. The highlights of our Kraków visit were many but chief among them was reconnecting with the Allens (Emma, Elton, Lloyd and Cerys) and the Roys (Rachel, Neel, Ashima, Avi and Inika). Finn and Avi acted like long-lost soulmates—the crack-up-at-every-crack kind.
Experiencing it all in the old world style Christmas market in the historic Kraków old town was charming and filled our eyes and hearts with the cheer of the season—that and the Polish sausages and mulled wine. We gathered along an immense table in a cave our first evening. While waiting for lasagna and steak frites, Emma tried to teach us Welsh, the craziest language ever invented.
Our favorite meal, however, was possibly the one where we crammed along a couple of sofas at the airbnb flat and dined on take-out shawarmas and champagne imported by the Roys from Paris. We watched an awful-wonderful, very American Christmas movie (Daddy’s Home 2), thanks to Clara’s good taste.
We also saw art and learned about Poland’s hardships and history at the beautifully restored Wawel Royal Castle. On our last day, we braved Schindler’s factory-cum-museum, which was moving, shocking, cautionary. The Jewish quarter on our visit reflected the contemporary weight of the Jewish world: a banner asking to bring home the hostages.
Kraków was cheerful, quaint, super walkable over those cobblestone streets and full of delicious food. Tatum again gave escargot in garlic butter sauce her full support, Clara favored the ribeyes, I reconnected with my love of the flat white coffee and croissants, Kevin tried multiple pints, and Finn just likes food. He’s nonpartisan. The warmed outdoor cafés lit up by fairy lights, heat lamps and hanging lanterns were irresistible. We were charmed.
That’s how we usually started our conversations. It’s funny for best friends to be so formal, but that’s what amused us. That was Josie and me, always looking for a way to keep it fun. We’re going to ride around the neighborhood on our bikes after dinner, smoking cigarettes and laughing, we promised each other. Our kids will be doing the dishes because our evening starts when we sit down for the fine dinner we have made for everyone. And from then on, it’s crossword puzzles, good books, a show, and bike riding.
We didn’t get to do that, but we always meant to. In fact, we could barely finish a movie together, interrupted either by our kids or ourselves, talking about something that couldn’t wait. We did sit in their glorious Bethesda backyard by the trampoline David put up, in the green grass and under the blue sky, sipping something out of the elegant acrylic glasses painted in happy colors with bikes. We talked and talked and talked.
Whatever else was going on–trauma, delight, holidays, boring days, dinners, coffees, doing chores–we talked. Tatum and Sophia were so aggravated with us on our college trip down to the Carolinas because regardless of which of us was driving, we were talking. We talked nonstop for 5 hours straight, there and back. The girls, teenage girls who never run out of talking, ran out of talking and begged us to stop but we couldn’t. They put in their ear buds and they slept. We just kept talking away, so pleased with our situation and ourselves.
That was almost as much fun as the night we dined on the pergola with all the families, the kids straggling in from poolside still in their suits, and for some reason we talked all night in Southern accents. Maybe that was Clara’s request. But once we started we couldn’t stop. Even when normal people like Uncle David showed up, we couldn’t stop with the drawls. It was so much fun sitting under the stars under the pergola under the summer night air. Who knows what we talked about–don’t remember. Nothing and everything. Serious and silly. Anything. With a straight face. Josie could do it wearing candy corn bucked teeth too.
She took me for serious prayers when Tatum was missing. She lived at my house for a month when I had to be away. She and the girls were our Covid-bubble family. You and Sophia and Georgie belted out the happy birthday song to Tatum on April 21, 2020…from the lawn at 8 am, standing in front of a huge yard sign. We drove each other’s kids to crazy faraway places just because it needed to be done and we semi-single moms couldn’t do it. We knew the inside-outs of each other’s marriages and parenting preferences, deepest hurts, fears and plans. We never missed an Edgemoor thrift sale. We went to each other’s churches, baptized our children together, and celebrated every single Mother’s Day together, usually over a homemade-by-kids brunch and mom-made coffees with cream. At your birthday last year, we had coffees and pastries at Boulangerie Christophe’s and later we dined around your table with your 99-year-old neighbor and vowed to be like her at 99. At my birthday in June, we picnicked at Wolf Trap with our families and listened to John Legend under the stars.
Remember our Bruno Mars dance party in the kitchen? “Feeling good! It’s my birthday…you look good! Whoooo. Put some perm on your attitude, you gotta relax.” Finn and Josie dancing was a sight to behold; legendary. Clara wanted to play her new Christmas tunes on the piano so you could sing along. You would have loved that.
We talked through all the details of all these moments before and afterwards, and no detail was unimportant or dismissed by Josie when it came to someone she loved. We talked so much we got in trouble–with our kids (“Mom, isn’t it time to go upstairs now?”) and our neighbors: “It’s too late for you to be playing in the yard. You need to go home now,” Andy said to your kids as we guiltily got out of the car. We had been sitting in the car talking for an hour one Monday night while our kids grabbed an unexpected gift of tire swing time, too late for a school night.
We aggravated our kids with long nature walks along the canal and Great Falls, even in, especially in, the dead of winter. “Isn’t this great?” One of us would say. “It’s heaven,” the other would reply. We aggravated our kids with museum visits and insistence on doing chores before hanging out. They aggravated us with regular requests to come home from school for no apparent reason.
We talked about the cows and the fences. Did you know that cows will walk the entire length of a field looking for holes in the fence before they will start eating the lush green grass waiting for them? They need to make sure they’re safe and the boundaries are secure. This is what we reminded ourselves and each other when enforcing boundaries with our kids, keeping them on track, at home, in school and with joy felt harder than we had imagined it could.
The last time I made her laugh was when I reminded her that God, whom she loved with her whole heart, cared about all of the details of her life, all of them. He would take care of things and she need not worry. I reminded her that he knows the number of hairs on her head and in her eyebrows…and we laughed.
When I walked out of Suburban Hospital Monday night, December 2, I couldn’t believe I was now living in a world without Josie. I had held her hand as she took her last breath, as her pulse slowed and stopped. When I shopped for shoes for Finn to wear to her funeral on Friday, I thought, “I can’t wait to tell Josie about this Nordstrom Rack, it has everything.” When I stood at her graveside at All Souls Cemetery on Saturday, December 7, I thought, “I thought we were going to Boulangerie Christophe for your birthday today.” I took Georgie and my kids instead and cried silently to myself instead, over pastries and coffee.
Last year at this time, we stole away to wrap all the Christmas presents together at my church, away from spying eyes. The only present I can give you now, Mrs. Hathway, is to love your children like my own, and I already do. Forever. I will never be able to fill your cool, colorful Hoka running shoes, but I’ll keep giving them the nature walks, pastries, and stars under the pergola every chance they’ll let me. And I’ll make sure they know how to talk and talk and talk. I love you forever, Josie.
We’re back already and it’s only Saturday morning. Teenagers have places to go and people to meet and privacy to protect, so we didn’t stay in Deep Creek very long but it was a full two days. Mostly full of mashed potatoes and pie: pumpkin, coconut, lemon meringue, apple, peanut butter, Oreo, and pecan chocolate. I brought my traditional pumpkin pecan pie, but we ate it for breakfast at the cabin because there was no room on the table for another pie.
Make that tables, plural, need to seat all 31 people. There were at least two in high chairs and someone asked if they should be counted as people. Um, I’d say yes? Clara was a magnet for the kiddos, who were literally climbing on top of her.
There was also turkey, gravy, stuffing, corn pudding, cranberries, vegetable medley, green beans, green bean casserole, sweet potatoes (baked), sweet potatoes (mashed), and sweet potatoes (souffléd). Thanks and so full.
The girls went to go down to see the moonlight and snow on the lake after dinner. Dad, Finn and I got our steps in during the day. Finn gets his flips in day and night—and at the gas station stop, as seen here with the flags—and the highlight of the trip for him probably has nothing to do with family or food: He mastered the roundoff backflip with the rope. Huge!
Fun and games, sarcasm and irritability not withstanding, included the crossword puzzle, jigsaw puzzles, Colorku, Spit, Rumikub, Boggle, Cranium, Memory, and Paddle Ping Pong (Finn and I got to 101). Does dog management (four at the cabin) count as fun or a game? Marley tried to balance it with schoolwork that kept her up late into the night, stressed about a project due Wednesday.
So all in all, a pretty classic Deep Creek Thanksgiving, a first for our kids. We tried the new American tradition of Black Friday shopping at the outlet mall on the way back home but it was so jammed packed, it was stressful and made us less thankful and less good human beings. No more of that for me.
In the meantime Kevin and Hugh both worked through the week. Hugh taught a unit on the family tree to his university students in Jordan, and Kevin spoke at a high-level meeting on transport in Ukraine. He’s increasingly thankful for electricity, since his is out on a daily basis.
Despite the cliché of it, I am thankful for the basics: food, a warm house, lights, health, clean air, and family around us. Not even our closest family and friends have all that this year. And I’m very grateful to have all the kids at home and doing great—by which I mean okay, which is great.
I found out that Kamala Harris lost and Trump would be our next president at about 1 o’clock in the morning, when Tatum woke me up, crying. She fell asleep with me, inconsolable. I knew how she felt.
While more than half the country clearly appreciates Trump’s vision for our future, I find it destructive. I see dismantling of basic checks and balances in our trifold system, stripping away of women’s rights not only to make decisions about our health and bodies but also about our very lives—since having a child only gets started at delivery (see last post); destabilizing our economy since I don’t believe that this administration cares very much about the working or middle class, in spite of their sales pitch; ignoring the planet’s health; and decreasing our sense of safety with each other and in the world.
It makes me sad, more than anything because I love the country we have built up over the last few hundred years. It takes so long to build and it’s so easy to kick structures down. To reflect on this, I took the children to see the Constitution and Bills of Rights the week of the election. It was moving.
My hope is the incoming administration will bring honor to those men who constructed our cool system of democracy. I hope they will restore more dignity and respect to people who feel left out or disrespected. I hope they will bring better budgets at the household level and the country level, and feelings of hope, trust and pride in all that the United States represent. Will they do the good works that my conservative grandfather would be proud to be associated with?
Will they honor the vision of George Washington, who represented the best in bestowed and elected power by modeling how to carry power lightly and peacefully, handing it over graciously when one’s turn is up?
My hope is that sadness is transformed into pride. Sometimes we lose our lives to find them when the broken pieces reassemble into something even better. Let’s see what each of us can do individually, collectively to reassemble into the better.
Hugh’s friends in Poland were baffled when he explained that the rest of his family lived in California, DC, Nashville and Copenhagen…simultaneously. “Do you not like each other?” they asked. We do, very much. And this is why having my mother live across the country from me, or vice versa, still kind of stinks. In the season of thankfulness, I’m thankful for planes. They brought Mom and Doug to us once again, for a fall visit.
Whereas the hills of Montclair, California, offer unbeatable views of city lights over the Bay, our little neck of the woods offers unbeatable…woods. I am so proud of our Cabin John Creek trails. Doug walked them with me and probably appreciated my company just fine, but would have better liked the company of his fishing rod.
One fun part of the visit was attending one of Finn’s competitions, where they got to see Finn’s freestyle, currently in development for international competition trials. Look at those screenagers.
One of the things I admire most about Mom is her gift for and investment in friendships, and this visit was no exception. Anna Borg, Jimmy and Rose, our neighbors Lisa and Norman, and Dad and Auntie Blitz came over to watch the elections, and it was indeed good to have company. Tatum, Aiden, Finn and Clara were gleefully startled by the irreverence of the so-called grown ups lounging around drinking, smoking, cussing and pontificating.
Marley pried herself away from hardcore senior year studies to come for Mom’s birthday, and we went out for Middle Eastern foods at Ala in Bethesda. Mom, naturally, ordered a lavender martini.
My kids have only celebrated Mom’s birthday in person with her a handful of times, so we made the most of it. Clara made dinner with me and Tatum made mini lemon custard and meringue cakes for dessert. Finn was on the low key end of participation, as Tatum, unimpressed, points out in his “card.”
Our celebration circle extended beyond the usual activities to include some handyman love. There’s nothing like rotting wood and funky electrical wires to bond men. It was great having Doug and Dad conspire to get my house back in shape. They brought out the ladder, the electric drill, hammer and nails, light bulbs, the whole toolbox, and repaired our steps, put up porch lights, replaced flickering lights with calm ones and generally made our house more respectable again.
This was nice because it gave Mom and me the chance to shop for my gala jump suit—more on that in a moment. Activities aside, it’s just the best having my mother by my side to talk and talk and cook and read and talk. It’s funny that the older I get, the more I need my parents.
@theterrace 