Away

The girls and I spent last week in Chicago with my parents and sister.  We are home now, enjoying our first snow day of the year.

I will write soon.

Father’s Day

And so I break my rule, just one last time, to send Father’s Day wishes to my Dad.  He’s in Cuba right now, hopefully having a great time listening to Cuban jazz and drinking mojitos.  (Just kidding. My dad would never drink a mojito.)

This picture was taken nearly two years ago just a few minutes before my Dad got on the ferry leaving Provincetown for Boston.  He leaves the Cape a few days early every summer so that he can go to the Telluride Film Festival with my brother.  This year will be their 19th year at the Festival.  In the beginning they slept in a tent in the town park and took coin operated showers and waited in line for hours and hours to get into the movies.  Now they sleep in a condo that the Festival pays for because my brother is the director of the student symposium.  My dad still waits in line for hours and hours to see movies, even though my brother could most likely get him into anything he might want to see.  They watch movies all day and night, and eat dinner at midnight and sleep late and ride chair lifts with famous people.  And sometimes they bring home the most amazing schwag.

They have never missed a year.  Not one year.  Ten years ago my parents rode their bike across the US and they planned the trip so that they would be in Colorado for the Festival.  Telluride is a religion in our house.

And so is believing in your children’s dreams.  And figuring out new ways of loving those children as they grow and their lives become more distant and more complicated.  This summer we will go to that same dock and greet my father.  And we will spend a few glorious days with him on the beach.  And then–too soon–we will bid him farewell as he travels over oceans and time zones and mountain passes so that he can watch movies with his son.

Welcome Baby

On Tuesday night around 9:30 my sister-in-love gave birth to her second son.  My brother’s second son.  My mother called early Tuesday morning to tell me that Sara’s labor had started and that she and my dad were on their way to Denver to catch a flight to Edmonton.  They arrived mid-afternoon, with the plan to just go to a hotel until the baby was born so that my brother and Sara could have some space. (Sara likes to have her babies at home, in a tub of water in her dining room.  She’s kind of a rock star that way.)  Anyway, DB (my brother) told my parents they should come on over so that they could watch their two-year-old, and so they did.  Which meant that my parents were in the house for most of Sara’s labor and that they heard their fourth grandchild take his first yelping breath.  Which means that I’m going to have to buy them a house in the Seychelles if I have any hope of trumping what DB and Sara just gave them.

There are few things better than spending a day going about your own lovely and boringish life knowing that someone you love is, at that very moment, working on getting a baby you also love out into this world.  There I was, dropping off the girls, going for a run, taking a shower, drinking a bit of coffee, writing a few words, and all the while Sara was contracting and huffing and trying to get comfortable and trying not to have the baby before the midwife arrived.  Throughout the day I would think of her and send her every bit of good energy I could muster and then I would get wrapped up in something and forget for a while, only to have the thought pop back in my head: “Sara!  Is! In! Labor!”  and I would feel the thrill again.  I would feel her close by, even though she is so many miles away.

There is nothing like having a baby.  It is our one chance to leave this world for a little while, to abandon all habit and routine, to forget everything we know about ourselves and what we are capable of, to forget everything we think about our bodies and what they can endure.  Like Sara, I did not have an epidural when I delivered Grace and June.  It’s a loaded topic, this drugs for labor and no drugs for labor, and I have no desire to add stones to either side of the scale, but I am grateful that things turned out the way they did for me.  I was way way out on some wild and gory and glorious edge with them (especially with June) and I won’t be there again.

But enough about me.  It’s not about me right now.  It’s about Sara, and a job well done.  And, most of all, it is about baby Max.  Welcome, little one.  We’re so glad you’re here.

The Election Day Diaries

8:00 a.m:  Before Chris and Grace leave for the polls we take a picture of the girls in front of our Obama yard sign.  Grace is her usual photogenic self; June seems unsure of why she is sitting on the lawn in her snowsuit at this early hour.    Later Chris calls from work to tell me that Grace marked the ballot for Obama herself.

10:00 a.m.:  My mom calls.  She is chopping 4 dozen leeks because she is making soup for all the Democrats in the neighborhood.  My parents have hosted an Election Night party for the last five elections, although I think the last two were more like group therapy sessions.  I haven’t spoken to her in more than three weeks– she and my dad have just returned from riding their tandem bike from Vienna to Budapest.  “I’m going to miss drinking hot chocolate three times a day,”  she says.  (Hot chocolate is a recurring theme in my parents’ annual overseas bike trips.  They seem to only travel to countries which are famous for its availability and quality.)  “I’m also going to miss the way Austrian’s greet each other,” she continues.  “They say ‘ Gott Gute.’  It means ‘Praise God.’”

2:45 p.m.:  I pick Grace up from school.  She is tired.  I tell her we’re going to vote, and that she can make the X next to Obama’s name again, just like she did this morning.  She leans back in her booster, looks out the window and asks if she can wait in the car.

5:00 p.m.:  I am making dinner when the phone rings.  I don’t recognize the name on the caller ID, but I answer anyway.  “Is this voter information?”  a man asks.

“No,” I say.

“But you called me yesterday, and told me where to vote.”

I realize that this is someone from my Pennsylvania Get Out the Vote phone list.

“I voted,” he tells me, “but my friend doesn’t know where to vote or when the polls close.  Can you tell me?”

He gives me his friend’s address and I go online to find his polling location and its hours.  Suddenly I understand what Obama is saying when he says that this election isn’t about him, it’s about us.

8:00 p.m.:  The girls are asleep and Chris and I are watching the returns and eating everything in the kitchen that isn’t nailed down.  When I see the Phoenix Boys Choir performing at McCain headquarters and then the crowd of 70,000 and growing at Grant Park I realize that we are going to win.

11:00 p.m.:  Obama takes Virginia and I hear a child crying in the back of the house.  I walk down the hall, unsnapping my bra as I go.  As I get to the door of the girls’ room, I realize it is Grace, not June, who is crying.   She’s had a bad dream, and while I am smoothing her hair from her face I can hear Chris yelling and clapping in the other room.  “Why is Mati clapping?’  Grace asks.  She is barely awake.

I pull her covers back over her little chest.  “Because Obama is winning,” I whisper. “When you wake up, he will be our President.”

I get back out to the living room and it is over.  They have called the race for Obama.  I can’t believe I missed it.

The phone rings and it is my mom.  She has more than fifty people in her house, Obama has just won, and she has stepped away to call her children.  Perhaps this tending to offspring in the midst of historic moments is in my blood.  We speak for less than thirty seconds.  Gott Gute, she says before we hang up.  Praise God.

While we wait for Obama I periodically hit refresh on the map showing early returns on California’s Proposition 8. Things do not look good; it seems that soon California’s constitution will be amended to insure that same-sex couples are second-class citizens.

Midnight:  Obama is on stage now.  I see him and I think of how truly lucky we are that no state was ever given the chance to vote on the civil rights of African Americans.  Because if they had, I just don’t think we would be where we are today.  And where we are today is amazing.  But I don’t have to tell you that, do I?  You’re here, too.   We are, finally, here together.

Finding My Dad

The woods I live in now are nothing like the woods I grew up in. I have traded soft pines and rock for old-growth hardwoods and moss. In winter the snow is sometimes heavy and wet, sometimes icy, and hardly ever the powdery ski-perfect snow of my childhood.

Still, when I ski in these woods I am a girl again, and my father is everywhere.

I didn’t always want to go skiing with my dad. Skiing was cold, and it was hard. So hard. But what if I hadn’t gone? What if he hadn’t insisted we keep on even as the snow fell, tying his handkerchief, still warm from his pocket, into a mask across my cold face? What if he had said, Alright then, you can just stay home? What if he hadn’t woken me when it was still dark and helped me into my long underwear and into the car and feed me donuts on the way up the mountain?

Then where would I go to find him now?

Of course, of course, there are many other places, many other ways that I keep him with me. But nothing is so perpetually fresh, nothing is so clearly him, as the woods in winter. The smell of ski wax and wet wool. The taste of cold water from his canteen and granola bars from his blue LL Bean backpack. The way he planted our skis in the snow with the bottoms facing the sun to keep them from icing over while we ate lunch. All of it, every last sight and smell, is mine every time I put on my skis.

I understand now that parents don’t teach their children how to ski, or sail, or fish, or ride ocean waves just because they love to do those things and they want their children to love them, too. They do those things with their children so that their children can find them when they are gone. And by gone I don’t mean when they are dead, I mean when the children are no longer children and the parents are no longer everything.

Our girls will find Chris at the ocean. I’m not sure where the girls will find me, other than between the covers of a Boden catalog. My guess is that, like my own mother, (and for better or worse) I will be with them just about everywhere.

I find my father in the snowy woods. He is always there with me, more than memory, not quite vision. Conjured by my muscles and my mind, he is still the best skiing partner I have ever known.