What a year

What a great year we’ve had. Only I didn’t fully realize it until it was almost over.

A few days ago, I woke up thinking that before January arrived, I’d need to take time to list all the significant events of 2011. This thought process always begins when I sit down in mid-December to write our yearly end-of-year Christmas card poem. I limit it to twelve stanzas, and the first and last are usually dedicated to the very general themes of introduction and conclusion, so that leaves me with ten stanzas for specific events. Needless to say, that’s never quite enough.

So maybe that’s why I woke with a list already scrolling through my mind like the crawler at the bottom of a TV screen. Once I started consciously focusing on it, I realized how many good things happened this year.

We met the wonderful people who ended up moving into our old house. Leaving our home on the farm was easier knowing how happy they were to be there. And they’re making fine use of their new setting, too: within six months of moving in, they’d acquired two cows.

We had amazing luck in finding a rental house elsewhere in town. We were lucky to find a rental house at all, not to mention such a comfortable and spacious one. But the fact that it’s on the edge of a state park with instant access to miles of hiking trails makes the deal seem almost miraculous.

We survived the move. Moving is never easy, and just thinking about those last few days of packing gives me a headache. But we did it. And fortunately, our buyers proved themselves to be the kind of people willing to call us any time they found something we’d accidentally left behind, and the less said about that the better, but let’s just say we’re lucky they’re so honest and ethical.

We had some wonderful getaways: weekends in Maine with friends, an overnight for the four of us in Boston, our summer trip to New York and Pennsylvania. And thanks to my thoughtful parents, I was even able to attend the summer writers’ conference in Colorado, where Mom and I had a joyful week together. One of my favorite snapshots of the year is the one of my mother, her two sisters and me dressed up for a dinner out together during the Colorado week.

We stayed healthy and safe. No accidents, no serious illnesses: not for ourselves nor anyone else in our close family. Those infrastructural problems that inevitably occur in the course of a year – extensive treefall, for example, following October’s snowstorm – could be easily fixed.

I received lots of great writing assignments. I wrote about a producer for This American Life, an ice cream entrepreneur, a child with muscular dystrophy who participated in his first half-marathon, an extended family who has maintained a family newsletter for the past twenty years. And, needless to say, I wrote plenty about the follies and foibles of my own spouse and children, as I always do. Rick stayed gainfully employed as well.

We had a couple of visits from Sarah’s family and a couple of visits from Lauren’s family. We hosted Thanksgiving dinner, a holiday cookie exchange, and a get-together for a far-flung group of my old high school friends. I spent an entire fall afternoon walking on a Maine beach with my college roommate, and I had brunch with a friend from Los Angeles whom I hadn't seen in 19 years. A dear friend from high school who now lives in the Bay area kept me company one morning while I cooked for the upcoming weekend.

And that’s only the beginning. I avoided missing any days of running, keeping the streak intact into its fourth year. Holly and Tim are doing well in school and enjoy strong social relationships. Even the dog has had a happy, healthy year.

It’s far too much for a Christmas card. I’ll have to write my own list of the highlights of 2011, not to try to rhyme it or be funny or clever or interesting but just so that I never forget what a great year it was. I didn’t do anything to deserve this. Commemorating it is the best I can do to pay it tribute. And so I will.

An extraordinarily ordinary life

I am almost done with the memoir project I began last March. And even though the client I’m ghost-writing it for will be thrilled if we meet our goal of having it ready for her to present to her family at Thanksgiving, I’ll be a little sorry to see it end.

The project began when the mother of one of my high school friends said she wanted to talk to me about an idea she had in which she would preserve memories of her 75 years of life: her childhood, her teen years, but most importantly her relationship with her husband, to whom she was married for 50 years before he died in 2008. The impetus for putting all of this in writing came during her recent move from her own home to that of one of her grown sons. Faced with box after box of letters that she and her husband exchanged during his time in the military, she thought about what a keepsake it would be for her family and friends if she could just somehow make a book out of all of it.

To say I was reticent to get involved is putting it mildly. I agreed to meet with her only to recommend how she might approach the search for a good ghost-writer who could take this on, but I made it clear that the appropriate person was not me. During our meeting, I framed my sentences carefully. “The writer you end up working with…” I said, and “Once you find the right person to do the writing….” But I told her outright that I couldn’t take it on.

“Let me tell you a little bit more about what I’m thinking,” she said. “I just want to make it a simple story about what it was like growing up in Arlington in the 1930s and ‘40s. About walking to church, and playing violin in junior high, and having my first job at the Arlington sanitarium.”

My fingers started to twitch. The fingers that take notes on my keyboard when I’m interviewing someone for a story.

“And meeting my husband in a chance encounter on the beach a few days before my 18th birthday. Our first year in college. What Harvard was like in the early 50’s.”

I turned on my laptop.

“The excitement of getting engaged the night of my senior prom. My husband’s summer job collecting seaweed in a wooden dinghy in Plymouth Harbor. And then how it felt seeing him go off to Marine Corps officers’ training camp.”

With a sigh, I opened a new Word file. It was becoming increasingly obvious to me who was going to ghost-write this memoir.

Over the course of three months, I did about ten hours of interviews with my friend’s mother, and in between our weekly meetings, I’d review my transcripts and do a little editing. Finally, I started going through the letters she’d selected, letters she and her husband exchanged during three different summers that he attended Marine Corps officers’ training camp in Quantico, Virginia.

From our first discussion to my last edits of our current draft, which is nearly ready to be sent off to the self-publishing press we’ve chosen, I remained transfixed by this story. When I tried to tell a friend about it, she asked, “Did this woman have a really fascinating life?’

“No!” I exclaimed. “She had an ordinary life! But somehow that’s just what’s so fascinating about it: I’m getting such an in-depth look.”

What radio shows she listened to during lunch as a girl. How she and her mother traveled to Downtown Crossing by bus and subway to shop at Jordan Marsh. What she remembers about her first year of teaching. The engagement gifts she received. It’s all so everyday. But told by the person who lived it, it’s also all so interesting.

I suppose it’s not surprising that I find the story of an unsensational life compelling. As a freelance journalist, I’ve essentially made my career out of writing features about regular people doing interesting things. I’ve never covered celebrities or political figures or crime stories; I always seem to write about some aspect of daily life.

Soon the memoir will be printed, and my friend’s mother will give copies to her children and grandchildren. I wonder if they’ll like it as much as I do. I wonder if they’ll even read it as closely as I have.

To me, it’s a wonderful tale of a life well lived and even better remembered. To them, it may seem uninteresting: there was nothing spectacular or amazing about this particular woman’s 75 years. But I hope they see in it just what I did: an unforgettable story about the daily wonders embedded within an ordinary life.

Scents and sensibility

This article in yesterday’s Boston Globe opened with what seemed like an obvious point: “Scents are very much linked to memory,” says perfumer Christophe Laudamiel. “They are linked to remembering the past but also learning from experiences.”

Of course they are, I thought. The article went on to explain new efforts under way to include scents in historical depictions: for example, “Jorvik Viking Center in York, England, is famous for taking visitors right into the smells of Viking life as part of its re-created Viking village. Dale Air, an environmental scenting company, imbued the center’s exhibits with smells that would have been present at the time - right down to the odor of a fish market and a latrine.”

And then in this morning’s Globe was a book review of a memoir by a woman whose intended career path in the culinary arts became derailed when she lost her sense of smell in an accident, emphasizing again the importance of smell in our perceptions of the world.

While I might not rush to a historical site specifically for the sake of inhaling the odor of a fish market and a latrine, I always find discussions about scents interesting, because they matter so much to me, and I know it’s not unusual to feel this way. In just a few minutes’ time yesterday, I made this list of ten scents, odors and aromas that always carry the same very specific connection for me:

Gasoline: Boating and waterskiing on the Maine lakes of my childhood summers

Grease in a frying pan: The apartment building in which my husband lived during our college years

Moth balls: My paternal grandparents’ lakeside vacation house in Maine

Coconut oil: The trip to Aruba that Rick and I took in the mid-1990s

A certain kind of furniture polish: my maternal grandparents’ guest house in Colorado, but also my aunt and uncle’s house in New England, since they had the same kind of antique furniture and probably used the same polish

Lemon Pledge spray: Tuesday afternoons of my childhood, which was the day our housecleaner came to our house each week

Industrial strength cleaner: a particular hallway (the one on the lower level of the Performing Arts Center) at my high school

Wet indoor/outdoor carpeting: the tennis club my parents belonged to when I was growing up, where a favorite privilege was getting to drink a can of Coke while watching them play tennis

Creosote: a bed and breakfast in Edinburgh where I once spent several days (though I can’t remember why it smelled of creosote)

Pepperoni pizza: the basement of my freshman dorm in college (the exercise room, where I worked out every evening, was adjacent to the campus pub)

And there’s a crisp, chilly, earth-like scent that every year fills the air in Carlisle on October nights: this to me is the quintessential smell of home.

Aromatic memories make for good writing prompts. Any of the above would be a good place to begin an essay. And I’ll keep adding to my list.

A discussion on disco casts new light

When I was in fourth grade, my teacher decided to teach us some disco.

By today’s standards, at least at my kids’ school (which is, of course, the same school where we did the disco-dancing), that’s a fairly preposterous use of classroom time. My kids’ teachers have organized schedules: they allot their classroom hours carefully, and the results show with well-prepared kids who get good standardized test scores and are effective learners.

Things were different in the mid-1970s. It was a progressive time in general, and in our school particularly so. Even though it was a public school system, we were part of an experimental structure called an open classroom. The classroom space was configured non-traditionally, but so was the way we spent our time in school. So it wasn’t particularly unusual when our teacher decided that he was going to teach us some of the line dances he’d been learning in his disco class.

At the time, I don’t remember finding this strange at all. We students were perhaps mildly amused by the idea that our teacher was taking a dance class, but in general we didn’t give much thought either way to how he spent his time outside of school. In that respect, little has changed about nine-year-olds: questions about whether our teacher was busy or bored, happy or lonely, satisfied in his personal life or depressed really weren't on our radar.

But sometimes it’s possible to look back more than thirty years and see a situation differently. Earlier this week I heard an On Point podcast on which an American studies professor at USC named Alice Echols was interviewed about Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture, her recently published book on the disco trend and its impact on American society.

According to this author, one effect that the widespread popularity of disco had on American culture was that it made gay men more comfortable dancing. Previously, it was seen as inappropriate in many circles for men to cut loose in general and with other men in particular. But disco was different: it gave everyone a reason to mingle on the dance floor together. And as I understood it from the interview – having not actually read the book – this gave some men the chance to be out in the public eye enjoying themselves while also hiding their affinity for dancing with men behind the fact that in disco, doing so doesn’t look strange.

But as the researcher talked, I realized that maybe in some sense we fourth graders did sense a newfound delight in our teacher when he brought dance moves into the classroom to the tinny strains of a Sony cassette player. He had told us a lot of stories from his childhood (this is yet another example of how loosely formed the curriculum was back then; my children’s teachers would never devote hours of classroom time to stories about their past): he grew up very poor as the only child of a single mother in rural Kansas. He told us he had very few friends, and we assumed it was because he lived out in the countryside, but looking back as an adult, I can imagine how emotionally isolated he probably felt in that particular part of the country at that particular time. Moving from the Midwest to the East Coast in his adulthood may have represented an improvement in terms of open-mindedness and tolerance, but he still must have felt somewhat lonely, a single male schoolteacher commuting to a suburb where the school was populated almost entirely by children growing up in affluent two-parent households.

Most of this is speculation, of course, as far as how he felt and what disco meant to him. He didn’t stay at our school much longer, but many years later, one of his former colleagues told me that he ended up back in Kansas living with a life partner and that his life had turned out settled and happy.

But really the point is less what disco did for him as what hearing this interview did for me. It put a situation from a long time ago into a new perspective and made it interesting all over again, more interesting than it had been when I actually learned to do the Hustle and the Bump. I like the idea that disco might have made his life a little more enjoyable than it otherwise was. And I like the way it’s possible to learn something so many years after the fact that can change one’s understanding of the past, even in a very small way.

Tim is 11 years old today!

Today is Tim’s 11th birthday. He will have to forgive me someday when he realizes that I abandoned the yearly habit of writing him a long letter on his birthday sometime around year 5 or 6. (And I abandoned the monthly habit of writing him a medium-sized letter somewhere around six months!) Best intentions, and all that.

Well, I wrote a book about him, along with dozens of essays that have been published in various newspapers – he’ll just have to be content with that. (Or, as some of my readers who are also parents have pointed out to me, I should consider myself lucky if “content” is how he’d describe his feelings about some of my essays. Come on, doesn’t every mom at some point write an essay about her son’s fascination with his athletic protective gear?)

I love celebrating Tim’s birthday. I love the memories it brings back and the sense of accomplishment it engenders. Eleven years of Tim – tell me that’s not an accomplishment. A blessing, to be sure, but an accomplishment as well. I love him, but I certainly do not always understand him. Last June, while I was at the Aspen Summer Words writers’ conference, I had such an interesting discussion with author/writing instructor Bill Loizeaux. We discovered we’d both had the inexplicable experience of meeting our daughters at the moment of their birth and knowing certain things about their personalities at that instant that turned out, years later, to be absolutely accurate. I actually wrote in my journal, still in the hospital, when Holly was one day old, about the kind of person I already knew her to be: generous, kind and good-natured as long as you don’t step on her toes, in which case she’ll be uncompromising about defining her space and making sure you stay out of it.

I laughed as I wrote, knowing I couldn’t possibly have any idea what her personality would be: I was either purely imagining or else projecting, describing the daughter I subconsciously wanted to have. And yet seven years later I know that the description really was Holly. Something about her newborn squawks and sighs, her scrunchy pink face, her curious dark blue eyes – I knew. I knew her character in those minutes after birth. And Bill had the same experience with his daughters.

After he and I discussed it, I thought about the conversation again and realized something I’d left out: But it wasn’t like that with Tim. I don’t remember inferring his personality on the day he was born, or the days when he was an infant. I remember – and I’ve written about – gazing into his eyes, and him gazing back into mine, as we both wondered what it would be like getting to know each other and spending our lives together. But I didn’t know his soul the way I did with Holly. And, I realized as I thought about it that day in Aspen, the amazing thing is I still don’t. Tim is still a mystery to me. I know his preferences – fantasy fiction, baseball, crisp lettuce doused in vinegar, sleeping late on weekends – but I don’t absolutely know what makes him tick. I don’t know how he thinks or who he will someday be. I didn’t eleven years ago, and I don’t now.

But it’s always such a pleasure on his birthday to think about all the celebrations we’ve had for him since his birth and all the ways in which he’s changed. His one-year-old party, on a sunny day in our pretty little yard in Framingham, when we invited all our friends – because he didn’t have his own friends yet – and celebrated the fact that we’d made it through the first year. His four-year-old birthday, when he and his preschool classmates were hoisted into a Peter Pan sling at One Stop Fun to sail through the air. His seven-year-old birthday, ten friends at the Spinners game, the sky clearing after a day of gusts and rain which we did not fully realize then were the outermost edges of Hurricane Katrina. (We held his party two weeks early that year because the Spinners, a minor league team, end their season on Labor Day.) His nine-year-old party, just his friend Austin with us in Maine, when Rick prepared a lobster- and clambake.

This year he wants to do laser tag; for various reasons we’re postponing it until next month, but he doesn’t mind. Tonight my parents took us out to dinner at Tim’s favorite restaurant. He ate all the crab Rangoon he could hold; I ate masaman curry and thought about how much tastier it was than the turkey sandwich a nurse offered me on Tim’s original birth day (since I’m a vegetarian, it turned into a lettuce sandwich for me. Not terribly satisfying after giving birth.). Then we all went back to the house for his favorite dessert, chocolate mousse pie, which I had made earlier in the day. He’s a happy 11-year-old; I’m a happy mom. I may not understand him really well, but I certainly do love having him as a son.