Seeking Compromise — in the Capitol, and in the Home too
It’s uncanny sometimes how events happening in the big wide world can be mirror images, at once identical and turned around, of events happening by the hearth. This week, I’m trying to figure out whether we have anything to learn from the government shutdown or the government shutdown has anything to learn from us. Washington D.C. is still in a “stalemate” – not really news at all, I guess. Over in Egypt, they’re in one too, and that one is … Read More
So Many Kinds of Breaking
A number of autumns ago, I had a college professor who would lean back in his chair and imagine how delightful it would be to teach a course called, “Great Books I’ve Never Read.” Right here and now, I have the nerve to write about, or at least use as a jumping off point, one television show I’ve never seen — ”Breaking Bad.” Now if my husband and I could figure out the order of the channels and know what’s … Read More
House of Bishops in the Heart of Country Music
I’m just back from Nashville — Country Music Capital of the World and also site of the Episcopal Church House of Bishops fall conference. Now there’s an interesting adjacency for you, or at least it just was for me, as I tried to juggle my role as spouse to a bishop at the Airport Marriott, some distance away from the heart of town, with the strong pull I felt towards most everything related to the twang of guitars – both … Read More
And We Think Our Kids Go Far…
It absolutely positively could NOT have been a coincidence that on the very day before I brought my son to the airport to travel to the other side of the world The New York Times ran a story about Voyager 1 exiting the solar system. What, I wondered, would that spacecraft’s mother be feeling? Imagining, first of all, that a not-exactly-darling contraption like this could in fact have a mother, I envisioned her in Houston (where else?) coping with the … Read More
Following Tennis, Religiously
You know those displays, often at museums and fairs, that let you put your head through a hole in a tableau and then suddenly, to people looking at you anyway – the rest of you becomes someone else entirely? The appeal lies in the juxtaposition: we laugh at the world of difference between you and the costume that surrounds you. You’ll never in a million years become Derek Jeter or a maiden in 18th century Sturbridge Village. Prompted by a … Read More
What’ll It Be — an Island or a Part of the Main?
Question: What’s the difference between an island and a continent? Answer: Huge, or nothing at all. Check tectonic plates. Spend a few days driving around the coast of Maine, going over all those bridges and seeing water constantly, and you’re apt to wonder if you’re on an island or actually a peninsula, still attached to the mainland. Then you might also start to wonder whether you need to pay attention to this distinction anyway. I mean, do … Read More
Who Ever Gets 100% of Anything, Indeed?
In a certain way, I almost envy the guy. “For the past 14 years, it’s always been a mix. I mean do you ever get 100% of anything, good or bad?” — Alex Rodriguez This might have been my younger son talking, looking back over his life so far, but he doesn’t much like to do this kind of reflecting, leaving it to his mother and her odd blogging habit. He’d advise something like this: “Run more; ponder less.” But … Read More
Should I Stay or Should I Go Now?
Some panoramas you miss, for good reason. This picture, taken by my husband, shows two of our kids (plus the omnipresent Rocky) on Franconia Ridge after a good climb. It was a spectacular day, and I was sorry not to be able to join them for it. I was alone in the car most of that day, driving back from Long Island where I had been engaged in a very different kind of activity with two brothers and a sister-in-law: … Read More
Summer Waterfalling
How far would you walk for a waterfall? What do you take away from the cool rush of a few moments there? Last week, my husband and I were led by a friend to see a place called Rainbow Falls, at the head of the Ausable Chasm in the Adirondacks. Since we had just spent a lovely few hours hiking and then paddling around in boats on the lake, we only needed to take a short jog up to see … Read More
The Bed Blog
Yesterday, the first day of my husband’s vacation, we went bed shopping together. It was time. Not only had we been sleeping mostly apart over the course of the past year (enough said about that), when we came back together we discovered that the bed we had was torturously uncomfortable. It had been good enough when we had the old mattress and a futon combined, but Rob was convinced that the mattress – dating back to the beginning of the … Read More