June 2010 Archives
Hello, hello!
Note to readers: This is a mostly personal post, so if you just tune in for the literary things, skip this one. The next several will be bookish.
That said, the Handsome Husband and I are just back from Oberlin, Ohio, a tiny town with excellent little restaurants, a fine new coffeeshop--the Slow Train Café--and the marvelous vintage Apollo theater, all refurbished to its former glory with help from Oberlin alumni. The college's architecture is eclectic and beautiful, and the town has a rich history of activist engagement with progressive and liberatory politics, from the Underground Railroad to women's rights. Lorain, Toni Morrison's hometown, is just to the north. If you're ever in Cleveland for the day, I recommend a quick side-trip to both towns.
All of which is just context for the fact of my heart, which is that we got to spend 5 days with Grey as he went through graduation. Every mother waxes rhapsodic about her children, so I'll just hold my tongue and not rattle on about what a sweet, kind, well-liked, talented young man he is. I'll just say it was wonderful to catch up with him, meet his friends, and observe him in the campus environment that has become his natural habitat these last four years. It was a joy. Leaving him behind was (understatement of the year) a wrench.
However, I'm so glad to report that he has found employment--even if it's just washing dishes in an Oberlin dining hall for the summer. A paycheck is a paycheck, and manual labor is important. Despite the scary unemployment statistics for people in Grey's age bracket, we really didn't want to encourage the failure-to-launch syndrome by making our sofa too inviting, so we're glad it has worked out. At summer's end, he plans to move to a very cool West-Coast city to live with friends and look for work more suited to his interests.
But, fair and tender readers, I had barely unpacked, when it was time to pack again. Due entirely to the generosity of my birthmother, Sharon (whom you might know a little about from The Truth Book), I'm heading out for a voyage across Europe. My brother--not Tony, the one I grew up with and who figures so largely in that abovementioned narrative, but Sharon's son--is about to marry the Italian woman he fell in love with on a study-abroad program twelve years ago. Since then, they've been carrying on a transatlantic romance, and now it's time to make it all official. They'll wed in a church in the tiny Umbrian hill town of San Gemini (which is too small to even show up on any of the maps I've consulted; it's near Terni, if you know the area). It's a fortress town and very old.
Sharon decided to make an odyssey of it, so I'll be flying with her, her husband, and my sister Lisa from Chicago to Amsterdam this Wednesday, then going to Paris, then Genoa, then the Cinque Terre, then Venice, and finally to San Gemini for the nuptial festivities. Heavens! I'm not a person who's traveled very much as an adult--and, if I can confide something a little embarrassing, I've been jonesing for Venice since, as a child in Miami, I was taken to the Venetian Pool in Coral Gables, which I found a utopian bliss-scape. It's like longing for Paris because you once saw an imitation of the Eiffel Tower in Vegas; not exactly Jamesian, but there you have it.
So anyway, this is extremely exciting for me. It's an astonishing opportunity, and I'm thrilled.
The places will be, of course, amazing, but the trip itself--the traveling, the being in train cars and hotel rooms--should be very interesting as well, particularly because I'll be rooming with my sister--my half-sister, technically--for over two weeks, and I don't know her well. We didn't grow up together, and from what I do know, we're very different. Very different. In almost every way. (Just to sketch a sense: she's 33, single, and a bartender, whereas I'm 42, long married, and an English professor--the very recipe for staid. I'll say no more.) Yet half of our DNA is the same, and I've always liked her when we've spent brief periods of time together. Two weeks of being roomies, gallivanting across the continent, should be fascinating.
Reports to come (she murmured mysteriously, tossing her red silk dress into her case).
Note to readers: This is a mostly personal post, so if you just tune in for the literary things, skip this one. The next several will be bookish.
That said, the Handsome Husband and I are just back from Oberlin, Ohio, a tiny town with excellent little restaurants, a fine new coffeeshop--the Slow Train Café--and the marvelous vintage Apollo theater, all refurbished to its former glory with help from Oberlin alumni. The college's architecture is eclectic and beautiful, and the town has a rich history of activist engagement with progressive and liberatory politics, from the Underground Railroad to women's rights. Lorain, Toni Morrison's hometown, is just to the north. If you're ever in Cleveland for the day, I recommend a quick side-trip to both towns.
All of which is just context for the fact of my heart, which is that we got to spend 5 days with Grey as he went through graduation. Every mother waxes rhapsodic about her children, so I'll just hold my tongue and not rattle on about what a sweet, kind, well-liked, talented young man he is. I'll just say it was wonderful to catch up with him, meet his friends, and observe him in the campus environment that has become his natural habitat these last four years. It was a joy. Leaving him behind was (understatement of the year) a wrench.
However, I'm so glad to report that he has found employment--even if it's just washing dishes in an Oberlin dining hall for the summer. A paycheck is a paycheck, and manual labor is important. Despite the scary unemployment statistics for people in Grey's age bracket, we really didn't want to encourage the failure-to-launch syndrome by making our sofa too inviting, so we're glad it has worked out. At summer's end, he plans to move to a very cool West-Coast city to live with friends and look for work more suited to his interests.
But, fair and tender readers, I had barely unpacked, when it was time to pack again. Due entirely to the generosity of my birthmother, Sharon (whom you might know a little about from The Truth Book), I'm heading out for a voyage across Europe. My brother--not Tony, the one I grew up with and who figures so largely in that abovementioned narrative, but Sharon's son--is about to marry the Italian woman he fell in love with on a study-abroad program twelve years ago. Since then, they've been carrying on a transatlantic romance, and now it's time to make it all official. They'll wed in a church in the tiny Umbrian hill town of San Gemini (which is too small to even show up on any of the maps I've consulted; it's near Terni, if you know the area). It's a fortress town and very old.
Sharon decided to make an odyssey of it, so I'll be flying with her, her husband, and my sister Lisa from Chicago to Amsterdam this Wednesday, then going to Paris, then Genoa, then the Cinque Terre, then Venice, and finally to San Gemini for the nuptial festivities. Heavens! I'm not a person who's traveled very much as an adult--and, if I can confide something a little embarrassing, I've been jonesing for Venice since, as a child in Miami, I was taken to the Venetian Pool in Coral Gables, which I found a utopian bliss-scape. It's like longing for Paris because you once saw an imitation of the Eiffel Tower in Vegas; not exactly Jamesian, but there you have it.
So anyway, this is extremely exciting for me. It's an astonishing opportunity, and I'm thrilled.
The places will be, of course, amazing, but the trip itself--the traveling, the being in train cars and hotel rooms--should be very interesting as well, particularly because I'll be rooming with my sister--my half-sister, technically--for over two weeks, and I don't know her well. We didn't grow up together, and from what I do know, we're very different. Very different. In almost every way. (Just to sketch a sense: she's 33, single, and a bartender, whereas I'm 42, long married, and an English professor--the very recipe for staid. I'll say no more.) Yet half of our DNA is the same, and I've always liked her when we've spent brief periods of time together. Two weeks of being roomies, gallivanting across the continent, should be fascinating.
Reports to come (she murmured mysteriously, tossing her red silk dress into her case).
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