Eulogy

My earliest memories are of Dad reading to me. He was a great reader to children—expressive and dramatic. And he was patient. When Mike and I were stuck in the ruts of toddlerhood obsession with one book (for Mike it was Katy and the Big Snow, for me, 'Twas the Night Before Christmas, year round), Dad read us those same books, over and over, playfully changing words to challenge our memories but providing the comfort for us of the same story, the beloved story, again and again. The gift of reading is one that both Mike and I passed along to our own children. It is a little piece of Dad's rich legacy.

As I struggled with his illness and anticipated his death, I sought comfort in words. Although Dad was not a poet or, for that matter, much of a fan of poetry, that is where I turned, to the art of words, to remember him, to honor him, to wrap my mind around my loss of him.

I started my search for a poem representative of my remarkable father where I was emotionally—focused on his end, his death. I considered the heavy rhymes of John Donne. His Holy Sonnets—“Death, be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful”—came to mind. But that was not right for Dad. Dad was too casual, too spontaneous, lived too much in the moment, for Donne's formal structures to speak for him.

I read Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose words were lighter, more celebratory. But Emerson felt a bit too proud, almost a shade pompous. And that, certainly, was not Dad, whose humility and life of service to others we remember today.

The Bronte sisters were too romantic. Dad was a man of fewer words, simpler words. He was straightforward, honest, and many times told me the truth when I didn't necessarily want to hear it.

My search for the right poem for this occasion ended with Carl Sandburg. He is a Midwestern poet who uses direct and descriptive language to create poems that celebrate humanity. They don't rhyme. They flow.

The Sandburg poem I chose for today is not about death. Instead, it is about the journey of life. And, as we all know, Dad's life was quite a journey. Whether he was travelling to Omaha or Baltimore to visit the grandkids, or to Tanzania to help build a hospital, or to Jamaica to work with orphaned boys, or to a youth group mission trip in Vermont, or from Orlando to Boston to deliver a bone marrow donation, Dad's life was full of roads travelled literally. But beyond that physical travel was the meaningful stuff of his life—making relationships, helping, serving in communities far and wide. We all know that about Dad. That is why we are here today.

This poem is a lovely representation of that duality—the literal journey from point A to point B and the more subtle one of relationship and meaning. This poem is called The Road and the End.

I shall foot it
Down the roadway in the dusk,
Where shapes of hunger wander
And the fugitives of pain go by.

I shall foot it
In the silence of the morning,
See the night slur into dawn,
Hear the slow great winds arise
Where tall trees flank the way
And shoulder toward the sky.

The broken boulders by the road
Shall not commemorate my ruin.
Regret shall be the gravel under foot.
I shall watch for
Slim birds swift of wing
That go where wind and ranks of thunder
Drive the wild processionals of rain.

The dust of the travelled road
Shall touch my hands and face.

Dad's journey surely was not without pain or regret. Disappointment and loss are essential elements of the human journey, and like any man, Dad experienced them. But in his travels, in his relationships with each of us, he had a full journey. And he finished his journey as he would have wanted it, with the dust of that travelled road, the dust of Christ-like service, the dust of commitment to marriage, fatherhood, and friendship, thick upon his hands and his face.

Counting on Baby

Ethan is thrilled to be getting a baby brother. At dinner a few weeks ago, when we were sharing our anticipations about baby's arrival, Ethan shared this plan.


"Mom, I'm going to teach the baby everything I know about math so that when he goes to Kindergarten, he will already know everything I know," he said.


My heart swelled. Ethan loves math and is intuitively good at it. How sweet that he wants to pass on to his baby brother his passion. Of course, I also felt compelled to point out to Ethan that he will start high school on the same day the baby will start Kindergarten. (Dwell on that for a moment, mommy.)


But he was nonplussed. "Okay. I can do that." Such confidence. I asked him where he'd start.


"With multiplication facts."


Hmm. I asked him, "Buddy, do you think there is something the baby will need to learn before he tackles multiplication?"


"Like what?" he asked with wonder.


I suggested that maybe addition and subtraction may precede multiplication.


"But mom, you don't learn addition and subtraction, you just know it!"

I took a deep breath and shared the truth of infancy with him. I slowly explained that the baby will need to learn what numbers mean before he adds or subtracts or multiplies or divides. We will have to teach him what numbers mean, I told Ethan, by showing him groups of objects. We will have to teach him to count. We will have to teach him to recognize the Arabic numerals.

And for once in his life, Ethan was speechless. His expression told all. Mom, his face screamed, what kind of a moron are you giving birth to?

La Troisieme Fois

Tout le monde connait la tour Eiffel. Elle est une icône de la ville de Paris et un monument de modernité.

La tour Eiffel a été construite de 1887 à 1889 pour l’exposition universelle pour célébrer la centenaire de la revolution française. Gustave Eiffel, l’entrepreneur de la tour, a imaginé une structure qui refléter l’âge culturel, scientifique, et artistique. C’était l’âge de Freud, Rodin, Jules Verne, un âge d’invention et d’avances techniques..

La tour fait 324 m haute et a 1665 marches. Chaque année, plus de 6 millions de visiteurs visitant la tour.

Moi, j’ai visité la tour Eiffel trois fois. En 1985, je l’ai visité avec ma famille. Mon frére et moi, nous avons désiré monter á la troisieme plate-forme. Mais ma mere, elle, elle ètait très effreyée. Donc mon frère et moi, nous ne sommes pas montés.

En 1989 j’y suis retournée. J’étais resolúe à monter la tour. Mais ce jour la, il fait chaud et la tour, il y àvait beaucoup de gens. Ils me pressent et moi, je me suis évanouie. Deux ratés!

L’été passé, avec ma propre famille, j’ai visité la tour Eiffel la troisieme fois. Mes enfants, eux, ils ont demandé de monter la tour Eiffel. J’ai dit, “Vous allez monter avec leur père, parce que maman est effrayée. Puisque j`ai suis plus âgée qu’eux, je suis effrayée des élévations!” Eleanor et Ethan, ils ont dit, “Mom, tu nous dois y aller!”

Donc, mon marie a fait une réservation sur le Jules Verne, le resto très élégant au deuxieme étage pour déjeuner. Il m’a donné beaucoup de vins. Et après une bouteille et un repas extraordinaire, avec mes enfants très jolis, j’ai saisi l’occasion et j’ai pris l’ascenseur au pinnacle.

Oh, Baby!

I do not believe in fate. I do not believe in astrological signs, star charts, destiny, or luck. I do believe in god, but I do not believe that god has a plan for me. She may have a will, but she certainly has bigger issues to address than my weird career trajectory and my suburban ennui.

But in the wake of the indefinite postponement of our move to Belgium, my dearest friends assured me that a wonderful path awaits me, with or without the European adventure. Their confidence that this would turn out for the best, that the universe knows what it is doing, did not dimish my sadness. Many dear friends have said, "Kelly, everything happens for a reason. You may not know what that is now, but you will, and when you do, it will make sense."

It didn't exactly comfort me to hear this because, as a guiding principle, I reject it. But boy, did it make me laugh. For despite my belief in reason, in science, in math and probability and free will and plain old chance, I did have a good reason to believe that this change of plans may be convenient.


We discovered two days after our move was postponed that we will be welcoming a baby into our home in mid-August. How about that?

Would we have made a transatlantic move with a baby expected? Yes, most assuredly. We moved from San Francisco to DC when I was six months pregnant with Ethan, and we made that move without the conveniences and budget the Belgium move would have offered. Seasoned movers that we are, we would have been fine. (Our parents, though, may have disowned us or preemptively sued for custody of the new grandbaby.)


Does the excitement of a new baby mitigate my disappointment, my suburban stuckness? No, not entirely. It remains a heartbreak for me every day.


But the joy of anticipation that Scott and I share for a child we have wanted for a long time is a wonderful thing.

What to Write About?

I have a long list of things I don't want my blog to be.

For starters, I don't want it to be a mommy blog.

I have nothing against mommy blogs. Indeed, there is something admirable about taking the time to document the life of the family in the midst of the raising of said family. And some of them make for enjoyable reading. I think I don't want to write one for the same reason that I don't send a holiday letter. Because while I love getting other people's letters, I cannot bring myself to assume that anyone wants to know so much about my family's goings-on. It's certainly not shyness that drives this. It's rooted, rather, in a fundamental distaste for the listing of the accomplishments and the cataloguing of the ailments. So while I may some day envy those mommies who blogged the details of their family lives, I will not do it.

A mommy writer could always engage in the mommy politics. But the meat of the mommy matter -- breast v bottle, work v home, cloth v disposable, jars v ice cube trays full of home-pureed carrots -- doesn't engage the full me. I am a breast, home-except-when-I-was-working, disposable, ice-cube-trays-with-the-first-kid mom by instinct, by choice, by judgment, but I don't want to write about it.

I also don't want to have a casual blog. Posting too frequently, without attention to quality, is not my style. (If you think this reads like the ultimate cardboard justification for my infrequent blogging, feel free to judge me. Really.) I want my posts to be thoughtful, important, and meaningful. I want each to contribute to the whole. And I want to work around a theme.

Could I write about politics? Sure. I certainly have strong opinions, a relatively well-informed set of positions, and plenty of material to work with. Especially now. But I count on Eugene Robinson, Paul Krugman, Hendrik Hertzberg, Ruth Cohen, Maureen Dowd, and the Davids (Brooks, Broder, and Ignatius) for the best of this kind of writing. In short, I want to read it, not write it.

The central struggle of the blog is that I had a theme. I was going to blog about the experience of an American mommy living abroad. My discourse would touch on parenting, but with a turn toward the consequences of the cultural choices we make for our children. My posts would engage in American politics, but from across the sea and with a nod toward the global perspective of one little household. My words would not document the lives of my children. There would be no soccer scores or club initiations or academic honors. But my words would record the nature, the rhythm, the flavor of our international family life.

What to write about now?

Packing Up and Stuck

Today we learned that our move to Brussels in June is off. Technically, it is postponed by the firm management until summer of 2010, but I know the truth. For the firm, relocation is dependent upon a positive change in the global economy. For us, at this point, relocation is hinged on our willingness to stay in limbo for the next year, waiting for it to work out. Accordingly, we told Eleanor and Ethan today that we are not moving. Of course we still may relocate to Belgium sometime in the next few years, but it seemed unfair to require them to live in this uncertainty, especially since we aren't sure if we can do it.

After all this anticipation and preparation, this is an enormous disappointment. The kids are sad and confused. So are we. Our vision of ourselves as a family had grown to include such great international dimensions and we luxuriated in those dreams. We cry now. We grieve in some entitled way for a dream that is . . . I don't know what the word is . . . stuck?

And for me, the mom and wife, this is a bitter moment. I did, after all, quit my beloved job. Life is easier without it anyway, and if Scott continues to travel as much as he is now, which is part of the firm's long-term plan for him whether we live in Europe or here, a full-time job is nearly impossible to pull off. I quit my beloved job, though, and have struggled through that decision every day, even with Brussels waiting. I also set to work learning a new language and fell headlong in love with French and my image of myself as a bilingual citizen of the world.

What I struggle to handle in my racing mind is how I fit into this changed vision of my own life. I am back where I was when I was at home with kids in school all day, fairly miserable without the challenge of a professional life. I am back in a pre-dream existence, where my children had never imagined classmates from 65 nations and field trips to World War II battle sites and the French Alps. I am back in a house in a suburb where I never really feel I have fit.

The best word I can come up with tonight is stuck.

Butter and Such

I wish I could dig out my "All About Me" essay from my first weeks of graduate school. In it I talked about geographic place and food and identity. The first page and half, if I remember correctly, was a list of sublime meals from different hometowns and destinations. (I had just read Tim O'Brien for the first time -- it must have been The Things They Carried -- and I thought listing was a very cool technique.)

Come to think of it, the article I published in an educational journal during my first year of teaching began with a food reference too. I compared the art of teaching to the art of making pasta as described by Marcella Hazan, maven of Italian cuisine and publisher of my favorite cookbooks. Really, the analogy held up under peer review!

So now I am the mommy of a family obsessed with food. We each have our own spin on that. I am fussy about ingredients and buy almost nothing pre-made. Yes, there was that two year affair with Trader Joe's frozen products while I was working full-time. But that is OVER. I am especially fussy about meat and haul myself all the way to Baltimore each week to get the right organic, ground in the store, no antibiotic, no animal byproducts kind of stuff. And it's yummier, too.

Eleanor loves food, too. She is especially passionate about desserts and has meals from holidays and trips and local urban foraging expeditions filed in her head. When she was in the third grade and writing a Cinderella story set in Paris, she talked me into lunch at our favorite French bistro in Baltimore, Petit Louis, for "research" and savored the soupe à l'oignon gratinée.

Ethan is picky . . . but not picky. Meatloaf, spaghetti, pork chops -- no. Pickled jellyfish, mussels, sushi -- oh, yes. While he does appreciate my crème brulée, I fail as a cook for him because I do not make authentic pad thai at home. His favorite food story about himself is that he ate the beef with red chili at Ollie's in New York that the Zagat guide said was "unsuitably spicy for children."

Scott is a lover of great food, too. Our courtship was marked by forays into Chicago neighborhoods in search of real food. I think we bought the Chicago Magazine cheap eats issue our last year of college and sought out many of their recommended holes-in-the-wall serving authentic and handmade Polish, Greek, Indian and Thai foods. As our budget has grown, we have come to love fine food and make it a priority in our nights out.

This is a long prelude to my favorite butter story, promised in a recent post.

When we were in Paris this summer, our daily habit was to eat an extravagant lunch out and dine simply in our apartment for the first and last meals of the day. Breakfast was croissant and pain au raisin. Dinner was salad, baguette, butter, and cheese. (And wine.)

One evening, exhausted from miles of walking, we sat at our table with our humble meal before us. We broke the baguette, appreciating its crackle. We tossed the oil and vinegar through the greens. The butter sat at the center. And as we all spread the golden stuff onto hunks of still-warm bread, Eleanor asked, "Is the butter better in Paris than it is at home? I think it may be." And Ethan said, "Maybe it's because the bread is better."

In these quiet family moments, our priorities shine through.