Cup of kindness

We brought in the New Year in a low-key way with dear friends. We sat around a table laden with a wild miscellany of food since we all brought whatever we wished, I made corn and cheese souffle and my husband made his signature salmon mousse, and we ate deviled eggs and sugared nuts and bruschetta and artichoke spinach dip and pepper jelly cheese and drank lots of Prosecco and the conversation went wherever and I looked around the table and thought how much I enjoy these people and I was thankful that this wouldn't be one of those years of wandering haunted through the rooms of my house, thinking we should have planned something, sure the rest of the world knew to plan something and now we would be slipping across the boundary of midnight without the sweet scaffolding of other souls, free falling into the new year without a plan. There are years like that, but this wasn't one of them. I looked around the table at all these people I have grown to love and I thought, we have watched our children grow up and away from us, watched them head out into the night so sure of what they know, angled like compasses towards their friends and leaving us each other. And as we raised our glasses at midnight and sang an off-key Auld Lang Syne I was grateful to take my cup of kindness with these friends and I wished silently that next year we might do this again in one of our homes, because it was so easy with them and I felt accompanied and accounted for and it was really sort of perfect.

The Six

"A true friend is someone who thinks 

that you are a good egg even though 

she knows you are slightly cracked"

—B. Meltzer

They have been friends since they were four and five and six and seven, they have romped through the rooms of each other's homes, arms open wide, they have weathered the growing pains, held on fiercely during the fifth-grade girl wars, questioned each other urgently about feelings and motivations, went out onto the fire escape en masse to discuss their hurts, and then stayed out there until they could hold one another close again. The teachers understood and let them. We all watched as they arranged and rearranged themselves in every variation and grouping until at last they surrendered and called themselves simply, "the six."

Who will be at the sleepover? "Just the six."

I stand in awe of these girls, of their capacity to give and forgive and to accept and to know one another for exactly who they are, who they are becoming, who they will be. They have no idea how breathtaking they are, how beautiful, how generous, how relentless, how wise. It is something to witness their friendship unfolding over the span of years, through superhero laughter and budding bodies and wretched high school complications. Through it all, they have been there for each other, whispering their secrets into trusted hearts, knowing they are fully encircled by love. 

Day Trip

November 2010

We have begun. College visits, that is. Back when I started this blog we were touring schools with my son, who is now a college sophomore. Now it's my daughter's turn. She is in 11th grade so we have time yet. But we decided to do leisurely visits to schools within driving distance this fall, and then plan a more intensive trip to see a few colleges further afield in the spring. Last weekend we went to see a school that was literally a 15 minute drive north, much too close to home for my daughter. "I thought this would be a road trip," complained the girl who loves nothing more than a road trip complete with a night or two in a nice hotel.

But she was game anyway, since we teamed up with one of her closest friends in the world and her family for the visit. Her friend's mom Isabella and I are also friends. We possess a mutual difficulty with all things unresolved, and a similarly obsessive turn of mind, and so we have set out to find the exact right schools for our daughters, encouraged by our girls who are just happy that we're keeping each other occupied and out of their hair! It was perfect, really. Isabella and I compared notes, the men and older sister looked on amused, and our girls listened and toured and revealed little of their thinking, except to each other.

Isabella and I ended up liking the school so much that my husband teased that we could be roommates and they could visit us in the dorm on weekends. Ha! In fact, my daughter does not yet know if she will apply, in part because the school is only 28 percent boys. She wants a more equal male-female ratio. But the school does not require SATs or ACTs. It has no tests. You take just three seminar-based classes per semester plus a 20-30 page conference paper or project for each class, which you develop yourself in conjunction with the professor. There are no core requirements either, just a course catalogue that your browse through and pick whatever the heck you want to take. The setting is really pretty, especially now in the fall with the changing trees. It did kind of have the feel of an exclusive girls boarding school, but everyone was really sweet/funny/quirky/open and all around campus there were hand-drawn posters inviting us to "Fuck Gender," "Bend Gender" and "Reverse Gender."

The program is definitely writing intensive and boasts alumni from Alice Walker to Barbara Walters to Rahm Emmanuel. Students end up writing a hundred or more pages a term, which I know our girls would have no problem with. They wrote their autobiographies in 7th grade, which were roughly 100 pages each, churned out with great inspiration between February and April of that year. They were amazing poetic excavations of their young lives. And having produced them by going deeper and deeper through several rounds of drafts—under the guidance of the most extraordinary teacher, Carol O'Donnell—our girls have never again doubted their ability to produce thoughtful, engaged, well-crafted writing.

Since there are no majors in the traditional sense, the young man who was doing the tour (the admissions staff made sure there were many young men in evidence) asked each of the prospective applicants what they were interested in pursuing. I got very still waiting to hear what my daughter would answer. "Cooking, photography and writing," she said.

The photo above is of our girls filling out their visiting forms before the info session. The one below was taken when they were in kindergarten. They were at their school's farm and were soaked head to toe from building a dam in the river. They are so beautiful, these girls. They are part of a soul cluster that has loved one another since that time. They are soul mates, really.

June 2000

Color Olympics

I found some pictures on the website of the camp where my son is working as a counselor this summer. If I look carefully through the photos, I find my son in the center of things, rallying the kids, leading activities. Here is a pic that was posted this morning, after the famous Color Olympics. My son has been a part of this ritual since he was 11 and a camper himself. The kids are divided into different color teams, red, blue, green, black, yellow, and they compete in various contests—swimming, flag raising, archery, sailing, rowing, sand-castle building, foot races, cheer raising, you name it. My son is apparently one of the leaders of the green team this year.

That's my son at center, his head just visible,
with the kid on his shoulders holding the flag.

A Good Time

Several of our friends came over to watch the World Cup Soccer final with us yesterday afternoon. We all have children the same age, which is how we became friends, but now we get together without the kids, who are usually off doing their own thing. It was lovely and low key, with wine, beer, seltzer, sweet-and-salty popcorn and panini fixings from figs and peaches to fresh pesto, basil and mozzarella—a whole lot of gourmet fixings brought by everyone! We each made our own paninis while my husband experimented with a plate of dates stuffed with manchego cheese and wrapped with prusciutto, then grilled. Delicious!

Spain won the final. I was the only one rooting for them. Everyone else was rooting for the Netherlands. But the curious things was, in between the easy banter, every mother present (there were four) would periodically check her cell phone for news of her teen. One was in Vermont at a rap-reggae music festival. One was at Coney Island with his girlfriend. One was at her home. My daughter, of course, was in a small village in Italy, where I later learned she had watched the World Cup final match in a cafe with a large group of teenagers, her host sister's friends who she has spent a lot of time with over the last week.

What was so interesting to me is that all the other mothers appear to be calmer, less anxious women than I know myself to be. But what I realized yesterday is that they worry just as much, they just show it less, and are more able to admit what is out of their control. It was reassuring to discover that I am in the range of normal, and that my current coming to terms with the fact that I cannot really direct the show for my children any longer is simply what comes next in this dance.

My daughter did call us when she got home at midnight her time. She seems to be having an amazing time over there in Italy. She and her group get on very well, and she says her host family is "sosososo nice" to her. Her host sisters friends always include her, she says, even though she cannot speak much of the language. They use signing and Google translate and have taught each other hip phrases and curse words in their respective languages. She seems to be in the thick of teenage life in her small town. She was telling me there is a parking-lot-square in the center of town and all the kids go there to meet. "I mean every single kid in town goes there to meet up and hang out," she said. "There is just no equivalent in New York."

She and her group are visiting Pompeii today. They have one more week of their homestays and then it's on to two weeks of culinary school in Northern Italy.

Braces, Gone

With her friends in Greenport last weekend, my daughter flashed pearly whites that were divinely (to her) free of any metal encumberances. The braces, after three years and two oral surgeries, had come off the day before. She smiled a lot.

The girls swam in a cerulean blue pool and laughed with a manic and adorable baby brother and rode a scary high ferris wheel and read magazines while lazing on the dock. 

Later they ran up and down the beach and pretended that final exams were not less than a week away. Ah, to be 16 and joyously in the moment.

Superheroes

They always knew they were powerful.

Annie P and Me

Kingston, Jamaica, 1976

Found this in one of my photo albums. I was a freshman in college when this was taken, and had gone home for the Christmas vacation. I was the age my son is now. That's my friend Annie in the blue top. One of my little cousins is on my lap. This photo was snapped on the back stairs at 37 Paddington Terrace, the house where I came of age, and for which this blog is named. Check out our afros. We're just a coupla cool chicks catching the sun. Annie P died earlier this year (I wrote about it here). Seeing this picture brought a whole rush of memories. Wish I could go back and do some things differently, but that's a useless thought, isn't it?

Vaguely Sad

It's a beautiful, sunny Spring day. This kind of weather always makes me feel melancholy. Maybe it's because it insists that I go outside and be happy, and as I seem to do when anyone or anything insists on something, I opt for its opposite. I've heard there really is such a thing as oppositional syndrome.

Or maybe I'm sad about other things. My son, for example, is so often irritated by me, and it makes me sad. I cannot be anyone other than myself so this dynamic, which has been true for most of his teen years, is unlikely to change. We have moments of breakthrough, fleeting times when we are close and sharing our hearts. But those moments are so fragile. Always, I end of up making some innocuous-to-me comment that annoys and shuts him right down.

He is 18 now and basically a good kid. He's responsible and smart and in his own way driven. His temperament, ironically, mirrors mine more than it does the easy-going, shrug-until-you-can-do-something-about-it temperament of his dad. But my heart aches to have him under my roof and know that he will be going away again in a few days, and yet I can't reach him.

From the sidelines, I watch him with his friends. I interact lightly and laugh with the group of them, unable to truly connect with my boy. I do love his friends. One of them calls me Mom, and I adore that. I also love waking up in the mornings and seeing them sprawled across the couches, asleep and looking like the tender boys I once knew them to be. I realize their mothers miss them, too, when they stay over at my house. But I am glad my son feels comfortable hanging out in his own home. That is something.

At times like this, I thank God again for my daughter, who is so loving and so connected. Even when she is fighting to get her way about something (and often winning, I might add), even when she is challenging me on a position she doesn't agree with, she never withdraws her light. Somehow, by her very way of being in the world, she manages to make her tough yet fragile mother feel unconditionally and consistently loved.

Why am I crying?? I possess such a treacherous brain chemistry.

Annie, Bright and Dark

This morning, I stood in front of the bathroom sink and I couldn't remember which toothbrush was mine. None of the colors looked familiar. Hadn't I been using a green one? So why were there only blue, purple and pink brushes in the cup? I stood there with the strange sensation that I was out of time, as if I was there but not there, and then I realized that I was crying, tears were rolling down my face, and I missed her so much.

My friend Annie P died last week in Jamaica. She had throat cancer. She and I were so close in high school. I loved her so much. Even now, I marvel that it is possible to love someone as much as I loved her, and yet lose touch.

She was an artist, an astonishing pianist, and a straight-A science student. She was just gifted all around. She was a grade ahead of me, but our spirits clicked. We used to say it was because we were born on the same day, though she was a year older. We first became close in choir practices. The photograph above was taken during one of our summer choir workshops. This one was held for two weeks at a girls' boarding school in Malvern on the other side of the island from Kingston, where we lived. The school was in a very rural part of the country, and as I recall, the showers sprayed freezing cold water day and night. There was no ceiling to the concrete shower stalls. Annie and I and some of the other girls used to prefer to shower in the evenings, squealing and shrieking at how icy the water was, even as we stopped to gaze at the night sky above us, bejeweled with stars.

Annie and I laughed all the time. After school, we often took the bus up to Manor Park Plaza where we'd browse through the bookstore or the record store. We'd sit in the aisles and talk and read and giggle over the slightest thing, or we'd hole up in a record booth and listen to album after album, singing along, and the hours would pass, sublime. Suddenly we'd realize it was getting dark out, and our parents would be worried, and we'd scramble to the bus stop and head in our separate directions home.

In her final year of high school, Annie discovered that her mother hadn't given birth to her. She had overheard her aunts talking. Annie was cut to the quick. I remember we were walking along Constant Spring Road when she told me. "So guess what?" she said, her tone deceptively flippant. "My mom is not my mother and my real mother didn't want me." And then she started to cry. I tried to comfort her with all the words a 16-year-old can think to muster. And then we just walked for a long time in silence, holding hands. It turned out that her father had had an affair on a business trip to the Cayman Islands, and she was the result. He brought her back home to his wife, who took in the baby girl and raised her as her own. Annie's mom, Auntie Lulu we called her, could not have loved her more if she had issued from her own womb. And Annie did know that. But I think she never recovered from the news that everything she had known to be true about herself, was in fact not the case. I think she never again felt rooted.

Our bond slipped a little the year she had an affair with her cousin's boyfriend. We were 20 and 21 then. She was in medical school in Jamaica and I was in college in New York. I didn't know how to be excited with her about this guy, I didn't like him, and I didn't know how to caution her. I didn't know how to tell her that I thought what she was doing was wrong, that her cousin would be devastated. I want to think that I tried to tell her this, but she couldn't take it in and I didn't have the heart to push harder, to make her feel judged. Later, when the affair came to light, she and her cousin, who until then had been like her sister, became estranged. Their estrangement lasted for the rest of Annie's life.

The threads unraveled a little more in the years that followed. Annie started drinking heavily after her ill-fated affair, and she never really forgave herself for wading into those waters. Sometimes, I wonder if she was trying to understand her father and the infidelity into which she was born. She did manage to finish medical school and become a doctor, even though I have often suspected that a career in the arts would have suited her temperament much better. She married and had a son the same year that I had my daughter.

But we were never again as close as we had been in high school. It had become difficult to hold a coherent conversation with her. I still loved her. But now I always had the sense of being adrift in her presence, as if I couldn't reach her through the haze of intoxication, or maybe some of her brain cells got pickled. It didn't help that we only saw each other when I visited Jamaica once or twice a year. Over time, I settled for news of how she was doing from mutual friends, and the occasional long-distance phone call.

And then came the news that she had a tumor on her vocal chords. She had gone to a doctor to check out a dry hacking cough that wouldn't go away and the loss of her voice. The doctor in Jamaica essentially told her it was untreatable, to save her money and have a nice funeral. So she flew to New York for treatment. She arrived last July and stayed until December with a cousin in New Jersey, traveling into the city daily for chemo and radiation. Just before Thanksgiving, she told us that the tumor was gone, she had been given a clean bill of health and would be going home in two weeks. She had Thanksgiving dinner with us in our home. Her voice was back, she was laughing and talkative. She looked great.

She flew home the following week. That was in early December. No one knew she was back in the hospital until last week when someone texted Annie's cousin, the one from whom she had been estranged, and said they'd seen her there. We don't know if Annie had instructed her husband not to call anyone. The tumor, if it ever really left, was back with a vengeance. It had reached down into her lungs and circled her spinal chord. She couldn't eat, she couldn't breathe. And last week Friday at 3:30 in the afternoon, with her husband and son on another floor talking to her doctor, she left us for good.

I miss you Annie P, and selfishly, I miss us. The times I spent with you in that bookstore or at choir workshop or listening to music in the record booth or just walking aimlessly and talking, may well have been the most carefree moments of my life. So I thank you for those. My dear friend and sister in spirit, I thank you for having loved me then as I loved you. And I pray you are at peace.

Contented

Snowstorm! Eleven blizzardy inches fell last night. Through it all, life kept happening. My son and my niece are home from college, and one of my son's friends from high school is also here, and my daughter has a couple of friends staying over. She and her two friends went to a party last night, with my husband and me driving them there and picking them up after, just as our parents used to do for us when we were teenagers. Except we were growing up in Jamaica and Antigua, where driving distances were short and the nights were always balmy.

The cold last night was the least of it. The snow was harrowing to drive in, and as we made our way from Harlem to Soho to pick up our girl from the holiday party for her scholars program, I glimpsed for the first time how terrifying it must be to navigate a blizzard in rural parts, with no visible landmarks. We inched our way down the highway, picking our way through more traffic than you would imagine in such a snowstorm. When we got there almost an hour later, our daughter and her two friends skipped out to the car and chattered happily the whole way home, totally unaware of all the concentration it was taking for me to psychically keep cars away from us on the treacherous road.

Even though it was midnight by the time we got home, the girls, all of them 15 years old, changed out of their party clothes and bundled up to go play in the snow as they did when they were 7, making snow angels, rolling down slopes, catching snowflakes on their tongues. My son had the good sense to wrap himself in a blanket on the couch and watch movies with his friend and exchange man banter with his dad.

My niece had left earlier to meet friends way out in Brooklyn, and almost got marooned there in the 12 inches of snow that fell on us last night. She eventually slept at a friend's house, and left early this morning to come home in daylight. She is catching a flight home to Kingston, Jamaica at 2 p.m., so her mom and dad were on the phone first thing this morning, checking to see whether the airports were open in spite of the snow. They are.

The snow has stopped falling now. The sun is high in the sky, doing nothing for the chilly temperatures. The little kids were out early, sledding on the hill in front of our building while my husband cooked scrambled eggs and spicy sausages for the household. With some amusement, I watched my niece getting ready to go to the airport, groggily stuffing things in her suitcase, her face bare and dry, the desire to just curl up and sleep overwhelming her. She reminded me so much of myself when I was in college, partying all night, rolling out to the curb from the dorm with my suitcase at 6 a.m. to climb into my Uncle Charlie's car for the trip to the airport.

We've just dropped her off at the airport and arrived back home to find our son still on the couch, the blanket now on the floor beside him. He's meeting the day slowly. Our daughter had another engagement today. She and some school friends are baking cookies to hand out to firefighters. It's a tradition started by her friend Julia's family after 9/11. My girl, new to her school last year, is thrilled to be included in this annual event with all the longtimers. Then tonight she has another party, and she and four other girls plan on sleeping over at another friend's house. Meanwhile, our son is heading out later to show off the city to one of his college friends whose flight to Atlanta has been grounded until tomorrow. But first, he wants to go see the movie Avatar with his parents.

All around us, life is happening. My husband and I putter at the center of it all, contented.

Joy!

Two of my daughter's gang of six at a dear friend's 50th birthday party, Saturday, November 21, 2009.

In the Weeds

Everything is ramping up at the magazine since we lost so many good people. Another person quit yesterday, in protest over the 18 people who were let go. You can do that in your twenties, quit your job in protest, because you don't yet have too many bills and no dependents other than yourself who count on your paycheck.

Anyway, the point of all that is that between long hours at work and being there for my mom and my aunt, 87 and 91, I feel like I barely have time to formulate a thought, much less a whole post. And then there is my 15-year-old daughter, who is not so happy about the way school is going right now. Which of course makes me worry (my default) and sends me into a tailspin wherein I try to figure out all the worst case scenarios so I can get busy preventing them. It's exhausting!

So please forgive the quoting of whole exchanges from my life. It's all I can do to record them. I have no mental space or emotional energy left over for the sort of analysis that helps me gain perspective. But thank God for good friends with similar overactive imaginations, who can contribute some analysis when you're lacking the ability to provide your own.

What follows is an email exchange from this morning between me and one of my friends, the brilliant mother of an academically gifted and charismatic 7-year old girl.

Me (responding to a question my friend posed that had absolutely nothing to do with my daughter's schooling): Jeannine, why am I so stressed at this moment waiting for my daughter's first quarter grades? I know she's not happy with them because she usually texts me them as soon as she gets out of the advisor conference. Why does this matter so much? Life is a long distance race and I keep getting caught in the weeds by the side of the road. So what if she didn't do that great? What am I making this mean? Sorry for going off on a tangent. I feel consumed with worry about how this might be the beginning of a downward spiral. A vivid imagination is not always a good friend.

Jeannine: What grade is she in again?

Me: Tenth.

Jeannine: If she's having a hard time then you can address it with a tutor or whatever. It's not the beginning of the end. The (potential) beginning of the end is if she's doing drugs, or pregnant, or suffering from depression. If she got bad grades one semester it's fixable. Even if she flunks out it's fixable. There is almost nothing that happens grade-wise in one year of high school that can't be addressed. I failed almost all my classes for three years of high school and ended up on the dean's list in university.

Maybe she senses your stress and it's stressing her out. I remember not showing my father my grades just because I thought he was too invested. I refused to show him my grades for my first two years of university (and I was doing well). Just something to consider.

But, I do understand. My kid's teacher wrote on her report card that she reads at "grade level," which is totally inaccurate and I am obsessed with how to show him the truth. I almost suggested she take The New York Times to school to pull out during quiet time.

I laughed so hard over that New York Times bit. I could totally picture her 7-year-old pulling the paper out and settling down to read. And then I took my friend's advice. I'm backing off with the worry. My daughter has such a well-honed sense of responsibility already, and she wants to do well so much she put herself on a Facebook diet for a week. It's true that Facebook is back interrupting homework again, but I think I will trust her to figure it out and just be there if she comes to me for help. The other part, of course, is that she is testing her chops socially right now, and as my friend pointed out when we talked on the phone later, it can be really hard to do the straight-A thing while trying to discover who you want to be socially.

I suspect my friend and I are members of a generation of nervous, overinvested parents. I think that we have bought into the baby boomer myth of scarce opportunities. And as parents of children of color we worry that the chances they get may be even more limited, and so they have to be super prepared. But the pathways to success are as creative and serendepitious and limitless and divine as individual definitions of success, and I don't know why I keep forgetting that.

Subway Day, Coney Island Night

Sometimes, all it takes to get in the flow of your life is to say yes to an invitation.

On Friday, we closed early at work for the Labor Day weekend. It was the last weekend of freedom for my daughter and her friends, all of whom start school next Wednesday. She wanted to go to the beach. She and two friends and their mothers are creating a tradition of going to the beach on the last weekend of summer. I say creating because last year was the first time they did it, but they had so much fun they promised one another to do it every year. I love these kids, who have been my daughter's friends since they were all 5 years old, and I love their mothers, who have become dear friends of mine over the years. But I wasn't able to go on their beach outing last year; work intervened. So when my daughter begged me to join them this year, I decided nothing would stop me.

Problem was, I had to finish editing a story with a writer who is particularly painstaking and this was our last round before the story shipped. This woman is actually my favorite writer to work with. I love her work ethic and microscopic attention to content, her insistence on testing and testing and testing the voice and development and internal integrity of a piece. It matches my own preferred way of working as an editor, which is really old school in the current fast paced environment of publishing, but this writer and I have preserved a corner in which we can still work in this way. And you know what? Our stories always win awards. Every single year, we collect an small armful of plaques for the stories we worked on together.

Since we both believe this story we're working on will be another award winner, I didn't want to give it short shrift. Plus it's a heartwrenching subject (can't say what here; it would be tanatamount to giving away state secrets). Suffice it to say, I was experiencing one of those moments when you're determined to do everything fully, and maybe there aren't enough minutes in the hours to make it work. But I managed to finish up and dart out at 4:30 to meet the crew on the R-train platform. We were headed to Coney Island.

I hadn't even told my husband I was going. I texted him from the subway: "On the train to Coney Island with ______." He texted back: "You're on the train??? How did that happen?!" My dislike of the subway is famous. I am known for traveling the city in yellow cabs instead. For me it's moments of meditation (inside a taxi all my own) versus moments of claustrophia and hectic-ness (inside a crowded subway car). I wrote: "My daughter asked and the company is great." He sent back: "Our daughter is really working this only child angle!"--a reference to our son being away at college and our girl having us all to herself. He added: "Have fun."

The others were laden with bathing suits and blankets and towels and snacks. All I had was my two empty hands. It didn't matter. I bought everyone bottled water on the boardwalk, and we set up on the sand near the water. Lounging on blankets, the three 15-year-olds, two girls and a boy, munched on corn on the cob and peanut butter sandwiches and fruit and boiled eggs, while their mothers settled back to catch up on our week. The conversation was easy and meandering. While the teenagers were in the water, we shared stories of crazy things we'd done in our youth, changing the subject when our children arrived back and flopped down next to us, picking it up again when they left to stroll the boardwalk.

At one point, another text came in on my phone. It was from the writer I'd worked with earlier. She wrote: "That was a great edit today." Somehow, that added to the moment I was having. It was just beautiful on the sand as the dusk came down. The air was cool and salty. In the near distance, the lights from the huge Coney Island ferris wheel were a glittering circle, and the neon from the other rides dotted the night. The moon rose full over the water, and on beach and boardwalk and pier, every type of humanity was illuminated by it.

On towards eight-thirty, the kids came back from their adventure on the boardwalk, brimming with stories of odd characters and sponteous events that had transpired there. The fell against us, each child leaning againt his or her mother, comfortable and dozing in and out of the chatter. We mothers smiled at one another as we stroked their heads, each of us aware that this breezy evening under the moon, the waves breaking hypnotically against the sand, the carnival music and lights in the distance, was special.

We tried to wait for the fireworks, which happen every Friday night in summer. By nine, the beach was crowded with locals and tourists encamped for the display. But it was delayed because of the minor league baseball game at the stadium way down the beach. Finally, near ten, we gathered up our blankets and towels and bags and headed back to the subway. Waiting on the elevated platform for the train back to the city, we suddenly saw the sky explode with blooms of color and light. The fireworks had begun, and from where we stood on the N-train platform, we had a thrilling wide-angle view. It seemed even better watching from the subway platform with other straphangers; it was more authentically New York somehow.

Afterwards, we took the train back to Manhattan, arriving home near midnight. My daughter and I jumped onto the bed, waking my husband, who had been asleep. We regaled him with stories and he teased me again about actually getting on the subway. Soon, my girl went off to check her Facebook and I drifted off to sleep. It was, all in all, a really good day.

Girls Hanging Out

My daughter (left) with two of her closest friends since they were four. I love how this slice of girlworld captures both their quirkiness and their comfort. Both are on rich display on any given day.

250 Men in Bow Ties (Graduation!)

Allow me a moment of basking. Our son pulled down a 3.8 GPA this year and was on the Principal's Honor Roll (the highest honor). He has finished up well, and hopefully is just hitting his stride as he looks toward college. The ceremony itself was lovely. All those young men in white tux jackets and maroon bow ties (school colors). What a sight they were. Tomorrow's leaders. A brotherhood.