Love at First Sight

Swag

Speaking of Facebook, this is my son's profile pic at the moment. The comments are proliferating. My favorite: "Chillin in air."

The Dance

"Are you strong enough to stand

Protecting both your heart and mine?"

From "Heavy in Your Arms" 

by Florence + The Machine

The photo above is from a dance choreographed to Elton John's "Tiny Dancer," which my girl was in. That's her, second from the left. The three images immediately below are of moments from the dance my daughter choreographed at Dance Concert 2012. Her dancers performed to the music of "Heavy in Your Arms" by Florence + The Machine. My daughter said the dance was about struggling with the worst pain you've ever felt and then finding someone there. The images here are a mix of amateur shots that showed up on Facebook, and professional images taken by the school photographer. Oh, these beautiful children.

Brava!

These beautiful young women call themselves Noir Nine, and they performed at Dance Concert 2012 last Thursday through Saturday. Dance Concert is a (for me, breathtaking) annual event at my daughter's high school. As soon as photos from the show are posted I will share them here. The group above were the dancers my daughter choreographed to the soundtrack of "Heavy in Your Arms" by Florence + The Machine. It was a haunting and poetic piece of motion, a rather dark exploration that my daughter says was about wrestling with heartbreak. If you knew my child, if you regularly experienced her usually sunny disposition, you would be intrigued by her subject matter. But then she is a rather deep thinker on our human condition, her heart wide open. She was a real little mother to her dancers too. Most of them are freshmen and sophomores and several of them play on the soccer team with her. She came to adore every one of these girls, and they her. (You should see the spa basket she lugged home on the train today, a big box of goodies they picked out for her as a thank you.) While some of the choreographers from the advanced dance class fielded conflict with their dancers, Noir Nine was fairly smooth sailing. I must say, they did mama proud!

The second photo is of the group that performed one of the numbers my daughter danced in. This was one of my favorites of the whole show, a flowy dreamlike piece that I watched with my mouth hanging open, unable to believe that graceful, precise, possessed creature leaping and twirling on stage was my child. She has come such a long way since her first Dance Concert. You can no longer tell the difference between how she moves on stage and how those dancers who have been training their whole lives move. She always was a quick and determined study. Watching her on stage this year, I couldn't help but recall the first day of pre K when she was four years old and saw a girl swing effortlessly, hand over hand across a long high row of monkey bar loops. I saw my daughter's intake of breath at the sight, her eyes like saucers, and then every day after that she would ask her dad or me to take her to the playground where she would practice and practice on those monkey bars, falling from what was then a great height again and again, then jumping up and climbing back up and trying again. Over and over, day after day, never discouraged, never deterred, until she was able to swing herself across those chain loops as effortlessly as she had seen her classmate do. That was when I understood that this girl will do anything she sets her mind to. She's not afraid to work at a thing until she masters it. That's what she has done—is continuing to do—with dance.

Below are some more backstage moments: My girl with her dance crew; with some of the other members of the advanced dance class; lying on the ground writing in a card for her teacher; and the last photo is of all the choreographers and their teacher, Katie, wearing her well-deserved crown.

A Chance in the World

A woman I once worked with talked about indestructible children. She said they were children who faced horrific situations and somehow survived, damaged and hurt, but with their humanity and sense of possibility preserved, their sense of purpose intact. More than intact. Activated. Surely this must be what she was talking about—this successful man whose small gestures betray the vulnerable boy inside him still. Steve J. Pemberton, once a foster child searching for home, grew up to become a corporate VP, and a husband and father of three. It you have 4 minutes, this is his story.

Two Worlds

Suddenly mouth is dumb; eyes

hurt, surprised it is we

who have changed...

                 To travel

is to return
to strangers.

—From Exile 
by Dennis Scott

I was glad to go home and 
I am glad to be home and 
I am glad I found no strangers. 

Sanctuary

My mom is 90 years old today. Today is her actual birthday although we celebrated last Saturday evening. These are some photos of older vintage that capture moments that mattered as she looked back on her nine decades of life. In a word, family. Oh, and my dad being knighted—she never pretends that wasn't a highlight, too. These photos, and many others of family and friends through the years, ran in a continuous loop on a screen during my mom's birthday dinner in a sumptuously decorated candlelit room with gold taffeta-tied chairs and red raw silk tablecloths and sixty invited guests, one hundred percent of whom showed up to toast the birthday girl. 

My cousin Maureen circled the room with a mic after dinner, after my brother spoke, and after I read a thank you speech my mother had dictated to me that morning, and everyone shared memories of my mother, and my father too, whom my mother had earlier declared to be present and smiling down on us, and of our Paddington Terrace days. More than a few spoke the sentence, "Those Paddington Terrace days were the best of our lives," that exact same sentence, and the street where we lived before I moved to New York became a metaphor for the gathering, a potent memory of our own personal Camelot. 

No wonder, I thought, no wonder when it came time to choose a name for this blog, I conjured the house on that street, because in that place, my parents created a sanctuary where everyone felt welcomed, young and old, the neighbor kids who ran in and out of each others homes barefoot, the grown ups who were a part of my parents circle, the aunts and uncles and cousins and friends, the young ones who moved in with us for months or years at a stretch while their parents worked through hard patches, or completed assignments abroad, or healed from illnesses, and the school friends who roamed through, and everyone was there, everyone, my mother and my father made it so. 

My mother preferred us to bring our friends home, and she made it very appealing for us to do so. She ran her own real estate business with her brother, my uncle, and worked long hours showing houses for rent and for sale. And yet she somehow managed to be there to make sandwiches and stir up pitchers of lemonade when our friends came over, which made them often choose our home when there was a question of where to gather. I took it so for granted then. Now I know better.

The memory that encapsulates that time for me, was the day a new family moved in across the street from us, and there were so many people on our front verandah, and so many children of all ages and descriptions playing soccer on the front lawn, and I noticed a girl at the gate across the street, watching us, and I went to the fence and asked if she had just moved into that house, and she said yes, and she looked over at our yard and asked, "Is that a boarding house?" I was 14 and she was 12, and she would soon become my friend, but that day I recognized in her a kind of yearning because she could see, even at 12, that every person in the place she thought was a boarding house knew what it felt like to be a part of something. My mother and my father made it so. 

Today, we celebrate her

My mom, above at age 56, will turn 90 on Tuesday, but the big party is today.