Hudson at 6 months

From his most recent dcotor's report - Chad recaps and gives Hudson's fall travel schedule:

Hudson had a 6 mo appt today - 3 shots and general checkup...he weighed 16 lbs and 26 inches long.
30th percentile in weight and 50th in height.
He and I are headed to NM for a 4 day weekend this weekend and then, I am headed to Cambridge for Johnny's wedding the following weekend (Hudson is not on the travelling squad right now for the Cambridge trip).
On Nov 1, Hudson and Nanny Yvonne are going to Georgetown for a week with David and Sarah.

Hugs to H. Love to the dad.

C

Defining bittersweet

Tomorrow's the anniversary of Hudson's 6th month in our world and Linds' 6th absent from it.

I do not know what to make of this.

Hudson should not have to share his arrival with a departure. I hope that, as years unwind and Hudson gets more teeth, a voice, we'll discover how to celebrate Linds along side him.

Maybe an extra candle, or silence, or Lindsey-esque dance-of-joy.

Cousin Annie (newly-married + ever-thoughtful), sent the following: prayers from us read by Ashley to Hudson at Linds' memorial.

(Note to the non-denominated: I too sometimes get a little jeeby with prayers, so if you want to substitiute "wishes" or "fervent hopes" that's okay too.)


A Prayer for Hudson

We pray you always know how deeply loved and cherished you are by all your mom’s family - aunts, uncles and cousins included. They would do anything for you. Their love for you is unconditional.

We pray you are blessed with your mother’s remarkable gift for instantly warming a person’s heart with her enormous, brilliant smile.

We pray you know how grateful we are that you were born and how blessed we feel to have you in our lives.

We pray that you have your parents’ zest for love and adventure.

We pray you have eyes like your mother so your daddy can look into them and see 2 great loves of his life.

We pray your father teaches you to dance so you can woo all the girls onto the dance floor and make your mom proud.

We pray that you admire your father’s courage and strength.

We pray you grow up embodying the same joyful, curious and generous spirit as your mother.

We pray you grow not only in size and strength but in wisdom as well.

We pray you get to know your grandparents really, really well. They’re all amazing.

We pray your dad will find a way to acknowledge a moment of joy in each day, and share it with you, paying tribute to the joy your mom gave and received out of life each day.

We pray that when you’re 33 you will be living as full a life as your mom was.

We pray your father will sleep well at night and laugh and dance with your mom in his dreams.

We pray that your daddy reads you Goodnight Moon with much frequency.

We pray that you fall as deeply in love with someone as your mom and dad did with each other.

And we pray that you always know how much your mom loves you and that even though you can’t see her, we pray you always know she’s there.

Much love, from your mom’s cousins and sister: Ashley, Johnny, Tenley, Courtney, Andrew, Peppie, Susanna and Annie (and their spouses)

C (peace-out little H)

Grandpop's letters

Mom or Linds may be watching this week's proceedings from elsewhere, but here amongst the huggable, I've got family, friends and I've got Grandpop.
Who I called last night with the news of R and my engagement.

Every Friday since we were young, and since through the decades that the family's grown, split and rewoven itself, Grandpop and Grandma have sent a family letter.

For its first 4 decades, the letter was typed missive in a long office-y envelope. (Sometimes Grandma would have re-pasted unmarked stamps on to make postage.) With Grandpop's carats and spelling corrections, Grandma's own typed note at the end hilighting a garden show, a visit, they document the mundane of tennis matches, dinners, as well as the inevitable passages - welcome ones and others not.

My family's timeline captured.

Then, some years back, a cousin (Andrew?) started Grandpop on the computer. Though the computer's now been updated, Grandpop's use of it remains exactly as when he started: he logs on, reads the emails accumulated in his Juno account (spammers be ashamed) and, each Friday morning, he sends the family email.

Like the other cousins, I scan for a mention of my name - to be recorded by grandpop is familial posterity.

Which is a long and rambly way to say: In this morning's email, Rus and I my news came in under the wire.

Here from Grandpop:
Greetings on another gorgeous morning at Sea Island. As many know, Ruslan proposed; Courtney happily accepted; no date yet for wedding. Courtney, thoughtfully, called the good news last night. DELIGHTED. Felicitations to Courtney; confratulations to Ruslan. That will leave Alexander the only unwed grandchild.. That's way ahead. Meanwhile, maybe more great-grandchildren will appear??

C

From Boston

It's many things that are amazing as I wrap my second full day of wearing my ring from R.

But here in Boston (where it's nicely, new england-ly, fall-ish) it's a little bittersweet.

I went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum this afternoon. I took the blue line from Logan, switching to the green at Government Center and the red just now.

How many t trips did Linds and I make together? It was our yellow school bus. A-zillion daily roundtrips Shawmut-Harvard-Shawmut to school ("Shawmut" could exist only in Boston, with brother "Lechemere") and a billion one-off trips to museums, friends' houses, Fenway, Faneiul Hall, Copley, Kendall when dad was in grad school.

Linds and I knew all stop-names, and the way the train slows (still) as it rounds into the Harvard Station - same as in 5th grade, as when Linds was in 3rd.

This afternoon in the familiar tunnels, emerging by the fenway, then entering the turned-inwards beauty of the Gardner's central courtyard, passing through the damask shrouded rooms, seeing a collection piled and hung one above another, so passionately gathered, with such an aesthetic pack-rat's eye, seeing all that one life might achieve and then share, and - well - I was alone.

Alone with my very big news and the ring and, in my old home town, no mom or Linds to share with.
Alone without my R to enjoy all the beauty with me either.

So - amidst so very much beauty - I was a little sad.

And, now in Harvard Square, I'm nostalgic again.

I feel mom + linds so much here - across from the Border Cafe, at the head of the alley where the COOP's lingerie department faced off with academic lady's clothing. Charette seems to be no longer - something chain-ish in its place. Lots more banks, Brighams gone for eons, Newbury Comics staff still smoking on the back stairs of the Garage.

C - channeling the missing in Harvard Square (lecture's in an hour)

Scholar mom

Mom and Dad drafting PhDs (on legal pads and manual typerwriters, mom handwriting each cedilla and umlat in the final manuscript), Sea Island circa 1980.

Tomorrow I'm in Boston for the 3rd annual lecture honoring mom.

This year, the lectureship's brought over a Sir John Boardman, Professor of Classical Archeology and Art at Oxford. His ambitious topic (right up mom's alley) is: "Greeks Going East: Exploring the impact of Classical Greek Art in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, past Persia into Central Asia and north India."

(ahem)

A copy of Mom’s PhD sits on a not-prominent shelf in my library, atop books on Seljuk portals and Ottoman architecture whose spines are familiar from childhood but whose content remain an utter mystery. Needless, maybe, to state here: I never read mom’s thesis (it goes immediately to my bedside stack after I post this though), but its tenor infused the first decade of my life. That caravanserai, madrese, anatolia, alexander the great, persia... are all romantic words to me is mom’s doing.

In 1978 mom and dad – doing unrelated phDs simultaneously - won Fulbrights to do doctoral research: mom's would take her to Turkey's far corners, Dad’s to Worli villages and amongst India’s rural poor.

Lindsey and I were enrolled in school in Ankara for the year but occasionally pulled early, or delivered late, so we could join mom on the road - 3 ladies traveling Anatolian Turkey in a brown Citroen whose magic hydraulic suspension drew crowds wherever we went.

Absorbing little of the actual scholarship – neither Linds nor I’d go on to read in ancient Arabic or debunk some Seljuk theory - we did develop a taste for turquoise tiles and a nostalgic familiarity with dirt courtyards, the dank smell of bats (so that the deeper recessed of Angkor Wat felt familiar), the rules of Ramadan and candies of Eid, the color of a poppy field. Mom would photograph with one of the Minoltas slung around her neck (slide and b+w), measure portal widths and carving depths, while Linds and I squatted, or sang what John Denver we knew, or traded with local kids.



C (nostalgic, thankful, inspired)

Mom

On 10/02/2003 I was upstate with Rod looking after mom and, as we prepared a bath for her, she slipped away. I remember that outside it was beautiful. What I know of fall foliage will hinge on the golds of that day.

There was more to it than that - more pain and messiness. ALS is without sympathies, progresses relentlessly. In mom's case it swpet through her and had claimed her entirely within a year.

But once she's gone, it doesn't have her any longer of course. She goes immediately back to being ours and our memories (31 years) supercede the just one year that ALS had mom. Like a brief affair, we can sweep that one away and try to forget the mockery it made of her independence, grace and will.

But how to now remember my mom.
And Linds who's left too.

I know they're not all gone.
Some faith in me assumes they are together.

And, honestly, sometimes I'm not sure the reality of their absence here has quite reached me. They're still alive - never ever dead - in my dreams. They still have opinions, would weigh-in on matters if just given a voice.

So sometimes it's like the two most important women in my life simply stepped off stage and behind curtain. In the photo here - taken on Lake Van in Turkey - mom and Linds hold hands. Imagine that, like scuba divers, they just fell backwards together and so not visible but still there. They don't happen to be in this scene but will return for others. My jerry-rigged version of eternal being makes it bearable for me.

C