Christmas 2001:
The annual report from Gideon Lawton Lane

Annual Christmas letters get a mixed reception: tossed unread, browsed lightly, responded to. In the aggregate, though, they have some historical value, some bits of information about who’s doing what. So here’s the archive.

Christmas 2001

Christmas greetings from sunny Portsmouth!

If this is a little late in reaching you, we blame the weather entirely. Rhode Island had a string of 70-degree days in early December, which got the holiday schedule off to a slow start. The saxophone guy on Thayer Street was offering long riffs on “Sleigh Ride” and other seasonal delights, but his public passed by in T-shirts and shorts and seemed quite deaf to sleigh bells in the snow.

This year, Christmas arrives with the prospect of more end-of-year change around here than usual. After the holidays, Dan will be packing his bags and boarding a Lufthansa 747 for Frankfurt, thence to Madrid via Iberia, and ultimately to Seville, where he will spend the next semester. He’s determined to turn all his semesters of Spanish into something approaching fluency. He hasn’t had to declare a major yet at the University of Vermont, but from where we sit, it looks as though political science is what really captures his attention. Or maybe he’ll end up with a double major in physics and political science. How often does that combination come along?

Susan is burrowing deeper into her beloved Boston. She found she missed the art classes that had been such a large part of her career at Lincoln. So she’s leaving Simmons College and will matriculate at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in January. That will give her a substantial daily dose of studio art and art history at the Museum School, liberal arts courses at Tufts University, and ultimately a Tufts degree.

Anson is nearing the end of his first semester at Tabor Academy and appears to love almost everything about it – even the food. (Do you know another high school cafeteria that offers fresh vegetables at a cook-to-order wok station, fresh batter at a do-it-yourself waffle iron and a brick oven for pizzas?) The Tabor Seawolves – seawolf is another term for killer whale – are well into hockey season. Anson is the sole freshman skater on the JV-A team and got his first three career goals in the six games before Christmas break. The daily commute is a bit of a haul – about 35 minutes one way – but so far it’s been manageable. He’s stayed overnight in a dorm for a couple 6 a.m. hockey practices, and the folks at Tabor seem very happy to be flexible for day students.

Alli has put the hockey coaching on hold in order to follow the JV-A Seawolves, who play in the same Wednesday and Saturday time slots as the team Alli would have coached. Her worklife now focuses entirely on music. The Providence Singers hired her as its first executive director, and she’s been on the payroll since August. The group continues to grow and chart new territory (go ahead – ask about the reviews of our fall concert). Keep an ear out for the next round of Pulitzer Prizes. “Proud Music of the Storm,” a work by Carlyle Sharpe commissioned for the Singers’ 30th anniversary season this year, will be in the running.

Alli and Mark are making their singing debut in Boston Symphony Hall as members of the Boston Pops Holiday Chorus. It seemed like a lot of antler music when we signed up, but some of the arrangements turned out to be downright challenging – fun to sing – and required some serious woodshedding prior to showtime. (Antler music, for those of you new to the term, is the type of song for which performers may appear onstage in reindeer headgear, though the Pops draws the line at blinking lights.)

Do we dare add a quick note on the garden? As promised (threatened, some would say), there are now eight blueberry bushes around the perimeter, although it will be a couple years before they bear reliably. The new, larger perimeter is now rabbit-tight along two sides, and the hand-crafted sprinkler system works well, though water pressure is sometimes a problem. This year we had an abundance of fennel and eggplant, neither of which we like, but they work well as still life subjects for Susan. We also had one rogue cherry tomato plant that took over a sizeable chunk of the arable land and produced fruit almost to Thanksgiving. The whole enterprise is now known as “The Farm,” which Mark takes, perhaps mistakenly, as a compliment. Coming in spring: The Orchard. We may be seriously into stone fruit – cherries, maybe plums – by 2005.

It’s still on the before side of Christmas as we write this, though you may not be reading it until sometime in the New Year. We plan to kick back a bit one of these weeks, savor some of our very own smoked sturgeon (one result of the summer’s adventures in Oregon, the choicest chunks of which were frozen for exactly this time of year), take a long walk along the beach in Newport and prepare ourselves for family life on two continents this winter and spring. We hope you’re also able to enjoy some slow time. You deserve it; this has been a rough year.

Love and peace,

Mark and Alli
Dan, Susan, Anson