Christmas 2003:
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 2003

On the surface, this may appear to have been a quiet year here on the lane, but a careful observer would notice the subtle markers of change that show up even when a household just keeps on keepin’ on:

• three little Montmorency cherry trees clinging to life on the northeast lawn;
• four cars in the driveway when the fleet’s in for Thanksgiving, Christmas or over summer;
• the makings of a new Rube-Goldbergian superstructure out in the garden;
• a new home office with three — count ’em, three — Ethernet ports in the walls;
• ever-larger piles of books, paintings, sheet music, classical CDs and IT paraphernalia;
• fresh paint (and about time too).

Music is becoming a more important theme around here — and from unexpected quarters. It’s not unusual now for the phone to ring or the e-mail to chime and for Dan to be on the other end with a question about opera. He’s intrigued by operas of all sorts, driven partly by his amazement at hearing his uncle Enrique perform in Madrid and partly by the physics of human vocal production (“How do they do that?") Or it could be Susan calling to consult about an essay assignment involving Beethoven’s late string quartets (that loud scrambling sound was her parents trying to find the CD and its liner notes).

More often, it’s the Providence Singers line, audible everywhere in the house but answerable only up in Alli’s home office. It’s been a busy year singing. During calendar 2004, Mark and Alli sang two performances of Handel’s Israel in Egypt, including an emotionally profound concert in Temple Emanu-El; Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 twice with the Rhode Island Philharmonic; an extraordinary concert on themes of war and peace, two selections from which will air soon on WGBH in Boston; and Handel’s Messiah with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra at concerts in Providence and New haven.

Not all the phone calls from Dan and Susan are about music; we also get the “Um, how long can you keep hamburger?” calls. They are both in their second year of apartment living and, to judge from the phone traffic, are enjoying the added degrees of freedom that come with living large. The cooking skills are coming along (as they must, of course). The Crawleys have figured out that there is a world of cuisine beyond pasta and red sauce. Dan is in his final year at the University of Vermont. He was teetering between majors in physics or political science or possibly economics but finally settled on political science. Susan is living in Brighton, sharing an apartment with a recent Brown grad who is pursuing her interest in geophysics at Boston University. Brighton puts Susan between her two campuses — Tufts University and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts — which had required her to spend three hours a day riding the T. No longer, though, now that we have acquired yet another used Toyota.

Anson is in his junior year at Tabor Academy, looking forward to three big milestones: his driver’s license, the start of the Great College Hunt, and especially the arrival of lacrosse season in the spring. How big is lacrosse, you ask? Big enough that for the first time since he was five, Anson decided not to play hockey during the winter. Instead, he’s into a conditioning and weight-training program focused on the spring season. The driver’s license may take a while. Rhode Island now requires driver’s ed before a learner’s permit. There will be lots of practice on the empty beach parking lots around here before the license arrives next summer.

The Montmorency cherries are tiny little things, full-size cherry trees grafted onto dwarf root stock. If all goes according to plan, they should be producing fruit in three years, although one of them managed to serve up a single cherry this year. It’s a start. Four of the eight blueberry bushes gave us a crop this year. All eight should be in operation next summer, so we’ll be constructing what amounts to an outdoor room to keep out rabbits and birds. We’ve expanded into homegrown horseradish, a second variety of asparagus (ready to pick in two years), garlic, heirloom tomatoes, and a variety of beet that looks like a little bulls-eye when you cut it in half. All this gardening seems somehow right: The land on which our house sits was a very productive truck farm for nearly two centuries before we arrived.

And now we’re settling in for ten days of unstructured rest and relaxation. There are Christmas books to be read, projects to do, mornings to sleep in. We hope you'll have time to do the same.

Love,

Mark and Alli
Dan, Susan, Anson