Christmas 2004:
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.

Sunday, December 19, 2004
The Eighth Stollen after Thanksgiving

Dear Friends:

A bulldozer arrived last week at the vacant lot next to us and pushed all the topsoil into a huge pile. Eighteen years worth of our old Halloween pumpkins are in there somewhere, along with old 4x4s from the garden, the rusted hulks of new hand tools that Danny and his friends borrowed to build their forts 15 years ago, and a nicely aging pile of compost that Mark had hidden amongst the weeds. The last unbuilt lot in the neighborhood is cleared now; there’s a house coming, we’re told.

Even when it arrives on your doorstep escorted by bulldozers, change doesn’t always feel like change. A lot has happened this year, but as we look back over the months, the year’s events feel like the ordinary kinds of things people usually do.

There was the Brubeck, though. Mark and Alli and the Providence Singers performed with Dave Brubeck and his quartet (plus additional brass and percussion) on opening night of the 50th Annual Newport Jazz Festival. We did the Brubeck cantata, The Gates of Justice, a very 1960s work with texts from Martin Luther King Jr., the Hebrew scriptures, Hillel and others, scored for chorus, instruments, Jewish cantor, and African American bass. It was a once-in-a-lifetime musical honor and thrill. We gave what Brubeck later said had been the best performance in his 30 years with the piece; it took us weeks to come down.

Christmas arrived early for Anson in the form of a thick envelope from the College Admission Office at Brown University. He’s been admitted by early decision to the Class of 2009 (yes, 2009; time does march on). Better yet, he won’t have to spend Christmas vacation hustling his Common Applications around to all the other schools on his list. Brown was the one he really wanted. He’s lacing up the skates again this winter and getting back on the ice out at Tabor ... as an assistant coach for the girls JV hockey team.

Susan is finishing her senior year at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. It’s been fascinating to watch her work develop; we keep wondering what will come next (one possibility: graduate school). She did a series of geometric paintings in acrylic, with horizontal and vertical lines bleeding across the canvas and creating the impression of very deep space. These works are very colorful; several of them are now framed and hanging on our walls. After four years in Boston, Suz will end up with a degree from Tufts University. She says she’s ready for a new city. Could be Washington, D.C. Stay tuned.

Dan graduated from the University of Vermont in May. He ended up in political science with significant work in economics and physics, but his heart seems to be in Spain right now. The semester he spent there made a great impression on him. His Spanish was good enough to travel and converse; now he’d like to achieve full fluency. He’s checking out a couple master’s programs that would put him in Spain for a full year of study. Meanwhile, he’s living in an apartment in Burlington — reading a lot, working enough to pay the bills, and figuring out what his next move will be. (We’re betting on the year in Spain.)

Alli continues her work managing the Providence Singers. The group is developing a strong regional reputation, appearing in the regular season offerings of the New Haven Symphony and the Rhode Island Philharmonic. Those of you who have followed the Singers’ development will understand what an important achievement those performances have been for the group. Choral singing has been a constant pleasure for Mark and Alli since the early “Tuesday night date” years, when the auPairs made it possible for both parents to attend the same rehearsal. Now Mark and Alli are taking weekly voice lessons. Alli has even more music in her life. She continues as a church organist and choir director and accompanies a middle-school chorus.

Mark has been devoting some of his spare time to family archives, including editing an English edition of a journal kept aboard the wooden sailing ship der Adler (the Eagle) by Fritz Mueller, the original immigrant, in 1865. (The Nickels arrived later, in 1879.) There is much astonishing material, including a group photo of dangerous-looking Milwaukee thugs who turned out to be Grandpa Nickel’s baseball team. Many of the original documents are written in Sütterlin script; some are in Cantzeley Schrift and are even older. They are exquisitely beautiful, delicate, refined and now utterly unintelligible even to modern Germans. Mark is hunting for German natives who can still read script; German schools stopped teaching it in 1941. But at least the family tree is now in reasonable order, and most of the records are in Web format. (Mark is happy to send copies to cousins, other relatives, and interested observers.) This coming January 12 will be Mark’s 24th anniversary at Brown University (he originally figured he’d be there three years, five at the max.) It’s still a fascinating place to be.

The garden. This year brought a framework of 2x4s above the blueberries, over which we stretched plastic netting to create an outdoor room. This kept nearly all of the birds out and eliminated the bird fatalities that can occur when the netting hangs in festoons. One of our million rabbits did manage to get himself entangled, although he was inside our perimeter defenses and thus safe from Zoë, our aging, rabbit-chasing chocolate lab. (Alli and Mark freed him and gave him a head start toward the empty lot.) Also new this year: electrical service and an underground hookup for the hand-crafted perimeter sprinkling system. Yes, garden improvements do seem out of control on occasion. Outlining the blueberry superstructure with white Christmas lights may have been a bit over the line. Susan and Alli yanked the plug.

Oh, and Alli became the first woman to shoot a hole-in-one on the Carnegie Abbey course here on the Island. Her five iron off the Number Two tee carried the water, bounced well before the green and vanished. Mark thought it was 20 yards short. Susan said no, she thought she saw it hit the pin. We kind of crept up on it, not believing what we had seen until Alli fished her ball out of the cup. October 10, 2004 — you may have heard the screams. Alli’s name will be added in gold leaf to a walnut plaque in the clubhouse, we’re informed.

Mark’s work on the family archives has had an atavistic effect on the holiday cuisine. We’re beyond Stollen this year, with batches of Springerle and Pfeffernüße already baked and consumed. More is on the way, perhaps a Johann im Sack. There was sauerkraut on the table last night. (Anson says he prefers the beer part of his German heritage, thank you.)

We hope this finds you in good spirits, in touch with your traditions or busily working on new ones — and that you’ll have some time to slow down, unwind and recharge.

Fröhliche Weinacht,*

Mark and Alli
Dan, Susan, Anson

* Mark wrote — laboriously, character-by-character — the Fröhliche Weinacht in German script using an online Sütterlin penmanship chart of kleine und große Buchstaben.