Christmas 2005:
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.

Day of the Three French Hens, 2005

Dear Friends,

Warmest greetings of the season to you and yours from the denizens of the not-so-empty nest here on Gideon Lawton Lane! We’re all here — the Corollas in our driveway are a dead giveaway — and we are now in kickback mode, intrigued by sudoku and sated with Stollen, Springerle, Lebkuchen and a variety of organic teas and coffee. Life is good.

Life is also changing, though we don’t really have sufficient perspective to understand precisely how. There’s a gathering sense of generational transfer perhaps, where kids who used to populate gatherings of the extended family are now showing up with spouses and kids of their own. There are grand-nephews and grand-nieces we haven’t met yet, and there’s a certain creakiness in the mornings that we do not recall being there a year ago. But it’s a happy and inevitable kind of change that probably deserves more pondering than we have time to give it. The bottom line: We’re all happy and healthy.

Dan is about to realize his plans for a year of graduate study in Spain. With last summer’s total-immersion Spanish language program at Middlebury College in Vermont under his belt, he got his online Spanish proficiency score well into launch range and has received word that he has been admitted to the program. He will do another summer’s worth of Spanish, beginning in June, and then take off for a year in Madrid. (And this from a kid who couldn’t wait to be done with high school Spanish!) Those of you who exchange e-mail with Dan will have noticed that he no longer relies on English for his Macintosh operating system.

Susan has half a year of independent living under her belt down in Bethesda, Md. She has a nice little seventh-floor studio apartment that’s close to the essentials (Metro station across the street, Starbucks a block away, pilates class within walking distance, assigned parking space in the basement) and furnished with images of Zoë, our ancient chocolate lab. Her first real job comes with a title — assistant registrar — and is fairly close to the work she was doing as an intern for community arts organizations in and around Boston. Susan’s next step may be some graduate work in interior design (her parents are already satisfied customers); she’ll take a preliminary course at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington this spring.

Anson loves Brown. He has experienced the thrill of 15-hour sessions in the Center for Information Technology, writing and debugging code for computer science projects (he sends e-mail that’s time-stamped at 4:15 a.m.); is keeping his hand in Spanish; has explored international relations in one of Brown’s freshman seminars; has made lots of new friends, including a Thursday-night “We Like to Eat Wings” Facebook group that chomps through tens of dozens of Buffalo wings at a hole-in-the-wall eatery on Thayer Street. One of his big interests is WBRU-FM 95.5, southern New England’s rock station, where he signed on as a marketing intern and was made a paid staff member by semester’s end. Even his endocrinologist asks him for swag.* On the way home for Christmas break, Anson observed ruefully that his Brown career was already one-eighth over.

On the Mark and Alli front, it’s all about Providence Singers and the blueberry patch. It’s been a huge year for the Singers: our first non-residential office, new additional paid staff, our first performance at Lincoln Center in NYC (offering the world première of a piece by Dave Brubeck with the Dave Brubeck Quartet), a monumental performance of the Verdi Requiem with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, and half the season (with one more world première) still to come. Alli continues as executive director and soprano; Mark serves as tenor and de facto webmaster (www.providencesingers.org). The Singers has been a part of our lives for 20 years and just keeps getting better and better.

As do the blueberries. The bushes went berserk this year, producing gallons of berries from July almost into October — as fast as Alli could pick them. The freezer still has whole compartments full of frozen blues. Although we have perfected our humane bird defenses, we do worry a bit about the visual appeal of The Farm, now that we have a gorgeous new house being built on the lot next to us, the deck of which will overlook our agricultural operations. That will probably require a ramping up of the weed abatement program and the installation of flowerbeds along the perimeter. The real problem is what to do with garden waste. The vacant lot had been a wonderful place for compost heaps ...

Work continues also on The Muellers in America, a digitized archive of family history that is nominally about Mark’s maternal great-grandparents and their descendants but keeps turning into a decidedly variegated family tree. Chinese, French, Irish, Scots, and others show up here and there, and at one point the trail leads to an arid mountainside in Arizona, where one of the forebears supervised construction of an enormous brick oven to bake daily bread for hundreds of early 20th-century miners.** (Modern Muellers have found the site and hauled away souvenirs, including bricks and the massive iron oven door.) We’re up to version 1.2, and the next step might be to install the whole thing on a website ... but we digress.

Our real purpose is to let you know that life here in Rhode Island is good and very interesting and getting more so. We hope that you are finding the same where you are and that you can make time — this week would be a great opportunity — to reflect on the year past and the year ahead, to restore a little balance if need be, and to prepare yourself for all the wonderful things that 2006 will surely bring you, courtesy of the good wishes constantly streaming your way from our household here by the sea.

With love,

Mark and Alli
Dan, Susan, Anson

* Swag is a blanket term for all the give-away knick-knacks and marketing frou-frou that attend rock radio marketing: Heineken baseball bats, T-shirts, keychains, etc. As near as we can tell, it derives either from the word for a traveler’s bundle of essential supplies or from the bag of booty that highwaymen gathered.

** That would be Uncle Bill Mueller, Opa Mueller’s kid brother, who was apprenticed in a machine shop after eighth grade and ended up as vice president of the Peterson Oven Co. of Chicago.