Christmas 2007:
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.

Dear Friends,

The doorbell rings and the UPS guy hands me something called a sling box. Anson arrives the next day, per his older brother’s instructions, takes the sling box down to the guest room and hooks it up. There are several international consultations via Skype. I later learn that all 500 of our cable TV channels are now viewable in real time on a certain Macintosh in Madrid. How else to watch American football? (Relax, I am told: It’s legal.)

The nest may be fully empty now (even our gentle chocolate lab Zoë is no longer with us), but life here on Gideon Lawton Lane is geting pleasantly larger and more complex with a global reach. (Alli and Mark recommend Avignon and Paris and are curious about Copenhagen.)

Dan has finished his master’s degree in Spanish — his Middlebury College diploma arrived without ceremony here in Portsmouth — but he is not finished with his love of life in Spain. He has been living in Madrid for the year, planning his next venture, which is looking more and more like law school back in the States. Mark and Alli are flying to Madrid the day after Christmas to visit family and do some traveling (Barcelona, Seville, and elsewhere) with Dan as their guide and translator.

Susan is spending a year in the AmeriCorps VISTA program, working as a community liaison officer for a charter school in Pawtucket. “It was one thing to know I was working in an underserved and economically and socially disadvantaged community,” she wrote, “but it was another thing to experience it.” She is impressed and inspired by the dedication of teachers at Blackstone Academy and has grown to love the school and her work there — especially the difference the school makes in the lives of its students. She’s living in a studio apartment in Providence and often has dinner with her parents on Tuesday nights before Providence Singers rehearsals.

Anson is halfway through his junior year at Brown, officially majoring in the international relations flavor of political science with enough economics thrown in to consider a double major. He’s still on the air at WBRU, the Rock of Southern New England. He and a close group of seven or eight suitemates will be spending their senior year living in a triple-decker in Fox Point, a short walk from campus. The lease is signed. Anson is eager to do his own cooking. He’s getting quite good at it.

Alli’s involvement in choral leadership went national this year. She was elected to the board of Chorus America, the premier supporting organization for choral programs across the country. It was a great compliment to her, as well as a feather in the cap of the Providence Singers. Alli’s election was consistent with the Providence Singers’ largest-ever season, which included the group’s first federal grant and an American choral arts weekend that featured three world premières.

The Singers parlayed the centerpiece of that weekend — the world’s first full performance of Lukas Foss’s The Prairie in more than 20 years — into its first professionally done studio recording. The recording session at Mechanics Hall in Worcester has been edited and mastered. With luck, you’ll be able to hear the Providence Singers performing Lukas Foss sometime in 2008.

Why yes, thanks for asking, there is news from the garden — news of an almost spiritual nature. Mark and his three brothers spent a week in the Midwest last summer, tracking down Mueller-Nickel historical sites and celebrating what would have been their parents’ 100th birthday (Hib and Addie were born on the same day, same month, same year). Mark returned from that trip with two shovelfuls of dirt, one from the original Mueller farm near Kendallville, Indiana, the other from Uncle Ernst and Aunt Erna’s farm near Janesville, Minnesota. A little rototilling, a little Haufenmist, and the historically enriched garden served up a bumper crop of popcorn, asparagus, tomatoes, jalapeño peppers and several other crops. We have shelves full of blueberry marmalade and jalapeño jam and bags of berries in the freezer.

One of Mark’s projects, inspired by that visit to the Midwest, is to create a family history Web space — www.frauerica.org, named for the matriarch of the Mueller clan — where all the photographs, journals, translations, draft cards, correspondence, obituaries, stories, and other archival materials can find a virtual home. It will always be a work in progress, but it’s far enough along that interested parties are likely to find things of interest. Curious readers might wish to try the English translation of Frau Erica's recipe for Großer Hefenkloß, a giant yeast dumpling roughly the size of a soccer ball. But we digress.

Maybe it’s the family archives project. Maybe it’s the gradual emergence of children into independent adulthood. Maybe it’s having an aunt and uncle on the scene in New York when trouble happens (Susan’s Corolla scrunched between two 18-wheelers; Anson at Beth Israel with food poisoning — everyone’s fine). It’s probably all of the above and more. But we are finishing the year with a heightened appreciation of family and friends — the people who understand as only family and close friends can, who help, support, delight, and amuse. The people who just know.

Great job, all of you. We hope this letter finds you happy, healthy, and immersed in wonderful activities and creative projects.

With love and best wishes for the New Year,

Mark and Alli