Christmas 2008:
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.

December 22, 2008
The Sixth Stollen of Advent

The Messiah was late this year; so was everything else.

When Mark, Alli and Susan finally set off through the snow to get a Christmas tree, there were almost none to be had. The lots were closed, their unsold trees already turned to mulch. Even Home Depot was done for the season and appeared to be thinking ahead to spring gardens and planting time. We did find one at our sixth stop, a garden center — “All the way to the end of the parking lot and turn left, behind the manure” — and now have it installed in the living room. Awaiting ornaments.

Dan and Anson will arrive late on Tuesday — maybe Wednesday for Dan, who is driving out from Minnesota — and all five of us should be here in Portsmouth for Christmas. It’s been a year or two since we’ve all been on the same continent.

Dan is back from two years in Madrid and has finished his first semester of law school at the University of Minnesota. From what we can tell, the Midwest agrees with him, except for the part about snow and freezing temperatures. (When he was hunting for an apartment, he wondered why indoor parking was such an important selling point; now he knows.) We always figured Dan would enjoy the study of law and the prospect of a career built on relentless argument.

Susan is back from Washington and has finished her first semester of graduate work at American University. She’s studying the management and executive direction of nonprofit arts organizations, and it’s been interesting to hear her occasional observations on the Providence Singers. Variable pricing schemes, advertising strategies, marketing approaches. There may be some time abroad in Susan’s future — another visit to France and perhaps a full summer of total-immersion French. Last summer, Dan and Suz both visited Fabienne, one of our wonderful au pairs from years ago, who now lives in Nantes with her husband Sylvain and their three children. Next semester, Susan will be interning at the Hillwood Estate, Museum and Gardens — “Where Fabulous Lives.”

Anson is about to embark on his final semester at Brown. The bursar’s office has his tuition check, the final pre-registration is all set, and the Class of 2009 Commencement is squarely in his sights. It’s turned out to be a great time to study economics, but perhaps not so great a time to be entering the job market and trying to launch a career. Anson spent the summer working for a municipal bond outfit in Manhattan and marveled that people would spend whole days in offices doing what they were doing. He lived in a sublet at his cousin Adele’s apartment.

On the home front, it was an enormous year for the Providence Singers, culminating in the Singers’ first commercial CD, a recording of Lukas Foss’ The Prairie, currently the 171,001st most popular recording at Amazon.com and working its way up the chart. We have an interesting premise for these recordings. We try to find significant works by American composers that are no longer being heard. The Prairie was the one that launched Foss on his composing career (he was 21 at the time), but it had not been performed since the mid-1980s, and the only recording was an out-of-print LP from the 1970s. For a couple native Midwesterners, the combination of Lukas Foss and Carl Sandburg was irresistible. Our second recording — Dominick Argento’s Jonah and the Whale — has been taped and is now in the editing process. There’s more under “current season” at www.providencesingers.org

Choral music also took Mark and Alli to Copenhagen in July for the world symposium on choral music, which happens every three years. It was a perspective-changing week, with workshops, master classes (with Eric Whitacre, among others), and choral concerts of breath-taking excellence. Those happened at least twice daily, including the definitive Brahms Requiem by the Berliner Rundfunkchor and a concert by an ensemble from Iceland that left the audience sitting in stunned silence. (When we finally got up and left, we discovered that the ensemble had reformed just outside the church doorway and sang to us as we walked out.) The next symposium will be in the Patagonia in 2011. We’ll be there.

The nest may be empty here, but the world outside is booming. Massive blueberry crops are now entirely unremarkable, of course, but the three dwarf Montmorency cherry trees went from maybe a dozen cherries in 2007 to freezerloads in 2008. We have also two dozen jars of cherry jam on hand and pints of canned whole cherries. We now have a strawberry patch, which required an extension of Mark’s handcrafted perimeter sprinkling system, various ball-valves, drip hoses and so forth. There are now voles abiding in the fields, however. The little buggers gnawed their way through the entire beet crop. Maybe 2009 will finally be the year for peach trees. It turns out that they thrive in Rhode Island.

It has snowed heavily in the last couple days — enough to ensure that Christmas will be white, if somewhat sloppy. We enjoyed singing that late Messiah (December 20). We have Lebkuchen, Springerle and Stollen on hand and the prospect of two whole weeks of free time (Brown has closed until January 5). The planets are in alignment for throttling back, completing our disengagement from campaign politics (our thanks to Rod Blogojevich and Al Franken for attenuating that disengagement), and letting the batteries recharge slowly. We hope you and yours are finding time and opportunity to the same.

With love,

Mark and Alli