Christmas 2011:
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 21, 2011
The Fourth Stollen

Dear Friends,

The cardoons returned this year all by themselves. They were our least favorite crop from the garden last year, so we did not replant. But the cardoons turned out to be drop-dead gorgeous in their second coming. They have craggy, freakish stalks and leaves crowned by intensely lavender fronds of which the bumblebees could not get enough. Who knew? We still didn’t eat them, but we admired them all season and then used them in dried flower arrangements. There is hope, you see: Even a ho-hum vegetable, dropped from the gardener’s list, can become the most beautiful flower on the property.

Dan has been a welcome and fairly frequent presence this year. After completing law school at the University of Minnesota, he decamped for Madrid equipped with a plan for opening his own business. He’s been back several times to organize his company and get the necessary visas (we had never heard of apostille documents; they sound vaguely theological). We have also visited him in Madrid, where he lives in a small apartment on the top floor with downtown Madrid at his feet. We like Madrid a lot too.

Susan has finished her program at American University and is now certified for teaching art in K–12 schools, although the paperwork hasn’t quite caught up. Her first position is a temporary one, filling in for a teacher who is on maternity leave. Landing that was a combination of a chance conversation and Susan’s knack for initiating things. (It was Susan, after all, who organized her grade-school friends into Portsmouth’s first dog-walking cooperative.) She loves being an art teacher. Smokes, who was a little puppy last Christmas, has grown into a fine young Lab.

Anson and Reva are living happily in midtown Manhattan, working at their jobs but also applying to graduate schools. Anson’s interest in architecture is still growing after a little more than a year of finishing his post-graduate year at Columbia. He has been looking at programs, assembling his design portfolio, and starting to submit applications. The New York Legal Assistance Group, where he works, relocated to offices in Wall Street just in time for the Occupy Movement to show up and make life interesting.

Mark and Alli discovered Florence this year, hiking through nearly every street in the old city. On our second morning we climbed to the top of the Duomo, surveyed the whole of Florence, traced our previous day’s route, and dissolved into uncontrollable laughter. We had each been very certain of the route ... and we were both plainly very lost. Still, that’s how we blundered into David.

Some good advice from the hotel clerk got us to the Uffizi Gallery at 8 a.m. on a Sunday when, as promised, there were no lines. We walked right in and were able to double back for another trip through the galleries before the crush of visitors arrived. And on our last evening, walking along a narrow cobblestone street, we followed strains of Monteverdi and soon found ourselves standing in the street listening to a chorus rehearsing on the second floor. We listened, then applauded vigorously, just the two of us.

We are starting to focus on what is shaping up to be the Semester of the Requiem. The Providence Singers performs Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem in early March. There’s plenty to learn about beyond mastering the music. Explicating the poetry of Wilfred Owen takes Mark back to his English lit college days. The War Requiem is still powerful in its 50th year. The interplay of Britten’s pacifism, the Latin Mass, and Owen’s verse from the trenches speaks truth to a world that remains so busily, so heartily at war.

Then in May we’ll do the Brahms Ein deutsches Requiem with the Rhode Island Philharmonic. That means, among other things, that we will have a chance to sing “Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen” (How lovely are your dwelling places), a heart-stoppingly beautiful piece that is difficult to sing because of the Kloß im Hals (roughly a “lump in the throat,” although the German phrase involves a dumpling).

But that’s all in the future. We’re settling in for the end of the year now. There are walks to be had along Second Beach and Sachuest Point (beachcombing in December is a great idea), books to read, projects to write, music to make and to listen to, and probably enough firewood left from our last half-cord to get us comfortably into January.

We won’t be turning off our devices and getting off the grid this year, though. At Steve Jobs’ passing, our quick inventory of Apple devices — iPhones, iPads, iMacs, iPods — stood at an even dozen, and another half-dozen guest devices will be joining us soon here on the Lane. We will definitely be taking things more slowly, though — de-stressing and spending time on projects and activities for which we don’t always take the time. But staying connected, we’re finding, is an important part of the season.

We’re hoping these last two weeks of the year are easy, renewing, recharging, and fulfilling for you.

With love,

Mark and Alli