Christmas 2014:
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 21, 2014
The Second Stollen of Advent

Dear Friends,

We have been in vocal Code Red here on the Lane — NyQuil, DayQuil, saltwater gargle, palliatives and ministrations of all kinds, whatever seemed worth a try — to get our cold-ravaged voices back in shape for the annual Messiah with the Rhode Island Philharmonic.

It worked, we are pleased to report. The big test came yesterday, with a back-to-back dress rehearsal and performance. The Providence Singers presented a full house with a fine rendering last night — melismas, high A’s, subito pianissimos, the works. Only one slight misgiving: This annual start of the Christmas season came later than usual this year — December 20 — which may account for the production and consumption of just a single Stollen. (No. 2 is proofing and will head for the oven in an hour or so.)

New here on the Lane this year: A full-time resident. After 16 years as CEO of the Providence Singers, Alli acquired the permanent title of Executive Director Emerita and has dipped her toe into the world of retirement. The interest and involvement in choral music continues, even expands — Alli is now on the Providence Singers board and continues on the board of Chorus America — but at a much more manageable level of stress. The daily routine now includes at least one long walk, a session at the piano getting the Beethoven sonatas back into her fingers, chipping away at decades of deferred maintenance (including, inter alia, the first visit from a chimneysweep in 28 years of fireplace use), and reconfiguring household finances against that time when another toe might test the waters. (No word on that issue.)

Brown University’s semiquincentenary — its 250th anniversary — was an important theme this year, not just because Mark continues in Brown’s employ, but because both Alli and Anson returned for semiquincentenary-infused reunions, their fifth and fortieth. Doing the math — no snickering, you math-whiz millennials — shows that Mark has been on hand for 13.6 percent of Brown’s entire history and has served with 28.9 percent of its presidents.

The millennials, by the way, are up to interesting things. The raw space Mark and Alli inspected last summer in Madrid — a gutted former bank — is now Dan’s third Tierra restaurant, with plans for a couple more already taking shape. Susan and George have moved on from Dupont Circle to new 11th-floor digs father up the Red Line to the northwest and closer to their work — Susan as an art teacher for D.C. public schools, and George as digital communications specialist for a national youth advocacy organization. Anson and Reva are putting the finishing touches on plans for their wedding next June in Brooklyn. Anson is about to enter his final graduate semester in architecture at the Pratt Institute, and Reva has plunged happily into her new job with Facebook.

In the resurrections department, our three dwarf sour cherry trees had been suffering terribly from two hostile attacks that withered the fruit and made the leaves drop in early June. Mark had the power saw out and was about to deliver the coup de grace, if that’s the correct French idiom. A gardening consultant agreed they should be removed, but suggested one last-ditch effort: radical pruning (with shears dunked into isopropyl alcohol between snips) and full-scale nitrogen therapy. We did that in early spring, and voila! We have sour cherries in the freezer and three dozen jars of sour cherry jam in the pantry — and the trees had leaves into October.

Other garden news is a little strange. Mark continues to channel Frau Erica, his maternal great-grandmother, a cookbook author and domestic advice columnist for German newspapers serving huge Midwestern immigrant communities. We grow several varieties of cabbage out back — produce that is shredded, salted, and packed into a two-gallon crock to ferment its way to sauerkraut. That much you may remember from last year. This year, the practice has spread. Frau Erica’s sauerkraut procedure now has devotees in San Diego and Bend, Oregon, with some of them prowling hardware stores for three- or five-gallon crocks. Brothers Joel and James helped put down a 10-pound batch during a visit last summer. Kraut-making is showing up on foodie websites, vegan blogs, and probiotic social media. It’s easy to do. Frau Erica is pleased.

But back to that toe-in-the-water business. One of Mark’s big questions is whether it is possible to fill all that extra free time in productive and rewarding ways. The question cracks Alli up, and she is ready with lots of fresh, fascinating, affirmative answers. She is finding that she now knows how to play Beethoven in musical, expressive ways that weren’t accessible back in the day. It’s now a matter of regaining the technique to realize her interpretations. Something to do with a more mature perspective, she thinks. There may be a new round of formal piano lessons in her future. And that same perspective makes even the day-to-day activities new.

We had a dose of that during our summer visit to Spain, buzzing up to San Sebastian in our little rented Fiat, heading west to Bilbao, then south through the Rioja wine country. It was harvest time on the high plateau, with nearly 360-degree vistas of wheat and other grains, broken only by distant combines. Very much like Mark’s year in Montana in the early 1970s. We stopped and gathered samples of wheat, oats, and what we thought may have been barley. In Bilbao, we spent a whole day at the Guggenheim, studying the special exhibits (and deciding that Yoko Ono’s work really doesn’t repay close attention), having a memorable experience with Richard Serra’s Matter of Time (ask us about “the differing effects on movement and perception” — and sound, we would add), and then going back to the top floor and slowly walking down just to experience the building again.

Much of what we encountered in Spain did, in fact, seem different this time, as if we were finding insights that might not have come to us even a decade ago. We hope that’s a large part of what lies ahead.

With love and wishes for a joyous holiday season,

Mark and Alli
mark-nickel@cox.net
401-835-1913
allison-mcmillan@cox.net
401-225-3659