Christmas 2016:
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.

Wednesday 7 December 2016    
The fourth Stollen of Advent    

Dear Friends,

Yes, our greetings are arriving earlier this year — partly an effort to blow on the coals of holiday memories, thereby restoring equilibrium, and partly an effort to put 2016 behind us as soon as we possibly can. No matter what your political persuasion, it’s been a nasty, brutal year.

But we are here to tell you that 2016 also brought some powerful happiness. Thomas Crawley Knowles arrived in Washington D.C. on July 30 — the same day, coincidentally, on which his great-grandmother was celebrating her 97th birthday. It’s hard for first-time grandparents not to gush, but we’ve been dumbfounded at how quickly and how deeply Thomas has burrowed into our lives. We have officially styled ourselves Oma and Opa. Susan and George are making every moment count. In January, Susan returns to teaching art; Thomas will be in daycare close to her school.

Here on the Lane, the adjustment to life without day jobs continues. There are two offices on the second floor now, the latest painted a restful medium gray and equipped with a large writer’s desk. The desk, made entirely of hard rock maple, was designed by Mark and built last summer largely by Brother Jim in his Brooklyn studio, with semi-regular working visits from Mark. A highly functional piece if we do say.

There is the Dreck of Medicare with its Decisions That Must Be Made (Mark) and the Choices That Tide a Person Over (Alli) until Medicare eligibility arrives. But the new phase of life is also bringing its rewards. We motivate each other to keep up our joint Monday-Wednesday-Friday sessions at the gym. There’s much more music (including a blockbuster two-and-a-half-hour concert of all five Prokofiev piano concerti at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with Anson and Reva and a thirtieth anniversary long weekend at Tanglewood).

We’re finding lots of time for the Providence Singers, both as board members and as singers on the risers. We’ll be performing two world premières this spring and making our fourth commercial recording next month — Dan Forrest’s Requiem for the Living, which we sang in 2014. A fund that honored Alli when she stepped down as executive director continues the Singers’ participation in a national commissioning consortium. The choral future looks bright.

Gustatory news from Madrid continues strong. Five restaurants, a bar, and a new takeout and delivery service now operate under Dan’s Tierra banner, and Tierra restaurants six and seven should be in operation before Valentine’s Day. Dan and his executive staff seem to have a lot of fun building the enterprise, to judge from their online ads. One has an animated burrito flying above Madrid to announce their delivery service, and another features noted soprano (and Dan’s aunt) Anne McMillan, who is so transported by her first bite of a Tierra lunch that she leaps up and bursts into an aria from La Traviata.

Our Spanish trip last May included a visit to Granada, where our first international Airbnb experience had us in a wonderful apartment in the Old City at the foot of the Alhambra palace and fortress. The more we see of Spain — San Sebastián, Bilbao, the Rioja wine country, Madrid, Segovia, Seville, Pedraza, Toledo and the rest — the more we grow to love it, and the better we appreciate Dan’s decision to set up shop in Madrid. We’ll return in the spring to visit the newest restaurant — Tierra Cuatro Caminos — with a side trip to a destination in Europe that we haven’t settled on yet, although Vienna, Paris, and Venice are all in the running.

News from Brooklyn continues exotic and upbeat. Reva was part of Facebook’s team at some of the primary debates and both national presidential conventions. Anson moved to a new architectural firm in Manhattan in September. His growing cabinet-making skills have produced a handsome new bookcase that organizes space in their apartment. They are just back from a family trip to India. (Our various devices suddenly lit up with photographs of elephant tours and the Taj Mahal.)

Well of course there was a garden. The star of this year’s harvest was rhubarb butter, a new preparation that involves cooking down five-pound batches of rhubarb with fresh orange zest and juice. There is no added pectin and not nearly as much sugar as one would use to make jam or jelly. The result is tart but intensely flavored, working well on toast but also with yogurt. We have just enough pint jars in the pantry to get us through winter.

Our major new local experience, after 30 years in Portsmouth: An international polo operation about 10 minutes south of our house. Amazing. Horses thundering everywhere, referees on horseback (how else?), arcane rules carefully explained, chukkas. The polo organization has maybe seventy tailgating plots for rent at each session. At midnight on a certain date, it posts all the summer’s rentals on its website and most are gone within the day. We snagged one this year and invited friends to picnic with us. It felt like a day at Wrigley Field and a trip to the Brookfield Zoo all rolled together.

We’ve also spent days in the grandstand at the Tennis Hall of Fame tournament, attended more of the Newport Music Festival, taken more frequent hikes at Sachuest Point and along Second Beach, planned some travels (neither of has visited the Grand Canyon, a state of affairs we will fix in 2017), perfected (almost) the informal elegance of Cocktail Hour, and have begun a serious round of home improvements and deferred maintenance. Alli continues her ever-deeper musical and technical explorations at the Steinway. Mark has redesigned much of the Frau Erica Project, a website that chronicles the first 151 years of Muellers in America (1,021 people and counting).

On balance, we’re finding that the New Phase of life suits us well. We recommend it to anyone who is teetering on the brink of Decision, and to those of you who might have a few decades before the Decision is even visible on the horizon, we offer the reassurance that there is every reason to look forward.

In the meantime, we hope this finds you well and engaged in lots of fulfilling enterprises and projects. Give us a shout and let us know how that’s going.

With love,

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