Christmas 2020:
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.

Tuesday 15 December 2020
The Fourth Stollen of Advent

Dear Friends,

If you knew where to look and if you looked closely, you might see little scars of pine tree sap on our living room ceiling, markers laid down by the too-tall, beef-fed Christmas trees we’ve cut down at the tree farm in Middletown over the decades. That wasn’t a problem this year, though. We’ve downsized substantially, just the two of us, with a cute little balsam barely chest-high. No need to move furniture or even rearrange spaces; it fits nicely right next to Alli’s piano.

Truth be told, it was a little disappointing at first, and there was a mighty temptation to think of our downsized little tree* as an appropriate terminal punctuation for 2020, an annus horribilis, to borrow a useful phrase from Elizabeth II. But dressed in lights and ornaments, our little tree* grew brighter and so did our recollection of the year past.

The year improved considerably at 1:45 p.m. on Thursday, December 10, when Leia Reva Nickel arrived in Brooklyn, all 7 pounds, 11 ounces, and 20.5 inches of her. Anson, Reva, and new Big Brother Archie are happy and healthy, and the pure joy of their news is brightening lives for a wide international family circle of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends. We look forward to meeting her in person in January.

We saw positive social change in action during an October trip to Richmond, where Susan, George, Thomas and James live a block away from Monument Avenue. Stonewall Jackson, Jeb Stuart and other larger-than-life equestrian figures have been removed, and the traffic circle with General Robert E. Lee now features a blindingly colorful array of graffiti and public art. We hiked around town a bit, hunted up some pre-Halloween pumpkins with the grandsons, built Brio layouts, lit up the backyard fire pit, and had a wonderful visit.

Covid pretty much flat-lined the curve of our international travel this year, but Dan managed to visit us here in Rhode Island for a couple weeks in November. It was perfect winter golfing weather and we took full advantage. Dan and Aliki have had a busy year in Madrid, Dan growing his restaurant business under very difficult industry conditions and Aliki launching her new jewelry design and fabrication enterprise. They are also revising their apartment as time and occasional lockdowns permit. We’re eager to visit them in Madrid again when international travel gets a little closer to normal.

Life here on the lane has been quiet and careful this year. The most noticeable change in our weekly routine was the blunt-force trauma visited upon choral singing by the pandemic. Change came suddenly and early for the Providence Singers. In early March we were two weeks away from a gala concert, complete with silent auction and festive buffet on the 17th floor of the Biltmore Hotel. But all that came to a halt a little more than a week before show time. The Philharmonic had to cancel the balance of its season and therefore ours (we were well into our rehearsals for two performances of the Verdi Messa da Requiem). A faint glimmer of hope that the virus would pass was soon extinguished, and plans for even part of a normal 2020-21 season — it was to be our 50th — changed utterly.

The whole experience highlighted how significant choral singing has been for us and for nearly 100 fellow members of the chorus. It’s far more than the satisfaction of discovering and learning the music, which is substantial. It’s the chorus experience that we miss. We’ve moved to Zoom rehearsals, and our live concerts have become “virtual choir” presentations. No one ever suggested that digital efforts would replace the in-person live experience, but the virtual choir presentations are amazing in their own way (more than 80 individually recorded voices singing their parts magically become one). Listen to Franz Biebl’s Ave Maria on the Singers’ YouTube channel. You can get there from our homepage — www.providencesingers.org.

The garden has been a constant, reassuring presence in a weird year. The freezer is full of blueberries, pesto, and chopped jalapeño, and the pantry has more than a year’s supply of pickled beets, home-grown popcorn, and various jams. Not much has changed otherwise except for the discovery of a great recipe for no-added-pectin strawberry-rhubarb jam (rhubarb from our garden and strawberries from a U-Pick farm here on the island). It requires at least 90 minutes of constant stirring and careful cooking, but it’s well worth the trouble.

We had a nearly perfect six-month record for our Monday-Wednesday-Friday gym sessions until the governor shut down all the gyms and fitness centers a couple weeks ago. Limited resumption may be a week away — or not, depending on how the Covid rates look. Meanwhile, we’re doing our best to keep moving. While he was here, Dan designed an exercise routine to help Alli with her continuing balance issues and to advance the rehab of her left arm, perfectly healed but still not quite back to full power since the broken wrist late in January. Piano playing also helps with that.

We are within reach of Christmas but winter really hasn’t shown up yet. Lawns are green, random garlic bulbs have sprouted in the garden, some hardy herbs and a few Brussels sprouts remain to be harvested. There are periodic, almost hopeful weather alerts that never seem to materialize. In three weeks or so, a tree crew will arrive to trim and remove some limbs from trees that have grown across the stone wall and now interfere with our Japanese zelkova. Rhode Island’s initial shipment of Pfizer’s vaccine has just arrived. In some ways it feels a bit like spring already, with some encouraging signs — or maybe we’ve just had more of 2020 than we’d like to admit.

Either way, hope is a precious commodity. We hope you find whatever you need to refresh perspectives, to restore any depleted reserves of energy, to root out any boredom, and to embrace the possibilities of what will surely be a much better year.

With much love,

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

* (From e.e. cummings, “Chansons Innocentes II,” in XLI Poems, 1925):

little tree …
look   the spangles
that sleep all the year in a dark box
dreaming of being taken out and allowed to shine
…

put up your little arms
and I’ll give them to you to hold
every finger shall have its ring
and there won’t be a single place dark or un-happy