Christmas 2021:
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 18, 2021
Two Stollens before Christmas

Dear Friends,

Drive about four hours north from Athens, follow a narrow two-lane road back and forth as it switchbacks its way up the side of a mountain, and you will enter the small mountain village of Agios Lavrentios (Αγιος Λαυρεντιος) in the region where the Centaurs come from. We met no Centaurs, but the week we spent there in late August easily sits atop our list of great memory-producing international travels. It was, after all, the wedding of our son Dan Crawley and Aliki Kantikou.

There is not enough time and space here to do it all justice — the picturesque town, winding stone streets, plaza, buildings, views, food, hikes, but mostly the people. We enjoyed meeting Aliki’s parents (Kostas and Lina) and brother (Dimitri), and we were happy to see our siblings and spouses. It was an international gathering. We spoke a bit of German with a few guests including Dan and Aliki’s neighbor Willi (Mark’s German was said to be clear but a bit 19th century-ish). The ceremonies, receptions, dinners and other events were wonderfully memorable. Even the end of our visit was extraordinary — in a hotel room below the Parthenon, where we observed the entire illuminated Acropolis from our balcony.

Here on the Lane, we’ve had a longer than usual Advent season — about double, actually. Since Tuesday, November 2, we have been looking forward to Alli’s homecoming and we hope that by the time you read this, her advent will have been realized. As we write, she is at the grandiloquently named Grand Islander, a skilled nursing facility in Middletown, recovering from hairline fractures of the S1 and S2 sacral vertebrae, the result of a 1 a.m. fall. (Alli just cuts to the chase and refers to her injury as “a broken butt.”) Sacral injuries are slow to mend, we were told, but CAT scans show these are well on the way to being good-as-new. That leaves Alli’s continuing struggle with MSA and orthostatic hypotension (what Alli calls “the wobblies”), but continued recovery at home with good home-health aides seven days a week will be a welcome step forward.

We remain transfixed by the march of generations. Overlapping visits from the Brooklyn and Richmond families had all four grandchildren spending the Fourth of July at Oma and Opa’s house. Archie, 3, and Leia, not quite 7 months, arrived July 1 with Anson and Reva for a four-day visit. Thomas, almost 5, and James, almost 3, arrived on July 3 with Susan and George.

It wasn’t all Brios. We harvested a nice crop of sour cherries, filled the freezer, and made a dozen jars of jam. Pitting the cherries used to be a chore, but when you show little kids how to squish out the pits, it becomes a wonderful summer game with overtones of Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence. And what gardener would not enjoy seeing a 3-year-old grandson excitedly yank beets out of the ground for the evening dinner?

Certainly, there was a garden this year, though the blueberry bushes put out more leaves than berries, which was disappointing. This growing season’s major discovery was succotash, a deep purple-maroon dry bean which, when combined with corn and a few options, yields succotash, the eponymous dish said to have been served at the first Thanksgiving. Mark has grown lots of heirloom vegetables, but succotash is an ancient heirloom original to Rhode Island’s native Narragansett tribe. They were among the indigenous New Englanders who schooled the Pilgrims in North American agriculture, including the trick of growing certain crops together, chiefly corn, succotash and squash. It’s a hardy, strong climbing vine that we’ll see much more of next year.

Change is coming to the manse. A second-floor master bedroom doesn’t make as much sense as it once did, so we are moving into guest quarters on the first floor, probably next week. The first-floor bedroom has a new bed, a new television, and a new HomePod mini, which provides an intercom service to other HomePod minis in our kitchen and in Mark’s second-floor office, in addition to all the other Siri-inspired services. We also have a full pallet of green-dipped shingles stored in the garage, a happy ending to what could have been a nightmare supply-chain problem that would have delayed completion of the project until sometime in 2023. They will be installed on the south exterior wall overlooking the garden, the final piece of a home improvement project begun in 2019.

We are slowly getting used to life without weekly choral singing. We both sang Messiah in 2019, which turned out to be the Singers’ last public performance until last month. Mark kept going with the virtual performance season last year, listening to the accompanist on his AirPod Pros and singing into his iPhone’s voice memo app. It was an interesting experience, and the resulting virtual choir performances were pretty good, but five or six dozen voices singing by themselves wasn’t the same. (Listen to a sample at https://www.providencesingers.org/ ) We are now both emeritus/a members and try to stay in touch.

There is one touching bit of choral news, though. In March, the Providence Singers will offer the world premiere of a newly commissioned work by Julian Wachner for chorus and orchestra, part of the organization’s 50th anniversary celebration. It’s a setting of Sara Teasdale’s “A November Night.” Artistic Director Christine Noel dropped by the house and gave us copies of the choral score and the full score. We were delightfully stunned to discover that the piece is “Dedicated to Allison McMillan and Mark Nickel in grateful recognition of their commitment to choral music and their long history of leadership with the Providence Singers.”

The work’s title: We Two Alone.

With love and best wishes,

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