The Eulogy I Didn’t Give

“Why didn’t you speak?” Lee, my sister, asked on our way home from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania.  “I thought you would.”

“Me, too,” I answer limply. I thought I would but listening to those who really knew our two cousins, I felt mute.  My mother built her life, our lives, around her family. My father’s relatives felt important to me, but unfamiliar.   

“It’s too far,” my Lee texted, when we learned that our cousin Margy’s daughter, Megan, who died of breast cancer, and our first cosin, Johnny, would be celebrated in Manomet at the end of July. “We can’t go.”

“Agreed,” I texted back.

“Beth found us a place to stay,” she texted a few days later.  “I think we should go.”

So, we went, my sister driving and me as navigator.

Manomet is to the Young clan what Eagles Mere is to our family—generational webs with family shorthand, shared lingo and plenty of in-jokes. The places, themselves, summon us, nestle into us.  We return, pulled by the lake as the Youngs are pulled by the ocean. As Bill tells me, “I’ve realized the memories are with the people; the walls, themselves, are less important.”

As soon as we arrived, I noted the blue of the ocean in the sun. I recognize Aunt Peggy’s inimitable blue Flair pen print on the back of photographs.  I am enchanted by the lapis lazuli blue hydrangeas.  I miss my dad and Aunt Peggy’s blue eyes, so different from my own brown ones. This enclave centers on sand and boats, gray-shingled cottages, rituals. 

I knew Megan only slightly, meeting her last at my own wedding. Aunt Peggy, my dad’s sister had chronicled the event on the back of a photo of the Robb family—Eagles Mere, 1985. That  picture and hundreds of other snapshots were displayed on a table. On a trifold collage, Megan sparkled, so full of life and love that it seemed inconceivable that she no longer lives.  There she was: tall and laughing, vibrant with a wide smile, blonde and confident. On Facebook, as she battled metastatic breast cancer, I noted her siblings’ fierce love for her, felt the hole she left even far away in Ohio because I, too, lost a sibling long ago.  Her mom, my cousin, Margy, had died of breast cancer, too, in 2006.  In Susan’s littlest daughter, I glimpsed a face I knew from black and white photographs of my father and Aunt Peggy as toddler in the 1920’s.  Genes are powerful.

At the first gathering in Manomet, welcomed warmly by Mason—the last of my four sibling cousins—and Beth, his gracious wife, I felt a stranger to myself. All these Young cousins—generations of them—knew one another, their genealogy linked so intricately that they identified themselves by numbers that explained their place in the lineup: 5512, if I have it right, is my cousin Bill’s number.  I kept looking for Johnny and Aunt Peggy, remembering over and over that they were gone.  I felt like an intruder, as if we should have stayed away.  John and Megan were ours, too, but connected by a slender filament dangling from a complex web of Youngs.  My sister, braver than I, introduced herself, took an interest in other people—she was so much like my mother that I lost my breath. I shadowed her, appreciative. 

We introduced ourselves to Jacy, John’s oldest daughter, whom I had not seen since the 80’s.  She is a writer, too, and the mother of daughters. 

The next morning, singing, “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God,” under the tent, wrapped in the familiar Episcopalian liturgy our branch of the family shared with the Youngs, we bid goodbye to Megan. Her friends dressed in Lily Pulitzer, the bright fuchsia and orange hues an antidote to sorrow. “A symphony is never finished,” the minister explained. A symphony is never finished. We sat with gracious Kitty and her family from Charleston, with whom we had discovered mutual acquaintances. We ate lobster rolls.  I relaxed, moved by the group of people assembled to honor this young woman, moved by the composure her brother and sister showed.

Between events, Lee and I wandered, meeting my best friend to eat ice cream in Plymouth, strolling through touristy shops, marveling at the blue, blue hydrangeas.

“Maybe, in my next life, I’ll breed hydrangeas,” I suggested to my sister, who was patient with my continuous raptures about every different shade I noticed.

“The color depends on the acid in the soil” she reminded me, ever-practical.

At dinner the second night, eating pizza, I sat with Jake, John’s son, and his wife, Liz, talking about teaching and a writing and Covid. We are a family of writers and teachers.  Conversation felt more natural.  This group understood, perhaps, why we had come.  Beth brought out a friendship quilt--its twin hangs in our home.  Almost 200 years old and lovingly embroidered with names of people we do not know, its silk and velvet squares still dazzle. We think the quilts were made for Big Dada’s grandfather’s second wife, but there is no one left to verify our half-remembered truths.  I told Beth of restoring ours and sending daddy the bill.  Our father, the ultimate cheapskate, paid up when I said the expense was for family.

Beth shared a story about my dad being greeted by name by all the parking attendants at the Head of the Schuylkill.  Dad had rowed for Penn.  Paige, Mason and Beth’s daughter, rowed, too. Now, Riley, John’s youngest son, rows for Bates. I was happy to hear a story in which my dad was the hero, not the butt of a joke.  He was a man who, like Willy Loman, was liked, but not well-liked, but here, in this family space, he is loved.  We drank wine, shifted seats.  I chatted with Zora, seven, then moved inside and sat with my cousin, Mason, a sculptor—the first artist I ever knew—his arm in a pale blue cast.  We talked about our shared inconvenience in having only one hand…more stories spooled out.  Mason’s calm reassured me. I felt glad to be included in the circle of his love.

The next morning, in a leafy cemetery, his children offered the end of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Keat’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” from which Fitzgerald took his title for Tender is the Night;  an original poem by John’s daughter, Julia, Frost’s “Into My Own”. It seemed right to send John off on a wave of words; he was a lover of language.  We dropped handfuls of dirt into a hole too small for John’s gigantic presence.  That night, we gathered one final time beneath the tent.  By now, I knew the players, understood more about this side of the family with whom I almost lost touch when Aunt Peggy died. 

In childhood, my family would pile into the station wagon on Christmas afternoon, leaving our presents reluctantly, to drive to Montclair, where our father’s parents lived on Midland Avenue.  The Youngs would all be waiting for us—Aunt Peggy and Uncle Bill, Peter, Margy, Mason, Johnny—hungry, annoyed by the dried out turkey, but I, the littlest by far, remember Margy’s kindness and the the crew of hulking boy cousins—they tossed me high and laughed at my shrieks. We were surrounded by Toby pitchers and Christmas decorations, my third-floor bedroom papered in huge cabbage roses, my father’s childhood bedroom—where my brother slept—done up like a ship’s berth.

As an adult, no doubt prodded by my mother and Aunt Peggy, I went to see my then famous cousin Johnny in L.A. with my husband, Seth. Aunt Peggy was so, so proud of Johnny—whenever one of his shows was on TV, she wrote to tell me to tune in. She was a one-woman PR machine, so rich in love. After Jacy and Jake had gone to sleep, Johnny and Jenny and Seth and I spoke of Grammie’s twin brother, Frank Sliger, a shadowy figure neither of us ever knew, but whose absence intrigued us. His army records had been sealed, then burned, his discharge dishonorable.  Was he gay? A spy? John had worked hard to unravel the enigma—he loved puzzles.  Grammie, he told me, used to meet Frank on a street corner in Manhattan because Big Dada, her husband, did not approve of her dissolute brother.  What became of him?  We do not know. 

Johnny told me, too, the story of spending one winter after college in Manomet at one of the houses—the Tennis Court House? The Big House?  I cannot remember.  He went there to write.  A plumber, called to fix something, noticed a small lamp and said to Johnny, “I’ll give you a hundred bucks for that lamp.”  Though he could have used the cash, John declined. A few days later, the plumber—or perhaps it was an electrician—tripled his offer.  John still said no, but when the guy had gone, John picked up the little lamp, turned it over and saw that it was signed by Louis Tiffany.  It had been a wedding gift, Aunt Peggy confirmed, to Grammie and Big Dada, from the bank.  John’s wife, Claudia, told me it was still next to his bed when he died.

Perhaps I should have told that story that evening. Others offered funny anecdotes, a list of likes and dislikes, favorite memories. But I didn’t speak. 

A few years ago, Johnny and I had re-connected. Through a group email, we discovered we had a person in common.

“How do you know my cousin, Ann Klotz?” John typed to Merle.

“She’s my sister’s best friend,” Merle rejoined.

After that unexpected connection, my mother and Aunt Peggy gone, I asked John and Claudia to have lunch with me when work took me to L.A.  For several hours, we laughed as John told stories about my dad, his godfather.  John knew the contours of my family—my parents, my sister, my brother, our shared grandparents, his mother’s penchant for sending Advent calendars to every child she knew—including mine and his.  As we grew older, the gap between us narrowed. We saw each other again in Princeton, his alma mater, at a reading of his lovely book, Pieces of Glass, and it was that event that reconnected me to his nephew, Bill, Megan’s brother.  You need an American equivalent of Burke’s peerage to keep the relationships straight. We emailed from time to time, but, when I went to check, I realized it had been June of 2020 when we last wrote. When the pandemic came, I was buried under Covid protocols, and he contracted brain cancer and died fast. We were not close enough to know.

“You could have started with, “There are two sides to every story,”” my sister suggested on 495, “And I am here to tell the other side. 

“That would have been good,” I agreed.  But I didn’t speak.

Early that first morning, in the unfamiliar ocean landscape, Lee and I climbed down a steep set of stairs to the narrow beach. We walked along, looking for pieces of sea glass, noting the huge piles of rocks that seemed to have been recently erected to shore up the bluff.  Erosion, we’d been told, has threatened the houses built on the bluff.  The changing tides, the ocean’s power, climate change—all of it has rendered the old houses vulnerable.  Families, too, I think, erode when we do not take care. We believe we will have more time, but we wait to connect, wait to speak or write, and then people we love are swept away. 

I wish I’d spoken.  Going forward, I’d like to worry less about not belonging and keep hold of my new connection to my Young relatives. Forged in loss, these new relationships feel like a gift. Keeping hold feels like one way to honor those I miss. 

Boulders shoring up the bluff at Manomet

Mother's Day Swirl

Here is the Mother’s Day swirl in my head today.

1.      I remember laborious breakfasts lovingly prepared—cinnamon toast, Café Francais, delivered on a tray to me in bed.  Small art projects.  Matching dresses.  Cards.

2.     Before that, I remember the infertility years and weeping at the hoopla for a day I deemed commercial, but yearned to belong to all the same. A club whose membership eluded me.

3. On Friday night, we go to a skating show. In dusty rose, a bevy of teenage skaters pay tribute to one of their own, who died in June. I ache for that mother, a stranger to me, but one whose loss—2 girls—is so profound that I can barely comprehend its hugeness. I watch the girls on the ice, gliding, twirling, each bit of choreography performed with so much love. I weep. I cry that night for all the children gone too soon and the mothers who mourn.

4.     In my mind’s eye, I see my mother, waving goodbye to us as we drove away.  We were always driving away, leaving her.  She was generous enough to let us go.  Every time.

5.     This morning, my husband drives to see his mother, who is 92.  It is right for him to do this.

6.     My son, the chauffeur, drives me to Whole Foods and to Trader Joe’s in the snow.  In the snow!!  We are intoxicated by being in these stores after 15 months of being at home.

7.     We return home with armfuls of flowers and frozen food.

8.     We eat ice cream in the middle of the day.

9.     I scroll through Facebook and feel overwhelmed by all the motherless daughters, all the grief on display.

10.     I push away the images of my mother that float up. Though she cried at supermarket openings—a family trait—she would not want me to be missing her.

11.  I had hoped to look in the yard for lily of the valley, her favorite, but the snow scotched that plan.

12.  Atticus and I light the gas fire and snuggle next to each other on the couch for a family Zoom call.  I see my husband, wondrous father to our three children, a state away, with his mother and his brother, his sister, and Jerry and Jerry’s two daughters.

13.  Ohio feels a little lonely.

14.  My sister and I text about the upkeep old houses require. Mom loved those houses.  We love them, too.

15.  I watch the snow and wonder if my plants, lovingly tended since March, and newly relocated to the garden, will survive. Maybe the snow will insulate them.

16.  I think about the five babies we didn’t have, the baby we almost adopted, the three we brought home, swaddled bundles, from New York Hospital long, long ago.

17.  There are no guarantees with parenthood.  One must wait a long time to see how it all turns out.  No one wants to claim a sociopath as one’s child. 

18.  I zoom with my two daughters and with Meg; we arrange flowers together, sharing all the tips we know about making bouquets. I bought more flowers than I needed.  I place four vases around the house.  Today, motherhood feels like abundance.

19.  Meg is the fairy godmother to my Jewish daughters. I am her son’s godmother.

20.  I nap and finish a novel, the plotline of which I could have predicted in my sleep, but it is utterly satisfying.  It is easier to read one-handed on my I-pad.

21.  We eat beef with broccoli and cauliflower rice for dinner by the fire—all prepared one handed!  I do some schoolwork, note that the snow has morphed to rain again, listen to our plaintive dogs bark for their father.  He will be back soon.

22.  Atticus seems unconcerned about a math final.  I marvel at this calm child I have produced and his two extraordinary sisters. 

23.  I marvel at all the children we’ve been lucky enough to love—so many we have had the good fortune to know.

24. My children post on Instagram. I feel their love, their fire to make the world better.

25.  Snow aside, it is a happy day.

Eulogy for Mom, 11 Years Later

Anna Quindlen writes that “Grief is a whisper in the world and a clamor within…Perhaps that is why this is the least explored passage: because it has no end…This is why it comes as a great surprise to find that loss is forever, that two decades after the event there are those occasions when something in you cries out at the continuous presence of an absence. "An awful leisure," Emily Dickinson once called what the living have after death.”.

When I think of mom, gone eleven years next week, it is always in Eagles Mere that I see her, never on the Main Line.  She is in her favorite rocker on the porch of Self Help, the prettiest house in Eagles Mere, gazing out at her lake.  Or she’s in her chair in her suite, pretending to be asleep, TV blaring, waiting for whatever is going to happen next. Maybe she’s in the kitchen making endless batches of apple sauce or creamed corn or frying scrapple.  Occasionally, she is lurking behind a door to overhear a conversation.  The Coo would have made a magnificent spy.  She adored intrigue. 

Family first.  Blood is thicker than water.  Peace at all costs.  How proud she was of her family--from her grandfather, the railroad scion, S.M. Vauclain, to each of her grandchildren, nieces and nephews.  She took great joy in our achievements, sending us off to every challenge with, “Just do your best; it will be good enough.”  

She was a schemer from an early age, giving us the sense that anything was possible—just believe and make it happen.  When she was 10, she and her cousin, Connie, called up Suburban Hardware and said, “Please have two beebee guns delivered to the backdoor of Broadlawn and charge it, please.” The guns arrived, and Cooie and Connie went out to shoot squirrels.

Her command of genealogy was formidable.  After dancing class, she would inquire with whom we had danced, and upon uttering some unsuspecting boy’s name, she would reel off, “So, that’s so and so’s child and they live in Wayne, and his grandparents were friends of your grandparents and they…etc., etc., etc. She loved understanding the web of connections from one generation to the next, and though she was never a reader, she kept up with decades of General Hospital.  She taught us to wear slips and taught me to carry a hankie, which I do always…and to keep a stiff upper lip and to pull up our socks and to be good sports.

Our mom loved tennis and fly-fishing and golf.  She was a tremendous sportswoman.  And not a squeamish bone in her body. She was great with blood or injury—calm under pressure.  And when the bursitis got her, she could still play backgammon. Make your bar point.  Those famous Vauclain doubles—thank you, Mom. 

More than a decade later, I am still on that edge of awful leisure.  But Coo Klotz would have no patience with that attitude: “Do something,” she would holler.  “Don’t just sit there.  Pick up a racquet.  Plant some pansies, get out the jigsaw and make something. Weave the webbing through a folding chair; go hit a ball against the backboard; play bridge, scrape some paint, sand something. Use your hands.  Fix a clock, find a magnifying glass, watch the stock market, live your life.” 

At the very end, when most of the words had left her, the words she could still say were “love” and “please” and “thank you” and “help” and  “goodbye.”  Of course, she remembered her manners.  The Coo was all about love.  Not so much a touchy-feely, cuddly love, but an unwavering commitment and ferocity.  She loved her life; she loved her family.  She faced a lot of goodbyes in her life.  When I leave Eagles Mere, I still imagine her waving me off. 

“Goodbye, goodbye.  Be safe.  We love you lots and lots!,” she calls. 

In my heart, I see her waving.  I am still getting used to the world without her.    

Truth to Power

Truth to Power

We were half way through the class when Quinn said, “This is boring.  I’m bored.”

On Zoom, it’s not always easy to read your audience, but though one classmate looked aghast at Quinn’s audacity, most of the rest of them—twenty-one third graders having a drama lesson with me—looked bored—fidgety, whirling around in desk chairs, head down on an elbow. 

“You’re right, Quinn, this is boring,” I admitted.  I’ve been a drama teacher since I was eighteen, teaching creative dramatics in a housing project in New Haven, inspiring all sorts of children to play, imagine, empathize, but until December, all my teaching had been in person.  I could tell by the energy in a group of children when it was time to change the activity, when it made sense to press forward against the resistance to get to a place of vulnerability or joy or creativity. 

“Quick, girls.  Take the imaginary balls we were throwing earlier and throw them all at Quinn.”

Did I really say at?  I meant towards.  But I said at.

Instantly, the little rectangles in front of me sizzled with energy. 

Quinn, delighted, caught imaginary ball after imaginary ball:  tiny weighless ping pong balls, small but deadly lacrosse balls, huge beach balls, basketballs.  The girls were specific in the spheres they hurled, and Quinn caught every one, declaring, “Now, this is fun!”

In the remaining lessons I had with the third grade before our December vacation, I watched the girls closely.  I sought advice from wise drama teachers who offered ideas on my Facebook page.  I trolled sites with titles like “Teaching drama on zoom.”  The Canadians, naturally, hosted the best pages; in many schools in Canada, drama is as important as math.  Just another reason to love Canada.

The girls loved Smuppet, my diction puppet, a fuzzy red fellow with a large orange nose who adores final consonants.  He translated quite well into on-line life.  So, too, did a variety of finger puppets I introduced and the numerous stuffed animals and puppets the girls decided to share one day.  We got through lots of drama basics:  plot, conflict, character.  But their favorite things, inevitably, were the simplest: plays with two kitchen implements, plays with two fingers, coming into the room as a high status or low status character, pantomimes—though several had difficulty pronouncing the term, they loved acting out actions without props—several were ready for Our Town in their specificity. 

And I?  I loved being a drama teacher, even on Zoom.  I was thrilled that our third-grade team invited me to be the “guest” in those remote weeks between Thanksgiving and winter vacation.  I loved coming to know each girl, realizing who the risk takers were, whose eyes lit up with a new challenge, whose internet made her participation tricky.  I learned that third graders adore emojis and, if I didn’t answer immediately in the chat, they would cut and paste their questions a million times. I learned, too, that Hamilton is a fave with this crew.  They loved the lyrics and several invited their kitchen implements to stand in as Burr and Alexander. 

I struggled, too, with pace; it is boring to wait for others to have a turn when you are at home and your connection is wobbly.  It is frustrating not to be able to give everyone a turn with every exercise because Quinn’s courage in speaking truth to power was a feeling I could see in the other small squares. 

To lead a school these days is to worry, every day, about the safety and wellbeing not just of students, but of our faculty and staff.  Some are terrified about having to return, which is the call I made.  I did not make it alone; I have a wise medical advisory team, a smart board of trustees, and a leadership team I trust, all of whom helped me make the decision to return.  But at the end of the day, I made the call and I cannot promise we will all be safe.  Though I know there is risk in everyday life, there feels like more risk right now in our state, in our school.  But go back we will, on Tuesday. 

I am trying to balance everyone’s needs, and I feel a little bit like Quinn at the moment I instructed the other girls to throw things at her.  While she relished all the balls coming at her, I am not such a deft catcher.  Sometimes, I want to close my eyes or duck.   Parents, many of them, need us to re-open, so they can also return to work.  Children, for the most part, look forward to being with their teachers and friends.  Adolescents seem to enjoy the choice they have in learning from home or at school.  It is easiest to teach everybody in person—a luxury we do not have for our high school because we do not have enough room to do so while honoring social distance—or to teach everybody online, but one size, in this pandemic, does not fit all.  We are all compromising.  And the stakes feel high. 

What can my recent foray back into teaching drama offer me?  Plan, but be flexible.  Presume best intentions.  Ask for help.  Thank people when they offer it.  Know that it’s not about being right—it’s about being brave and vulnerable.  Take risks. See everyone and know that there may be as many points of view as people.  Learn from your blind spots.  Be sure each person on the screen or in person feels valued.  Listen.  Breathe.  Warm up.  You can be a drama teacher for 42 years and still have a crummy lesson; it’s not about you.  Switch strategies.  Let go of ego.  Let go of control.  Laugh as much as possible.  Praise whenever you can.  Thank the internet gods when connections are stable, especially your own.  Seize opportunities for joy.  Thank you, my third-grade girls.  Thank you, Quinn.  I can’t wait to see you on Tuesday, even from six feet. 

Unicorns

At Laurel, the school I lead, certain traditions bind one generation to another.  Women who were graduated more than fifty years ago speak with fondness about ceremonies and rituals they associate with their era:  the Laurel banana—a cherished dessert featuring lemon juice and confectioner sugar on a banana; all-school assemblies that punctuate the year—today would have been the Snowflake Assembly, the gathering that sends us into winter vacation. As a alumna of a girls’ school myself, I am conscious of the value of shared experiences that connect a community. It is good for us to feel a part of something larger than ourselves.  

But everything looks different this year.  The school felt lonely without children this week; it was a little bit like Pompeii—without the lava—as if everyone had suddenly left what they were doing when we migrated to School@Home.   Once upon a time, before Covid, most of our students went to school all in one building, little girls looking up to the older girls, imagining themselves trading jumpers for plaid skirts; older students looking back at the little ones and remember their own childhoods.  It is civilizing, humanizing to be under one roof.

Traditions that have endured at Laurel are centered on girls’ love for their school.  After Thanksgiving, the Juniors receive their class rings in a ceremony featuring a faculty speaker and a white rose for every girl, regardless of whether or not she chooses to get a ring—though any girl who wants a ring can have one.  Alumnae have donated back their rings for girls who want them but cannot afford an expensive piece of jewelry.  Typically, after the ceremony, we host a reception for families in the dining room, with cake and the girls busily twisting their rings as many times as the numbers of their graduation year.  This year, I reached across six feet and pretended to turn rings for the Juniors who joined us in person, masked and manicured. 

Right before winter vacation, the Upper School celebrates Song Contest, a tradition dating back more than a century in which the girls rewrite lyrics to popular songs to make them Laurel-centric.  In performance, each class led by elected Song Contest Leaders, who choreograph and coach their classmates. Musical classmates accompany the singing.  This tradition is both a superb example of authentic leadership and is utterly incomprehensible to those unfamiliar with our culture.  A panel of alumnae judge the contest and the competition is fierce.  It took me more than a few years as Headmistress to actually “get” it.  My epiphany occurred when our oldest daughter invited her Senior Class to sleep over at our house the night before Song Contest, an invitation issued without my knowledge, but convenient for sneaking into the school to practice that evening.  Secretly, I loved that the girls wanted to come, loved, too, that our daughter knew we would be delighted to host the whole crew.  That afternoon, we stocked up on chips and cookies and soda, and after one more rehearsal in the gymnasium, they trooped across the chilly parking lot and packed into our living room.  At the time, our young son was a light sleeper.  As I retreated upstairs, I exhorted the girls to be quiet enough that they wouldn’t wake him.  Then, I climbed into bed with a book.  A few minutes later, I heard them.  Sihan was playing softly on our apartment-sized piano and the girls were singing through their lyrics, quietly, quietly, but with so much love. 

We belong to the green

We belong to the white

We belong to the numberless hours

Of work every night

Wherever we end up in the fall, we’ll always remember

We belong, we belong, we belong here forever

The girls belong to their school and we, their teachers, belong to them; it’s an extraordinary chemistry, made bittersweet for the Seniors by the knowledge that the countdown has begun.  They will leave us. Time moves forward, inexorably, pandemic notwithstanding.  When we do our work well, they leave us, ready for new adventures.  They have been ours, but are ready to claim their voices, to take their seats at the table, lead with purpose, live with grace and ambition and empathy. They must go.  That is the prescribed order.  And, by and large, they are ready.  But it’s hard to leave a place they know so well. 

Sometimes, we worry that our girls are too comfortable at school; they whip off sweatpants or sweatshirts with too little regard for modesty—or decency.  They lounge in the hallways, limbs extended until I remind them gently to allow passersby to pass.  They leave their possessions all over the school, trusting that items will be there tomorrow—and, typically, they are.  They storm and struggle and move in and out of friendship groups.  Some classes and concepts come easily; some require persistence and effort.  They forge relationships with one another, with older and younger girls.  They connect with teachers, who routinely offer, so generously, their time and expertise.  They make mistakes and, on a good day, learn from them.  And then, in white robes on the stage of Severance Hall, they are graduated.  Their day-to-day chapter as schoolgirls is complete.  It goes quickly, as if in a blink they morph from middle school-ers to young women--competent, confident, capable.  All summer I miss them.  When school starts again, I look for those most recent graduates, expect to see them in the hallways, in my office, making announcements, giving Senior Speeches, but they are off to new adventures.

And then December.  Home from college, recent alumnae typically return alone or in small groups, like unicorns--rare, prized, elusive.  Transformed by a semester or two or three at college, some are shy visiting the landscape they so owned recently—now, they are tourists, steeped in recollecting their own past. They appear at the door to my office, and always, always, I ask the wrong questions, “Are you happy?  Are things going well?” because it feels as if that is the compulsory script.  We have passed over a bridge, these girls and I, and I have trouble reconciling their older selves with the girls who flung themselves onto the couch in my office, eating candy, talking about the details of their everyday lives at Laurel. Now, they are familiar strangers.  I crave more time with each one of them; frequently, we have time only for a quick hug before I am committed to a meeting or another obligation.  What I want to ask are questions too big for the moment:  “How are you doing in the face of all I know you coped with at school?  How is your mother, really?  Has your broken heart mended?  Do your parents know yet about your sexual orientation?  Are you managing all the alcohol in college?”  These questions visit me afterwards and I wonder why I dodged them in the moment?  Social appropriateness?  Changed intimacies?  They are no longer ours. 

But they feel as if they are…it is the way schools work; young people grow up within our walls and then go off to their next chapters. When they return, I sometimes can’t remember how long they have been gone—a year? three?  I see each as she was:  poised at the podium delivering her Senior Speech, racing down the soccer field, aglow in her role in the musical, head cocked in my ninth-grade English class.  It is their job to change and grow.  It is the school’s job to honor who they were and to celebrate who they are becoming.

This strange year, we have adapted, iterated, coped.  We have missed being together, missed the small moments. We have suffered grief and worked to be the best school we can be for all girls. As the snow falls gently, I am thinking about how much I miss slender, brief moments of connection—in person, eye to eye.  I am hoping each of our alums knows she is loved by her school, by her headmistress. 

No More Tears

They’ve told me nothing, and when I ask, plaintive, the day before when a woman finally calls to tell me to be there at 7:15, she kindly explains that she is only the scheduler.

“How long is your eye surgery?” my oldest daughter asks.

“No clue,” I answer.

“Mom!”  Her exasperation crackles through the line

“Not for want of trying,” I offer, again, slightly ashamed of myself for heading into a procedure—albeit a minor one that might not even work—with so little information.

I have wept from my left eye spontaneously for decades.  Adult when it began, I attributed it to my ferocious seasonal allergies and began slipping one of my mother’s soft linen hankies into the stretchy gold wristband of my Mickey Mouse watch; the fabric was softer than any tissue.  I’d blot my eye, make light of my proclivity for drama, explain to the girls in my school what a handkerchief was.  Vaguely, I recall asking my allergist about my left eye; he said it was an eye problem; an eye doctor, seen along the way as my vision worsened, assured me it was an allergy.  Last December, I developed an infection in my right eye.  I was traveling; no drops soothed it.   Finally, back in Ohio, I saw a new eye doctor.  As she offered relief, I mentioned my crying left eye.

“We can fix that, you know. It’s your tear duct.  You need to see Dr. Perry—not the wife, the husband.”

Nasolacrimal canal may have been the term he muttered.  Surgery.  Successful in 80% of cases.  Or 60%.  I scheduled surgery.  I didn’t ask a lot of questions.  And then the pandemic.

At the Clinic, the receptionist is excited that I am early because the person before me has just canceled.  Swiftly, a mask-to-mask kiss with my husband, and I am bundled into a hospital gown and onto a bed.  My feet are cold.  I forgot socks. No one pays much attention to me except to ask about anesthesia and former surgeries.

I smile blankly.  “I don’t love it,” I say.  “Sometimes, I throw up.”

“You won’t,” one of the kind nurses assures me.  “It’s a general because it’s your eye.  You don’t want to be awake.”

No, I think, wondering if it is tacky to go to sleep before anyone gives me drugs. Later, I make a list:  breast reduction, c-section, foot, shoulder, appendectomy. 

Dr. Perry, unrecognizable in surgery garb, appears.  “So, off we go.”

My bed rolls into the bright OR, a plastic mask, covering my nose.  I come awake to Lorna Doones and apple juice. Kindergarten snacks. 

“You might get a black eye,” the recovery nurses suggests.  “Don’t worry that your mouth is dry.  Only Tylenol.  And ice.  Off you go.”

I am home and hungry by 10:00 a.m.  The eye itches, even a few days later.  Time will tell if the tiny tube inserted to carry my tears away is doing its job.  Will I miss those tears?

Weightless Snarl

I almost don’t see it because I am looking up at the tiny saffron leaves twirling down from a tree above me. And then I am upon it—a tangle of slender stems, tan with only a hint of green left on one stalk, a ghost of a lavender blossom dangling from the end of one branch.   It’s round like a hollow globe.

“A squirrel’s nest?” my friend, Marcia, asks.  We are walking around the circle on which I live, a walk I take several times a day.

“Petunias,” I say, noticing the shape of the single faded bloom, the way the dead flowers thin out at the end of each little stalk.  The leaves and stems almost look as if they’ve been woven together, and at the end of the knotted branches is a small clump of dirt attached to some roots.  “Former petunias,” I correct myself.  I bend and scoop up the weightless snarl.

Marcia raises her eyebrows. 

“I need them,” I explain.  We keep walking, the entwined branches dangling from my fingers. 

Fall pruning, I imagine.  Formerly sticky mint-green leaves supporting a profusion of gaudy grape-amethyst blossoms spilling over the edges of a flower bed replaced by more sedate chrysanthemums in shades of russet and burgundy and lemon.  Chrysanthemums behave; petunias are more like unself-conscious toddlers, tumbling, undisciplined, in joyous abandon. Perhaps yesterday or the day before, someone yanked these from their bed or pot and tossed them aside.  Perhaps the wind caught them up, blew them to this sidewalk square just at this moment, discarded now and already almost all the green is leached from the leaves and stems.  They are beige, lighter than brown, the color of milky coffee.

At home, I place my orb of branches on a table in our family room, where over the course of the afternoon, the sphere melts into an elliptical shape, more like see-through driftwood than dense greenery.  The stems, the stalks, the dry leaves are still attached, their architecture elegant, though they are too far gone to be revived. 

“What’s that?” my recliner-bound husband inquires, as I place an icepack behind him and rearrange his towel.

“A thing I liked.” The tangle moves me. I, too, feel mixed up and unrooted after a dreadful week—a difficult incident at school, ensuing anger and rippling consequences, my husband’s surgery—a shoulder replacement on his left side.  I am pulled in too many directions—dealing with our menagerie, running the school, nursing my husband, feeding my son. I have trouble quieting my mind in the dark loneliness of my bed.  My husband has to sleep in his recliner, summoning me from sleep for ice or painkiller.  Last night, disoriented, I found myself at his side without remembering how I had come down the stairs.  I curled up on the loveseat and finally drifted off, comforted by the ambient glow and murmur of whatever he was watching on TV.

I often say to the girls in my school, “You are not a tumbleweed; you have agency, choice.”  But some weeks feel as if they carry us forward on a momentum not of our making, a great current of need and obligation.  I am tired, full of feelings, stiff from my time on the couch.  Tomorrow, I will carry my summer relic outside.  Tonight, I enjoy its beauty, translated. I decide not to photograph it, to keep it as a picture in my mind’s eye, a reminder that I am not a tumbleweed, but that objects in the natural world, accidental or not, can remind us that the world is made of wondrous items, that we, too, in our humanity, are both vulnerable and durable, full of nuance and complexity, that it is good to pause and look and breathe and feel.

Not the weightless snarl, but milkweed, equally lovely.

Blurred Boundaries, Micro-Rituals and Whack-a-Mole

When Covid19 forced us home right before our school’s spring break was to begin, I remember thinking my faculty and staff had never worked harder to pivot to a brand new distance learning platform that we called School@Home.  It was not uncommon to find me on the phone at 11:00 p.m. with a division director or with my Associate Head working out one more logistical challenge and then on a call with other local independent school heads at 7:30 a.m. the next morning. Adrenalin fueled us.  We were fighting a pandemic. My school rose, majestic, to the challenge, and delivered superb distance-learning for our girls. 

The school landscape, as we understood it, had shifted irrevocably, and we were continuously trying to jog up the down escalator in a crowded department stores.  Sisephyean, we thought, shaking our heads, but how long could it last?  Turns out, it’s still with us.  I thought, once we made the decision to open our school in person—PrePrimary through Eighth Grade on campus with the Upper School online--that we would feel a sense of relief.  Instead, now it feels as if we are engaged in a prolonged game of Whack-a-Mole.  We solve one problem—outdoor classrooms—and begin to worry about something else:  what time should families finish the temperature app?  We open a third section of Kindergarten and fret about sinks that need to be touched to be turned on.

For me, school life has always been punctuated by predictable rituals and the rhythm of the calendar.  As a career schoolteacher, I can, like a blind mole heading for light, move through the school calendar with certainty:  Opening Day, Convocation, a Thanksgiving all-school assembly, the Junior Chapel, the Snowflake Ballet, Song Contest, MLK, Jr. Day as a day on for service and reflection, rather than a day off, the Flower Assembly, moving up ceremonies, Last Chapels, Commencement, our closing meetings.  And yet.  Once going to school stopped being what we did, we had to reimagine so many of the rituals that marked of the passage of time.  We did the Flower Assembly in which the Kindergarten girls give each Senior a Gerbera Daisy online, and we only invited the Kindergarten and the Seniors.  Each K girl had colored in the outline of a daisy and we had sent an envelope to each senior with the carefully colored in daisy within. “You can pin the daisy to your bulletin boards in college,” I explained to the girls, an enhancement we had never considered when we used cut flowers. I asked the girls questions about the year, about School@Home; on the camera, lots of Kindergarten girls, old pros now at managing online, answered questions, shared memories.  And the Seniors did, too.  It was different, but it was lovely. 

At home, I found myself craving new routines, creating what I think of as micro-rituals.  Each night, I ground the beans for coffee.  When school is physically in session, sometimes I grind the beans and sometimes I don’t.  I can have a lovely cup of coffee with our Keurig in the office. Eating out or ordering out stopped completely.  Our oldest daughter, living in Manhattan, took on ordering groceries, which we dutifully wiped down outside before bringing them into the kitchen.  One day, four bags of lemons arrived.  She had ordered four lemons.  Ah, the surprises of Instacart!  My son and I began to cook together:  lasagna, chicken tikka masala, various bowls full of ingredients over rice.  Early in our quarantine, that same son suggested watching the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe.  We did not watch a different movie every night; sometimes, we were too tired, but by late May, we had seen them all, and I was hooked.  I liked washing the dinner dishes all together and settling down into our spots in the family room—my son on the couch, my husband and I in armchairs, mine with the light shining over my left shoulder so I could do needlepoint while I watched.  My husband would struggle with the remote until my son liberated it, and together, we would enter a world of heroes and villains, strong women, great special effects.  That ritual felt like something we could count on, but after we had watched all the movies, I felt sad that we could not find another series as riveting. 

At the end of June, we gathered at my family’s summer house.  Each day found us plugged into our laptops:  me, my oldest daughter, her fiancée, my younger daughter, her beau, my son and my husband.  By day, a house built for leisure masqueraded as a We-Work.  But in the late afternoons, the kids began to play tennis almost every day.  We played a lot of backgammon.  Whoever cooked—we rotated that nightly obligation—did not clean up.  We grew proficient at corralling four of the dogs on the front porch, so that Artie, the timid and unpredictable rescue dog, could leave the house without running into any of her canine cousins.  I baked scones several times a week.  We ordered more citronella candles—since we were serious about quarantine, we relied on having items delivered.  We found our rhythm. 

But here’s what didn’t change:  the huge amount of work so many in the school I lead needed to do to prepare to open school.  We migrated from Google Hangout to Zoom, hired more teachers, erected outdoor classroom spaces, talked with the County Board of Health.  We consulted with our Medical Advisory Panel, wrote letters to families, hosted calls with our Upper School girls, hired more teachers, thought about racism and how to be an anti-racist school. We acquired PPE, an acronym I’d never heard of before March. We followed the number of cases in our county and in our state with the fascination of children at a slumber party gathered around at Ouija Board.  I conferred with my head pals around the country, by phone, by text, by email.  We fussed about buses and how to keep children safe on them.  We invested in thermometers and worked out who would scan the foreheads of every child.  We waited for the app we ordered that records temperatures.  We designed new schedules, built yurts, reorganized grade-level teams, listened to people’s real fear and tried to address it.  The boundaries between work and home eroded; sometimes, we worked until 11 p.m.  I learned my new division director in the Upper School was an early riser just as I am; we spoke frequently before 7 a.m.

This bleeding of boundaries, no ending of the workday or the work week—one day resembled the next as July flipped by—is not normal.  “Take a break,” I urged my leadership team until one of them kindly responded, “Ann, I appreciate the sentiment, but there is too much work to do.  , there is no break to be taken.  ”

There is no break to be taken.  I paused, embarrassed to have suggested something that could not even be an option. They were right. In quarantine with my own family, my son fussed at me almost every day for still being on my computer, for still being on the phone. I did endless loads of laundry, searched for missing socks, loaded and unloaded the dishwasher. Work life and family life began to resemble one another.  There are no breaks to be taken, but the pace, the intensity, feels hard to sustain.

And maybe this is why the micro-rituals have become all the more essential.  When the mountain of obligations rises too high, there is no scaling the peak.  But jumping in the lake for ten minutes with my children will not further delay my solving of insoluble problems.  It is okay after 9:00 p.m. to remind myself, as I have often reminded young administrators, that all the work will be there tomorrow.  The laundry will be there, too. This is the song that never ends… And a game of Whack-a-Mole has no expiration date.  We will be playing for a long, long time. 

This is the Song that Never Ends...

When my children were young, they delighted in singing Lamb Chop’s “This is the song that never ends; it goes on and on, my friends…” to torment me. I would put my hands over my ears, crying, “La,la,la, la, la” until they stopped.  I loved Lamb Chop. I hated that song.  

Recently, however, those lyrics are floating through my head again during endless Zoom meetings as my remarkable team and I—not an epidemiologist among us—struggle to determine the very best plan and the multiple scenarios required for returning to school.  I feel the weight of wanting to make the best decision—for all of us—and I feel the weight of our collective uncertainty.

“I read a study that says transmission between children and teachers is low,” one team member offers.

“I read a study about two teachers who died because they shared spaces” another says.

The research is new.  The disease is new.  Everyone has an opinion.  Our meetings have never been longer nor less productive.  People need to be able to talk, to process, to ruminate.  One colleague, the mother of three daughters, told me that she changes her mind about whether or not she wants her daughters back in school in person several times a day.  We are weary.  We are schoolteachers; for most of us, that means we are accustomed to being in control and to knowing what will happen next.  Against the backdrop of a global pandemic, our expertise melts away. 

“Denmark never closed schools and they are fine,” one teacher, excited about returning to the classroom,  offers.

“Israel re-opened schools and it was a disaster,” my own daughter, a Lower School teacher, worried about returning to her own school, announces at dinner.

We go round and round. I have Covid 19 fatigue, which is a privilege compared having to the real illness. But I am spending all day on this disease, and it creeps into my dreams as well. This is the song that never ends…

We are a nation of individuals who resist, somehow, sacrificing our individual rights on behalf of the whole. Americans don’t like to be told that we must all pull together and wear masks, no matter what, to get through this storm.  Where is Churchill, I wonder, who inspired the British in the midst of the Blitz?  Where is FDR, reassuring us with his Fireside Chats that we would manage in the dark days of the same war? Where is the Queen, who elderly and in her solid colored coats and hats, still summons a calm and majesty that I find comforting?  Where is John Lewis, who wrote to us after his death to implore us to do the right thing? I do not feel tall enough to possess sufficient gravitas to quiet all the fears so many feel. I feel humble.  I have been a Head for a long time.  I enjoy the support of my board; I know the talent and dedication of my splendid leadership team. Our faculty and staff are the best—so committed and willing and creative and optimistic.  Our parents believe in us and trust us to care for their children.  Our girls (and very small boys) are magnificent.  We are a school of superlatives.  And yet, this summer, we are all singing the song that never ends. 

I speak with heads of school around the country; we compare notes, share communications, ask one another new questions that pop into our heads…the questions are endless and unresolved.  We go round and round, more and more tired as the weeks pass, the start of school draws nearer.

 Here is what we know:

 ·      We all wish we could be back in school.

·      School will not look or be the same for girls or for teachers.

·      We all mourn that. We liked school last year.  We want to be able to have that experience again.

·      It is not easy to do a reading conference with a first grader when we have to be six feet apart and masked. 

·      But masks and physical distancing and hand washing are our defense against illness.

·      Young children do not and should not and cannot thrive forever with on-line learning as the only option.

·      But children are more resilient than adults.

·      Part of why last spring worked as well as it did in our school was that children and teachers had known each other for six months. 

·      If we have to start online, it will be harder to help our new students feel connected, but we determined to do just that.

·      Our plan is an excellent one.  We are so fortunate to have space and resources and huge flexibility.

·      If the public schools all close, our wise medical advisory panel believes we should close, too.  So do I.  But there are families who don’t want that.

·      Teachers are afraid of getting sick.

·      We wish there was a vaccine and that everyone had to have it before anyone returned to school.

·      We wish our state and county had managed to bring down the number of new Covid19 cases each day.

·      We know families rely on school not only for an education but also for childcare so parents can go back to work . 

·      Masks are not a political issue; they are a safety issue.  And everyone in our school, from Kindergarten up, must wear them if they come to school.

·      What we understand about symptoms continues to evolve.

·      Teachers have always been superheroes about getting girls to wash their hands.

·      Teachers are superheroes.  Full stop.

We wonder why it’s a good idea to send children and teachers to school when many of the parents in our school will continue to work from home until the new year.  We wonder if a delay in our in-person start could help?  Might the number of positive cases begin to decline?  We wonder what happens if an asymptomatic child infects a teacher?  What would the impact be on our school community if someone died?  It would be horrific. 

We are a resilient school.  We cope with hard things and manage them.  We can manage.  We will manage.  But the days are long.  I worry about girls who rely on our school for breakfast and lunch.  I worry about how our teachers will cope. What is the impact of all this worry on their families, on their children?   I worry about families who, at the 11th hour, decide to hire a tutor and pull their children from our school when we have counted on their tuitions to pay the salaries of faculty to whom we made a commitment last March.  I worry that everyone is afraid and there are no risk-free, perfect options. 

This is the time to tell you that most of the time, I am a professional optimist.  I do not scare easily.  I am not afraid for my own health.  I am ready.  

Yet, this is the song that never ends.  It goes on and on, my friends. It is hard to turn off Lamb Chop’s lyrics, once they are in my head.  How about you?

It’s Just Stuff: Letter to a New Independent School Administrator

All over the country, in these tumultuous recent weeks,  a new crop of independent school administrators are moving into new offices, getting ready to come to know new school cultures, remembering what they did at their old schools and having to adapt to new ways of doing everything. This letter is for them.

“I’m not sure I can do this,” you text late on a cold Thursday night.  “I’m not sure it’s sustainable.”

I call you right away; we talk through the challenges of a hard week, the intensity of mid-winter in independent schools.  By morning, you are feeling slightly restored. 

But I can’t sleep, thinking about how to help you know how good you are at running a division, at meeting the needs of the girls, the faculty, the parents.  It may be you are too good, entirely empathetic, at your own expense.  You tell me you have never cried before about work, and I think about all the times I have cried because of work, because of how inadequate I felt, how ill-equipped and inexperienced I felt about how to face a situation, find a path. 

I’d lie in our bed in Manhattan, my husband fast asleep and cry because I didn’t know how to manage, what to do, because I felt like an impostor, because a child in my care at school was too sick or sad or lonely or a colleague was too infuriating or a parent was too hard on a girl and I couldn’t protect that girl.  I did not believe I would ever feel equal to the work, worried it would consume me at the expense of my own children, but what else could I do?  I am a teacher.  And that meant, in order to make more money, I took on more responsibilities in my school.  Eventually, I became a Head of School.  I remember very little of those first few years of headship, except crying while my husband slept. 

Once, early on, I told him, “I can’t do this.  I don’t know how.”  I bleated, quivering, awake this time, not restored by sleep.  My mother always counseled that things looked better in the morning, but this time the dawn was as bleak as the night before. 

“So, are you a quitter?” my kind husband asked.

I bristled.  I am anything but a quitter, often to my peril.  I never give up on anyone, anything.  He knew that.  How dare he accuse me of being a quitter?

“Of course not,” I retorted, still crying.

“Then get dressed and go to work and figure it out.  Ask some people to help you. It’s just stuff.”

It is just stuff.  Sometimes, it’s mountains and mountains of stuff.  We feel an urgency to respond, to provide solutions, to meet every need, and then we are depleted, fragile, frustrated.  So sustainability is the right goal.  I look at the ways we raise the girls in our school.  We preach resilience all day long.  We have to be purposeful in practicing the components of resilience for ourselves.  If we want to be strong, durable school leaders, we must walk the walk.  That means taking ourselves out of the game from time to time, knowing when we need to vent or kick a problem upstairs or remind ourselves that a lot of the urgency we feel is because others want us to feel that urgency.  One of my mantras is that “it will all be there tomorrow.”  What really matters?  In the tsunami of minutiae, we get to decide.  Not everything is a capital letter crisis, but there are days that feel that way. I liken it to being trapped on a wonky escalator.  I can’t get off.  But, most always, we can. Race matters. Black lives matter. Building equitable systems in our schools matter. The rest of it is mostly stuff.

We can always look at how to better organize the work, but a weird thing will also happen.  You will keep going, buoyed by people who love you.  The rhythm of the year will become more familiar, not easier, but less like your calendar is living you instead of the other way around.  Or, like me, goaded slightly from my self-pitying puddle by my husband who knew that all he had to do to move me from paralysis was to taunt me with my greatest fear—that I might give up—which, in a slightly unbecoming way galvanized me, you will find a path forward. 

You’ve got this.  We can whittle the job into smaller bites, remind you of the high regard the faculty hold you in, the affection girls have for you, the trust parents are developing in you. I remind you that there is nothing wrong or weak when you ask for help or feel overwhelmed—it’s a fact—the work is overwhelming.  Hard.  Frustrating.  Some days, hopeless.  But most of the time, it’s just stuff. 

And, I was thinking in the middle of the night, that sometime down the line, you will offer your own version of this to a younger, less seasoned administrator.  Pass it on.  My job is to care for you so you can care for lots of people who benefit from your care.  Put your away message up for the weekend.  It will all be there on Monday.  And take a real break over vacation.  It helps. 

Looking for Silver Linings

“Look for the silver linings,” Facebook urges me during the weeks of the pandemic.  The silver lining is the bright side, introduced to us by blind poet, John Milton, in his long poem, Comus.  Why is it that I feel churlish when I am asked to consider the good that comes of tough situations?  Corona Virus makes me churlish. 

Silver linings remind me how fast a piece of silver tarnishes.  I have several lovely candelabras inherited from my grandmother, heavy and full of crevices.  When I get around to polishing them, it is gratifying but messy job. I rub the polish cream on with a rag and the grime lifts, transferred to the cloth and to my fingers.  Eventually, the silver gleams, but my fingers feel chalky for hours.  It is a labor of love--one I do not undertake often and then feel guilty about having neglected for so long.

Neglected.  That is how my empty school feels when I wandered the halls earlier this week. Without children to animate the rooms, the school I lead feels dusty, sorrowful, like one of those pieces of silver left too long unpolished. Our school has delivered a distance learning curriculum for more than two months.  My faculty and staff are tired.  We know there will not be much of a break this summer because we need to plan for next fall, and the weeks of June, July and August will fly too fast for us to get everything done.  Our parents will have higher expectations.  So, I try to summon optimism and determination as I lead, but at home, where no one can see me, I feel grumpy, inadequate, dull.  I cannot fix Covid-19.  That much I know.  My empathy for those mourning end of year celebrations is great; I feel sad, too.  We have tried to celebrate our grieving Seniors, tried to comfort their mournful parents.  We have planned a virtual commencement and a drive-through pick up for diplomas and a box of treasures, but there’s a hollowness to all of it, a sense that we are dutifully trying to make lemonade from a batch of lemons without much sugar to sweeten the drink. Of course, these days, even lemonade stands are forbidden, and how could we drink lemonade through masks, anyway?

I started a gratitude journal in the middle of March just as the Governor of Ohio asked us to self-quarantine.  I remarked on having the time to notice, much more acutely than usual, spring’s procession: buds appearing from one day to the next on branches outside my window, the moon, the sunrise, daffodils in their infinite variety, feathery leaves and the elegant pink strands of weeping cherries.  I appreciated our pets more—the cats’ antics, the faithful and unstinting affection of our three rescue dogs.  I continue to recite Shakespeare to our amazing long-lived Shark, our carnival goldfish, who was promoted to a bigger tank a few weeks ago, but has now begun to break out in black spots.  I have Googled cures all week, forestalling, I hope, his demise with Epsom salts and ammonia water tank tests. 

About two weeks into Shelter in Place, one of my two Manhattan-based daughters decided she and her beau and their large dog might fare better in Ohio than on the Upper West Side.  They packed up all they could imagine they would need and drove to an empty house we are lucky enough to have on our school’s second campus.  For the first two weeks, we dropped food at their back door, waved, and occasionally took walks in masks, more than ten feet apart.  And, when the fourteen-day period ended, we began to socialize more—first, the pleasure of hugging one of my girls and then dinner at our house, backgammon at their house, ping pong at ours.  Suddenly, our family enlarged again.

I have always missed the day to day presence of my grown-up daughters, always missed the heavy swing of the younger one’s long thick hair and the curious big blue eyes of her big sister.  And now, we had Cordelia, Cole and Artemis, the dog.  Miranda, the older one, and her beloved Sara, facetime us often, so we sometimes eat meals together. We have gone from three lonely family members—our son is the only one still at home—to a crew of seven!   Cole is an excellent chef, refusing offers of help and leaving few dishes to clean.  Cordelia used me as her model for a Zoom yoga last week for mothers of a certain age.  I love having her be my teacher, and I love talking about distance learning and what to make for dinner with Miranda, who is a second-grade teacher. We can talk about school for hours.  Sara promises she will soon help me update my website.  We are so lucky.  All of us are healthy; we are managing. 

We do not see Cordelia and Cole every day.  Most nights, my fifteen-year-old son and I make dinner—ingredients ordered online by Miranda in NYC and delivered to our back gate by masked people.  My son is increasingly interested in cooking, a more willing sous-chef than he ever was.  In fact, I appreciate what a good conversationalist he is and how lucky I am that he still enjoys spending time with me.  Over chopping onions or reading recipes, we have discussed the Avengers. My son is an expert.  Early in quarantine, we began, at his behest, to watch the entire Avengers oeuvre in chronological order according to Marvel Universe.  We sat together in our family room watching a movie—sometimes with Cole and Cordelia, sometimes just the three of us and not every night depending on his homework or my Head of School duties.  I’d do needlepoint, hiding my eyes during the scary parts. My dreams are filled with my students and various Avengers fighting Covid 19.  Black Widow and Falcon scoop up tiny girls in plaid jumpers and whisk them to safety; Captain America informs the Seniors that graduation is back on. Iron Man tells me that it is safe to return to school, but I return and find hideous purple Thanos! Some of my dreams are splendid and others terrifying.  My son and I have talked about the fact that few in the Marvel world are purely good or purely bad.  Absolutes matter less when the circumstances are ambiguous.  That is an idea I am trying to hold in these uncertain times.  We have to be able to live with uncertainty, to manage ambiguity. There are no tidy resolutions.  My job is to lead without having a sense of exactly where we are headed and to project a confidence I may not always feel.  I have to believe that shiny silver glows underneath all that covers it.

Covid-19 is terrifying; I wonder if we will ever have school again as I know it.  But there are also opportunities to re-shape American education that nothing but a pandemic could have catalyzed.  And, at home, there is my family—my calm and funny husband, my son who will get his license soon, my daughter, the Yogini, her musical and culinarily-skilled boyfriend, and my NY daughter and her fiancée, who, though far away, are with us because of technology.  I can see and talk with them.  They have postponed their August wedding—a hard call, but the right one.  At least I won’t have to order my mother-of-the-bride dress from Amazon, which was my fear before they postponed until next August.  Perhaps, a year from now, we will all be together, with masks or without.  I’m planning to wear a silver dress.

Hitting the Wall

I have been the head of a school for sixteen years.  In the stats on headship, I am an anomaly.  I have an extraordinary faculty, fantastic students and parents, a wonderful board of trustees, a team of administrative colleagues who rise to every challenge, a supportive family.  I have my health, the good health of my family, and pals who check on me.  I live in a beautiful house with food that arrives regularly, ordered by our daughter who lives in NYC and has become an Instacart maven.

Yesterday a cloudy Friday at the end of Week 5 of our distance learning framework, I give into being grumpy, feeling sorry for myself.  A headache bloomed.  I’m tired of the new normal, tired of being in my house instead of at school. May is usually a marathon of celebration; instead, I feel homesick for my girls, worried about how hard our amazing faculty and staff are working. Perhaps it is that all of us leading schools have all attended one too many Webinars, squinted at our tiny square selves during one too many Zoom meetings, considered preposterous questions like: how will we fit children on buses? How will we socially distance young children next fall, who will have to wear masks they will hate?  And how, exactly, we will feed lunch to masked children?

Self-care is no joke and feels hard to manage in these long undifferentiated days when there are no easy solutions, no sense that others will figure this out for us and then we will all be fine.  When I am not grim, I feel inspired by the pedagogical discoveries we are making that we will carry with us into “in-person” school.  We know how flexible our students are, how creative our teachers can be.  Our parents, in our school, have been our champions.  We can all manage anything for a certain length of time.  And there’s the rub.  How long will we need to be physically distant from our girls and little boys?  How will we pivot from distance learning, which we’ve figured out for all but our smallest learners, to another iteration of how to be in school in safe ways. 

My husband says, “You’ll have to stagger the times periods begin and end, so all the kids aren’t in the hall at the same time.”  I feel myself getting tense.  I hadn’t thought of that. 

“We’ll mark the floor with gators, six feet apart,” I parry, proud of my quick-thinking even though it’s an idea I heard another head suggest earlier in the day.

“But it’s not linear, honey.  It’s six feet in every direction.” 

I hadn’t thought of that either.  In fact, there is so much I hadn’t thought of.  Each day, it seems we are playing a huge game of Whack-a-Mole.  We solve one set of problems and a host of new ones present themselves.

I listen to a number of men heads on webinars confidently preview their plans for the next eighteen months, and I feel inadequate. 

“Is this a gender thing?” I wonder to my best friend, Meg.

“It’s a control thing,” she suggests.  “You know enough to know you can’t control all the variables.”

“Or any,” I muse.

Letting go of the idea that I can “fix” any of this is a lesson I need to learn over and over again.  I worked for a woman who told us that we are presented with opportunities to learn what we need to learn over and over again until we really learn. For me, the sense that I need to “fix” anything broken is deeply ingrained. But I am not Oedipus. I know the limits of my ability.  I eschew hubris.  I did not cause the pandemic. Nor can I fix it.  I cannot fix the way it feels to miss being with our girls in “real” time or how it feels for the girls to miss the prom that was supposed to happen tonight or fix our sense of uncertainty about next fall.  All I can do is remember that hope is the antidote to fear, to think about my sheroines, Louisa May Alcott, Maya Angelou, Eleanor Roosevelt, my grandmother, my mother, my sister, my women friends—some heads, some teachers and some unconnected to education.  I can model living with not knowing for my girls and remember to breathe, to take breaks, to take it one day at a time.  What other choice do I have? 

In our garden, the bleeding heart has started to bloom.  It is one of my favorite early spring plants; my grandmother had an enormous bleeding heart in her backyard in Montclair, New Jersey.  I love the pink heart shaped bloom, the tiny white and pink drop hanging from the heart like a tear that doesn’t fall. It is ephemeral, like feelings. The tear doesn’t fall, only trembles for a few days until the blooms disappear and a green shrub remains.  Beyond the forsythia hedge on this sunny Saturday afternoon, I discover four juniors sitting on the tops of their cars, socially distanced in our parking lot.  I visit with them for a few moments, happy to see them, delighted by their creative solution to socializing.  My mood lifts.

I hit the wall, bounced, and found my feet again.  Onward.   

Holy. Wholly.

I speak with my old friend, Marijean, today.  She is not far away in Dubai but at home with her mother in Devon, only one state away. A serendipitous accident. Her mother and my mother are the same age.  I am glad my mother is not living through this pandemic.  I think it might frighten her, though she practiced social distance for the last decade or so of her life, preferring to watch her small slice of the world through the window next to her recliner.  When we lived on the East Coast, we always went to see her for Easter.  Not church, but lunch—asparagus, the good china, an assemblage of relatives.  Since she died, we haven’t paused for Easter.  We tend, however, to gather for Passover with Seth’s family or with our daughters, wherever they are.  Today, speaking with Marijean, we talk about living in this time of paradox—death is all around us, death and fear.  But so is spring, the resurgence of nature, the magnolia buds bursting forth.  Death is a part of life.  We have always known that, but this year, that knowledge feels closer. 

 Palm Sunday.  The little palm cross, small enough to fit in my hand, is dry, a faded green, a talisman.  I loved that little palm, tucked one into the mirror on my bureau, replacing it with a fresh one year after year.  But yesterday, the day after our Zoom Seder, I think about that little cross and that Jesus was forced to carry the cross on which he would be crucified up a hill.  It’s a horrible symbol. My son asks me to explain Easter and I give him a thumb nail sketch, pausing on “My god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me.” A real hero, in religion of literature, reveals vulnerability, I explain, always the English teacher. That doubt Christ experienced, that crisis, feels so human.

An attack of vertigo this week upended me literally. On Ash Wednesday and Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, our Jewish family rituals supplanting the WASPy practices of my girlhood, I think about how pagan the spring celebrations are:  eggs, herbs, rebirth.  I love these rituals, but I am eager to move through through all the pain, all the tests, the betrayals, the plagues. I am weary of my own discomfort.  Let’s get past the exodus, the crucifixion and get to the good stuff:  freedom, resurrection, family dinners with brisket or lamb or chocolate bunnies whose heads we bite off with cannibalistic delight.  Easter and Passover during Covid 19 feel surreal—as if we are, in our isolation, weirdly in a new world.  The hyacinths, admittedly more spindly than the ones in the grocery stores, rise in the center of the garden.  Deer and squirrels steal the snow drop bulbs, the crocus bulbs, the tulip bulbs, but leave the daffodils and hyacinths behind, graceful, resilient, fragrant. 

Holy.  Wholly. To care for the whole of a community, not to put one’s own well-being above that of the whole.  So easy to preach.  So hard to do.  I am wholly in favor of social distance.  But I forget to wash off the mail.  I forget these new rules, remember old ones.  In my head as I peel garlic or set up another Zoom meeting, I hear my mother singing, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God almighty.”  She has been dead almost exactly ten years, but all week, I have heard these hymns I thought I had forgotten.  Words float back, unbidden.  I hum the melodies, mix them up with Dayenu to entertain myself.  

 The other night, I couldn’t sit at our Zoom seder for long; the dizziness came in waves and I needed to lie down.  I listened from the living room, happy that the children had put this enterprise together—mostly for their grandmother, Seth’s mother, who is 92.  But the blessings and the laughter of another faith weirdly make me miss my own mother.  My first seder was about 100 years ago in Long Island at Seth’s Aunt Ursula’s house.  She died this fall.  No one speaks of her, but I am missing her, missing her unconditional love for my husband and missing my own mom.  I listen to the Haggadah that we wrote before we even had children.  I think of other seders, bringing together our Jewish and non-Jewish friends, cooking in tiny Manhattan apartments, and then I recall a seder my mother, remarkably attended, in our tiny walk up apartment when Miranda, our oldest daughter, was a toddler.  It’s like a gift to have that memory float up.

 Yesterday, according to Facebook, was sibling day, and my sister posted a great photograph of the two of us from a few years ago.  I’m too ill to do more than repost it on my own page.  I wonder vaguely why I rarely post any pictures of my brother.  His loss thrums through all my writing.  This morning, feeling a little better, I look around the house.  There are pictures of my brother—my favorite features him sporting a huge bandage on his forehead.  School picture day must have followed his run-in with a stone wall, an event I remember because my mother dumped me at the neighbor’s house on her way to Bryn Mawr Hospital to have his forehead stitched up.  There are several pictures of Lee with Rod in matching outfits.  But I cannot find any pictures of me with him.  It bothers me.  I’ve been working on an essay about catching newts with him at North Mountain, the fishing stream, but I’m stuck trying to figure out the essay’s shape.  Is it that I am looking for myself with my brother? 

 I remember Easter preparations with him, remember distinctly Rod being with me.  On Saturday, we’d dye at least two dozen eggs.  I loved dropping each little pellet of color into a Pyrex Jello cup. I remember Rod lifting the teakettle and pouring boiling water in to mix with the vinegar he had allowed me to spoon into the cups.  The color fizzed up like the Fizzies we sent him at summer camp.  The colors were so saturated, so promising and ultimately a cheat, much more vivid than any egg I ever dyed.  We held the eggs with a little wire holder and drew on them with a wax crayon or we rolled them with our fingers, turning our index fingers green and purple.  The decals were always dumb and never stuck.  Rod had more patience than I did, rolling the egg in the dye longer, his eggs a deeper hue than my faded pastels. 

 I remember it was often too cold for the new Easter dress that I wore to church.  Ruffled socks.  Mary janes.  Hair combed.  Rod in a jacket.  Lili in a grown-up dress. Daddy dapper. Mommy smelling of perfume in the chilly spring, her hanky and peppermints in her bag, requisite church accessories.

Baskets.  The baskets lived somewhere between Easters.  On the third floor?  Each basket sported cellophane green grass, a sugar egg with a scene, the frosting hardened into ceramic.  I wanted fancy hollow eggs or eggs with Ukrainian designs, but we had plastic eggs with Hershey kisses tucked inside.  Once we tried blowing eggs—our Aunt Nancy did it and her eggs were glorious, quivering on an indoor tree.  She had a gift.  Our experiment was unsuccessful. I keep a few of those small eggs in a cabinet here in Shaker Heights, a talisman of childhood. They lived high on a pantry shelf through a glass door during the off season in Haverford.

 “It’s like another Christmas stocking,” Seth said in some disgust as I prepared elaborate baskets for our girls when they were small.. 

“Yes,” I grinned.  I love any reason for presents.

 One year, Mom had us each make a basket for each other.  Lee and I went to Woolworths and got Rod a turtle.  I had fuzzy hang ten red socks in an egg in my basket one year.  Their faded glue imprint still adheres to the chiffonier in our hall in Ohio. I do not know what happened to the little turtle. 

 Daddy hid the eggs after church. Dye had seeped from the cold eggs into the base of each egg’s cardboard compartment.  He nestled one the pachysandra, another in the ivy, others in Mom’s garden, in between tulip leaves or blending in with hyacinths, and one in a drainpipe, discovered weeks later.  I do remember searching, gleeful when I found one that my brother or sister had missed.

 And then there’s this memory—a single memory though maybe we did it more than once.  We painted eggs at Aunt Janie’s with model race car paints and tiny brushes.  The older kids or Aunt Janie, herself, made a gold egg and a silver egg; there were cash prizes if you found those on the hunt!  My brother Rod carefully designed an egg with the saturated enamels he had brought from his race car track in the basement.  This egg was much fancier than our pallid ones from home.  I can see the operation in the kitchen—Kathy and Johnny and Chucky and Rod and Brinton and Lee and Netchen—the children of my childhood along with the Williams, but I don’t think they were on the scene then. I have no idea if we were all there, but I remember that Mercer and I were not allowed to paint with the fancy tiny bottles.  We were too little, too clumsy.  Where were Aunt Janie and Aunt Nancy and Mom?  Having a cocktail in another room?  Happy to have us all occupied?

 Brinton told me recently, on Facebook, where we hunted for those fancy eggs down a path behind Aunt Janie’s house.  It was hugely exciting.  I do not remember finding any.

 Across the street at our grandparents, there was formal Easter Lunch—roast leg of lamb, potatoes and creamed onions, asparagus, mint jelly.  A children’s table.  And egg cracking, fat end to fat end.  Even after my grandmother died, we always cracked eggs.  When I taught Seth this bizarre family tradition, he immediately won, beating all of us one rainy spring Easter at Mom’s condo.

 The years slip and slide along with my vertigo this spring. My childhood, my children’s childhood, traditions we’ve shared, those we no longer keep, ones we have yet to create.  Old friends.  Powerful connections.  The strangeness of the pandemic and our distance from the people we love bring memories swimming to the surface. Wholly.  Holy.  How best to care for the whole on this Easter day?

30 Years by the Numbers

Our friends, Ned and Anne, celebrated their thirtieth wedding anniversary this week and sent us a photo of us--Seth resplendent in a tux as an usher, me in a dress I had made for being an attendant in my friend, Deborah’s, wedding.  We flew from Athens, Georgia to Athens, Greece for a spring break about as unlike our current pandemic as I can imagine.

Thirty years.  I remember my mother referring to people she had known for thirty years, and I couldn’t imagine sustaining friendships over so many decades.  Now, Seth and I have been married for thirty-four years, thirty-five in August, when Miranda will marry—if the pandemic terror has lifted.

In thirty years, we have had three children, 27, 25, 15. 

We have spent more than half that time in Shaker Heights.

I talk to Meg each weekend.  We do text and email, but we still speak each week.  She is the first friend I made my first year of teaching at NMH in 1984. 

When we moved to Ohio, we embraced a non-apartment Halloween, lavishly decorating our lovely school home with skeletons and scary lights and noises, only to have children shriek in delight when they realize the witch who answers the door is really their Head of School.

We said goodbye to one of Cordelia’s closest friends.

We have lost a dog and a cat, gained three new dogs and three new cats plus a Shark, our long-lived carnival goldfish.

We have said goodbye to both my parents and to Seth’s dad.

We have watched our daughters finish high school.

We have said goodbye to each of them when we dropped them off at college and felt the strange molecule shift that happened in our home without their daily presence.

We have watched both daughters graduate from college.

We have moved both daughters to Manhattan and welcomed their significant others into our family.

Seth has become a legendary lawn decorator at Christmas; families stop in front of our yard to gaze at his display.  How much is too much, he wonders?  Apparently, we have not yet reached too much.

All three children have worn braces.

We have eaten more take out than we should because, by day’s end, the work of headmistress-ing often renders me too tired to cook.

We have stopped running ETC, our summer theatre program.

We have bought a green barn that my mother loved in Eagles Mere and a small house that we have not yet renovated.

I have become a tennis mom for a son whose first high school season has now been cancelled.

I have started to write more seriously, more often.

I have spent time teaching other women to be heads, to dream big, and to think about how best to interview.

I have launched five heads from Laurel.

We have tried to keep in touch with old friends in whirlwind visits to NYC.

I have started to go gray in a streak and at my temples. Seth, who has dark hair in my mind’s eye, is silver-haired now.

There is more of me to love than there once was.  My feet object to Size 6 shoes and prefer a 6 ½.

What else?  Number of chicken nuggets consumed?  Dishes washed?  Trips taken?  Children with nightmares put back to sleep?  Temperatures taken?  Booboos kissed?  Cups of coffee made and left abandoned on the counter, tears, laughs, moments of wonder?

Number of pandemics we are in the midst of enduring:  one. 

We are the Gators; That is Our Name

We Are the Gators: That is Our Name

The sweet moment of District Championship!

No one would call me a sporty.  As a girl, I played compulsory field hockey, softball and lacrosse.  In all cases, I was afraid of the ball, the last chosen for a team, and a slow runner who wheezed.  I would daydream, hoping not to have to do anything.  I could neither catch nor bat nor dribble with any skill. 

My emergence as a sports fan began with heading a girls’ school in Ohio.  I know the research.  Most female CEO’s played a team sport.  Athletics matter for girls.  As the Head, it was important for me to show up at sporting events, to cheer on the girls, to chat with parents.  Early in my headship, on the soccer field, I screamed, “We love you, Laurel.” 

My Admissions Director pulled me aside and said, “You can’t say that.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“It’s just not how we cheer,” he offered kindly.

The next day, girls stopped me in the hall to thank me for coming.  “We knew it was you,” a player smiled, “because you are the only one who would say you love us.”

It became my signature cheer.  I am, to my knowledge, the only person who hollers, “We love you, Laurel.”  My husband has grown used to this expression of my loyalty and my pride in our girls.  My adolescent son rolls his eyes.  Parents of players smile indulgently.  I have been a head for a long time.

Once I arrived at a playoff game wearing the colors of the opposing team.  I invested in more green and white clothes, our colors, and acquired a set of green and white pompoms. My enthusiasm grew.

Our athletic fields, bordered by woods, are gorgeous in spring and late summer and fall. I try to get to several games in each sport every season.  When the girls wear helmets and mouth guards, it’s hard for me to make out individual players.  Across the field, one ponytail can resemble another. I hate it when either side takes a knee, meaning that a player is hurt. I am not their mom, but in those moments, worry clogs my throat as if I am.  I’m not great a tennis spectator because you have to be quiet, and golf matches often happens at a more distant location where loud fans are not encouraged.  The softball and lacrosse seasons are brief because the spring is notoriously muddy and wet in Northeastern Ohio.  Track and cross country are more individual and require a significant time commitment.  Swimming is very exciting at the end of the season when our girls often go to compete at States, but the pool tends to be loud and hot, and, in their caps, it is, again, hard for me to tell who’s who.  In the fall, our un-airconditioned gym can be uncomfortably hot, but I love watching the fast pace of volleyball, the way the team works together. 

I’m not sure when basketball claimed my heart.  One year, I taught a lot of the JV players in my 9th grade English class, so I got in the habit of dropping in to watch a little bit of a home game before I left for the day.  Soon, our son, a Middle Schooler, was practicing with the Varsity girls; he became a mascot of sorts, forming deep friendships with kind, older girls, keeping the books for some games, wearing the official team coaching polo.  Before long, my husband was a fixture at every game, sitting in the last row of the bleachers, next to a former coach and our Athletic Director, cheering on our Laurel Gators.  And this year, unless I was traveling, I did not miss a home game.

“Why was that a foul?” I’d ask and someone nearby would explain.  I learned more about the game, more about how each girl played. 

Our team was on fire, winning continuously.  They are fast and aggressive and fabulous.  The twins, Juniors, have a twin language on the court, passing to where one understands the other twin will arrive. They are remarkable, scoring and rebounding and making the game appear effortless. G., a four-year senior, has come into her own as a leader with confidence and skill.  Anna, recovering from a torn ACL, was a steady, kind leader.  Terrific newcomers in ninth grade have added speed and skill.  As the season proceeded, the team attracted attention from the press.  We believed we might have a shot at States.

We won Districts and headed to regionals, winning the first play off in a nail biter.  I told our Upper School we needed to learn real cheers.  “De-fense, de-fense” was not enough.  They rose to the challenge.  The parents had created a Gator Clap.  Each play-off game had a theme—a white out, a green out, wear your favorite athletic jersey.  A school-wide search ensued for our Gator mascot costume.  The whole school was energized, excited.  We practiced our fight song, “We are the gators; that is our name.” We felt buoyed by our team.  Everybody loves a winning team.  The little girls were thrilled, “Will you be at the game, Ms. Klotz?” they asked in the halls.

“Of course,” I smiled.

When several Upper School girls arrived in my office, wanting to know if we could have the day off when we went to States, I cautioned them not to get ahead of themselves.

“We’ve got plans,” I reassured them, imaginging a school-wide pep rally, the possibility of canceling school to take them all to States, “but remember Zeus,” I chided.  “He’ll zap us with a thunderbolt if we are too prideful.”  I tamped down their pride and my own; I was afraid to want the win as much as I did.  I allowed them to order an inflatable gator to wear at the game since we couldn’t turn up the real one.  When some Juniors told me in horror that they had learned the other team had a racist mascot, I counseled them to focus on supporting our team, to rise above, to cheer on our players.  And they did, two bus fulls of fans—hollering cheers right till the bitter end. 

On Friday night, our ebullience popped like a bunch of helium balloons, green and white tattered bits abandoned on a wet pavement.  We lost by four.  Our shots didn’t go in. Theirs did.  We played great defense, but our high scoring players didn’t score.  One of the twins fouled out.  We trailed by more points than we had all season and we couldn’t get it back.  Nerves?  An off night?  Hard to know. Our girls were grim, determined.  They played fiercely till the end.  I was proud of them and heartbroken for them and for the rest of the girls who cheered them on with vigor.  I felt sad for the players’ parents and coaches and for my son, who, in a play that night and unable to see the game, wept when he heard the news.  We came so close.  And then It was over.  The other fans were terrible—parents and children.  I have never heard such rudeness.    I try to remember that they wanted it as much as we did.  But somehow, it was worse to lose to nasty people.

On the snowy drive home, I tried not to see the girls’ sad faces.  We are the feisty underdog in Cleveland, rich in love, but never arrogant.  We had pinned our hopes on our basketball team.  The loss felt bitter.  My dreams that night were full of the Corona virus and shots that wobbled on the rim and did not go in.  I could hear those ugly fans screaming at the refs.  I saw myself screaming at the men behind us in the stands, “Behave yourselves; these are young women.”  I saw myself hugging hordes of weeping girls and then pushing them away, bewildered, for fear that I was contagious.  I knew, in real life last night, to keep my chin up, not to rebuke the opposing fans, to smile and hug my brave and brilliant players, who fought so hard.  But waking this morning, tears leaked from my eyes.

“What is this?” I asked myself.  One team loses.  That’s the way it goes. Yet our meteoric rise had felt symbolic, a good omen, a rallying point, a source of pride. Like the flat ginger ale in a glass by my bed, all of that joyous energy leaked away in the last quarter. I was helpless as our glory dissolved. Of course, we’ll bounce back.  We always do.  We’re resilient.  The team is young.  And yet…

I am not an athlete, merely a devoted and devastated fan, acknowledging how sad I feel for my girls and my school.   

100 Years of Making Plays at 100 East End

One hundred years of girls on stage.  Amazing. For weeks, I have been thinking about Drama Club, about Oreos and sandwiches on Saturdays, about our tech week dinners—the one Rasha’s mother made for us when we did Antigone.  I’ve thought about the girls, who are now women, from whom I learned so much, about big risks and vulnerability and inhabiting other worlds.  I’ve thought about costumes and heightened language and vulnerability and risk.

Nineteen of those years are stitched through me—just as we stitched our enormous quilt for Threads!  Many productions happened in the Assembly Room and the last several, joyfully, in the Black Box, which was really blue, at least, at first. 

For me, the drama club productions—an interschool play or musical in the fall and a Chapin-only production in February—were the times I felt I could really teach acting because we rehearsed three times a week—Monday. Wednesday and Friday and for three Saturdays before each show. (Never on Tuesday, so the actors could be part of Dance Club!) While my “half-credit” classes and full drama classes were wonderful, they met only 45 minutes; it was in rehearsal, in tech weeks, that real breakthroughs happened.  And, I had many girls for five years—starting in eighth grade; they grew up doing plays, mentored by older girls and then becoming mentors. They were formidable. How I love them.

When I arrived at Chapin in the fall of 1984, all drama was in the hands of Janet Walker, whose husband was the long-serving music teacher, Charles Walker; they retired at the end of the year, and Mrs. Berendsen asked if I could “take on the drama program, in an interim way.”  Of course, I said yes, and, after that, I would teach both drama and English for many years, directing two shows a year and overseeing the girls’ direction of one acts in the spring. 

For seventeen years, we asked for a lighting grid in the assembly room—on every budget every year, and finally, finally, one was installed.  We were a team—Seth and I—because before Jeremiah or Luc, there were no tech directors. There was Seth, then Seth and Kevin Holly, our first part-time TD, who worked at Riverdale, and the team of amazing NYU women I assembled to design because I wanted the girls to see women lighting, set and costume designers.  Caty Maxey, Rhonda Roper, Theresa Squire, Christy Irish, and our dear friend, Joan Racho—these were talented women who were willing to teach and work alongside the girls at load-in and strike—both required always for the full cast. They knew how to make magic on a shoestring; we were very frugal. We did make posters and buttons--the girls wore the buttons advertising the shows on their skirts or backpacks--and the posters, often, were lovely.

If a play happened on stage, we could pull the curtain and leave the set, but if we performed on the floor, which we often did, given the limits of a shallow proscenium and no wing space, the set had to be struck each night and re-set.  Everyone had a job, and knew exactly what she was supposed to do. After tech-Saturdays, with lunches from Coleman’s thanks to Nancy’s generous aunt, we would walk the Assembly Room barefoot, making sure we hadn’t missed a pin or a nail, so the Middle School girls would be safe in dance class on Monday morning. Tom Palermo was our great friend and advocate, letting us into the building on weekends to finish a tricky project, helping when the fog machine continuously set off the smoke detectors during tech for the Scottish Play, shaking his head at the girls learning to set up and take down our fancy Wenger risers, shaking his head some more as Seth utilized every inch of space underneath the Assembly Room stage to store platforms. 

Over time, our department grew.  Laurie Gruhn was with me from the start; Martha Hirschman, Patti Norchi, Sarah Rutledge supported the musicals!  Mike Calderone and Julia Heaton and Beatrice Cody all joined the drama department and began to direct, so I no longer did every show. 

I have enough memories for a long memoir, but share only a few.  Apologies for all the great moments I forgot to include and all the girls.  Write to me and remind me! I may not have the order right--Seth has an enormous box of videos and photographs that we intended to go through to share with you, but we ran out of time--perhaps for the 125th celebration!!

My first big production:  Jill Kamin on Roller Skates as Hamlet in R and G are Dead; Lizzy Bruce and Lisa Stevens in matching swirling capes; Tia Fuhrman as Claudius.  The players doing remarkable ensemble work, popping out of the trap on the floor of the assembly room stage.

For Threads, the first play the girls and I wrote, we laid out our enormous quilt on the floor of the Assembly Room, set up lights along the fabric, and quilted the top layer, the batting and the back, using embroidery floss because it was so big.  Each girl had made her own quilt square. “How hard could it be?” I remember thinking, “to put together a quilt?”. The girls and I made a play about pioneer women going West because they wanted to wear long dresses; Eliza led the way; Sisi in yellow calico as Grace Vitengruber; the staging for the trial came to me in a dream; the girls thought I had lost it.

The House of Bernarda Alba  Remarkable Rachel, singing opera—against her will—during rehearsal as Bernarda with Minnie and Sisi and Eliza and Katrina and Christina—we made the set like a birdcage with Rodrigo guitar in the background. 

Wild fabric costumes for The Tempest, Jessica as Prospero and Sasha as a most winsome and ferocious Caliban.  

Stage Door—a costume parade and a box set in the Assembly Room!  The girls said to me, “Ms. K., let us play the boys. We’d wear the clothes better, anyway!”  And they did. What a fun one this was. Many of the dresses we bought at a vintage shop in Pennsylvania formed the basis of our costume collection for years.

Antigone—striking the set every night and repainting the marble; Alixa making elaborate braided hair dos inspired by Greek vases at the Met, Barbara’s little brother coming to rehearsals, working on lines during the tenth grade trip at Frost Valley, beautiful dyed costumes.

Godspell—an interschool musical with Reminiscence overalls and a jungle gym, a misplaced mink coat in the audience on closing night.

Working—also a musical with a silver scaffold set with a Tylenol bottle left on stage on opening night; Hugo so ill at intermission, but determined to finish the show.

Galatea—another show we wrote ourselves, largely in my apartment.  It was inspired by Ladies’ Magazines, circa 1914. . Barbara, Nicky, Angela, Alixa, Heidi were the staff of the magazine, Galatea, all attired in Edwardian costumes.  Allison Chang kept it all organized. A tiny version of the poster hangs by my bed here in Ohio--Alixa drew our magazine cover!

Pippin—replacing the boys who lacked commitment with Nora Zimmett as Pippin!  Lauren Willig as Charlemagne in gold painted football pads.

Anything Goes—telling the accompanist he had to play with BOTH hands on the keyboards.

Caroline and Joanna and Georgia and the racist characterization of the two Chinese characters that led us to a new chapter about equity and inclusion in our plays.

The Scottish Play—stained glass window costumes, Nora’s Lady M on the balcony of the Assembly Room; setting off smoke detectors with the fog—Kristen Kenny’s amazing work and Clelia’s Macduff and their great fight.

Revolution!  One of our most ambitious productions, the third  play we wrote from scratch was inspired by the girls’ interest in an etching in their history book of women—fishwives and prostitutes—marching on Versailles.  We turned the Assembly Room into Paris—the stage—and Versailles—the windows facing the building next door filled with enormous vases full of flowers and sprayed with something to prevent the audience from seeing into the neighbors’ windows.  Exquisite performances and amazing writing: Lucy, Alexandra, EB, Georgia, Lily, Nancy, Caroline, Janet, Sabina, Martha, the Kent sisters, and ANF keeping it all running. We alternated between Paris and Versailles trying to imagine how the women in both settings felt.  And we had a spy plot! Alixa came back to help us with the costumes. 

Twelfth Night  Our first production in the Black Box with gorgeous drops painted by Theresa—set in the 1920’s—hilarious Martha Roberts, swinging from a pole as Sir Toby; EB as Malvolio in yellow stockings, Georgia as Viola, Lili as Maria, Laura as the Priest and elegant Lucy as Olivia. 

Johnny Belinda  Polly popping popcorn on cue was one of Seth’s greatest triumphs!  The beautiful signed Lords’ Prayer—Georgette and Lili and Amy Boyle sharing the role of Belinda with Georgia as the hateful villain.

Peter Pan Lili playing the guitar; Georgette as Smee in a boat that moved across the Black Box floor; Justine as Tink in a tutu, wildly ill on Saturday night, but determined to go on, Amy Boyle as Tiger Lily, Elizabeth Grant as Wendy, Hana, too, but I can’t remember if she was Mr. Banks or a brother--and Emily Meisler in footie pajamas as Michael!.  Julia directed this one, but I loved it. Tender but not saccharine. 

To Kill a Mockingbird  I’ve written a whole essay about this production, but will say that it stands in my memory as remarkable.  We used the rehearsal process to consider questions of race and class at Chapin. Sharing out narrations, we used Lee’s language to make Maycomb, Alabama in the Black Box,.  We had three Scouts--Hajera, Lindsay Thomas and Jennica with Jenny Lancaster as Atticus and Chris Diggs as Jem with Jennica as Mrs. Dubose—illness struck during production, so we had great understudies take on roles!  The current Broadway production is spectacular, but ours, in the shadow of 9/11 was rich in love. Our own little girls, Miranda and Cordelia, watched every tech rehearsal and every performance from the catwalk. It was during this show that I famously said, “If I ever had a boy baby, I would name him Atticus.”  Little did we know...

Hamlet The Frank Lloyd Wright room at the Met inspired the look and feel of this production, also in the Black Box. We explored ideas about power and corruption and personal responsibility.  Georgette was Gertrude; Jennica was Hamlet; Jenny was Old Hamlet; Sophie was Ophelia; Abby was Claudius; Lindsey was Laertes--it was a hugely strong ensemble. I think of our audacity in producing Hamlet and then think, “Why not?”  It’s a play that speaks to adolescent grief, to culture, to questions about authority.  

Great Expectations  My last show and a tricky one because of all the scene changes that Georgina, thankfully, ran. We returned to the Assembly Room because we needed more space!

To put all my love and even a quarter of my memories  into words reminds me of what a privilege it was to teach drama at Chapin for almost two decades.  I wish I could be with you for this celebration, but I know we can’t always go home again. When I think about all these plays, all these girls we loved so much who peopled our lives--because it was very much a family affair--I remember what it felt like to stand in a circle before opening night, to count the cast down into character, to hug each one, to remind them that “It’s a play, not a work,” and “No matter what happens, deal with it,” and to tell them to “Light up the Sky!”  

I wish the Drama Club a wonderful Centennial.

Making Memories: Some Thoughts about Disney World as a Long Weekend Approaches

Reposting a version from almost a year ago. Thinking of families who might head to see The Mouse this upcoming long weekend or over Spring Break or ever…

Time and Money  Disney World is not an inexpensive way to spend time, and when you spend roughly two hours of standing in line in the sun—no, Fast Pass did not work for us--for a ride that lasts roughly 5 minutes, I begin to question my sanity.

 A Stroller is Key  Once we took our two daughters—perhaps ages 4 and 6—to the Magic Kingdom.  We had four adults plus a stroller.  That was about the right kid to adult ratio, and the stroller was key for holding all the stuff—sweatshirts, discarded but needed later; water bottles, snacks, large stuffed animals, the obligatory mouse ears—where else beyond Disney World would one ever wear such ears?  This time, I wish there for strollers for grownups.  The number of steps I walked—cause for jubilation in some circumstances—made my bad knee ache.  It’s a walking destination—no question.

 Stuff Envy  When we toured the West Coast some years ago in an RV, I discovered an RV subculture of items that I had never even considered—cool hanging lights, a tiny fence for your seven tiny Chihuahuas to lounge outside the RV on a tiny patch of turf, various exotic grilling items.  I longed for stuff I had no use for beyond the week spent in the RV.  So, it is with Disney World—see note above concerning ears and a weird yearning for a Mickey t-shirt.  I squash the longing by buying a pair of socks—the last pair I bought is one of my favorite pairs of socks.  I looked upon the new socks as a worthy investment.

 Food is Love  Tiny waffles shaped like Mickey adorn the over-priced breakfast buffet.  They are cute.  Very cute.  But no breakfast buffet was ever worth $29.  I resist the urge to tell my son and our exchange student to eat more, to put extra tiny chocolate croissants in their pockets to eat throughout the day. 

 Sociology  It’s hard not to encounter WDW as a huge sociological experiment.  After all, there you are, surrounded by many, many other people.  The outfits, the little girls in costume, the multi-generational families—it is some kind of cross section of affluent and largely white America.  And the place is clean.  Very, very clean with flowerbeds meticulously maintained.  It’s a gigantic stage set, but we all participate cheerfully in sustaining the illusion. We want to believe in make believe—for the children?  Maybe.  But I think some piece of the grownups there crave magic, too, crave happy endings and manicured order. Disney World meets some need or it wouldn’t have lines that curve round and round filled with cheerful people playing Head’s Up on their phones with strangers. Oh, those aren’t strangers after all.  It’s my son and our Turkish exchange student, Melis, playing with strangers.  I sort of love that!

 Hospitality  People who work at Disney are well-trained in the whole customer service mentality.  No one is snarky or barks at you or glares—in other expensive venues, snottiness is often de rigeur, but not at Disney World—the cashiers, the ticket takers, the waiters, the people tidying the restrooms—all are preternaturally cheerful, but it’s a nice thing.  Slightly creepy, but very nice. 

 Culture  We went to Disney World this March because we were already in Florida visiting relatives, and because we knew our son would enjoy being the expert tour guide for our exchange student.  I could manage two days of extreme heat, extreme lines, and extreme expense.  But here’s what I don’t get.  People return to Disney over and over again.  It’s as if by visiting Epcot, they feel they don’t need to go to any other real countries.  This puzzles me.  Epcot is lovely—beautifully designed in terms of offering mini-countries.  But they are not the real countries. 

 Entitlement  I’m back to money.  Sparkly tiny purple glitter back packs cost $95.  $30 gets you Minnie ears on a headband with a polka dot bow.  The aforementioned breakfast buffets.  The expensive hotel rooms at the Swan—this time we needed two.  The last time we stayed over—one night about eight years ago—we stuffed our family of five and two friends into one bedroom, but decorum required a separate bedroom for our exchange student.  I wanted the Mickey ice cream bar—it’s just a popsicle, but whenever I thought about buying it, I thought about how ridiculous it is to pay that kind of money for a popsicle and I resisted.  What could I bring my students?  I have twenty in my English class.  What could I bring them that would not break the bank?  I finally settled on tiny Japanese erasers shaped like animals—six per pack for $6.75—basically a dollar per eraser—and it felt like a bargain.  People bring huge families and stay in the Disney resorts and eat there…the cost boggles me.

 Comparisons to other Families  You can’t help it. Sometimes, your family looks so good by comparison.  Sometimes, you want a chasm to open and swallow you whole.  Your parenting is on display in front of millions of strangers with their own family dramas.  It’s a great “judge not lest you be judged” setting. 

 Pool  It was lovely.  I wish we had spent more time in it. 

 Being Present  Too absorbed in sensory overload, I almost missed the best moments.  At Epcot, my son and I ate dinner together the first night, traveling from one food stand to the next, a race before they closed, sharing a dish.  “We’re eating around the world,” he explained.  And it was fun.  We stood on a low wall and watched the fireworks.  “The blue ones are the most expensive,” I told him, his eyes glowing as we gazed up at the bright dark sky.  Later, walking out of the park, we admired some sparkly bits in the sidewalk.  A tiny girl in a stroller next to us noticed the shining dots just as we did.  “I like the sparkles,” she cooed.  Me, too.  “I saw fireworks tonight and they were all diamonds and I think some of them fell down from the sky and landed here.”  Her mother told her how clever she was.  I looked at my son, walking next to me, now taller than I.  For a moment, I let my churlishness subside, my worry about money, about privilege, about long lines and heat.  I looked at my son, at the little girl rolling past us in the warm dark evening.  “I think you’re right,” I said out loud to her.  She grinned.  My son, who hates when I speak to strangers, squeezed my hand.  Making memories.  They know how to do it.

Gird the Cats!

This year’s holiday battle cry in our home was, “Gird the cats,” a malapropism that stuck.  Beginning on December 20th, we hosted our daughter’s rescue dog, Artemis or Artie, who, anxious in new situations, was not a fan of our menagerie. Cordelia was afraid that, upon meeting one of our pets, Artemis would eat it for lunch—or dinner or breakfast.   The three dogs and the fish were easy to contain behind the kitchen door.  The cats, however, roam free throughout our house, and we worried about Artemis’s delicate nerves, not to mention the potential sacrifice of one of the metaphorical nine lives of one of our three cats.

“Are the cats girded?” we asked one another. Initially, whoever started the expression combined guard and herd, but the term caught on in our family.

“Could you gird the cats?”  someone hollered down the stairs. “Have we ungirded the cats?” we’d ask hours after we had contained them in a room.  Or the simple command, by text:  Gird.

After a week or so of assiduous girding, we grew lax.  One morning Artemis encountered our small calico, Phoebe, on the stairs.  No harm ensued. Phoebe gracefully leapt down the steps.  Artemis hardly noticed her. A few days later, we allowed Artie to pass through the front hall while black Tonio hid, undetected, beneath a chair.  While our dogs definitely knew there was a stranger in the house, the cats seemed unconcerned.

We embraced various forms of the verb, to gird.  We made it our own, introduced it into the lexicon of our family.  Early in the New Year, Seth sent us the etymology of the verb to gird, which derives from the ancient custom of girding one’s loins, as in cinching or wrapping a piece of fabric tightly around the mid-section in order to make flowing robes less dangerous in battle.  In more modern times, the connotation of girding one’s loins has come to mean to prepare oneself for a difficult situation, to get ready.  The idea of actually girdling the cats or trying to do so made me laugh.  They are their own creatures, alternately friendly and ferocious.  Over the holiday, they allowed themselves to be picked up docilely or scratched ferociously.  While Cordelia worried that Artemis might munch a cat, I worried that one of the cats would take Artemis down. 

Artemis lived in Cordelia’s bedroom, crated when we needed to be downstairs.  She may look ferocious, but is a love, pacing and whining when Atticus, our son, her primary care taker during Cordelia’s vist to her beau in Montana, left the room.  One day, I surrendered to a migraine and lay on Cordelia’s bed, Artie my faithful companion. Thinking about what she endured before Cordelia and Cole gave her her forever home makes me sad.  She is afraid of wind, pigeons, people, squirrels, snow, the inflatables on our front yard, loud noises, strangers, and, sometimes, people she knows—if only briefly.  But, she is a good dog, rich in love and kisses, delighted to have scratches and much larger than our little three.   It was fun having a canine houseguest, though I felt sorry that she couldn’t mingle with the rest of us downstairs and worried, always, about her wellbeing and the wellbeing of the cats. 

The other night, the black cat, Tonio, and the grey cat, Sebastian, did not come in when Seth gave the dogs their evening walk.  It is Sebastian’s practice to walk the circle with Seth and the three dogs, to use the dog door if necessary to come back into the house, to curl up on a coat or in a shoe cubby or on a dog bed.  Tonio never walks the whole way, but recently, both of them have been inside long before bedtime.  Phoebe, the little calico, never goes outside.  10:00 p.m. came, then 11:00.  I called and called.  Tonio often comes when he is called.  Finally, Seth put his clothes back on, went downstairs and walked and called.  He returned, cat-less.  As he was ready to give up, he turned around and saw both cats.  Had they come in and he hadn’t noticed?  Had they been there all along?  No matter.  They were safe.  We could sleep. 

And now, Cordelia and Cole are gone, Artie in her crate, looking dolefully out the back window as Cordelia and Cole make their way back to Manhattan.  The cats seem to have taken their departure calmly.  Tonio is sleeping on my bed.  Phoebe is sleeping on my freshly laundered pile of black slacks.  And Sebastian is in the kitchen with the dogs, sleeping in their bed.  Let’s be clear who is in charge in this family. 

Happy 2020.

Old Enough to Know

Fifty-nine for a week, and I keep hearing my father’s voice reminding me that I am old enough to know better.  Here, as we approach the end of the decade, are some of the things I know I am old enough to know.

 I am old enough to know:

That, as my mother used to say, things often do look better in the morning.

That dishes will not wash themselves.

Wet towels, left on bathroom floors, have a tendency to reproduce.

That the end of December can feel melancholy.

That the pleasure of gifts lies more in giving than in receiving.

That Christmas without a small child in the house feels smaller, somehow.

That busy is not the same as purposeful.

That no one can ever really understand another person’s marriage or relationship.

That keeping my mouth shut is often the best choice, especially during large family gatherings.

That the smell of coffee brewing cheers the house.

That my gas fire, even if largely placebo, still pleases me.

That the hour before everyone awakes—even the pets—is my hour for writing and thinking.

That scrolling Facebook can lead to feelings of loneliness, and self-control is required to move onto something more productive. 

That white mint chocolate chip ice cream is not as good as green mint chocolate chip ice cream.

That I do better early in the morning than late at night.

That my birthday might be more fun if it were at another time of year.

That rejections of essays mean that I’m submitting essays.

That I am a cheap date; half a glass of wine and I am sleepy, and New Year’s Eve is a dumb holiday.

That any leftover, kept more than 3 days in the fridge, will lose whatever appeal it once had.

That living in clutter overwhelms me.

That sometimes, though I fear conflict, given time, things work out.

That it is more fun to look forward to a holiday than to recover from it.

That wet shower curtains touching wet skin is unpleasant.

That it is more fun to make a meal than to clean it up.

That the holidays make me miss my parents even though they have both been gone almost a decade.

That odd snippets of memory float up from childhood when we are engaged in our own family celebrations.

That lighting Hanukah candles is one of my favorite rituals.

But the sight of menorahs covered in wax several days later is slightly dispiriting, and the thought of washing them all and putting them away until next year—plus the Christmas ornaments—is daunting.

That it’s not so easy for adult children to come back home and it is not so easy for their mother when they leave. 

That I have more books to read than uninterrupted time to read.

That resolutions enrage me because I feel so angry at myself when I don’t live up to them. So this year, heading into the new decade, I won’t have any and will practice compassion for all I may not accomplish. 

The Time is Out of Joint

 One too warm September afternoon, I take refuge in the air-conditioned mall.  As I hand over my credit card, my phone vibrates.

“Mom, where are you? Firemen are in our house.” 

What?  In fact, I’m shopping.  I’m playing hooky from my life, taking advantage of a small break as the over-scheduled headmistress of an all-girls school on a Friday afternoon.  I am buying an over-priced Eileen Fisher outfit, my son and husband having headed to Michigan for the weekend. I’m alone.

I urge the saleswoman to simply throw the clothes into my arms,  imagining flames shooting up, gray plumes of acrid smoke spiraling from the slate roof. Our Tudor-esque house was built in 1929 by alumnae for their beloved headmistress. Now, I’m the headmistress. I love our house, love the way it restores me each weekend after long days of meetings and conflicts and the inevitable challenges of life as the leader of any school.  The house holds us safe within its sturdy walls, a fortress, a messy sanctuary. I do not want the firemen to chop down our arched front door—like a hobbit door, the children say. I dash to the car, drive an interminable six minutes.

Three fire engines greet me parked at the curb at the edge of our lawn  I whisk out of the car, race through the back door, where our neighbor, Heather, is graciously accompanying the firemen.  My quick-thinking husband had phoned her as I drove home.  Our alarm is blaring: squawk, squawk.  It’s too loud, relentless.  I try to reset it, but the code doesn’t take. Unconcerned, the firemen ask where the smoke detectors are. I point up; we are standing underneath one outside the basement door.  

“Any others?”  I do not know.  I feel guilty, like a bad mother.  I have raised a son and two daughters in this house.  I ought to know.

After a brief lecture on clutter, the firemen depart and Heather leaves with them.  The alarm continues to screech.  I walk the first floor, unsettled. In the living room, a table’s polished surface is sprinkled with water.  Did a fireman rest an extinguisher on the table? I look up.  Two long cracks stripe the plaster ceiling.  Like tiny clear teeth, water droplets form along the fissures, dripping onto the table, onto the rug.  “Aha!” I say aloud.  Not fire.  Water.  How did water trip the alarm system?  

A few hours later, I sit alone in the den. Our grown daughters now live in Manhattan; my son and husband are in Ann Arbor for a football game.  In Shaker Heights, it’s just me.  The last decade and a half swivel in my memory as I listen to Ken, the plumber, and a maintenance man from school move furniture, shake out drop cloths. I remember my son in footy pajamas at the top of the stairs, each elegant daughter descending the staircase for prom. I conjure our elaborate Christmas display, see us lighting the menorahs in the living room window. I lose myself in times past, helpless to fix whatever is awry.  There is no action to take, just an odd sense of being alone, of casting on memories of our family’s life is this beloved space over many years. Though my lap is empty, in my mind, I am knitting row after row of recollection.  I shudder at today’s close call, think about how much worse it could have been. I am frightened by what did not happen.  Fire would have been irrevocable.

I hear the plumber intone, “We need to go in.”  Plaster rains down. I calculate how much all this will cost the school—fixing the leak, fixing the plaster. I put a photograph of the gaping ceiling wound on Facebook; friends commiserate. It’s just a leak, inconvenient, not fatal. The school was built the year my mother was born; I used to tease that older ladies—schools, women—were slow to reveal their secrets, but both needed loving maintenance, occasional restoration. My mother is gone now.  The school and the house endure, their structure sturdier than my mortal mother.

A week later, on Friday the 13th, my husband and I go to a play. With a pop and flash, the power fails—in the theatre and in the region. We wait a few minutes. Should we go or should we stay? Finally, we decide to leave.  On the drive home, lightning flashes, strobe-like.  Sirens wail. The streets have flooded--gushing brown rivers of deep water. Tree limbs tumble, jagged, across streets--a disco gone off the rails. A microburst.  At home, our son is glad of our early return. One cat is dripping by the back door.  We are reunited. Only the next day do we understand the vast destruction in our neighborhood, how lucky we were to be unscathed.  Again, I shudder, contemplating what could have been, grateful.

Meanwhile, our house reveals more leaks.  More holes are cut.  The insides come out—ancient corroded pipes, lathe, plaster. Dining room furniture is shoved against the wall underneath my great-grandmother’s portrait. Huge sheets of plastic taped to the walls of the dining and living rooms rustle and dance, billowing ghosts. We camp out in the family room, laughing at the ways in which chaos closes in on us.  In the midst of this madness, my husband has surgery, gets a new shoulder, begins to heal.

Houses can be fixed. Eventually, all will be whole again. Families are harder to repair. Last month, I visited the cemetery of the church where we grew up—my sister and I—thinking about our parents and our long dead brother.  It’s death I fear the most. Those ruptures cannot be mended; their aftermaths spool out forever.

In my new navy Eileen Fisher outfit, I consider climate change, the destruction of the microburst, our house, families, choices we have and those that are thrust upon us. Shakespeare used foul weather to signal chaos— happenings in the external world mirrored disorder in society in his plays. Our house is crumbling. The world is off its axis. Global warning? How safe are we?