Tales of Two Cities

Shoeless in Boston - Take Four

Here is the fourth annual Christmas photograph of the shoeless gang.

We were so busy on Christmas day I completely forgot to set up the tripod.  I barely got any snaps of our activities.  (It takes infinite patience and time to liberate toys from the packaging, which I know because I did a lot of it on Christmas morning.)

Fortunately, Liz, Steve and Emily came into the city on Saturday and I was able to get everyone to sit still for a few minutes just before they left for home.  Except for me, that is.  I triggered the camera then ran like hell to get into the picture.

Emily was tired from a visit to the New England Aquarium with her grandmother, grandfather and uncle (along with zillions of other kids, adults and an incredible number of strollers that seem to be attracted to my shins).  She checked out the penguins, the sharks, the whale skeleton, and the jellies.  We had lunch at the cafeteria then \hit the museum shop where she acquired a pink penguin (see above).  We took the subway, which she continues to enjoy, and rode as many escalators as we could find, which she also loves.

2008 photo here.

2007 photo included in my January 2008 Happy New Year entry.

2006 photo here .

Holiday Serendipty

 

It was already December 17 and I just wasn't in the mood for Christmas.

Not that I wasn't looking forward to the holiday.  Our son will be with us for a week, we will spend time with our daughter's family (including in-laws and Emily's half siblings).  We will raise a glass with friends and neighbors.  These are all experiences to look forward to.

Alas, Christmas also brings stress.  Trying to get boxes into the mail in time for them to be received for Christmas.  Shopping for those closer by.  Buying and decorating the tree. Cooking, cooking, cooking.  Shopping, shopping, shopping.  Wrapping, wrapping, wrapping.  Dealing with the demands of everyday life that drain our energy and swallow up our spare time.

On the day in question, we received an email from a friend offering us free tickets to the Boston Pops Holiday concert at 4 that afternoon and asking if we wanted to join her.  Charles and I looked at our schedules and figured we simply couldn't take the time to go.

Naturally, we said yes.

Although we have lived in the Boston area for more than 50 years and in the city for almost 30, we had never attended one of the Holiday Pops concerts.

As it turns out, the concert was a joy.  Symphony Hall looked glorious.  The program, performed by the Boston Pops and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus was spirited and uplifting.  The conductor for our performance was James Orent. 

Some of the highlights:

The Gifts of Great Meadows: This was a lovely medley of Christmas music arranged by Gus Sebring, the principal horn player of the Boston Pops.  What made this piece particularly moving was that it was illustrated with evocative photographs of natural ice sculptures projected on a giant screen.   Amazingly,  Mr. Sebring used his cell phone to take the pictures while cross country skiing on the Sudbury river flood plain last winter. (Cell phone photography is one of the newest rages in photography.)

The Twelve Days of Christmas. Mid-way through the second half of the concert, the Pops and the chorus began to perform this familiar piece, even though it wasn't on the program:  Before long I realized that I wasn't listening to your everyday Twelve Days of Christmas.   The arrangement, by Broadway composer David Chase, was an audio pun in which the familiar lyrics were matched with music from various well known classical pieces (e.g., "five golden rings" was sung to the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and "nine ladies dancing" to the dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy).  It was very cleverly done to the delight of the audience and performers alike.  Mr. Orent explained that the Pops traditionally performs a surprise encore in the middle of the concert.  This version of The Twelve Days of Christmas was introduced in 2007 and has been popular ever since

The grand finale was a sing-along of Christmas favorites.  I always love it when I have the chance to sing at full voice without fear of being heard.  Obviously (and fortunately) almost everyone else felt the same way.

After the concert, Charles and I smiled all the way home despite the bitter cold and brutally strong winds.  

The long list of "to dos" before us was no longer daunting. 

The spirit of Christmas was upon us.

About time, too.

Merry Christmas!

There's No Place Like Home

Speaking of talent and persistence, Elizabeth certainly showed her mettle while she and Emily were staying with us last week waiting for power to be restored to their home.

Elizabeth needed to produce a video lasting 30 to 60 seconds for one of her on-line classes.  It had to be either an ad or a public service announcement.  Earlier work had to be ditched because the stars in her initial concept, a cat food commercial, were at her house and our cats were definitely not star material.  In fact, they were in semi-permanent hiding for most of the time Miss Em stayed with us.

Exiled to our home in Boston, Elizabeth started the assignment all over again from scratch. First she needed to conceive of a coherent idea.  Then she had to make it happen.  I was privileged to watch the process (and to be one of the stars of the production!)

First Elizabeth came up with a vision.  Although she told us what it was, I couldn't visualize it in its final form.

Once she had her vision firmly in her mind,  "filming" began.  Some takes weren't quite what she wanted (too dark, framing poor), so she thought through the problem and tried again. With hours to go before her assignment was due, she had to find a charger for her video camera battery, which meant a lot of phone calls and a subway ride to Coolidge Corner.

In the end, she produced a very personal video lasting just under 60 seconds.  As you will see, it has a Christmas theme and it is something our family will treasure. Watch it here.  Be sure to see it through to the end where there is a serendipitous moment that will make you smile.

Vision, perserverance, flexibility and a touch of serendipity.  Can't beat it.  I am so proud of my daughter.

Postcard du Jour #3 December 2007 - In the Métro

To ride the métro in Paris is to become familiar with the phenomenon of people moving from car to car in the hopes of picking up a few euros from other passengers.  Generally there are two varieties:  those who give long speeches explaining how they came to be in their current circumstances and those who perform. 

The other day, I was riding the métro when a man began to sing in the car somewhere behind me.  He sang a capella through two stops - not a familiar ditty, but a complex piece with which I was not familiar.  Ahead of me I watched a couple of teenage girls staring at the singer and rolling their eyes.  Other passengers studiously ignored him, while still others exchanged brief, complicit smiles.  "Here we go again," you could almost hear them saying with weary tolerance.

Gradually, I became aware that the singer had a lovely voice.  The tone was pure and the dynamics nicely modulated.  If he had had an instrumental accompaniment, it might have been an unusually good performance.  When he finished, he moved through the car, holding out a little purse to gather whatever coins his listeners felt like giving him.   

No one gave him anything until a man, sitting just across from me with a young boy, reached into his pocket and dropped a coin into the open purse. As the singer moved on, the man leaned over to the boy and quietly explained that the singer was performing in the métro because he didn't have a job or a place to sleep or money for food.  Some people are luckier than others, he explained, and it is the duty of those who have to share with those who do not.  The little boy, eyes wide and leaning towards the quiet words, listened intently. I was moved.

Later in the evening as I headed home, a rapper entered at the other end of my car and started to sing. His aggressive delivery and staccato gestures got my attention, briefly, but I didn't give it much thought - opera, rap, sappy ballads, nothing really new for the travel weary. As we pulled into my station, I was amazed to see his feet in the air.  He was breakdancing on the floor of the moving car.  Passengers, clearly enthralled, formed a circle around him, giving him plenty of space. He was still at it as I walked towards the exit.  I felt uplifted.

The holidays season has arrived in full force and Paris is decorated for the season, sometimes tastefully and sometimes garishly.  Ads promoting Christmas spending dominate the walls of the métros.  One particularly striking ad seen all over the city promotes the new sub basement tool emporium in the BHV, one of the major department stores in downtown Paris. The shocker, for me at least, is that the ad currently covers the walls of the Palais Royale-Musée Louvre métro stop.  (See photo)  As Charles wondered out loud, who would have thought there was such a good market for tools?

Happy Holidays from the Paris métro!

Coming Soon - The New Improved PDM

What does it all mean?  Life?  Love?  The pursuit of happiness? The strange inexplicable absence of Virginia's Postcards du Jour? 

We have been here for two weeks and I have not given birth to one Postcard du Jour.  Actually, there is one gestating at the moment.  But still, it is a bit embarrassing.  Of course, the Postcards du Jour have already become more like Postcards de la Semaine.  It would appear, however, that they are evolving into Postcards du Mois.  PDM.  Yes, that has a nice ring to it.  At least I have been posting a photo each day.

Meanwhile, the transportation strike is over - for a few weeks at least.  Christmas decorations are going up all over the city and the trees lining the Champs Elysées are now lit up at night.  To give you some idea of the festive feel, check out the photo of one of the windows of Hediard, a very upscale delicatessen.  The main store in Paris is at the Madelaine.  This one is on the Avenue George V. 

Here Comes 2007!

Memories of Christmas Past

Late last week I put a Christmas CD on, turned on the Christmas lights that were already on the tree and, singing along with "Oh Come All Ye Faithful," "O Holy Night" and "The First Noel," I finished decorating our 6-foot high table-top tree. 

Many of our ornaments are relatively new, purchased to replace broken ones.  These evoke little in the way of memories.  Then, I unwrapped an ornament I made in the mid-1960's when I was a stay-at-home mother of two children under three. Charles was traveling a lot for work and I had some time for projects after the children went to bed. Inspired by wonderful ideas in the women's magazines that year, I spent my evenings making flowers out of gold rick-rack and attaching them, along with ribbon and other decorations, to styrofoam balls. It was a lot of fun and very satisfying.  I remember the period before Christmas that year as one of my happiest ever associated with the holiday. 

The memory is, however, bittersweet.  That Christmas was the eve of a very difficult period in my life, and for rather complex reasons, the ornaments I made in the weeks before the holiday became associated with the bad times.  Today only one of those ornaments survives:  the one on which I worked the hardest and  loved the most.  As I placed it on the tree this year, the memories came - the bittersweet and the sad, and I felt a twinge of grief for that very young twenty-something who still had so much growing up to do.  At the same time,  I recognized that without that and other stumbles along the way, I would not have made the  choices that have made me the person I am.  Forty year's on, that worn ornament reminds me of how lucky I have been to be able to experience the joys of piloting a light plane, to practice a profession I loved, and to pursue my current love, photography. 

As I added more and more ornaments, trying to balance the decorations for pleasing effect, my thoughts drifted to the years when our children were young and the part my mother played in our Christmas mornings.  My parents lived 3,000 miles away and years went by without our seeing them. Nevertheless, my mom found ways of staying a part of our lives.  Every year, she sent boxes of presents for the four of us -  gifts small and large, some thoughtful, some useful, and some just plain silly.  Each was wrapped exquisitely.  But best (or worst) of all were the poems she wrote to go with many of the gifts with rhyming hints of what we would find inside or suggestions on how it was to be used.  We would read them aloud, often to theatrical moans, despite the fact that many of her efforts were quite clever.  Good or gawd-awful, they were full of my mom's special humor.  They brought her close to us despite the miles between us.  My mother died shortly after Christmas 7 years ago and I miss her.  Especially at Christmas time.  I shed some tears for her as I decorated our tree.

Tomorrow we will celebrate Christmas Eve at our daughter's house with Emily, her parents, her other grandparents and her older brother and sister.  Then Christmas morning Emily and her parents will come here and once again there will be a little child in the house opening presents from under the tree.  I'm not the same kind of grandmother that my mother was.  I have no talent for wrapping presents.  I don't write clever, moan-worthy poems to go with gifts.  But that's OK.  I live near my granddaughter and have no need to find other ways to be present in her life. For that I am very, very grateful.
 

Santa Ate the Captain

This Christmas card is published with permission of the artist, Mike  McCarthy.  Mike is a member of dGrin, an on-line photo forum to which I belong.  He lives in Florida and specializes in bird photography.  As you can see, he also amuses himself and others with his photo manipulations.  This one really made me smile!

Too bad I can't share it with Emily!

Around the time that she turned two she began to express specific fears. Crawling insects were suddenly frightening. Alligators and crocodiles (both of which she calls alligators) were really scary.  She has never seen a real alligator, of course. But they show up in a number of her children's DVDs.  In many of the modern ones, alligators play non-threatening roles, such as providing their backs as rafts to transport cute little animals across a river.  But sometimes they play villains, their toothy jaws opening and closing menacingly as they chase their prey.  Her parents dealt with this by reassuring her about the bugs and by buying her a small, cuddly, stuffed alligator and a little plastic alligator on a key chain, both of which she loves.  The fears seems to have abated, but caution remains, which is, of course, a good thing.  After all, alligators and crocodiles are dangerous.

It is the story of Peter Pan that has somehow given Emily a context for coping with her fears that seems appropriate for a 2 1/2 year old.   Whenever she sees a picture of an alligator, she explains matter-of-factly that he ate the captain.

I think we should leave it at that for now, which is why I don't think I will share Mike's Christmas card with her.  At least not this year.

A Mini Vacation

Our friend, Laurie, is a Paris-trained artist, owner of the apartment where I stayed on the Quai des Célestin last summer, and a sometime resident of nearby Cambridge.  She grew up on Martha's Vineyard in a house built in the 1950s by her parents up-island on Pease Point in the town of Chilmark.  She attended grade school in the Chilmark two-room school house that now serves as an incongruously pretty police station.

This week we spent two days on the Vineyard with Laurie and her 13 year old daughter, Sophie.  The weather was hot but the light, refreshing breezes made the shade delightfully comfortable.   What a pleasure it was just to sit and take in the magnificent view of stately old trees, lush salt marshes, tidal inlets and Vineyard Sound.  The Menemsha fishing port and the Coast Guard Station were visible in the distance providing just the right amount of activity in the otherwise peaceful scene. How quickly we relaxed, and how easily the pressures of our wired, city lives faded from mind.

As you can see from the photograph, Laurie delivered on her promise of a lovely sunset, which we enjoyed while sipping French champagne and munching on Italian olives and fresh local radishes.  Now that is civilized.

Nourished in spirit, we returned home with the energy we need to prepare for our move to Paris for the month of September.  Sometimes life is good.