365 Memories

My son is back in camp after the weekend away. Sometimes when I pick him up, he has a repertoire of chanting, singy -songs he goes through. Often these are unfamiliar to me, but sometimes I am stunned to hear the same words sung by him and and his classmates that I sang when I was in grade school myself, all those years ago and in a different city. The latest one is "Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack; all dressed in black, black, black" with those silver buttons down her back. How do kids all end up with these same songs? I have a hard time imagining parents teaching them. How do these silly, nonsense songs survive generation to generation? Who knows. But now that I'm thinking about these songs (and the clapping games that went with them), here's another I remember from when I was perhaps a couple of years older than my son is now. I haven't heard this one from him yet. Maybe you'll remember it, too. If you do (or even if you don't), hope it brings a smile. Miss ...

Sublime: We are standing at what seems to be the summit of the world. Cordes - sur -Ciel, France. A fortified town (" bastide "), founded by the Count of Toulouse in 1222 as a safe haven for the heretic Cathars . The old town juts into the sky, high above the valley below, even above the clouds. Our physical height begs for metaphorical application: a couple of days now before our wedding, and we are also feeling high on hopes for the future, the beginning of a new chapter of life. Inside the ramparts, we stroll with some of our guests, point out the sculptural details of 13 th - and 14 th -century Gothic architecture. All is beauty and bliss. Chèvres : Amid the tall stone columns of the open-air marketplace, under the thick wood rafters and medieval pennants in the center of Cordes , our sublime moment takes a turn toward the ridiculous. My husband is on a cell phone, checking in with the manager of the château in Couiza , where plans for our wedding reception are underway...

What things plow through a woman's mind just days before her wedding, making her fertile perhaps but also furrowing her brow? If, like me, you are overseas, marrying someone from another culture (albeit one you are familiar with; it is European, Western, and you speak the language), the wedding ritual is made slightly more complicated, concerned as you are with the comfort of international guests and the possibility that any of your own faux pas will be magnified through the lens of difference: different customs, a different church, different any- and everything. A destination wedding is beautiful, but it is also an act of loyalty, courage, and maybe insanity (or at least masochism). All this to say that a lot was going on in my head space four days before taking vows, much of it logistic. An abundance of logistical detail of course means that you do not have to think too deeply about your emotional state. But here's what I remember about June 25, 2002, exactly seven years ago...

One thing I have always known and will always remember about my mother is that she is a voracious reader. I see her now in my mind's eye, sitting at my parents' long dining room table, a stack of newspapers and magazines piled up to one side. Here are the publications I remember her reading over the years, most of them simultaneously: the New York Times , the Wall Street Journal , the New York Post , USA Today , the New Yorker , People ,  Time , Money ,  Newsweek ,  BusinessWeek , Inc ., and the  Economist , along with assorted trade magazines and investment newsletters. I'm not sure I ever saw her flipping idly through, say, Vogue or Cosmo —sometimes Vanity Fair , for Annie Liebowitz's photos—but occasionally she did pull a copy of the National Enquirer from the rack in supermarket checkout line, add it to our groceries, and absorb its sordid content in the privacy of our home. This, mind you, is a list of just the periodicals—and I know I am missing some important ...

The worst kind of prejudice is the kind that slips under the radar. It's too subtle to cause a stir (and if you point it out, you'll usually get a sideways look: you're the one making too much of nothing), but its corrosive message nevertheless seeps in—subliminally, insidiously—beating down the spirit of the group it belittles or excludes. I am blessed to have been raised by two parents who were sensitive to prejudicial undercurrents; they fought against them in their own distinct ways through the tumultuous 1960s, and into the 70s and 80s as I was growing up. And it seems, thinking about it now, that they never missed a good learning moment with me: we often discussed issues of bias, prejudice, stereotype, and their harmful effects. This week, images in some of my kindergartener's reading books gave me pause. And in wrestling with how to handle these, I remembered something I hadn't thought of in many years: the library at the Brentwood Science Magnet School in ...

I have never understood why, in English, we call today's religious event "Good Friday." It is most counterintuitive . Yes, we know how the Christian story ultimately ends; we know that Easter Sunday is around the corner, and with it new life. But today, Friday, is somber in tone. It commemorates what exactly? Humiliation, pain, death. What's so good about that, other than the fact that it had to happen in order for the rest to follow? In addition to this explanation of why the crucifixion of Christ might be called "good" (his sacrifice being for the greater good of humanity), there are other theories that are less theological or philosophical and more linguistic. I have come across references to the word "good" having archaic meanings of "holy" (giving us Holy Friday, as the day is in fact called in other languages) and also "God," such as in the word "good-bye," which is a way of saying "God be with you" upo...

Paris, 1991. I was twenty-one years old that spring, living in the City of Lights, working a "stage" (internship) at a software-publishing association, and learning what is arguably the most romantic language in the world. I had left a serious boyfriend back in New York State, in the Hudson Valley, and I was at least technically faithful to him (flirtations don't count for anything in Paris). I don't remember when it was exactly, but for nearly a full week he took a vacation from his job (he was nine years older than I and owned his own business) and came to visit. I had found us a modest, clean hotel: the Hôtel du Danube in Saint Germain. It is now a refined three-star accommodation that I wouldn't recognize except for the warm, wood paneled part of the facade where the hotel's name is spelled out in raised gold letters. At the time, though, we could've stayed almost anywhere minimally decent, and I would have been happy. Because it was a romantic visi...

Although I am an only child, I paraded through childhood with a group of kids who felt very much like family—they even lived in my house. They were fictional characters, but no less real to me. Actually, while I was growing up, they often seemed more real to me than real people did. That is, they were much more honest. They didn't try to stuff you with platitudes or false optimism when things weren't going well, but they gave it to you straight . . . including giving you the knowledge that you'd make it through whatever it was, intact. These characters most often were the brainchildren of one or the other of two classic children's book authors: Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume . (In fact, they're so classic that I almost worry it's cliché to remember them here.) While living in Chicago, I started out with Beverly Cleary and her neighborhood of kids on Klikitat Street. Ramona may have been a "pest" to her sister Beezus —and as a parent, I tend to agre...

When I started seventh grade, beginning in a new school (a private college-prep academy in Los Angeles, where I had spent the previous two years in a disastrous public "magnet" school), I experienced the joy of having Latin thrust upon me, non-negotiable. We were all required to take it for at least two years—maybe longer, but since I eventually left the academy for a performing arts high school, I am not sure whether the suffering of unwilling students persisted beyond that point. I don't think, at that age, that any of us really took to the subject. Those who got good grades were academic strivers , and the rest of us, well . . . I had other things on my mind then. I held myself somewhat apart, caring only about "extracurricular" activities, which for me meant dance on a pre -professional level. I had no room for a dead language, and although my mother had been told repeatedly of my "good ear" and aptitude for language (when I was ten or eleven, she ...

March 2000. The "French Engagement Tour," I'll call it: Paris, Toulouse, Carcassonne . I had been to France with my husband-to-be about a year an a half prior, but at that time I was the "petite amie ," and this was different; this time, I was the " fiancée ," and the circle of people I needed to meet had grown considerably. On the flight across the Atlantic, and again the night before our official engagement party in my mother-in-law's home, I was briefed on the various branches of the family—the bevy of tantes , flocks of cousin(e)s, the assorted copains / copines . I have great memories of the engagement party and other festivities, introductions, moments of agitation and repose, and I may well post about some of these, but for some reason what stands out from this trip at the moment is one of the more casual evenings, a quieter one toward the end of our journey. My mother-in-law had invited some friends over (two couples of her age), and she ha...

Sometimes, it's just too much. "It" can be anything at all: losing your keys, the series of phone calls you have to make to investigate a fraudulent charge on your credit card bill, a visit from the in-laws, the cat scratching the furniture, missing the bus, burning dinner, the rude person who lets a door shut in your face while you juggle groceries and a child, broken machinery, stepping off the curb into a dog pile . . . But sometimes there is nothing wrong, it's just a day with an overwhelming amount of work (real work and "busywork") that must get done, and you are just a one person with two hands. My mom and I have a shorthand for empathy in this situation. "Want to go scream 'shit' out the window?" we'll say to each other. It dates back to a specific moment of frustration, though I don't remember at all what it was about. We were living in Chicago—on Lake View across from Lincoln Park, which puts me at about eight years old. T...

Am I five years old? Seems about right. At this age, I took a plane by myself from Chicago to Florida to visit my paternal grandparents. (Being the mother of a boy the same age now as I was then, I shudder to think of this.) I remember I was in a window seat and, I think, in a bulkhead row on the right-hand side of the plane; I have a memory of seeing the exit door to the left of where I sat. I recall the widening space between myself and my parents, their worried withdrawal (or was it just my father I glimpsed at that last moment?)—also my sense of perfect security despite being alone. I don't remember the flight itself, what I did to pass the time, if I talked to anyone. I don't remember arriving in the airport in Florida, don't remember the drive to my grandparent's house (in an overly large dull green American boat of a car), but I can clearly see their driveway and the garage through which we entered into Mimi's kitchen. This is the central memory, though: the ...

Today I remember Mr. McCatty, my middle school English teacher. His first name, I believe, was Ed. On a daily basis, he made himself memorable to us kids with his tweedy, uptight, grammarian ways; with his perfect enunciation; with his personal crusade against the interjection "like," which in Southern California in the 1980s was a quixotic endeavor (this was, after all, the time and place of the song "Valley Girl," by Moon Unit Zappa . . . like, gag me with a spoon, fer shure). Mr. McCatty had many other bêtes noirs. When someone raised a hand and asked, "Can I go to the bathroom?" his response was always, "I don't know. Can you?" If you didn't rephrase your question with "May I . . . ?" you may as well have peed in your seat. Mr. McCatty further disapproved of using the pronoun "I" in any kind of an essay. One could not write "I think that . . . ," under any circumstances. It was an egregious redundancy, as...

For any dancer of a certain generation (or two), there was only ever one "Mr. B," and that was Balanchine. He was ballet master extraordinaire, and before I was double digits in age, I knew enough to know that he was the surrogate father to please; the signposts of my nascent life read "NYCB or bust." Not that I needed another father—mine was wonderful—but Mr. B was the man whose vision shaped the ballet world, and that was the world I wanted to claim. I read biographies of Balanchine and autobiographies of dancers who were lucky enough (they must have been lucky, mustn't they?) to have inspired him to make ballets. I wanted, as did all my peers in the ballet world, to be the next Suzanne Farrell, the next muse, if only time and luck would be on my side. But it was not to be. Turning fifteen, attending NCSA (North Carolina School of the Arts), I already sensed that something about my dreams and my reality were not matching up. I saw the New York City Ballet, and...