365 Memories

Welcome to September—to the U.S. Open, to crisper air and lengthening shadows, to a return to routines, and above all . . . back to school. Although my own son is still enjoying the liberty of summer vacation (why is Labor Day so late this year?!), we've already done a bit of shopping to get ready for the upcoming term: some tan corduroys, two pairs of shoes, new pens and pencils and composition books and flash cards. It's a ritual I love, always have: unsharpened pencils and unsullied erasers equal a seductive, if fleeting, perfection. The new academic year holds so much potential, be it for high marks or team tryouts, or else a respite from whatever social tyranny dogged the previous year (because when the newness of the year wears off, the drama tends to set in—and I'm not talking about the school play!). Here is what I remember most about back-to-school shopping from my own childhood: First, new markers and glue; three-ring binders (that ubiquitous scratchy blue kind t...

The hiss and boom of fireworks are tapering off. Another Independence Day in the United States. Today, I think about all the reasons why I feel lucky to belong to this messy community of free thinkers and loudmouthed discontents. News in recent weeks is enough to remind us: we do have basic freedoms of thought, speech, and action that people (especially women) in other parts of the world can only hold in their hearts as hope. I don't have the strongest record as a patriot, but there are not many other places I'd rather be at the moment, barring the need for serious health care (knock wood). Well, on vacation, yes, but that's different. So this day of anthems and outdoor grilling is coming to a close, and what do I remember in this moment? Really, because of the fact that this afternoon our family did nothing to mark the holiday (traditional plans fell through), I am remembering the picnic we would have had—the one that we've had whenever possible, in the years since I ...

OK, so after choking on this post for a while, I have realized that it is pretty much impossible to create something that will live up to the expectations that we (people in general, I specifically) put on the "big events," in this case my hopes for a post to perfectly capture a single facet of my wedding day in stunning detail. In part this is because I am tired today, but in part it's also due to the fact that weddings are like this for the couple in question—at least for most brides, I think: hard to experience fully in the moment. This is one reason why a good photographer is worth every expense; you are too invested, too much the director of this production to set yourself aside and just live fully in the "now" of it all. Our ceremony was lovely, beyond a doubt. It was full of love and joyful celebration and outrageous indulgence and passion. All these things, and yet it passed in such a blur. My memory of the event itself is a fragmented collage, a culmina...

As a daughter who enjoys a deeply bonded relationship with her father, a memory springs to mind now, on the eve of my wedding anniversary; a memory concerning a tradition I imagine might be perfunctory for some, but that for me was anything but: the father-daughter dance. I remember, in the months leading up to the wedding, agonizing over what song we should dance to. Whose idea was it, finally, to choose a song by Alan Jackson? By default, I assume it was my idea, but I can't remember the notion actually coming to me; it's possible he made the suggestion. Really, it seems just as appropriate (emotionally, if maybe not technically accurate) to say that we found the song together, both of us owning the idea equally. My father had been a fan of Alan Jackson since way back. I remember being college age when I first borrowed his album, Don't Rock the Jukebox , and heard Jackson's accented voice and his clever lyrics, humorous and soulful, for the first time. I appreciated h...

Forty-three years ago, in the Greek Orthodox Church of Sts . Constantine and Helen, in Detroit, Michigan, my parents were married in a traditional wedding ceremony. Of course I don't remember this event; I was born three years, three months, and three weeks later. But a fascination set in long ago, and I remember looking at albums, at the square-format photos with thick cardboard backing, photos now bleached out with light exposure and age . . . Without the photo in front of me (I swear it), I can remember the exact orange-pink shade of the roses my mother carried, the cream color and elegant tailored cut of her sleeveless dress. I see her in profile: slim body, head angled down, youthful skin with full, flawless cheeks, the merest hint of a smile like a pale Mona Lisa. I see my father, brown suit (or was this just the discoloration of the print?) draped on a "tall, dark, and handsome" man. Not a trace of silver in his hair yet. He, too, looks fairly serious, but complete...

It seemed like a good idea when I first thought of it. Of course, when you're six or seven (or even much older), lots of things seem like good ideas that aren't, including conning a babysitter into letting you wobble around the neighborhood wearing your mother's high-heeled boots, many sizes too big and in any case off limits; or else sticking a tiny seashell up your nose, far enough so that a couple weeks later—because you'd done this on the sly and were afraid to say anything when it got stuck—the shell had to get vacuumed out at the pediatrician's office. You know, stuff like that. (What? You mean to tell me you never put a shell up your nose when you were little?) Anyway, this was no big thing, didn't have any serious consequences. No getting in trouble, no trip to the doctor. Still, it marked me for its foulness, and I've never forgotten. To give some background: I don't know whose idea it was, mine or my mom's, but together we started a mini t...

I made a cake today for my son's sixth birthday party. It's a yearly chocolate-buttermilk tradition, this sweet indulgence topped with fluffy buttercream . The cake was made to resemble a tennis court (I admit to green food coloring in the frosting), with a net and two players that I found at a cake and baking supply shop on West 22 nd Street. Tall, skinny, brightly colored candles lined one side of the court. The tennis was an appropriate theme, since the gift from my husband and I this year was a flashy red and black "Agassi" Head racket . We sent guests home with canisters of tennis balls, too. Last year, the cake was a giant baseball with the traditional red stitching; one gift, thanks to grandparents, was a set of tickets to a Bridgeport Bluefish ball game. Going back from there, I recall a racetrack cake, a Curious George cake (illustrated with royal icing) . . . But today's memory spans more than the past half-dozen years—it covers another generation and a...

March 26 was Easter Sunday in 1978. I was nine years old. I have had many memorable Easter celebrations—among them, one in Ireland and one in Greece, both when I was an adult—and I'll certainly write about them in coming weeks, but the general spirit of a childhood Easter season will always belong to 1970s Chicago. Between the ages of five and ten, those years in which holidays are perhaps most magical, we lived in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago. It was here that I still believed in the Easter Bunny (a tradition that seems odd to my French in-laws, since for them it's the "bells of Rome" that fly overhead dropping eggs down to expectant children; really, I guess that's no stranger than the idea of a rabbit "laying" eggs—we also go round about whether the Easter Bunny is the reason why "Americans don't eat rabbit," which of course we do but not as much as in France and, it's true, often not in childhood). And it was in Chicago...

For twenty years now, or very nearly, my father and I have shared a tradition of leather journal giving. I confess that the ratio of giving and receiving is not at all an even one. Mostly it is I who have been blessed with a package to unwrap—a hardcover, hand sewn, hand bound package smelling of rich, oiled sheepskin. The color of the hand-dyed leather has varied, as has the size of the journal (from the rather large to the quite compact) and the image carefully pressed into the cover, but one thing has always been the same: the journals all have been brought to life by the same hand, that of bookbinder Greg   Pfaff . The first journal, I remember, was discovered by my father at a small gift shop in Rhinebeck , New York, where I lived alone in an apartment on Montgomery Street while I attended Bard College. He gave one to me for Christmas, I think in 1990 (if not, I could only be off by a single year). I was immediately honored and intimidated. How could I ever hope to have thoughts, ...

Detroit in the 1970s. My aunt (my mother's sister, the eldest child out of six in the family) had a finished basement in her house, and she would host large family parties there—often I think, although pretty soon after my birth, we left the Detroit area and so were too far away to participate in many of these celebrations. I think I attended two of the parties, but even to me, it felt like a ritual occurrence, such was the welcoming atmosphere, the instant acceptance of family. Jean and Louis (my aunt and uncle), plus their grown kids and my cousins once removed (who were closer in age to me than my first cousins), opened their home and their hearts, their basement and their kitchen to us all. I was very young, so I don't remember much, nor do I trust the memories I do have; they may just be associations. Mostly I remember two things, and the first is culinary. When we came through the front door of the house (or maybe it was a side door? I have an image of a set of two doors,...

Sundays in Chicago, when I was young: elementary school age, Sunday school age. The mornings belonged to me and my father. Often in those years, he traveled for business during the week, and this made "seventh day" mornings all the more precious. On Sundays, we'd leave our family's Lincoln Park apartment early, dressed in church clothes, and head downtown. Occasionally we'd stop at my father's office in the old Playboy (Palmolive) building, which was the art deco, stair-step style skyscraper at the top of Michigan Avenue—the one with the beacon on top, sometimes called the Lindbergh beacon, that is now extinguished but that would, throughout my childhood years in the Windy City, shine like a lighthouse guiding nighttime traffic down Lake Shore Drive. I used to watch the spinning, searching light in the dark and know that this was where my father was; those evenings he worked late, I imagined that beacon of light still connected us and that this was what would ...