A Winter’s Tale
Reading Lesson
Reading Lesson (re-printed on page 2) OR Reading Lesson (original/extract)
The Painted Drum
Sleeping Like a Widow
Having given up…
Having given up first on Christmas cards, then on the annual Christmas letter, I eventually abandoned the Christmas e-mail update as well. So I find myself here, once again, re-creating the blog I first opened a year ago, and posting an update for friends and family. My *plan* is to post here regularly with photos, news, links, and musings that can’t easily be accommodated in the brevity of a FB update.
Randy, Sophie, and I have had a good year. Sophie is now in fifth grade, discovering new interests and continuing to add new friends to her ever-growing roster of buddies, which expands outward from her “clump” — a group of girls who hang out together during school recess–to friends from church, the neighborhood, and anywhere else she spends more than a couple of hours. Here’s a photo of her with Caroline and Hannah – two good friends (yes, they are all the same age!) – dressed for the children’s choir on Palm Sunday.
Sophie is irrepressibly social. To the great delight of her parents, one of Sophie’s growing interests is music, and she has added drama classes to her repertoire this fall and winter as well. Her excitement about piano continues to grow, thanks to a wonderfully fun and encouraging teacher, and she has added a mini vocal session to her weekly lessons (with, appropriately, Mrs. Singer), though she has yet to sing for us at home. At school, she continues to play recorder with glee and gumption, surpassing all the other kids at Oakview Elementary except her good friend, Claire, with whom she loves to play and perform. So at the school Christmas concert she played in the recorder ensemble and sang in the chorus; in the church Christmas pageant, she was Narrator #1, one of the dancing ladies, and a swimming swan (among other parts and costume changes I can’t recall), and on Christmas eve, she was running back and forth from her role as an acolyte (carrying and lighting candles and looking very solemn in her official robes) to sing in the kids’ chorus, and play a duet (Sophie on piano with Hannah on bowed psaltery). We were suitably proud. She remains interested in volleyball, but doesn’t yet have the chance to join a team – we’re hoping middle school (next year!) will allow for that; and her interest in swimming (i.e. actual laps) is growing. She’s hoping maybe to join the “pre-team swim” club at the Y this spring so as to be ready finally to join the swim team at the summer swim club where we hang out. She likes to go to UD and swim in the wonderful RecPlex pool (with a cool vortex pool, a diving well, and a lovely hot tub) with Mom on days when she’s off school.
Sophie is growing up in so many ways – most of them quite wonderful. She turns 11 at the end of January, and she’s already 5’3″, wearing size 8 ladies shoes (well, that was last week – she’s probably an 8 1/2 by now). She loves all things tech (i-pod, wii, dsi, e-mail, and, as of yesterday, Skype!), and retains a VERY strong sense of style. Mostly, she wears black or grey skinny jeans and grey or grey-striped tops. She loves hats – mostly those droopy tams hanging off the back of her head – and big earrings. So, when she got her very first pair of glasses last week, we were not wholly surprised that she jumped on the barely emerging trend of RayBan frames. Here she is in her new “geek chic” specs.
Unfortunately, all this fashion wisdom comes with unsolicited advice for mom. Did you know, for instance, that only GRANDMOTHERS wear matching tops & bottoms? So much for my lovely red Christmas skirt set. I won’t even tell you about the grief I faced in trying to sew a Halloween costume that met her expectations for pirate girl.
Randy continues to stay busy as a full-time dad and household manager. When not running Sophie to and from extra-curricular activities and social dates, he may be found at the grocery store – where he goes daily, in between weekend trips to the Fifth Street Farmer’s Market. His menu continues to grow – including slightly healthier versions of southern classics as well as plenty of Asian options – and Sheila now does only “ceremonial” cooking (Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter). He also walks and goes to the gym every day, with weekly classes of either yoga or pilates. He is doing a much better job than Sheila of staying fit and healthy. He also continues to read voraciously – usually a book or two a week of politics, sociology, psychology, etc. Basically anything good that isn’t “Literature.” He also follows many blogs, web magazines, and other stuff Sheila doesn’t know what to call. In short, he is very up-to-date on what the thinkers are thinking and the doers are doing. He keeps Sheila from falling off the edge of the earth by giving her something important (besides literature and administrative reports) to read every once in a while.
We all spent a great week-plus in North Carolina in July, with the Hughes-Boyer clan. We had a few days in Raleigh with Randy’s folks (his mom wasn’t up to traveling to the beach and his dad didn’t last long once there), plus a full week at a grand beach house on Topsail (pronounced “topsol”) Island. Just glorious. We could hear the surf through our bedroom window, and we spent far too much time lounging in beach chairs with our feet (and, often, much more) in the surf. Sheila found that if you position yourself just right, you don’t need to salt your margarita glass. Despite some serious sun burn from spending hours on end in the water (how many layers of skin can one lose?), we had a lot of fun, and a lot of good seafood. There were twelve of us there in total, aged 88 to 18 months. Randy’s parents, Ben & Janie, have experienced rapidly declining health this year, and so he has gone to North Carolina to visit a couple of other times, as well, including a last-minute visit early this fall. He and Sophie are hoping to get there again for New Year’s, while Sheila stays home with the cats to enjoy a little quiet time before heading off to the MLA convention in Seattle. Randy and Sophie are tagging along this time, and they plan to have fun playing tourist in the city while Sheila is locked in her hotel interviewing frantic faculty job candidates.
Sheila had a fair bit of travel on her own this year, including a week’s visit to Vernon in February to visit sister Kathi and her partner, Glen, and to spend time with her Mom, who remains in good spirits despite declining physical and mental health. A conference in Seattle, in June, allowed for another short trip up to Vernon to spend more time with Mom. Joan remains too weak to walk unassisted, and so has been in a wheelchair since her major stroke a year ago last November. But she has gotten more agile with her right hand and her legs, and she can move herself around pretty well – when she remembers where she wants to go! She gets very good care at Creekside nursing home and, in addition to regular visits from family and lots of phone calls, she has a beloved professional aid who takes her out for day trips a couple of times a week. Everyone at Creekside loves Joan, who remains very social and has held on to her slightly wicked sense of humor. Sheila hopes she can someday weather loss and age with her mother’s mix of tenacity and grace, and she continues to find herself inspired to write poems about this amazing woman (there’s a link to one, “Sleeping Like a Widow,” on my blog site).
Sheila’s big trip this year was to France & Spain: the culmination of a spring seminar spent studying the history of the Marianist family and the founder of its male religious order (which sponsors the University of Dayton), the blessed William Joseph Chaminade, in the 250th year of his birth. (Fr. Chaminade collaborated with two women: Mother Adele de Batz de Tranquelleon and Marie Therese de Lamarous, who co-founded the female order). With the former Superior General of the Marianists, Fr. Dave Fleming (now living primarily in Bangalore, India), Sheila joined a handful of other department chairs and UD leaders on an “intellectual pilgrimage” to visit sites and communities important to the history and contemporary life of the Marianists. After a few days in Paris (we were hosted very warmly at the Marianist welcome center, attached to a large high school, in Antony), putting sight, and sound (and taste!) to the French/revolutionary history we’d been studying, we traveled by train to the city of Bourdeaux, where Chaminade spent most of his adult life and founded the Society of Mary. Staying at the darling little “Hotel Madeleine” right next door to the Madeleine Chapel and house where Chaminade lived and the current SM brothers live and serve, we experienced a profound connection to history. Over a lunch with too many courses and too many wines to count, we were welcomed warmly and genuinely as long-lost family by the brothers of Bordeaux. We talked afterwards of the deep sense of belonging we felt among these people we’d only just met, though many of our group couldn’t even speak the language Sheila especially enjoyed getting to talk at length with a very jolly brother from East Africa who complimented her on her French accent and language skills. A proud Canadian moment. She also made a new friend in Natalie Quintos – a vowed Marianist sommelier. LOVE those Catholics. Nathalie gave us all wine-tastings lessons, arranged for a tour of a magnificent winery, gifted us with an extravagant magnum of sauternes, and gave Sheila free French grammar tutorials as we drove through the Bordeaux countryside. Dreamy.. Sadly, my memory card died near the end of our trip, and I’ve yet to be able to recover any photos. (And my camera is still not working – hence the bad phone photos here).
In all, we spent about 5 days visiting Marianist sites, Marianists, and friends of the Marianists (including a 7-course/9-wine dinner hosted by the father of a UD MBA grad, at his large independent bookstore-wineshop-restaurant) in the Bordeaux area. Then we took the train through southern France and Basque country to Saragossa (or Zaragoza), Spain, where we stayed in a lovely little boutique hotel (with a stone cavern spa in the cellar!) right across the plaza from the Basilica of Our Lady of the Pilar. This was where Chaminade spent his years of exile during the French Revolution, and where he was inspired by Mary to return to Bordeaux and found the Marianist sodalities (a sort of house-church movement that practiced a kind of equality among priests and religious, vowed and lay, men and women, that is unique among Roman Catholic orders). During our stay, the youth of Saragossa were camped in tents in the plaza beneath our hotel windows, protesting high unemployment (about 22%!). Precursers to the Occupy Wallstreeters here. They had some interesting signs (which I had some difficulty translating, since the only Spanish I know comes from Dora the Explorer and French and English cognates. One said something like, “We are not drunkards and sloths.” Clearly, battling some of the same stereotypes at work in the U.S. I did find that after an evening of tapas and beer in the oldest part of the city, I was able to translate Spanish perfectly. Must have been the magical creamy cheese, sardine, and dark chocolate tapas! Our trip wound up with a visit to Madrid, where we visited with folks from UD Publishing, a joint venture with UD and Grupo SM (the largest ESL/EFL educational publisher in Spain and Latin America) before flying home.
The year has been a busy one at work. I continue to serve as department chair, finishing up my first four-year term in 2011-12, with a lot of work on a complete overhaul of our undergraduate major and the much anticipated full implementation of a new first-second-year required composition curriculum. In order to see these things through, I have just agreed to serve for a second term, though I sometimes question my sanity. I’ve also taken on some new campus-wide responsibilities in the past year or so—including launching and chairing a new UD Speaker Series (Vandana Shiva, Ottmar Edenhofer, Ebony Utley, and David Suzuki this year!), serving on the Sexual Misconduct Education, Prevention, and Response Task Force and then Implementation Team, joining the University Hearing Board (for student misconduct), serving on the Academic Senate, and continuing to work with others to advance women’s leadership at UD. I also especially enjoyed teaching a new class this fall – an intercultural pilot of ENG 100 with half international and half American students. It was the most fun I’ve had in the classroom in years and reminded me how much I love working with international students (my first teaching experience was with young adult ESL students in Vancouver in the late 80s).
Despite a number of ailments (I have now had cortisone injections in 3 different parts – all on my right side!), I still swim 3 mornings a week, but tennis has dropped off – playing doubles just once a month now. I am determined to get in better shape in 2012 so that I can keep up with Randy & Sophie.
We have enjoyed a quiet cozy Christmas at home this year – though we all got a workout putting together Santa’s big gift: a 600 (?) lb. ping-pong table that came with 143 tiny screws and 40 large bolts, plus various tubes, braces, and other odd bits. Randy is transforming the basement into a man-cave/games room, hoping, I think, to keep our house the cool place to hang out as Sophie moves into the teen years. Not a bad idea, though I worry what it means for my wardrobe.
Best to all our friends & loved ones for 2012! Please come visit us when you can…
