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OK, see, I was 23 years old, living in Austin Texas. My dad had died four months before, but I was just so so thrilled to be finally in labor, and about to see my firstborn child. Labor was long, as 1st labors often are, and she was nearly born tomorrow — 11:47pm she finally came out, screaming her lungs out. A head full of dark hair, and roly-poly rolls around her little fat neck. So cute, it makes my teeth grind just remembering how much I wanted to eat her up.
In most of the photos from her first months, you never see my face or head, because it was always leaning down into her crib. I never let the poor little thing alone; I held her all the time, nursed her all the time, never let her out of my attention. (Note: I really learned my lesson, and when baby #2 came along, she learned how to cry a little bit and wait for half a minute!)
All my thoughts today are with my daughter Katie, in Austin. The person who made me a mother, and saved/created my life in doing so. Happy birthday, Katie-Kate. (And Katie, look at the music widget below the photos. 
)
LOTS of photos after the jump: CLICK to continue reading it was 20 (8) years ago today….... Continue reading »
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My sweet older daughter Katie got married in June 2008 (easiest anniversary ever to remember: 06/07/08). Hers was a much more traditional wedding than Marnie’s, complete with puffy white dress, groomsmen in tuxedos, rosebud corsages, and all that happy jazz. She hired a professional photographer, who caught this very enigmatic shot that I rediscovered yesterday while wandering through her online photo album:
me dancing with my son
Several things to note, before turning attention to the odd glance:
1- That’s my daughter Katie, dancing with her husband Trey, in the right side of the photo
2 – That’s Marnie visible in the back, in the green maid-of-honor dress
3 – Yes, that’s right, I’m wearing the same dress at Katie’s wedding as I wore at Marnie’s. First, both girls crazily decided to have OUTDOOR weddings in the HOT SUMMER, so something extremely cool was called for. And second, I bought it specifically to wear to Katie’s wedding, and when Marnie’s came up I decided to call it my “dress I wear to my daughters’ weddings.” I’ll have to keep it safely aside to wear in the future when my youngest girl gets married, which will probably be several years, since she’s a sophomore in college.
It’s a very long story with my beloved son – lots of very long stories with him, to be more accurate – so I know everything that lives behind that glance, behind my close hold on him. I store the photo here so I don’t forget about it again.
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I had a long conversation with Katie, my older daughter, this morning, which was essentially a conversation about what gives a life meaning and value. Like me, her desire is for close-to-home things – meaningful work, a family, being a mom. Like her, I am often intimidated by people whose lives are more dramatic, or whose work is more “exciting,” or whose lives are more something than ours.
And then, while I was uploading my new sock photo to ravelry, my iTunes randomly played a song from Annie Lennox‘s album Songs of Mass Destruction. (If you click the album cover to the left, it’ll take you to the Amazon page where you can buy the music; I very highly recommend it!) I became fixated on the first song released from the album, Dark Road. Sony took down the video, so I can’t show it here. Bastards. It’s a beautiful video, and the song is heartbreakingly beautiful, as many of her songs are.
55? isn't she gorgeous?!
I’ve been in fan love with Annie since I first heard Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) back in 1983, I think. As a matter of fact, that song always makes me think of Katie; she was a tiny toddler at the time and she was crazy for the song. It could be playing at the other end of the house and she’d squeal, come running, and then stand there, bopping and grinning to the beat. Adorable. Annie’s music has been the soundtrack for much of my adult life; the Diva and Medusa albums truly are the soundtrack to the end of my first marriage, and my devastating divorce. The Peace album is the soundtrack of a year of my life in graduate school, when everything — everything — came together and I was absolutely happy in myself. The Bare album is the soundtrack to one of the biggest changes of my adult life.
So anyway, I’m sitting at my desk, doing my little small life thing, documenting a little sock I knit, for heaven’s sake, and the next song from the album came on – Sing. Sing my sister sing, let your voice be heard, what won’t kill you will make you strong, sing my sister sing. It could be trite, but it isn’t. Annie sings it with urgency – sing, my sisters. Sing. The song is the focus of her Sing campaign to prevent HIV transmission from mother to child.
So there she is (just a couple of years older than me, by the way) making beautiful music and trying desperately to help save lives in Africa, and to help women, and here I am taking too many pictures of a sock.
Of course in light of this morning’s conversation with Katie it struck me. I could say the cliched thing, something trite about “all lives have meaning” blah blah blah (note, it’s not trite because it’s not true! it is true that all lives have meaning. But it’s trite because it’s a too-simple answer to a deeper concern). I don’t know how to resolve it. I feel it, I understand it.
Maybe it’s something like understanding that age 51 I’m probably not going to be an astronaut and should cross that one off my list.
Anyway – here’s Sing, if you haven’t heard it:
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even death is beautiful in Ireland
Just around this time last year, my darling daughter Katie (who was born Katherine Kennedy Galloway, such a pretty green-eyed Irish girl) and I went to Ireland together. It was her first trip out of the country, and she’d always wanted to see Ireland so I felt incredibly lucky to have the chance to take her. I was attending an academic conference in Dublin, so we went several days early, and stayed in a gorgeously wonderful little B&B in Lough Gur, under the eagle-eye care of a marvelous woman named Bridget. After traveling around for those pre-conference days, Katie explored Dublin while I conferenced at Trinity University.
Ireland is even more beautiful than people say it is. I think it must be one of the most beautiful places on earth. Thanks to Pip for her comment in the previous post, mentioning Galway. It caused me to look back at my flickr set:
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……and, we’re back. Roatan was just wonderful – even better than last year, in many ways. We weren’t able to be online with any ease, so I just put up one giant post on the Roatan blog, with a flickr slideshow. It was great to be there, and kind of awful to be facing work tomorrow. I only have 235 emails, so it could definitely be worse, but I can’t bear to look at them today. Tomorrow will be soon enough.
I did a lot of knitting on vacation, partly because I had a dreadful cold the first couple of days, and there was an amazing storm for a couple of days. I finished the holey socks, and am ~75% finished with the other pair:
side view of the holey socks
holey socks, accompli!
- Pattern: Holes in my socks! By Nicole Okun
- Yarn: Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock Multi (Colorway: Beverly 209) – 2 skeins were more than enough
side view of the monkeys
looking down on the monkeys
I’m going to try to knock out the rest of sock #2 and get them both out in the mail to Katie asap, then I need to return all my knitting time to the wedding shawl.
While we were gone, spring seems to have arrived in full force here in Manhattan! It’s sunny and gorgeous outdoors, and people seem refreshed. Today is the post-vacation normalizing for us – piles of laundry, straightening up and putting everything away, getting ready for the week.
One thing that makes it better, coming home from vacation, is that we always start planning the next one. Our current idea is to go to Laos, with a trip to Cambodia to see Angkor Wat and maybe a side journey into Thailand, avoiding Bangkok if at all possible. Or to the degree possible, anyway. The child sex trade there is too horrifying to bear, and I don’t want to give a penny to the country that supports it. Every country supports horrors of one kind or another, and there’s little gradation between things at that far end of the spectrum, but that one in particular is unbearable for me. So we’re focusing on Laos, and trying to figure out how best to get there at a reasonable price. We loved Vietnam so much, and especially enjoyed Hanoi, so we may just make a stop there, too. Fun fun fun, anticipating and planning. It makes the coming home a bit easier.
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sock #1
The second sock is nearly at the heel part, so I will finish it when I’m in Honduras next week. I’ll mail them to you when I get home! It has made me so happy to make them for you, and I look forward to making the next pair, too. I’ll use a different pattern, of course.
As immune systems will do, mine crashes after a prolonged period of stress. It’s been working and working, carrying me through the stress, and when the stress backs off just a little bit, crash. It’s kind of fascinating, if you ask me. My stress is still very intense; I woke up at 4:45am this morning so I could get to work early. But I guess the relief is coming, so crash. So just in time for my beach vacation: a cold, thankyouverymuch. Still, I’d rather be there with a cold than at my desk with a cold. If I have to have one.
Off to have a steaming bowl of tomato soup and an intense regimen of ColdCalm. And early to bed, so I can early to rise again tomorrow.
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Yesterday is done for the year, so moving on! Today we’re going in search of a new bathroom light fixture, and we’ll take a trip down to Chinatown for some eating of Thai food – I think that’s the current plan. I’ll take my camera along, so I may have photos later.
My weeks fly by in a blur of stress – my best intentions to post more regularly are just paving the road. A week from today we’ll be flying back to Roatan – I hope you’ll drop in on that blog now and then while we’re gone. I’ll leave a note here when we leave, so the link as at the top.
Sock knitting is about all I’m getting done, a couple of rows on the subway to work, and a couple more on the way home. Still, a row here and a row there, pretty soon you’ve got a sock! Here’s where I am now:
going down the foot toward the toe!
spread flat, with the heel underneath: a bit of green pooling at the top of the foot
I’m kind of brain dead – do you know how that goes? Too much stress at work, consuming all the ATP molecules and all the attention, leaving a drained little husk of a mind. Maybe the weekend will energize me…..possible, since we have SUN!! Hallelujah!
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The wedding shawl knitting is ongoing, of course, but I’ve just cast on a pair of socks for my first daughter, who lives in Texas. She’s a pretty Irish girl, and so I wasn’t that surprised when the two yarns she chose contained different shades of green. This first pair I’m making for her is a combination of blues and greens – jewel tones, more or less, very beautiful:
"Holes in my Socks" in Lorna's Lace Shepherd Sock, Beverly colorway
the colors are spiraling!
I finished the new couch cushions, very squishy and beautiful. They look nice on the brown leather couch, and complement the oriental rug, too. But I was sitting at my sewing table with the window open – we can’t control the heat in our apartment except by opening the windows – and suddenly there was a loud noise and a snowball came through the opening. Scared the living daylights out of me!
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