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2002 As I sit to write, I’m listening for Greg at the door, coming home from school. Lately he’s been trailing a couple of friends whom Phil refers to as “The Horde” (also members of my Boy Scout Troop) who are, well, lively. As part of my conscientious effort to appreciate the present, I can’t help but consider the future, so I know that this liveliness, while it is loud, messy, and sometimes annoying, is something I will miss when it’s gone. Greg will be coming home from high school for one more year. Already I miss Rob, and he’s only gone 2 miles away, living in the dorm. We see him for laundry every few weeks. Rob’s life has seen the most change this year. Going to London this summer with Dana and Dad, living away from home with all the time management skills that college demands, is maturing him into a very nice (if quiet) young man. He’s been a ringleader in getting groups of friends, his and Greg’s, to dress in costume for the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings movie openings of this year. Be sure to see the photos Phil has scanned onto our website. (You might call it unhealthy obsession with stuff not even real…I call it participation in art.) We are LOTR fans, re-reading the books, analyzing the movies (including all the extra material on the expanded-edition DVD), arguing the many book/film comparisons. (An inter-generational Teachable Moment!) Interestingly, Greg dressed as Samwise…the character I most identified with when I first read the novels, back in high school…and Rob as Gandalf, with whom I identify now (since all the women are babes and I feel I can no longer go there). At Pennsic this last summer Greg went to Juggling classes and keeps up his interest attending the Juggling Club on campus. He gets better all the time, and does pretty well on his unicycle, too. In school he has been taking art classes. This last week he had an assignment in which he was supposed to interpret a well-known work of art or architecture in some edible substance. He says that a lot of kids bake sheet cake, color icing, and go from there. His first inclination was to make sushi with different colored ingredients and look for a painting in Pointillism…but that’s a big table full of sushi. As he looked at sculpture images on-line and brainstormed what food he could carve, I remarked that we had some big turnips in the leaf/compost heap, leftovers from Halloween decorating. He fished them out and carved a pretty respectable head, after Giacometti. I miss that creative problem-solving from my art student days, and I get as close as I can with things like being a counselor at Art Camp, working in a Haunted House, and using medievalist knowledge in many guises: Artist in Residence with the 6th graders’ history unit, activities at our local library’s Festival, interpreting Viking culture (this group has rigorous accuracy standards), and cobbling together costumes for R&G& friends for movie openings and Halloween. My sewing machine has become my major tool, and the second-hand store my supplies source. In other adventures, I’m still Scoutmaster, and took 9 kids and 6 adults last summer for snorkeling, camping, and being on the water in a sailboat around the Florida Keys. Favorite moments: trying to follow a little sea turtle around the reef without losing track of my buddy, seeing black nasty squalls move in from a distance, and all the new plants and birds. Sad to say, I’ve been a temperate-zone dweller all my life, and that subtropical stuff blew me away. Lush! Weird! Next, New Zealand…or maybe I’ll just have to settle for seeing LOTR again. Sigh. Hope you are all well this holiday season and finding joy in acceptable quantities. Life in Athens! What a trip!
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Revised 2002/12/20