my beating heart

The sun was already setting and the chill of an early November evening settled upon us as I rode the Bakfiets back to the school for the third time that day. Townes chatted contentedly to me while I rocked the heavy bicycle back onto its brass and rubber stand and looked behind me toward the white-lacquered gate of the school. Parents and babysitters were gathering but no children had yet emerged. Inside the sandy brick walls of the school, the kids would be gathering coats and scarves and mittens before gripping the handles of their cartables, the rectangular, wheeled backpacks that are ubiquitous among French schoolchildren, to follow their extra-curricular instructors out into the courtyard.

Across the tiny street to my right, a couple of twenty-something guys unlocked the front door of their narrow two-story townhouse and walked inside, casually dropping their effects onto a kitchen table near the door. Through their enormous Dutch windows--every house here is visible all the way through to the garden, with no window trimmings to impede the curious glances of passers-by--I could see them collapse onto a sofa and turn on the television.

Soon Violette was wriggling onto the padded wooden bench of the Bakfiets alongside her brother, and I stole another glance at the house. The guys were now nestled even more comfortably into the couch, feet up on a coffee table, hands dangling nonchalantly inside bags of potato chips. I thought of the four or five hours of hard work ahead of me--the ride home, a mad scramble to get dinner on the table while simultaneously mopping up any mischief that Townsend was getting into and gently encouraging/enforcing homework and piano practicing, the forced cheery patience as they resisted pajamas and lights out, my anxiously awaiting the moment when their breathing would settle into the slow regularity of sleep so that I could rush back out of their bedroom to fold a load of laundry and clean up the dinner mess before finally dropping into my own bed. Just before drifting off into delicious but soon-to-be-interrupted sleep, I would set my alarm for six forty-five a.m., when I would begin again the long day of a weekday widow.

Looking at the guys and their television, I exhaled in a deep sigh. Lucky, I muttered.

I rocked the bicycle forward and kicked the brass stand back up with a loud, satisfying click, and started along the narrow cobblestone street and around a corner. I looked at the little fawn-colored heads nestled together in front of me, talking excitedly about school and who knows what else, reveling in being together after the separation of the day.

I'm lucky too, I said aloud, smiling gently to myself, and the breeze picked up my words and carried them away like a birthday balloon as I cycled us home for dinner.

--

The first performance of the evening was still going on behind black metal double doors. Outside in the lobby, where long farm tables and industrial chairs rested on Persian rugs for an indie recording-studio effect, I sipped green tea from a glass and watched Steve pacing around outside the theatre on a work call, hunching down into his dark, high-collared jacket, newsboy cap pulled down low against the wind.  I relaxed back into my chair, content to have an unaccounted-for moment, and pulled out my iPhone to distract myself with the exoticism of photos by strangers and friends on Instagram. After a minute, I realized that I could hear the loud, rhythmic beat of my heart, so pronounced that it seemed that it would be audible outside of my body. I put a finger on the pulse at my throat, and felt the evenness of it in time with the drumming in my ears. Maybe I just wasn't used to quiet anymore, had forgotten what it was like to be able to hear my own heartbeat.

Steve came back inside just before the next performance, and we stood with the rest of the very white Dutch audience and listened to a disarmingly sweet young black man from Brooklyn rap his interpretation of William Shakepeare's sonnets. Later, we would see a one-woman performance of the story of Horatio from Hamlet that danced on the edge of sanity and completely blew our minds.

At home, after our lovely babysitter, Ksenija, had gone home and Steve had mounted the stairs to check on the kids, I perched atop the pot-bellied stove in our living room to regard the painting hanging above our sofa, which we had finished making a few days before, and I pulled out my iPhone to take a photo. Again, in the quiet, I could hear my heart beating loudly. I tilted my head, puzzled and a bit worried, and listened closely. I laughed. It was the sleep machine app on my phone. Violette or Townes had no doubt slunk away, unobserved, with my phone earlier in the evening and, scrolling through the white-noise options, had settled on this one.  It had been beating away for hours.

And that, really, is what they do, these darling children of mine: they drain my battery, but they make my heartbeat so audible that I can hear it as it beats proudly away in adoration of these two tiny miracles. Happy birthdays, my girl and, in exactly one week, my boy. I am so, so blessed to share my life with yours.  May you grow in stature and wisdom, but always retain the wonder that you have now, at the beginning of seven and on the cusp of three, and the indulgence of your own imaginations. You are, and will always be, the most enigmatic, engaging, life-altering gifts that God has ever given me.

on time

The sign at the trail's head read Herzogstand, 2.5h, with an

arrow directing us to ditch the car, at which the clouds overhead were tossing smatterings of precipitation, and hike up into the woods to our right. The gondola to the lodge at the top of the mountain, where Joerg's fortieth birthday party was underway, had stopped running twenty minutes earlier. On foot was the only way up, and we had two over-traveled kids in the backseat and two exhausted parents in the front.

We had been late even before leaving Munich to sit in weekend construction traffic on the Autobahn. After a late-night return from Salzburg the day before, we had planned a morning of quick errands at Merianplatz--wooden hairbrush, giant pretzels, sausages--before our departure for the mountains. Parking difficulties and torrential rain, however, had turned our Hour, tops jaunt into four hours of leapfrogging from shop awning to shop awning, both umbrellas having gone the way of all the earth. From time to time our children would belly-flop onto the wet cobblestones and emit such high-pitched screams that every head in the square would turn in our direction, and elderly passers-by would fix them with disapproving looks and give them what I assume were lectures about their bad behavior in German. Back at the car we had checked the party email for directions only to find that the festivities were to commence mid-afternoon, not around dinnertime as I had thought, in spite of my having glanced over the email on at least two prior occasions.

Now, staring at the trail head sign and frantically considering what it would take to hike the two-and-a-half hours up the mountain with our kids and an overnight bag, embarrassment, frustration, fatigue, and, worst of all, the knowledge that we were missing celebrating with our friends, washed over me in quick succession.  I whispered Uncle from behind the hand covering my face and Steve put the car in motion again. We drove on in silence, past Lake Walchensee, stunning in the filtered light and framed by blue mountains, and cute little Bavarian chalets, until my phone indicated that it had 4G outside of a picture-perfect Bavarian restaurant.  In five minutes we had a hotel for the night in the next town, and in another five we were in the restaurant ordering a locally-grown salad and wood-fired pizza, to be followed by homemade strawberry and banana ice cream.

Bamburg, Germany

Davis in Ghent

Public poetry project, Utrecht

I felt awful; fatally flawed. Then, unexpectedly, peace washed over me. It was like the relief of a storm breaking after days of oppressive heat. The dramatic gesture of missing the party for which we had spent nearly two weeks and a significant amount of money to attend, all because of a minor logistical error on my part, allowed me to admit to myself that I had not been realistic at all about our summer and my ability to adapt to its constant changes. I remembered our anticipation in mid-June at the idea of having so many people we enjoy visiting in quick succession, showing them our new home and favorite day-trips, popping over to Belgium for a night here and Normandy for a few nights there, showing a friend's niece Paris for the first time. We had done it and were rapturous to be seeing everyone, but all along we had had the feeling it would be more fun to look back on than it was in the moment. Not the way I had envisioned it.

I sat waiting for the pizza while Steve and the kids played outside, my thumbs poised to make notes on my phone in the absence of a notebook, trying to make sense of our lives so as to avoid repeating such mistakes in the future. I realized that there had been several clues that things were out of control which I had been ignoring for weeks: constant difficulty getting out of the door on time, a physical sensation of always being severely out of breath, the fact that we left home driving in the general direction of Munich with no specific plans or hotels booked, even for that night, ten days before the missed party. I usually research like a fiend, brandishing printed sheets full of options tailored to our needs for any country we are visiting.  I had been so busy before we left that my sheets wallowed on my laptop at home, incomplete and unprinted.

In this moment of honest self-reflection at the pizza place, I also had to admit that I had not truly had a grasp on Time since our move last year, and tried to remember what I had done in the past to organize myself. It took a few minutes to unearth simple procedural memories: a single handbag tidied daily; in that handbag, a paper agenda, rather than a calendar on my phone; a dedicated time every morning for correspondence and calendar items; an apartment in which I had designated a place for everything, and never put anything anywhere but in its place. To do otherwise left me prone to the chaos of my mind, as I was demonstrating so thoroughly.

Over the summer, with such close proximity to so many people that we know well, I observed that individuals and their relationships to Time and Place can be arranged on a sort of spectrum, and that couples tend to be composed of one individual from either side of center on the spectrum, however similar they may be to one another when compared with the world at large.

On one side lives the Time-Keeper. If she says she will be at x place at x time, she is there. She views time as something to be carefully managed, budgeted, and spent. She is most likely an early riser and is good at accomplishing fixed goals. She is dependable. From the other side of the spectrum, the Time-Keeper may seem rigid or unemotional. Her less time-conscious partner may feel that she is not as thorough as she could be, or leaves things imperfect in her effort to be in the right place at the right time. The Time-Keeper views tardiness as irresponsible, disrespectful, and an indication of priorities. And she is not wrong.

Except that, on the other side of the spectrum there exists the Dreamer, a philosophical type for whom the physical world may be less real than the world of Ideas, Imagery, and Emotion. For this type, wrapping one's head around time can sometimes feel nearly impossible, and prioritizing and organizing it may take monumental effort. Without constant vigilance, he slips back into his world of ideas and that twenty minutes that he had to get where he was going somehow vanished half an hour ago. A fixed appointment, even something routine like getting kids to school or getting to work on time, may require headache-inducing focus. This type may lose things often or be forgetful. It takes years or decades to learn tricks and adopt habits that will mitigate these difficulties, and he may have to start the process over again whenever there is a major life change (e.g. new job, new child, new class schedule). The Dreamer may require a great deal of spacial organization to be functional. Shocking, I know, that I naturally fall into this category.

(I think sheepishly of a line on the C.V. from my early professional life:  "Adapts quickly to new situations and procedures."  True, if we are talking about new foods, music, places, or this season's trends. Not so, unfortunately, with organizational procedures, schedules, or unspoken rules of etiquette, although I wasn't self-aware enough to realize it at the the time that I was shopping this gem around. Luckily, aside from one corporate P.R. internship, I have worked in creative fields, where my adaptive tendencies are more at home.)

While our natures may be immutable, our indulgences (whether to be late or to be impatient with another's lateness) can be disciplined. In our eleven years together, I and my resident Time-Keeper have gradually moved to the center of the spectrum, although we will probably have to exercise patience with each other until the day we no longer have children at home. On that day, I expect that we will magically start being fifteen minutes early for everything, the years of resistance training having finally paid off. (Have you ever noticed that about grandparents?) 

I asked him, in the throes of my self-flagellation over the missed party and all of my other time misses this summer, how he tolerates me. He laughed and said that it was hard at the beginning, but then he started paying attention to how hard I was trying, how much more stressed I was about being on time than he was, actually. I already felt like a failure. He couldn't change that for me,and he couldn't wish me--or berate me--into being on time. In fact, the more he tapped his foot, the more fraught those already stressful minutes became, and the later we ended up being. He decided that he would change himself. Instead of seeing five minutes late as being a failure to be on time, he would look at my gradual improvements and the effort I was making. Aside from the rare big-ticket event, what were the actual consequences, he asked himself, if I made him late? Was he placing what other people thought of him or of us above what was most of worth to him? Was his anger or feeling that he was right in that situation worth what it cost our relationship? And how did these qualities that led to my functional difficulties benefit him in other ways?  According to him, I make his life more fun than another spreadsheet jockey like himself would have. Vague but I'll take it.

As for myself, I had to learn the opposite. First, I had to step back from my own stress and embarrassment and think about how my actions were making others, especially my husband, feel.

Then what? For times when I know there will be a lot of upheaval and excitement, I have to remember to schedule days for rest and organization. In college I realized that I had to get rid of my watch, which I would look at obsessively rather than doing the things that would actually help me to be punctual. At some point, after a missed flight on Christmas Eve early in our married life, I figured out that nothing works so well as leaving a big fat cushion before a serious deadline. I know that our weaknesses can become strengths, given enough time and work, because we don't miss flights anymore.

I have to repeatedly teach myself, still, after all these years, how to prioritize items with deadlines and make plans to meet them, sometimes at a level of detail that a child (well, a Time-Keeper child) would scoff at. Put shoes by front door. Pack church bag night before. Set alarm for thirty minutes before I have to leave for school pick up. I have to remind myself that emotion and spontaneity are good traits only when bridled properly. I have to watch the things that people who are on time do, and figure out how to do them for myself. Luckily for me, there are a lot of punctual people in the world to emulate. I make my travel dossiers.

I also have to convince myself again and again that not doing these things naturally does not make me an idiot. I have to remind myself that while Steve may run errands twice as fast as I do or clean the kitchen in fifteen minutes less, he doesn't always think things through and do them as thoroughly as I do.

It seems so simple: On time = Good. Late = Bad. The truth, though, like almost all truths, is more complex. The world needs all of us, Dreamers and Time-Keepers alike, even with the faults that accompany our gifts. We need big ideas and we need the trains to run on time. We want mind-blowing art projects and people to manage the logistics of mounting exhibitions that allow us all to see them. We need people at every position of the spectrum. We need that, and we want it, too.

That stormy day and night in Bavaria made the rest of our trip a bucolic one. We stopped in beautiful Fussen, Germany for a couple of days and had dinner in Lichtenstein, adding a new country to our list. I spent a day enjoying the collection at the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Switzerland while Steve and the kids went to the zoo. We peeked at the antiques in Colmar, France and loaded up on local treats at a boulangerie in Strasbourg. By the time we met up again with Jen and Alex in Ghent, Belgium we were able to revel in things as they were happening. Sometimes it just takes stopping for a minute to look at things, even if the stop is a forced one. 

Yes, those are my thoughts for the summer, finally, in November. Here are a few photos from the second half of our summer. As you can see, it was not so bad as all that.

Skinny-dipping at Nymphenburg Castle

Boating at Nymphenburg Castle

Ghent

Sunset in Salzburg

BMW Museum, Munich.  I love Townsend's face, like he owns this thing.

Saint Nicolas, Ghent

Playing at home in the North Sea

my uncle's stronger than your uncle

Is that guy who was here last night going to be here again today? Davis asked, peering into the bedroom where my sister Celestia and her husband Si'i had slept.

The room's occupants were already on their way to Prague, I replied, but they would stop by again in a few days on their way home to Utah. 

Awww, okay, Davis sighing, before shoving his hands into his pockets dejectedly and shuffling downstairs. 

The evening before, as we watched Si'i and Kai playing ball with the kids in the garden while we lingered over the remnants of our outdoor dinner, Jane, Celestia and I had joked that Davis, when asked about his holiday in Europe, would say, It's so great! They have a guy there who plays this game called football, and throws kids in the air!

Nobody plays the Pied Piper like Si'i does, and nobody cuts my hair like my sister, even when jet-lagged and thirty-four weeks pregnant with her sixth child. Especially not Violette, who gave herself layers and transformed her brother's curls into a Euro-footballer mullet the week after Celestia snipped my locks into a rough-and-tumble bob. Short haircuts for summer, everybody!

When all the numbers were in for the summer, they read like this:

House guests: 17 (9 adults, 8 children)

Days without visitors or travel between 26 June and 1 Sept: 1

Countries visited, not including Netherlands:8

New countries visited: Austria & Lichtenstein

Rolls of toilet paper consumed: 56

Audiobooks/Podcasts completed while cooking or doing dishes:  Middlemarch, by George Eliot (32 hours); Wave, by Sonali Deraniyagala (5.4 hours); A Royal Pain, by Rhys Bowen (9 hours); Slate Political Gabfest (7.4 hours); Leonard Lopate (5.5 hours)= 59.3 hours total

Individual pounds gained sharing in regional delicacies: 6

Plants purchased at the beginning of summer: 19

Plants alive at the end of summer: 17

I had to put that last one in because it was my one definable success. Tucked into those numbers were all the narratives of late-night talks with old friends, exhausted tantrums and tears, the sounds of violins and pianos being practiced, childhood games, sleep deprivation, sage parenting advice and empathy, and lots and lots of food. We were so lucky to have so many of our dearest come to us this summer. We feel loved.

 
How did they do it? you ask. Besides finding a housekeeper willing to come two mornings a week and being perpetually forty-five minutes late for everything? Mid- summer self-loathing and redemption coming up in the next post.

Some Belgian waffles, Gouda cheese,  and American-style lemonade and chocolate chip cookies to snack on while you are waiting...

empty nesters

It's so quiet around here, Steve says as he wanders into the room where I am working. A couple of hours later, I poke my head into his office to say the same.  It's a strange feeling, being on our own. We have so rarely been alone in our own house, not for almost seven years.

A few days of tears in the morning turning to smiles by mid-afternoon, and we have moved from one era of our lives to the next. For him, a world of adventure has opened up, one with its own playground full of cars he can actually drive and two climbing apparatus, where everyone chatters in French or Dutch and he is surrounded by other tiny "big boys and girls" like himself all day long. In only a week, a couple of lovely maternelle teachers have finished potty training him for us, he is answering to the Francophone pronunciation of his name, and casually dropping full, useful sentences in French amid plenty of French-ish gibberish. He loves being a big boy. At drop off now he looks at us and says, "Am I going to cry today?" and swaggers into the classroom with a satirical grin on his face. And Violette's timidity at being the new kid at school last year has been replaced by the confidence of having friends to meet up with on the first day of school and knowing her way around, and being able to show her little brother the ropes. She spies on him during recreation time and reports back to us what he played and whether or not he seemed happy. Today she said that she wants to be a teacher when she grows up because she wants to teach Petite Section, just like Townsie's teachers.

For me, there are now no more mid-day snuggles or tantrums (except on Wednesdays and weekends), no more wondering how to find an unaccompanied hour for groceries or a museum, and far fewer deep knee bends a day to pick up the thousands of little items and pieces that we seem to have accumulated, and which scatter themselves through our rooms with abandon. Once again, as before I had children, it is up to me to prove that I can do something useful with all of this unfettered time. I am much more prepared now, with a few more years of life experience under my belt (literally) than I had back then. It's like I get to keep the sense of purpose that having children has given me and use it in their absence. Totally cheating. My plan is to write and write, and see how it goes, see if I can turn it into something. I am prepared to fail a lot before I succeed in the slightest. Another something that I have gained from all that giving to my children, all those parenting failures.

We had a madcap, unwieldy eight-week summer that brought us much love and travel and very, very little of the silence that now surrounds me. The start of school was always an antidote for the boredom of summer when I was a child. For my own children, the calm of their school schedule has made angels of the (not always) cute little demons who gave up all thoughts of sleep and reason to spend the last two months partying it up with friends and family.  I am still figuring out how to parse it all for this journal of mine. Memories will be trickling out post by post, I expect.

In the meantime...Peace.

a violet(te) by any other name

What's in a name? Shakespeare was very clever with words, but it is an inescapable fact of life that names imbue people, places, and things with a certain je ne sais quoi (pardon my French). He must have known so. After all, his ladies have such fabulous monikers: Portia, Ophelia, Desdemona, Hippolyta, et al. Recently, we had trial ownership of a dog over a long weekend. The dog's original owner had designated her Maddie, and while we considered keeping the dog, there was no way we were keeping the name. We know several children with variations of that name, and besides, if we were going to walk her, feed her, and care for her, we were going to name her. So, for the few days she was with us, before allergies and our children's innate disobedience sent Maddie back whence she had come, I tried out a number of potential appellations.

In doing so, I realized that each made her look like a different dog, at least in my eyes. Emily Dickenson, Edie for short, was perky and comfortable, loved long walks, and was smart but not intimidating. Dorothy Parker, on the other hand, was intriguing but a little worse for wear, as though the afternoons were a bit too long. I think I loved her best as Capucine, after the famous French fashion model best known for playing Peter Sellers's wife in The Pink Panther. Capucine the dog was elegant and mysterious; her coat seemed a little shinier, her ears more regal. And that's just a dog, an animal that is non-verbal and is unlikely ever to have a curriculum vitae to worry about. With people, the issue is so much more loaded. All this to say that I know how it sounds:  We move to Europe, and before you know it we have changed the spelling of our daughter's name from Violet to Violette. The Snobs, you must be thinking, the Carpetbaggers, the Yuppity-Ups. I don't blame you. I would probably think the same. But it's not quite as it seems. (Is it ever?)

Let's go back to The Night It All Began, in that hospital delivery room perched high above FDR Drive.  In the minute of new parent enchantment between the torture of delivery and the terror of all that went wrong afterward, Steve, his eyes wet as he gazed upon that magnificent, moon-faced, howling purple infant, said, "Maybe we should call her Violet(te)." 

Then some other stuff happened that I won't go into just now. My sister took the baby, the room filled up with doctors, and I was wheeled into an operating room. All that night alone in recovery, and the next morning as I waited for my husband to be released from the psych ward and my baby to be cleared by the neonatal ICU, the thought running 'round and 'round in my mind was, "I need to see my little Violet(te)."  By the time we were finally together as a family, sometime around noon, she had a name.

But did her name have a spelling?  Well. The great-grandmother who was partial originator of the name, as far as our baby name list was concerned, was Violet. I, being an amateur Francophone, while respecting the traditional British spelling, couldn't easily get past the fact that in French, violet is the masculine form of the word, and violette, the feminine. Violette just looked prettier to me, and could be pronounced either way. Ah, but we had both spent our entire lives spelling our own names for strangers, we said, pen hovering over the blank line on the birth certificate. Did we want to curse our daughter with the same fate? Everyone, most English-speakers, anyway, would know how to spell Violet by sound. Violette would require constant verbal correction of schoolteachers and receptionists, and the ladies at the DMV. Pragmatism got the better of us, and we quickly wrote V-I-O-L-E-T on the page, handing it to a nurse before we could change our minds.

Over the next few years, I had moments of doubt, but none serious. Actually, most of my doubts had more to do with our not having given her my last name in addition to Steve's, again done out of pragmatism. I spoke French with Violet at home quite a lot, and when I did she was always Violette, but the spelling didn't seem to matter either way. When she learned to write her name, she learned it both ways, because she asked to. Two years later, school application time arrived--which in New York is something akin to writing and defending a doctoral thesis (or so I have heard from friends who have done both)--and for various reasons, Violet was enrolled at a French school. There she officially became Violette. She loved school, made friends, and started to get comfortable with the bilingual program, but we noticed with concern that she began to differentiate between when she was as Violet, and when Violette.

Then we moved to Holland. A transfer into another French school was easy--the curriculum is consistent throughout the French system--but a move is always a bit emotional, and a new school in a new country, neither of which speaks the family's native language, is a lot of change. Violet(te) transitioned remarkably well for an almost-six-year-old, but the name differentiation became worse, and we worried that we were creating a situation in which she might believe she is a different person "out there" than she is "in here". We made a decision, undertook an experiment. Her name would be spelled Violette all the time, regardless of the pronunciation. No paperwork has been filed or changed, no official pronouncement made to family and friends. She is six, so her personal correspondents are few, mostly grandmothers, and she is rarely saddled with the task of completing legal forms. We figure we have a little time to test our hypothesis. In the long term, this change could be brilliant...or meaningless, or possibly misguided. That is parenthood. Things could also be back to the way they were before you read this post. That, too, is parenthood.

She is quite a Violet(te), though, no matter the spelling of her name, and she just lost her first tooth! (She added the exclamation point as she copy-edited my original draft.) Adolescence is just around the corner.

nous sommes tous 70 (we are all 70)

We look out at the beaches from the cliffs and grasp that it was reality, that hundreds of thousands of mostly young men just like us, with fathers and mothers, friends, wives and children, chose to wade from boats or parachute from planes, here.  Many had never set foot in Continental Europe, had no loved ones here to fight for, and still, they got off of the boats.  They jumped out of the planes. They died before they reached the shore, or as they scaled the cliffs, or hitting the ground too fast in the dark. Each was willing to be one of the lives given in a battle strategy that depended on having more Allied men than German bullets.

As we drove home from Normandy we stopped in Brussels for chocolate and a bit of shopping. Nearing the antique shop, I saw mounds of flowers and two barrel-chested men in uniforms standing guard, powerful weapons at the ready.  On the corner, a pair of ten-year-old boys whispered to each other with somber faces. My shop was next door to--shared a wall with--the Jewish Museum, where only a week earlier a jihadist had walked in and gunned down the visitors, killing four people.

The conflicts of Normandy aren't over.  They have just shape-shifted.

Still, we and the German friends that we were traveling with, grandchildren of sympathizers on both sides, stood on the cliffs of Pointe-du-Hoc and watched our children climbing in and out of bomb craters--now covered in brilliant green grass--together. Surely there is an answer in there somewhere?

See:  The Longest Day
Read:  The Origins of the Second World War, by A.J.P Taylor; The Atlantic, "How Many Tons of WWII Munitions are Found in Germany Each Year?"
Listen: The Romantic Hero, Vittorio Grigolo, Manon, Act II

(Header photo by Chief Photographer's Mate Robert F. Sargent, available from the National Archives and Records Administration. Thanks to Anne and Jörg for the article, use of their photos, and for the good company.)

prague

Before Utah, there was Prague; drizzly, confectionery Prague. It had been there, beckoning, since I was a teenager and first fell in love with anything and everything Art Nouveau (although absinthe and I have never been, nor will we ever be, acquainted). In my mind, it was a city of shops selling the work of Czech artisans housed in gorgeous, finely-wrought old buildings. And it was, kind of. My friend Jen warned me shortly before we left that it was more like Disneyland, really, existing only for tourists. The preparation did me good. I could enjoy the architectural eye candy and ignore the tourist traps at street level, having known what was coming. We walked right by the obvious restaurants and shops and instead found little gems--Michelin quality at American chain prices--and looked a bit harder for the authentic local experiences. I think we found them.

The moment that will stay with me from Prague was during an architectural tour that Violette and I took of the Municipal House, an incredible collaboration of local artists and architects created to affirm the Czech right to independence while part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is a stunning building, one of the most beautiful in the world, and there my daughter stood, in the Alphonse Mucha room, first sketching and then photographing the details that caught her imagination, while our fellow tourists watched her in fascination. Magic. If you asked my children, however, they would tell you that in Prague they saw rock candy being made, and that may be all. True, too.

What we will hopefully forget is that Violette most likely had had a fever for a day or two before we realized that we had been dragging a sick child around a foreign city. We will also try to forget that the rest of us had similar fevers by the flight home. If we were going to get sick, at least we had beautiful, long-lasting impressions of Prague to keep us company.