Gail's Blog

It is the night before Christmas Eve. Ridge is making hard sauce now, because the girls and I will be taking the kitchen over tomorrow for our cookie making. As he points out, we have an eclectic variety of cookies to make. Every year we make the Williamsburg Cookbook's Bourbon Balls. That is sacrosanct! (Holy Bourbon Balls--can you use them for communion?!) Then I usually want to make Koulourakia, the little twisted, sesame-coated butter cookies my Greek family liked. Put a little ouzo in and...oops! Another candidate for communion! Alcohol and flour...close enough to bread and wine, isn't it? I bought the cookie ingredients today, after talking on the phone with my Mom. She's in St. Thomas' Hospital in Akron, again, for depression. She says, "I want to be with you!". She says it to everyone who calls. How hard it must be for her. The nurse says that she won't stay in one place for more than a few minutes. She complains of pain in her back and knees, but

The Brahms requieum has spoken to my heart since I sang, "How lovely is they dwelling place" in Concert Choir when I was in the tenth grade. Of all the choruses in the Requiem, "How Lovely" is the most performed. Partly because it is a set chorus with no solos, and because it is mostly harmonic, with only a small part that is polyphonic, it suits high school, college and church choirs well. It is also most beautiful. I came across this picture of Bethlehem, the long view, tonight and "How Lovely" sprang into my mind. How lovely is thy dwelling place, dear God! You came among us and dwelt here, on this earth, living the life of the everyday human being in the sin and degradation he/she regularly inhabits. Yet you stayed with us, died among us, and rose for us. This is an everpresent puzzle to me. You didn't have to do this! No one made you! And if I were you I certainly would have changed my mind and decided to go back "home" where things

Throughout her early years, Alix adored animals. Really, to say she adored animals is being too cute about it. She empathized, and identified with animals. She believed individual animals were her personal friends. Our next door neighbor had a yellow cat named Mandy. Or, rather, Alix called the cat Mandy. I'm not sure we actually knew what the cat's name was. Alix greeted Mandy when she came home from kindergarten, and sat on the front stoop with Mandy in the clean, clear Spring air. Alix called Mandy her "friend cat". When Mandy disappeared, Alix looked for her, and hoped for when she came back, which she did. Mandy was a friend in the friend constellation that my younger daughter always maintained. A preschool student's mother gave us a rabbit in my first year of teaching. Alix was five. This started our family's rabbit adventure. The rabbit, Cinnamon Pie, became another friend in the constellation. Soon there were too many friend rabbits to mention here!

Today was my first day as acting director of our Preschool, a school in which I've taught, laughed, scolded, danced, sang and generally made a fool of myself in the name of nurturing learning in young children for twenty years. I did not seek this sobriquette. I was drafted! So far: Our director has had troubles enough that Job should stop belly-aching, and she has not been able to do her job. The school was looking for a new director for when our director finished her contract at the end of July, but since she hasn't been around, the staff pushed for help immediately. Since I have been looking for better pay, they decided to ask the church to draft me for the dubious honor. The church said yes. I went in this morning to find other teachers rushing me away from the office because our former director had come in. She was furiously deleting her files from the computer. No one wanted me to be a target of her wrath, which I found profoundly touching. So I went into teacher mode an

We live in a very diverse area of Virginia. Some people believe that Northern Virginia should secede from the rest of the state because our values are so different. We don't hold that it should be okay to let people into bars with guns (just so they don't drink, wink wink!). We don't believe in limiting the rights of immigrants, homosexuals, or people without health care. (or at least most of us don't) And we regularly rub elbows with people from all over the world. I stopped in at a Starbucks in an area we call Bailey's Crossroads. Someone else can tell you who Bailey was, I'm sure, but I know it as the area to which we took our daughters when they were little for shopping and dining. There are several ethnic restaurants and food stores there. I was on my way to the Greek store, Aphrodite Greek Imports, to be exact, to pick up my Easter supplies. I walked into this Starbucks and immediately felt like I was in an African coffee shop, if African coffee shops are

After six months in rehab, Kristin is coming to our house for dinner tomorrow, spending the night and going with me to the nine o'clock Sunday morning. It is a kind of raw time for us. The rest of the family hasn't even seen her clean and sober for years. I have since I visited her in jail, and then in rehab. I hope they see the change in her that I see, and that was celebrated at her transition ceremony at the center. I like the Kristin I see, now. She's the same person, and yet she is so much more self-aware and focused. She knows the possible pitfalls, and her "triggers". She knows to depend on her sponsor, her counselor, her re-hab friends. She knows not to resume friendships with the people she did drugs with. She knows to keep her mother at arm's length. And she knows it won't be easy. That is very new for Kristin. It won't be easy, and she knows it. I am in awe of the work she's done, and the way she's grown. I'm impressed with the p