Happy Birthday Mom

Dear Mom,

This past Tuesday I was on the phone with the Squirrel Hill Flower Shop ordering flowers for your birthday. After I picked what we wanted and gave the saleswoman your address for delivery she asked me to tell her what I wanted to write on the card. Since the flowers were from all of us, I warned her that there would be a lot of names and I started listing them. Sam & David, Katie, Ari, Avi & Koby, Lou & Rick. Eight of us in all where there used to be three, and we just keep growing.

Everyone tells me all the time how lucky I am that my family is so close. That I have sisters who are my best friends, that the boys we married get along so well, and that we all like and enjoy each other. That we make an effort to get together as often as we can. That there are near daily phone calls, emails, presents sent, Facetimes and Gchats. That we not only know what is going on in each other's lives, but care deeply. That even though we don't all live in the same city, we do whatever we can to bridge the geographical distance, and do it well.

And when they tell me that, I always agree that yes, I am - we are - lucky, but I know it's not really luck, or not only.

It's you.

Since we were little, you have shown us what it means to live, and live well. To be caring and giving and loving. To be a good sister and a good friend and a good person. We learned from you that sometimes things won't be rosy, but to smile anyway, put our heads down, forge straight ahead, and trust that better things lay ahead. And you taught us that when in doubt, call a sister, because when something happens to one of us, it's happening to all of us and we get through it by sticking together. That's just the way it is with family, and with sisters. Over the past few months I have put that advice to use over and over again and the hardest things seem easier, and I feel lighter, because of it.

You taught us that home is not synonymous with perfection. It's a place where there might be dirty dishes in the sink and maybe last week's newspapers on the living room floor, but also a place where there are stacks of books, delicious snacks in the kitchen, and where family and friends feel comfortable to gather and to stay as long as they want. And anyway, perfection is overrated. Because from you we learned that it's far better to leave the dishes for awhile and eat some popcorn in front of the TV, even if you accidentally drop a kernel or two on the floor. And we are better off because of it.

You showed us how to build lives and families of our own, and how to love in a way that makes those lives and families interesting, happy, and strong. You taught us what to look for in a partner, and fortunately for all of us, we followed that advice and found the ones we were meant to build those lives with. You gave us the freedom to be ourselves and to become the people who we were always supposed to be, and because of you, all three of us are leading lives and becoming people that we can be proud of.

We are, in short, nothing without you. All of us.

Maya Angelou passed away earlier this week, and in the deluge of her quotes that have surfaced all over the internet, one of them struck me:

"My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor and some style."

Thank you for passing along to us your passion, compassion, humor and style, and thank you for teaching us - and allowing us - to thrive.

Happy, happy birthday.

Love,

Sam

Throwback Thursday: Senior Week 2005

The Summer I Left From One Home, And Came Back To Another

When I got off the plane in Jacksonville, I felt like I was in a movie where the kids go away to camp and their parents move away without telling them. Except for me, it wasn't that they didn't tell me about it, but rather that I conveniently forgot about it all summer long.

I knew somewhere in a tiny part of my brain kept mostly shuttered that when I left my house in Pittsburgh to go to camp in June I was leaving my childhood home for the last time. And somewhere in my grey matter was floating the idea that plane tickets to Florida had  been booked for me for August, but I was thinking of it more like a vacation rather than a place where I would have all the things one has in the place they live.

So I spent eight weeks at the camp I loved, pretending that everything was as it should be. I lived in a cabin with  friends that had been mine for years, making late night mac and cheese in contraband hot pots and reading Judy Blume's Summer Sisters out loud to each other. I had my first kiss, learned how to slalom on water skis, and made a deliciously ugly pillow in the art shack.

And if the occasional thought of my parents setting up our new house in Jacksonville crossed my mind, I shoved it down and smothered it with bug juice and barbecues.

Except camp doesn't last forever, and I had a plane ticket to Florida that I suddenly couldn't ignore anymore.

The land below the descending plane was flat, brown, and foreign. The blacktop of the runway seemed to simmer in the stifling heat that is late summer in the south. The jolt of landing yanked me roughly out of one reality and deposited me into another, creating the fault line between my lives that said to me, "you live here now and not there."

I sat in the back corner of the car on the way home and stared out the window at the unfamiliar scenery and the palm trees rushing by. Along the highway billboards screamed bible verses touting the virtues of Christianity and decrying abortion and I felt like I had entered another world, which I guess I had. So I closed my eyes and didn't open them again until I felt the car pull into the driveway.

When I walked in the door of the house my mind was running on a constant loop, chanting I don't know this place. I felt my breath backing up in my chest and knew I had to do something - anything - or I would run screaming from the house that was now supposed to be home.

There were bags to unpack and my new room to set up, but there was time enough for that. Instead, I dug out a bathing suit that still smelled like camp and pulled it on, searched out a towel, and headed straight outside.

As I dove into the clear, cool waters of the swimming pool that was only steps away from my back door, I had the fleeting thought that maybe Florida wouldn't be so bad after all.

Clearing Skies

It was raining when we got in to the car to leave Manhattan. Not a heavy and driving rain, but rather the kind of drizzle that lasts for hours so that you never quite get all the way warm and dry.

In retrospect, it was probably a mistake to leave from the city, but we didn't really think it through when we made our plans and I had to work for most of the day, so from the city it was. We realized our mistake when it took us twenty-five minutes to travel one single block, and another forty-five before we were even in sight of the Lincoln Tunnel - the escape hatch from the holiday weekend and rain induced gridlock that had taken over Manhattan.

An hour and twenty minutes after we left my office we finally found ourselves on the other side of the tunnel. We were crabby and frustrated by the delay that we should have should have anticipated - I mean, we did live in the city for almost a decade and know its traffic whims better than anyone - and not at all looking forward to the three and a half hours of driving that separated us from our Memorial Day family weekend.

Newark looked just as dreadful as always as we made our way down the New Jersey Turnpike, and the pockets of slow traffic we hit every time we managed to actually go the speed limit threatened to drive me slowly insane.

But then.

It happened as we drove past the "Welcome to Delaware Sign." At first it was a separation of the clouds to reveal a patch of blue. And then rays of sun came arrowing down over a highway that was miraculously clear.

I slipped my sunglasses on and we stopped at a rest stop to put the top down.

And we drove away, clear, cool, gorgeous air rushing through the car, blowing around our hair. We smiled at each other, cranked up the music, and enjoyed the ride.

And what a ride it was.

Clouds clearing over the Delaware Memorial Bridge

We're this cool.

Throwback Thursday: Graduation Day

Nine years ago.

It was a raw, grey and chilly day when our alarms signaled the start of our very last morning on that campus. The campus that had loved us and nurtured us for four years. The campus where we grew up into different versions of ourselves than we were on that sticky-hot August day when it all began. We knew we were better versions of ourselves because we knew each other now and we didn't then. And better in other ways too, we hoped.

We got dressed, not daring to look each other straight in the eye for fear that the tears hovering just below the surface all weekend would once again spill over, ruining painstakingly applied makeup. These were the kinds of tears that overpowered even the most waterproof mascara. The kind that once started, would never stop.

That we were mostly all moving to Manhattan at various points over the summer didn't matter. Once there, everything would be different. Some of us would have jobs, and some of us would be in graduate school. Some of us would live together, but some of us wouldn't. The days of classes and cafeteria meals all together were mostly over. Manhattan may be a tiny island, but on that particular day, it was feeling pretty big to all of us.

When the time came we said goodbye and headed to our separate department graduations. We walked across small stages and smiled for the cameras our parents couldn't seem to put down and accepted the diplomas that were a testament to four years of hard work and classes and studying, but also to friendship, fun, and unbreakable bonds.

And then we all gathered back together to line up to march into the gym full the real ceremony. We lined up and held hands and started to walk as the first strains of Pomp and Circumstance filled the air. And we sat down in the rows and rows of chairs and half-listened to a speaker that I'm sure none of us could name today.

Then

And when the speaker was finished and the university president pronounced us the class of 2005 the balloons began to fall.

And through the sea sea of blue and white we smiled shaky smiles at each other, wishing for just a few more years, two or three at the most, on the campus that had become our home. That had given us each other. 

Today, nine years sometimes feels like nine minutes, and sometimes feels like nineteen years. We are different people now than we were on that happy-sad day. We have careers and houses and husbands and kids and we leading lives we never could have anticipated or hoped for. 

But lucky for us, we are still doing it all together.

And now.

Nine years later. Still together.

One Evening In Spring

On a stunning spring evening, the sun is still shining out of an impossibly blue sky, the leaves are rustling in a light breeze that doesn't quite yet carry the warmth of the season, and everything that was once bare and broken from winter's wrath is coming back to life.

Drawn to the outside, needing to be a part of it all, she slips on her new sunglasses and walks out onto the the deck that was built by her man. The deck where they spend their spring and summer moments, talking about their life and their love, and where they whisper their hopes and their dreams, their wishes and their fears.

She settles into a lounge chair, romance novel and drink within arms reach, but she neither reads her book nor drinks her drink. Instead she lays back and thinks her thoughts for her thoughts are many and messy, the way that thoughts sometimes are.

As the breeze flutters her hair and she enjoys the view of the home that she and her man are making together she smiles. And in that moment, she is grateful.