letter feb 6 2011

Dear Everyone,

It’s the night before the Super Bowl. Tomorrow evening we will be at Barbara and Roger’s with the Tuchlers, Andy, Gail, and Maddi. Of course my family will be for the Steelers, both because we like them, and because we would cheer anyone against the Packers (well, except maybe the Patriots). We are anticipating lots of traditional football food: guacamole, chili, tortilla chips, and beer.

Last week will go down as one of bigger winter weather systems in the last dozen years. It has been awful on the East Coast, and I guess it was our turn. I left work at around 3 PM on Tuesday afternoon, and it took well over an hour to get home. The tollway (294) was fine, but I was on 95th street, normally a 10-15 minute drive on a six lane road, for over 45 minutes. Even today the road frequently dips from three lanes to two, and driving time can be quite slow. We did a lot of digging on Wednesday: the front walk, a pathway from our back door to the back yard for Meeko, out to the birdfeeders, etc. There were big four foot drifts in some areas, and other places had only a few inches of snow. The kids had Wednesday and Thursday off of school, tennis and swimming, and when not shoveling spent most of the time unproductively inside playing computer games and “Rock Band’. In the old days we would have been outside making forts and snow tunnels - - but I must be thinking of my 7 year old self; I don’t remember any snow days as a teenager. On Thursday I had two unpleasant surprises: the master bathroom ceiling was leaking, the result (we think) of an ice dam on the roof where two gables meet. And, I opened up the garage to go to work to find that the 70 mph winds had blown under the small gap at the bottom of the door resulting in a two foot high drift in front of the cars. More shoveling! At least the hospital was more or less shut down on Wednesday and Thursday, so there wasn’t a big backlog of material to analyze over the last few days (I am on call this weekend, and I would say the Saturday workload was smaller than average). Speaking of analyzing tissue, I am reading a really interesting non-fiction book called The Emperor of All Maladies, a Biography of Cancer. I also recently read Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, a good 40’s noir, but a little too psychological for me. I am certainly not aware of my mental state as her characters seem to be, lucky me!

Other recent events of interest were the 18th birthday of Nicola and the 16th of Lucas. Each received cards, gifts and the requested meal just for making it through another year. Nicola no longer has a state driving curfew and Lucas looks forward to the opportunity to take his drivers test in the late spring. Last weekend Cindy drove Jasper to Indianapolis for the weekend to swim in a meet. He has one more short-course meet to try to make a regional time cut, but since the cuts are so much harder for the 13/14 boys compared to 11/12 we are not anticipating a regional swim this season. Nicola has had a poem accepted (submitted a few months ago) for a teen writer magazine. We all (but Cindy) watched Kurosawa’s Rashomon last night. This is a classic movie that was just as good for me yesterday as it was thirty years ago. Lucas and I talked a little about it today when I got home from work. Lucas thought that everyone was just lying. Perhaps I had a more nuanced view. None of the stories match up, but are the characters telling the truth as they see it, or are they deliberately altering the reality of their tales? Our memories of events are fragile constructs and can be manipulated just be our own telling of them, let alone during an outside interrogation. We can’t even trust our own perceptions at the instant they occur. Another movie Lucas and I saw recently was Blind Fury with Rutger Hauer (remember him?). This is sort of an American remake of the Japanese Zatiochi movies. Actually, I rented this movie a few years ago, and I may have mentioned it before.

Speaking of perceptions, I remember that I was remiss last letter in not detailing the elegance of Alison on the slopes. I think I might ski faster down hill (I am more foolhardy), but Alison has beautiful metronomic turns down every slope, no matter the steepness. None of us could follow in her exactitude!

Go Steelers!

Love, H.