Yearly Yuletide Yelpings from Marlborough!
This annual year-in-review missive event now has a few imitators. Last Christmas I got a couple of form letters from people on this very list detailing the minutiae of their own lives. Although their mailing lists and mine don't overlap very much, wouldn't it be neat if we all kept such a chronicle of our individual goings-on from one year to the next, not as a daily diary (which is way too much work), but just one big blast of recollections at the end. In this age of way too much information way too readily available, I think this kind of archive would fit right in. Years from now, the Mary & Leigh Block Gallery would have a retrospective on the lives of the Classes of '85 and '86, as told through their own form letters. The collection would then be donated to the National Archives, where they would be stored right next to the Nixon correspondence. So, in the interests not only of the present but of all future generations and posterity, this is my contribution for 1995. Those who have tried their own (i.e. the Rebstocks, the Stat-Man) will hopefully continue, and those who don't own a computer hopefully will some day catch up with the rest of us. Now at least I'm no longer alone in the implicit conceit that comes with sending everybody I know a laundry list of my life's own adventure.
As it was happening, 1995 was obviously looming large as a critical year in Bartletthood. The first reason is evidenced by the enclosed (I hope) Christmas picture of our very own little girl, Chloe Miranda Bartlett, who was born on Friday the 13th (of October). She was 6 lbs 2 oz (now up to 10 lbs 3 oz). Where did this sudden urge to have a kid come from after all this time, you ask? Well, it wasn't a sudden urge (as you know, not much that I do is sudden), it was something we just decided to have a go at. If it had worked out that one of us needed an operation or it was taking two years to get pregnant and nothing was happening, then we wouldn't have done it. We didn't expect to have much difficulty, and we were largely correct. Beth had 8 and a half months of throwing up and almost constant heartburn, but otherwise physically she felt okay(?), and never really showed enough for total strangers to approach her and pat her stomach. For the last couple of months, she had several extra ultrasounds to keep track of her placenta's questionable health, but it turned out not to be much of an issue. Two weeks early, she had been going to the hospital twice a week for non-stress tests, and was starting to develop toxemia, so her doctor did a c-section that evening. I was there in the operating room for the bulk of the surgery, and watched the whole thing. It was pretty neat, in a clinical sort of way, sort of like the Learning Channel, but colder. The childbirth classes tended to demystify the process of giving birth, but concentrated mostly on normal childbirth, because a c-section is really an operation. So there Beth was all opened up, and the doctor reached in and slid out a little purple baby! I was commissioned to hold her after they had her wrapped up a little, although she was still a little slimy, but they had to give me something to do while they stitched up Beth. The next three days in the hospital we tried to piece together from anyone who would tell us just exactly what we were supposed to do with her. I stayed home for a week, and by the time I came back to work, we had sorted out most of the big stuff, like breast feeding and dirty diapers. The other stuff I don't hold out much hope for.
The Stonefamily now have some company in the baby department. They will always be the trailblazers because they're so far ahead of everyone else (although we're gonna try and catch up!) But Chloe didn't even place third, after Elizabeth and Hannah. Nancy and Lee had a baby girl, Kyra, in April. Of course I didn't find this out until, I don't know, August, maybe? Sometimes you just have to call somebody and say, "Sooooooo, anything going on down your way?" They seemed psyched by the whole thing. We hope to see them in March (oops, have I told them that yet?) and get a personal viewing, but she'll already be a year old. The passage of time is another thing that takes on a different perspective, because babies change so fast and go through so many milestones, we see their lives flashing before our eyes. To them, every second is an eternity, but to us, it's happening really really fast. At this rate, both Kyra and Chloe will be filling out college admission forms by next fall. The trend of having babies has by no means ended at us, but I'll let those who know do their own announcing ahead of time if they want, and I'll give it a mention next time around. Tune in just 365 days from now!
If you count back 40 weeks from Beth's actual due date, you would arrive at the first weekend in February. Coincidentally(?) this was the weekend we drove to North Carolina for the wedding of a friend of mine from the Bank who had moved there, found a nice church-going girl, got married, and then subsequently moved back. It would have been much easier on me if he'd moved back and then got married, but on the way down, we stopped by Norfolk, which isn't really on the way, but close enough, and spent a couple of February days at Phil's abode. Phil proudly showed off the campus of Old Dominion, where he is about half way through a 99-year bachelor's program in accounting, which I'll never comprehend no matter how many times he explains it to me, but he knows what he's doing so leave him alone. Almost as importantly as visiting the Kocher, we made a return visit to Captain George's incredibly large seafood buffet. This time, however, Phil didn't have to play a concert an hour later and could therefore stuff himself as much as I did.
Over the course of the summer, something happened that had never happened to me before: people started asking me if I'd lost weight. As near as I could remember, I hadn't lost an ounce since the day I got married (although I had gained many many ounces). But, no, they were right, my pants were looser on me, but I wasn't doing anything different. In fact, my appetite was increasing, as was my heart rate, and I was sweating a lot, which wasn't surprising given the temperatures this summer. So when people started to get alarmed, I moseyed into the doctor's office, and sure enough I'd lost 37 pounds. This put me at the low end of my pre-marriage weight of around 170, but everyone I work with doesn't go back that far, and the people in the chorale obviously have lost their long term memories. Considering the fact that I hadn't tried to lose weight (although the doctor had admonished me to think about it last year), this was kind of unusual. Well, come to find out, I have an overactive thyroid, one of those things that just happens for no reason and you can't prevent. So now I'm on thyroid medicine that will supposedly slow me back down to normal and then I'll actually have to work at watching what I eat. It's hard to get much sympathy when you tell people you have this affliction that caused you to lose so much weight while eating more in the process. So hurry up and come visit now, because I don't know how long I can hold out before I start cramming twinkies down my throat again!
Prior to this, towards the end of May, I hopped on a plane and went to New Orleans on business. After nine years at the Bank, I finally got them to send me on a junket, this one to IBM's technical conference. Because the conference was so time intensive, I went by myself, and it was fun to be on my own in a new city, and New Orleans is kind of fun, too, although I didn't experience the full effect of the French Quarter (nudie bars, etc.). It was obscenely hot and humid the whole time I was there, and my hotel was a brisk 20 minute walk from the convention center, so at first when I started losing weight, I thought maybe this was some ancillary benefit from all the exercise I got in the heat of New Orleans. Looking back, now I think it must have been bad crawdads. Anyway, I had a good time and learned virtually nothing at the conference, and am hoping the bank sends me to the next one in April at the Opryland Hotel.
Now for the bad news. As many of you know, my dad died this summer. This was not unexpected, as he had colon cancer and had not had a good prognosis for a while. But it was a shock, because he was 58 and I never really expected to have worry about the state of my parents' health quite this soon. Most of the time, being 1200 miles away from home is an asset, but during the time from last October up until June, it was a burden, because everything was happening so far away and I couldn't be there to help. We made it out three times. The first was last Christmas, just after he had his third operation, this time for a urostomy. Although his condition wasn't that great, they let him out of the hospital so that he could be home for Christmas. The day before we left to come back, he had to go back into the hospital because he couldn't keep any food down. From that point up to the end of May he was there almost continuously. At the beginning of May, we drove to Illinois again. We had told everyone the second we knew that we were expecting because we figured they could use some good news. Dad was excited about it, and we hoped that he would be able to hang on until the baby was born. This time us kids cleaned out the Rexroat Store, dad's commercial property/storage facility that had had a seriously leaking roof for two years. The pictures don't do it justice, and don't give you the smell, either. Things were stable, otherwise, so we came back.
Six weeks later we got the call that it was only a matter of days. We hopped in the car and drove out for the last time. The insurance company was getting antsy with Dad's case, so the doctors had decided that he was stable enough to send him home and have a nurse there 24 hours a day. After all those months in the hospital, he was thrilled to be home. They moved him around in a wheelchair, and he could sit in it outside for awhile. That went on for a few weeks, and then one day he was just looking off into the distance and didn't recognize or respond to people. He would have occasional moments of lucidity, but most of the time he was lying in bed, skin and bones, his mouth hanging open, staring into space. This was the point when we arrived, and I'm pretty sure that he knew I was there, but you had to search for signs. We were all home for a week as his condition deteriorated, and then one day short of Scott's birthday he died. There had not been a death in the Bartlett family since Grandpa Bartlett died in 1976.
Needless to say, it was a huge blow to everybody. Having a big family helped a lot. Mom did very well under the circumstances, and, not surprisingly, has not sunk into depression (at least not as far as anyone can tell), but has been doing some things she'd been meaning to do. The biggest was to sell the house, the house we grew up in, which all happened a couple of weeks ago. She had wanted to move back to Springfield for years, but the sheer volume of stuff that dad had accumulated made it unthinkable. Scott spent all summer and then some putting the basement in order, and Mom unloaded the antiques, and the baseball cards are still there until we figure out what to do with them. The new buyers have been very accommodating. Now, I've always felt that having that old 1983 NU phone directory was a great asset because even if one of you wandered off somewhere and the brain cell that said, "write to Mark" had died unheeded, I could still track you down through your parents. Well, guess what, that's no longer the case with me, so any of you that don't know where I am, or lose my address, once the post office stops forwarding Mom's mail, you are, as they say, SOL. So, does that mean the burden has shifted even more lopsidedly to me? Maybe, but I'm old enough and cynical enough now that maybe next time I won't try that hard. Let that be a warning to all you Creighton-types out there that can't seem to sit still.
There were some calls out of the past these last few months, precipitated by the miracle season of 1995 for the Northwestern Wildcats. I'm happy to report that in two weeks, Tony, Nate and I will be heading west of the Pecos to witness in person what is potentially the only bowl game the 'Cats will ever play in our lifetimes. Tony, wheeler-dealer in international pharmaceuticals, had not been heard in person since the NU-BC debacle three or four years ago. Even Jeff was calling during those heady times when the 'Cats could seemingly do no wrong (let's forget about that Miami of Ohio thing). Suddenly, the Wildcats are on top of the Big Ten, and for the first time since 1948, we're Rose Bowl bound. Although the alumni office would have us spend upwards of $1500 for a six day package that still didn't include the $100 a person alumni New Year's Eve dinner, Nate came through as I knew he would and got us a cheaper package that will be a little under $1000 for yours truly (not counting the $50 t-shirts and other incidental expenses while in LA). It will be four days and three nights in scenic Burbank, grandstand seats for the Tournament of Roses Parade, and nosebleed seats to the game itself. This may require a special postmortem letter to all those who have a valid excuse for not being able to go.
Possibly related to all this, suddenly we had company. The Kocher came up for Thanksgiving, on his way from and to New Jersey where he witnessed the marriage of the Drew to his mail order bride. He figured since we had imposed on him twice already it was time to return the favor. I whipped up a TG dinner for five and Phil carved the roast beast. Two weeks later, the E-Man called out of the blue and said he was touring the countryside with some of his cronies from the Marlboro festival in Vermont, and would be in Boston last Sunday. So I hopped down to the Gardner Museum to hear the Mozart oboe quartet, the first piece in a very long concert, and the only one that he played in. Here we thought we'd be spending New Year's in Florida, and could visit the Olsons, Nate, and a host of other people. Now we're in Pasadena, and who lives out there? Wendy Prober is the only one I can think of. She always said if we went to the Rose Bowl we could all stay at her house.
Things are definitely in flux outside. As our parents start to leave us, we really do become the primary generation, with only descendants and no antecedents. The same forces than can cause Phil to pursue accounting, or Nate to leave Minnesota, are at work on all of us. Will I have as much to look forward to next year as in 1995? I hope not! You Chicagoans can expect to get a phone call sometime soon as we take the baby on her first world tour. Most of the rest I either just saw or will see in Pasadena. Or else they are in Germany, or Boulder, or some other godforsaken place I'll never see. So drive carefully out there, and for whatever of your holiday season has already gone by as well as what's to come, I hope it is/was a happy one, and that 1996 will be full of surprises and all of them good ones. Merry Christmas!