So, this is either last year's very very late Christmas letter, or this year's only marginally late Christmas letter, or some hideous combination of the two. You be the judge, I'm just starting to write it and I haven't figured it out yet. Let's start by assuming this is really last year's letter, in which case I should begin by prostrating myself in abject humility for not having gotten around to writing this for the last twelve months. If anybody had actually noticed, I would've been moved to right this wrong sooner, but as it was, the expected flood of frantic phone calls and telegrams checking on my continued yet dubious well-being never materialized. But, hey, that's hardly anybody's fault, since if I was too lazy (read: busy) to set pen to paper in the first place, it's not that surprising that everyone else was too busy (read: lazy) to ponder its lack of arrival.
After all, what really happened of substance last year anyway? Well, okay, we did have another kid, but I mean besides that, since we'd done that once already, as have most of the rest of you by now. And my grandmother died, but she was 90 and after three years in a nursing home she was ready to go, so it wasn't like it was a shock or anything, although it was still sad. This proximity of birth and death was a repeat of 1995, when Dad died and Chloe was born. This was one reason why we've decided not to have any more kids, as I'm running out of relatives. Plus now, with a boy and a girl, one of each, there are no worlds left to conquer, so why tempt fate?
If anything is tempting fate, it's trying to resume this whole Christmas letter thing after a year in absentia. The other un-noteworthy thing about 1998 was that except for the Pollocks we didn't see anybody from the NU crowd, which was an all-time low (in quantity, I hasten to add, not quality, as not only did we visit Doug & Jennifer in their ancestral Riverside home, but only a month or so before their first, Benjamin, was born). The rest of that trip we hung out at my sister's house with her then-new baby, Alexa, who is now almost two. It was April and cold and rained incessantly and Beth was five months pregnant herself, so we didn't get out much.
So see, you didn't miss anything. By last December, Justin was only four months old and best known for spitting up every five minutes morning noon and night. I was known to joke that we'd be unable to tell when he really got sick. As it turned out, I was wrong, we were able to tell, as he came down with the 24-hour bug in January (came down with it all over me, as luck would have it), then managed to pass it along to the rest of us. Not only has he excelled over Chloe in the sheer number of illnesses he's contracted, he's also set new standards in spreading them around. Nothing serious, only one worthy of a trip to the emergency room, but it was a Sunday afternoon and they weren't that busy. Now, at 16 months, he totters around from room to room, getting into more mischief than ever occurred to Chloe in her wildest imagination. Last weekend at a friend's house he pulled over their (artificial) Christmas tree on himself. No one was more surprised than he was. No people or ornaments were injured, fortunately. My mom used to say of my younger brother, "If I'd had him first he'd be an only child." Now I know what she means.
Chloe is now four years old and started pre-school three mornings a week this fall. While she's no Cris Moore, she does okay, and particularly likes the art and music parts of the day. Three weekends ago we all trooped down to New York to see my cousin's daughter perform in the "Nutcracker", meeting up with Mom and some of my relatives. It was a sunny 50-degree weekend, there were more people in New York than I would have imagined existed on the entire planet, and twice as many pigeons as people. The Nutcracker, which wasn't a real Nutcracker but some kind of marketing ruse foisted upon small-town dance studios to give them the opportunity to perform "on Broadway", at their own expense no less, was not the high point of the weekend, but the weather made it all forgivable. Before and after our day in the big city we hung out with the Kevins, who may someday soon be leaving Clifton and not be nearly as handy. Lee recently got a job working for the same company as Nancy, although not in the same town, so they're planning to move as soon as they can find a house that suits them, which turns out not to be that easy of a task. Even though Kyra and Chloe only see each other once a year on average, they do very well together, and hopefully the same will be said for Russel and Justin, once ours gets past the grabby stage. With a total of four kids to ride herd on between us, it was hard to carry on much of a conversation with the elder Kevins during our visits, but we managed.
Our ubiquitous trip to the Midwest happened at a much more sensible time of year this go-around, and as a result we were able to meet up with several NU cronies and their families. The equally ubiquitous Pollocks were of course first on the list, and their nearness to the Brookfield Zoo made it a no-brainer to arrange for a day with the animals, strollers in tow. Jennifer, who only a couple of years ago brazenly dragged two near-toddlers with their parents to a late-night dinner at a Mexican restaurant, now was seen to be scheduling her life around her kid's naps, just like everyone else. Oh, the irony. Ben looks so much like Doug she doesn't even need to write anything on the back of the pictures she sends out. When we visited, Jennifer had just been unceremoniously laid off from her menial job at the nameless "small architectural firm" where she'd been working for awhile, and was finding there were lots of other jobs available, although nothing particularly interesting. She's since found one, and is working part-time, and Doug is shopping around for city planning positions in places like Fort Worth, Texas.
If anyone (in fact, the only ones) can be said to go out of their way to visit with the Bartletts, then it would have to be the Stonehills, who made the trip from South Bend to the far western suburbs of Chicago to spend the day with us during that same trip. This added enticement was enough to bring the Rebstocks down from the great white north of Mundelein, and a reunion of sorts was effected, as Don and Bill hadn't seen each other for eight or nine years. I grilled up some chicken and kabobs and burgers and the kids ran around in the sprinklers and designed their own desserts, and a good time was generally had by all. Those of you who were among the living at Bill & Karen's wedding should feel another pod fall off your conehead (as in "The Leisure Hive") at the thought that Elizabeth is nine and Hannah was about to turn six. Meanwhile, the Rebstock brood featured Amanda, who was about 3 and a half, and Emily, who slept through much of the festivities, being only about four months old. They had just discovered there were towns even farther away from Chicago than Mundelein, and were about to make the move to Grayslake, which they've since done. We took pictures of all the families in front of my sister's house, and someday I'll add them to my website for your general edification.
Thus ended another momentous trip to Illinois, no? Well, not quite. I always have a reason for picking a particular week to visit, and this year it was the Shostakovich festival that the Chicago Symphony was undertaking under the baton of Mstislav Rostropovich. While the entire festival lasted three weeks, I was able to work in about eight or nine days worth and went to the CSO three times, first with Mom and the second time with Jennifer. For the third concert, Yefim Bronfman was playing the 1st Violin Concerto, so the natural first choice was our own Nina Saito. The only problem was I hadn't seen Nina since my wedding in '89, so it seemed kind of awkward to call her parents house out of the blue, not knowing even if she was in the country, to see if she'd want to get together. So I did what any self-respecting computer geek would do, I got on the internet, thinking, "Hey, she's a musician, she must be on a web page somewhere." And sure enough discovered not only her, but her picture and an e-mail address on AOL. I sent a "Nina, is that you?" message to it, and within hours, we had re-established contact. Oh, if only the Mars landers had it this easy. We ended up dining at the Berghoff and had a nice evening at the concert, too. Nina has pursued her vagabond freelance musician career, been all over the place, toured with the NY City Opera, does her annual stint in Graz, Austria, and generally making all of us would-be musicians turned bankers jealous. With any luck we should be able to get together again well before 2009.
The rest of the summer came and went. I took a trip to San Francisco for a week on business and saw three SF Symphony concerts while I was there. Michael Tilson Thomas (whom I still can't look at without thinking of Phil calling him "Mr. Nose Candy") was doing a Stravinsky festival, which included Patrick Stewart narrating "A Soldier's Tale". And how many times did I make it to the BSO this year? Zero, naturally.
As the fall approached, our thoughts turned to the Wildcats, now Barnett-less, and I decided to use this free plane ticket I'd come by to make the trek to Evanston in search of the brick. As it turned out Nate was planning on being there on a similar brick-quest, so I took a long weekend and met up with him, Jennifer and Don for breakfast at Walker Brothers, which I hadn't been to in centuries. Nate regaled us with his stories of his poorly chosen roommates and his battles with the phone company. Don had to babysit, so he was useless for the game (although he did lead me to his favorite free parking spot), Jennifer couldn't care less, and Jim was using Shep's tickets. So it was Nate, my brother Scott and me sitting in a brisk wind watching Minnesota do the Golden Gopher stomp on our beloved Wildcats. By the time the game was over, the sun had come out, so we walked around at the one paved-over end of the field and found The Brick. No, not Nancy, the brick for the NU Croquet Club, which Nate had ordered and as far as I know no one else ever paid for. The text I had suggested didn't all quite fit, so it simply read "NU Croquet 1985 Plimbo Climbo Fixes".
Because there was the barest of remote chances that the game might be on tv on the east coast, it had started at 11:00 am (what, do you drink mimosas at the tailgate then?). So we had some time to kill afterwards and spent it walking aimlessly around the campus, trying to figure out what all the new buildings are, visiting the site of the late lamented observatory, and wondering where all the students had gone. We made our way to scenic downtown Evanston, where we eventually had dinner with the Stonehills, who thought nothing of making the two hour drive from their house (a la Ken Clearairsystem) just for dinner with us, and Jim Andrews, whom I hadn't seen since his e-mail revelation that he shared more with Julie Andrews than just a last name. A riotous dinner ensued, where I can't say I learned much about Jim's latest escapades other than his leaky roof was being fixed, or Nate's other than he voted for Jesse and was now deeply, deeply sorry. Dave's still looks exactly the same, but was apparently slated for the wrecking ball along with the rest of the block to make way for a new MegaMart or something, and was going to move down the street to Chicago Avenue. So I was glad to share its waning days of glory with my own.
The Turkey of the Year award goes to one Anthony Lauro, whose stunning turnaround within a couple of years is unprecedented. Although he did announce to me and the world at large that he was moving for the fourth time in four years, this time to Michigan, he went ahead and did so without any further communication, never to be heard from again. Since he's taken his Mom along on the last couple of moves, I don't even have an alternate address any more to track him down by. If the Wildcats had had a winning season, he probably would have resurfaced, but it was not to be. Here's hoping the holidays are enough to guilt him into coming out of the woodwork. Even Creighton has been unusually verbose lately, so stranger things have happened.
Meanwhile my company, BankBoston, entered into a "merger" with a bigger bank, and only Y2K has prevented the snarfing from commencing already. But my project survives and all of us along with it, so not to worry. Last December, spurred on by my brother, who now runs triathlons, and my brother-in-law, who's just so competitive it's scary, I found a gym near my job and went about 250 times in the last twelve months, losing 25 pounds in the process. No, really, I did. While I don't aspire to triathlons, or even uni-athlons, a 5K seems doable.
Don't know how much longer I can keep this letter-writing thing up. Always good to hear from people, at least I think it is, as it hardly ever happens. Even e-mail has turned out to be not much of an incentive to get people to spontaneously communicate. The exception being when Jeff thought Monty was going to be on that Millionaire show with Regis (incidentally, if anyone gets on that show and wants to use me for the "phone a friend" lifeline, you have my permission. Of course, Beth says, "I wouldn't call you, I'd call Monty!" That's okay, too, you can find him on the Python conference on usenet). Consider yourselves duly warned, we'll be in Chicago for the Worldcon around Labor Day, and the Wildcats are at home then, too. Hope to see you all there! Until then happy belated holidays and best wishes for a non-post-apocalyptic new year!