What I’m most thankful for this thanksgiving is the Hiraldos in my life. First and foremost for being my World, of course, but also in some very specific ways that reflect each of their timeless uniqueness, as well as ingredients of our recent days.
JNH, for the way that he has rolled with the epically involved high school application process here in NYC. A process that parents fret over, but then we really do need to check ourselves, as where else would you have options from 700 programs in several hundred schools across five boroughs, from focuses that range from STEM, to film-making, to marine conservation, together from the opportunity to learn from being in a city like this.
The various essays and audition materials that JNH submitted have brought out marvelous nuggets of his creative, thoughtful self (proud mama-bragging alert here, but hey, it’s been a while). Like an essay on a moment that’s challenged him intellectually, for which he wrote about how he felt on finishing the last page of War and Peace. He said that while the story absorbed him entirely, he found Tolstoy’s inter-woven philosophical holding forth tedious. Or as he put it – and as I doubt anyone else would - the “brilliance of the story made reading the chapters in-between even more painful. Every word regarding the definition of ‘power’ and whatnot filled me with a longing to return to the story.” He described how, despite the challenge of reading the book, Tolstoy’s view has shaped his way of seeing the World, particularly Tolstoy's belief that we shouldn’t focus on individual leader-figures but on the masses, the “force that really moves history”.
And CMH, for his perennial hutzpah and un-bragging leadership. How he’s already assembled a new crew at middle school, and is hustling on the basketball court alongside eighth graders two times his height. And how at a soccer club talent center he’s been attending on Fridays, his response to a coach testing him by saying he wasn’t taking the practice seriously enough was to quietly get back to playing, and to score three goals, to show that yes, I’m taking this seriously.
Tia Z, who comes on most thanksgivings including this one. (She didn’t make it last year as I came down with Covid, and the previous one was when we visited her in Vegas). With sporadic visits you can’t predict when there will be moments of reconnection but there always are. For me and her this time it was when we were both up earlier than the others on the Friday after thanksgiving. As I had my morning coffee in pajamas she mentioned the sustenance she’s been getting from the stoics – prompted, perhaps, by the fact that the day before, after hitting up Central Park, we’d hunkered down on the sofa to watch Gladiator, which opens with scenes featuring Marcus Aurelius, who’s one of them.
I remembered how much stoicism had resonated with me when I discovered it – through Seneca I think? – in the car park-style sprawling library at Edinburgh University. The conversation provided a much needed re-grounding reminder of the tenets of courage, temperance, justice and wisdom (and whatnot, JNH might add).
And C, for believing in us, and in me. When I take leaps I have tendency to assemble doubts around them (hence the need for stoic courage!), and without a flicker of doubt from his side he will just say “I know you are going to do this.” And well beyond that belief, is a knowing of me. He included in our wedding vows ‘let me be patient in learning your ways’, which has that nailing-it dimension that C has when it comes to the things that are really important in life – accompanied, I hope, by my knowing of him, and accompanied by our openness to continuing to learn together.
