Category Archives: Motherhood

There Is A Rose In Spanish Harlem (Me!)

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We have always said that the day we take our youngest child to college we will not come right home that first night. Awash in nostalgia, we would wipe our tears, turn north to New York City, and drown our sorrows in exotic cuisine and art exhibits and parks and architecture and layers of history until we find that we are perfectly fine and content being Siegenthaler, party of 2, once again.

Well, two things about that.

In His goodness, the Lord ordained that our nest won’t be empty after all. My niece Erica is going to live with us for a while and work and study here.  And we are most glad. We weren’t really ready for empty nest anyway.  And, second, my new business dictates that I be home for a class early the next morning after I make Will’s dorm bed in Belz Hall and leave him under his own recognizance.

So, as Robert Burns said, the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley, and the NYC transition plan seemed to be ganging agley.

But by God’s grace it is going to happen, just a little early – today! Hooray for an early-August lull before the school year starts.  And for an Airbnb “third floor walk-up. Will that be a problem?”  Not at all, I scoff from my one-level rancher. And hooray that our lair is in Spanish Harlem on a street called Tito Puente. Allow me to romanticize it.  And for the Manhattos Indians and the early Dutch settlers and every homeless, tempest-toss’d immigrant yearning to breathe free! Right now, my children are really glad they aren’t going with us.  I’m unbearable when it comes to the grand human story.

Our plans include the following, quite out of order:

*Walking our feet to bloody nubs
*A walk over the Brooklyn Bridge and a tenement-appreciation moment; that chapter of NY history slays me
*Biking through Central Park
*Dining in Queens with Ben and Kim Kaufmann, true food connoisseurs
*Amateur Night At The Apollo in Harlem – you’re jealous over this one, aren’t you?
*Freedom Tower and the Memorial Pools of the World Trade Center
*The Museum of the City of New York
*MoMA- photography exhibit
*Shopping at Century 21; Andrew for sunglasses and me for a new school bag (CCS co-workers, I finally threw out the tattered pink polka-dot one with no rubber left on the wheels)
*Browsing some antique shops and finding a little piece of the city to take home
*The Highline – thanks to Will Hogue for this pearl!
*Columbia University, St. John the Divine, Riverside Church and its tall tower and view
*Greenwich Village literary hotspots and Washington Square
*Abyssinian Baptist, Harlem YMCA, The Cotton Club
*Pizza in Staten Island with the Baldinis – Hey, y’all!  DeNino’s for “The Garbage Can”?
*Book stores, ethnic food, and coffee better than we can make at home which is saying something
*Subway and bus lines
*People-watching, picture-taking, blogging it all in
*Post cards from the bodega
*Another week of Andrew’s beard growth for the general amusement of Christ Covenant Presbyterian Church
*Time to talk and laugh and read and think and sleep a little
*Return quenched with cool urban cultures and glad to be back in time to take Will to college and to welcome Erica to our favorite little town

In short, a leisurely, knockabout week.  🙂
And if you don’t think we can accomplish all this, then you don’t know Andrew.

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Johnny Clamps

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Happiness Is . . .

~ Thinking you are done forever with making boxed lunches, then realizing on day one of summer that not only are you now making them for the recent-grad-turned-summer-construction-worker, but the lunches must be bigger (think meatloaf), and must be poised at the back door by 6:15 am because work starts early in the Alabama summer, and finally that the lunch must be in a manly cooler that has been banged up and seen its day. The Wonder Woman lunch box he used with pride through high school will not do on the work site, no, not at all. For those of you thinking, hey, he is 18, he can make his own lunch, I can only respond with laughter. I’ve been saying that for years and then when I see what he throws into a limp Walmart sack and calls lunch, I just. can’t. do. it. And for all your big talk, you know you can’t either.

~ Johnny clamps. The same new-minted construction worker reported after his first day on the job that he went with a site-boss to a supply site and the boss told him to look for the johnny clamps! Rather than ask the needed question – what is a johnny clamp? is it big or small? will it be labelled ‘johnny clamp’? – he moved forward with a look of determined where-the-heck-are-those-johnny-clamps? and took cues from the other guy’s manner of searching. Someone found them, I guess.

~ Three weeks with my Little Mama who is an unflagging cheerleader and fan for all her children and grandchildren. She sees the good and tells you. She rises early to read her Bible and devotional book, pen in hand underlining particularly moving phrases or thoughts. I smile though because, no joke, the whole book is underlined. 🙂

~ A smiling picture of the out-of-the-country daughter with the caption, “Just had Baba Ganoush that CHANGED MY LIFE.”

~ The first shower after the water is turned back on in your house. It started, as these things often do, with Andrew checking the mail. Perusing the power bill he grew grave and meditative. Comparing last year’s numbers for March and April, as the bill conveniently does, with this year’s, there was a clear, inexplicable uptick. The game was on. Bill in hand, he visited the power company and a clerk’s offhand comment lead him to determine that the hemorrhage, if you will, was with the old water heater. In head lamp and knee pads, he crawled under the house, confirmed his hypothesis, and proceeded to reroute the pipes in another mysterious direction to the smell of that purple sealant.
Declaring success, he turned the water back on with a flourish; the newly fitted pipe burst forth from the wall and Niagara visited our laundry room. It needed mopping anyway. I was able to look on the sunny side because this was just the first explosion. There were two more to come, as the clock ticked, mom’s flight time crept nearer and nearer, and no showers had been had by all. Suddenly, all you can think of is a shower and a glass of water. Blessedly, local plumber John Dunn, yes, just like that John Donne, came calmly to the rescue. We easily made the flight, showered and fresh. My five foot tall mother, smiling and pulling her rolling backpack through the Shuttlesworth Airport doors, made the whole flood in the laundry room and drought in the bathrooms something to remember and laugh about.

~ Barre class with Rachel Eidson. If football players can push themselves, so can I.

~ A husband’s birthday. A friend told him this morning that he was ‘playing on the back 9’ now. Well.

These things are happiness today.

“This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.”
Psalm 118:24