SIMPLE
Tatjana is in New York working on her fourth book and I asked her to look around and see if the New York Times is right and that men’s fashion is veering towards Americana and Ralph Lauren and sloughing off the Euro look. She said all she has noticed is that everything is called Simple there – Simple Cafe, Simple Restaurant, Simple Store. Obviously New Yorkers are in the mood for Simple.
Meanwhile, I have been trying to sum up how truly wonderful our first family vacation was and I really don’t know what to say. I come from a large family who came from a large family (my grandmother was one of I believe 13 children, it might have been 11) and I always wanted a family. Now I have one and we took our first family summer vacation and it went swimmingly. If I had known just how much having a family felt so right to me I would have fought harder for this moment a long time ago.
SILLA
I love that Tin will grow up bilingual and possibly trilingual – language opens the door of the imagination because if you have an abundance of words to describe the experience of life, well, what I can I say, you have life. My ex mother in law gave me a wonderful gift, a framed wood block that said all that can be written about life is summed up in books. And I would say now in blogs as well. I found out today that a couple I’m very fond of are pregnant – very exciting news – I told them some would come to them and tell them horror stories but that having a child will be the most rewarding experience of their life (if not as my blogger friend and others have said, the most challenging). But I digress, I was speaking about language, and while we were in Spain, Tin walked in a friend’s apartment’s terrace and saw a small red chair and she, who doesn’t speak English, said “silla?” because she could tell he was drawn towards it. And Tin turned to her and said in perfect Spanish, “Silla!”
SOJOURN
The Chinese have a saying that a person who goes on a journey comes home changed. I came home changed from this summer vacation; I feel the weight of family has stopped a lot of my rocking. I looked at Tin who Tatjana said would grow up on the beach because all children come back from the beach more grown up and the little baby whose feet were dangling out of the bassinet on the Delta flight to Madrid looks to me in this photograph here, sitting on the red “silla”, as if he returned a little boy with the world in the palm of his hands.
