Raising the roof

When we were looking at the house on the hill for the first time, the two most obvious bits of it—from anywhere in town—were that the fake-rock siding was hideous and the roof was rusted through. The siding is long gone, and the house stands proudly naked in its original wooden clapboards. The roof, however, has remained a rusted tribute to the power of time and salt water wind.

Last week, as I towel-dried my hair in my bedroom, I heard the sound of the loudest can in the world being peeled back. This sound—of screeching metal—may not be one that would make your heart beat with joy. My heart, however, was thrilled with it. I called all the family in to listen quietly at the window. Some were not as thrilled as me, “Why are you making me stand here and listen to that obnoxious sound, Mom?” Naomi complained. I took hands and raced to the back porch and pointed delightedly: the can being opened was our new house, the roof covered with people ripping the old bits off. This was, of course, a thrill even for Naomi. We watched the roof—installed in 1988—get peeled back. Then the second roof—installed with the house in 1925 stood in its rusted glory until it too was peeled back. The house, proudly topless, faced the sea with the aging glory of a Mediterranean matron. And then the new roof went on, long sheet by long sheet. Rob and I, checking in on the progress, wondered when the roof with the lovely deep mossy green colour was going to go on as the house’s final proud topping. Alas, though, the pale undercoat finished, the roofers packed up their bags, leaving us to squint at the pale green thing they’d left behind. Could it be? No! Yes! The pale green thing WAS the roof. The tiny inch-square chip, translated to huge sheets of roofing, turned out to be quite a different colour than I had thought. Oh well, it’s only $15000 anyway, and we’ll only have to live with it for 15-25 years. No worries, mate.

In the week since the pale-ish roof went on, I have come to not hate it so much. It beats the rusted roof we’ve removed, and it blends in with other roofs nearby. We’re hopeful that once the naked wood is painted, the pale green roof will be highlighted in different ways and will look, er, better. (For the record, Michael likes it.) In the meantime, I have been practicing non-attachment to the colour I thought it would be, and non-attachment to my dislike of the colour it is. Not so bad, really. And, as I get increasingly agitated about all the sunsets we can’t see from our current house, I am increasingly excited about living in the new house, pale green top or not. (True, it’s only a 20 second walk to the beach to have a great view, which is a totally spoiled brat thing to complain about, but I am something of a spoiled brat about this view.) Our move-in date is early February, and there’s still this house to sell and a book to write and my friend Jane to welcome. I’m loving my Christmas in summer.

Hope you’re all having a wonderful holiday wherever you are, too.

(pictures today obviously of the roof: first, the label on the roofing material itself which should have given me pause: notice the warnings about my new roof!; one roof down; two roofs down and topless (new pink wood over the new Keith-room at the back of the house); final touches on pale green roof. Maybe it'll look better with skylights?)

A strange noise around every corner

Michael here – I wanted to recount a recent experience Naomi and I had the other day when we were off to her Girl Guide meeting – Girl Guides are the global version of Girl Scouts in the U.S. The Girl Guides are having their annual jamboree in a few weeks and the group of girls from our area met to go over information and preparations. This entire event brings a bit of difficulty for me as a father. It will be Naomi’s first real trip away from us, other than an overnight or a weekend away. She, and 3000 other New Zealand girls from all over the country will be in Christchurch for ten days. That feels like an awful long time from where I sit, but we’ll see how that goes.

So the meeting was in the next community up the coast – Raumati (with the “au” pronounced like ow, as in, “Ow, I stubbed my toe!”) - just about ten minutes from here, at the Scout Hall. Easy enough, Scout Hall in Raumati. A couple of things to know here. For one, there are three different distinctions in Raumati: Raumati, Raumati Beach, and Raumati South. This is a relatively small community, but nicely spread out. As Naomi and I drove into the village, I asked her if she knew exactly where the Scout Hall was. Before we left our house, she insisted that she knew exactly where the meeting was, with the kind of confidence and annoyance that only a ten-year-old can offer. Now that we were a bit closer, she was a bit less so. “Actually Dad, I’m not entirely sure where it is,” she admitted, as the clock showed we had just a few minutes to find the hall.

Another thing to note: There are lots of halls in every little community in New Zealand, at least the ones I’ve seen. A Memorial Hall, a Community Hall, maybe a hall connected to a church or a library. A hall attached to the Bowling Club, a hall for the knitting club, the croquet club. You probably get the idea. So when we asked an elderly couple walking their dog where the Scout Hall was, they asked which one. “The Scout Hall in Raumati,” I explained. “Raumati Beach or South?” they asked. Their dog seemed quite interested in the whole conversation. We were getting later for the meeting, as Naomi kept reminding me. We were closer to Raumati Beach, so I opted for the close one. They ended up telling me where both Scout Halls were. We headed off. Two quick wrong turns later in the general correct direction, we saw what clearly looked like a hall of some sort on the other side of a playground. As we pulled in to the hall’s parking lot, we heard that strange, unmistakeable sound that can only come from a half dozen people playing the bagpipes, each warming up to their own bagpipe tune. (A sample and testimony to Pipes in NZ.)

Already thinking that this must be the wrong Scout hall, I noticed the large sign over the front entrance of the hall. “Scot Hall” it read, not Scout Hall. Scot Hall, I thought. You must be joking. I mean, where else would there be bagpipe practice? This must be in a movie somewhere. I went inside just to make sure that there were no groups of 12-year-olds planning a Jamboree. I found one nice, elderly woman sitting at a folding table, sorting through what must have been sheet music for bagpipes. No she said, there were no Girl Guides at the hall. And, No, she didn’t know where “Scout Hall” was, but thought that one of the bagpipers outside did. What that meant was going back out to where the practice was going on. By this time, the Scot Hall parking lot had filled with more bagpipers – clearly, the weekly bagpipe practice was just about to begin. Another interesting note here: there were a whole lot of people playing their bagpipes. Older people, younger people men, women. Bagpipes are either quite popular, or are experiencing a surge in popularity. And the number of people of Scottish descent in New Zealand must be significant, as to warrant a whole hall.

So when everything was said and done, we found the right Scout Hall – in Raumati beach – and we were only a half hour late – a blessing in disguise as the meeting went on for another hour after we arrived. Naomi is all prepared for the Jamboree. I’m more emotionally prepared for her time away. And I know where to go when I decide to pick up playing the pipes!

Caption: Naomi (in the center) with the rest of the Paekakariki Girl Guides in the Anzac Day parade.

NOTE: If you want to see our year in review in Photos, go here.

Leaping off into the next place

There isn't time to write a proper entry tonight, but we've just returned from one of those blissful, i- can't- believe -this- is- my- actual -life evenings. Melissa and her friend K walked up the beach with their beautiful daughters. Michael and I walked down the beach with our dog and kids (Rob was helping out at the new wood-fired pizza place in the village). We met at the midpoint between our two houses and sat on the beach and ate fresh strawberries and drank champagne while the four kids ran and played and finally took turns jumping off the sea wall and into the soft sand. It was too beautiful not to share.

There are many leaping off moments to talk about in the next couple of days, but tonight, just take the bliss of a bunch of kids holding hands and leaping into their summer holidays.

Quake free

Hello all friends and family,
Many many of you have emailed, worried about the earthquake which shook the bottom of the North Island and damaged houses and collapsed buildings in Gisbourne, which took most of the damage. This is just to say that we here at Paekakariki are totally totally fine. I admit that I was icing a cake and hanging with Rob and Michael in the lounge and didn't even FEEL it at all--much less get disrupted by it. (It's also true, of course, that there were no serious injuries at all anywhere on the island.) Now I'm going for a walk on this spectacular chilly summer morning along a stretch of deserted beach in the slanting morning sun and I'll come home to a house filled with children on this first day of summer vacation. Only my schedule and my seasonal sense are shaken here on this Friday morning in New Zealand.
Thanks to you all for worrying. I feel loved from around the world!

Strawberry Christmas

There is a joke in our house this year. We go to the farmer’s market each Saturday morning and choose basketfuls of fresh summer produce—perfect strawberries and raspberries, fresh juicy peaches, tiny plumbs that look just like cherries. We pass by the Christmas decorations with our arms laden with fruit and sigh, “Nothing says Christmas like strawberry season!” And we eat all the raspberries in the car on our way home and try not to stain our shorts with their juices.

We are seasonally challenged right now. Unlike last year, where it was unseasonably cold here and unseasonably warm in the US, this year the seasons seem to be right for the hemisphere. Which for us feels totally wrong. On Sunday afternoon—12 days before Christmas—I stretched out on steaming hot sand and listened to the waves pound. Then, hot enough, I ran into the cold sea, jumping waves with Aidan and then floating, my purpled toes breaking the surface of the water.

And it’s not just the weather, it’s the light. Here the sun is well up by 5ish and the sky is still fully light at 9pm. They have to schedule Christmas light excursions at 10:30! Our pathetic Christmas tree—now relegated to the back lounge because I couldn’t stand to look at it each day in the front lounge—sits without its lights on most of the time because it’s simply too bright outside to bother.

If this sounds like utter bliss, it’s only because it IS utter bliss. But there are worries too. The biggest worry is that I cannot get my head to believe that it’s Christmas. I cannot get my act together to buy and ship presents overseas (look for gifts in the New Year, Dad). I cannot make a Christmas list and check it twice. I cannot bake gingerbread houses for my children to decorate. I mean, I have to be at the beach! And would you pick gingerbread or the strawberry shortcake I made last night for dessert—I mean, seriously!

Sometimes, though, it seems like Christmas is perfect in the summer. I know it’s a solstice holiday and the lights bring comfort during the coldest and darkest days of winter. But it’s also a family holiday and a time for masses of people to gather together and spend time together. Here, folks set up tents in their lawn for out of town guests. Here you throw Christmas dinner on the barbeque and take a picnic to the beach. Here you can stay up late on New Years eve because it’s only dark for a couple of hours before midnight anyway. So while it’s surreal, it’s the kind of surreal I could get used to over time, I think!

Michael went to a holiday party the other day where there were heaps of strawberries on the table. “Nothing says Christmas like strawberry season!” he joked. A colleague looked at him with a distant smile on her face. “That’s what my mother always used to say,” she said happily, biting into a rich red Christmas berry.

PS In the 24 hours since I’ve written this, the weather has turned cold and nasty and feels seasonally Christmas weather. “Look at this weather!” my cab driver said in disgust today. “You’d think it was the middle of July!” Indeed. Exactly what I was thinking myself…

Ode to Rob

I think I have not been clear enough about the joys of having a chef live in your house. There was a time in DC when personal chefs were getting popular and people would come to your house and cook you a week or two worth of meals and leave it in your freezer and go. This seemed to me a luxury I would never be able to afford--and maybe wouldn’t really want. After all, I quite like to cook. But if you get the chance, I totally recommend the strategy of having your best friend get trained as a chef and move in with you. It has benefits that are nearly too numerous to count in the length of this train ride. I’ll try though.

The first benefit happens on the nights I work. Last night, for example, I worked in town and got home at 6, as I always do. Coming home to kids who need attention and food that needs to be cooked is always a trial. I know that I should prepare something for E, who looks after our children, to pop in the oven before we get home, but I have managed that level of preplanning only ONCE in the year that I’ve lived here. Last night, though, instead of giving the kids a quick hug, racing to pull off my work clothes and change into my home clothes so that I could throw together something fast and adequate for dinner, I came home to Rob, cheerful in the kitchen, making the house smell delicious. He and E and the kids had already made a “science/ baking experiment” for dessert—seven little chocolate candies, thick slabs of dark chocolate on the bottom with a layer of homemade caramel on top. Dessert finished, Rob was cooking on his own—dinner.

He served the meal 15 minutes after we walked in the house: homemade three cheese ravioli in a sage brown butter sauce. This meal, cooked by my friend in my very own kitchen, was sublime—one of the best things I’ve ever eaten. We sat at the table and drank wine and ate salad with Rob’s fresh honey mustard vinaigrette, and we all moaned out loud with nearly every bite (Aidan had thirds).

There are serious benefits for the nights I don’t work, too. Then Rob will decide what the dinner is and I’ll help, or I’ll decide and he’ll help. We’ll cook together—often with Melissa or Michael or a kid or two—and he’ll make everything I make better than it would be if he weren’t there. I’m a pretty good cook, but he’s fantastic, and he can be totally complementary and supportive at the same time he’s making suggestions that take my cooking to a different level.

And then there’s the benefit of having a chef around and thinking like a chef. Even if he never cooked anything again, even if he didn’t pick up a knife to slice carrots into exactly even julienne strips, I would still learn just by going to the market with him and hearing him think out loud about food. He thinks like an artist: How about this ingredient plus this one? I’ve never seen this veggie before, let’s buy one and sauté it. Don’t throw out that too-ripe fruit: let’s make sorbet. And so on. I have the chance to get inside the thinking of a chef and to hear about how things go together and how I could experiment more to see which new combinations there are to create in the world. And I would be a better cook even if he modeled nothing but his thinking.

Ah, but homemade pad thai on the porch after a day on the beach or the freshest spring rolls I’ve ever had on a warm evening (and with no cilantro!) or grilled peaches and apricots, hot and sweetly dripping—these are delights I’ll hold with me a long long time. The fact that he’s our oldest friend and can remember our wedding and our first dog and me at 17—this just shows how careful a preplanner I really am. After all, who needs to prepare a casserole when you can just make friends with a chef a couple of decades before culinary school!

postscript: We've come home from a date where Rob-the-wonderful has taken care of our children and we have gone out for dinner which was totally less good than Rob's food, alas. Pictures today are of Rob's favorite head shot, Aidan climbing the walls inside the house, and Aidan and me in front of the new house.

One year

Saturday was our one-year anniversary here, and we celebrated by going to a Hanukkah dinner at the Temple With The Beautiful Rabbi (this is not the official name of this temple, which is less artistically just called Temple Sinai like nearly every third synagogue in the world). At the temple there was a fantastic klesmer band, a potluck dinner, and a whole group of friendly-looking jews who mostly ignored us all night. We hung with the rabbi some and we watched the intergenerational dancing, and I found that the trumpet player’s parents live in Chevy Chase, but mostly we just wondered how to break into conversations that seemed to be going really well without us. Still, there were beautiful moments and it was amazingly cool to be in this very international group of jews. I, of course, am on the outside in even a US group of jews, so there was no happy home for me in this group, but there was great beauty in songs and prayers and traditions that spread around the world and through so many different cultures.

So the celebration, as it happened, waited for Sunday. After the open house (one family back for the FOURTH time—we’re going to start charging them rent), we headed back to our place with a sickly Karen and met up with the ever-prompt Melissa, patiently waiting on our front porch for our return (this is the last time she’ll wait on the porch—now that she has her own key she can avoid our constant tardiness in the comfort of our living room). While Karen nursed her herbal tea and tried to breathe, we went about messing up the house which had only seconds before been picture-perfect. I made the messiest of all foods—latkes—and Rob made that December Hanukkah favorite gazpacho to go with the Christmas classic of homemade strawberry ice cream (we are SO much having to get used to these spring food choices during this winter holiday season!). We drank champagne with fresh raspberries and toasted the idea that life changes in uncertain ways and that times can look really dark and confusing but it’s all part of the upwards spiral of happiness we’re trying to construct. And there we were, each of us in these serious life transitions, each of us uncertain about where we might go next, and all of us laughing and hoping together.

This has been a week for looking backwards and forwards. We have been remembering the tumult of our lives a year ago as we arrived in this new country and tried to make our way here. We have been picturing our future in this new house of ours and with these new friends. And we’ve been breathing through the present day, knowing that each of these moments is its own kind of gift. We’re learning that no matter how clear things seem, each element in our lives has its own kind of uncertainty, and no matter how uncertain things seem, each element in our lives has its own kind of certainty.

We never would have guessed, two years ago, that we’d be celebrating Hanukkah 2006 in New Zealand, fresh off the planes, shiny new residence visas in our passports and all our things on a ship. At that Hanukkah, we’d never have guessed that Hanukkah 2007 would be celebrated with people we didn’t know a year ago and also with our oldest friend, come to give NZ life a try for himself. At this Hanukkah I feel utterly certain that I have no idea what Hanukkah 2008 might hold. Who will we celebrate with? What will our life feel like? And at the same time, there are pieces that seem quite likely: there will be a new menorah to replace the broken one, there will be candles and latkes and laughter. And it’s nearly certain the backdrop for it all will be the big sea view out the lounge window and the sound of waves breaking in the distance.

Still, no matter where we are, it’s clear that each celebration brings its own joys and its own tearings. This is a time of year to miss the family and friends we’ve left behind, and it’s also the time of year to go to the beach after school each day, to unwind before dinner with the sound of lapping waves and laughing children. I have learnt that it is very very hard to feel sorry for oneself with sand between ones toes!

And now for you, gentle reader. I am grateful to those of you who turn to this blog to maintain our connection together, grateful for the occasional email asking me to follow up on something I’d mentioned or clarifying a point I made in a confusing way. I’m curious, here at the end of the first year, who you are and why you read this blog. I’ve been surprised at some of the folks who read regularly (and also surprised at the folks who don’t read much at all!). If you think about it in the next little while, drop me a note to let me know who you are and what’s going on in your lives. No matter how uncertain the world might be, it is the connections between us that give it its form and substance. It wasn’t the excellent food and champagne that made the marking of our one-year anniversary feel special, it was the drinkers and the eaters around our table. I like to think that each of you reading is around my table too, only you’re slightly harder to see and hear (and you don’t eat so much). I hope this last night of Hanukkah brings light and miracles into each of your lives, whether you’re in the winter or the summer, and whether you celebrate Hanukkah or not. May we all be connected through cycles of light and dark, cold and warmth, and growing and changing friendships. This are all miracles.

(Pictures today of the miracles of year one: the menorahs at the temple, Michael in the new upstairs window and again on the driveway of the new house. Don't you wonder what pictures you'll see in the next year? I know I do...)

Conference calls

I have been to my first NZARE conference now, and so am a full part of the educational research world here. The differences between the NZ educational research conference and the US educational research conference (AERA) are much like to the differences between the two countries more generally.

AERA is an enormous conference. Only a handful of North American cities are large enough to host it because you need hotel rooms for 15,000 and conference presentation rooms for more than 200 simultaneous presentations, plus several large rooms to hold more than 1000 at a time. It’s the conference rooms, I’m told, that scuttle the deal—that’s a whole lot of break out sessions. I think there are about nine cities that can do it—probably eight now that New Orleans lost its conference infrastructure.

NZARE is a smallish conference, although bigger than I expected. Still, there aren’t that many cities in NZ, and so the number of cities that can hold the 400 people in hotel rooms and dozen simultaneous presentations is probably close to eight here too. The infrastructure is small enough, though, that at the closing ceremonies on Friday, the organizing committee for this conference looked hopefully to someone who might organize the next one, but they couldn’t find any takers (it was supposed to be a joint conference with the Australian educational researchers but the registration in Brisbane was $800 Australian which the New Zealanders thought was “too dear” for its membership so now they’re looking for someone to hold it here).

The size matters in everything. Here, everyone goes to all the keynotes—because they can. Here, one person presents for 40 minutes as opposed to the seven papers in 90 minutes you’ll get at AERA. Because of that, here there’s real content that gets discussed, which both offers real ideas and also exposes the lack of real ideas. There’s no place to hide in 40 minutes. There’s no place to reveal in the typical 12 minutes you get at AERA.

This all means that I went to far more sessions here because there was much more likelihood that I’d learn something, but each session had just one paper so I saw far fewer papers than I’d have seen at AERA. And maybe that’s the key difference in this tiny size: you have fewer choices, which means that each choice you have is more important than it would be if you had heaps of choices. Here you have fewer people, fewer research projects, fewer ideas. That means that when the folks at my place of work (NZCER) stand up, they are each of them representing the whole organization all the time. I suppose that’s true at George Mason, too, but at Mason, the odds of your being seen by someone who really counts are slim. Here, the odds of your being seen by someone who really counts are much much higher. Each idea gets more currency, which makes each bad idea more wasteful, each good idea more powerful than their counterparts would be in the US.

Thus scale is human and people get to be human together. Nowhere is this more apparent than at the conference dinner. At AERA I don’t know whether there even is a conference dinner; in any case, it has never occurred to me to go. Rather, each major university has a gathering and you go to those where you have connections—where you were a graduate or are employed or are friends with someone in one of those categories. I go to the GMU session and drink wine and eat cheese and see all the people I see in regular faculty meetings. I go to the Harvard session and drink wine and eat hot nibbles and see former classmates and Grand Personages in Education. I go to some of the bigger, more boisterous schools with a colleague or friend and watch strangers do jello shooters and carve their dinner from huge sides of beef.

At NZARE, people go to a conference dinner, and we sit at big round tables like a wedding reception. And then there’s entertainment! I had heard about this, about the fact that there would be a comic and a band, and I had heard that people danced. Still, it was hard to picture. But sure enough, after the dinner finished and the weak comic production was over, the band began to play and the tables emptied out onto the dance floor. And I mean nearly all of them. All of these educational researchers (mostly women, median age in the mid- or late-50s), poured into the dance floor and began to dance in one seething mass of brain and body power. It was most impressive. Here the Grand Personages of NZ education not only brushed elbows with but actually boogied with the nobodies. Here a new layer was added onto the conference-success-metrics: not only did your methodology need to be sound and your analysis convincing, but you had to have rhythm too. Some of the people I had seen earlier somberly discussing evaluations of major government initiatives were now flailing sweaty arms in the air. (Of course my group, who had the most impressive overall body of research presentation, also had the most impressive overall body of dance prowess, too—which I now realize is an entry bar that I passed only by virtue of my across-the-world phone interview.)

I missed seeing the people I used to see at AERA, old friends and mentors I meet for coffee or dinner. I missed feeling like I belonged to the place, if only by virtue of my snotty judgmental attitude about the whole thing. So I felt like an outsider—again—which isn’t all that much fun. But I felt like I was nearer the center (or centre, really) of something that could make a possible difference than I ever have been at AREA. And that’s a key distinction here, too. In the US, I’ll never be able to make a difference for my country. In NZ, I can have the chance to make a difference, but not my country to make it for. Inside and outside, centered and not. Eventually GMU will offer me the possibility to come back forever or not come back at all (I’ll get my first letters before Christmas, and won’t find out anything final until after Easter). But no one will offer the make-a-difference card. That one I have to create on my own and then I’ll have to see in what country it might be valid currency.

(the picture today obviously has nothing to do with anything except it's cute)

A new Hanukkah era

I am on an early morning flight to Christchurch to go to the New Zealand Association of Research in Education. I’m hoping to meet new colleagues, give a couple of presentations with people I like, and see a little bit of Christchurch. Right now I’m flying past the Kaikoura range of mountains, still snow-capped here in early summer, framing smaller hills and leading down to valleys with farm land. Have I mentioned that this is a magnificent country?

Last night was the first night of Hanukkah, our second first night of Hanukkah in New Zealand. We had Melissa and Ayla over, and it was a magical night. Dinner came after a somewhat stressful day at home where I had to deal with a wide variety of house issues. The kitchen guy needs a heap of money instantly, as does the roofing guy, the plumber, and the fellas who are working on the job. All the flooring for the second floor arrived yesterday to that’ll have to be paid for too. And the plumber, the electrician, and the window guy all gave quotes—some of them three times what we’d expected (the others sliding down towards what we expected). I spent the day trying to stop the hemorrhaging of money.

But after all we live by the sea and it’s December—summer time (?). I took the three kids (mine and Melissa’s) to the beach after school and watched as they rode their boogie boards, bobbed in the gentle waves, and built sand people on the shore. The sun was hot and the breeze was cool and, if I had counted I would have found at least 100 different blues in the water and the sky. I could feel my blood pressure lowering.

We ate dinner on the front porch, latkes and frittata with Melissa-made apple sauce. Rob made chocolate sorbet to go along with the peppermint ice cream he made the day before. We pulled out the two menorahs to light them—Naomi’s small one, which I carried in our luggage last year so that we could have Hanukkah even before our things arrived—and Michael’s big one, which I bought for him nearly 20 years ago and which we’ve lit every year since.

An aside about Michael’s menorah. Rob and I bought that menorah at the Rockville JCC in 1989 or so. I gave it to Michael for Christmas as an interfaith gesture while we were dating. Never did I imagine he’d light it every year for nearly twenty years, and even less did I imagine that he’d have me next to him as he was lighting it. When Rob and I went to buy it, I always pictured Michael lighting the menorah with his nice Jewish wife and surrounded by his nice Jewish kids (who in my visions always had wavy dark hair). Every year I get this sort of shock of surprise that the one he married was me and that it is my little blonde children who light this menorah each year. Last year was our first since 1989 not lighting it because it was on the slow boat from the US, and so this year we took it out with the anticipation of an old friend. To every season there is an ending, though, and this menorah was not, apparently, destined for life in New Zealand: it was the only thing broken in the move. We pulled the shards out of their oodles of packing material in stunned silence. Somehow it felt like the end of an era.

And so it was an end of an era, all of us eating on the front porch in a summer December Hanukkah night, the three children and four adults finding our way through this new world. The adults are all American, half of us are Jews, all of us in love with this New Zealand life. We opened presents to the squeals of delight of the children. For the kids there were three kites from Bangkok, and beautifully drawn set of coupons from Rob with promises of things like a piggy-back ride to school or a boogie-boarding session. For all of us from Melissa there was a song about friendship, written and performed for the occasion (and soon to be posted on the blog). We walked up the hill to the new house, and the kids flew their kites in the park. I suppose there’s no mistaking that it is a new era. We’ll need a new menorah for the next twenty years.

(pictures from today: Melissa playing the guitar in the sun--with help; two pictures of the new house--one with the upstairs room and one without (notice the new window above the new floorboards in what used to be just the attic; Naomi standing in the new upstairs room, looking out that new space which will be the new upstairs window)

Sunny Sunday

Sundays are currently strange but magical days. In the morning we go to the little synagogue we seem to have joined (not much choice in Wellington which has two little synagogues—one liberal and one conservative). There, the kids have Sunday school with a woman who must be the most beautiful rabbi in the world—a woman about 40, with lovely wavy blonde hair and an easy laugh. She looks like a California girl, but she was born in Dupont Circle, about half a mile from where I grew up. The kids stay with her and the other kids and teachers and Michael and I—or Michael and Rob and I—go out for breakfast. This morning again we went to a place where they serve magical food. I had poached eggs on sautéed spinach on crispy hashbrowns and covered with hollandaise (I can hear you moaning from here Dad—these are just one 24 hour trip away from Augusta!). Michael and Rob had meals almost as perfect. We sat in the restaurant and moaned and drank coffee and talked about how wonderful our lives were.

Then—after a quick stop by my office and a quick hello to R who shouldn’t be working on a Sunday but does anyway—we picked the kids off and whisked ourselves back up the coast to finish putting the finishing touches to get the place ready for our billionth open house. The house isn’t selling yet, but there’s no good reason for that. When Rob and Michael and I are finished, it gleams and shines so much you just can’t believe anyone is stupid enough to sell it. On a day as perfect as today, with azure skies and hot sun and cool breezes, the whole house opens up, all the windows unfolding—in some cases whole walls unfolding—until it becomes one magnificent shady space to sit and welcome the sea breezes. Seriously—you’d have to be crazy not to want to buy this place. So we left the perfect house and walked up the perfect beach to do our surf club penance. Even in early November when it was freezing and rainy, I knew that mostly surf club would have this feel—forced time to sit and do nothing on a sunny warm beach while Naomi ran up and down and did her workout and learnt her ocean swimming skills. Little girls took turns walking Perry up and down the beach, Aidan got to play in the sand for hours, and I got to meditate on the perfection of the soft waves, turning translucent and illuminated before curving into a water ring. Melissa and her daughter joined us, and J and his, and Karen came out from town to spend the afternoon and evening with us. We laughed and talked and dug in the sand (everyone other than Michael, Aidan and I went swimming). We couldn’t leave Naomi alone (surf club requirement) and we couldn’t go back home anyway (open house) so we sat on the beach for hours. If you think you’re hearing any iota of complaint in that, you can retune your ear. There are any number of things it might not be fun to have to do, any number of places it’s not fun to wait for Naomi to finish an activity. This perfect Sunday on the beach, however, does not make the list!

We took extra kids home with us and Karen and I walked along the beach, marveling. Although it was just barely 5 when we got home, everyone was weak with hunger, so I opened the fridge full of leftovers and let the hordes descend. It was like locusts in my kitchen, sandy sun-pink children eating plate after plate of food and stuffing fruit after fruit in their mouths. Then, finally sated, we headed back down to the beach to boogie board in the slanting evening sun, the only sound the slapping of the waves and the occasional squeal of delight of a child who had made a particularly good run on the board.

This week will mark the beginning of our second Hanukkah in this country, and my first attempt at the annual meeting of the New Zealand Association for Educational Research, which I am desperately hoping I’ll like better than the American Educational Research Association meetings, which I abhor. And Saturday marks our New Zealand birthday—we’re one year old Kiwibergers then. We’ll keep you posted on birthday and Hanukah and all other summer festivities as the winter snows fall in the northeast. Want to come and visit us in the December summer sun?

Blissed out in Wellington, too

Ah, I've been quiet since I got back from Thailand, but it's mostly been me feeling blissed out about being here at home. I've been catching up with friends and having WONDERFUL food cooked by Rob and doing cool things at work. And I've been walking on the beach with Michael and tickling the children and scratching the dog. This is an amazing life!

So, pictures from a day so lovely we all thought we would burst from the joy of it. We headed into Wellington to pick out all the fixtures for the new bathrooms, and we stayed there because there was a big festival next to the water and the day was so clear and the water so blue and the sun so hot that there was nothing to do but watch the kids on the bungee and lie in the grass and eat gelato and look at the harbour.