Snapshot: Happy birthday, sister!

Today is my baby sister's birthday --

-- and I love her so much!

Snapshot(s): Back Bay friends and neighbors

The weather is changing now, and you all may remember that I really dread the fall. So to perk myself up a little bit, I thought I would remind myself and you of my fabulous beach-filled summer in Sandbridge, Virginia. In addition to spending cherished time with some of my favorite people . . .






. . . I shared my Back Bay beach vacation with some more exotic neighbors:






I'm ready to go back!

" In keeping with tradition, the bride wore scarlet . . . "

So the husband and I attended the most lovely wedding earlier this month. A former colleague who worked with my husband invited us to participate in her wonderful day, which involved not one but two wedding rituals -- one Christian and one Sikh.

Now I must admit at the outset that we both were . . . I think nonplussed is the word . . . to learn that the Eastern ritual would require that we enter the room without our shoes, cover our hair and (can you hear the creak of knees and hips?) sit on the floor for the two-hour ceremony.

It was easy enough for me to find a lovely scarf to complement my western dress, and Coleen was confident that as long as I had a fresh pedicure the no-shoes situation could hold no fear. But the husband was . . . I'm going to say hesitant. Yes, hesitant, and -- because he rarely wears headgear other than a ball cap on a Boy Scout camping trip -- concerned that he would offend either our hosts or his own sense of dignity. (Men . . . .) He ended up wearing a patriotic red-white-and-blue bandanna that, while perfectly appropriate, also gave his charcoal grey suit a dashing biker dude air. He wouldn't let me take a picture.

And I'm telling you people, the lovely if virginal white wedding dress that we Westerners are accustomed to pales in all ways to the opulently beautiful traditional wedding garb of an Indian woman.

This is to say nothing of the fact that in the Indian and Sikh tradition, the groom dresses like an exotic Eastern prince. I will never swoon over a man in a tuxedo in the same way again.

Now don't get me wrong -- the Christian ceremony that followed was lovely. The lakeside setting and the adoring gaze of the groom were enough to make any grandmother a little teary-eyed. You do see that he shaved in between the two ceremonies, right? For me this just proved what I have always suspected: beards really are that itchy, and he really must love her a lot.

As the bride appeared with her father for this second ceremony, I was vividly reminded that this woman is really such a gorgeous blending of two worlds -- all rolled up in one brilliant and sophisticated package: a savvy computer engineer who also founded an e-zine for young and modern Indian-American women, who want to embrace every aspect of both their cultures. No wonder her dad looks so proud.

I think I know what's going on here.

So it's been a while since I checked in with all of you here, and I do apologize. I have to say, the school year for the college kids snuck up behind me, and then jumped out from behind a tree and scared the bejeezus out of me -- so I had to go lie down. The college academic calendar meant that not only did the tall boy go back to school last week, but so did a gaggle of besties and cousins. It seemed like every time we turned around we were saying good-bye to someone. In addition, I myself headed back to school, teaching again this semester at the community college -- which I am realizing more and more is what I was meant to do.

But here's the weird thing: all those college kids have been reporting bizarre natural phenomena, which have forced them to evacuate -- like the girl in charge's bestie (an 18-year-old freshman), who was in residence at the College of William and Mary for a whole week before Hurricane Irene came for a whirlwind visit and she was told, " Get out. Oh -- and if you get a chance, tell your folks where you are." I paraphrase, but only slightly.

In contrast, the tall boy was not evacuated -- he was told to hustle to his college campus as soon as ever he could. The tall boy, who had plans to move in to his new dorm room last Saturday, was sent a text from the college doo-dahs: "OK, so remember how we told you don't even think about showing up to college early? Well -- forget that; get your ass here as soon as possible."

I'm paraphrasing again, but it turns out that between the hurricane (due to hit us on Saturday -- right in the middle of hauling a refrigerator and a carpet remnant across the hilly Catholic University campus) and the earlier damage caused by the earthquake (the National Cathedral was supposed to host a big and important Martin Luther King, Jr. event that was moved to the CUA campus because the Cathedral was so damaged), there was no way in hell the tall boy and his dad were going to get a car on to the Catholic University campus. His actual text from the nice Campus Life people said, "If you plan to arrive on Saturday with a vehicle of any kind, you are so screwed." Paraphrasing again . . . .

What does this mean? It means that the tall boy and his dad were unloading the boy's shit at his dorm in Washington, DC at 11:30 on a Friday night. Now tell me that's not a great dad!

Just a little word about our earthquake (summary: I was driving, so never even knew there was an earthquake -- while at home, the hellhounds freaked out). Californians mock us for our measly 5.8 quake but I would respectfully say to each of my west coast friends, "Back off, bitch!" We live in Virginia, y'all. We have some experience with hurricanes (I would submit Camille, Agnes and Isabel -- who all were very cranky ladies ). But we don't do earthquakes.

We don't do uncontrollable wildfires either -- and yet the Great Dismal Swamp has been burning since mid-July. That just looks like a beautiful sunset, but it really is smoke -- I took this picture at the beach in early August, on a day the wind was blowing from the west.

Add to all of this bizarreness the fact that just last week my friend Wendy's teen-aged son took out the trash without being asked, and I think it's pretty clear we are looking the Apocalypse dead in its gaping maw. Not that I'm worried.

Beach lovers: the last word

It's not hard to understand why
I love the un-family so much . . . .

Small pleasures: found rainbow

I am actually not a particularly rainbow-y person; in fact when I was in college, the kind of sweet, sweet girl who decorated her dorm room with rainbows was the kind of girl I wanted to punch in the throat. This was the girl who usually ended up talking way too much baby talk for a theoretically intelligent college student, and -- if I can paraphrase Dorothy Parker -- she made me want to "frow up."

But sometimes the rainbows just show up right in a parking lot, and it's hard not to smile . . . . Please don't punch me in the throat.

Happy birthday, adored one!

So the girl in charge turned 17 last week while we were at the beach, which makes me very angsty because it's all going too damned fast but let's not dwell or I'll cry.

Well, here's the thing -- as some of you may know, the girl in charge shares a birthday with Harry Potter, Neville Longbottom and J.K. Rowling. This is huge, people -- especially for a girl who always has a Harry Potter book in rotation, can recite whole passages from each of the seven books verbatim, and kills, kills I'm telling you, at any kind of Potterish trivia game. I mean, just don't even try to beat her. We have used up three hard-backed copies of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, no lie -- literally read them to pieces. In this picture, my girl is saving our seats for the fabulous midnight premiere of the last Harry Potter movie; bet you can't guess what she's reading!

So in the middle of a summer like this one, when you can't trip over a log without finding a photo of Daniel Radcliffe underneath it, the girl in charge was in Harry Potter heaven. And for her birthday, I might have gone just a wee bit overboard on the Harry Potter loot. She got Harry Potter Legos (Hagrid's Hut and the Knight Bus -- way cool!).

She got a Harry Potter wand that lights up when you say "lumos!" (and give it a little shake and make sure a battery is in there somewhere) and a Harry Potter sticker book (which one might think was aimed at the younger Harry Potter fans but one would be wrong, wrong, wrong, mother! because for the girl in charge and her friends -- seniors in high school, remember -- the only thing as cool as Harry Potter stickers would be a Doctor Who coffee mug or a "Tangled" poster, both of which are currently on the girl in charge's Christmas wish list).

She also got a Harry Potter poster book, and I take great glee in reporting that the soldier, who reported back to West Point less than a week later, begged -- begged -- for the Hermione poster, and the girl in charge gave it to him and told me that it was the first time the soldier had ever hugged her.

I do hope this magically wonderful girl (who could have been The Chosen One) realizes how much she is cherished and adored; the world is full of busy-ness and hustle-bustle, and we all move way too fast and talk too much, and fill our heads with worries that don't really mean anything. I feel like every day that slips by is another lost opportunity to make sure my beautiful girl knows: I am the luckiest mom.