Thanksgiving

It has been so mild that Stonepile is open and we are going to have our Thanksgiving there for the first time ever. It is almost the first time the house has been open in late November. Just once, to my knowledge. We have been fortunate to have had mild weather. Global warming comes to mind, but it is just a cycle. Five falls ago, when Sophie and I stayed in the house until the first of December, there was a five inch snowstorm in mid-November. I expect to shut things down within days after we have Thanksgiving. All it will take is one cold front coming through.

In the Old Days, we would gather outside around the big beech tree in what we called the Holly Woods, and what my grandfather Sherer had named the Marion Osborn Sherer Memorial Woods. Actually, she is looking down from her portrait on the wall behind me, a woman I never met, of course and whom my mother lost when she was a young girl. In the Holly Woods we would race around as kids, jumping in the leaves and climbing trees and rocks. My grandfather would have an outdoor fire in an open stone pit blazing, with dishes set to the side to keep them at varying stages of warm, and large metal pots of black coffee steaming. I can see him in his khakis, a yellow and black lumberjack plaid jacket, a khaki visored hat, red-faced--probably from bourbon, i suppose, though I never thought of this until now. All of the uncles and aunts and in-laws and cousins. Perhaps an interloper or two: I certainly had no idea. Grandpa Sherer died in 1956, but the tradition endured through most of the next generation. In 1976, there were some 76 of us assembled for the centerfold of Yankee Magazine, looking pretty much like an advertisement for Orvis and L.L. Bean. The festivities would begin at high noon, when the hard liquor was put out and the blanket-wrapped turkeys emerged from the trunks of people's cars. By two, most of the people were merry with gin and quite ready to fracture into compatible subsets, indoors beside someone's fire.

This year we will reinstitute the tradition in our unheated except by fireplace summer cottage, what was then called Stone Pile Shanty, a name that has been shortened to just Stonepile. We will have our own relatively diminished group there for the afternoon before disbanding. It may be mild enough to stay overnight for three of us: I hope it is. Dad will return to his Assisted Living quarters, as will his companion, Louise and her family will come spend the day with us. Sally will make the meal and indoctrinate Sophie into the magic of preparing the dinner. A few cousins from up the lane way may drop by before their dinner later in the evening. It will never be like olden times, but it will be fine and fun, as long as the weather remains as projected in the 50s. And if it rains, it will not matter inside. The view across the Sakonnet is always beautiful, and the fields are yellow and brown and full of blazing reds. We will be thankful to be there and with each other, graced by life.

"Dear College Applicants..."

It is college application “crunch” time, and time to create and polish your essays. For most, the personal essay will be one of the few ways to distinguish yourselves from fellow applicants. A few hundred well-considered words will allow you to jump out of the admissions office files that have initially reduced you to raw, impersonal numbers. The essay is an important, often rushed element in the evaluation process, and savvy applicants will take full advantage of the opportunity.

I am the parent of a Wheeler ’09 graduate, now a freshman at Columbia University. Over the years I have helped her and many sons and daughters of friends to think about, craft and edit their essays and school articles. The combined efforts have assisted students applying to places such as Amherst, Princeton, Rice, RISD, Savannah College of Art & Design, Virginia, Chicago, Swarthmore, Smith, Middlebury, Wellesley and Brown, among others. I help students consider who they are and how to set their best foot forward. I do not write the essays, but I can offer impartial advice and editorial assistance. Oftentimes, it is psychologically easier for someone who is neither a parent nor a school advisor, someone who has an outside, educated and experienced perspective, help in the process.

What are my credentials? I majored in English at Princeton University and attended Harvard’s Publishing Procedures Course, after which I worked in NYC as an editor and writer at The Village Voice, American Photographer and as a freelance editor. I have written dozens of winning proposals for toy and clothing manufacturing companies, a hospital foundation’s newsletter, a publishing house, as well as being directly or tangentially involved with writing for many corporations and educational institutions, alumni publications and newspapers. I have interviewed applicants to Princeton as an alumni volunteer in New York and Rhode Island every year since 1991.

Seniors who would like an impartial, qualified editor to assist them sort out and focus on a solution, or parents who may see the advantage of inserting a third party between themselves and their children in a situation fraught with the pressures of “getting in,” I am available to help you. Give me a call.

Yankees Win! Yankees Win!

It is November, with the morning thermometer regularly dipping into the 30s, and baseball season has finally concluded for 2009. Last night, well into this morning, technically, the New York Yankees defeated the Philadelphia Phillies in the sixth game of the World Series. It was an exciting best of seven, won in the new stadium in the Bronx with four familiar faces from the Yankees of the late 90s through 2001. Jeter. Rivera. Posada. Pettitte. And Johnny Damon, the former Red Sox Yankee nemesis, now a member of the pinstripe contingent. And A-Rod, Alex Rodriguez, and the great Hideki Matsui. It was a fun series. Of course one needs to be circumspect around these parts, as Rhode Islanders and Massachusetts are thoroughly Red Sox Nation, and as such, fall into the "ABY" category, that is, Anybody But Yankees. My daughter accused me of being a traitor to my New England roots, but there is a certain time when prudence dictates a loyalty towards players (such as those named above) that tops geography. And there is not enough time for masochism. I sometimes think of The Old Man and the Sea, and how Hemingway's old man knows things are right again when the great DiMaggio and the Yankees are winning the World Series. When like the old man catches his enormous marlin, breaking his string of fishless days, the odds are with him again. His chewed up remnant of a fish lashed to his boat is a sad reward, so I wonder how far Hemingway wants to extend his metaphor, when a mindless tourist calls the great fish a "shark."