Neylan McBaine

The Fickle Lover

We've come to New York for the week, to make sure our little ones remember their cultural home although it is no longer their physical home. Yesterday, the city welcomed us warmly: a gorgeous winter day, a rewarding meeting at church and then an entrancing afternoon at the ballet with good friends. There is something so fulfilling, so warming to the very bone, about seeing my children run around the Lincoln Center fountain -- my "back yard" growing up across the street -- and learning to love the very same places I loved as a child myself. With a small immediate family to offer them and down even their grandfather, I feel like familiarizing them with my childhood home is familiarizing them with the inanimate personalities and influences that made me who I am, much as they are learning about Elliot from his abundant and involved extended family.

But those warm feelings came yesterday. Today introduced my kids to the darker side of New York and, like a spurned loved, I wondered what exactly we're doing hanging around here. We had tickets to see the Tim Burton exhibit at the MoMA at 2:00pm. Never having been a tourist in my own city during the week after Christmas, I naively failed to realize that a million other people -- literally? -- would have the same idea. Pushing a stroller through midtown today was a miserable and deflating experience. My city, it seemed, was working so hard to flatter the mobs of tourists queuing down the streets for the Disney Store, the American Girl Store and Radio City Music Hall that it had absolutely nothing left for me. In this light, the city seemed more like a bad version of an adult's amusement park than a sublime bastion of beauty and intrigue. 

We'll try again tomorrow, and I'll be sure to stay away from midtown. Hopefully New York will show us some love again.

A Christmas Eve Story

Two facts lead me to the years 1991 or 1992: First, I had well outgrown Santa Claus, having had the big reveal from my mother while in the sixth grade. (Does any kid suspend disbelief till age twelve anymore? To my credit, I had been suspicious for some time.) Second, my dad was not around. In the first years of their separation, there had been a pretense of family togetherness as he commuted down the hallway of our apartment building from his apartment at 10D to ours at 10B several times a day. But in 1991 or 1992, Christmas with my dad had disintegrated into buying him the requisite large, hardcover history book and calling it a day. I believe there were a few Christmases when he went on a cruise.

I would have been fourteen or fifteen, that transition point between Christmas meaning Santa Claus and then meaning something much less tangible, much less inclined to produce flurries of anticipation and then satiation on "the big day". Less like flame licks of happiness and more like a consistent simmer on a warm burner of faith. My testimony of the Savior was, at that point, real and stable, but I had yet to understand the power of the Gospel message or Jesus' efficacy in my life.

My mother and I decided to have a Christmas Eve party. For both of us, it was probably an effort to replace the vacuum left by two men -- Santa Claus and my dad -- with the reality of a third -- the Savior -- although that was never acknowledged at the time. I made the invitations, drawing by hand a line of "Silent Night" and then underneath writing "Come Join Ariel and Neylan for an Unsilent Night of Words and Song". I took the invitation to Mike's Copy Shop on 59th Street (it's now the Starbuck's across from the Time Warner Center) and had it copied on card stock with red ink.

We counted almost 80 people in our two bedroom apartment that Christmas Eve. In the abundantly and deliciously producing factory that was our tiny kitchen, my mom prepared beef bourgiugnon over rice and stacked piles of cookies on our round glass dining table. The Christmas tree -- our "best ever", as we declared every year -- provided the majority of the light in our lovely living room. Beloved members of our New York ward family made up the bulk of the guests, but even Dinah, our next door neighbor of fifteen years, entered our apartment for the first time. Mom had purchased British Christmas crackers for everyone and pretty soon the crowd appeared to be debauched revelers donning paper crowns and toasting with paper cups, filled only with Martinelli's. 

But the music... In my mom's fashion, she had planned out a program making proper use of the extraordinary talent we had among our friends in those days. D. Fletcher made his home for the evening at our Steinway, providing prelude and postlude to the official program with always a few quality voices joining him in the piano's crook. I remember "Weepin' Mary" having one of its first performances that night. It was the first night I accompanied my mom on John Jacob Niles' carol "What Songs Were Sung", which we have reprised a few times this season. My friend Eliza and I sang Niles' "Carol of the Birds" as a duet. We turned the stage over for much of the night: original poems, ensemble singing, short stories.

I'm sure "Santa Baby" was sung at some point, but as I remember the night now, the night belonged to the Savior. And it was that night when my childhood understanding of Christmas outgrew the visceral hunger for presents under the tree and instead embraced a more clear perception of the Christmas peace. Music, for me an always potent spiritual tool, provided the bridge between the Christmases of my childhood and all of those that have followed since that very special night. 

We do not know, we cannot tell

What songs were sung, what starlight fell,

When Mary birthed her own sweet Son

And peace and love became as one.

John Jacob Niles

Come Together

It's been a Chinese food evening. Always a good sign around my house: a stress-free change from the ordinary routine. We've now migrated to the couch where Elliot is singing "Revolution" to the Beatles' Rockband karoke graphics and Elliot's brother Quentin (shout out to Uncle Quen! here you are, on my blog Q!) is braving the "hard" level on the guitar. Oops, they just failed. Time to pick a new song.

I, obviously, am observing from the sidelines of the couch. I love these kind of evenings at home, when little girls are asleep and visitors feel welcome and we're all enjoying a little down time. The truth is, I've been stressing for a week now over what to write in my next post for this blog, and although I've had a number of ideas, I haven't found the time to actually sit down and formulate them into any sort of skilled writing. My self-inflicted guidelines for this blog included posting only mini-essays of a literary sort -- and yes, you could possibly read that as too-many-words, not-enough-pictures, and way-too-serious -- but it's the type of product I feel comfortable reading myself and would like to see more of in the blog world. But a side effect of this guideline is that I have now become a slave to my mini-essays, and my simple ideas -- which might have merit simply as undeveloped ideas -- never get voiced because I don't have the time or energy to develop them. 

So here's a post to honor Chinese food night in my home, a simple, unprofound moment that brings me happiness although undeveloped into a larger thesis. And hopefully this post is the beginning of your hearing more from me in the future: on those evenings when I don't have enough energy to present my most impressive writing, I'll at least try to share a little something of me.

Wow, Quen just answered his cell phone and continued rocking the guitar to "Back in the USSR". That simple fact may have given you more insight into my home this evening than any profound essay would have.

Tribute to Mary Foulger

One of the dearest influences in my childhood and youth, Mary Foulger was a towering personality and as near to a saint as I've found. Mother of six and grandmother to about fifty grandchildren, she treated me and my mother as if we were her own. Sadly, she has been bedridden for several years now. I recently wrote this letter to one of her daughters, hoping that she could read it to Grandmother at her bedside. I share it because I want to pay tribute to this great lady as she nears the end of her life.

Your mother sat in as my own grandmother at my sealing in the Salt Lake Temple. Growing up as I did, with no siblings and geographically distant from any extended family, our "family" often consisted of ward members or neighbors who my mother frequently and generously invited into our home. We were always reaching out, trying to make connections with those in proximity to us, offering our home as a sanctuary to so many who came and went through New York. With your parents, it was different. Their home was our sanctuary, a place where my mom and I could revert to being loved and pampered instead of always doing the loving and pampering of others. Your mother's home was, for me, the proverbial grandmother's house where something warm is always cooking in the oven, where cousins abound and where children can learn on the knees of older generations. Your mother even had an attic that your granddaugter A. and I rummaged through on occasion. I remember finding antiqued floral stationary in there on which A. and I wrote pledges to each other as "best friends forever". I remember the thrill I felt the day I saw myself on the grandchild bulletin board. There was my picture, included with the other beloveds! I didn't care if there were 25 or 50 or a hundred other grandkids up there with me. I felt like I belonged and it was marvelous.

Even though I am not part of her blood lineage, I figured I could make myself part of her spiritual lineage by emulating her and learning from her personality and habits. Optimism and effusiveness became my target characteristics, and I tried for a while to copy her trademark expression: "Oh! Oh! Isn't it wonderful!" while clapping her hands in delight. Such gushing sounded weird coming from a teenager and so I eventually adapted the execution, but the sentiment remained sincere. Her love of the scriptures was also something I figured I could emulate. I told my future husband I wanted a little wooden table by a window where we could permanently leave out our scriptures and our gospel study books. Apartment living hasn't accommodated that yet, but her legacy of scripture study certainly burns bright even without the little table. Her love of beautiful things and her world view were also important elements of crafting my idea of what a Mormon woman should be. She is curious, adventurous, luxuriant in her way and a promoter of the world's best offerings. She never shrinks from the world. She has a sense of humor. I'll never forget the good laugh we all had one morning in Israel when her sister J. described her adventure from the night before: She had washed her garments, hung them by the window of her hotel room to dry and went to sleep. In the middle of the night, J. woke up to what she thought were angels fluttering in her window. "I'm ready!" J. cried. "You can take me now! I'm ready to meet my maker!" We laughed at J.'s surprise when she didn't go anywhere and the angels turned out to be her laundry blowing in the breeze.

In Russia, a few years earlier, we ran into your parents in the Rembrandt Room of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, where they were touring with the Tabernacle Choir and my family was on vacation. "There is no such thing as a coincidence!" your mother gushed, and your parents whisked me and my mother away to one of the best restaurants in the city and gave me my first taste of caviar. Then they hired a street artist to sketch my portrait. I'm convinced Grandfather paid the artist to make me look like a Kirov ballerina. Generosity was another defining characteristic I am determined to make my own. The degree to which Grandmother and Grandfather share their home, their money and their time is astonishing. From her devotion to the local Chinese branch to her endearing American accent when referring to her Latino house guest "Angel" to the gifts and mementos she would slip into my hand at each visit, your mother gives everything she has. This generosity literally saved me and my mother when my parents were going through their divorce and I was starting college. I too try to give all I have because of her.

Somehow after I went away to college and moved to California, I stopped seeing your mother as often as I had. I went off and got married, worked, started having children, moved around and I was not as good at keeping in touch as I should have been. I'm sorry for that. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that, except for my mom, Grandmother had the greatest impact on my character and my spiritual personality than any other woman. I love her. It's hard for me to think of her suffering now and I hope that knowing of her profound influence will bring her some comfort.

I know she has a legion of descendants who honor her everyday by living righteous lives, but please tell her she has one more in me.