We are off to Brooklyn for a day to visit my daughter Emma, who is thriving there. She’s a big wheel at a hot new website called SportsOnEarth and she is thriving in her life there, living with her boyfriend, also a sportswriter and is close to her good friends from Yale, loving Brooklyn and the intense cultural life there. Family has always been life’s insoluble mystery, for me and for Maria as well. I have never figured it out.
My own family was shattered and remains disconnected and distant, we have none of the cohesive connections which is so important to so many families. Emma and I have struggled sometimes in our own relationship as many people do – she never quite understood my move upstate and then, the divorce – and we have both worked hard to get back to a good place. I have always felt close to her and connected to her, and I often wonder at the wildly divergent paths our lives have taken. She is a writer, like me, and has a similiar and odd way of looking at the world. She has no interest of any kind in the country or the natural world, other than her beloved dog Pearl and seems quite bewildered that I am living where I live, doing what I do. I think our parents often mystify us, if we are lucky we sort them out later, maybe after they are gone. I am excited to be seeing Emma, I think she is funny, brilliant and we are very close in our own particular way.
I sometimes think the notion of the happy loving family is something of a myth, an idea the culture fosters upon us. Family is very hard work for almost everyone I know. But as with Emma and me, there is something about family that we don’t let go of, don’t walk away from, keep on fighting for. I am very happy to spend a day or so walking around Brooklyn. Emma will go to the movies with us, I suspect, and take us to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens Saturday. She is always looking for photo ops for me. We are staying in her apartment, and I have never done that before. We are wary of intimacy in my family. Maria and I love exploring places and we will walk and walk, me hauling my 30 lb camera bag which makes me tilt. I am glad Emma and I never quit on one another as my first family did.
Once I figured out that the family thing is both inexplicable and insoluble, I think I learned to be okay with it. See you Sunday, hopefully with a few good pictures. Taking just two lenses – the 24/105 and the 50 mm. No Ipad, just the Iphone. Two paper books, “The House At The End Of Hope Street,” by Menna Van Praag (which I am loving) and “The Whispering Muse” by Sjon, a deliciously mystical book from Iceland that is a European sensation.
