Baubie

March 20th was blessedly the first day of spring and also would have been my Baubie's 100th birthday. She lived 95 of them about as well as you can. She grew up in Minneapolis the oldest of five sisters, had two daughters and four grandchildren. She was a social worker and a faculty wife who loved her college community - much of my stubborn romanticism about academic life is thanks to her, her bookshelves, and her stories about Saul Bellow's various wives. She was a widow for al...most thirty years who remade herself in every way. I first read the New Yorker at her apartment by the lake in Chicago. She took me to the Art Institute countless times and taught me to remember one thing in particular from each visit because you can't remember them all. The last time she visited New York we went to see Avenue Q and she was a good sport about the puppet sex. She stayed at the Wellington hotel that visit and this week I happened to walk by it on St. Patrick's Day and suddenly felt her presence among all the drunken kids stumbling around. I remembered taking the bus with her downtown, talking about Mary McCarthy. Those were my people, she said, the college girls of the Depression, a little eccentric but had their heads screwed on straight. She loved books but wanted to know why so many great writers had such a pessimistic view of the world. I never came up with a good answer to that one. She died just over a year Eli was born and when I found out I was having a boy I had a dream that she said "I thought we'd never have another boy again!" Family legend has it she once had five boys call her in a single night to ask her to the same dance - I can believe it looking at this picture. Happy birthday Baubs.