LETTERS FROM HOME: AT HOME IN THE WORLD OF ALMOST SPRING

March 1, 2001

Dear Julie,

The first day of March finds the household counting down until spring, breathlessly awaiting the 70-degree wild blue yonder of cabins and rivers and golf courses. Change, if not in the air, is at least in mind.

We are the egg at the moment of cracking, the jumbled mess before the omelet appears.

Earlier this week, a stabbing occurred at an apartment building across the street. Craziness is around.

Winter can beget a routine that wraps around you like a heavy coat. Hank and Lucy have memorized mine to the second. They know when I arise at 6:30 they get to go outside so they sit at the top of the stairs, intently watching me brush my teeth and getting more excited with each stroke. Later on they watch alertly from the bed as I press my clothes, then move to the hallway as I dress and then congregate in the kitchen as I descend the stairs to leave for work.

They have great expectations of my predictability.

Soon golf season will arrive and my routine will change. How do I keep Hank and Lucy's sense of reality intact?

Transitions are the passage from one condition, from one place to another. DC's pastor, the Rev. Miles White, and his wife, Caroline, are leaving town to lead another church. We are sad. He married us. I liked the red-blooded sermons urging the congregation to take their Christianity out of the pews and into the community to do good. He's a Presbyterian minister but I always suspected he was a bit of a closet Pentecostal. He wants people to feel the Holy Spirit alive in themselves.

As far as I know, Miles' lone flaw was forgetting his wife's birthday. As it approached, everyone in the Rotary Club and at church would try to make a point of reminding him. One year he took her out to Sam's Club for her birthday. They happened to be serving free hors d'oevres that day.

Miles loves Sam's Club.

Writing is all about transitions.

In Joyce Maynard's memoir "At Home in the World," she tells of becoming an instant writing celebrity with the publication of her New York Times Magazine cover story "An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life." J.D. Salinger wrote a letter in response, advising her that she is a real writer and ought to be careful of the people who will want to abuse her. Soon she was living with him. There's a heady transition, from embryonic writer to J.D. Salinger's lover.

Mike, one of my golf teachers, has taught me lots about the swing but says I still don't have the transition figured out. A few nights ago, I worked with one of Mike's associates, Larry. He showed me how the transition is like a dance step. Your arms are going one way while your hips are going the other. It's a hula, a belly dance invented in Scotland.

Maynard wrote "An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life" in 1972 as a Yale freshman. Now she's embarrassed that her soured idealism presumed to speak for her generation. She can hear her parents' voices, especially her mother's, in her words. She so wanted to please them.

You can become at home in the world, at home in your golf swing, but waiting for it to happen can be excruciating.

Love, Sam