Malta, here comes baby!

Wish I could've blogged more frequently recently...lots of fun things going on and a lot of silly observations about the world I would've liked to capture - of course, they're all gone now. But things have been hectic - a wonderful weekend last week in NYC with Bub and our friends from high school, a day that started as a walk in Riverside Park and ended at 1AM with about 20 rounds of drinks, a mariachi band, and an Aerobie rally in between. Bub starting his residency and practicing suturing. Started running two days a week with friend Marian on the many many running paths in DC, which was the perfect antidote to the feeling of nostalgia and a twinge of despair I had the week before while driving on Skyline Drive. The grass had just been mowed and I caught a whiff of flowers, something I remember smelling every single day of summer as a kid and thinking "the entire summer will pass and I'll not see or smell or feel any of this". And then all of a sudden Marian and I decide, rather spontaneously, to start running and we are watching the sun set over the Potomac and feeling the heavy DC air shift through the trees regularly, and I think of the line Jordan says in Gatsby, right before everything falls apart when they're driving "into town" about how there's something so sensual about the air, like overripe fruit. That's DC in the summer, if you can appreciate it. I also have pollution- and exercise- induced asthsma, so I can only appreciate to a certain point. So if you see two girls running suicides on those stairs near the water on which everyone likes to take cheesy wedding photos and one girl looks like she could use an artificial lung, just beep and wave, you may see me nod my head about half an inch in return greeting.

But enough with all that - leaving for Malta tomorrow! I've been so busy at work and outside work as well, it's surreal - I'm even blogging when I should be packing. We've always gone with a big US family contingent and met up with the big Malta family contingent, but this time its just me and my grandfather- as much as I wanted my dad to come with us, I think it'll be really fun, just the two of us. He came up to NY to see Joseph Calleja debut in Rigoletto last winter and I invited my friend Dana over and he had us all in stitches, telling stories from Malta when he was young. I have this vision of us in a beat-up jeep, my legs are resting on the door and my feet are sticking out the window, and he's singing Italian war songs from the Mussolini era and explaining to me how the Italians used to strafe Malta and they had to go and hide in the catacombs. Both of you who read this blog may remember that my Italian grandmother (other side of the family) died a little over a year ago and there are so many questions I can't believe I never asked her, so maybe there's a little atonement here, we'll see.

Speaking of Atonement, it's one of the 10 books I'm bringing on my trip. The others include A Savage War of Peace (about the Algerian insurgency of the 1950s), The Adventures of Auggie Marsh (Bub recommendation), The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (so I can read the new Chabon when I get back), Interpreter of Maladies (Jhumpa Lahiri, who also wrote The Namesake), and I Didn't Do It for You, about Eritrea by Michela Wong. I think it's a good mix and hopefully I'll finish at least half of them. I don't know, I'd like to think I'll have a lot of downtime to sit on the benches by the water and read, but we'll see...

Again, will try to blog from vacation but both of you know how well that's gone in the past. See you on the back end...!