The Writing on the Wall

When the twins were eleven months old, we flew from hot and sticky Buenos Aires to icy, wintry Albany, New York (via Rio de Janeiro and NYC) for the holidays. We stayed with my mother in her tiny house in Kinderhook. The twins had their cribs in an upstairs bedroom, pushed against one wall. Almost from the first day, a mysterious thing happened – scrawling scribbles in what looked to be pencil appeared on the wall by Sebi’s crib. Now, the twins were, at that time, eleven months old. They didn’t walk or talk yet, so we couldn’t ask what was going on. I looked everywhere for a pencil. We took Sebi’s bed apart. We took his mattress off, we shook out his covers. We looked in nooks and crannies in the crib and found nothing – but every morning there were more scribbles.

We washed the wall. Searched again. A pencil in the hand of an eleven month old could be dangerous. We took the bed apart, again. The next morning – more scribbles. This happened for over a week. We could Not understand where Sebi got the pencil. Where was it? How? And then one day, as we were washing the wall and again, searching for the pencil, my mother moved Sebi’s stuffed bunny out of the way, and felt something hard in it. Carefully looking, we found a tiny hole, and poked into the hole, was the stub of a pencil. Sebi had been taking it out, scribbling on the wall at night, and pushing it back into the stuffed animal when he was done.

The mystery cleared up, we could stop worrying about ghosts handing out pencils to wakeful babies at night. And then we went to Florida for the polo season. There, we rented an apartment with pristine white walls. And there, one day, Sebi (or Alex – I’ll never know) found a pen and scribbled all over the wall behind the couch. My husband had been gone all morning and I’d been watching the twins. When he came home, I was busy scrubbing the wall. Obviously, I’d failed in my duty – the blue markings on the wall proved it. “How could you let him do that?” My husband said. “How hard can it be to watch two toddlers for an hour?” 

Well, the next day I went shopping and an hour later I came back to find my husband, red-faced, scrubbing the wall. While I’d been gone, and while he’d been watching one twin, the other had found a pen and had scribbled all over the wall again. I was far too virtuous to say “I told you so.” But one day, I promised, I’d write the story down. And so I have.

 

Day 28 of lockdown – Polo Life Stories

I had twin sons, Sebi and Alex (January 1986), then eight years later, along came a daughter, Julia (August 1994). Anyone with kids knows that kids are half goodness and light and half demons from darkness. Mine were no different. What made my relationship with them slightly different was that the twins were “extreme preemies”, born at only 6 months and very fragile, and the fact that my husband played polo, and so we travelled all over the world, never staying more than a month or two in the same place, going from guestroom to hotel – sometimes staying in rented houses or apartments. We travelled alone or with the polo team. Sometimes there were forty horses, eight grooms, four players and their wives and children along with us – sometimes it was just us, going from tournament to tournament.

Arriving at the airport, we had our suitcases, golf clubs, polo sticks, the “polo bag” with my husbands gear in it, the stroller, the carry-on bags full of food and bottles for the twins and their stuffed animals. Our car looked like a gypsy caravan, especially the time we spent a month in Deauville, and we had the dog and a hamster cage in the car as well. (Of course we couldn’t leave the hamster behind!) Just to say that the twins were with me all day, every day, and they were used to a certain type of organization in life that bordered on complete mayhem.

It was impossible to keep any kind of schedule when you cross six or seven timelines every month, where you go from the tropics to an English springtime complete with snow and freezing rain then back again. We stayed in such a wide variety of housing that the twins were constantly adapting to different beds, sometimes no beds, sometimes fold-out cots, matresses on floors, canopy beds, double beds, beds in front of fireplaces in houses with no electricity…And they were troopers.

Their first trip was made from West Palm Beach, where they were born, to England. They had just spent two months in the NICU, they weighed four pounds each, and they shared the same baby cot in the plane they were so tiny. With our reguar luggage were their heart monitors that the hospital had lent us – we had to send the back when a doctor in England would give permission, and until then, they slept with little webbed bands around their tiny chests which held (more or less in place) the electrodes that measured their heartbeats and breathing. When those little electrodes slipped and the alarms went off, (usually in the midle of the night) Stef and I would peel ourselves off the ceiling and rush to the boys’ room – thank goodness it was never anything other than a false alarm. We didn’t get much sleep those first months.

That summer, we spent April to August in England, then we went to France (Paris, Deauville, & Bordeaux) and stayed until November, with just a short jaunt to the south of France. After we went to Argentina, where we stayed until December, and then we got in a plane and flew to New York for the Christmas holidays. Then it was down to Palm Beach for the winter season. So by the time the twins were a year old, they’d already been across the globe, had changed stollers twice. (The first one got broken when it traveled with the horses, so I bought a new one in France, but somehow the second one got left behind in the airport and so I got stroller number three in New York.)

For their first birthday, we were back in Palm Beach. Their heart moniters were back in the hospital where they belonged. The twins had graduated from eight bottles a day to a more manageable five and were now crawling around and getting into everything. Alex was just about ready to walk, Sebi, who had been very ill just as we arrived (January 1987) in Florida, was still sickly and cranky. Stef and I spent a week in Jamaica playing polo – the twins stayed in Florida with friends and family – the polo community is a very tight-knit one when it comes to family and children (they will cut your throat for a job though), and so, after a year of being with the twins constantly, Stef and I actually had six, full nights of uninterrupted sleep. Thank you, Sophie, Jean & Lou, Angelica, Theresa, and everyone else who chipped in to babysit the twins.

When we got back, I organized a big birthday party for the twins. I invited everyone, I ordered a huge cake, and we went to the park on the corner of the street. Of course, a cold front had moved in and as soon as we got to the park it poured. There was a mad rush back to the apartment, carrying the cake, the candy, the kids, and the drinks. Inside the small apartment there were now ten toddlers, twelve children under twelve, fifteen mothers, nannies, neighbors, dogs (Someone brought their three dogs plus my sister-in-law’s dachshund), all crammed in the house for the twins’ birthday party. Now, the doctors will tell you, with premature babies you must avoid over-stimulation. The advice we got, when the twins were in the hospital, was to keep them warm, fed, and in a very calm environment. That never really happened, but Sebi always was hypersensitive, so he wailed and sobbed all through the party, with the result being that as soon as the cake was cut and devoured, everyone grabbed their kids, dogs, coats, and umbrellas and fled. The silence was deafening. Sebi stopped screaming. Alex (who could sleep through anything), woke up and started to howl for his lunch/tea/dinner/anything he could eat). A dog crawled out from under the couch and begain to howl as well. Someone knocked at the door. “Sorry, forgot my dog,” said the neighbor.

 

 

 

Polo

“Polo, the only reasons to stop are financial ruin or death.”

Saturday was the Jacques Macaire polo trophy at Bagatelle polo club. Julia and I went to give the trophy. Jacques was my father-in-law. He was a charming, talented polo player, a superb technician and much-loved teacher. I hadn’t been to the club in a while. I used to hang out there when I wasn’t working with my friend, Andie MacDowell. It was at the club that I met my future husband, Stephane.

 

Polo day!

Polo game at Bagatelle

June 2009 – horses for auction at the Bagatelle polo club

Polo Ponies

Happy New Ear!

My favorite New Year’s celebration was in Punta del Este.

It was 1989, going to 1990. We had been in Punta del Este for nearly a month, staying at a hotel affectionately called ‘The Waffle Tower’ because every day, at tea time, it served home-made waffles. The waffles were incredible. They were made with old-fasioned, cast-iron waffle irons heated over a huge fire. The tables were all set with white linen and silverware, and the dining room looked out over a garden full of lavender and roses. During the day, we went to the beach, or to a huge park in the middle of a eucalyptus forest. The park was filled with fanciful, fantastic wooden figures, cars, boats and trains all painted in bright colors, all for children to climb upon and play with. There was also a double-humped bridge, that we called ‘the up-and-down bridge’. Everyone loved to go over it as fast as possible, so there was always a long line of cars in front of the bridge waiting their turn to zoom over it. The ocean in Punta del Este is dark, ultramarine blue, and the sand is naples yellow. Huge, black sea lions swim in the waves, and inland, past the dunes, the pine forest, and the eucalyptus groves, are huge plains where shaggy, long-legged emus run. We were there for a polo tournament. Every evening we would watch the games as the sun went down, and the dust rose and made everything gold and shadows.

That New Year’s eve, we went to a pizzaria with the twins, who were 3 years old, and with two young polo players from France. We had a great time, and when midnight came, everyone stood up and cried ‘Happy New Year!’ The twins looked at me, and Sebi said, “Who got the new ear?”

They thought we’d been celebrating someone’s new ear.

What was your favorite New Year’s eve?