{"id":145,"date":"2012-05-30T21:48:19","date_gmt":"2012-05-31T03:48:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/fathertime\/?p=145"},"modified":"2012-05-30T21:48:19","modified_gmt":"2012-05-31T03:48:19","slug":"old-haunts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/?p=145","title":{"rendered":"Old Haunts"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Almost nine years ago, my oldest daughter Hannah was born in Massachusetts.\u00a0 As much as I would like for her to be a Southern girl, she\u2019s a Yankee by birth.\u00a0 She lived in the Boston area for a year and a half before we moved to Nashville.\u00a0 Hannah doesn\u2019t remember her time in Boston, but I do.\u00a0 It was a tough time for Hannah\u2019s mother and me.\u00a0 There aren\u2019t a lot of churches in Boston, and the only one to which we felt drawn was 45 minutes away\u2014a tough commute with an infant.\u00a0 We never had more than a handful of friends at any one time there, and almost all of them were people we knew from college.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know how you make new friends in Boston.\u00a0 We never figured it out.<\/p>\n

Having a baby is a wonderful gift, but it\u2019s a hard thing to do when you\u2019re not able to share the experience with anyone.<\/p>\n

Between the social isolation, the medical problems, the bleak weather, and an income that didn\u2019t come close to matching our expenses, we suffered in Boston.\u00a0 I loved my job there, and Hannah was a delight, but there were many days where despair took hold.\u00a0 After two years of struggle, we left, heading back to Nashville, where the weather was great, living was affordable, and we knew we had friends.\u00a0 The move was a retreat, but that\u2019s what makes sense when life is untenable.<\/p>\n

I spent this past weekend in Boston.\u00a0 My job gives me the chance to travel from time to time, and when I was invited to speak at a conference in Boston, I decided to stay a few extra days.\u00a0 I hadn\u2019t done much of the tourist thing while I was there seven years ago.\u00a0 I was too busy trying to survive daily life.\u00a0 Perhaps my life had moved far enough away from Boston that I could enjoy the city now.<\/p>\n

This weekend I walked the Freedom Trail for the first time.\u00a0 I attended a Boston Pops concert conducted by fellow Furman University alum Keith Lockhart.\u00a0 And I wandered the streets near Harvard Square where I used to live.\u00a0 Being back on those streets was a bittersweet experience.\u00a0 I was reminded of those bad times, of a relationship stretched almost to breaking, of a constant sense of failure in that relationship.<\/p>\n

But I was also reminded of my favorite memory from those days in Boston.\u00a0 On Saturday mornings, come good weather or bad, I would often let Hannah\u2019s mom sleep in.\u00a0 I would set Hannah in her stroller, bundling her up to her eyeballs if necessary, and wander through the streets of Cambridge.\u00a0 Here in Nashville, there\u2019s not much point to walking around the neighborhood on a Saturday morning\u2014it\u2019s just street after street of the same houses.\u00a0 But in Cambridge, you could set off in any direction and be surprised by what you saw.\u00a0 The houses, the shops and restaurants, the people on the streets.\u00a0 It was never a dull morning I spent with my little girl navigating those cobblestone sidewalks.<\/p>\n

I wouldn\u2019t trade those Saturday mornings with Hannah for the world.<\/p>\n

Walking those streets again this weekend, I realized that not all my memories of Boston are dark ones.\u00a0 When I think of my time there with Hannah\u2019s mother, I\u2019m sad at the opportunities we missed to enjoy the city, and I\u2019m sad that the hope we had for a better life for the two of us was ultimately not realized.\u00a0 But I have other, happier memories of Boston\u2014memories that belong to me and Hannah, and ones that are all my own.\u00a0 Coming into my own as a teacher for the first time.\u00a0 Having dinner with a few of my students in the freshman dining hall, a place straight out of Hogwart\u2019s.\u00a0 Helping Hannah learn to walk and climb in one of the many nearby parks.\u00a0 Watching my dad, who died just after we left Boston, laugh and smile with Hannah, his first grandchild.\u00a0 He loved babies, and babies loved him, with Hannah no exception.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t forget the hard times, but I can choose to celebrate the good times.\u00a0 Those two years are not just part of my story; they\u2019re also the start of Hannah\u2019s story.\u00a0 Thank you, God, for the measure of peace I now feel about that season of my life.\u00a0 I think I\u2019m ready to share more of my memories of that time with Hannah, and to celebrate with her experiences she only knows from photos. She asked me this week when we talked on the phone if I would take her to Boston one day. I think I will.<\/p>\n

Image: “The City Slows<\/a>,” by me, Flickr (CC)<\/address>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Almost nine years ago, my oldest daughter Hannah was born in Massachusetts.\u00a0 As much as I would like for her to be a Southern girl, she\u2019s a Yankee by birth.\u00a0 She lived in the Boston area for a year and a half before we moved to Nashville.\u00a0 Hannah doesn\u2019t remember …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":147,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[27,61,38,30,66],"class_list":["post-145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-friends","tag-frustration","tag-joy","tag-memories","tag-places","column","twocol","has-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=145"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":148,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145\/revisions\/148"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derekbruff.org\/blogs\/disfordad\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}