High = Experiences

Did I pass all this down to my children? Judge for yourselves. “High”experiences I have had over the years include:

• As a child, moving from smallish house, to custom-built house above acres of meadow, to house with 35 rooms, to house with 5 acres and horses
• Progressive private school through 8th grade
  
• Visiting my grandmother in New Jersey, the cold pool, the long lawn
• Summers on the Cape
• California beach house
• Hippie private boarding high school – not generally words found in the same sentence
• Growing up with an art collection destined for a museum
• Year living in London
• Museums in Amsterdam
• Christmas in Portugal
• Christmas in Hawaii
• Christmas in Jamaica
• Christmas in Mexico (and no, it never got old)
  
• Ivy League university
• Summer working in France via that same Ivy League university
  
• Family jewelry
• Working in London for Sir Cameron Mackintosh, for almost no money at all
  
• New Year’s Eve in Paris during an ice storm that closed the city streets and sent the bon chic bon genre into the Metro, even though I was earning no money
• Helping William Hurt memorize his lines for an Off-Broadway product of "Hamlet"
  
• 3 months in India freelance writing on their film industry, even though I had no guarantee of getting paid
  

Comparable experiences my children have had:

• Same midsized house all their lives, remodeled once and fraying again at the edges
  
• Little bitty backyard
• Same progressive private school through 8th grade
  
• Visiting their grandparents in Santa Barbara and the hills above Silicon Valley
• Summer on Martha’s Vineyard with my father
• Christmas in Stockholm and Rome, during which my 2-year old daughter cried, “No more churches! No more museums!”
• Summer trip to the Swedish Archipelago with my mother including a stopoff in Paris to see museums – daughter was 12 and loved the Musee d'Orsay...
  
• Week in Bay Head, New Jersey, every summer
• Summer trip hiking in Switzerland with friends
• Summer trip to the Dordogne with friends - same ones
  
• Private high school, no boarding, no hippies
• Same Ivy League university
• Summer internship for daughter in China
• Summer trips for son then interested in Marine Biology to Hawaii, Costa Rica, Australia
• No art collection, but a stepmother who takes great photos
• No family jewelry, but I guess I could start, right?
• And to remedy the lack of funding for non-salaried post-college jobs and travel, the purchase of New York City Upper West Side co-ops in their early 20’s, and 3-month trips to India, a lot of advice on how to write a resume….

You recreate what you can, fix what you can, and compensate where you can do neither. At least my daughter will never sit on her sofa when she is 52 and wonder how she could have managed to lose not 1 but 2 diamond stickpins over the years.