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February
7, 2002 will mark one year since Anne Morrow Lindbergh passed
away at the age of ninety-four. As the wife of Charles Lindbergh
and a well-known author, she lived an interesting life. She
spent her summers with her family on a Maine island. After
she married Charles Lindbergh in 1929, she accompanied him
on his survey flights around the North Atlantic, to launch
the first transoceanic airlines. The tragic death of
their first child forced the couple to move to Europe for
privacy, and War brought them back to the United States.
They chose to live on the Connecticut coast. After their children
left the nest, the Lindberghs traveled extensively to Africa
and the Pacific, and they lived in Hawaii until Charles Lindbergh
died in 1974. Anne Morrow Linbergh spent her final years
in her Connecticut home.
In Gift From The Sea (Pantheon Books, $16.00), one of the
most beloved, best-selling books of our time, Ms. Lindbergh
reveals her compelling and unforgettable meditations on youth
and age, love and marriage, solitude, peace, and contentment,
as she set them down during a brief vacation by the sea. As
she writes in her introduction, “I began these pages for myself,
in order to think out my own particular pattern of living,
my own individual balance of life, work and human relationships….Even
those whose lives had appeared to be ticking imperturbably
under their smiling clock-faces were often trying, like me,
to evolve another rhythm with more creative pauses in it,
more adjustment to their individual needs, and new and more
alive relationships to themselves as well as others.”
Using the sea, the beach and an island, she writes metaphorically
and shares a great deal of wisdom. She uses the moon shell
(a snail shell, round, full and glossy as a horse chestnut)
to represent solitude, “Every woman should be alone sometime
during the year, some part of each week, and each day….Certain
springs are tapped only when we are alone.” She continues,
“Woman must come of age by herself. This is the essence of
‘coming of age’ – to learn how to stand alone.
She addresses the lifestyle of beach living, “One learns first
of all in beach living the art of shedding; how little one
can get along with, not how much….Physical shredding to begin
with, which then mysteriously spreads into other fields.”
In a recent Oprah magazine article, Maria Shriver named A
Gift From The Sea, as one of her top five favorite books.
Rose Kennedy had given the book to Ms. Shriver when she left
for college. This short and easy-to-read treasure will make
a special gift for a friend or for you. You may even want
to read it on a vacation by the sea, this happy new year.
Editors
Note: Debra Scala is the Director of Marketing at the
East Meadow law firm of Certilman, Balin, Adler & Hyman,
LLP, and she teaches “How to market and Promote Your Business”
at Hofstra University’s School of Continuing Education.
Her email address is
dscala@cbah.com.
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