Saturday Morning

Silas is napping his 9 AM nap, Ben is surfing his Saturday morning surf, and I am sitting up in the loft. It is clear and cool outside. From here I can hear the sound of the freeway and the quiet of Saturday mornings.

I just got back from breakfast at Kim's house. Sunflower Bakery bakes such good bread. Frontier is my usual, but this morning we had cinnamon swirl as french toast. Yum.

Last night Ben and I found a babysitter (hooray!) and went on a date. I made Beef Bourguignonne yesterday -- this is NEW territory, making recipes for dinner -- so we ate here, then went to Alta for vanilla chai and chocolate cake, then a bonfire on the beach. The wind was cold off the ocean, but fed our fire, which smelled like pine. We sat on the cold sand, the skin of our faces hot, talked and read Prince Caspian. On the way home, we stopped by Ralphs and each got bags of bulk candy (really to break a $20 to pay the babysitter) -- I mixed gummy frogs, good n plenty, those gummy black/raspberries, and jordan almonds. Ben put each kind in a separate bag: sour apples, reces pieces, red licorice (which ended up being waxy and hard and tasting like my childhood).

There are so many things we will miss if we move (it kind of makes my chest hurt). The other day I found myself wondering how life could ever be better than this...

Driving North on the 5

The drive from my house to San Francisco has become one of my favorites. First of all, it is beautiful and the landscape is so varied (back to this). Also, once through LA, there is hardly any traffic and you can fly. There are also multiple rest stops with Starbucks and huge mini marts. Always a plus.

The landscape: it is Orange County/LA weirdness -- strip malls, brake lights, weird power plants, car dealerships, sitcom billboards -- until you come to the Getty perched up on the left. Then there is a gradual climb up and the scenery quiets into steep brown mountains patched with brush, and then a decent into "the valley." The net 45 minutes or so, you climb and wind through the mountains. They are a different kind of mountain than we have in the east -- they look much more geologically formed, more sculpted crevices and grooved faces, as if water gushed down them not too long ago. Their surface is different too; rather than being covered head to toe in trees, they are brown dirt and rock with scattered shrubs, desertous ones, patchy over them. The higher you climb, though, the more pines there are, and this morning, I even saw some stubborn remaining snow frozen in the shadows.

When the road begins to wind downward (my ears always pop here), it suddenly straightens out into a perfect ironed ribbon and the land becomes farms as far as you can see. Unfortunately, yesterday when I drove north, there was so much smog that as far as I could see was only a few cars in front of me. . ,

The farm land lasts for miles and miles. There are mostly orchards. Some were shaggy with leaves and full of oranges, but most were barren. Those trees, which I think were almond trees (must ask Eli) were the color of pink tinsel Christmas trees, but quieter -- just the sheen along the bare branches.

My favorite part of the drive is what comes next -- the smooth round hills, much softer than the others, that bulge and roll for the miles before San Francisco. These hills, I think, are where Salinas is -- read East of Eden. These hills, which slope to the road and have cows standing at impossible angles on them, are different every time I pass them. They change with the light and the seasons. Last time I drove, they were soft and downy (see pic below), but yesterday they were different entirely. They looked more like worn leather, the down gone, like skin. They looked muscular, sensual, breathing.

And today they were shadowy and lovely but not striking. These are the hills where the windmills are that make me think of Ben. Yesterday, they were all stopped. Almost eerie. And I wondered who decides that an energy supply is sufficient for the moment, who programs them to resist when the wind blows.

Road Trip

I am sitting in Kirsten and James' apartment in San Francisco. Decided this morning to pile Silas in the car and drive up for Kirsten's Stegner reading. Throwing things in the car is much more involved with an infant... I remember swearing that when I had a baby I would not haul a lot of things around, but it turns out it is a worthy trade off to be prepared. And so here I am with suitcase, huge bag, small bag, pack n' play, refrigerated items all in hand...

It also turns out that it is difficult to attend a poetry reading fully with a 10 month old. I walked into a woman's office in the Stanford English Building (a woman who was clearly working -- books open and typing) and asked her if she'd be willing to play with a baby for 5 minutes. How could she say no? So thanks to Melissa, I was able to have 5 uninterrupted minutes of listening. Kirsten was poised and despite herself seemed utterly at ease. And her poems were, of course, striking.

And now I am sitting in an apartment I love -- blend of modern and antique -- cream, oranges, green. I love it here. Off I go to retrieve my suitcase from the car.

Family --

Life's solitude. It seems to be a theme. Or perhaps just a reality.

My mom is in Minnesota right now at her mother's so they can sort through the house together -- all of my grandmother's possessions, enacting a will as they go along. It feels premature, improper even to have to sort through one's own goods and leave them, but the downsizing is inevitable -- a move to a community where the apartments are small.

The difficulty certainly is in the work of it, the elbow grease and decisions, the packing and hefting and packaging of things. But it is also in the weighty implications, in what is said and confronted and all that is unsaid and avoided. They rub in words and in approaches, in years of patterned child-parent interactions that are swinging around as their roles change.

And it makes no difference if all of this is to be expected with your own mother if you wait long enough -- it is still flint against stone, singing sparks and a burst of flame.

My mother says it's the hardest thing she has ever done. Her mother says the same thing. And though she has buried a son and husband and watched another son ache into pieces, this is a different kind of loss and release -- there is finality, which must make her breath catch in her throat. What could that feel like?

And once again, the story boils down to the fact that we all have to go it alone -- no matter how loved and surrounded we are, how supported or cheered for, or seen.

You are the one who must put one foot in front of the other and walk yourself through the muck. You are the one who must move your mouth and have the conversations. You are the one who has to show up for your own mother. Or brother. Or face whatever dysfunction that lies in your skin. Even when you have kids who love you. Or a husband. Or a friend or dog or whomever. (and the fact is, they really all have their own scrabbly lives too, which is too bad) No one, no matter how empathetic, can get into your chest and feel the aches there that weigh you down and make you soggy. No one can know the way your muscles go taut in all that lifting.

Even in clouds of applause, we stand alone on our two feet.

(thank goodness for light, and wings, and winds of sun, and a quiet Spirit that settles us)

Houses

I am in the treetop house -- wobble-glass windows of an old Victorian, a house that used to belong to the town dentist in 1863. He had the exterior painted black back then -- a bit foreboding. I wonder how many of his patients had come for gold.

This top floor of the house was the servants' quarters. I'm sure they knew -- quietly and with hope -- that they had the sweetest nook of the house: window-fulls of hills and the peak of Mt. Tam. I wonder whether the weather patterns of San Francisco were different back then -- the hills much more barren, stretches of raging wild fires. Perhaps they were up here because of a heat that no one else chose to bear. Curious too that in this home they were servants, and across the country there were still slaves.

Did the people here have views of such an issue or did distance breed a sense of irrelevance? I wonder what it is, in my 2006 home, that I am turning the same blind eye to. I'd like to know and face it full view.
***
Houses are a funny thing. They are a member of the family and then suddenly one day are not. They cease to contain all your living clutter and then fill with another's -- and yet, even so, the door jams remain the same, the height of the ceilings, the soft arches into the living room, the addition your parents put on the kitchen and the remodeled attic they designed in pencil at the dining room table. These continuing elements are what make houses haunting, eerie, are how they can make you ache in your chest.

When I was 16, we moved out of my childhood home. I slept on the 10x14 foot concrete front stoop with two girlfriends the night before strangers moved in. I knocked on the door and came back to visit the next year -- out striped valances were still in the sun room, our brick-orange tile on the kitchen floor.

Then yesterday, 13 years later, a childhood friend called to tell me her mother, a nursery school teacher, was invited to a 4 year old's birthday party. His address: 4400 Q St. So today she celebrated another child on my childhood patio and tried to peek in the windows. I wish I could have gone too, just to smell the shaggy pine that grew in a line up the backside of the house and to see fallen magnolia leaves resting on the stoop like yellow leather boats.

After Watching "A River Runs Through It"

I saw "A River Runs Through It" for the first time. What struck me most about the brothers' relationship was that it was not about details. They were not submerged in each others' inner worlds. They didn't ask a lot of questions or reveal each nitty gritty inch of self. (I am accustomed to wanting this kind of transparency).

Instead, they watched each other live. They laughed together with friends. They fished and stood side-by-side in a river. They were unmovingly loyal -- brothers. And they allowed each other to live his own life, to go his own way even when it was full of mistakes. They didn't try to save each other -- they knew that they couldn't.

Allowance. It's the way love really is, or is when we are brave. Even when we love someone, we can never *really* know another's depths. We are each solo and untouchable at the core, or at least mysterious, changing.

To allow the mystery. To let love settle on standing together in a river, on watching each other live.

Swimming Babies -- You Have Got to See This

Though I have got to wonder whether these babies are traumatized and why they are in an aquarium-like setting (??), there is something irresistible about this scene:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2006/10/02/GA2006100200467_index_frames.htm?startat=1