I remember being a young teenager.  I remember being so embarrassed by everything, so worried about what people would say or think about me.  I remember my face right close to the floorboard of my dad’s Buick at every stopsign and stoplight as we went down the road toward the freeway one Saturday morning while we ran errands.  I pretended to tie my shoes repeatedly so I could keep my head down, so no one would see me.  I wonder what my dad thought.  Hopefully he just thought I was being weird and it didn’t make him feel as awful as I feel now remembering it.  I will never not cringe and apologize for that.  But it’s good to remember, right?  I’m able to sympathize and empathise with my kids when they get really spun about something that doesn’t seem even a little bit like a big deal to me.  Because I know it doesn’t have to make sense, and I know those feelings are like a tractor beam and you’re just pulled along kicking sometimes and you don’t know why but even so it’s consuming you, and there you are, just acting like an asshole even if everyone knows that deep down someplace the you that isn’t pelted with hormones 24/7 is really not an asshole most of the time.   

The summer I was fifteen was especially rough for me.  I can’t remember what all was going on, but I remember being in the back of the car while we drove someplace, maybe across Texas, maybe we were in Kansas or Oklahoma.  Wherever we were, I was miserable, looking out the window and up at the sky, at the big white piles of clouds above the road, sure that my friends back home were all having fun and forgetting I existed while I spent the summer with my dad.  We had so much fun there, though.  We tracked hurricanes and watched thunderstorms from the backyard.  We lit candles at night and put them in the ceramic lanterns my dad made and turned off the lights and listened to the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit on a recording put out by the BBC (at least, I think it was the BBC).  And we listened to old radio shows like The Shadow.  We watched baseball and football while we sat on the floor in front of the TV and had salami and cheese and club crackers, the ones with all the butter, off a big cutting board. And the popcorn, with Cokes and dishtowels for our buttery hands.  We played poker with our jars of pennies and my brother wore a green banker’s visor and counted out the money with reverence and serious concentration.  It was the only time he was both awake and still and quiet, I think.  We watched Alien and The Blues Brothers, a lot.  My dad drew designs in the air with his cigarettes in the dark, wrote our names so fast we could read them.  We listened to Bob Wills records, Willie Nelson, Billie Holliday, Bob Dylan, Cab Calloway, Pink Floyd, and ELO – backwards. I didn’t appreciate that time enough when I was living it, but I did at least enjoy it as much as I could given my age and insecurities and all those fabulous beach parties I was sure I was missing far away in California.

Now I’m on the other side, with a teen daughter who is often horribly humiliated that she actually has a family, and I know she’s going to grow out of it.  Eventually.  I remember the moment that things kind of changed for me.  I was in the back of the car, on that trip across someplace in the heat, someplace that was not cool, someplace where we stopped for breakfast in a small truckstop and didn’t fit in with the locals, at all. I was still looking up at the sky and what must’ve been a college radio station played Fall On Me by REM and I was suddenly connected to all the things I’d been pining for.  I knew that song, I had that album back at home, and it was on the radio and for every single second of it I was floating and smiling and relieved and not lonely anymore.  It’s not really working for me to explain, because it doesn’t have any logic behind it, but I felt saved from the country highway we were on.  I felt really super cool and my heart beat with the music and I had no idea what Michael Stipe was saying (and I still sing along with my own version of lyrics, I’m afraid).  Anyway, that CD is in my van and I’ve been listening to it, feeling that rush and connection again nearly 30 years later, and feeling like a kid again even though I spend most of my time taking care of them.

I took four years of art classes in high school, but without at least some natural ability, well, things tend to come out not really right.  Right isn’t probably the best word to use.  I think if you want to be more tender and forgiving toward yourself you can make the case that something created in the spirit of art is always right, even if the lines that should be fine are clumsy and the perspective is off and distracting.  At the time, I was really frustrated that all we ever did in art class was copy.  It was like, Find a picture in a magazine of something and copy it in pencil.  Use charcoal to sketch this still life of blocks set up on my desk.  Paint the fruit bowl in acrylics.  

Every morning Scuba makes me a cappuccino and brings it to me while I’m still in bed trying to wake up.  He wins at mornings, that’s for sure  Usually I am awake a lot of the night and fall into a good, deep sleep just about an hour before I need to wake up. Yes, I take melatonin.  No, I don’t ingest any caffeine after 10 a.m.  There’s just something about 3 a.m. that wakes me up a lot and something about 6 a.m. that makes me so, so sleepy. 

I’ve got the house all to myself tonight for the first time since we moved in, I think.  I spent my precious alone time doing dishes and laundry, picking up the girls’ room, figuring out where in the hell the crawl space trap door is before the electrician comes tomorrow (floor of Lex’s closet!), and watching the videos my cousin gave me on Sunday of our family’s 1988 reunion.  There’s my dad, telling a story.  I’m next to him, just a tiny bit older than Lex is now, in my baggy clothes, ducking my head when I know the camera is nearby.  Hearing my dad’s laugh again is devastating and wonderful in pretty similar amounts, so I’m laughing and crying and maybe kissing my finger and touching it to the screen once or twice.  God, my stepmom was pretty.   

Scuba says, in the nicest way, that it’s a little depressing around here.  Here being the blog and not our house or anything.  Our house is mostly happy – as happy as it can be given the number of teenagers and all that.  Well, I tell him, I’m just so sad still.  And he says, Of course you are, how could you not be? 

Mostly, though, I am not sad.  I mean, I *am* sad about my dad, but everything else has finally arrived after a lifetime of wishing.  My dad used to make this kind of clicking sound and shake his head when he was talking about, well – missed opportunities and things that we’d say were too bad, I guess.  And that’s what I have, this sad click all the time that he’s not able to come see our new house and help with the physics homework and watch the girls play soccer and debate politics with Lex and his girlfriend and then tell me afterward how impressed by them he is.  He still had so much of a life to live, you know?  But I’ve got this incredible kitchen to cook in, this amazing garden to try and care for, all this light coming in the windows.  I’m happy and I’m crushed and I don’t think that one really excludes the other.

Willow on her first day of fifth grade.  

I borked the annual first day of school photo this year, but also the kids’ schools started on two different days, so we didn’t technically have the photo opp.

Here’s one of the first ones I took in 2005:

And Willow when she started kindergarten:

Last night part of her homework was to look in the mirror and say black bug’s blood five times fast.  That’s one of the many tongue twisters my brother and I used to say with our dad (my favorite was probably rubber baby buggy bumpers) so I could do it well enough.  I never know what’s going to make me miss him the most.  I thought it would be big things like birthdays and holidays, but it’s really times like last night when I wished they could video chat and he could teach her a bunch of tongue twisters, or later when we all went out and watched the International Space Station as it passed across the sky over our quiet backyard. 

We’ve been in our new house for six weeks, or maybe for always, given that I don’t really think about living anywhere else.  We (ok *I*) still have just a few boxes to unpack.  We all mostly know where all the kitchen stuff goes.  I’m used to the new sounds (favorite sounds coming from outside are: the neighbor’s dog when it has one of its squeaky toys, the shrill ripply chirps of the hummingbirds that are nearly always out there, the same train whistle I could hear from my old place).  I know how the light comes in the windows at different times of the day.  I’ve finally stopped walking into end tables and dressers, so the bruises on my thighs and upper arms are disappearing.  I can walk to the kitchen in the dark of night for a glass of water. 

We eat outside every night, next to this backyard garden we inherited when we moved in.  It makes me nervous, though, because I’m a terrible gardener with many dead, bitter plants in my wake to prove it.   So far I’m mostly just cutting things back where needed (totally guessing and zenning my way through that part), watering a little every night, adding shells that John’s brought back from dives and rocks the kids painted when they were little.  Clay projects they made in school.  The little fairy statue my brother and sister-in-law gave us back before we had a garden.  I bought one plant at the hardware store, and put it in the ground.  If I can keep it alive and healthy, I’ll bring home more.  But slowly.  My goal is for us to be eating our own tomatoes next summer.  Yellow squash, strawberries, maybe some tarragon.

We didn’t use the yard at the old place very often because it was bordered at the back by a two storey apartment complex and all those windows looking right down on us were a little unnerving.  The yard here is pretty secluded, and quiet.  Having all this good in my life makes me miss my dad even more (he would have been so, so happy for us) and so when I can I go out in the late night or very early morning and stand in the backyard and watch for the International Space Station to go overhead.  It feels like he’s checking in on me, so long as I’m down with suspending reason for just a few minutes.   And I always am.        

Even though we have way too much to do to be going out to Sunday brunch and walking around the Haight all afternoon, we snuck up to Suppenküche on Sunday with Willow, Lex, and his lovely girlfriend, A, for some fun.

Sophie *finally* got ahold of me via facetime.  She’s having a great trip, of course.  Now that she’s in Sweden and has wireless access, we should hear from her pretty much every day.  London was incredible  (she says, in between telling me about all the cute boys that are there to play soccer).  

Ok. Back to work with me. 

I’ve woken up at 3:30 a.m. (give or take a few minutes) the last three mornings in a row.  Wednesday: up at 3:30 to take Sophie to her friend’s house by 4 to catch the shuttle to the airport where they got on a plane to fly to London with her club soccer team to play in the Gothia Cup next week.  Thursday: 3:52 a.m. text from her friend’s mom, letting me know they’d landed and Sophie had a great time talking to a couple of guys on the flight. (Of course she did.)  Today:  phone rings at 3:26 a.m. – Lex is locked out of the house, and his girlfriend’s mom has just dropped him off.  

He doesn’t have a house key at the moment because Scuba and I bought a NEW HOUSE and we’re the only ones with keys so far.  We have spent the past month or so packing and cleaning and driving to Home Depot and GoodWill, unpacking, more cleaning, more GoodWill.  A zillion trips to Ikea.  There was even a little garage sale action.  Scuba made several runs to the dump, which I think cost just about as much as we made at our garage sale, but at least we got rid of what we needed to. 

We’re tired, but super happy.  Our house is perfect for us. 

Scuba and I are camping in Monterey, and even though now that the sun is down and it’s so cold he just went out to buy gloves, another hat, anything warm at all, it’s undoing all of the stress.

We rode bikes from Monterey to Pacific Grove, and then hiked our favorite trail off of Highway 1. I should unplug and enjoy the fire and make sure the tent doesn’t blow away (not joking!) but, 3G.  So.  Time to download another TC Boyle book and be thankful we are not actual pioneers.

P.S.  Everybody but the kids, the dogs, and us at this campsite is smoking weed. 

Last Friday I took a day off work and went with Willow’s 4th grade class to Columbia, CA to pan for gold and buy a ton of ice cream and candy, which I’m sure the 49ers would have done, too, if they’d had access to freezers and high fructose corn syrup.

We don’t live near gold rush country, so we took a 3+ hour bus ride.  At breakfast that morning, Scuba asked her about the bus, if it was a school bus, and she said, Nooooooo, it’s a LUXURY bus, with TV screens and velvety seats!  And she was right that there were TV screens and surround sound, but the seats were more of an easy-care naugahyde or vinyl or something.  

I sat in the front row with a mom I’d never met before, and we totally hit it off.  We talked so much, in fact, that the bus driver finally just put in his earbuds.  When we pulled into the parking lot, he got on the loudspeaker and was all, Okay kids.  When you find gold, the first person you have to pay is the BUS DRIVER! 

The field trip was completely fun.  Like, really, REALLY, fun, and I wish I’d made time for it when the three big kids went when they were each in 4th grade.  The kids were put into groups, and everyone had a job: doctor, navigator, leader, cook, hunter.  They got some money at the start and went to an auction and had to decide what supplies to buy for their trek.  Everyone wrote a letter home using a quill and ink (there was more ink on the kids than the paper).  Willow’s letter said that the journey to Columbia was ruff, and one person died on the way from illness.  The navigator got a map and the trail they needed to follow was highlighted for them.  They followed the map, and had to stop at five or six different stations along the way where they had to make choices about buying things or trading and they had to get a signature from each station.  Parents were supposed to watch and help only if the kids got really lost or ended up in town.  We also had to help them cross what the park rangers called the “live” streets, which had actual cars driving down them.  It was sort of funny to talk to a dude who looked like this:

and then have to make sure that the kids didn’t walk in front of a speeding Camry.  

Willow’s team won (I think) even though nobody found any gold and they did buy the lotion or powder or something that the woman who said she’s been abandoned by her husband told them would make gold stick to them if they rolled in the dirt near any gold.  Did you think it would work? we asked the kids.  No, they said.  But we got it anyway.  Just because.  (Which, you know, sounds just exactly like the cellulite cream I bought that one time.) 

After the expedition part was over with, we had something like three hours to walk around the shops in Columbia.  And I had these thoughts:  #1) That is way.too.long. WTF?  Then, I saw the cute little downtown and the little shops and I thought #2) RAD!  This will be super fun and Willow and I can go to all these places, yay!  And then when I realized that the chaperone duty didn’t actually end until we got back on the bus #3) Does the saloon serve beer?  Cause this is WAY TOO long to keep track of 5 boys and 4 girls, even with three other parents.  

In the end, our group did the best job of corralling our charges (we were winners all the way, yo) and I kind of bonded with this one little kid who was sort of a pain in the ass, behaviorally speaking.  At one point, he came out of the ice cream shop with the other kids empty handed.  I was all, Dude!  No ice cream? I thought you said you wanted some? and he was all, No money, so I gave him some and then all the kids smelled my weakness and I bought a couple of sodas, a mood ring, and one horseshoe for my friend’s kid.  And a couple of cap guns, but only after I said, Okay.  You have to look me in the eye and tell me that your parents are okay with you having a gun.  Because I do NOT want to get a call from them for getting you this if you’re not supposed to have one.  Deal?  and he looked right into my eyes and said, It’s fine.  But only a fake one.  

We rode the bus back home in the late afternoon, through the pink and gold central valley sunshine, past rows and rows and rows of almond trees, and past old barns and little towns and fruit stands, and back into the traffic and smog and cement of the bay area.    

We got home and before we got off the bus, the teacher took the microphone and told the kids to make sure to leave no trace – no candy wrappers or trash or mess, and the bus driver was all You must leave only one thing on the bus: YOUR GOLD.  I liked him a lot.  Willow was happy that I went and the other kids were bent because I didn’t go on their gold rush trips.  And I should have.    

  

I take a lot of terrible photos – expensive ones on instant film.  I cook a lot of awful meals, write a lot of bad prose, DIY a lot of projects that turn out all WTF?  I often regret what I say, struggle to make myself understood, and feel like a total jerk.  And then sometimes I get lucky and the light is lovely and the boats line up in the background and the poppies are bright orange and I sit on the ground next to them and focus the sx-70 correctly and have the exposure dial in the right place.