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Surely I'm wrong

There are some things I know from spending so much time at my coffee shop of choice:

A woman, about seven months pregnant, is trying to decide if she should go on an exotic trip. She wants to, but isn't sure it's safe. She's spoken to several friends about her predicament.

A man in love with his own voice and gestures runs a company that makes nutrition bars. They are sold at Whole Foods. He very much wants his nutrition bar to be the Number One nutrition bar in existence.

Another man, this one not nearly so well groomed, with a greasy black-gray beard, sits in the corner day after day. He jiggles his knees compulsively and stares with wide, baggy eyes, a small smile cavorting across his lips. He speaks to no one.

Next to me, a woman drafts a book. She seems as unfocused as I do, writing a little, then chatting online, browsing, downloading music, writing a little more. I say, "Sorry to be nosy, but that looks suspiciously like a manuscript."

"A memoir," she says. She's been working on her story almost as long as I've been working on mine. She's on her third draft. I think I've seen her around school, that she's another parent.

I marvel at all the creative people, ambitious people, down-trodden people who pass in and out of my life everyday. I'm sad that, most of them, I'll never really know.

Though in certain ways it seems like I do, like I might. Sometimes I feel I've run across so many people in my life that I see the intrinsic sameness of us all. Each of us possess bits of the same qualities, they are just rationed differently. A little more drive and energy for this one. A touch of mental illness for that. More compassion for him. A heavier stroke of insecurity for her.

Or maybe I'm just naïve.

A Hungry Green

So, I've been writing and posting installments of this story, Greener Grass, for more than a year now. Holy cow! We're starting to wind down. The end is near. Thank you so much to everyone who's followed it, posted comments on it, emailed me about it. It's been so much fun. Just a few more installments to go...

If you'd like to read the first part of this story, it's in my right sidebar, under I Like To Write.

*****

Tamara grabbed the remote and snapped off the TV. The room, that had been filled with loud cartoon laughter and sproingy sound effects was, for a moment, silent. Until Caitlyn and Eli whined at her to turn it back on.

"No," Tamara said, feeling the old motherly authority infusing her, forcing her to stand and make decisions rather than huddle there, filled with regret, somehow fearful of this teenage girl watching her. "That's enough Spongebob."

The kids, the two kids who were still here, looked at her wide-eyed. Her absence made her proclamation more meaningful. See? she wanted to bellow. See what happens when mommy leaves? You respect me more. It's true!

Slowly, she began to realize who the girl was. She'd seen her before. At Dave's office picnic last summer, at various other places around town. She was long and sleek, with layered, fitted t-shirts and short, denim cut-offs. Her hair was pulled back into a messy bun, the kind that looked adorable on pretty, teenage girls. She was Teresa's daughter. 

"I'm Tamara," she said, neglecting to extend her hand. Instead, she smoothed Caitlyn's hair, wondering how she lived these past couple weeks without the warm feel of her daughter's head.

The girl nodded and said, "Megan."

The refrigerator rattled to life, humming as the freezer clunked out ice cubes, sounds Tamara found supremely comforting. She couldn't deny it, she was glad to be home.

Gently, she crouched so she could look into Caitlyn's blue eyes and asked, "Do you forgive me?"

Caitlyn's bottom lip curled and she began to cry. She threw her arms around Tamara's shoulders and, between sobs, yelled that, the day before, Joshua and Eli had each gotten three Oreos while she'd only gotten two. She accused Eli of hiding her stuffed elephant and hiccuped that she wanted to watch the end of Spongebob.

Megan stepped forward and rubbed Eli's back. "They're tired," she said.

Tamara wanted to bark, Of course they're tired. Don't you think I know that? But she only said, "Right. I've been gone a while." Logically, she knew Caitlyn's reaction was natural, that she couldn't understand how to articulate the loneliness or fear she'd felt while Tamara had been gone, and so would rail against lesser inequities. But still, Tamara was irked. Hurt? Either way, she had no right to be.

"How's Joshua?" Megan asked.

It was then that Tamara noticed something in Megan's eyes. Something laid bare, yet twitchy. Like one of the kids when they'd eaten an extra piece of candy from their Halloween buckets. She wondered if Megan had dabbed on some of her cologne or snooped through a drawer. She felt, for a moment, sympathy for the girl who'd helped Dave while Tamara was off on her little furlough. "He's...the same." Hot tears, like melted wax, congealed on her lower lids.

Eli had plopped himself on the kitchen floor and begun taking apart a Lego car, evenly lining each plastic brick in a row in front of him. When the land line rang and Tamara had to hop over Eli and his Legos to get it. Dave's voice greeted her, sounding, for the first time in months, buoyant. "He's awake!" he said. "He's asking for mommy."

"Oh my God," Tamara pushed her hair off her face. "Oh my God. Okay, we'll be right there. Can the kids come? I don't know if the kids can come."

"Just bring 'em," Dave said.

So she did, strapping them into their car seats while Megan hopped into the front next to Tamara. "Is it okay?" she asked.

"Yeah, fine," Tamara said distractedly, pulling out of the driveway. "Do you have to call your mom or something?"

Furrowing her brow and blinking, Megan said, "Um, no. I don't have to call my mom."

When they got to the hospital, wet from the rain, Tamara still grungy and so tired her brain wobbled like a marble in a glass bowl, they all went up to ICU and found Joshua's room. Surely they were breaking some rule with such a large group, with two kids for God's sake. But no one stopped them, so they crowded the door. Tamara rushed to the bed where Joshua laid, looking sleepy, but alert.

She kissed his smooth forehead over and over, said, "I"m sorry, baby. I'm so sorry."

Finally, weakly, he batted her away. He smelled little boyish, a mixture of sweat and jelly beans, so normal, that she could hardly force herself to stand and give him space. Finally, though, she did. And when she took a step back, she saw it. Dave gazing at Megan. 

There was no other way to say it, his gaze was hungry.

Enjoy this

If there's one thing that makes you want to reach your arms around your children and pull them into a silken cocoon where all that is served is strawberry milk and chicken nuggets, where nothing but Magic Schoolbus plays all day, where growth is arrested and everyone stays exactly the age they are for eternity, it's being around teenage boys.

One day this week, during Fruit Bat and Kitty Cat's winter break, we went up to the school to ride bikes. Slumped across the play structure were three kids, all male, all about sixteen. One was of Indian descent, the other two were white, with longish, scruffy hair. You know how they wear it now.

"What do you want to do?' one of them muttered.

"Get picked up by your mommy?" This was said, in an Indian accent, by a white kid, and was directed at the Indian boy.

"Nah."

"I wanna shoot people," the other white kid said.

The Indian boy: "I bet you do."

I watched Fruit Bat and Kitty Cat whizzing back and forth across the pavement on their small bicycles. Oh God, I thought. Oh, please. I hate these boys.

"So, man. What do you wanna do?"

It was right then that I reminded myself to enjoy this. Not being near the obnoxious teenage boys this. But having a six and four-year-old this. Because this is now and this is here, when Fruit Bat and Kitty Cat will still wind themselves around me like koalas grasping gum trees.

And it will not last forever.

Better now

We just came back from San Diego, where we went to visit J.'s mother. She lives in a retirement facility (?) Independent living compound (?) Or, as Kitty Cat calls it, her Compartment. I never quite know how to refer to where my mother-in-law resides.

It's this sprawling, multi-winged stucco structure with spanish tiled roofs and dark, thickly carpeted hallways and a special space for Walker and Wheelchair Parking outside the dining room and lots of balding men with scabby heads and frothy-haired old women and sparkling swimming pools and the smell of salisbury steak everywhere.

J. finds the whole endeavor depressing. Being around the elderly reminds him of what's coming. And if there's one thing J. doesn't want to think about, doesn't want to be, it's old.

I understand where he's coming from. You can't help, when you're surrounded by it, pondering what you'll be like in thirty or forty years, what will ache, what will have stopped working, what surgeries you will have had. How it will feel to know that any day your body could just give out.

But I like the geezers, too. I always have. When I was in middle and high school, we had a Senior Citizens' center located two doors from my dad's chemistry lab, down the hall from the band room. The Seniors would eat lunch in the same cafeteria as the students. A handful of us were recruited to help them carry their trays, fetch their condiments. Good Morning America even, in 1980, came and did a Feel Good story on the integration of Seniors and kids (Of course, they rearranged us to look like we actually sat with the old folks and chatted while we ate, which we did not, like we walked down the hall side by side with them between classes, which we also did not (an early lesson in how media distorts reality)). My point is, I've always been comfortable with the over-seventy-five set. I feel for them. I admire them. I see the hunger and the resignation and the gleam in their eyes.

I don't mind hanging out for a while at the Senior Housing Development (?) Fruit Bat and Kitty Cat dig the long, racetrack-like corridors and the lemon trees and wild rabbits and the pancakes in the dining room.

So we just do it, once a year. We go there. I sneak in my six-pack or my bottle of wine and we sleep with the window open (albeit, all in one room which is crazy-making after the second day) and cobble together meals that are safe for Fruit Bat and we take the kids swimming and J. puts on his lawyer's hat and looks at papers for his mother and, as long as Kitty Cat doesn't get too princessy and foot-stompy, I'm okay with it.

How to explain the pencil-lead point I teetered on last night after we got home, then? Travel logistics? Trying to communicate with a grumpy spouse? Re-immersion? Post traumatic Elder Community (?) Sleep deprivation?

I don't know, exactly, but I'm better now, startlingly happy, today, to be alone with the kids.

Cat Video Friday

It's been a loooong time since we've updated Cat Video Friday. But we thought this little gem was worth a post.

Little trolls

 

Here's a photo I took last weekend. It's kind of a tradition, on Saturday mornings, for the kids to stop by the Fremont troll on the way back from swimming lessons. So here they are, damp and also sandy from climbing up onto his hand.

I wonder what they're conferencing about.

Pure

Hand in hand with a longitude/latitude

The other night J. and I had a talk that left me sad and a little stunned. We were lying in bed, facing the ceiling, blankets up to our chins. Earlier in the day he'd told me about a co-worker who was offered a job in the Bay Area. 

"What would you do?" I asked him. "If that were you?"

He said he didn't know. But that he'd like my support, my willingness to relocate if a great opportunity arose for him.

I was borrowing trouble. No such 'lucky' break has come along. Yet. I say 'yet' because, though we moved to Seattle as separate, single people and both planned to make this city our home, his heart still, in some ways, belongs to California. Also, his clients are mostly in San Francisco. A move south, at least the discussion of a move south, seems inevitable to me. Or perhaps it is just fear because I am so snug and so happy where I am.

In the last twelve years, I have fallen in love with Seattle. While he's been toiling in a tall tower downtown, I've been roving around (mostly with children in tow), establishing connections, bonding, swooning.

I love it here. I do. I love the temperate climate that is enough to placate my need for seasons without being too harsh. I love how the grass stays green all year. I love the mountains to the East and West. I love the city with all its nooks and crannies and bridges and alleys. I love the people I've met. I spent my twenties moving back and forth and now I feel like I'm home. Like Seattle is it.

I asked J. "Does it feel like I'm married to this place more than I'm married to you?"

Ever the pragmatist, he answered, "You may be."

"I don't want that," I said. But I couldn't deny it. Not honestly. I am always hearing of women (and okay, maybe a man here or there) moving for the sake of their spouse's career. Moving, in theory anyway, for the financial stability of the family. Why can't I be that kind of person?

Anyway, we can't know for sure that the subject will present itself at all. Not unless a shiny, new job crops up that looks, to J., much better than what he has now.

Until then I'll just curl into a lima bean ball and hope that nothing will come between me and my mistylushgraygreen city and fall asleep.