BlogLily

This page is inspired by the Mass Observation Project, which I write about here. If people could keep journals during the difficult time after World War II, I can certainly keep some sort of journal of what life is like in the early 21st century. I will try not to be tedious, and I will try to be specific.

June 24, 2008.

Summer’s here.  I just got back from a trip to New England — which was so much fun — and now we have the rest of the week off, to be home, to do stuff like finish the half-pipe (which is presently a quarter pipe), write a little, grill stuff, go to  the library, see some movies, sleep late, recycle the newspapers.  The boys are also engaged in their own pursuits, which I’d like to record here because they say something about the many things that can occur in the summer:

• Charlie:  Sleeping!  Actually, I’m going to guess he’s lying in bed reading.  I’m not going to go up there and find out.  When you’re almost 13, what  better thing to do in the summer than laze around, with  no stress at all:  no posters to make for a science project, no essays to write, no math tests to study for.
• Jack:  Argentina!  On tour with the Pacific Boychoir.  He sends the electornic equivalent of postcards:  texts.  or gives us 30 second phone updates.  He sounds happy, excited.
• William.  Starting a business!  William’s up early.  Thinking about whether he can go into the neighborhood delivery service, picking things up for neighbors at our local grocery store which happens to be about a block from our house.  Right now, though, he’s outside, practicing tricks on his skateboard

May 23, 2008.

William’s Elementary School open house. Scenes from William’s journal (in which he and Ms. Chang, his teacher, write to each other.) For some reason, this exchange between William and Ms. Chang really cracks me up. Maybe it is learning that he planned to be a dorf for Halloween and never told me. You might wonder, what is a “dorf”? It is a small person who carries a club, of course.

Ms. Chang’s response does not surprise me. Do you know what she was for Halloween? An angel. (I’d also like to add that she is truly lovely — she likes the children a lot, and she is strict with them because if she wasn’t they’d all be club fighting on the rug near the storybooks.)

William here shows that he might be bloodied (which is the whole idea of being a dorf and playing lazer tag), but he is unbowed. His commitment to games of violence, to go around and wack people is strong, despite the small-ish smackdown from his teacher. And I am fine with that. What happens in the imagination stays in the imagination, as we say around here.

May 15, 2008.

Gay lives have long been hidden ones: the two “friends” who live together fifty years, the “companion,” the “partner.” It’s just right that today, a beautiful spring day, the California Supreme Court had decided it’s no longer acceptable to call these loving, committed relationship anything other than marriages. (To view its very well written opinion, you have to go to the cases published on May 15, 2008.)

May 11, 2008.

William’s First Communion was last Sunday. Afterwards, to reward him for crossing himself in the right order and not dropping the Body of Christ (or the Blood), we went to Skates by the Bay. There, his older brothers demonstrated how you should behave when the paparazzi are hounding you for your photograph.

April 30, 2008

What’s in my purse these days:

April 20, 2008

A weekend in Santa Barbara with Debby. Scenes from her house:

Lovely chickens. I brought eggs back, and Weyman scrambled them. They were good, as one might expect from happy chickens who live in a coop with a very nice shade to keep them cool on hot days.

March 18, 2008.

I just want to record that on this spring morning — a morning when it looks like it might rain — William is playing his recorder with his third grade class, along with the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra. They are playing what I can only assume will be a rousing rendition of When the Saints Come Marching In. And they are playing this at 10:30 a.m. at Malcolm X Elementary School. We cannot ever move from Berkeley. It is where we all belong.

March 1, 2008.

Spring. That’s all.

February 25, 2008

Finally, a lovely, warm spring day. It’s like nothing else, the arrival of spring, and easter. Last year, I was still so tired and afraid and sad. And this year? Well, sometimes I’m hit by a huge wave of sadness — about how short life is, and how little time there is to do what I want to do, and some regret about how I’ve taken so long to understand what I want to do with myself and so long to understand what I need and because I took so long, I didn’t arrange those things for myself very well, but chose other things, things that don’t really make me very happy. One’s life is a lot like a novel. In the beginning, you have an infinite number of choices, but as you proceed, making a decision here and there, your choices narrow and your way becomes difficult to deviate from. I also know and feel strongly that regret is wrong — it’s not the right way to view experience, which is the fabric of one’s life and should be welcomed, no matter what it brings, because it always makes you better and stronger to take things in.

Today, getting out of the car, William said, “I’m glad you had children, mom. I love my life. I have everything I want.”

Such happiness, children.

February 17, 2008

I don’t mean to turn this page into a transcript of things William says, but really, what do you make of a child who, when he has a moment of flatulence asks you if you’ve heard him? And when you politely answer that no, in fact, you did not (even though, of course, you did) says, Mom! A deaf person in Antarctica would have heard that fart!

And, while I’m at it, I’d like to note for the record that he’s decided what he wants to be when he grows up: a bachelor. Good thing. The only trouble is that he was under the impression a bachelor draws a salary (from whom I’d like to know? The Playboy Foundation?) What he will do with the information that a bachelor doesn’t get a regular paycheck just for being single is anyone’s guess.

February 3, 2008

It has been a year of biblical rain: lashing rain, buckets of rain, endless rain, lots o’rain. We own a lot of those $3.99 yellow and blue IKEA umbrellas, because I cannot resist buying in bulk things that are only cheap if you buy one of them. (Do we really need half a dozen large umbrellas? I say yes. Most say no.)

A few days ago in the car William opened one of the umbrellas, apparently too inexperienced with rain and umbrellas to understand the volume of a car doesn’t accommodate the width and breadth of an umbrella. He panicked, a little boy stuffed into his seat behind the open umbrella. And what did he yell? Somebody turn this thing off!

I feel the same way about the rain.

January 3, 2008

The days after Christmas are full of time — unplanned, wandering around, looking for things to do time. These are the days when the wise men were making their way to Bethlehem, so at least they were busy, on a voyage, full of anticipation. We aren’t any of those things and now that I think of it, I wish we were.

You think unplanned time is good for children, and it’s probably good for parents, but we are so little used to this kind of time that we grow uneasy with each other, and our house seems smaller than usual. Today, the boys have a friend over and they are all tired of material things. They half-heartedly tried to install batteries in a toy, chatted for a little while, and then began to fight. So I made them all go outside, where it is about to rain a thunderous amount, so much rain that there will be an epic storm in the mountains, closing down the roads, forcing people to abandon all hope of getting home by the end of the holiday break. That kind of thing might be fun, come to think of it, more fun than hanging around our house staring at each other.

Me? All I want to do is take a shower without anyone fighting with each other while I’m soaking wet and towelling myself off and unable to tell them to stop with any kind of authority. And then I’d like to quietly read Twelfth Night and think about longing and desire and mistaken identities. That I can’t do any of these things, and have a cold besides, makes me want to whine and moan. Instead, I’ve moaned here, and am going to go and shower anyway.

December 20, 2007

All month I have been working on the Great Fragrance Project. I come down in the morning and ask people what I smell like. This morning, Jack told me that the l’Heure Bleue I had on smelled like Mexican food. Good Mexican food. William agreed. Beans, he thought.

How will they ever manage to convince a woman to marry them?

December 2, 2007

The beginning of December, sky beginning to darken, maybe it will start raining soon. The light’s been so golden in the evening and hiking up in the hills it burnishes everything: the bridge, the trail, the eucalyptis trees, the boys’ golden hair.

We meant to clean out closets and boxes, and instead I took Jack and then Charlie to do their Christmas shopping. It’s a little lesson in how to be a mellow, thoughtful shopper when I’m with them. They have their budgets, stick to them and don’t agonize. They’ve already asked and figured out what to get their loved ones. They don’t agonize. They don’t wrap either, so that’s something I’m going to have to teach them.

At William’s soccer party tonight, we had an epic parents against children game. I actually played, and loved it, loved passing the ball forward, loved stealing the ball from … I’ll admit it … young children! I also got scored on twice, but then that was my contribution to their self esteem.

It is night now, and W and William are reading A Horse and His Boy. Charlie is reading Sports Illustrated for Kids, and Jack is in the bath with what looks like a French comic book. Our house is messy, but we are all pretty happy. And in Narnia, I think things are coming to a rousing close.

October 8, 2007

Today is W’s birthday — he is 49 or, as Jack likes to say, not quite 50.

It is also a beautiful fall day.

April 9, 2007

I so do not want to moan about my work life; I would much rather live in and be writing about the world of this photograph — a graceful world, where a writing desk is used for writing, and displays things from the last century. I don’t want to be in my office with a flourescent light overhead from 9 to 6. But there you have it, my world today is all about what happens under that unvarying light and within the pages of the briefs in front of me.

March 30, 2007

William has become a reader. Only a month or two ago, he told me ruefully that he’d have to go to high school in Mexico, because he’ll never learn to read in English.

And now, he’s doing just that. It’s lovely to see him stretched out on his bed at night, just like his brothers, reading his own books. That the books he is reading are a series about the Mijos — or homies — cracks me up and underlines how reading is ultimately and fundamentally about pleasure. He loves these stories of street-wise mexican-american kids. The other day, he and Charlie made “mijos” t-shirts out of white undershirts. They have numbers on them, written in bubble writing with a black sharpie — and their names on the back. William wore his to school today. He is a homie. And a reader.

In choir school, he’s just become the Minstrel Lead Boy. He doesn’t seem to know that he’s been given this honor. Apparently it’s not official for two weeks, because they haven’t picked the other boy yet. It’s hard to find someone quite like William, I guess.

February 24, 2007.

A week in the San Joaquin valley with J.

In the twenty years I’ve known her, most of our conversations were ones where I felt I’d said the wrong thing. It would happen like this: I’d say something about what I was doing with the children, or a vacation we were planning or what I was cooking, and end up with the feeling I’d somehow gone wrong. W [husband's father] does this too. I wonder what is behind the instinct to tell other people they’re wrong? I can’t possibly be that wrong, that often. And why the references to people W knows who do things I do — write novels, practice law — but do it better than I do? This is not inspiring. It does not whip me up into greater effort to be told there are lots of people smarter than I, more successful than I, better mothers and wives than I. It makes me want to eat ice cream and lie around in my bathrobe, thus becoming an even less acceptable mother and wife for handsome, first born son husband, who most likely could have done far better than I.

(Note to self: don’t offer unsolicited advice, comparisons in which the person being compared suffers, or corrective tips to children who marry into my family. Occasional praise of grandchildren without mentioning (a) other grandchildren’s achievements or (b) grandparent’s or parent’s similar and/or greater achievements also in order.)

Cleaning out J’s huge house — a house that’s been lived in by four generations of her family in the dusty San Joaquin valley in the middle of a vineyard — I saw in the many objects I helped her sort and pack where she is from. And I realized that possibly my resentment at her for not seeing me clearly (or trying to see me at all) had prevented me from finding out who she is.

This is what I saw: The spidery, faded handwriting of people who’ve been in California since before the gold rush. Two or three generations back, a great-grandmother wrote of her husband, “called me a foolish old woman. I am sure I have had enough of him.”

Textbooks from the beginning of the last century: educated people, among the first graduates of the new University of California in Berkeley. A grandmother who was a sorority girl and read lots of poetry. Beautiful crystal decanters. Not one, but two drinks carts. Cigarette boxes and porcelein objects whose only function is to hold cigarettes. Silver trays for snacks. These were generous people, who like to make other people happy and comfortable. More bodice-rippers from the late 19th and early 20th century than I knew existed. Nice editions of Woolf, Faulkner, Dinesen, Steinbeck: readers — for fun and for enlightenment.

Pictures of J as a young woman, at a women’s college in the east, looking like a more beautiful Grace Kelly. She studied Russian history and told us about how she’d opened her window wide in the winter and put on her fur coat and pretend to be Russian. As a young married woman with W in Alaska, she shot a huge moose. She knows how to clean fish and knew how to gut a moose. The other women in their group (two of them native Alaskans, she says, with some disdain even now, after forty five years) refused to gut fish or clean the moose.

Back in California, a handsome woman with four young children at Lake Tahoe. Jerry Brown (then, the young and hip governor of California) appointed her to a government board that tried to keep Lake Tahoe a pristine place. She’s wearing glasses now in the pictures of her in the paper, a serious woman staying home with her children, but doing something that matters.

She cares about her children and is not particularly judgmental, like a good hostess at a great party. W once told me that he can tell her anything and she will listen to him. She wants to give each of her children whatever they want: sometimes to their detriment and her own. She’s more generous than I am, and in two days divided among her four children four generations worth of pictures, and silver, and crystal and furniture and rugs and books. Every time I turn around, she’s handing me another piece of her history. That many of these things are covered in dust and spiderwebs does not detract from their beauty or their history as objects used to entertain and beautify.

J. kept almost nothing from the house for herself. I was with her when she sat in a furniture store in the little town near her vineyard, ordered a set of well made, but by no means fancy, furniture. I have seen her for the last five days reshaping the rest of her life into a simpler shape with the deft movements of a woman who knows exactly how she wants that to look. Everything she’s chosen to do for herself absolutely suits the woman she is, and is determined to be after March 31, when her house and her vineyard start a new life in someone else’s hands and she embarks on her own course. It must take enormous courage to do what she’s doing. And she is happy, that is quite clear. I’m so glad about that.

Note to self: Every time you think someone is failing to see you clearly, particularly someone who is part of your family, look a little more closely at them, and try to discover who they really are. It doesn’t matter so much whether they hear you. Just don’t let that keep you from hearing them.

Additional note to self: Do not store books in boxes and keep them in a damp place. They will be unusable when you get back to them ten years later. And never put things in boxes you don’t actually want when you move from a vacation house. Someone will have to go through them at some point, and that will not be pleasant for them.

Final note to self: Is it possible I am allergic to mold? Have developed horrible eye condition in left eye for which some kind of drops are needed. Also, may be allergic to damp, dust and spider webs because what began as a mild cold is now a raging sleep-depriving headachy sore throat monster. Certainly am allergic to clutter.

But am not allergic to mother in law. Love mother in law very much and will be going back to hang out with her and do more moving in a few weeks. Am grateful to husband for having such a mother and am only sorry it never occurred to me to read Russian novels in the middle of the cold New England winter with my window wide open. For that, though, I will need a fur coat, and J has not yet given those away.

February 17, 2007.

I’ve never cut big branches from a blossoming tree and put them in a vase before. I keep seeing this kind of arrangement (the Asian Art Museum, Chez Panisse) and think the branches beautiful, sculptural and spring-like.

Tomorrow’s Chinese New Year. Long, elegant cherry tree branches for sale everywhere at the Civic Center Farmer’s Market. We don’t have a cherry tree and could hardly sneak over to our neighbor’s and denude theirs, so I hacked three bud-filled branches from our magnolia tree (it’s not in the least the worse for wear) and stuffed them into a vase. I like it, but think there’s probably a way to keep them from going bad. Bleach in the vase? Also, the larger the vase, the more it looks like you’ve got the tree into your house. In a huge interior, that’s good. In our little house, not so good.

We’re spring cleaning around here. After the horrible year of breast cancer we need to announce to each other that we are in a different place now. Two big ways to do that? Buy a bigger house. Remodel our house. Either way, before we can do that, we (I really) have to clear out everything we don’t want or use anymore. Big garage sale coming up. Here’s today’s room, before.

Before the weekend ends, there will be an after. But until we get to work and remodel our house, or move into another one, we will have to live with that unfortunate floor.

Mission Impossible, the television series entertains us tonight. Who knew we’d be old enough to find this kind of thing nostalgic and our children to view it as ancient history? How funny it is to explain to a child what a phonograph record is. I love the past. Even my own past, which is full of badly cooked food, dingy interiors and lots of yelling.

All over the ‘net people are writing where they’re from. The trouble for me is that I am from where a lot of Americans are, a place that doesn’t lend itself to loving concrete memories. That’s because I’m from moving boxes, discarded photo albums, absent grandparents, parents’ wilfully forgotten memories of places too small, too painful, too hot, too dusty to be lovingly preserved. There is only one small piece of the past that still lives in me, and that’s from the time we lived in Europe and maybe too our yard at 12 Cedar Drive. Most of my memories of beauty come from living in those places. My own children, though, for them it’s another story entirely. For the last twenty years of my life, this place in northern California is exactly where I– and they — are from.

From my window I can see a small bird quivering on our neighbor Catherine’s magnolia tree. Her blooms are nicer than ours, more richly purple, but our tree is venerable and hers is a newcomer. The funny thing is that she’s the venerable one — almost 80, curmudgeonly, the owner of a dog named Spree whose barking has become part of the soundtrack of where we live. And we are the newcomers, the ones with the loud children. One of our greatest pieces of luck has been to find a house that’s surrounded by neighbors who are either hard of hearing, or incredibly mellow.

Finally, would like to record that I wrote this while (a) W and C got ready to go skiing, loaded up an ipod with appropriate songs and left; (b) littlest child played a huge fantasy out in the backyard about being a secret agent and, for the last ten minutes, has come upstairs every thirty seconds to badger me about setting up the wii so he can play on it. That’s twenty interruptions in ten minutes. It’s a wonder my head doesn’t just disintegrate. I do hate electronics sometimes, even if they love them.

2/17/07. A belated valentine’s day dinner at Chez Panisse. We rarely go out anymore, being so preoccupied with children and work. It’s good to remember that we once did this sort of thing, liked it, and will do it –someday — again.

Upstairs at the cafe, we walk by the open kitchen, and see a crowd huddled over what appears to be pizza dough on the counter. A woman with a cap of dark hair and a nice smile — Alice Waters — appears to be teaching the neophytes how to make a really good pizza. This is a good sign. We ate oysters (all oysters served at Chez Panisse are identified by their homeland, in this case, Hog Island, which I imagine Alice Waters goes to frequently, just to make sure that the ones she’s going to be serving me are up to snuff as the briney pieces of perfection they’re supposed to be. In fact, that’s just what they were.) W had a spring time ravioli, with peas — it was perfect and jewel-like. (Note to self: Lucette is making pasta from scratch. I should try that again after my effort ten years ago.) I had the thing everyone has, but I never do: the mixed lettuces salad with little rounds of baked goat cheese that have been rolled in some kind of crumb mixture. This used to be unusual; now you can get it at Costco. But it’s lovely, because it’s dressed by someone who loves lettuce and knows how to make vinaigrette.

Best of all, though, was the tisane. It’s such a simple thing really, but there’s no restaurant I know of in the United States where you know for a certainty that they boil the water they put over your tea (in most places it comes straight out of the espresso machine water tap). And how lovely to see those mint leaves become incredible tea. W had apple tart (pink lady apple, I’ll have you know). I shared my tea with W, because it is Valentine’s Day and that is What You Do. I want to grow mint and lemon verbena and have a glass teapot in which to make tisane.

One of my favorite things about Chez Panisse, oddly enough, considering that it’s a temple to gastronomy, is the bathroom. Someone, a lapsed catholic, a penitent glutton, installed what look like little confessional windows over the light fixture that’s directly above the toilet paper. I’ve never actually taken a picture of the interior of a bathroom before, but this seemed to call out for memorializing.

The movie we saw — Dreamgirls — was memorable only because it featured an Eddie Murphy who is so clearly enjoying himself. Everyone else seemed ‘way too earnest. This is, after all, a story about the rise of Diana Ross and the Supremes. I loved the audience though, a mixed group racially, with lots of African American women ranging in age from teenager to grandmother and lots of couples on dates. People clapped at particular rousing numbers by Jennifer Hudson and I did too. I like that sort of participatory cinema far better than the artsy movie theater in downtown Berkeley where people glare at you if you dare to shift in your seat a little bit.

I’ll admit to a moment of wishing I could, like Pepys, now write “and so to bed” — in fact, it was “so to home in order to put children to bed.” First, though, a terrific meltdown by smallest boy, who was reprimanded for yelling “bastard” at the game he was playing, and for calling the woman who has cared for him so lovingly since he was a baby “fatso.” He is, all accounts to the contrary, not a total monster. Not yet. But if we don’t continue to be very, very strict with him about things like this, he will be.