Feet Leave the Ground

Sorry the Haus has been so quiet!  
There's the usual intense internal dialogue going about some major things...I've been a real Thinker Thinkerton over here, but have felt much more private lately.  Weird, huh?


At the end of the day yesterday, after Pizza Port-ing and butterfly sightings at the beach, we pulled over at a quiet spot so the boys could surf.  There wasn't much surf to speak of, but their skinny, flu-weakened arms couldn't have handled much anyhow.

Every time I look at Sage now, I think of the word akimbo.  He's all lines and angles and I think to myself, "Arms akimbo!"

I watched him running towards the water yesterday, and for a brief moment as he jumped over a pile of seaweed, he was airborne.
I thought, that's how you know you're happy; when your feet leave the ground.

I used to love to open a book when they surfed, but I don't do that anymore (and yes, I do plan to join them!)

I watch, and I soak it up.  Remember in the beginning when you would watch them breathe?  You do it at the end, too.



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Gettin' Some-Why I Hate the Gym and Crave Adventure

Something funny has begun to happen to me.

I've never been the most physical of people.  I don't enjoy being out of breath and in pain, and I hate the gym with a passion.  When I go inside, I feel a part of me dying.  It's socially acceptable, institutionalized self-torture!  Like the terrible Greek myth of Sisyphus who is doomed to push a boulder up a hill over and over only to have it roll back down, people run and run and arrive at precisely nowhere, climb stairs that will never, ever end in a rooftop view, and endlessly push their arms and legs against a contraption that is not pumping a well or moving a stack of wood or doing anything at all.

And let's not even talk about the music.  Gym music makes me suicidal.  I know...listening to Nick Drake croon, "pink, pink, pink, pink moon" doesn't make you want to jump around.

I understand that people do it for their body, their health, and that it inexplicably makes them feel good after.  But you know me-I need meaning in everything.  If you want to move your arms, lift roofing materials onto your old neighbor's roof.  If you want to do squats, go help harvest lettuce at the local organic coop.  This is how I feel about exercise; it's great if it's a by-product of actually doing something.  

Super unpopular I know, as my views tend to be.

Well, I don't really know where this is coming from, but lately my desire to push myself mentally and physically has grown.  Quite a bit, actually.

Maybe it's rebellion against the idea of what a mom "should" be like.  Maybe I feel defiant about my age and the complacency that has crept in and made itself comfortable in my life.  I'm tired.  I don't want to be wet or dirty or uncomfortable.  I'm becoming less flexible, less tolerant, and I hate that.

I don't want to grow soft.  I don't want to "go gently into that good night".  I want to rage, rage, and maybe surf or skate into the dying of the light.

So I've been thinking; why don't I bomb hills with my kids?  Aside from a lot of skin surface and my front teeth, what do I have to lose?  Who said I can't?  And if not now, then when?

Suddenly I want to dangle from cliff faces, hike the entire Camino de Santiago de Compostela, jump out of moving things, and plow through heavy surf.  I want to feel the very edges of my physical and mental boundaries...I want to know their contours and textures intimately.

At dinner with friends the other night, I articulated this out loud for the first time and my best friend asked, "Why do you think you feel like that?"

"I don't know," I said,  "I just want to live.  Until there is no life left in me, I want to feel and I want to live."

Anyone else up for some adventure?





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CAMPAIGN DESK

Once upon a time I bought a beautiful house and claimed a room in it as my office. This room was not large, and the dumb old antique glass doorknobs always fell off when I slammed the door shut and yelled, "Be quiet! I'M WORKING!!!" Sometimes they fell off on the outside, which meant eventually someone had to come and let me out. This still happens in the master bath, and so, if you haven't seen me in a while, please check there first.





But it was my room. OK, so I shared it with the ironing board (taunting me always) , a guest sofa, several friendly guitars, and enough amplifiers to recreate the Who's WALL OF SOUND. Yet, when I said the words, "I'll be in the office," I wasn't referring to a blanket fort under the dining room table. You didn't have to follow the extension cord until it ended at me, sitting on the floor in the stair landing, typing furiously. It was a room with a door, and it was mine. Occasionally my family was even kind enough to leave a pen or half-chewed pencil there for me to use.





Fast forward a few phases of child development, and it became necessary to give our sons their own rooms. Among other things, the top bunk was being used to investigate certain laws of physics. Growing up in a house full of girls, it had never occurred to me to see if I could pee on ANYONE'S head from the top bunk. There is simply no way to prepare for certain things about parenting.





There followed a whole year where my "office" was an old desk three feet from the blissful marriage bed, from which my husband would lovingly glare at me, turn over, sigh loudly, and bury his head in three pillows. I felt great about it. I was also able to conserve nearly all my calories, since my commute for the day was: roll out of bed onto rolling chair, push self off wall over to desk. Never had gaining weight been so easy, so automatic!





I decided to rejoin the living by sharing the family computer upstairs. Commence six months of wondering, was it just me or did everyone in my family chew food/breathe so loud that I could not focus on what I was doing? (It was me)


This is my long, I'm-sick-in-bed-so-I'm-going-to-tell-you-my-life-story, way of saying we are turning the garage into an office and I painted an old campaign desk Kelly green. Behr's "Mint Sprig" green to be exact. The rug and the chair look a little awful with it, but nothing says "These would be perfect for mom" like random things dug out of the basement. I know...my selfish materialism knows no bounds.





SO, come visit me in the new office. We can hold important meetings and try and ignore that the garage door was just sprayed by a skunk. I hope you like centipedes and mice as much as I do! Of course, if you don't find me there, it's possible that another family need has forced a relocation of my office. Look for an extension cord. Follow it. There are a few spots we haven't yet tried as my office. There's a crotch in the tree out back I may be able to use...

The Trouble with Reading

I've fallen down a rabbit hole but it's ok, I've been here before.

As a kid I spent entire years of my life here, reading book after book, walking around with barely one foot in this world. Having kids meant I had to choose the Now, although I could have easily become one of those professors that bumps into things and wears the same clothes three days in a row.

I could have been even weirder than I am now. Imagine.

I watch my son, coming late to the experience of really reading, doing the same. He comes home late from school and immediately excuses himself, apple in hand, to his room. He lays on his bed sideways, propped on an elbow, facing the wall and curled around his book.

I make no sound when I see him there-the large, messy pile of books next to his bed a small version of my own. I know that he's not really there, and that if I speak to him the voice that answers me won't be his.

Inside the books he is finding the things that I want him to find, and the things that I'm afraid he'll find. He reads about the Chumash, the Maus graphic novels that make their ugly but necessary mark on him, John Muir's memoirs.

At this age I know that each book will somehow be about him, while the books I read are less clear to me; a Chinese scholar swatting flies under Chairman Mao's rule, a plain slave marrying a farmer and living through cycles of want and prosperity, a Black Atlanta teenager navigating a complicated family, Indian immigrants and the seductively academic world they inhabit. I recognize the universal problems of "being", the work of becoming oneself among the complications of community and family, the blurry line that context makes between right and wrong.

And when I get up from my books, I have that old familiar feeling of being a little tender and lost in the world. I look at a lamp and try to force myself to think "lamp," but I can't.

Today my mind is curled around its books. I am turned towards a wall, but I see everything.



What I'm reading this week:

The Bitter Sea, Charles N. Li
The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck (again)
Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri (run, run, run to buy this)
Silver Sparrow, Tayari Jones
Swim Back to Me, Ann Packer
The Power of One, Bryce Courtenay
Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv

I'm Happy, Feeling Glad

This has been the summer of Summer. I don't mean that everything is going my way...not at all. Ebay sales are taking a long, extended vacation for instance.

And my 13-year old is in an awful "criticize and question everything my mom does" phase. And also a "find everything she does irritating" phase. I am unpopular, and there's no sign of a comeback on the horizon.

Yet Dad is still, confoundingly, the awesomest human being alive. Dads get all the brakes I think.

And nothing in my life is or ever has been easy or free. I do my own stunts. What I have, I have made happen pretty much on my own, and that has meant years of steady and very hard work, saving, self-discipline, and, in the realm of relationships, intense loyalty and emotional investment (also a few bucks worth of therapy).

Maybe that's what accounts for the extreme pleasure and satisfaction of seeing my life take shape to be something, well, rather close to what I wanted it to be, with a few surprise elements mixed in.

Very early on, I clearly remember deciding to go for happiness, and you know what? I found it. As a kid I just sort of instinctually knew...that I would have to insist on it. That I couldn't compromise and that there would be no shortcuts. That it's not an easy path to walk. That lots of things would try and throw me off the path to happiness. Some by masquerading as happiness (money, selfish ambition, the promise of a "better" or "easier" life with someone else or somewhere else), and some by overshadowing it. Disappointment. Bitterness. Loss.

I have walked through the valley of the shadow of yuck, most surely, and for many years, but I feared no evil because I really did believe with all of my big squishy heart that I would come out on the other side happy.

The Bible, since you mentioned it, says people can be "refined" by fire, like metal. You can get burned up and blackened by life, or you can let the fire burn away the impurities and come out solid.

This week in particular I am filled with motherly gratitude. As all mothers can attest, it is the nirvana of motherhood to be able to raise your children as you wish to, providing them with the things you value.

Last night as we sat on a bougainvillea-covered patio eating dinner and talking--about our upcoming trip to Spain, about the day spent surfing and kayaking, about our goals--I felt, I don't know, rewarded? Blessed? Fortunate? I guess all of the above, and peaceful too.

I am exquisitely aware that I have a privileged life (even if to others it doesn't look that way), and that most parents don't have the option of taking care of their children the way they would like.

That's why I get the deepest joy out of things that seem silly; a bag full of new jeans for school, air conditioning, organic cherries, a Fleet Foxes song that comes on the radio as we drive along the ocean. These things make me feel like the luckiest girl in the world.

Today my kids are doing this



to this bridge, and then anchoring for lunch and a swim




And very, very soon we are all going to there





and there







This morning I dropped by the thrift store and bought a European resort wear wardrobe for $16.50 including two pair of shoes.

Want to see me model them with my knobby knees and freckles and gap-tooth grin? Come back later and see if I convince the husband to play fashion photographer!

Change of Plans

I had planned on venting this morning.
People seem particularly mean-spirited and aggressive lately, and it hurts my soft, squishy little heart. So, while I got the laundry going, and while I bagged almonds for school lunches, and while I poured my coffee I didn't even see what I was doing. I was busy, see, mentally rehearsing the many ways in which people and life have been less-than-stellar. Just so I could accurately share the love (hate) with you.

And then something in me turned over at the thought of being that person.

And I thought instead of the blissful hour spent holding my chubby little niece while she mewed and sighed and nuzzled me in her sleep. And how my husband kept opening the office door and looking at me, which was at first so entirely annoying until he finally said I just like to look at you when it's quiet. Reminding me in quite an off-handed way of a favorite Pablo Neruda poem.



Even how my oatmeal and hot blueberries taste just a little bit like dessert.



And that November is back in a nice, moody little splash of rain and I have to watch the Painted Veil because it's way overdue and didn't I pay extra for it, so hadn't I better watch it?



And all the people who said nice things about my hair and made me feel kinda pretty (yes I did it!)




So I'm not going to be that person. I don't have any reason to be.

Silencio, por favor

I haven't been saying much lately. Maybe you didn't notice? The thing is, lately I can't stand blogs. Mine or yours (but not hers or hers...they do their own stunts and are always redeeming). The thought of barfing out another useless blog post makes me sad. Sometimes the blogosphere smells like one big sewage recycling plant...barfing out the same barf someone already barfed a million barfs ago. It is SO TIRED sometimes it makes me want to go Pete Townsend on my keyboard.
And what's with all the unpaid product endorsements? "This cream cured my chapped udders" "I'm swooning for this." Really? You swooned? Was your corset too tight? Did you have to be revived by smelling salts? Any particular organic brand you'd like to endorse? Cuz the next time you swoon I'm going to punch myself in the face, and I'm really going to need smelling salts.
I had a mean, grouchy, talented AP English teacher in high school. And when we would write, he'd say "If it's already been said, and you can't say it differently, then please DON'T BOTHER!"
Kind of a good rule, don't you think? Maybe a good way not to be a regurgitator is to be honest. Say something truthful, painful, or surprising. If you're a designer, show us your own work. Put something out there that wasn't there before. And if you got nothin of your own, maybe you should go out and DO things for a while and get yourself something.

So in that vein, here's what's really going on this week.
We're applying for new health insurance and they've asked us, a number of times now, both in writing and on recorded phone calls, to swear on our dead mothers that we've never suffered mental or physical ailments of any kind. Because your mothers are going to be dead if we find out you're lying to us. Insurance companies are such goons. I truly fear them and their power as if they're some Japanese street fighting gang controlling my neighborhood.

The final question was totally bizarro. The lady said, please answer yes or no: "I am not seeking insurance because of an illness. It is only for peace of mind."

Oh, what a psychotic system this is. No, of course I wouldn't expect my health insurance to treat my illnesses! That would be crazy!
Geez people, I just don't wanna die! That's all. I'm not even asking for peace of mind. Just agree to stop the bleeding and reattach the limbs if necessary. Please insure me. Or I'll have to defect to Cuba. I like those cars...

Also, the youngest is going totally bat guano on us lately. On top of that, he suddenly can't sleep and wants all the lights on. Which, according to all the parenting books, is the number one sign he's taking drugs or that something far more sinister is going on. Which is why I don't read parenting books. But thanks, stupid child psychologists, for making parenting an even more paranoid experience.

And finally, Pork Chop here sure is cute but he's been busy coating everything in our house in thick, musky, brown dog pee. Like, the smell does not go away after it's cleaned up with toxic, non-Mrs. Meyers, bleach-based contraband cleaners. Yes, getting him fixed will help. But the husband is feigning ineptitude in locating one of the 90 vets within a mile of us to perform this basic task. I'm about to do it myself with a pizza cutter. Shut up, PETA.

Yeah, not glamorous. No product recommendations or overexposed lying-sack-of-poo photos showing us all perfect and enjoying an end-of-summer tomato salad on the beach. I had In-n-Out and a beer for dinner. You want a picture of that?? Besides, it would take too long to crop out the dog pee, the pizza cutter, me shaking a fist at the husband, the oldest rolling his eyes, and the youngest rolling on the floor being weird. Photoshop just isn't that good. And you know what? Neither are we. Deal, yo.

StoryCorp-Germans in the Woods

Many of you are reading and passing around Joanna Goddard's Storycorp post of the sweet, elderly couple.
But late night KPBS-viewing yielded this new recording. It's still breaking my heart this morning. And it illustrates the damages of war on a personal level that is somehow more accessible and immediate than those overwhelming scenes of mass-casualties and destruction. This we can wrap our minds around. This refuses to be glorified or justified.

Watch the full episode. See more POV.

Summer's End

After the fastest-paced Summer ever, we've been slammed into school mode...hard. Ah, it's only just Opening Day and we're already resurrecting the late night, tearful, "I didn't know my homework would take so long" performance of last year. Bravo! Encore! The tears seem so real! Powerful performance, night after night!

I'm hoping the possibility of a schedule may emerge from the chaos...you (gainfully employed folks) may chafe at your regular work hours and dream about having flexibility and an all-pajama work wardrobe. But me? Lately I find myself dreaming of structured schedules, lunch hours that don't involve a fistful of pretzels and two loads of laundry, colleagues that aren't dogs or children, and downtown offices. Business calls that aren't interrupted by something burning on the stove (and the microwave and outside my office door...). I bet most of you don't have two boys in trunks and towels and snorkel masks standing next to your desk saying, "Are you done yet? Are you done yet?" in tandem, repeatedly, until you give up, shut down the computer, grab a bag of pretzels, and take them to the gosh-dang beach already. Well, maybe that part wasn't so bad.

The point is, I'm ready. Ready for school to start, and not in that "can't wait to get rid of the kids" way, but in that "I'd like to have some control over my time" way. Yes, there IS a difference.

What about y'all? Does the Fall bring changes to your pace and purpose? Even without children, it seems like a bit more of a buckle-down, get-to-work, introspective season. I know...I bragged in the early Summer that I was going to talk about sangria all the way through October, and now I'm rushing the season out the door. Here's some of our Summer color to make it up to you:

Latin/ On Leaving the University

If I've learned anything in the past few months of blogging, it's that the public sphere can be a treacherous place for a tender little heart. And yet...
I had intended to share a clip of Billy Collins (2008 Poet Laureate) reading his poem Litany, but ended up, after three minutes of frantic typing, with this. It surprised me, too. Sometimes my brain communicates directly with my fingers and fails to check in with the shy editors in my frontal lobe.


"They say you've not truly arrived until your name is followed by a Latin phrase. No, they don't say that. I say that. But I don't mean it. I'm sure you can be very accomplished without being summa cum-laude or poet laureate. Without Greek symbols of your intelligence hanging in dipped gold around your neck. Without confusing people; are you a Free Mason? Greek Orthodox or something? Without the silly ceremonies where mothers and cheerleaders alike cross their hearts and swear to add their sweat beads of wisdom to the intimidatingly large pot. Where favorite professors in black robes knight you, press you into service. Convince you to ride shotgun and fight ignorance. And you ARE convinced. You see yourself moving amongst those time-worn halls till the End of Days. Smelling nothing but books and libraries and Fall, seeing tops of heads bowed down low at the sound of your lecturing voice. And bright eyes. You think of what chair you would put in your office and the eager girls who will sit there...a lifetime of sculpture and syllabi and research mixing with plants in your big-windowed house. But you take communion only half believing in your visions. And you could stay forever but you rise and walk out, your black robe billowing, your medals making hollow clanks at your neck. Those who have come to watch you, they only half believe too. And you can't make it real. The vision only goes so far, and you can't see your family or the Forever from the big-windowed house. Just books. A beautiful desk. Your preferred pencils. The soft light on your aging face. And you walk out into the rain and you don't go back."


p.s.-gone to Malibu...back Thursday. Talk amongst yourselves.

Age of Awareness

Observing kids this week has made me wonder:

When do we stop wanting to climb into treehouses, or hang out of car sunroofs, or go out in the ocean as far as we can and look at the shore from the distance?

When do we stop noticing that the branches of a tree are good for climbing?

I think it's when we stop being thrilled by seeing the world from a different perspective and start fearing it. When change is threatening instead of interesting. When we begin to willfully contract the borders of our world. When "different" becomes something we try to avoid.

I think it's when we start seeing, and caring about, race and class and status, and we know where we stand and where everyone else stands, too.

I think it's the beginning of cynicism; the beginning of the belief that the possibilities are not endless.

I think it's the death of curiosity. The Age of Awareness is a damn shame. I hope I never get there.

This I Know...

Costa Rica, 8/09

I know that.....

every day I have more of everything than I have any right to

Paris is even better than you think it is; better than it has any right to be

sometimes words, both spoken and written, aren't quite enough; sometimes you need music

a ten-year old who wears fedoras with everything melts my heart

being good will always be way more important than being great