"Just Okay"

"Just Okay".

The answer my son gives to everything so far on the 3rd Annual Lipton Family Driving Trip. From the absolute wild splendor of Big Sur to the quiet dusky golden hills above Santa Barbara from a tent right before the sun ducks behind the far hill. The only times he's been enthusiastic are: 1) in the Musee Mechanique on Pier 39--a pier full of mechanical games from Europe in the 1800's; 2) Everything about Point Lobos; and 3) the breakfast at Deetjens Big Sur Lodge.

It's annoying, especially when I'm having such a wonderful time, but like the book I've been reading "The Geography of Bliss", it's all relative to the person who is experiencing the place. My husband and I are satisfied by the beauty of mile upon mile of craggy cliff...to a 10-yr old, probably not so much.

But today it all came together on the pier at Avila Beach and later at the safari tent at El Capitan Canyon...I cooked our dinner over a campfire, aided by a nice bottle of local Pinot Gris, and smores rounded out the night as the kids played with the kids from the tent next door. As we settled down for the night our kids asked questions about the bears and cougars the signs warned about. We told them that's why they were in the bed next to the tent opening...ahhhh, the lol on their little faces.

Tomorrow is horse back riding and sea kayaking...while I will be happy in both places, I'm not holding out for more than an "okay" from my son...and a chicken cluck from my daughter (which is a whole other story), but of not, then I have no doubt that his bliss will be found a mile or two or 100 down the road.

We all have a geographic place of bliss in each of us, even when we don't know it until we are right in the middle of it.

Where is the Fisherman Dwarf!

My daughter was extremely disappointed to find out we'd been saying "wharf" and not "dwarf" today. It's 5 hours since the "realization" and she's still pretty bitter....although good food at dinner might have dented the haze of disppointment that surrounded her most of the afternoon. I haven't asked her what she was imagining...quite frankly I'm a little scared...so we'll all just keep our own fisherman dwarf pictures in our own heads.

I love a restaurant that meets you at the door with a glass of good wine. That's what we found tonight at the Pacific Cafe on the Inner Richmond tonight. Amazing staff, great food---the salmon bisque, calimari steaks and Turbot cooked in paper was all to die for...luckily we walked around for 8 hours today because the food was big and yummy.

The kids had a great time working on a three-masted schooner this afternoon--raising the anchor and singing old sea shanties was pretty cool for all of us...that's the power of our National Park service...right down among the crowded tourist muck of the wharf is a national park with all kinda of refurbished boats from schooners to paddlewheel tugs and more...the presentation of information kept both kids interested, not to mention both parents.

No books today but found two culture magazines that I promptly subscribed to: Giant Robot, which mostly focuses on Asian pop culture and DAMn which is about international contemporary culture. Both arecworth looking into.

One kid is asleep , the other just asked "If you had a piece of chalk and were drawing a line, how long would a minute be?". I swear we didn't hit The Haight again today, but from where I'm sitting right now, I kinda wished we had. Off to answer the unanswerable.

24 Hours in San Franciso

Ball pythons. Ghosts of swimmers a Sutro Baths. $88 of fun at Cal Academy of Science. A poem about food at corner of Haight & Ashbury. Dinner with family in the Castro. Book stores, coffee, and chocolate!

The Art of Embarrassing Your Children

A few days ago, my daughter and I were talking about our upcoming trip and she was talking about meeting kids to play with and so, I started to paint a picture for her.  The family on the beach, other kids her age nearby, me cuddling and kissing her, calling her monkey-butt and tickle-butt and various other names, playing tickle monster and World Federation Baby Wrestling, followed by our verions of "So, You Think You Can Dance?", and then, the culmination, me kissing her dad in front of everyone.

"Mom, you have totally lost your kid memory", she said. "That would be just evil to me if you did that."

"What is kid memory", I asked her.  "You know", she said.  "It's like when adults forget how to be a kid, or what it was like to be a kid."

Ahhh...my Kid Memory.  Yes, on some level the years have blunted the impact of those moments thrust upon me by both parents and siblings alike...the rough edge of mortification and the drowning feeling that it was just going to keep getting worse.... but not so much that we as parents don't get quite a bit of joy out of heaping it upon our children..probably too much sometimes if truth will out.

The whole topic came up again last night while she and I were reading in bed.  She decided that the only books she was going to take on our trip were books that would remind me about Kid Memory--her logic being that if she reminded me every day I wouldn't do anything to embarrass her.  Silly, silly girl.  I feel for her, really I do.

But beyond that, I have to admit that her list of books is practically perfect--and here are her "Top 5":

5.  Ramona and Beezus

4.  Fudge, SuperFudge, DoubleFudge

3.  Junie B. Jones (any of them)

2.  Babymouse:  Queen of the World

1.  The Penderwicks and The Penderwicks on Gardam Street

So, here is to my daughter and her dream of an embarrassment-free childhood.  I wonder what she'll say when I tell her that to me, these books are just ideas waiting to happen?

I Will Never Laugh Again!

This, of course, is coming from our son who until recently was the nicest, laughing-est kid around.  His laugh is infectious and goofy and you can't help but smile back at him.

Until recently. 

I've mentioned this before, but it bears mentioning again:  10-year olds can be moody little so-and-so's.  This morning's incident was because he couldn't find 'the most important game in the world' for his Nintendo DS, so he was stuck playing something "boring and worthless" when he was 'powned' in my office for a couple hours while his sister was at the dentist with Dad.

Of course, I'm like, "Dude!  Read...you have the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy there...one of the funniest books around."

And of course, he's like, "I haven't laughed yet and I won't...not even inside."

And of course, I'm like, "Whaaaaaa!  What do you mean you haven't laughed....hello?  42?  Doesn't that get a giggle?  What about the whole conversation between Arthur and Ford about the monkey's doing Hamlet?"

He just stared at me. Reminded me of the time we took him to Chinatown for "chickenfeet and squid"...there was a joke that really backfired on us.

So, instead of torturing him some more, I set about jotting down the books that make me laugh, outloud and at length.  A few of these books I've mentioned before, but they're worth repeating. 

So, in no particular order:

Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving:  My friend Christy Gardner and I read and re-read this in the halls of Butte Falls High School, sitting and laughing hysterically.

The Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy O'Toole.  All I can say is, 'the hot dog scene'.

One for the Money (and the rest) by Janet Evanovich.  Stephanie and her pals crack me up! 

Lamb.  The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal.  by Christopher Moore.  I laugh because I can go to Confession and make it all good again.

The Wrong Venus by Charles Williams.  Best noir about Americans in France, bodice-ripper genre and kidnappers.  Don't ask, just get it, read and laugh your ass off.

P.S. Your Cat is Dead.  by James Kirkwood.  I don't know how this got into my parents bookshelf, but it did and I would read it in secret...hard to do when everybody can hear you laugh.

Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins.  There are three lines that get me every damn time.  First, "They're no threat to me.  I have a black belt in Haiku.  And a black vest at the cleaners."  Second, "Sharks are the criminals of the sea.  Dolphins are the outlaws." And last but not least (and I'll mis-remember this one)..."She lunched on Papaya Poo Poo or Mango Mu Mu or some other fruity thing with overripe tropican vowels."  Classic!

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris.  Duh!

A Porcine History of Philosophy and Religion by James Taylor.  This was at a friends house when I was growing up.  I had no clue who Kierkegaard was at age 12, but there was something about these drawings of pigs that made me giggle.

I could go on and on...from Rivethead to Catch-22.  And Bill Bryson to Nick Hornby.  But these books above are the ones that I remember laughing with and can look forward to laughing with again someday. Hopefully my son will be there with me on some of them...once he decides to allow laughter back into his life of course.

The Rolly-Polly Dilemma or "Let the Great World Spin"

My daughter has a fascination with the rolly-polly or pill bug.  She likes how they look and what they do, but mostly she likes to care for them, her little body all folded up in an effort to get closer to them.  When I see it, it is one of those moments as a parent where you want to laugh and dance in the sunshine or where the back of your throat get's all tight and achy.

As the majority of our rolly-polly live in an area where we also have quite a few lizards, frogs and toads, a lot of my daughters time is spent worried that they will run across each other and what will happen at that point.  Quite a few of our midnight conversations have her working out, in detail, the possibilities of a rolly-polly meeting up with a toad or a lizard--their conversations, the adventures they might have or about those times when things go horribly wrong very quickly.  In the background of these stories is our family, especially her father who spends time on the porch at night smoking and reading.  His footsteps have both saved and doomed many and various of the rolly-polly much to her delight.

It is a small view, the barest of understandings, of her and her friends place in the world and how they are effected by larger forces, but sometimes as her stories play out, I get the sense that her curiosity about cause and effect drives more of the action than just straight imagination.  Her little voice in the dark huffing out, "Oh, well.  Harold (a rolly) would have preferred to be eaten by the toad, but of course, Daddy's foot drove him right into the Lizard. Poor Harold...", makes me laugh--She has total control over the story,  yet her bitterness at the outcome is biting.

All of this reminds me in a way of the book I'm reading now, Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann.  I orginally looked at it because it was set around Phillipe Petit and his inspiring and petrifying walk on a wire between the World Trade Centers in 1974.  I love the documentary, Man on a Wire and wanted to know more.  However, I found that this was just a background and catalyst for the real stories--small lives intersecting to create bigger things..sometimes horrible, sometimes happy.

The beauty of these lives are in their convergence where singular becomes plural and the ripples more interesting than the drop that preceeded it.  As with my daughter and her stories of the rolly-polly, this book is lyrical in how it swirls in and out of the chance versus fate philosophy of life. 

And,  regardless of whether you are a "chance-ist" or a "fate-ist", you'll love this book, only don't get it on the Kindle as I did...it is a book worthy of the visceral feel and weight and smell of a book.   Just like my daughter gets in close and personal, pets and pauses, thinks and re-thinks, so to will you, I think, with this book, whose story, like those of the rolly-polly to a parent,  can inspire a throat to both laugh and ache.

In the future I can see it on my shelf, its raggedness speaking for how much I cherish it... much like a droopy rolly-polly in a small hand on a hot day.

Ear to Ear Combat

I read somewhere that we actually have a "National Listening Day" on May 16.  This annoys me for a number of reasons, but mostly because it seems to be counter-intuitive...my whine about this type of celebratory day is the same for this specific one:  we all should be working on listening to each other everyday or we will be engaged in, as my daughter called it last week, "Ear-to-Ear Combat".

As part of my nightly conversation with my daughter, we were laying in the dark meandering all around the listening subject and I asked her about her earlier comment that listening is 'ear to ear combat'...she said it's like when she's playing war with her older brother and his friends and she's always put in the corner of the yard as the "POW" so they can ignore her while saying they are playing with her...she said as the littlest person in the household her words always seem to lose out, or as she sees it, "...put in the corner", especially by her brother, and that they have to fight to be heard.

She went on to say that mostly he only hears what he wants to hear from her. 

I agree with her--not just about her brother, but in general.  We all have a problem with only hearing what we want to hear, regardless of who you are listening to. 

Sometimes it is because you want them to be saying something different, or saying it differently.  Sometimes it's because you will only hear a certain thing, no matter what they are trying to say.  Sometimes it's because you are so busy trying to figure out what to say next, you just hear what they are saying in the best context for your comment.

Regardless of why, not truly hearing what the other person is saying rarely leads to happy moments for anyone.

I am on this subject because it's summer which means the kids are thrown together a lot more than during the school year...and being 7 and 10 they each have a strength of will that would put Napolean or Ghandi to shame.  And because my husband desperately needs to be heard by an adult by the end of his day and I'm not always available as that's all I've been doing all day.  Not surprisingly, it's on his mind as well, as the post on his blog (http://carnefelize.blogspot.com/) the other day (A Parentalogue on Process), talks about it from his perspective. 

Needless to say, there is not a lot of listening happening right now so it's something we are working on..sometimes painfully.  When my son asks for the more expensive but three-row rental car for our driving vacation, I'm almost tempted to spend the money. But no, we'll get the two-row car and we'll have fun, dammit!

So ironically it's in the midst of this that I find I chose as part of my summer reading pile, to re-read for the umpteenth time "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee.  Which, at it's heart, is about a situation where people only heard and saw what they wanted to hear--Boo Radley and Tom Robinson were only known by what others said about them,  except for the children who seem to hear the truth of and behind everything. Most people say that this book is a lecture on the sin of killing people without a voice.  You can also flip the penny and say it is a sin to, as my daughter said, only listen with blinders and hear only what you want to hear.

On the lighter side of listening, I'm reading for the first time the Vish Puri mysteries by Tarquin Hall...an investigator after my own heart as he is very much the Perry Mason/Precious Ramostwe-good listening type of crime solver. They listen with their heart and head, often leading to the right, but "grey-ish" decision.  There are two books about this Indian private investigator and they are a fantastic read.

For children, a favorite book in our house is Hepcat, by William Bramhall about a musician who has 'lost his groove'.  He's told to 'cruise the scene and find his music' and while wary at first, he let's  himself go and finds his music again in the sounds around him from the thunder to wind in the trees to birds and more.  It's a fun, lyrical read and the illustrations are really groovy.  But most importantly, it's a light but impactful way to talk about the importance of listening and what you can lose if you don't.

My hope is that by the end of our driving vacation we will all have gotten over this phase in our various relationships and will have moved from Ear-to-Ear Combat to something less aggressive and in nature. 

Hmmm, maybe I should get the three-row car just to help that process out.