Emerald Friends When It Rains Gravel

There is something about seeing old friends that is fortifying and grounding like little else can be. It gives continuity and normalcy and perspective, all useful in a year that has been most un-normal. Seeing the Pauls was grounding, normalizing and as always, brought a lot of good laughs

They all seemed so well. Gloriann and of us women commiserated on Covid hair. John and April shared insights on academics, and we collectively threw up our metaphorical hands about the impossibility of balancing parenting and working well. Stan filled us in on what he’s been reading lately. It has something to do with advances in neuroscience but I can’t pretend I understood anything he said about it.

The food was a feast, needless to say. There were two elegant salads, one celebrating grapefruit and feta and goddess dressing (April); a delectable au gratin potato dish (Stan), Good Earth bakery baguette (John), sausages and grilled veggies kabob style AND grilled pineapple (Doug), and not one but two lemon meringue pies (Mom). Not to be biased, but my mother’s lemon meringue pies are incomparable. Even Stan agreed. And I set a mean table, a critical contribution.

Seeing these friends who have been in the center of my heart since I walked the curb the day before second grade started, was a gift. It was like being handed an emerald after a year of sitting under raining gravel.

San Francisco New and Told

It’s good to get out, and San Francisco is a fairly magical place to get out to. It’s especially nice for me to be outside in the fresh air instead of squirreled away in the outside room at Mom’s and Doug’s house, where I had hidden away for the last two days and nights. I had rapid tested positive for Covid, but this morning PCR tested negative. It was positively a relief to be negative.

Hugh took us into the city this afternoon to see a drive-in movie, and we watched Madeline in Paris with the San Francisco Bay glittering to the sides and seagulls swooping in front of the screen. Afterwards, we sat at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge at golden hour.

We then drove down Lombard Street, the crookedest street in the world. Finn and I raced along the side of the Ferry Building in the magical dusk while Clara watched skaters in the park and etched the Marina into her forever mind. I snapped photos of Fisherman’s Wharf and Hugh entertained us with stories.

As we drove past Ristorante Firenze into Chinatown, we felt chastened and reflective about the unconscionable violence towards Asians this week and forever. Especially in the Pacific-facing city, where ghosts of miners and gold panners live and where footprints of Japanese internment camps lay nearby, it’s impossible not to think with sadness of our tragedies.

Luckily as we told family stories of San Francisco, our thoughts lit up like the lights on the Bay Bridge. We laughed remembering how Kevin “dropped” his wedding ring into the Bay to prank Poppop and Brooks right before our wedding. Walking up the gangplank to take a champagne brunch cruise for Robin’s 50th was a bubbly memory, a whale of a good time that has forever warped my kids’ understanding of “brunch.” Getting creeped out at Alcatraz with the Hohenstreiters was a favorite for Finn.

And I had a fleeting memory of dinner at a Chinese restaurant with my grandparents as a child, pondering the jade lions guarding the door and my fortune. I love that my staid, conservative grandfather was progressive enough to work for Chinese colleagues in the 60s.

Clara may not get on the plane back to DC with us in a few weeks, as enchanted as she is by this cool gray city of love, in the words of Gary Kimura. That’s the great thing about travel, it pulls threads of the past into the future all while you’re just trying to enjoy the moment for a moment.

Thanksgiving II

Happy Thanksgiving! Greetings from Sink’s Grove, West Virginia, where the moon shines bright and the bulls roam free. Kevin found a small farmhouse for us for a few days and it’s so nice to have a new view. From every window, we see nothing but rolling green hills, cows, puffy clouds and hay bales. We thought it would be cool to give our California skater girls a new experience, and they seem to be enchanted. (Not to mention that we needed a break too.)

Or maybe it’s the fact that they’re sans parents and can sleep with their phones and eat Reese’s Pieces cereal from a casserole dish for breakfast.

It’s interesting meeting people with totally different lifestyles. Amy and Bob, who own this farmhouse, work as an RN and for the Caterpillar company and they run this small working farm. Amy is 45 and has two grandchildren, the older of whom (age 7) just killed his first deer this week. It’s like taking the blinders off and looking at the panorama to remember how differently people can construct happy lives.

It’s hard being separated from family on these holidays and the internet is spotty, but we did get to zoom with Tatum briefly and with Kevin’s family. Last year for Thanksgiving we were in Seymour. How quaint and decadent that family visit now seems!

Yesterday Kevin told Finn to go pet the pretty cow standing in the field. When Finn hesitated, taking in the side of the mammoth black beast, Kevin told him from behind the nice fence to toughen up. It turns out that pretty cow was a bull. Well, every day is an adventure in Wild West Virginia.

It was a Dark and Stormy Night

Halloween 2020 didn’t happen for a lot of kids, but it did in Cabin John. Lots of social distancing, contactless picking up of treats on tables, and, appropriately, mask wearing. It was awesome, considering. Events turned darker than expected personally, but it was a treat having family and friends with us to celebrate, including parents, nieces, and Tunisia-based Noelle and Mica.

“We’ll Make Tiny Changes in Your Honor”

I really appreciate Tatum’s concern for justice and her willingness to speak truth and speak up for what’s good. I hope the legacy of RBG endures and gives my lion-natured, social butterfly, beautiful, live-in-the-moment daughter all the opportunities she deserves and support she needs to survive being an adolescent girl in the 2020s. I can’t do big things right now, so I will focus on doing tiny things in her honor.

Maker of Soup Magic

There are some kinds of soup that are fillers before a meal that you barely notice, and then there are Poppy’s soups. They are the heart of the meal or perhaps the only dish in the meal. Dad and Mary Ellen had us over for dinner last night and Dad made soup. It was sort of in the realm of potato and leek soup, and it had both of those ingredients in it, but it also had other things, sausage and some other mysterious things. It was milky and hot, requiring Finn to have a good dose of milk as a chaser. Finn was motivated by the cupcake waiting for him at the bottom of the bowl, as it were. Clara could not be convinced even by the cupcake, although she tried cheerfully to move things around in case we missed the pile of leeks on her plate. Dad equally cheerfully shared a bite, but only a bite, of his cupcake with her.

This is the thing about Poppy soup. Poppy doesn’t make soup, he makes soup magic. It is about trying new things, never having the same soup (experience) twice because there’s always something else that would be interesting to try, and always, always being curious and keeping things interesting.

It was about a year ago (on October 8) that Poppy came home from the hospital (three hospitals, over two months, one new heart later), and we celebrated with a vat of paella big enough to feed a village. That day, we didn’t know if Poppy would be able to physically get into the house or even out of the car. We didn’t know if he would be able ever to walk upstairs again.

When Poppy reads articles about patients with COVID being on ventilators, kept alive by “something called an ECMO, which I wouldn’t expect you to understand, but it basically serves as the body’s heart and lungs,” I smile and nod and try not to experience PTSD. I don’t tell him that I could write a small thesis on the ECMO and it’s relationship to hypoxia, oxygen saturation levels, blood pressure, kidney functioning, sedation and intubation. Everyone in the family could.

Just over a year ago, we took every flicker of the eyes or a movement from his left hand as an important indicator, not knowing which way he would go. We dissected his every movement for signs of progress or regression. We cried over his bedside, sat beside him throughout the night, prayed for him and held his hand while trying not to touch the equipment saving his life. We listened to every Rounds in the hallway, studied x-rays on the screen of Dad’s lungs, and asked too many questions (we were trained by the best). Camp Biggar may also have been known to eat a serious amount of food from Sweet Green, Panera’s, the Thai place and the M&M company. We rearranged waiting room furniture and conducted reliable and valid bathroom evaluations–anything to distract us from the fact that Dad may or may not leave that room awake.

Last night, I had to jog to keep up with him while walking the dog. He ran 4 miles a few weeks ago. He had Tatum pruning the hydrangea bush in the back yard yesterday, has handwritten 100 postcards to voters in West Virginia, written a screen play, performed as Bob the Weatherman in Finn’s film, and repaired our refrigerator. He has been to the Kennedy Center, a talk I gave at American University, and would have traveled the Baltic Sea this summer had it not been for a pandemic. Dancin’ Bob danced at Honi Honi and may have waterskied. He has made soup magic. Every dinner is a celebration with Poppy.