I was the only person there born between 1970 and 1985, and so the kids table was drastically diluted by my presence. And possibly corrupted, though I admit nothing. The 32 and Under Table, as it soon became known, was marked by more wine than advisable, given that only two of us were of legal drinking age. I’m fairly certain the eleven and under contingent stuck to Sprite, but they were the leaders in my other Exploit The Children effort, the one entitled The Little Candies In The Green Mesh Bags By Everyone’s Plates Are Delicious So Go Steal Your Parents’ And Bring Them Back Here.

My only defense is that they far outstripped me in devious candy-acquiring techniques. Those kids were downright felonious; surely a mere half hour of my unwholesome encouragement can’t be held fully responsible.

Low on proof of my corrosive influence, but glasses of wine hold still. Nine-year-olds on candy-thieving ninja sneak attacks do not.

The photo I really wanted was of the eldest granddaughter pouring me a ludicrously large glass of wine. Or the nine-year-old returning to the table with five green mesh bags held triumphantly in his slightly grubby fist.  But those moments pass too quickly for accurate pixellated capture. Which is why I rarely take pictures. Because why bother? But I’m beginning to realize that other photos are just as worthwhile – for retaining the context of the moment, if not the action.

When I look at that photo up there, I’ll remember the people sitting next to me. The salmon. The Labradoodle named Diego. How nobody knew the words to The Boxer, but sang gamely and tunelessly anyway. That photo will jog the memory of what was happening around the wine glass, which will in turn remind me that a lack of incriminating evidence is probably for the best.

How often do I do that in life? Not do something because I’m convinced it won’t happen the way I want or expect it to? QUITE OFTEN, I IMAGINE. Different than what I want or expect isn’t always a bad thing, and is sometimes even better.

My parents moved from a tiny cabin in the woods (a keen desire to live in tiny spaces might be the fault of some crumpled DNA strand) to the house my mom still lives in a few months before I was born in 1978. I went to New York for college from 1996 to 2000, also known as the dot com bubble. Since we live in Silicon Valley, housing prices shot up astronomically. When I came home on breaks, I’d find the blue collar neighborhood my parents moved into was the site of creeping brambles of yuppie-ism. Houses on her street sprung extra stories, turrets, and columns. Cars got bigger and shinier. To this day, I walk through the neighborhood with my jaw unattractively slack at all the huge cement boxes crouching on lots where modest ranch homes used to be.

Even my mom’s taken to tarting things up, if less with major renovation and more with paint and new carpets and furniture. And she insists on moving things, which means I’m constantly betrayed by muscle memory. I’ll find myself groping fruitlessly under the sink for a dish towel, only to remember that dish towels haven’t been kept there in ten years. I also find myself the under butler for a very spoiled cat. My mom gets up and lets her calico cat out approximately 9 bazillion times a day and when mom’s not available, I find myself pressed into service by a demanding four pound fluff ball. After getting up and opening the back door, the cat will slink out and sit in the plants waiting for a foolhardy squirrel to come within reach. The squirrels leap from rooftop to flimsy branches and swing wildly for a few seconds before scrambling down the trunk to perch on the head of the Buddha statue sitting at the base of the tree. Buddha is remarkably casual about this indignity. Even when they’re exactly at eye-level, the cat never catches one.

Buddha, minus the squirrels

My brother and I were a bit lax in the gift-giving department this year, but we did avoid justifiable sibling homicide. You can’t wrap that, but I’m sure my parents appreciated it. My brother narrowly avoided death after blasting youtube videos of a heavy metal band with a singing parrot as I was trying to nap. (Any jury would acquit me. After requesting repeated viewings of the evidence, as a heavy metal band with a parrot for a lead singer is admittedly awesome.) I cheated the grim reaper after threatening to follow him to his poker game and hover over his shoulder asking questions like, “So, what are you going to do with that ace?” So, yes. Christmas was lovely. Complete with tree, packages, visitors, hot chocolate with three different kinds of booze, and a noteworthy lack of death.

How was yours?

But I’m not very good at dreaming about things that might actually happen. I can begin the thought: I’d like to [pick one] ride a bike through Vermont as the leaves turn, write a novel about a whiffle bat-wielding dwarf, paint by dipping the soles of my feet in cans of red and yellow and dancing on a sheet of canvas. But I can never quite get to the end of the sentence without my brain snapping back on itself like an errant fifth grader with a rubber band and a grudge. These thoughts often echo “that’s not something I could do.” As if I am less capable than anyone else in this world. I’m not quite sure where this mindset came from, but there it sits.

So I signed up for Mondo Beyondo, an online course by Andrea Scher and Jen Lemen that eases you into dreaming big. Or maybe it dumps you into the deep end of your dreams and waits patiently to see if you can swim. I don’t know, I’m a few classes behind.

One of the first assignments was to think about people who have inspired us. I wrote the below thinking no one else would read it, so I wrote things I might not have written here. We’ll see if it stays or gets quickly deleted to save me embarrassment when I discover all the subject-verb disagreements and family members start pointing out the details I got wrong.
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People Who’ve Inspired Me

My great aunt was a traveler. She was born in 1904 and in her lifetime she rode the Orient Express to Russia, visited Norway, Denmark, roamed all over Europe, and countless other countries. Then she came home to play euchre with her sisters in Wisconsin. When I was young, she’d come to visit and take me on what she called An Adventure. I could hear the capital letters in her voice before I even knew what capital letters were. We’d board the bus and travel the unimaginable distance of ten blocks, where we’d disembark and eat an ice cream cone. When she died, some of her inheritance came to me with instructions that it be used as adventure money. Her legacy bought me my first plane ticket out of the United States and sent me to England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, France and Italy. I still travel every chance I get.

My mother’s cousin went to medical school in the 1950s. If she could became one of the first female radiologists at a time when women were routinely called “sweetheart” in public, then I can certainly be a writer. Whether or not I succeed, no mustachioed mysogynist has ever called me “sweetheart” and we have women like her to thank.

My boss, an incredible artist and writer, is teaching me to respect my own process and not get mired in the murk of my own head. His glee for the business side of his art is catching, and I hope his bank balance is too.

My mom inspired me to love and accept people as they are. Watching her allow my brother to be the complex, flawed, and often brilliant person he is – even as he resists every social construct invented by Western Civilization (except his car, he likes his car) – and watching him open up to her as a result, in a way he doesn’t with anyone else in the family, has shown me just how valuable that acceptance is. She would never admit this, but I think she’s mastered the art of loving a person exactly as they are in this moment. Even as their disapproval of showering drives her absolutely batty.

I expect today will be much better.

Public Service Announcement For Anyone Who Finds Themselves a Victim of Basic Human Biology

I was skulking around the kitchen yesterday afternoon when Brian asked what was wrong. I paused for a moment because EVERYTHING WAS WRONG. NOTHING WILL EVER BE RIGHT AGAIN, ESPECIALLY WHILE OUR FAX MACHINE IS BROKEN. NOW PLEASE EXCUSE ME I HAVE A T-SHIRT TO REND. Then I said, “Hormones.”

“Do you know about the Ten Jumping Jacks?”

Assuming this was a whimsical name for some zen technique that would ricochet me into a guru-like state, or at least keep me from sobbing over the French press, I shook my head. Turns out, he was referring to actual jumping jacks, the kind preferred by Jillian Michaels. There are official reasons they help, but my brain tends to go pleasantly hazy when science is discussed and I flash back to a conversation where the answer to everything was “BECAUSE OF SCIENCE.” Which echoes in my head, drowning out all information of a factual nature. What I did catch: the human body is pretty efficient and can cycle out excess hormones simply by jumping around a bit. After dutifully performing my ten jumping jacks, I felt much better. I did a set whenever I felt the caps lock coming on, and by mid-afternoon, hormones were no longer making me their bitch. Try it! I urge you. It works. BECAUSE OF SCIENCE.

Wherein My Mother Gently Chides Me Because SHE Wanted the Gap Gift Card

My mom kindly threw a family dinner on Sunday to celebrate my new job. Even my brother showed up, which was absurdly flattering for reasons that I shouldn’t get into, because he’d be distressed if he even knew the words “my brother” appeared here. Which means I can’t show you the picture I have of him against the backdrop of my mom’s newly-painted dining room. (It’s a lovely hue of green. Light green? Forest sage? Fancy colors confuse me.) I got a whole ream of good pictures, none of which I can show you, because as I was taking them, I got several worried looks. “These won’t go on the internet, will they?” “Of course not! Wouldn’t dream of it!” Blast.

I can show you this one. Because there are no people in it, only patio furniture. Please note my mother likes blue.

Anyway, as helpful people put dinner on the table, and I got in their way taking pictures, my mom asked if I had chosen the winner of the Gap gift card. When I said I had, a week ago, she informed me that I really had to announce it because people might think I’D KEPT IT FOR MYSELF. WHICH WOULD BE WRONG. AND I RAISED YOU BETTER THAN THAT. (A thesis she drops as soon as she witnesses – yet again – my horrendous table manners.)

I meant to post about it but got distracted by life, as you do, and sort of assumed you either didn’t care or could read my mind. Can you read my mind? No? Well then: the winner of the gift card, chosen by a random number generator, tempted though I was to choose my favorite haiku, is: Christine! (She got the card a week ago, by the way, so this announcement lacks a certain something. Like momentum. Or some semblance of surprise.)

Because My Mind Remains Maddeningly Opaque

If anyone who signed up for OOTLS 2 didn’t get an email yesterday, let me know. It’s all very low tech over here and the possibilities of missing someone are fairly high. BECAUSE OF SCIENCE.

Apparently, this “cleaning” thing is all the rage. I had breakfast with my dad this weekend and, after telling me about weeding out his storage room, he presented me with a pair of earrings. Bought as a present, he’d somehow forgotten to fork them over. I asked if he meant to give them to me at Christmas. He replied, “No. They were for your eighth birthday.”

Oh.

My mom and I had lunch last weekend and she casually mentioned that she’d just thrown out pepper that she bought while she and my dad lived in the cabin.

They moved out of the cabin in 1978.

It was really quite a career trajectory for that little box of peppercorn. Purchased sometime in the mid- to late-’70s, it was sprinkled over seven grain casseroles served in avocado-colored pyrex dishes until it was moved to the suburbs, where it languished in dusty splendor for the next 30 years until being tossed in the bin.

Conclusion: 1) DNA has absolutely nothing to do with it, and 2) I wasn’t just cleaning cupboards this weekend – I was waging war against my heritage. Let the record show that the oldest thing in my kitchen was a box of crackers that would have tasted better in October of 2006.

Yes, I ate them anyway.

Yesterday was Holly’s birthday, which we celebrated in the best way possible – a table full of favorite people, drinking mimosas in glasses the size of soup bowls and eating pesto scrambles to soak up all the champagne. Leah and Simon brought Baby Wombat and passed him graciously around the table. When Simon said, “Who wants to hold him?” my arm shot up so fast I almost took Holly’s ear off.

(The birthday girl, a perfect baby displaying a perfect grimace of ”who the hell is this woman and why won’t she share her french toast?” and me.)

With no notion of what the future holds for me romantically, I’m certain only of my admittedly-biological-but-also-well-considered determination to have kids, man or no man. And I’ll take this opportunity to say that Baby Wombat would be first on the Borrow and Not Give Back list if my methods took a felonious turn. Wombat is the platonic ideal of babyhood – cute, good natured, and plump as a Christmas ham. He’s so easygoing that even a rank amateur like myself can bounce him on my knee, keep his occasional grimace from turning into a full-blown squall, and stuff myself with french toast and coffee at the same time. (Still not entirely convinced this is the case, however. If genes hold, there’s no way I’m getting a child as sweet and quiet as Mr. Wombat. I spent 1978 to 1981 shrieking like an angry Rhesus monkey and I’m quite sure the karmic wheel took note.)

Wombat’s parents are as laid back as their spawn, and this may have something do with his gentle, non-fussy nature. I wonder what role their genes will play in his development as he morphs from mooshy bundle of ovary-busting sweetness into a toddler and a boy and a man. Will he look more like his mother or his father? (The breakfast jury is still out. We spent hours saying, “Now he looks like Leah. Wait, now Simon. Nope, there’s Leah again.”) Will he become a musician, because his father drums his little hands to an imaginary strain of Led Zeppelin and often assists with Baby’s First Air Guitar? Or will he be more inclined toward his mother’s eloquent writing style and perfect grammar? Or maybe he’ll blend the two and become the voice of his generation as a great poet/musician, allowing me to retire when I sell these baby pictures on Ebay.

(For my mother. Because this is as close to a picture of me with a grandkid as she’s going to get for quite some time. Enjoy.)

Part of me is very taken with the idea of adoption – there are plenty of children in this world who need homes and neurotic mothers – but a bigger part of me wants to watch my genes meld with those of someone I love. To watch as those genes and traits from the two of us turn into something entirely new.

And laugh when in fifteen years that child drops a chunk of macaroni and cheese in his water glass and drinks from it anyway.

Walking into my mom’s house after the smoky drive, I was greeted not with the customary “hello” so common in polite society, but with a “Where on earth did you get those pictures?” Referring, of course, to the pictures I posted the other day of my grandmother Margaret.

“I don’t remember her this way,” my mom said, as my aunt and I flipped through the photo album. Reading your comments on that post made me realize that I don’t remember her that way either – fun, happy, and in possession of a smashing wardrobe. My only knowledge of her is based on my mom’s stories, most gathered at least 20 years after those photos were taken.

Flipping ahead in the album, my mom pointed out another picture. “This is how I remember her.” My grandmother was older and had a furrow between her brows. The laughing girl wasn’t gone precisely, but she’d been buried under the layers life tends to heap on us. Most of my mom’s stories involve a rather stern woman called “mother” – as opposed to the more affectionate “daddy” assigned to her father. But one story involves my grandma lounging on the couch in a leopard print coat, dramatically waving either a highball or a cigarette. Either way, it feels closer to the girl she was, hair wild and smile big. I don’t know what kind of life my grandmother led, what kind of pressures she was under. I imagine the pressures were many, she lived through the Depression, the second World War, and later with an alcoholic husband.

As much as I recognize myself and my family in my grandma’s smile, I also recognize myself in her furrowed brow and tense expression. There were days last year when I looked in the mirror and saw lines etched between my eyes, courtesy of many miserable hours. The hours and days and weeks when my relationship was circling down the toilet, in spite of our best efforts. Even my hair hurt from the tension. Another aunt, my father’s sister, trims my shaggy head at her salon in Half Moon Bay. A few months ago, she found my first gray hair, yanked it merrily out, and handed it to me. I’ll be thirty in a few weeks.

I don’t have kids yet and I suspect my life has been – and will be – much easier than my grandmother’s. And I want my children to remember my laugh, not the furrow between my eyes. So I’m concentrating on enjoying my life, just as it is right now, and not fretting about what it isn’t or what I might like it to be.

I also need to stop worrying about the hundreds of fires burning around us. Trust my brother and his fellow firefighters to put them out, so we can all see the sky again.

My grandmother Margaret, smiling.

My grandmother Margaret, eating.

I feel a kinship.

When my mother was young, all her clothes were bought on sale. Full-price socks were the work of the devil, and that devil must be thwarted. If I remember correctly, she took her first paycheck and bought a dress that had never seen the business end of a discount price tag. She may have even paid a little extra – just on principle. I’m sure it was a glorious moment, with ticker tape falling lightly from the sky and fat cherubs cavorting merrily in an orgy of consumerism. But I don’t think the experience stuck. Or maybe early enculturation is just too hard to shake, because one of my earliest memories is of my mom telling a neighbor, “I would never pay $30 for shoes.” I’m not sure if they were gossiping about someone who DID pay $30 for shoes (the wanton hussy), or if it was an academic discussion with 30 as the monetary tipping point, but this conversation attached itself to my unformed mind, when so many admonitions about bed-making and not pushing my little brother into the heater floated out my ears and into the ether.

I have certainly paid more (sometimes a lot more) than $30 for shoes. But I like to think my bargain shopping skills are finely honed - even intimidating. Many of my favorite things were bought at secondhand stores or from a sale with so much red ink they practically paid me to take it home.

Thrifty Danish stock paired with a grandmother who used corrugated cardboard as shoe leather during the Depression firmly entrenched frugality in my DNA. But thanks to my disposition (see: highly susceptible to the capitalistic dictates of $4 cups of coffee and $40 face cream) and my own particular brand of information dispersal, this tendency has mutated. Into an insidious ailment that makes me to react to compliments on my shoes by shouting, “THANKS! THEY WERE ONLY $12!”

I have a brown velvet skirt that I love. It’s long, it swirls, it fits whether I just ate six blueberry muffins or dutifully crunched down a bowl of grape nuts. I found it at a vintage store on Haight St. and it cost less than a large pizza. (All right, two large pizzas.) Whenever someone compliments me on it, I fold my hands modestly in front of my stomach and whisper, “It was such a deal.” Therein lies the end of my restraint, so I start flapping my hands and yell, “SO CHEAP! IT WAS SOOOO CHEEAP!”

In addition to sounding like an oversize (and mentally deficient) canary, another symptom of this nonfatal but highly annoying disease causes the questioner to ease carefully away from me, in hopes of finding someone who doesn’t feel the need to shriek that her breast implants? “WERE SUCH A BARGAIN IN THAILAND!”

Our next door neighbors have a three-legged black cat named Batman. Batman is apparently displeased by their habits (which presumably include jobs, a word unheard of in this household) and has decided to adopt us instead. So every morning, Batman hops his three little legs over the fence, drags his paunchy tummy to our back door, and yowls to be let in. And, like a chump, I open the door.

Batman got into this habit a few weeks ago, when there was a heat wave and we left the door open during the day. Drawn by the bowl of dog food near the door, Batman wandered in. He chomped down some dry, meat-flavored cereal, was probably given a pet or two in passing, and decided this was where he’d like to be. And, by “this”, I mean “on the brand new white couch.”

After he clawed his way up, because three legs don’t allow the same jumping radius as four.

I mocked my mother a few weeks ago for constantly hopping up from whatever she was doing to let her cat in. The cat would saunter inside, eat a solitary piece of kibble, and walk back to the door, mewling imperiously. So mom gamely let her out. Only to get up again five minutes later when the cat wanted another piece of kibble. My mom retired from teaching to be a kitty butler. The rest of her time she spends at the grocery store, stocking up on four different kinds of expensive wet cat food so Princess Fluffy Pants has her choice.

You would have made fun of her too.

Today, as I got out of my chair to let Batman in, for the fourth time this week, I realized that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

The dog is resigned. The cat is insane. And possibly drunk.