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In the mid 1990’s I was living in an amazingly cool flat in North Oakland with my college homegirl E.  While I was pretty hunkered down in a fairly long term relationship, E was enjoying a very active dating life, including a set of very colorful, very diverse characters.  A drug dealer.  A politically active artist who was part of MTV’s Real World: San Francisco. A shy younger tomboy/lesbian rapper with impressive lyrical talent.

She dated one guy for a minute or two — it was the kind of relationship where he never actually came into our home, but would call her from his cell phone or simply honk when he pulled up in front in his chocolate brown hooptie.  The relationship with him didn’t last.  But during one of her visits to his home in West Oakland, she met Juju — his four year old nephew.

Juju was tiny for his age.  He had a mischievous smile, crazy bad-guy eyebrows that swooped up with impossible dramatics, and one of those birthmarks in his hair which left him with one blond patch in the middle of his head of tight dark brown curls.  His mom was a frequently homeless crack addict who had, I believe, four significantly older kids.  Juju was the result of a relatively late-in-life true romance that ended only when Juju’s father passed away when he was two.  Together Juju and his mom bopped about, couch surfing at the homes of friends and other family members.

Eventually E and I got into the habit of picking Juju up, from wherever he happened to be staying, on Friday nights or Saturday mornings, and returning him on Sunday nights.  He was fun to have around, he seemed to really dig being out of that environment, and it gave his mom a bit of breathing room so that she could, you know, do her thing.

I remember calling over to his house one Saturday morning to make arrangements to pick him up. When Juju answered the phone, I asked to talk to his mom.  “She’s not here,” he answered simply.

“Oh.  Well, what are you doing?”

“Making breakfast.  I’m making some scrambled eggs.”  A four year old boy, without any grownup supervision, cooking eggs for himself.

We’d take him to the zoo, or go to the movies, go shopping, or just hang out or visit with our friends.  We’d let him play in the bathtub, fixed him up a little bed to sleep on on the floor of our bedroom, and he seemed happy.  We even took him to family gatherings, and when I moved down to San Diego, E brought him down one weekend for a long happy visit at the beach.

Eventually, E moved to San Francisco, and while she’d still see him on occasion, his visits became less and less frequent.  We had a good run of things, for as long as it lasted, but really, we were only a constant presence in his life for maybe two, two and a half years at most.

Flash forward eleven years or so.  E was driving through West Oakland one afternoon and saw him standing on a street corner.  He was fifteen years old by then, and had dropped out of school.  He was dealing.  She picked him up and took him out to lunch.  She told me later that he looked just the same, only slightly bigger.  He was still small for his age, still had those crazy eyebrows, but he was clearly hardened.  His life had not been, would not be, an easy one.

The thing that kills me is that he was such a cool little guy.  Such a great spirit.  It makes me sad to think that his fate was pretty much already determined when we had our brief time together.  No amount of TLC at that point of his life would really sway his inevitable outcome.  It makes me sad.  Especially now as mother myself, a mother of a four year old boy who knows no limits to what he will be — one day it’s a cowboy, the next day it’s a police man, whatever he wants to be, he can be.

Not so with Juju, who now goes by his more “grown up” name of Julian.  Julian will probably never again get out of that predefined life of his.  I wonder if he ever thinks back on those weekends that we had together, or if all of that is just a fuzzy time of life that holds no special meaning.

I think about him from time to time, tonight being one of those times.  I hope … what?  I don’t know exactly what I hope for him.  I guess I just hope…

image from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/daveglass/

Whew.  Well we’re back from what turned out to be a bit of a whirlwind weekend in New York City, a combined celebration of Charley’s big 40th birthday, and our upcoming tenth wedding anniversary.   (Ten years!  Wow!)  We stayed at the swanky W Hotel at Union Square which was a bit of a splurge, but hell, he only turns 40 once, and who knows if we’ll make it to the next ten year anniversa– no, no, no... I kid. In any event, it took me a minute or so after arriving for me to figure out where I’d seen the building across the square before.  It was this:

I’m a huge fan of Improv Everywhere, and though I don’t think this is necessarily their best work, there’s a good message here:  Look Up More.  So I did. We walked around a lot, and I looked up a lot.  Here are a few of my favorite pictures from our trip, all of them up.

It turns out that there are lots of interesting things all around, if you actually just take the time to look up.

The thing is that I’m prone to extremes.  In an effort to get a different perspective on things, I tend to take one step back.  And then another.  And then a thousand.  Until all of a sudden, I’m hovering above it all, looking at things from an extreme distance where everything loses its meaning. It’s all fine and good to indulge in a healthy nihilistic two-step from time to time, just don’t do it on your husband’s birthday.

“Happy Birthday.  Nothing Matters.  Love ya’ babe.”

The other day — was it just yesterday? — the FBI arrested a local man and his father for lies they told in relation to terrorist plans to bomb (depending on what news source you trust) mass transit, air planes, hotels and/or stadiums in major US cities.  This is biggish news, with potentially wide reaching implications.  And yet, the main question that all this conjures up for me is, Is this going to muck up our weekend plans?

It’s Charley’s birthday this Saturday — the big four oh — and it’s also just a few weeks until our tenth anniversary, so I’ve been planning a little adventure for this weekend.  It’s a bit of a secret.  I’ve told him to pack his bags, take some time off, but that’s all he knows.  I’ve been dropping little hints.  For example, I’ve told him the weather is forecasted to be warmer and sunnier than the winter-like slush we’ve had here lately.  He started guessing Mexico, Hawaii, Las Vegas.  I’ve told him to think more along the lines of Bakersfield. I’m not sure he’s buying it.

This will be our first full weekend away from both kids in six years, and I’m not ashamed to say I’m a little giddy.  It does feel wrong of me to focus in on the personal, purely frivolous implications of this latest potential terrorist threat, but god damn it:  mama needs this vacation.  And really, if I let this get in the way of our plans, then the terrorists have already won.  Right?

image from: http://www.unltd.org.uk/blogs

image from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/15103399@N06/

As summer break wraps up and we begin shifting back into school mode, I find myself, once again, feeling inadequate.

Today the boys and I rode our bikes down to Colin’s school to check out the classroom assignments.  The lists weren’t posted yet when we got there, so we hung around a bit.  The kids played in the playground, and I struck up some conversations with the moms of Colin’s classmates from last year.

After we found Colin’s first grade assignment — he’s in Ms. Estrada’s class — we rode back home and the boys got to playing out front with the kids from next door.  I didn’t realize that I was feeling all that mopey about all this until the mom next door stepped out to track down her kids and asked how I was doing…

I mentioned that I had just gotten back from checking out the class lists at school, and that I need to ramp back up to get ready for all that.  And she seemed to know kind of what I meant.  “Yeah, it can all be kind of annoying.”  With that I let loose, rambling on about my worries that I was failing my kids somehow.

She stopped me and said, “You are the perfect parent for your kids. You were selected precisely because you are the right mom for your two boys, you know what’s right for them, and the path that unfolds for you all is the exact one that you all were meant to take.”  Now I know that my neighbor is a big Jesus fan, and that a lot of this was probably coming from a bit of a churchy place, but it all resonated with me in a big way.

The weird thing is that the first thing that popped into my mind as I was listening to her was Kung Fu Panda.  I’ve been thinking more about the message of that movie lately.  (Partly because I just saw it for the second time last week.)  Here they are:  (1) there are no accidents, and (2) there is no secret.

So the path that those other parents take with their kids, is the exact right path for them.  And this one, the one that we’re on with our kids, that’s the right one for us.  Our boys will be fine.

***

But in the meanwhile, I ran across this article, and can’t resist providing a link to it here, even if it is a bit old.  I’m a Beta Mom, through and through.

This afternoon, as I listened to an Intuit website customer serenade me over the phone with what I suspected was a slightly obscene country western song that he claimed to have written for both Kenny Chesney and Hank Williams Junior, I had a mini-flash back.

I got my first summer job when I was fifteen years old, working in the shoe department at K-Mart.  All day long, I unpacked and arranged cheap shoes from China in rows and rows of display racks.  Occasionally, I’d hunker down in the darkness of the world’s narrowest stockroom doing ten-key data entry, punching in numbers from the tickets the cashiers pulled from each pair of shoes that were sold.  And once or twice a day, I’d wheel out the little blue light cart, dial into the store intercom and announce, in my best grown up voice, “Attention K-Mart Shoppers…  If you look up and around you’ll see that blue light is flashing back in our footwear department, where, for the the next ten minutes, and ten minutes only, we’ll be taking an additional 30% off of our already marked down clearance shoes.  So head on back to our footwear department, and, as always, thanks for shopping at K-Mart.”  (Yep.  I remember the script.  Word for word.)

I don’t, however, remember many of the people I worked with, except for Joel.  Joel was a slightly older teenager, a taller skinny guy who was a rock and roll stoner version of Napoleon Dynamite.  Joel and I didn’t interact directly very often, but he would occasionally hijack the store intercom system and call out mysterious nonsensical messages to me.  Evvvvvvvelyn.  Have you ever walked down a road in the middle of the night with a noodle on your head…?

One afternoon, I heard a page for “Footwear, Line 2.”  When I picked up the phone, I thought at first that it was Joel, faking a weird southern accent.  “I’m looking for some muff,” the voice said, in a long, slow drawl.

“I see,” I responded, trying to be helpful. “Was there a particular size or color you were looking for?”  I had no idea what he was talking about.  For a good five minutes or so, after I realized it wasn’t Joel after all, I faked it, all the while trying to figure if maybe he was looking for a new pair of fuzzy slippers.

It turns out that naughty prank phone calls aren’t nearly as exciting for the caller if the callee is so dense that she doesn’t ever get that she’s being pranked.  Eventually the caller gave up on subtlety and said something like, “Pubic hair!  I’m talking about pubic hair,” at which point I hung up.

That may have been the only other prank call I’ve received since the one I think I may have gotten this afternoon.  Because I’ve been Googling the song title my country western crooner mentioned, and it turns out that  Kenny Chesney has never recorded a song called “Big Pussy of Kentucky.”  Nope.

image from:  http://lemurianabbey.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/rider-waite-the-fool.jpg

When I woke up this morning, a little later than usual, I found the boys were already awake.  They were parked on the sofa watching cartoons and looked up when they heard me coming down the stairs.  The night before we had talked about my upcoming birthday, and, after explaining that there would be no birthday party, no bouncy castle, no magician, I told them that the only thing I really wanted from them was a hug and a kiss… and for them to listen to me so that I wouldn’t have to repeat myself for one whole day.

So when I saw them looking up at me with blank expressions this morning, when it was clear that they had forgotten that today was my special day, I prompted them.  “Do you boys have anything to say to me today?”  I raised an eyebrow.

They looked at each other and I could almost see the wheels turning in their little brains.  They responded simultaneously.

“I love you?” offered Kai.

“I’m sorry?” guessed Colin.

I rolled my eyes.  “Dum da dum dum, dum dummmm…” I hinted.

“Ohhhh!” They both jumped up and ran over to give me a hug.

“Happy birthday!”

“I love you!”

I smiled.  That’s more like it.  “I love you guys too.”  I said.  “With all my heart.”

image from:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/2455252050/

I get that routines can be comforting, that they can help provide important structure to lives that might otherwise become unmanageable.  And yet…

In my mind it’s just a short hop from routine to repetitive, and really, there’s nothing good about living a repetitive life.

The thing is, I don’t actually mind when things naturally fall into their own groove,  without being forced.  I don’t mind living that life, if that’s how things shape up.  But the idea of planning for it makes me feel a little claustrophobic.

***

And while I’m on the topic of repetition, let me just toss a general question out there to the universe:  is there a secret to being heard by young boys?  Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a tired Bill Cosby comedy routine.  “I said ‘come here.’  Come here.  Come here, come here, come HERE…”

I think young kids just sort of naturally tend to block out their parents.  And then parents — or at least this parent — typically react by speaking louder, or by saying the same thing over and over again, with the hopes of being heard.  Which then sort of conditions the kids to further screen the yammering coming from the direction of the parent.   It’s a downward spiral.  All I know is that I fear that I’m becoming barky, and I don’t like it.

So just to reiterate the theme for this post:  repetition is bad.  Once again, that’s “repetition is bad.”  Read it.   Learn it.  Know it.

image from: http://valerielorimer.com/gallery/

I blame our part-time nanny, and the twenty-somethings with whom I work, for getting me started with the whole texting thing.  It’s not like I wasn’t plugged in enough as it was, what with gmail, instant-messaging, Facebook, and this blog, for example.  I made it nearly forty years on this planet without caving to the allure of the text message.

But now I’m one of them.

I’m somewhat comforted to know that texting really isn’t just for teeny-boppers anymore.  (Do people still use that term?)  The other day, I was enjoying some free outdoor jazz in Boulder with the boys, when I noticed something that kind of took me out of the moment.

The stand up bass player was thumping his way through his solo, the drum player dutifully keeping time with only a nod of his fedorra-ed head.  The slightly graying piano player had his eyes closed, his hands tapping on his thighs as he sat on his rickity piano bench.  He was apparently appreciating the groove that the bassist was laying down, when I saw his left leg straighten out slightly.  It was a move I recognized from those rare moments when my grandfather, the Colonel, would accompany my grandmother and me to church when I was a little girl.  We could always tell that he had had enough when he would stretch out his left leg, and lean back slightly to put his hand in his pocket to get a Rolaids.  Only on this occasion the piano player retrieved not an antacid, but a cell phone from his pants pocket.

And then, while his jazz trio was still performing, with all of us watching, he flipped open his phone and started texting.  It seemed a little rude, or, at the very least, a little post-modern.  Perhaps ironic?  Luckily he wrapped up his important texting just in time to jump back into the music, but it did make me wonder if maybe there shouldn’t be times when multi-tasking isn’t appropriate.

Or is it just me?

image from:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/moriza/126238642/

I find myself at an interesting kind of blogging crossroads.  The problem with having a public blog that is really just a personal journal is that I run the risk of offending people I know.

On the one hand, I enjoy the idea that people I know get to keep up with me here, and I even like knowing that occasionally people I don’t know stop by to take a peek.  But on the other hand, knowing that people I know read what I write here does give me pause when I want to write about the people in my life, or when I want to include something about myself that may make things awkward with those I know.  I tend to over-share in real life but that’s mostly because my mouth often gets ahead of my brain and my self-editing skills don’t have a chance to kick in in time to save me from myself.  And while I’m drawn to (almost) daily blogging precisely because it avoids a lot of the hard work of editing and re-editing a piece until it is just right, writing still allows for a little more refection than simply speaking off the top of my head.  And so I occasionally find myself in a mild state of writing paralysis, where I want to write freely… and yet I feel hesitant to do so.

My thing is that I choose not to waste my energy hating —  neither in real life, nor in the the things I write.  That doesn’t mean that I’m living some contrived life of positivity.  In fact, it’s kind of the opposite.  I like to be around, and I like to write about, deliciously flawed people who interest me.  Those are the people I care about.

I’m rambling, so let me wrap up with a preemptive, yet sincere, “Sorry” to anyone who might ever be offended by the things I write here, particularly if you think you might be reading about yourself one day.  It kills me to think that I may hurt someone I care about — even if I haven’t done it yet.  But the fear of doing so makes it astoundingly difficult to just be me here.

And with that… let the blogging continue.

image from: http://www.mikepaulblog.com/blog/