In The Spotlight

So, there's no chance in hell that I would get tagged with a blog meme, like "take a photo of your fridge" or "five things you must eat before you die" (and yes, I know about these because I read some food blogs). But... I just started reading Boobs, Injuries, and Dr. Pepper from time to time and she got tagged by someone else for this interesting meme In The Spotlight (see rules). The person who wrote it says, "If you are not tagged by anyone and would like to participate in this meme, then I officially tag you now. (You're Tagged By Christy of Christy's Coffee Break)!"


So, I'm tagged. One of the rules is that I have to tag five people; I'm not going to do that, because I don't know how. However, if you want, Christy will tag you if you just go to her blog. I can't cut and paste the questions I choose, so I will write them out in the answer in bold, so you can see what the question was.


What I hope to have at the end of my year of blogging is something like 365 entries, mostly intelligent and intelligently written. I established this blog to make myself write every day. With the exception of when I was away from home, so far I have accomplished that (this is my 157th post). I hope what I write is intelligent; certainly there are days that are much worse than others, but I hope the overall effect is better rather than worse.

However, I would be satisfied to see that I wrote every day.


My favorite childhood memory is this: I don't remember when this was, but I know I was younger than ten. There were several nights when Mom came home from work and announced that we were going to Baker Beach for a cookout. She would load up the Weber Smokey Joe and a cooler and off we'd go. All of my memories of this include Saj, and at least one girl from the neighborhood, J Jump Joyful or DeeKay.

One night most of the parents in the neighborhood came (this is how I remember it, though it seems unlikely in retrospect). That meant that there was half a classroom's worth of kids at the beach, and we had hot dogs (I liked mine burnt, and still prefer them that way) and s'mores. The picnic sites were up from the beach, in the trees, sheltered by the wind, though I don't remember the wind; I don't even remember wearing a jacket. We ran around on the beach, started digging to China, and made sand angels at the picnic site.

The sun went down and the park ranger drove through the parking lot. Our Horizon and the other families' station wagons were parked in the lot, but the ranger didn't come up to the picnic site. At least an hour later when we were leaving the beach, we got to the gate and it was closed! JJJ's older brother got out and determined it wasn't locked, and we went home. It was very exciting for us kids to imagine that the park ranger hadn't made us leave when the beach closed.



Another favorite one is of the April Fools' Day in my second or third grade year when Mom had all the neighborhood kids over for breakfast before school - and served hamburgers and French fries!

A Friend To Mountains

I grew up next to the ocean. With my family and other people in the neighborhood, I spent whole days, as well as just evenings, on Baker Beach, just inside the mouth of the Golden Gate. I played in the 55F degree water as only children can do while adults stroll along the foamy edge of the waves. At Ocean Beach, where we were only allowed to go as far in as our ankles, my friends and I would peer at the Farallones and imagine we were seeing Japan. During spring break of my freshman year of college, Jujubi, Hawaii, and I went to Seaside in Oregon and I flew a stunt kite on the beach most of the time we were there, the sound of the waves and the buffeting wind soothing my depressed and confused adolescent heart.



I consider myself a friend to mountains. I am not a mountain climber, or even much of a hiker. Like John Muir with a flower, I want to sit beside a mountain (or perhaps "on a mountain" is more like it) for a minute, or a day, and hear what it has to tell. I see layers of rock, smell the powdery scent of rocks after rain, and feel my skin catch on a thousand small fissures when I run my palm across the ground. I took enough geology in college to imagine upthrust and erosion, volcanic eruption and re-eruption, while in front of me and around me the mountains sit in peace.

I have lived near mountains. The house I grew up in is a couple miles from the summit of Twin Peaks, looking toward Mount Diablo, not even a mile high but visible from all over the bay area. The house I lived in in college had two small windows, one in the stairway and one in the upstairs bathroom, which faced Mount Rainier. The first place I lived by myself had Mount Saint Helen's out the kitchen window and Mount Hood out the back door. I truly wish I had photos of these mountains to post here, but I am missing about nine years' worth of photos and don't have any to scan in. Please go to www.google.com/images so I don't inadvertently break any copyright laws.

(photo by Mark Dix)

Our House Is A Very, Very Fine House

The parenting blog on sfgate.com has a feature titled "Off Topic Tuesday," which allows the bloggers and commenters to talk about non-parenting topics. I think this is mostly because Peter Hartlaub, the lead blogger, likes to talk about growing up in the Bay Area in the 70s and 80s. I can get behind that. Like him, I also grew up in the Bay Area in the 70s and 80s. In fact I mostly read the blog because of "Top of the Hill, Daly City!" and the old Nut Tree.


This past Tuesday the discussion was "The Best Place You've Ever Lived." I noticed that the definition of the "the best place" had a lot to do with how close the house/apartment was or is to whatever the resident thought were good things to be near - the beach or ocean, restaurants, schools, etc. I was thinking about this, and the place I've lived the closest to all those kinds of things was the house in which I grew up: My elementary and high schools were within walking distance, as were the Junior Museum; the California Academy of Science; the Japanese Tea Garden; UCSF with its community pool and fun summer classes like Circus Skills; the Children's Playground, the Panhandle, and not too far from Sharon Meadow, Marx Meadow, and Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park; Rocky Road Mountain; and Haight Street with its roller skate rental shops and cafes (this last when I was in junior and high school, as I wasn't allowed on Haight until I was a teenager). We spent a lot of time at Baker Beach and at the Exploratorium. The corner grocery allowed us kids to sign for candy on our parents' accounts.


As I write all this down, I realize how lucky I was to live in such a place. I haven't lived in a place so close to everything as I did then. While I was thinking about the post on the other blog, though, I was thinking about my favorite place I'd lived as being the house I shared with Jujubi, Phil, and 17 other people across the three years I was a sophomore, junior, and senior in college. One block from campus, it was university owned, and had one bedroom for a triple, one for a single, and one double. There was a fireplace, a kitchen with yellow tile counters and a breakfast nook, one and a half bathrooms (including a tub), a livingroom with a plate glass window, a separet dining room, a huge basement, a backyard. On clear days we had a view of Mount Rainier from the window on the stairs. This house was known as Our House, after the song, and the Dance In The Living Room House, or DILR House. More formally (well, hardly "formally"), it was called Eleven Twenty Three, after the address.


The university thought it was a six-person house. Most of the time, only five of us were officially living there: soph year, Jujubi, Phil, Mrs. P (before she was Mrs. P), Bink, and I lived there. Junior year, Mrs. P and Bink had moved out and a friend moved in, along with two freshmen, one of whom left college after a couple weeks and the other of whom moved into a dorm at the semester break. Senior year Jujubi, Phil, and I were joined by two others of our friends. In the meantime, though, we had one friend or another sleeping on the couch for a semester or boyfriends sharing sleeping space. Since all the keys had "Do Not Duplicate" printed on them we left the door unlocked.


At that time, Tacoma wasn't much of a place to hang out in. The only place to hang out close to the university was a bar, so if you were under 21, which I was most of my college days, and you wanted to go out you went to Denny's or Dunkin' Donuts on 6th Avenue or up to Seattle to the Last Exit. There was a grocery store and a 7-11 within walking distance, and a public library and park a long walk away. Bus service was marginal so without a car it was hard to go to the mall, a movie, or Point Defiance Park.


But I didn't want to go those places most of the time. I was really happy to be at home. Because we were on the main approach to the campus, everyone came to the house all the time. On snow days, I would get up in the morning to one or several friends drinking coffee on the couch - people whose classes started earlier than mine and learned classes had been cancelled once they got to campus. When we had cast parties, from down the street you could hear people singing with Steve Miller, "I've been to Phoenix, Arizona, all the way to TACOMA!" If it was a warm fall or spring day, Phil would grill chicken or hamburgers, sometimes on the front lawn, and people would stop by on their way home. On the colder evenings, they would come by for some of Jujubi's great bean soup and beer bread.


At the time I credited Jujubi with the power of making that house feel like home. Maybe it was because she had such a nurturing vibe and I felt like a kid most of the time (I was, but I didn't think so then). She and Phil were the love in that house, and I just kept the door open. Our friends brought in a lot of love of their own, and that's what made our house so very, very fine.

Hard to Believe

And yet, not so hard. Sometimes I still feel like this girl.


Jumping-flying down this hill at Baker Beach was so much fun. I've just landed from a long swoop down the hill, as demonstrated in this great picture of No: