Mom's Cooking

I had a mom who worked "outside the home" while I was growing up. She didn't have much choice, being a single parent, but she worked three days a week until I was ten or so and four days a week until I was in eighth grade, at which point she went full-time.


When we were younger, Jindi was at the house when we got home if Mom wasn't there, or the Stay At Home Dad (who was in junior high then) and Dimpi (his sister) took us on the bus back to their house. When I was in the Upper Form at CSH, I wore my house key on an orange yarn hair ribbon under my uniform, and ate graham crackers with milk while watching The Brady Bunch in the afternoon.


No and I always called Mom when we got home. Sometimes she asked us to put the potatoes in the little oven and turn it on, since they took so long to bake. Mom would come home and turn on The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and put together the meat and vegetable parts of dinner. We had a lot of three-part dinners, often a potato (baked or boiled, or very occasionally frozen french fries), a piece of chicken or beef, and a vegetable. We often had broccoli, but in the spring had asparagus or artichokes. Mom would garnish our 60's modern plastic dinner plates with a piece of parsley, which we never had to eat (thank goodness, I don't like parsley to this day!). For dessert, which we ate at least half an hour later, we usually had fruit cocktail or ice cream.


Mom made one casserole, which she called Irish-Hungarian Goulash. From my friends who grew up in the Midwest, I understand versions of this are called Hot Dish, though one friend told me that if it doesn't include cream of mushroom soup it isn't Hot Dish. We hardly ever had this casserole, probably because Mom wasn't the make-on-Sunday type and she got home from work after 5pm. Of course, I love it, and consider it comfort food. Maybe you do too.

Mom's Irish-Hungarian Goulash

1 pound ground beef
1 onion, chopped up
1 can stewed tomatoes
oregano, basil, and salt
cooked elbow macaroni
grated cheese for the top

Brown beef with onion until cooked through. Add the can of stewed tomatoes and the herbs and stir. Combine in deep casserole pan with macaroni. Sprinkle cheese on top and bake at 350F until heated through. Serve with broccoli to happy children.


I am thinking about all this because recently I have been eating the way I ate when I was a kid. KT had a baby two weeks ago, and Mom and I have been spending a lot of time at my brother's house. Mom has been cooking for the new parents, and a lot of it is tried and true classics from back in the day. They're also relatively fast meals so Mom can hang out with the new parents and the grandchild. It's been fabulous.

You're never too far, wherever you are

The first movie I ever stood in much a line to see was Star Wars. We went to see it the first time at the Coronet, which was the movie theater in town. It was a huge theater with over a thousand seats and showed first-run, exclusive films. Apparently George Lucas was a big fan of the Coronet and selected it to premier Star Wars in San Francisco - and it played there for seven months. Tickets to the show were $3 for adults, and one could pay an additional fifty cents to sit in the balcony, where smoking was allowed. My mom says that a friend of her remarked, "If I'm gonna spend three bucks on a movie, I might as well pay the extra fifty cents so I can smoke during it!"


Grush took a bunch of us neighborhood kids to see Star Wars again at the North Point near Ghirardelli Square. That was pretty far afield for us, as we only went to that part of town when there were out-of-towners visiting as part of the "tour guide." We were standing in line when a guy with a guitar and two guys with a camera and recording equipment came down the line asking people to sing the "Reach out and touch someone" jingle from AT&T (as it was known in those days, and is again). They got to us and we were soooooo ready we were jumping up and down, "We know it! We know it!"

And we sang:

Reeeeach out
Reach out and touch someone
Reach out
Reach out and just say hi
Da da da de dum
Da dum de de dum to
Reeeeeach out
Reach out and touch someone!

He told us they would not be able to use us in a commercial since we didn't know all the words. I don't think we even knew it had other words until we got to where they were supposed to go. Needless to say we all very disappointed that we had missed being "discovered" outside the movie theater. The next one of us who saw the ad paid very close attention and taught us all the whole song, just in case a guitar and a camera appeared the next time we went to see Star Wars.

Yesterday's Future

I have a nicely bound "anything book" that I filled with high school crap like book covers, report cards, school IDs, and prom memorabilia. In the notebook is an assignment I did in tenth grade for my Honors English class. The teacher wrote the questions and I interviewed a family friend.


For extra credit I pretended to interview myself in 2024 (at which point I would be 56). Reading the extra credit part of the assignment was so painful that it took me four tries to get through it. When I was 15, I was planning that by the time I was 56 I would:

Have attended UC Santa Cruz and Boston University;
Be fluent in Spanish, German, and Japanese;
Have published at least four novels and at least three books of nonfiction;
Own my own restaurant, through three closures and one almost-bankruptcy;
Married;
Adopted three boys;
Still be friends with the friends I had in tenth grade;
Occasionally write columns for the San Francisco Chronicle;
Have been on Time's bestseller list at least twice; and
Be taking one course at a time in things like film making.


I wonder when I thought I would sleep. Sometimes I look back and think I must have been a really annoying person when I was teenager.

The Missy Mommies

When I was growing up, all the kids in the neighborhood spent almost as much time in each other's homes as we did in our own. I've listed before the different attractions different houses offered. We had a lot of sleepovers at each other's houses too, sometimes on school nights. I remember late-summer nights of sleeping out in the W's yard, and one in particular when Eri and I swung on the swings for hours as the sun went down and the sky turned to purple and black.


Sometimes one or another of us would be overcome with wanting to be at home. I only remember this happening at J Jump Joyful's or DeeKay's house, probably because I don't remember my mom loving anyone as much as she loved me, except - maybe - No. We'd go to bed, and whoever's mom would come in to say good night and turn off the lights. Somehow, one of us would tell the mom she was sad, or wanted to be at home. The mom would sit on the bed and rub the kid's back, speaking in a quiet voice about having "the missy mommies" and how that was okay, you would see your mom in the morning but now it was time for sleep and in the morning we would have breakfast and you would go home and Mom would be there for you just like always...


The lulling voice and the back rub would relax you so much that you could snuggle into your pillow and hear the other kids' breathing and when the mom got up and left the door a little ajar so the hall light would make a slice on the floor and you knew that this was an okay place to sleep.

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.

Get Down On It

Raj, Saj, and Dimpi had a bunch of cousins, and there were many afternoons when the four of them, the three Singhs, and No and I would all hang out together even though Raj and the oldest cousin were so much older than we were. I remember very challenging games of "Mother May I?" and "Simon Says" with Raj or the cousin being "mother."

One afternoon, we were all in the living room listening to Earth, Wind, and Fire, The Jacksons, and Kool and The Gang. The Singhs had the coolest stereo cabinet with the hifi in the center. The speaker cabinets had covers on them that lit up in green, yellow, and red with the rhythm of the music. Jindi and Biji never seemed to care how loud the music was.


There was a young woman who had one of those rhyming names who was also often at the Singhs' house. We called her by both names all the time. Raj recently told me that she was a teenager who'd been traveling around the US and wound up working for his parents at the store. While we were dancing spastically the way young kids do, Teri Blackcherry appeared and announced she was going to teach us the Hustle line dance (I think the hustle partner dance would have been beyond us in elementary school). We moved some chairs out of the way and she got us in two lines, smaller kids in the front.


Celebrate good times, come on!

The Houses I Grew Up In

I grew up in a neighborhood where everyone was welcome in everyone else's house. Everyone's parents were everybody's parents; when we were young, our folks must have agreed that one adult's permission was enough for all of the adults' permission. While Tam lived across the street from us, our house, DeeKay's house, and J Jump Joyful's, Eri's, Ria's, and P's back yards all had gates into each other's yards. To get to Coop's and DeeCoo's house we had to climb a the fences of the backyard of the apartment building between DeeKay's and the Coos', but we just considered that a more adventurous way to get there.


Where we went was determined by what we wanted to do. As a group, our parents had purchased a huge wooden swing set (with a ten-foot high metal slide), which sat in the W's backyard next to a tree three stories tall in which there were two treehouses. The big one was about twenty feet high and we climbed a leaning ladder to get to it since there were no branches within ten feet of the ground. It had walls and a roof, and a couple of windows. The higher one, which was reached by stepping from branch to branch, was merely a platform almost at the crown of the tree. There was also a rope swing tied at the bottom of the third-story deck, and a fort built into the stair supports.


The W's house had a big closet of games, coloring materials, and books, and we played Chinese checkers and Parcheesi sitting in there. There was a costume closet full of old formal dresses, ties, hats, and animal costumes (my favorite was that of a cheetah. I was sad when I grew out of it). All of the W kids had to take piano lessons, and a basket of maracas, plastic bongo drums, tambourines, finger bells, and a rainbow-colored xylophone sat next to the piano. Their house was the first (and for years, only) place I saw MTV.


DeeKay had a lot of stuffed animals and a record player in her room. She also had a bed on a box spring, which none of the rest of us did (No and I slept on beds with wood panels under the mattress; Tam had a bunkbed, P's was under a sloping ceiling, and JJJ, Ria, and Eri slept in beds that were cut out of the walls) so if we wanted to listen to "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" and jump on the bed, her room was the place to go. When the K's remodeled their kitchen they had an instant-hot water faucet put in so we could kind of cook without using the stove.


At Coop's and DeeCoo's house we danced to Eagles Live, Don't Look Back by Boston, and Surrealistic Pillow by the Jefferson Airplane. We also used as many curse words as possible, since that was only allowed there. We climbed out the attic window and sat on the peaked roof to see the Pacific Ocean. Coop made chocolate mousse and taught me to crack an egg with one hand and how to separate the yolk and the white.


At Tam's there was a train in the rec room on which we could sit and push ourselves around the track, and her mom's loom, which fascinated me, and the many materials she used on it. Tam's older sister had a collection of trolls whose hair she allowed us to stroke, and Tam herself had a bunch of little dressed mice and a doll house in which they lived (which of course we called the Mouse House). She also had a radio in her room, and we would dance to Silly Love Songs, Fly Like An Eagle, An Old Fashioned Love Song, and The Year of the Cat. Tam taught me to play Blackjack using pennies from the three-gallon jar in her parents' bedroom.


At our house we had a variety of conveyances in the big room downstairs - a bike or two, tricycles, a green plastic car with pedals, a red plastic tractor with pedals, and a Big Wheel. There was a stop light and we would ride around the room in circles in time to the red, yellow, and green lights. We played kickball in the street in front of our house, and pretended we were a rock band while playing "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band" on the record player. We picked cherries from the tree in the back yard, and explored the stuff collected in the garage and the basement. DeeKay liked to eat the very sour ornamental oranges that grew in the driveway and one time made herself sick doing so.


Each of these houses was home.

Behind The List, Part Two

68. Fallen in love and not had your heart broken
Yep, still married to him.

69. Toured ancient sites
When Mom and I went to Paris, we went under the plaza in front of Notre Dame where they were excavating an ancient Gaul village that had been found when a bank was trying to build a vault. That blew my mind.

72. Gotten married
See #68.
I've been shacked up with a couple people too. But I knew when getting married was the right thing to do.

73. Been in a movie
'68. A terrible film I have had the privilege of seeing three times. I was an extra and spent the day in Golden Gate Park dressed like a hippie and dancing to John Cippolina. The movie is unbelievably awful, but not because of me.

77. Made cookies from scratch
But they always suck. I can't even get the famous Mrs. Field's recipe to come out right. I am, however, good at my mom's brownies.

84. Performed on stage
I played Hattie in the aforementioned Laundry and Bourbon. The first sound was my cue to both enter and speak. From backstage I was allowed to ring the doorbell that would start the action. On opening night I saw the slashes of bright lights through the windows in the set, took a deep breath, moved into character, and pushed the doorbell.

85. Been to Las Vegas
I've only been there with Zirpu. The first time we went, not long after we started dating, the person at the check-in counter looked at my ID and asked if my last name would be the same when I came back.

88. Kissed on the first date
However, not Zirpu.

90. Bought a house
We had looked at or driven by over 100 houses, but when we walked into this one, we knew it was the one we wanted. There was a big family room in the back part of the house, and we both immediately thought, "Ballroom!"

92. Buried one/both of your parents
Dad died of cancer in March of 1974. He wasn't buried; Mom scattered his ashes over Half Moon Bay.

100. Picked up and moved to another city to just start over
When Shobi-wan graduated we moved to Portland. It took me a long time to find a job, the first one of which was in a health insurance company. After a few months, the publishing company I'd really wanted to work for called me because the person they'd hired over me had been arrested for stealing credit card numbers when she was taking book orders over the phone.

101. Walked the Golden Gate Bridge
I must have done this. . . haven't I?

104. Survived an accident that you shouldn’t have survived
July 30, 2003

110. Broken someone’s heart
But a piece of my heart broke off too.

117. Eaten mushrooms that were gathered in the wild
If the football field at my college is "the wild", yes.

118. Ridden a horse
When we went up to Tahoe in the summer with DeeKay's family, often we would go on a horseback ride at one of those places where you ride a horse on mountain paths. I liked that, but when No and I went to Camp Beaverbrook I liked my Western horse-riding boots much better than I liked riding the horses. I remember that all of the kids in camp dreaded "getting stuck with" one particularly stubborn horse.

127. Eaten sushi
I first had sushi in junior high school when Mom and I went to Fuki-Ya in Japantown. I don't remember what No did on those nights, but it was our time to hang out together. I don't even remember much about those evenings except that they were "our time."

128. Had your picture in the newspaper
Recently, because of a feature on the food bank's new digs and the Food Bank Director and I were both in the shot. My favorite one, though, is the year Shobi-wan and I marched in the Pride Parade in Portland and a photo from above of the Gay and Lesbian Chorus was on the front page of the Oregonian. I knew we had marched ahead of them in that parade and found us in the photo, even though we were small!

134. Read The Iliad - and the Odyssey
I started to read The Odyssey after seeing O Brother, Where Art Thou? I hate to say I couldn't get through it so it's still on my list of "Classics I Should Read."

135. Selected one “important” author who you missed in school, and read
I read Giovanni's Room after I graduated from college. I found it full of self-loathing and so I didn't like it. Of course, I may have to read it again, but I think I will read James Baldwin's other books first. I read Giovanni's Room because that was the book from which Baldwin read for Calliope Records, a short-lived company my father had in the early 1960s recording authors reading from their own works onto 45's.

138. Communicated with someone without sharing a common spoken language
I do this at the food bank often. In fact, I talk to people who speak Vietnamese, Cantonese, Korean, and an African dialect on a regular basis. Whenever I have a conversation with someone in Spanish, I start with "Mi espanol no esta muy bueno" and afterwards thank my 10th and 11th grade Spanish teacher, Sr. Crossley, wherever he is. You get a long, long way with good will and sound effects.

146. Dyed your hair
I've done red once and pink twice. I've bleached it. I plan to dye it purple before 2008 begins.

148. Shaved your head
JR shaved my head for me about a year and a half ago. It was really cool and I felt so hip! Mom hated it, but Zirpu liked it.

149. Caused a car accident
According to the other driver, I had come into his lane on 280SB on the way to Tanforan Mall when I was a sophomore in college. I had originally tried to merge right and someone moved up into the space I planning to go for. Supposedly I overcorrected and went into the lane on my left. That's the reason I think I know what happened when the person who crashed into my car did so.

Behind The List, Part One

Surfing around the NaBloPoMo list, I ran across this blog written by a woman who's raising eight kids with her partner. It's kind of a mommy blog on steroids, but not quite - it's a family consisting of eight children and two lesbians, certainly a unique point of view.


Anyway, she posted this list. There's 150 of them, which is too many. I was much more curious about the ones she had done, so I thought I would borrow the idea and expand upon my own answers. However, I think I have to break it across two posts.


03. Climbed a mountain
Does Rocky Road, aka Corona Heights, count? All of us neighborhood kids took summertime classes at the Randall Junior Museum. Sometimes afterwards we walked up the long, eastern side of Rocky Road to its peak to look over the city and the bay toward Oakland.

06. Held a tarantula
I forget if this was part of sixth grade Science Camp or at the Randall Junior Museum, but we all sat in a circle and the tarantula walked across our hands as we held them close to each other, palms up, to make a path for the tarantula.
A college friend of mine was so afraid of spiders that when they made him do this is sixth grade, he freaked out and threw the tarantula across the room.

07. Taken a candlelit bath with someone
When I was a kid, the Coos had some property up in Healdsburg, with a cabin that was basically one big room and a sink that had a hose from the creek. There was an old barn, a great treehouse, and an outhouse. There was also a sauna on a deck attached to the cabin. Inside the sauna was an old bathtub in which we would pour about three inches of icy water from the creek, and we'd sit in the tub when we got too hot (DeeKay, as I've mentioned, never did). One night we were all in the sauna with some older kids (I don't remember who they were, except they were teenagers) and they had brought candles into the sauna with us. They had to keep lighting them because there wasn't enough oxygen for them to burn with all of us kids in that little space.

08. Said “I love you” and meant it
Many times.

09. Hugged a tree
I remember a field trip to see some old-growth redwoods. The ranger had some kids in the class hold hands and circle the tree to see how big around it was. We stretched our arms as much as we could and it still took six or eight of us to wrap ourselves around the tree.

11. Visited Paris
Mom called me in January '96 and said, "Round trip tickets to Paris are $400. Want to go?" I arranged coverage at both my jobs, paid for express mail and express processing for my passport, and we spent a week walking all over Paris. Highlights: The Musee D'Orsay and watching a parade of veterans walking up the Champs Elysee to the Arc d'Triomphe, in which hung the largest flag I've ever seen.

13. Stayed up all night long and saw the sun rise
Several times, in different states and different states of mind.

15. Gone to a huge sports game
Mom took No and me to see the Giants play the Cincinnati Reds at Candlestick Park when we were kids. I may have been ten at the most. It was much warmer than we'd expected and we sat on our parkas. I was rooting for the home team, but probably read a book during most of the game.

19. Slept under the stars
I was in college the first time I slept in a tent. In second and third grade we went on class camping trips and slept under the trees. one year he place we camped had three-sided shelters, which coincidentally was the same year it rained and rained. There were a bunch of parents, but many many kids - two classrooms' worth, plus our siblings.

20. Changed a baby’s diaper
I hated babysitting. Not because of diapers so much as because of babies. Weird to think that the four children I babysat are now about 30 years old.

22. Watched a meteor shower
A bunch of us working on Laundry and Bourbon and Lone Star in the summer of 1990 went out to Yelm to watch the stars fall. It was some big named meteor shower, though I can't remember which one. The assistant director of the show was from Yelm, and she said it would be dark enough out there to see. It was. We sat on a picnic cloth, drank wine, talked, and got home really late.

25. Looked up at the night sky through a telescope
But I can't really see through telescopes because my vision is so bad.

29. Asked out a stranger
Zirpu and I met on Craigslist. We exchanged a few emails and then arranged to meet in real life. Did I suggest meeting first? I don't exactly remember.

30. Had a snowball fight
A few days a year, usually in late January or early February, the college would have to declare a snow day because it was too hard, or too dangerous, for students and professors to get to school.Our house was near campus so lot of people would come over and we would go on walks, have snowball fights, and drink hot chocolate and eat the cookies or brownies or whatever other good things Jujubi baked.

34. Ridden a roller coaster
Willard's Whizzer and the iconic roller coaster at Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, and The Demon at Great America.

36. Danced like a fool and didn’t care who was looking
What does a fool dancing look like? I've done so much dancing that I've probably looked like a fool at least once. I have a still photo of dancing bolero with Zirpu in which I look totally clumsy and graceless.

37. Adopted an accent for an entire day
I took acting classes at Attic Theater when I was in junior high school. One evening after class a friend and I spoke in British (or British-ish) accents for the whole ride home. We were in a cab, and were talking as if we were in a production of The Diary of Anne Frank. The cabbie probably thought we were show-offs, which we were.

38. Actually felt happy about your life, even for just a moment
Much longer than a moment, and at more than one time. Like these days, for example, despite crankiness due to work burnout.

41. Taken care of someone who was drunk
One night when Bink was in law school, she had a party at her house and Spudwhip, Denver D, and I sat in the backyard and passed a bottle of Three Star vodka back and forth. Denver D was in the middle. Spudwhip really took the lead in making sure Denver D would be all right - and the next morning he felt the best of the three of us, since he'd been so sick the night before.

42. Had amazing friends
More interestingly, I have some friends I don't really like. Well, acquaintances really. But the rest of my friends are amazing. I wouldn't settle for less.

44. Watched whales
When Bink got married in the backyard of her in-laws' house on Orcas Island, at the end of the ceremony the minister asked the guests to remain seated while the wedding party walked through to the deck to line up for photos. When the wedding party recessed, all of us were looking out into the San Juan Straits under a blue sky and a hot sun, with lots of boats on the water.

Suddenly a pod of killer whales appeared. It wasn't just that they appeared, but that they showed up after the wedding but while everyone was facing the water. I think it was a sign of good luck.

47. Taken a road-trip
Washington to Colorado three or four times. Oregon to Colorado once. California to Colorado twice. San Francisco Bay Area to Los Angeles area several times. The I-5 Boogie many times.

49. Midnight walk on the beach
After graduation from college, a bunch of us rented a house in Seaside for a few days through Jujubi's parents. The house was a block or so from the beach. One night one of the guys who came down to Seaside for the celebration and I went onto the beach and into the water. It was dark, but there was a moon, and it was cold, but he was from Maine and went a little further out than I did.

53. In a restaurant, sat at a stranger’s table and had a meal with them
Jujubi and I were walking around the Hawthorne Street Fair and stopped in to the Baghdad for a cold beverage. There were people at all the tables, but we asked a couple if we could sit in the empty chairs at their table and they said yes. Not long after they left, and a couple of men asked if they could sit with us. People had done it for us, so we said yes, and one of them started chatting a lot to Jujubi.

That was the Famous Irishman. We learned much later that he had made his friend follow us around the fair because he wanted to meet Jujubi.

55. Milked a cow
I milked a goat at Camp Beaverbrook in Calistoga during the summer of fifth grade. The different tent groups took turns taking care of the goats, and our turn fell on a Sunday, the one "sleep in day" during the week. The goats couldn't wait, so we were up at 7:30 to milk them.

58. Sung karaoke
"Me & Bobby McGee," twice. Never again. Do I sound snobby if I say that I sing much better, and feel much more comfortable, with a live band?

59. Lounged around in bed all day
When Shobi-wan and I lived together we stayed in bed as late as we could on Sunday mornings reading the paper and drinking coffee.

62. Kissed in the rain
I lived in the Pacific Northwest for twelve years. Of course!

63. Played in the mud
See above

64. Played in the rain
See above

A Caroling Story

Good tidings we bring

To you and your kin
Good tidings for Christmas
And a happy new year!

When I was growing up, a whole bunch of neighbors would carol through the neighborhood. We walked up to the peak of the neighborhood and back down, in a long circle among houses that we never saw any other time of the year. Of course all of us kids went too, singing loudly, playing with the wax that melted down over the tinfoil cups we'd made for our candles and momentarily burning our fingertips. DeeKay had a great tolerance for heat, loved hot baths and hot tubs, and could cover all of her fingertips with wax caps. Ria could too, but that's because she was the toughest kid in the neighborhood excepting her brother. I think she could even drip wax onto the back of her hand.


We walked and sang to darkened houses, and I loved caroling, even though there were so many of us that I thought we were singing to empty homes. There was one woman who was in charge, handing out the booklets of carols that had "Property of Mount Olympus Neighborhood Association" stamped onto the inside front cover. She called out the carols by page numbers, and a nearby adult would always make sure the kids knew what page we were on. Every couple of blocks we stopped and sang a carol, and between corners we sang the figgy pudding song - we always went on even though no one ever gave us any, whatever it was.


My favorite carols were (and still are) the religious ones, despite my not being religious at all, let alone Christian. I especially liked the ones sung in Latin, "Oh Come All Ye Faithful" and "In Excelcis Deo," but also liked "Oh Little Town of Bethlehem" and "Silent Night" (especially the German verse, even though it's as hard to sing as the national anthem). Even as a kid the one I disliked the most was "Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer."


After the caroling was over everyone would go to the house of J Jump Joyful's family. There was always a big buffet of Christmassy treats. The ones I remember best were the ones JJJ, Ria, and Eri would make with their mom out of marshmallows and cornflakes, but there were brownies, cookies, and bourbon balls (which were much too bitter!), cheese and crackers, and a universally ignored tray of carrot and celery sticks. There were olives which we would stick on our fingers and nibble at when the sweets overcame us, and cold eggnog and hot mulled wine. As our neighborhood was blessed with perhaps an unusual number of great piano players, there were more carols, really raucously played, once we got back to the house. JJJ's folks had a ton of kids' instruments and we banged plastic bongos and kit drums and shook tambourines and maracas as loudly as we could.


That is my favorite Christmas memory and it happened that way for years.

No and DeeKay, with Mom in the background, Christmas 1976

Lost Lyrics

My mother, your mother
Live across the Bay
Sixteen, Seventeen
East Bay Way. . .

I swear this was the start to a jump rope song when I was growing up, but no one I've asked seems to know it, or even know of it. I don't remember the rest and I really want to know how it goes. I've always assumed it's a San Francisco song, though I suppose they might have sung it in Wisconsin, too.


I remember the middle of this one, which I know was much more common:

. . . Twenty-four robbers knockin' at the door
Asked 'em what they wanted, this is what they said:
Spanish dancers do the splits, turnaround, touch the ground, out the back door.

Back back sit on a tack
Read a book but do not look. . .

Despite the popularity of Double Dutch, I didn't do much rope-jumping when I was growing up. At Dudley Stone, I was busy playing on the big climbing structure the PTA had purchased for the school. It had a wobbly bridge, a climbing net, tires attached together to crawl across, and spinning logs to stand on. It was perfect for playing Adventuring In The Jungle, and the jump rope songs were usually drowned out by the playground noise of balls being bounced and the screams of kids playing Tag. This is why I can't remember the songs very well now. Do you know them?

Advising

Free advice is worth about as much as you pay for it, so they say.


The problem with advice is that even when it's good advice, you only know so in retrospect. Often you can't take it in at the time you're receiving it. I advise people all the time, and my advice is rarely taken. I accept that. We all make our choices.


At the shower yesterday, we all made a book of advice for the tiny human. I'd asked each person to bring a photo of herself as a young kid to put into a memory book with some piece of advice that she wished she had received while she was growing up. Until I received a photo and a [piece of advice for the book from Shanelah's mother-in-law (who wasn't able to attend), I didn't realize how much the advice people submitted was going to be about them personally.


I brought these two photos:























When I was a junior in college and the end of the first semester was approaching, I was considering dropping out of the School of Education because I didn't want to be a teacher. At that time one could get a teaching degree as part of the BA, and I was carrying a major, a minor, and then this minor-plus education course load (this was going to result in my having two electives in my four years of college). I was student teaching at schools unlike the small ones I'd attended with other academically-focused students, and I hated it. Of course I was freaking out about it, because I'd wanted to be a teacher for so long, and I had no idea what I would do if I didn't become a teacher.


I was talking about it with my academic advisor, and she gave me the best advice ever - which of course I could not absorb at the time, though I remember it word-for-word. The Killer Lady was teasing me yesterday by telling some of the other guests that now that I have the message, I do my best to spread it. I compared it to the zealotry of the converted. This is what I wrote in the book for the tiny human:

No decision you make is the only decision
you get to make about any particular thing.

It is okay to change your mind.

Snow Francisco

While it rarely rarely snows here, after my Northwestern Exposure and my Colorado experience, winter without snow doesn't feel right. Even though I've experienced many more winters without snow than with snow (and those Portland ice storms do not count), and I was 19 the first time I saw snow fall, snowless winters feel unusual.


When I was in third grade, there was a big storm one night and in the morning there was snow! By then we'd all been to Tahoe a few times, so we knew snow, but everyone knows "it never snows in San Francisco!" All of the kids in the neighborhood played hooky (even the ones too little for school), and one or two of the moms took us to Buena Vista Park to play on the slopy hills in the park. As we arrived at the park, we saw our classmates walking up from the school with our teachers. We all played in the snow for awhile and as it was disappearing from the heat of the action (literally), J Jump Joyful's mom suggested we go to higher ground.


I don't remember where we went exactly. I remember that it was Mount Tamalpais in Marin, but it seems more likely that we went to Twin Peaks. Twin Peaks is much closer to the old neighborhood, but Mt. Tam is much higher and not as full of tourists.



One of the first few Christmastimes I was back in California, Dnever D and I were at Mom's for an early Christmas with Mom, No, and KT, who were going to be with KT's family for Christmas proper. Denver D was there, so it would have been 1999 I think. I don't remember a big storm, but it was raining, and at some point I looked out the window and the rain had turned to snow. We all watched it fall, and watched cars drive uncertainly up the street.


The snow didn't last long, but did cause Mom, No, and me to launch into the story of the day there was snow in The City for Denver D and KT.

Memoirs

For me, it started with Angela's Ashes.


I just finished The Glass Castle, a memoir about a miserable childhood (as a former counter for the US Census, I was interested to see proof of why the government asks how many toilets in the residence). I've read Bad Blood: A Memoir, Learning Joy from Dogs Without Collars, Running with Scissors, and several others whose titles I don't remember right now. The early parts of these books are a little more fun, when the authors are so young that they don't understand how really screwed up things are.


These memoirs make much more interesting reading than happy, "normal" childhoods would. I remember that when I started volunteering at Harry's Mother, the trainees were asked why they wanted to work with run-away, throw-away youth. There seemed to be two camps: Those of us who had survived crappy childhoods with poverty, bad parents, poor parenting, trouble, and/or drugs wanted to be the person who helped them when they were growing up, or who they wished had; and those of us who had had ordinary childhoods and wanted to reach out to those who hadn't been as fortunate as we had been.


Sometimes I feel like I shouldn't be reading these books, being entertained by someone else's unhappiness (though they are not relentlessly unhappy every moment). The authors are telling their stories, though, so it seems that they want someone to read them, to hear them speak about where they come from and who they (and their families) are. I'm drawn in, time after time, and not just to the unhappy childhoods.

I Want to Ride a Bicycle, I Want to Ride a Bike

The Food Bank Director and his wife are hard-core cyclists. He just passed 5,000 miles on the odometer on his commuter bike, and he and his wife didn't even own a car until a baby was about to arrive. Without baby, they ride bicycles everywhere. The other day he was telling me about the LikeABike. It's a wooden bicycle without pedals that a toddler can push with his or her feet. They plan to get one for baby as soon as he can stand stand up on his own. This bike helps kids learn how to balance, the hard part, before they learn how to ride, the easy part.


Talking about teaching someone how to ride a bike made me think of how I learned to ride one shortly after I turned six. I think it was spring, but winters in San Francisco are so mild that it could have been then. For Christmas, I had received a wonderful pink Schwinn Flyer with a sparkly purple banana seat, tassels on the handles, and a white basket with a pink and purple flower on the front. This description makes me think it is probably the girliest thing I've ever owned that wasn't a dress.


I'd been riding it with one foot on the ground for several months prior; that bike never did have training wheels. I can't remember but J Jump Joyful may have been bike riding by then; certainly her older brother was. We all had vehicles, of course, tricycles and Big Wheels and these things that looked like yellow rafts with wheels and I had a red plastic riding mower with pedals and No had a blue-green plastic sport car with pedals that our parents had had shipped back from France when we came back to the States. We all rode around and around in circles in the big room downstairs, guided by the stoplight my father had found somewhere.


All of us kids must have been there but I only remember JJJ, her dad, and myself at the Panhandle the day I learned to ride the bike on my own. I saw the acorns on the ground and worried that they would "trip" the wheels on the bike. This sounds like a such a cliche, but I really did feel like I was flying as I pedaled, faster and faster, and I felt the bike release from JJJ's dad's hands and I saw the handle tassels stream out and it was no wonder they called it a Flyer!

The section of Panhandle where I learned to ride a beautiful pink and purple bicycle.

Don't It Always Seem To Go...

When I was in middle school, two of the girls in the carpool were taking figure skating lessons. My neighbor DeeKay was one, and the girl who'd been our hook-up for the carpool in the first place was the other. Skating lessons were on Wednesdays, and I think DeeKay's mom may have been the Wednesday driver. We all went to what we called "Skates" on 48th Avenue.


DeeKay and the other girl owned their own ice skates, shiny white and with blade protectors. The rest of us rented ours, brown with the shoe size printed on the back of the heel. The ice rink smelled like the inside of a freezer, and the oval-shaped rink had a mural of people skating on a frozen pond with snow on the evergreens around it. There was a wooden fence along the high side to keep people from falling onto the rink when they walked into the building, and along the right side was the enclosed snack bar, which smelled like what a freezer would smell like if you'd left a few cups of hot chocolate in there. We bought Nestle Crunch candy bars and played Space Invaders there.


DeeKay's lesson was in the middle of the rink and I watched her skate backwards and try an axel or a camel spin. All I knew how to do was skate forward, and I did that, as fast as I could. As I sped, crouched, along the outside of the rink I imagined myself to be Eric Heiden, who won five gold medals and set Olympic and world records in all of the speed-skating events.


We didn't just go after school for DeeKay's lessons. I remember going there with the kids from the neighborhood (as opposed to the carpool kids), and DeeKay had one if not two birthday parties there. When he was eight or nine, No broke his thumb there when a man skating backwards crashed into him. After Ryebread moved to Washington State and then moved back, sometime during my senior year of high school, a group of us wound up ice skating. I remember feeling really happy because it was so simple and didn't involve trying to drink beer.


They tore down the ice rink while I was in the Northwest and built townhouses or condos on the property. I'm still sad that the old rink, which was admittedly small and in an old rickety building, is gone. I have spent much more time on dance floors than on ice, but I would love to smell that ice-and-chocolate smell and wear those heavy boots again, and take another Eric Heiden spin around the rink.

Cleaning Out The Closets

Shmeen was in town this week to help Shmeen's mom, Jolly Woman, clear out some of the crap in the closets. Shmeen's specific task this week was to go through her stuff. It turns out that Shmeen is quite the saver. I kind of knew this, but I didn't realize the extent... I knew that she still had her old dolls and games, but I saw a binder today with Shmeen's 5th grade work in it, a small box of ribbon-wrapped barrettes, and keepsakes from Great America with photos of people Shmeen didn't remember.


Shmeen and I have known each other for a long time, so it wasn't just that the things she dug up looked familiar to me because we are about the same age, it was that I remembered those barrettes in her hair and played this really fun game with her during the Carter Administration.


One box held two things I was absolutely astounded to learn she had hung onto:


Her school uniforms from grammar school!


These are the dress uniforms we wore on Mass days, for class photos, and some assemblies. Our regular uniforms consisted of white button-up collared shirts and colored cardigans or vests. The lower form uniform (on the left) was a jumper worn through sixth grade, and the blue skirt was worn by seventh and eighth graders. You can't really tell by these photos but these uniforms are why Shmeen and I dislike the hounds' tooth pattern to this day.


I don't remember what happened to my uniform once I got to high school. I hope it's not sitting in a box in Mom's basement! If it is, I think I may mail it to Shmeen...

Early Reading

Frederick
Corduroy
Anansi The Spider: A Tale From The Ashanti
Dr. Seuss' Happy Birthday To You!
Free To Be... You And Me (and the record)
Where Did I Come From?
Where The Wild Things Are
In The Night Kitchen
Richard Scarry books
The Wizard of Oz
Tick Tock of Oz
Alice In Wonderland
The Phantom Tollbooth
a biography of Sam Houston, title forgotten (which I won for my good marks in California history, which even at the time I thought was strange)
Julie of the Wolves
The Diary of Ann Frank
Harriet The Spy
The Call of the Wild
The Narnia Chronicles (my favorite was, and is, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader)
The Hobbit
Shogun

Reading A Memoir

I'm reading Madhur Jaffrey's memoir. My uncle took a memoir writing class a few years ago and he explained to me that the difference between a memoir and a biography is that a biography tells the whole story of the subject and a memoir is built around one or two themes. Climbing the Mango Trees is about family and food - not all that surprising since it's written by a cookbook author.


What I've been thinking is that perhaps Jaffrey might have thought her childhood was pretty ordinary (but I'm only about 100 pages in) but what makes it interesting to me is that she grew up in India. The book is filled with things like mango trees and tamarind chutney, and she grew up in a multiple-family household led by her grandfather, surrounded by many many cousins.


I think my childhood was pretty ordinary, but it was my childhood and it was great. I say that knowing that our family experienced a great loss at the beginning of my and No's childhood, but that's a question mark that can't be guessed at. Could I pick out a theme around which a memoir could be built?



One of the things I'm doing with this blog is posting super-short stories from my life, mostly my young life. "Write what you know." It's practice in writing and part of my daily practice of writing.


That's all I have to say about that. This is my 200th post, just past the halfway point in the calendar year.

Apricots

When I was a kid, many of us neighborhood kids would play kickball in the street in front of our house, with Mrs. Snyderman's Volkswagen station wagon for first, the manhole cover at the top of the street for second, and the corner between our driveway and that of the house next door for third. Home plate faced the intersection, so the players at second base were always the first to see the produce truck.


It was a big green truck with short white and green striped awnings that hung over the shelves of fruit and vegetables that were for sale. I don't remember his name, but I think it was Joe, followed by something Italian (I asked Mom if she remembered his name and she said she's not sure she ever knew it). He was balding, had thick hands and a paunch, and wore light brown pants and an orange polo shirt. While the neighborhood wasn't that fancy when I was growing up, it wasn't the ethnic enclave in which he probably did more business, but he was always friendly to us kids playing in the street.


I don't remember many adults buying produce from his truck on our street, but we kickballers always talked to him, admiring the size of the truck or the awnings. One day he had these small, slightly fuzzy yellow-orange fruits on the shelf. I had never seen that before, so I asked him what it was.


"This, Muffin," he said, holding one in his big hand, "Is an apricot."


At that time, my favorite thing to eat was dried apricots. They were sweet, tart, tough, chewy, and I liked to suck on them as if they were hard candy. I had never seen a fresh apricot and didn't even know they were something one ate without their being dehydrated. "I didn't know they came fresh," I told him. I didn't tell him no one had ever called me "Muffin" before (or has done so since), and I liked it.


The produce man gave me the apricot and said I should eat it. The fruit was soft, with a hint of the concentrated apricot flavor I was used to from the dried version, neither too sweet nor tart. The difference between dried and fresh was that between standing next to the radio and hearing music on the breeze. I liked that, too.