Planning to Commit

In May of 2002, Zirpu and I had been dating for about eight months. He was living in a 400sf apartment that was too small for all of his stuff (namely, big furniture, a Bowflex, and an exercise bike, plus many books and a couple of computers) on the west side of the San Mateo Bridge. I was living in an Oakland house with a 14-bit modem and which was located in an area without much cell phone service.


One afternoon I broached a very scary topic: Our moving in together. Zirpu had concerns about living together that didn't have anything to do with me, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to live with anyone. At the same time, we wanted to be together all the time, and dating involved a lot of driving for both of us, with me spending whole weekends down on the peninsula. Mostly I remember that I worked really hard to just listen to what Zirpu had to say and then think of my response, rather than listen and think at the same time.


At the end of that conversation we agreed that we would talk about it again in January 2003 and see if we both wanted to live together, and perhaps start sharing living space a few months after that. Whew! We were done with that conversation, but we both knew where the other stood: "Yes, right now it seems that living together would be good, but I'm not ready right now."



We all know what happens to plans. In September we were engaged and moving into an apartment halfway between my job and his.

You can't resist it
When it happens to you

Fifteen Seconds

The twentieth anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake passed a couple weeks ago. That was the quake that knocked down Watsonville and parts of Santa Cruz, broke part of the Bay Bridge, collapsed a 1.25 mile section of highway, caused a big fire in the Marina district, and postponed the third game of the World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A's.


I was in Tacoma, at college, hanging around the house with some folks, including a friend of mine who had just arrived by from San Francisco for a visit when I received a call from a guy I was seeing. He had been watching TV, waiting for the game to start, when he (and everyone else) lost the video feed and learned that an earthquake had just hit the Bay Area. He didn't have a phone and had jumped in his car to go to a friend's to let me know.


At the time, a friend of ours had (unofficially) moved in to live with his girlfriend, one of my housemates. While none of us "real" residents of the house had a TV, this fellow had one in storage in the basement and we brought it upstairs and propped it on the coffee table. I remember that it was both small and yellow.


I tried to reach Mom and couldn't get through, so I called my aunt in Massachusetts to see if she had heard from Mom (this was our back-up plan for emergencies). While I was on the phone with Aunt Alice, Mom called and said that she was all right and the house was all right. She had just sat down in a meeting with two people at work when the earthquake struck, and after the they ducked under the doorway or the desk, everyone had gone straight home. No was at college in Southern California and she had already spoken to him.

My friend who had just arrived got in touch with his family, who lived outside SF, a few hours later. In the hours while we watched the news, I kept thinking of more people to wonder about how they were doing. A friend of my mother's lived in the Marina (still does), though I didn't know where exactly she lived so any of those apartment buildings that had just fallen on their faces could have been hers. Eventually I learned that this person wasn't allowed back in her apartment for three days, when the SFFD let her in for fifteen minutes to get some things; she stayed with a friend until her home was cleared by the engineers. Most of one family was at their warehouse south of Market Street; the buildings on both sides lost their front walls, but their building was fine, and at home they lost only one teacup when it fell out of the cupboard.


It was bad enough being glued to the television. I'd heard Mom use that expression when she would describe where she and Dad were when JFK was shot. It was really strange to be so far away when the earthquake happened - particularly for my friend, who had left SF the previous day. We felt like we should have been there, participating.


Are you prepared?

Short Shots

National Blog Posting Month is approaching, starting Sunday**. The point of NaBloPoMo is to post something every day, and my plan is to write at least a short short story each day in November. I hope also to snag a photo album or two from Mom's so there will be pictures too, as this blog has been too text-heavy recently.

For kicks, here's a photo from the entrance of the Disney store in one of the malls around here.



**This Sunday is also Fall Back, so change your clocks and check your fire alarms and the food in your emergency kits.

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:

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)

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.

Quizzical Fitness

Arnold Schwarzenegger came on the scene about the same time that I started 7th grade. With his support,The President's Council on Physical Fitness mandated a new program in schools, which had the requisite Physical Fitness Test. It was something that you could fail, but would never result in your being flunked out of PE.


Every day we dressed down for PE, wearing our uniform shorts and shirts and changing into sneakers from our saddle shoes and Oxfords. From what I remember, the Test was a battery of events we had to complete, and it consisted of what seemed like days of different events: The 50-yard dash, the 1000-yard (or some distance) run/walk, the long jump, and timed push-ups, sit-ups, and pull-ups. There was a chart showing how many of what you should be able to complete for your age and size, which made it very clear to all who was failing and who wasn't.


I knew that I would fail the test. I didn't have what it took to meet any of the benchmarks, and I told myself that I didn't care to. I liked the long jump, which we did on the sidewalk outside the art building, because I was more successful at that than I was at any of the other events. I don't remember even trying to run the run/walk, which at my school was six revolutions around the lower playground. I knew I would never come close to the speeds of any of the bullies, so with a "screw you" attitude, I started out walking and kept walking. I had the slowest time of anyone in the class, of course.

At the time, I hated the PE teacher. This may have been simply because she was the PE teacher, and in retrospect I'm sure she was frustrated by my attitude. But she allowed team captains to pick their teams, allowed girls to say nasty things to other girls at bat or when serving, and allowed the playing of Dodgeball. These are all things that the Famous Irishman, an elementary school PE teacher, has told me he doesn't allow in his classes, and that these days are generally frowned upon among PE teachers he knows.


Years later when I signed up at the gym after the car wreck, I felt pretty intimidated by all the people there. I knew it was something I wanted to do, in fact, felt like I needed to do, if I was going to have the strength to dance at the level I wanted to dance. For the first four years at the gym I never spoke to anyone who wasn't staff, other than to ask if someone was done with a particular piece of equipment. I kept my eyes to myself, never looking directly at anyone else working out. I figured if I didn't watch anyone, no one would watch me - which is to say no one would judge me, my shape, or the weights I was lifting or pushing.


The Famous Irishman has said that bad memories of PE classes can turn people off to physical activity for the rest of their lives. I approached each workout, particularly those I did on my own and not with the trainer, with that ostrich attitude because I had body memory of those awful middle school PE classes. On the other hand, though I am still slow and would still fail the Phsyical Fitness Test as it was administered in middle school, sometimes I smile at how far I've come.