My 10-year old is attending the local Vacation Bible School this week at a church just a few minutes from our house.  This is good because I can stay asleep until the very last minute.  She is old enough that I can drive her to the church door and drop her off, no walking in required. I do not have to appear in public.

So I drop her off–getting up only six hours after I go to sleep–and then returning home to walk the dog, work, shower, pick her up at noon, work, drop off another kid at work, work, work, work, wonder what to make for dinner and so on and so forth.

I am sleepy.

Yawning.

Only two more days and then next week . . . Junior Lifeguard Camp.  I’m not sure exactly what that entails (besides a new one-piece Speedo), but I do know that all next week, I’ll be waking up early to get her off to camp.  Fortunately for me, another mom and I are sharing carpool duties.  She will do the morning drop-off and I’ll do the afternoon pick-up.

Just for kicks, this Saturday I have to get up before the sun gets up to drop off my husband at the airport.   It’s like the universe is conspiring against me and I’ll never get to sleep eight hours in a row again.

*

In other news, today is my twenty-sixth wedding anniversary.  I married my husband when he was 26, so now he’s been married as long as he was not married.  They say the first twenty-six years are the hardest, so I expect it will be all sunshine and rainbows from here on out.

Actually, he’s such a good husband and father that I’ve always known marrying him was the best decision I ever made.  I do feel sorry for him sometimes because he has to live with me and my accompanying ridiculousness but he’s been a good sport and never tells me that my hair looks terrible, for instance.

He did not know what he was getting himself into when he said, “I do” all those years ago–and neither did I.  How can you know when you’re standing there in your home-sewn taffeta gown in front of God and everybody and you’re only twenty-two and you don’t yet know that your husband-to-be hates maps?  And you don’t know about the rocks in the road or the detours or the dangerous stretches ahead?

But I still do and he still does and that will get us through the next twenty-six years.

One of my favorite shows to watch is Chopped on the Food Network.  Have you seen it?  Four contestants are given a basket of “mystery” ingredients and they must concoct an appetizer in twenty minutes.  One contestant is chopped, then the remaining three get a basket of more “mystery” ingredients and in a slightly longer time-frame, they must create an entree.  Another contestant is chopped and the remaining two contestants compete in the dessert round.

The “mystery” ingredients are always odd, sometimes stuff I’ve never even heard of, other times, ingredients that would confound and sicken me (a whole sheep’s head, anyone?) and sometimes they’re just weird (a box of chocolate covered donuts for the entree round, for instance).

My whole life is an episode of Chopped except that I have a pantry rather than a basket and I don’t have any fancy kitchen gadgets and I am not a creative cook and I would rather be pretty much anywhere than the kitchen.  (Oh, and I have no camera crew, no good pot-holders, merciless judges, no training, and no possibility of winning $10,000.)

So today, after work at about 3:30 PM I was lying in bed playing Candy Crush on my phone when it rang.  My husband called and I told him I was trying to figure out what to make for dinner and he suggested:

• Meatloaf
• Spaghetti
• Hamburgers

I shot down each suggestion because I didn’t have any thawed ground beef or sausage (which I use to make spaghetti sauce).  After I hung up the phone to continue losing Round 65 of Candy Crush, I pondered what I could make.

I did a Google search for a recipe for “Cheeseburger Soup.”  Doesn’t that sound like it’s a recipe?  I didn’t find it.  Then I thought maybe stuffed cabbage.  I settled on Porcupine Meatballs.

Not that I’ve ever made them but a quick scan of the recipe showed common ingredients.

I started gathering ingredients and thawing the meat and grabbing giant bowls and turning on the oven and all that jazz.  As if I were a real cook.

Then I remembered the recent incident of the Rice in the Pantry in which I discovered little black rice-shaped bugs crawling in the long-grain white rice. (Welcome to Southern California.)

At this point, a Chopped contestant would come up with a brilliant and tasty substitution.  I went upstairs, fixed my hair, slapped on enough make-up to disguise my utter fatigue and went to the grocery store to spend $2.69 on a bag of rice.

Start to finish, cooking dinner took me two and a half ridiculous hours.

Everyone liked the meatballs, mashed potatoes and asparagus.  And I did not serve any bugs with my rice, but I did hear a report of a Bernese Mountain Dog hair in a meatball.

And that, my friend, was my mystery ingredient.

(Sadly, I was not chopped.  I will appear in the kitchen again tomorrow night at 4 PM with absolutely no idea what to make for dinner.  I just hope the mystery ingredient isn’t rattlesnake meat.)

 

As we drove to the beach tonight to meet friends, I doubted.  I felt disconnected and unsure of myself.

There’s really only one thing to do when you feel that way.  Do it anyway.  Go.  Be interested.  Stop gazing at yourself in the mirror and just grab the beach bag and forget what you hate about your reflection and go.

So, we arrived and found a parking place, connected with some people we knew and had a great time.

And afterward, I felt sandy and sticky and a little more connected than before.

Summer used to last longer.  I’m not sure whether we can blame global warming or the economy or Barack Obama, but someone did something unauthorized and now summer flashes by like lightning.

Don’t you remember being a kid and swimming through a summer day as if it were an ocean?  And you’d get so bored because the days lined up in a single file line that stretched a thousand miles between the last day of school and the first day of school?  You’d get sick of sitting in the dark living room watching the Electric Company with the drapes closed because you were bored with going outside and riding your banana seat bike around the block to visit all the off-leash dogs in their yards because you did that a million times already, almost as many times as you stubbed your bare toes and dripped melted Popsicles down your arms.

Now, you look up and find yourself practically in the middle of July and school starts in the middle of August and your daughter hasn’t finished that multiplication tables book and your son hasn’t started his summer reading and why, oh why, is summer almost over?  You haven’t had enough fun yet.  You haven’t even had a single Popsicle.

You could even prove to yourself that summer is fading away by going into Target and noticing the school supplies replacing the pool toys.  And you are tempted to buy more Crayola crayons until you realize that your kids don’t really color anymore, except for your baby girl who just got her ears pierced and thinks she is mostly grown up. And you have twenty packs already that you discovered when you moved two years ago, though who’s counting?

I’m a little bit upset about summer breaking the speed limits.  It’s a symptom of a much bigger problem, namely the probably of my rapid aging.  I read an article the other day by 80-year old Oliver Sacks called The Joy of Old Age and while I hoped that it might be true (the joy of old age), mainly I feel grim about the sands of time sliding in a great avalanche which leaves me sputtering and wondering how my babies grew so fast.  Why didn’t I take more pictures? My imaginary To Do List is pages long and I have barely even gotten started.  (For instance, I meant to travel back to Tahiti and yet I haven’t even had a valid passport in dozens of years, ever since that one I got when I was sixteen and still wearing that lavender crew-neck sweatshirt every day.)

I’m not really fighting it, though.  When I recently noticed a cluster of gray hair at my part–well, “cluster” might be an exaggeration, but at the sight of that gray, I decided on the spot to stop highlighting my hair and to revert to my natural hair color, only this time with strands of gray running through it.  This is as glamorous as it sounds.

How can you fight aging?  You can either let the future drag you along by your graying hair or you can stand up and keep moving.  Try to keep up.  Leave a trail of breadcrumbs, not that you’ll ever be able to go backward.  You can pretend that one day you’ll meander back and notice the things you missed the first time you jogged past.

Tomorrow we’re going to the beach.  I don’t want to hear that we’re less than six months away from Christmas.  SLOW DOWN.  You move too fast.

You’ve got to make the morning last.  (Okay, so I just drifted into a Simon and Garfunkel song . . . did you hear the tune in your head?  If so, you are ALSO OLD.)

 

 

 

I actually started a post on a particular topic the other night but it was very late and I was very tired and so the opening paragraphs of the post sit in my “drafts” folder.  I will finish it at some point.

But that doesn’t help you, does it?  (All three of you who read here.)   You’re wondering what’s happening in my life, right?  Ha.

We have a houseguest, the girlfriend of one of my sons.  She is a delight to have around.  Grace treats her like royalty and a sister rolled into one.  Having a houseguest is a constant reminder to me to wash another load of bath towels because we are constantly out of clean towels because my children can’t seem to use a towel more than once before leaving it in a damp pile on the floor.

On Saturday, some of us went to the beach for the afternoon.  I inched my mini-van into a parallel parking spot, backing up, cranking the wheel one direction, backing up another inch, cranking the wheel again, over and again about ten times.  Normally I am a competent parallel parker but for some reason, the car behind me on the road decided to stop right behind me while waiting for me to park, totally cramping my style.

Finally parked, I opened the back of the van and pulled out beach chairs and discovered my umbrella was missing.  My husband had just taken my mini-van in to have it washed and vacuumed and I figured the umbrella was removed from the back and mistakenly not put back.  Not having a beach umbrella is certainly a first-world problem, but I was upset about not having it.  Luckily, I had sunhats and sunscreen, so we managed.  Having a beach umbrella once seemed like a fanciful luxury to me but now it feels like an essential.  How did I live without a beach umbrella?

Two days later, my husband and I were talking about the missing umbrella again.  And as we talked and considered where it could be, I suddenly remembered propping it against a chain-link fence at a park weeks earlier when my daughter had a soccer scrimmage.  When I propped it, I said to myself, “Don’t forget this umbrella.”  And then the game began and ended and I walked to my mini-van and completely forgot my umbrella.

I wonder if that park has a Lost and Found.  I wonder if someone absconded with my umbrella.

*

You know what’s weird?

I found a Post-It note on my desk.  It’s in my handwriting, so clearly I wrote the note.

But it makes absolutely no sense.  It says this:

“accidentally kill

Meat Eaters

woman like two”

WHAT IN THE WORLD?  The three lines seem unconnected.  I just have no idea what it means.  Am I composing Haiku, only not?  Have I begun writing a novel about Meat Eaters who accidentally kill, only not?  HAVE I LOST MY MIND?  Why is Meat and Eaters capitalized?  I can’t bear to throw away this nonsensical note until I can figure out why I wrote it.

*

This week my daughter has soccer camp and one of my sons is helping at Vacation Bible School at church.  One of my sons is employed and the other is hanging out with his girlfriend.  I am just trying to stop myself from losing personal belongings and from writing myself cryptic Post-It notes.

Wish me luck.

I sit behind this big cluttered desk for hours every day and night.  It’s mahogany or cherry or some kind of wood that I never would have chosen had I picked out this desk myself but I didn’t.  The previous owners of our house offered to sell us a few items when they moved.  I am convinced that’s because they didn’t want the hassle of moving this giant desk with its interlocking bookcases and cabinets.

I’m not really a fancy desk kind of girl.  Really, if it were up to me, I’d still be sitting at a desk cobbled together from an old door balanced on two short filing cabinets.

All this to say that today at some point, the left drawer on this fancy desk got stuck in the not-quite-closed position.

Something’s apparently fallen and can’t get up way back in the way back of that drawer.  I’ve done the obvious things to solve this problem.  I’ve pulled the drawer out as far as it will go and yanked up and felt around for a magic release button and I’ve used a plastic ruler to sweep around the back of the drawer like you’d sweep a finger into the drooly mouth of a baby who has a Cheeto stuck in the back of his throat.

What?  Your baby doesn’t eat Cheetos?

(Either does mine.  I don’t have a baby.)

So, I have this drawer that looks like it just needs a gentle push to close it but that’s a lie.  The drawer will not close.

I did a Google search, looking for a solution and found nothing.

I’ve always wondered why this drawer didn’t pull out more in the first place.  You can’t really see or reach the stuff in the back of that drawer.

(You think I’m going to write a whole post about a dumb struck drawer, right?)

No.

Tonight one of my sons got his first-ever paycheck.  He gave the envelope to me and told me I could open it and I did and read out the number so he could be impressed by how much money he earned already.  We talked about taxes and withholding and then he said, “Just keep it.  I don’t know what I’d do with it now anyway.”

So . .  . Mommy’s going shopping!

Just kidding.  I’m just hanging on to it until he opens a bank account.

Tomorrow I have nowhere I have to go, nothing I have to do unless you count the pet store to buy dog food.  I’m planning to take the rest of my very dull knives to the Farmer’s Market where I’ve found that my neighbor was right:  there’s a guy there who will sharpen your knives on the spot and charge you just a few bucks.  Last week I took in my 26-year old chef knife and had it sharpened.  I used it as soon as I got home and promptly nicked my index finger because as it turns out, sharpened knives are sharp.

My husband’s birthday was last Sunday which makes me feel like this Sunday is Groundhog’s Day . . . hello Father’s Day, but I already cooked a roast and mashed potatoes and made perfect sweet tea and baked a chocolate cake from scratch and picked out thoughtful cards from all the children and bought a gift.  Now I have to do it all over again?  I mean GET TO do it all over again?  As I recall, on Mother’s Day, my husband left me alone in the world with these four children while he gallivanted off to a tropical island for 20 days.

Okay, fine.  It was a missions trip and he did make sure the kids gave me cards on Mother’s Day and my own mother was here. Still.  (*DISCLAIMER* My husband is awesome and I adore him and I’m just kidding around.)

Today my friend, Claire, and I took Grace to get her ears pierced.  We surprised her by taking her to a jewellery store.  She was shocked and I think a little scared–even though she really wanted to have pierced ears, she wasn’t too excited about the actual piercing part of having them pierced.  So, we have pictures of her cringing and when it was all over, she cried a little and said, “Katie lied when she said it didn’t really hurt!”

I felt like a monster who let my baby get hurt.

Well, before I had my drawer crisis and before the ear-piercing torture and the first paycheck, other stuff happened this week.

My husband and I went to see a taping of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.  He got a high-five from Jay at the opening of the show, but I was crowded out by a guy in an orange shirt who just stood clapping, blocking my path to Jay.  (We’re on a first-name basis now since this is the second time I’ve seen him in person.)

We went to a graduation party. (My husband and me, not me and Jay.)

Then there was work, soccer practice, and shuttling kids to and fro, reading (Torch by Cheryl Strayed), napping, cooking, laundry, dog-walking and all the other mundane and routine tasks that stitch together the days.

And so it goes.

Thirty years ago, I had a sunburn from floating around in my friend Shelly’s above-ground pool on some sort of inflatable raft.  I remember this only because I graduated from high school thirty years ago and the pictures of me with my grandparents show my very pink skin contrasting against my white blouse.

Back then, I didn’t know anyone who had a graduation party.  I certainly didn’t.  My grandparents drove an hour up I-5 and after graduation, we ate ice cream.  At least that’s how it goes in my memory.

Of course, that was thirty years ago and my once unfailing memory falters sometimes, more often than I would have expected as that 18-year old girl.

If I passed my 18-year old self on the street, I’m not sure I would recognize her.  Too bad, because I’d like to pull her aside and tell her that everything will work out all right.  But I’d keep it cryptic because really, no one really wants to know what will happen before it does happen.  How could you survive the agony of waiting for the Thing to crash toward you?  I wouldn’t want to tell her what was around the corner.  The good would outweigh the bad but the weight of both would crush her.  Too heavy a burden, knowing the future.

Looking back, thirty years feels like just so many slides clicking past, not so long ago, click, click, click.  And suddenly I’m looking at my crepe-paper neck in the mirror and admiring my finally-gray hairs.

But looking forward thirty years?  Unimaginable.  A journey of a hundred thousand miles taken one slow step at a time, in snow, barefoot, uphill the whole way . . . and when I get there, I’m seventy-eight.

Except I’m sure in thirty years it will seem more like a barrel rolling down a hill with me careening around inside.

Speculation.  Just speculation.

In the meantime, tomorrow Grace has a soccer scrimmage.  Later on, I’ll take a couple of my kids to a pool party to meet the youth pastor candidate, his wife and toddler.  I will read–I finished Justin Cronin’s lovely The Summer Guest and just picked up The Great Gatsby.  I need to clean out my fridge, sort the basket of socks, organize my desk drawers, bake a cake.  The dog needs a bath.

All the details will fade from memory by the time I’m seventy-eight, but for now, they are the details that make this life my life.

(Note from seventy-eight year old me to forty-eight year old me:  Stop worrying.  Everything will work out all right.)

When we moved into our new house in 1977, a bunch of boxes were never really unpacked.  They were stacked under and around the pool table which was crowded into the garage, though the garage wasn’t really a parking place for cars in my family but rather a place for stuff.

So when someone in our family couldn’t find something, we’d laugh and say, “It’s in a box in the garage.”

All those things you have but can’t find . . . are in a box in the garage.  Figuratively speaking.

A couple days ago, my newly employed son mentioned that he needed a padlock for his locker at work.  I said, “No problem!  I have padlocks.”

And without too much trouble, I was able to locate two padlocks.  I could not find the keys.

If we were still in our previous home, I could have located a key in minutes because I own an entire collection of mystery keys.  I’ve kept them in a clear plastic box for many years.

Why do I have a collection of mystery keys?  Most of them unlock doors in places I will never live again.  They are keys missing their locks yet I tuck those orphan keys in that clear plastic box.  Because you just never know.   You never know!

I checked the garage shelves, the drawers in the laundry room, the cupboards in the kitchen, the filing cabinet and then I circled around a second and third time, looking in vain for that box of keys.

I can’t find it.

I bought new padlocks with keys.

If you were a box of keys, where would you be?  Until I find it, I’m not sure I can ever truly rest again.  (Just kidding.  Nothing comes between me and sound sleep.)

But I would like to unlock this mystery.

Do you save mystery keys?  What about old calendars?  (Yes, I do have a pair of shoes that I owned in high school.  Why are you asking?)

I know.  Where have I been? Why haven’t I written anything here?

I am the Poster Child for How to Lose Your Blog Audience.  My Number One Tip:  1)  Do not blog for days, weeks, even a fortnight. Or longer.

Well, now that we have that out of the way, let’s proceed.

My husband left me.  TEMPORARILY.  He went to Micronesia for twenty days to teach some classes and climb a coconut tree and eat freshly caught tuna and to sweat.  Hey, it’s a tropical island.  What did you expect?

Meanwhile, the day  he left, I drove up to Anaheim to have dinner with a friend, but mainly to pick up some other friends from Washington.  The woman and her son have been friends for ten years.  Our sons met in kindergarten class and we eventually realized they were born on the same day.  And my friend, the mom, was born only a few days before I was.

So, they came to visit for a few days.

We had a whirlwind of a weekend.  This is what we did:

• Spent the afternoon at the beach.
• Took our kids–five total–to see Iron Man 3.  (Everyone loved it.)
• Rode the ferry from Coronado Island to downtown San Diego where we toured the USS Midway Museum.
• Dragged the kids to the other side of Coronado Island to see the Hotel Del Coronado.  (The boys thought this was super super boring.)
• Strolled through the Carlsbad Street Fair.
• Visited the Safari Zoo.
• Delivered them to the airport.

A day after those friends left, my mom came to stay for a week.  We ate lunch out every day, pretty much, did as much shopping as we could, visited Seafaire Village and ate lunch while watching sailboats glide by.  A funny thing happened at the Edgewater Grill–we sat down at our table with a view of the water and a bird drunkenly flapped and fluttered around us.  I have a well-documented unease around indoor birds, yet even I was trying to capture the poor thing between a menu and . . .  my hand?  Eventually, other customers managed to guide the bird to safety.  It was an exciting beginning to our lunch.

We had so much fun, my mom, my daughter and me.  We ended our afternoon by losing our car in the parking  lot which is kind of a regular occurrence for me.  I always have a good reason for being unable to find my car, so that’s something.

After my mom left, I had another week or so before my husband returned from his tropical adventure.

My husband’s absence affected me in one major and painful way:  I had to wake up every morning at 6:20 AM to make sure my son was awake (he was, every morning) and then again at 7:20 AM to drive him to school.  (Normally, my husband, the Early Bird, takes care of morning stuff.)  Then I’d come home and sleep some more before working at 10 AM.  The problem with early mornings is that I work late nights . . . so I was getting to sleep at 1 AM or 2 AM and . . . boy, that was really exhausting.

My husband came home just in the nick of time . . . to drive my son to school for his last day of school.

I cannot believe that my boy has finished his first year of high school and his second year of school here in California.

Meanwhile, yesterday my daughter saw a coyote behind our house.  The coyote saw her, too, and then me, and also, our big dog.  We all kind of had a stand-off and then the coyote slunk away.

Oh, I forgot to mention the MOST FUN my mom and I had.

See that picture up there?  That’s the back of my head.  We went to a taping of the Tonight Show with Jay Leno.  My mom uses a walker so we were seated first in the studio . . . in excellent seats right on the floor.  I was about ten feet away from Jay Leno during his monologue.  Jay Leno shook my hand . . . but the camera panned away from us at that very moment.  I think that happened because some idiot guy walked right onto the stage–which we’d been told NOT TO DO.

(That’s my mom’s manicured hand outstretched to the left of my hair.  And in front of me is the idiot guy who is standing on the stage in violation of the rules.  I should have given him a wedgie or at least a hard shove, but what if he fell into Jay Leno and I got thrown out of the studio?  Good thing I just stood there with my hand out, waiting for a handshake.)

Anyway, so I’ve been busy and every night when I finish work after midnight, I think about blogging and then I think how I’m just too tired . . . and sometimes, during the day, I’ll compose fascinating blog posts in my head and then I take a nap before work and work and finish working and realize how tired I am and so I check out Facebook and go to bed.

This is How to Kill Your Blog Without Really Trying.

And this is the pet pig I saw on Coronado Island.

You’re welcome.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My son was invited to an after-school birthday party at the beach.  He celebrated the same friend’s birthday at the beach last year, so when he mentioned it, I remembered last year.  Last year I asked, “Will his parents be there?  How will you get there?  How will you get home?  Are the parents staying the whole time?”  And I worried a little.

This year, same friend, same parents, same beach, same everything.

I forgot, though, that the party was today until I received a text message from my son asking me to meet him after school with his swimsuit, boogie board and lacrosse stick.  I took the liberty to add sunscreen and a beach towel to the bag and I met him at school.

He sauntered up to my van with his friend, all cool like a 15-year old is.  I pushed the button and the back of the van slid up and he grabbed the bag and lacrosse stick and boogie board.  I said through the open windows, “Hey, do you need a ride home?” and he said, “I don’t know.”

“Well, text me,” I said, “And let me know when you know.”

Fast-forward a few hours.  My husband, The Good Parent, says, “So when is our son coming home?” and I said, “I don’t know.  I figure after it’s dark.”

At 7 PM, I text my son:  “Any  idea what time you’ll be home?  Or need a ride?  Dad’s asking . . .”

I took a nap.  When I woke at 8 PM, my husband said, “When is our son coming home?” and I said, “I don’t know.  I”ll text him.”

I texted him.   “Hello?”

No answer.

At 8:27 PM, I text again.  “Hey, let me know what’s going on when you have a chance.”

Then, a bit later:  “Please text me.”

At 8:59 PM:  “I’m heading to the beach to look for you.  Please call me.”

No answer.

While I drove to the beach, I thought all those dark thoughts you think when you consider the worst possible outcome.  Had my boy drowned?  And the parents didn’t know how to reach me to break the news?  Were they in a terrible car crash and no one survived and therefore, no one called me?

Honestly, I figured that my son’s phone was in his pocket of his shorts and he was wearing a swimsuit, not those shorts and he just didn’t hear his phone.  Or rather, feel it since none my kids keep their phones’ ringers on.  They depend on the buzz of a silenced phone to alert them.  (Don’t ask me.  I have no idea.)

But.

What if?

I walked down the steps to the beach, walked along the sidewalk and up onto the Pier for a better view.  I saw three separate campfires and strolled by each one, straining to see my son’s blond hair in the darkness.

He wasn’t there.

I headed back up the stairs toward my van.  Before I reached the top of the stairs, at 9:23 PM, I got a text from him.  He was just leaving the beach, safely in the car.  He left his phone in the pocket of his shorts in his bag.

I knew it.

But seriously.  I ought to be fired.  I failed to get any contact information for the parents.  I didn’t know for sure which beach they were going to.  I had no idea what time they’d be home.  I couldn’t remember the friend’s name.  (My son pointed out later that he’d mentioned the friend’s name in his original text this afternoon.  And he reminded me that the friend’s dad is a teacher at the school.  Oh yeah, now I remember.)

The moral of the story?

Don’t do as I do.  Do as I say.  And be sure you know where your kids are and what time they’ll be home.

Stop being so relaxed about everything!  Someone’s gonna put an eye out with you in charge!  And by “you”, of course I mean, “me.”

Don’t be me.