Kat: You know, pink is really not your colour.
R: I thought I looked okay in this shirt.
K: Makes you look pregnant.
R: I am pregnant.
K: Makes you look pregnant in the wrong way.
R: Okay! Come to dinner tonight and I will get a haircut and put on another shirt.
K: Oh, your hair looks great, and I love those frames. It’s just the shirt.
R: Good thing I have robust self-esteem.
K: You value our honesty.
In which we continue to fail to climb Mt Diablo.
We’d had this plan with Django for the last couple of years – I think Claire was a peanut when it was first mooted, but scheduling conflicts, weather and the awesome power of inertia all stood in our way. Finally, yesterday, after corralling Jonathan and his lovely daughters into our mad scheme, we made the long trek out to Dublin, a pleasant oasis of strip-malls in a desert of arid paddocks, and then commenced the slow climb through the newly developed suburbs and up the side of the mountain. It was a very challenging ascent! For the cars. Claire kept threatening to fall asleep, so Jeremy started counting with her, until the infinite series of integers provoked an existential crisis.
“Thirty-nine!”
“Thirty-nine!”
“Forty!”
“Forty!”
“Forty-one!”
“No, Daddy, stop.”
I asked at the gate whether the tarantulas were out, and the ranger said it would take a few more weeks.
“No big furry spiders today,” we told Claire sadly.
“Oh no,” she said. “Big furry spiders tomorrow?”
We parked at Rock City in the beautiful oak woods near the top. “Diablo, Rock City!” sang Django and I, making devil-horns with our fingers and banging our heads. Knoa and Claire were enchanted with a nondescript boulder in the parking lot and had to be pried away to see the beautiful wind caves in a sandstone wall.
Claire climbed intrepidly enough, but Knoa sped over the rocks like a large pink spider herself. Jonathan dangled by his fingernails from an immense height. Even Avi hooted until she was held to boulders and allowed to inspect the lichen. We all piled into a large cave in a basin among the rocks, where Django plans to hold Tribal Rituals. Girls will be allowed to come along, he told me, as long as we wear sheepskin bikinis with coconut bras.
A hike like this is full of teachable moments. “Knoa,” said Jonathan, “can you see the big-ass poison oak? Can you say big-ass?”
Horrified gasps from passers-by.
Me: “Can you say, ‘Knoa’s not getting into the selective pre-schools?'”
It also turns out, according to Django, that those prefab suburbs are entirely prefab. You get your silver, linens and wine cellar as part of the package.
Django: “It’s for people with absolutely no tastes of their own.”
Jonathan: “It’s a good way to ensure that your neighbours are exactly like you.”
Finally we trekked out a good tenth of a mile to Django Rock, with its incredible views of the entire world, partly blanketed in fog. After such an immense effort we were completely exhausted and decided to attempt the actual summit another day.
“The mountain is a cruel mistress, changing from instant to instant,” I said.
“Yes indeed,” said Django. “Sunny one minute, partly cloudy the next.”
We popped a bottle of French champagne in the parking lot and everyone had some – “It’ll help them sleep,” said Jonathan, reasonably enough.
There’s a tentative plan to Toddler Tame the Bay Area’s highest peaks, since you can mostly drive to the tops of them. This was inspired by serious mountaineers attempting the seven summits of each continent, an exercise that is very serious in, say, Asia or Africa, but farcical in Australia, where Granny in her electric wheelchair might well overtake the climber on the way to the so-called peak of Kosciusko. (Looks like they’ve replaced Kosciusko with Vinson, in Antarctica; and once again the net mirth of the universe is reduced.) Anyway, at the rate we’re going, Knoa, Claire and Avi will be grannies by the time we get done.
The whole experience has been ruled a smash hit by the key influencers, by which I mean that Miss Claire woke up this morning and announced: “Knoa! Avi! Climbing! VERY BIG ROCKS!” She proceeded to boulder all over her sleepy parents in bed.
In closing, a song:
Dance your cares away!
Worries for another day!
Let the children play!
Down at Django Rock!
Cynthia the distractingly gorgeous midwife, listening to Zoe/Julia’s heartbeat: About 134, I think.
R (amazed): You can hear the beats per minute?
Cynthia: I trained myself. It took years. I would guess, and look, and guess again.
R: You should be a DJ!
Laughter.
R: Claire’s godfather is a DJ. He’s playing Ministry of Sound!
J: Let’s see a film.
R: Okay. What film?
J: One with LASER BEAMS and romance and jokes and horses.
R: Ah yes: Serenity.
J: I wasn’t actually thinking of that, but okay.
Quinn: There needs to be a name for that Japanese martial art where you wrestle with the tentacles growing out of each others’ genitals.
R: Romance.
Another crazy social weekend: Lake Temescal with hot mamas Jamey, Salome and Vibeke all day Friday, where I succeeded in getting thoroughly sunburned; bagels and Bernal playground with Bryan, Cian and Rowan on Saturday; then a two-barbeque Sunday. First up was a lazy lunch in the Meadows in Tilden to celebrate Kusia’s completion of her bar exam. Claire met three of the Bay Laurel horses, Nadya, Clancy and Tosca; played frisbee with Knoa and Avi; and squabbled endlessly with Chris’s adorable daughter Nora over possession of various balls. Finally, after lengthy naps, we headed over to Tim and Allen’s lovely apartment in Duboce Triangle for salmon and honeydew melon and chocolate mousse.
Too much fun, too much food, too much lying around in the sun telling jokes while the children bounce and squeal. I tell ya, there oughta be a law.
I’d been waiting and waiting and waiting, mostly lying on the couch or asleep in bed, for the nesting instinct to kick back in. We had the shambolic Alabama Street slum nicely ship-shape when Miss Claire made her appearance, so I knew it could be done.
Just now Jeremy and I cleared out the closet and the big blue chest of drawers, prepared three bags of clothes for Community Thrift, dusted off Claire’s baby clothes and discussed where to put any new furniture that might be required at some unspecified future date.
After years of reading infertility blogs while two of my closest friends struggled to conceive, I’m sticking to the Jewish approach of not taking anything for granted until I am presented with a live healthy daughter. Still, one of those friends now has a bouncy four-month old boy, and the other is expecting a son three weeks before Julia’s proposed birthday.
So it’s possible this thing might be about to happen after all.
“So this guy came in the other day, this older guy, his name was John, he was like 24 or something but he was so fitted out. His teeth were so straight and white, and he had this pretty hair. He was fine. I was taking his order but I kept forgetting, and I was all ‘So what’s your name?’ He told me he was one-half black, one-quarter Puerto Rican and one-quarter Indian. He didn’t have no rings on or nothing, and I don’t even know if he had a baby mamma. I was saying to myself, ‘Damn, why can’t I be 20 or 21?’ He was hella fine, oh yeah. That boy was fine as fuck.”
Ian: You never answer your phone! Why do you even have a phone? You know what I got from your blog the other day? “Blah blah dog blah blah builder blah blah I LEFT MY PHONE ON THE CHARGER”!
R (inspecting phone): Oh, Ian, looks like I missed a call from you.
First I baulked at the five-hour drive to King’s Canyon, so we compromised on Tuolomne Meadows; then Bryan realized he couldn’t really spare a day from work, so we compromised again on Bullfrog Pond. We made it as far as REI – Jeremy was inside buying camp cookware, and I was sitting in the car in the hot sun – when I realized the cramps were actually getting worse, and I nearly passed out from the pain.
I thought for a little while that I was losing the baby. There aren’t many circumstances under which projectile vomiting at the cute midwife on whom you have a fierce crush, and being diagnosed with gastroenteritis, come as a great relief; but having suspected you were in pre-term labour definitely qualifies as one. I was pretty acutely uncomfortably but Julia was perfectly happy, so they kicked me out of hospital and I went to sleep for 24 hours, waking only to ingest clear liquids and applesauce.
Ian likes to call his gut his “food baby”; at about midnight last night I was delivered of mine, and matters improved greatly. Today I did shag-all but attend to some neglected paperwork. We ventured out at six for sushi at Yo’s and pear sorbet from Mitchell’s, then Claire and I had a warm bath and she washed my hair.
Maybe we’ll go camping next weekend.
Q: How do you know you’re living in San Francisco?
A: First thing you see when you step out your front door is a pit bull attack.
Actually what I saw was the builder’s assistant whacking the pit bull with a shovel. They were among a mob of people under the tree across the road, outside the house that the builder and his assistant are doing up. I think the builder owns the house. I was horrified to see the dog being hit and yelled “Hey!”
Then the pit bull’s owner, a thug in a wifebeater and filthy jeans, shoved the old man from the big Victorian down the street. The old man toppled over backwards like a skittle. He has a bad knee. This made me realize the situation was more complex than I had at first assumed.
I scrambled in my purse for my cellphone to call the police, but I’d left the phone on its charger, and then I saw that Michael from the warehouse was already calling them.
The owner and his mother collected their dog and took it back up to their house, directly across the street from ours. I know the dog. It’s a beautiful brindle, like Belinda and Cholla who I love, but I’m scared of this dog, because it growled the one time I approached, and it meant it.
Apparently the dog had been taunting a couple of other dogs in house that’s being renovated, so the builder asked the dog’s owner to leash it. The dog’s owner shoved him against the wall of the next-door garage and hit him repeatedly in the face, splitting his lip and cutting the skin on his forehead. The dog dived in underneath and bit his butt, hard enough to rip his jeans.
The builder’s assistant and the old man from the Victorian heard what was happening – you could hardly miss it, there was so much yelling and growling – and came running to help the builder.
The dog bit them both, on the knee and butt. That’s when I came out and saw the assistant belting the dog with his shovel, thus getting quite the wrong impression of what was going on.
We stayed to talk to the police. While we were waiting, the owner walked past us again sans hellhound, and yelled “My dog will protect me!” Probably not, after the judge orders it destroyed. Sigh.
1. “Marmalade!” (pause for thought) “Daddy-lade? Baby-lade?”
2. “TWINKLE STAR, I WANT YOU STAR”
Fred: Hershey has bought Scharffen-Berger.
R: Oh no!
F: I know.
R: Oh no!
F: I know! It’s as if Budweiser bought Anchor!
R: Exactly!
F: I learn so much about the world through my tiny window of mergers and acquisitions.
R: Oh well, there’s always Dagoba.
F: Dagoba?
R: An organic chocolate from Oregon.
F: Oh, I don’t eat chocolate.
Gasps of dismay from entire office!
Adam: Communist.
I collected Jeremy from Oakland last night with inhuman precision, leaving Burlingame (and Ada in floods of tears at Claire’s departure) on the spot of 9.30, pulling into the airport parking lot at 10.10, checking the arrivals in Terminal 2 to see that his flight had not yet landed, then checking the arrivals in Terminal 1 to see that it had.
Claire ran up and down a red stripe in the carpet, for practice, and when our party appeared she hurtled towards her respected sire with loud, glad cries of “Daddy!”, and crash-tackled him around the knees.
He had good stories. Knoa hadn’t bothered to remember anyone’s name, so the Jeremy in the next camp along was “the guy with the same name as” (pointing) “him” and the seven-year-old girl, “…my older friend.” Jeremy said she always included the pause.
A hippie climbed a tree to offer a kite to the tree spirit, and when he fell he lay on the ground vocalizing in low, even tones. His friends asked if he needed any help, but he waved them away, and since he was the kind of hippie who would lie on the ground at 3am toning under ordinary circumstances, they went to bed. In the morning he was still toning, but requested a medic. He compressed a vertebra and broke his wrist. He’ll be okay.
The last story is, as Jeremy says, amazing and tragic. He spoke to a Korean man who remembers, at five years old, going to the bus station in his grandmother’s village and catching a bus to Seoul to find his parents, who were doing up a house. He ended up on the streets of Seoul at 10pm, not knowing his grandmother’s name or village or his parent’s address.
They never found him.
He lived in an orphanage for a year before being adopted by an American couple. Now he’s in his thirties and working for Microsoft Research.
The sorrow of his birth family is hard to think about.
C: Fort, foot, fart…
R: Claire, do you even know what a fart is?
C (indignantly): Yes! Poop! (much giggling)
Jeremy’s at the Phoenix Festival with the evil Jaffe Tsangs, disapprovers of potential names for Zoë/Julia. I miss him horribly, although I slept like a baby and got to work far earlier than usual today. Claire misses him too. Our dawn chorus is “AY! DADDY! AY!”; when it was me that went to get her instead of J, she looked disgusted and demanded “Daddy go?” The “Where did” is implied.
I called J and gave C the phone. She’s very professional about it these days.
C: Allo daddy. (pause) I Cian’s house. (pause) Cian pillow pile. (pause, with much nodding)
R (sotto voce): Can you tell Daddy you love him?
C: Yes. Love you Daddy.
At which point everyone died of delight.
preoccupations
