Bye Bye Betty?

Goodbyes are so difficult.  I am not ready to say goodbye, but it looks like it may be time.  Betty is at the car hospital.  I had to call the AAA emergency line on Saturday.  We were heading home in the early evening when she suffered a loss of gas to the engine.  (See map; click for points of interest.)

She wasn’t out of gas--I gave her 8 gallons that afternoon—but the gas was not getting where it needed to be.  There was no power to the engine; there was no power steering; there were no breaks.  We coasted until she came to rest on the front lawn of a large house in Davidsonville, Maryland.

An hour or so and 23 miles later, a very nice tow truck driver was unloading Betty from the flatbed ambulance to the corner of a tiny mechanic’s lot in Southeast DC.  (Conveniently, and coincidentally, down the block from my work.)  I said goodnight to Betty and climbed back into the tow truck cab for a ride home.  I haven’t seen her since, and it’s not looking good.  The mechanic is having difficulty locating the part she needs—a flex coupler.

Betty and I have been through a lot together.  8 years I’ve had her.  8 years and 5 months.  That’s longer than any other vehicle I’ve had.  That’s even longer than any home I've had.  (Thanks, Mom and Dad, for kicking me out for college.)  When I bought Betty for $2200 on New Year’s Eve in 2007, Daddy told me she wouldn’t last a year.  My amazing mechanic in Cali said I’d probably get at least another year when I moved in 2013.  In that light, making it to 2016 isn’t too bad.  But still, I don’t want Betty to go.

Betty has carried me through my life in four states.  Together, we did the move to three of them.  We’ve been across the entire country, from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and many parts in between more than once;  Highway 40, I-80, Route 66, and of course the gorgeous drive down Route 1 with Munchkinhead.

Betty and me in Wisconsin winter-before-last.  She looked good in snow (it hid all the missing paint).

There was that time in Iowa, when Orgfish’s neighbors called the cops about this unsightly car parked in their neighborhood and the police left a giant florescent pink “WARNING” on Betty’s windshield.  (I sent it to Orgfish as her birthday postcard some years later.)  The adventures with Daddy moving from Cali to Wisconsin when we spent an unplanned day exploring Ephraim, Utah while the hose connecting Betty’s coolant overflow tank to the engine was replaced.  And that infamous time we got pulled over for DWB, also in Utah.  I guess we should have stayed out of Utah.

Daddy and me being the statue outside Ephraim City Hall while Betty was being repaired.

She’s had some tough times, my Betty.  There was that incident where I sort of backed the side of her into a pole trying to get out of a parking spot in Cali.  And that time a week later when I did it again in a different garage.  That first incident was the one that resulted in my having to go in-and-out the window for awhile until a body shop could get her unlocked.

After that, I couldn't lock Betty anymore.  She was ransacked at least once in every town in which we lived, but it was never that bad.  In El Cerrito and D.C., they just made a mess.  But in Cudahy, they took my tape adapter.  I had to fork out another $5 for a new one from Amazon. 

Betty after being ransacked in Cali.

But that was back before I made Betty her very own mixtape.  We've been listening to it a lot less these past few months.  One, I was getting a little tired of it, but more importantly, Betty hasn't been feeling well a lot of the time and it's important for me to listen to her as we putter around town.  She gets especially cantankerous on damp or rainy days and left turns.  I check her fluids at least weekly and keep a storehouse in the trunk of every liquid you could need to put in the car, plus spare clothes and an astronaut blanket in case we get stranded, and bungee cords and sheets for unexpected hauling adventures.  She can really carry stuff!

Taking home my new queen-size bed.  The frame was in the car.  Sometimes going in-and-out the window is a good thing!

Betty hasn't really had a radio in a few months.  The antenna was knocked off by a carwash back in Cali years ago.  The mechanic disconnected the auto-expander and quasi-fixed the antenna to the car.  A few months ago, I walked past Betty on the street and noticed it was gone completely.

Betty with antenna quasi-fixed back in 2014 (after we lost her front trim on who-knows-what).

Betty sans antenna in snowy DC this winter.

DC is rough on Betty.  Besides the antenna loss, the swampy humidity caused the fabric on the ceiling to start detaching.  I pinned it back in place with a decorative pattern of thumbtacks.  Sometimes, they fall off, too.  Backseat passengers, beware.  Parking outside with no shelter these past two years hasn't been great.  The mohawk on her roof that had developed slowly over the years has quickly gone, leaving just a small patch of white amid a mess of unpainted grey and rust.  Whenever AAA asks what color the vehicle is, I say, "well, where there's still paint, she's white."  AAA came out a lot the past year.  In addition to the tow, there were several dead batteries. We eventually figured out the culprit was the glove compartment light, which wouldn't shut off correctly ever since Munchkinhead broke off the latch on a very cold WI night coming home from the theater.  I braided some yarn, looped it through the inside hook and the hole in the door where the latch used to be and tied the door shut, but it wasn't enough pressure for the light switch.  A mechanic took out the bulb and Betty stopped dying.  Somebody took out a taillight with who-knows-what.  (I replaced it.)  Oh wait, that was me.  I backed into a tree trying to do a Y-turn; dented my bumper sticker.

And then there was that time a few weeks ago when Betty got shot.  Just her tire, luckily.  The police tape is still in her backseat, next to the blanket I put in her for when homeless people use her as a warm place to sleep.  (Tho I would prefer if they'd put the seat back upright when they're done.)  The tire shop had to bust off one of her hubcaps in order to rotate the tires when I got her new one.  That put her down to two hubcaps.  We'd lost one in Cali when the mechanic had to bust it off.  She wears the two she has left on her back tires.  The recently removed one rides in the trunk.  I always have to call AAA when I have a flat tire, not because I can't fix a flat, but because I can't jack up the car.  There's no frame left for the portable jack to lift; it just goes right through the car.  AAA has to come out with their big fancy jack and lift her from the frame underneath.

Betty's got character; there's so much that's still so wonderful about her. She floats down the highway--when her engine's getting gas anyway.  I can parallel park her like you wouldn't believe, even on the left-hand side of the street.  Her heater is amazing--the air-conditioning hasn't worked since at least '08, but I hate air-conditioning anyway.  She's very polite--no horn.  Her interior is spacious and comfy.--At least I think so; Daddy thinks her front seat is broken, claims it's lopsided.  He may be right, but since I weigh about 100 lbs less than him, I can't really tell.  The thing I notice more is that one hole in the floor by my left foot that my stiletto will slip into if I'm not careful.  It matches the hole in the seatback from the previous owner's dog.  But I digress. 

Betty is so spacious, Munchkinhead turns into a t-rex when she tries to drive her.

And most importantly, she gives me an amazing freedom.  Not just the standard freedom of a car that allows me to go places far or near whenever I want, but the additional freedom of going places I otherwise couldn't or wouldn't.  I never worry about where I park Betty, if she'll get scratched--who'd notice? or that she'll be stolen--that'd be a very weak joy ride.  I get the prime spots in the grocery store lot, right next to the cart return.  Her heft makes her a great option for snow-covered streets (ok, my Wisconsin training helps a little with that, too.)  And I'm safer in neighborhoods where I otherwise would stick out like a blazing red target.  The combination of Betty and my white privilege allow me to go anywhere.  Betty helps me blend in where it's rough, and being a white girl gets me a pass when Betty raises suspicions in the fancy places.  In a city like D.C. where neighborhoods can change from one to the other in half-a-block, and where it's so easy to get lost, this is especially important.

Betty and I have travelled a long way together and we're both a little worse for the wear.

Betty and I both looking shiny, if not new, back in the summer of '08.

 



Betty turning 170K just over a year ago.

 

 

I'm just not ready to give up.  Not yet.  Not quite.  Not without a lot of tears.  So here's hope that somehow, a 1993 LeSabre flex coupler shows up in D.C., and that the mechanic can then figure out why gas stops going to the engine sometimes.  The flex coupler isn't for that; it's so the steering column doesn't detach from the wheels.  That's why she's been hating those left turns.

Fly Away with Me

Thirty-thousand feet up in the air a circle of sunlight on a plastic tray table transports me further than the plane I'm in ever could, to a time and place lodged in the happiest corners of my memories, where I keep Christmases and home-comings and everyday bits of my childhood that make tears well up in the corners above my smiling cheeks like dewdrops in the creases of a daisy.

The warm beam hugs my small frame as I lie on the floor, stocking feet swinging in the air, chin perched on tiny  hands above elbows planted in rough gold carpet.  The crowd from the tv screaming behind the roaring white noise of jet engines and oxygen circulation systems, as though even an Airbus can yell, "go Pack, go."  My mother cheers.  The man behind me snores. I ask my daddy for some more popcorn.  I take another sip of my hot tea.

The bright light creates rainbows on my paper at the edges of the window's shadow, rainbows on the golden carpet fibers enthralling my curious young eyes.  I glide my hand, smoothing the paper, watching a hundred dazzling, sparkling stars dance and twirl on the plastic wall and someone else's seat, my aging eyes behind corrective lenses still enthralled by the magic splendor of prisms in the sun.

Outside, the dark ridges of the Appalachians flow under a sheer veil of mist as a river winds off in the distance. Outside, the world is brilliant in the gleaming white of a Wisconsin winter, clear and cold.  Skies of the brightest blue.

I am grateful to be tucked inside, in my sunbeam, warm and glowing, from the love around me, from the memories inside me.  In my mind.  In my heart.

The Road to being Stuck in Your Room is Paved with Good Intentions

It was June, the summer after 6th grade.  My sisters and I had some sort of fake slumber party on the hide-a-bed.  I don’t remember the details.  The middle of the day on Saturday, Mommy and Daddy had gone out for a walk.

My sisters and I wanted to make Daddy something for Father’s Day but we needed supplies.  There was a JoAnn’s not too far away; Alfred and I rode our bikes there frequently, just over a mile.  Munchkinhead was too          Us, a few months later
little to  ride that far; she was only about 3 years old.  We decided we’d walk.

We cleaned up our slumber party.  Sort of.  Figuring we’d want to play again later, instead of folding the hide-a-bed back into the couch, we made the bed up and tucked all our stuffed animals into it. 

We cleaned anything else we’d been playing with.  We left a message for Mommy and Daddy in the living room, checked that all the doors were locked, took our house key and set off for the store, pulling Munchkinhead in the little red wagon.  We took an umbrella with us in case it rained while we were away.

We were pleased with ourselves, feeling we had remembered to do everything we were supposed to do.  We were having fun together and excited about making something nice for Daddy.  How were we supposed to know Mommy and Daddy hadn’t taken a house key with them?

They couldn’t get in.  They couldn’t get our message.  They didn’t know where we were.  And, it had started raining.  Apparently, these circumstances make parents freak out.

Mommy and Daddy found us with the little red wagon, next to the McDonald’s, heading out of the Plaza parking lot.

I don’t remember what Daddy got for Father’s Day that year.  It couldn’t have been good because I remember we spent a lot of time looking at puffy paint supplies.  I know what I got though.  Grounded.  For being irresponsible by not anticipating the facts I didn’t know.  And for making my sisters go with me.  They didn’t get in trouble at all.  “They’re too young to know better.”  Harumph.  And yes, 20 years later I am still bitter.

But I’ll tell you this much, as a grown-up, I’m pretty darn good at anticipating a whole lot of “what-if” scenarios and preparing for most of them.

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

“But if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need,” continue Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ lyrics.   And sometimes, it takes a long time before you realize you got what you needed instead of what you wanted.

When I was in high school, I had a huge crush on this guy.  I’m pretty sure everyone knew it, too.  He was tall and cute and our intellectual sparring rivaled Elizabeth and Darcy.  I wanted to date him so badly, that when he started dating someone else, I joined the track team just to stop myself from being depressed.  I never liked running.

It wasn’t until fairly recently that I realized although what I wanted (and our family and friends expected) for most of my teen years was to date him, what I needed was to not date him.  I didn’t get what I wanted, but I sure as heck got what I needed.

He was, and still is, one of my closest friends.  We’ve been on lots of adventures together and through a lot of growing pains in the 20+ years we’ve known each other.  He’s a great guy.  He also has a very strong will, stubborn temperament and red-headed Aries fury. 

As a young girl, had I gotten my wish of being in a relationship with him, he would have totally controlled me.  Not because he’s a bad person or anything like that, but because I would have let him. 

Most teenagers are still figuring themselves out, and I was as naive and impressionable as any of them.  My world would have revolved around him, and he would have let it.  It’s just the way our personalities were then.   I would have missed out on a lot of my own growth.

On the simplest level, there would be no varsity letter on my jacket.  More deeply, if I ever did find my current ability to stand firm against peer pressure, it would have taken a lot longer.  Most importantly, I may have wound up losing him as a best friend.

Looking back, I’m very glad things turned out the way they did.  He has a wonderful wife who is absolutely adorable and a very good match for him all around.  And we still have our friendship, with a ton of great memories.  The current reality is well worth all those teenage tears.  That makes me smile.  It’s also very helpful when dealing with current tears.  I may not always be getting what I want, but I’m likely getting what I need.

Long Live the Little Green Men!

You gotta watch out for people getting you back, especially the ones you didn’t even realize you “got” in the first place.

I’d left my dorm room unlocked.  I always left my dorm room unlocked.  There wasn’t anything valuable that could be taken with ease – my speakers were 5ft around – and my sorority-sisters neighbors were usually milling about that end of the hall.  But there was no denying that if I’d locked the door, I wouldn’t be dealing with this …. this what?  It wasn’t really a mess and was only slightly annoying.

Army men.  They were everywhere.  I opened my dresser drawer; army man.  I pulled down a shoe box; army man.  I put on a pair of pants and put my hand in the pocket; army man.  There was even one in the mini fridge’s freezer!  “He’s in Siberia,” my clearly guilty next door neighbor grinned.  I was finding those army men until well after I moved out of that dorm room.  Thanks Amanda.

But as I said, she was just “getting me back.”  Except, I hadn’t filled her room with army men.  No, the little green men first appeared elsewhere on campus, all over campus, thanks to another sorority sister, a trip to Leon’s and the dollar store that just happened to be on the way home. 

A tradition was born, and that tradition continues.

Mommy found one somewhere the other week.  Likely a remnant of   the attack of all attacks just before I left for Zambia.  There’s a lot of good hiding spots in a house with 3 floors.  They’re sneaked into the bottom of packages and carried along in suitcases on visits.  One of the original instigators’ daughter has her own toddler-appropriate army man.   Gummy army men were passed around for holidays and birthdays – I heard they were quite delicious.  One of my  sorority sisters even incorporated them into her wedding!

 

And this past Christmas, Alfred got me the most amazing and absolutely perfectly appropriate present.  A snowflake ornament made out of army men!  I love snow.  She found it on etsy.  It’s super cute and very ingenious.

A Decade of Craziness

Wow, ten years, can you believe it?  Today is the 10th anniversary of my first blog post.  Back then, the blog was called “Why You Think I’m Weird, Stories from My Childhood” and was hosted on LiveJournal.  Remember LiveJournal? 

My very first post was called “Wormhole,” and like many of my early posts, it was quite short.  When I began the blog, I was really just transferring mediums.  My posts were things I used to leave in my AIM status update box; fun little stories about when I was a kid.  (Apparently both AIM and LiveJournal are still out there.)

As I explored this new medium, my posts slowly grew in length, but the topics mostly stayed the same: fun stories from when I was kid.   More current fun stories started to get mixed in – though honestly, for many of my adventures, if I don’t tell you how old we were, we could have been 10 or 30.  And then I went to Zambia.

For two years, my posts were sparse as I dealt with infrequent access to shaky internet connections.  I remember sitting in the small internet café in Monze, typing for an hour only to have my post lost when the internet connection went down; Monze, and Kitwe and Choma, it happened everywhere.  I’d give up and wind up posting just a short note, like this.

I wrote for a bit when I returned from Zambia.  Then, there was a long break.  Life gets in the way like that sometimes.  When I picked up blogging again in law school, there was a definite shift to the present.  After a few months, I moved the blog to Blogger and switched the title to better reflect the content.  Since then, it’s been a mix of all sorts of things.  I think the stories from growing up are still my favorites, though.

Blogging’s changed a lot over the past decade.  The original LiveJournal  community was all people I knew, either my family members or friends from from college.  The nature of my posts really reflected that.

In 2008 and 2009, blogging felt to me like it was in it’s heyday.  I had readers from all over the place and the community around my blog was made up of both people I knew well from life and people I only knew from their own blogs and our comments with each other.  In many ways, I think Twitter played a big role in the demise of that part of my blogging community.  Twitter also had a big effect on my own blogging.  It gave me a different outlet; one that required far less thinking than a full blog post needs.

I’m not sure what the future of blogging will look like.  It often seems outdated to me know with the massive amounts of news sites and things like Pintrest, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.  But I’m glad my blog’s still here and I’m glad I have a place to keep writing.  Thanks for keeping reading.

 

Interesting Blog Stats

Most-visited post of all time, The Legend in his Rick Ross Halloween costume. with over 2300 views since it was posted in 2009.  (The second-most popular post only has just under 800 views, by comparison.): Hallo Weeeeee Een

Total posts to-date: 622

Most common tags: picture, Cali and Zambia

Little Round Berries

I was walking down the BART path on my way to the dentist, cruising along at my usual brisk pace when something caught my eye.  I stopped dead in my tracks.  Little berries.  Little round berries.  Little round red berries.  Memories came flooding back.

When Alfred and I were little girls at the old house, we had a backyard full of amusement.  Sandboxes, swing sets and swimming pools migrated around the yard, with much help from Daddy, until Daddy found them their permanent homes. 

One place the swing set lived for awhile was the side of the back yard, just off the driveway, right under a small tree.  A small tree with little berries.  Little round berries. Little round orange berries.  They grew in bunches on that tree, the same way the little round red berries were growing in bunches on the tree along the BART path.

Like the birch tree we fed to the pandas, the berries were just another toy in our giant whole-world playground.  Mommy had told us not to eat the berries because they were poisonous.  Somehow, we got it in our heads that berries were not poisonous only if ingested, but utterly and completely poisonous.  The berries would fall from the tree onto our slide. We’d roll them down, an orange river flowing to the ground, always careful never to break a berry for fear the poisonous berry juice would seep through our skin.

As I stood looking at those little red berries, so exactly like my childhood berries in everyway but hue, I wondered momentarily if they too were poisonous.  I briefly wondered if the orange berries even were.  Certainly not to touch, but to eat?  I didn’t squish a red berry or try to eat one to find out.  I smiled, turned back down the path and walked away in a haze of happy memories

A berry-les berry tree. Alfred with a shovel on a swing.

My Lake

[Originally written on my way to visit Alfred, November of last year.]

As we flew out over Lake Michigan, a tear slipped from the corner of my eye and slowly rolled down my cheek. I was so happy.  Though miles away, seeing the lake made me feel close to home, as if Mommy and Daddy were an arm’s length away. 

This lake, this wide shimmering body of blue, this lake is part of me.  Though it took the life of one of my friends and still holds the body of his wife, I bear it no ill will.  Theirs were not the first, nor last it has taken.  But it does not know. 

It ripples on, beats against the shores, rages on the breakwaters and laps onto the sands.  This lake that I have enjoyed from every side, climbing dunes in Indiana, sitting on the beach in Michigan, walking along the cliffs in Wisconsin and gazing at hungrily from a plane leaving Illinois. 

This lake that filled my marching band days with the smell of dead fish, that kept us ten degrees cooler than the next county over, that brought us extra snow, delightfully heavy snow perfect for snowmen and snow forts. 

This lake that gave me beautiful sunrises, the red ball reflecting below, yellow rays streaking out in all directions, a mirror of water and sky both purple at the edges, a glow of pink slowly lightening into a bright clear day.The lake that tumbles under my favorite bridge. 

How much of this lake have I drunk, swan, bathed in, played in! 

Yes, this lake is truly great.  It is my Great Lake.

The Two Hearts

Moving, moving, moving.  She felt like she was always moving.  She was tired of it, and tired of dragging around so much stuff with her.  Kneeling down on the hard floor she groped around under the bed until she felt what she was looking for.  Hidden deep in that dark abyss, behind empty boxes, a missing shoe and a few stray pieces of paper.  She pulled the heavy black bag, tugging as it caught on the underside of the bed.  It was a little overstuffed, but she’d never been willing to expand beyond one bag.

These were her ‘mementos,’ discarded remnants of relationships long past.  No use in keeping them anymore.  She wasn’t moving all the way across the country to hold onto this baggage, physically or emotionally.  She probably should have just thrown the whole bag into the trash, but the sentimental never let go that easily.

Making herself as comfortable as the wood floor would allow, she sat down next to the large box that had become the garbage, already full of the crazy odds and ends one finds when packing up their life.  And in the mist of all the other packing, she began to unpack.  Unpack the bag and unpack the corners of her memory, corners she had purposely allowed the cobwebs to cover.

A hair brush from a guy she sort of dated in college, a t-shirt from some frat boy, a framed sketch, all sorts of random things that have use only as sentimental objects.  The trash, the pile for Good-Will, the recycling bin, the different items were distributed as appropriate.  Lingerie that was never worn, birthday cards, printouts of long im conversations.  Some of it seemed downright ridiculous to still be in her possession.

Then she pulled out a small ball of tissue paper.  Confusion crossed her face.  What could this be?  She began to unwrap it.  Sharp edges protruded from the tissue, yet there was a solid circular feel to it.  She knew exactly what it was.

Her 17th birthday.  Her boyfriend, her first boyfriend, had given it to her as a present.  A small clear crystal heart, the tip perched on this circular base with swirls of clear crystal and a pink rose, two birds had sat together on one of the heart’s round humps.  She remembered unwrapping it, sitting in the passenger seat of the car in a parking lot.  She remembered wishing it was her 16th instead of her 17th birthday because then it would somehow be more special.  And she remembered what happened to that gift.

It was a little thing at first, a crack, or maybe one of the birds fell off.  Some sort of damage to the structural integrity of the gift.  That week, they got in a fight.  Then, things were getting better, they were patching it up, they were working on it and moving forward.  At least she thought so.  Until she was trying to adjust something on the bed and knocked the gift off her night stand.  In broke into many, many pieces.  The next week, the relationship ended.  For good.  He moved.  She went on.

Many months later, she came across the broken pieces of the gift, which she had gathered together and kept in her desk drawer.  It really was such a pretty present.  Why not try to put it back together again?  She took a small tube of super glue and attached the first piece back onto the circular base.  The next day, she ran into his best friend.

She glued on a few more pieces.  She saw his car when she was driving in her neighborhood.  Soon the whole thing was glued back together, minus the tiny slivers that had not been salvageable.  She ran into him in public.  They agreed to meet.  It was late, a 24 hour restaurant.  They sat across from each other.  The conversation was stilted.  It was clear it was too soon to be here, too soon to talk.  It was clear this was not going to come back.  She went home.  The glue gave out, the pieces of the gift fell in on each other, a small pile of fragmented crystal on the base of swirls with the pink rose.

The remaining circular base sat in her hand.  The power of the crystal, as she had started to think of it in that wild imagination of youth, was gone.  With only that circular base left, the gift had no magic left in it.  She had thrown out the pieces long ago, but the base had been tucked inside this bag, wrapped in tissue, waiting.  Waiting for what?  She had no idea.  Waiting for this she guessed, waiting to be put out with all the other pain held in that bag.  Waiting to become part of the trash heap that represented moving away and moving on from so many things.

- - -

Yogurt, Sandcastles and Physics

I don’t consider myself a health food nut (that’s my Daddy) – I just eat what I find yummy - but today, as I opened my lunch box and pulled my light blueberry yogurt out from under my rice cakes, I had to wonder if anyone else would agree with me.  Oh well.

Yogurt, it’s a fun, nice little treat.  One of those things I only buy on sale.  This particular one was my favorite brand, Yoplait.  I remember Daddy often buying Yoplait when I was a little girl.  Back then, my favorite was the custard style, banana.  Now, my favorite is the pineapple coconut with the pieces of fruit and crunchy little coconut shavings in it.

I was always fascinated by the shape of those Yoplait containers.  I remember once carefully washing out my empty Yoplait cup, being careful to get all the yogurt out and not break the plastic.  I took that little Yoplait cup into the back yard, to the sandbox Daddy had made for us.  I thought it was going to make a really neat sandcastle, cuz the top would be bigger than the bottom.

It didn’t work.  Cuz the top was bigger than the bottom.  I packed my sand into the container, mixed with just enough water to get a good, strong castle, and I flipped that Yoplait container over exactly where I wanted that piece of my castle, and I pulled up the container, and …. nothing.  The sand was all still inside the container.  Cuz the top was bigger than the bottom (when the Yoplait container was upside-down in sandcastle mode).

I tried to help ease the sand out, as if it could squish through the smaller opening and come out in the proper shape – like Daddy Bunny in a suitcase.  The sand came crumbling out of the Yoplait cup into a big pile of, sand, just a big pile of sand.

No neat little Yoplait shaped sandcastle for me.  Boo. :(

Tennis in the Woods

All day Thursday I was excited about Mr. Trizzle cooking dinner.  As the bus bumped along on the way home from work, I smiled, thinking about how wonderful it would be to get home and relax for a change.  Then, 3 stops and 4 blocks from home, my phone rang.  I’m so hood… and I wear my pants.. "Hey. What’s up?”  It’s Mr. Trizzle.  He says he’s going to play basketball with The Legend and 8ft-Red.  “I probably won’t be home for dinner,” he says.  “Oh, and if you’re not home in the next 5 to 10 minutes, I’ll probably be gone before you get here.”  Gee, thanks.

The bus inches forward at the red light. Turns the corner. Welcome to El Cerrito, I pull the cord.  Off the bus, four blocks I’m walking, trying not to fume.  After all, Mr. Trizzle should be able to go play basketball; it’s not his fault his friends picked the day he was finally going to try cooking dinner. 

Well, I know Mr. Trizzle only moves at one speed, the speed of Trizzle, and that’s not very fast.  So, as I figured, I was home before he left.  Giving him vampire  a little (in a very joking manner) for having to play basketball only when he had other duties.  Then I found out, they were playing at Cordonices Park.  That was all I needed to know, I was going too!

Cordonices has this amazing, giant, concrete slide.  It’s so fun, and so scary, I’ve only gone down it twice.  Once each time I’ve been to the park.  And that includes this trip.

But, I didn’t start at the slide.  I started in the rose garden on the other side of the street.  I don’t know if it’s because everywhere in California is running out of money, or what, but the rose garden looks less like a garden and more like the surroundings of a fairy tale castle.  Thorny bushes rise up above my head, stretching and drooping into the paths.  In some places, the weeds rise up taller than the roses.  In others, the paths are so overgrown with weeds, they’re really no longer paths.

I wandered through the rose area and then into the woods.  Taking thin trails that wound around half buried steps leading nowhere, I ducked under tree branches and side-stepped overgrown vines.  The gentle roar of traffic came down from the street so near, above the trees.  Yet, the sounds of birds chirping and animals running under leaves was so close, it could almost drown out the traffic.  I continue along the paths, feeling lost in my own enchanted forest, and then, came abruptly upon a fence, a backyard with a swingset and house.

The park is completely surrounded by residences.  Each house I stumbled upon seemed to have its own gate, clearly marked private, leading directly into the rose garden forest.  The backs of buildings pressed up against chain link fences really ruined the whole ‘lost in the woods’ feel of the park.  I turned away and headed down a path further from the edge.  Stopping at a giant tree, I contemplated climbing it for awhile.  Deciding against it, I headed back into the rose area and wandered around the shambles.  I stopped to rest on an old wooden bench next to the tennis courts.

Whop.  Whop.  Chirp.  Flutter.  Sh sh sh shh.  The sounds of tennis balls bouncing intermingled with the beautiful blue bellied birds hopping in the leaves behind me.  The cool breeze blew past, fluttering the rose petals on the arbor high above me.  Sweet smells drifted in the air.

Whop.  Chirp.  Whop.  “Daddy, there’s one open.”  A little boy, about four years old ran down the steps under the arbor, past me, to an open tennis court at the bottom of the sculpted hill.  He was carrying his father’s full size racket and his own little racket with a tiny handle.  “Ok.  We can use that one.”  The father followed far behind, helping his two year old daughter down the steps. 

“Daddy, I wanna go this way.”  The little girl tried to go towards the garden area.  “No.  We’re going to play tennis first.  We can go there later.”  “Can we go in the secret paths?”  “Yes, we can go through the secret paths after tennis.”  I wondered if to the little girl, those paths really were secret.  The same paths I had wandered on before stopping to rest on this bench.  If to her, her father was the only person in the world who knew about them.  And he had shared this special knowledge with only her and her brother.  The way Alfred and I felt about the mud path near our old house when we were little.

It was only a small path that ran along the ridge high above the railroad tracks, lined with trees and thick bushes.  Much closer to civilization than we ever realized.  Daddy showed us the path once when we went walking somewhere.  It connected the two through-streets next to our dead end.  After that, it became our secret mud path.  We would spend hours exploring it, this 2 block stretch of woods.  Sometimes, we would travel very, very far, venturing all the way to the great field opening, a whole block away!

As my sister and I emerged from the woods in my mind, the family was beginning their tennis game down below.  I sat on my bench, my back to the courts, listening to them play.  “Daddy, I can do it!”  “You want to serve?  Ok.”  I turned to look.  The boy took a golf like swing at the ball he held in front of his racket.  Whop.  bounce, bounce bounce.  “Matilda, can you get the ball.”  Ah, so that’s how the two-year old’s included, she’s the ball girl. 

As I listened to them play, my mind began to wander.  I pictured the father and son, here, playing tennis 15 years from now.  The boy, a strong tall teenager.   The father with streaks of grey in his long, wavy, black hair.  They’d just finished a game.  Lots of running, sweat coming through their t-shirts, hair a bit wet.  They were done for the day.  Carrying their rackets and heading toward the gate, the son threw his arm around his dad, laughing, he teased him.  “Remember when you used to always beat me, Dad?”  The dad smiled.  “Looks like I’m catching up on you old man.”  The son still chuckling, the father pretended to look a little hurt, but inside, he was proud of his son.  His mind wandered, back to today.  He was thinking about the little four year old boy with his tiny handled racket yelling “Daddy, I can do it!” and taking that lobbing swing at the ball already almost on the ground.