rainy thoughts

I have been reading emails from friends. And friends of friends. And friends of friends of... Well, you get the idea. I put out a call to my peeps for anyone with information, connections, or personal experience with Tetralogy of Fallot and what I got back has left me dazzled.

So many people went out of their way to try to help us. So many words of encouragement, from all the crazy corners of my life. The poets and the doctors; the lawyers, the teachers, the pray-ers and the skeptics. I love you all. Thank you.

Any of you who've followed this blog over time may have gathered that our Isaac -- from here on out to be known as "our first-born," just because it amuses me and feels charmingly cliche and like something I'd never say, ever -- is a rather intense little person who demands a great deal of our time and attention. And while he is still that and in all likelihood will always be that, Isaac our first-born has been doing a fabulous job of busying himself lately. In fact, he never stops being busy. Ever.

One of this favorite things these days is cutting out snowflakes. You know, the fold the paper and snip holes kind. And while I might object somewhat to this premature winter filling my windows, considering I'll have a real, New England winter on my hands before you know it, I can't help but be charmed by my son's creations which include his very best writing.

Bundled into the center of his snowflakes are conglomerations of the words he can spell without thinking too hard, so that they usually say things like "IsaacMomDadRhysCatLove." And I take them from him and think, yeah, pretty much, that's it.

The authentic snowflakes are still a ways off for now, gratefully, but weather has been unusually rainy here these days. Downpours several days out of the week seem common.

Both my boys were born in the pouring rain. There is a sacredness to rainy days. I have always thought so. There is something to gain from the darkened scenery, the baptism of garden and asphalt alike.    

All I can do is just move through this time with Rhys. Move slowly through.

Everything wants to be the rain.
The yellow maple leaves
pinging against the walkway
gather first to fall in a gold sheet
of sound. The dry grasses
bending in the wind
thirst to be like the rain --
how it can calm the most hassled
day, put us softly to sleep.
The traffic on the highway --
especially the traffic -- puts on its best
mimicry, longing as it does
to be instead the beat and whoosh
of contemplation that is the rain.
And as the rain streams now, down
the windshields of rush hour,
it does not mock or scold its proteges,
does not deny them their allegiance
as it might, but simply continues, steady
in its example.

Excuse me, but did you just say the word 'casserole'?

blueberry muffins
homemade ketchup
homemade pesto
and the topper – a brown rice casserole.

This is the current list of things we've been greeted with my our new neighbors. We seem to have landed in some kind of wonderland of friendliness, not to mention, victory gardens.

Also worth noting is that we seem to be surrounded by Californians. The wives on both sides of us are California natives, the diaper service lady called Arcadia home before moving east, the mailman hails from Santa Rosa, the young couple running the groovy farm in the next town just moved out here the month before we did from Santa Barbara, the woman across the street lived several years in Palo Alto. Curious.

In my first couple weeks in the house, which of course were also my first couple weeks with a newborn, I have not been able to get out and about and meet these west coast transplants with good community habits. I am quite secluded in my tiny room filled with a collage of straws, washcloths, ibuprofen, pillows, and a squalling infant they say is mine. My sequestered existence only deepened when Little Guy, being pretty little, was not able to eat so very much, and I ended up with badly blocked milk ducts, near mastitis, that culminated in the precipice of delirium and a 103 fever on my birthday. (This child crowded into August, for goddsakes, when every other event in our lives happens. He knows how to find the party.)

Milk Duds? exclaimed Gerard.

Ducks! I shouted. Milk Ducks!

-- from Anagrams, by Lorrie Moore

When I complained I'd never get out to see anyone, that I felt like a ghost, here but not really here, Mike suggested putting on a long, black veil and walking slowly around the lighted porch at night, just to add to the mystery and mystique, charge up the rumor mill.

There are many, many things I have no memory of in my life. Many, many of those many, many things relate to the early days of being a mom. But there is one thing I remember with keen clarity. It took nine days for my nipples to stop being ripped apart and feeling like they were on fire. Nine. Not eight, not ten. This time was no different. Nine. Though there was a space in which I dreamed of a shorter penance.

I heard through the grapevine that my next door neighbor was a lactation consultant. She was also, as it turned out, on vacation. We waited in great anticipation for her to return.

When did my life turn into an Alanis Morissette song? I moved in next door to a lactation consultant...who was on vacation...in CALIFORNIA.

Obsessed with someone I never met, the days ticked on and my tender nipples scabbed. Until one day, Mike was looking out the kitchen window and, adding on Mike's inability to remember anyone's name, you get this conversation--

Mike: Hey! There's Tim...

Me: You mean Todd?

Mike: Todd is putting car seats in the car; maybe he's going to pick up his family...You should go over and ask him if Natalie...

Me: You mean Cynthia?

Mike: Cynthia's coming home today.

Me: 'Hi, Tim-Todd. I'm Kitty. Is your wife Natalie-Cynthia coming home any time soon? Because I'd really love to show her my boobs!'

Won't you be my neighbor?

The deed to the house arrived in the mail and I set it on the changing table.

The weather added to my insular existence; rain just kept coming. There was nothing to do but wait for it to stop and heat up the casserole.

Detour Entry: Community and the Dumpster Story

***A QUICK PLEA: If you are reading along, please consider leaving a comment so I know you were here. Under each entry there is a link called "Dare to Share." Thanks!!***

Isaac was born in a place that calls itself “America's Last Hometown.” We lived there for about two years. It took me about two days to figure out that I do not belong anywhere near America's Last Hometown. Now, I will also tell you that one of the biggest reasons for leaving the Monterey Peninsula is a search for community. One might expect to find community in America's Last Hometown. One might grow old searching.

When Isaac was one, we moved to another town that lacked all of the aesthetic charm of America's Last Hometown. It was better this way, you had no expectation of camaraderie or neighborliness. I could talk on this topic of neighborhoods ad nauseam, but I will spare you for now and get to the story.

I'd lived behind a church for the last 4 ½ years. While packing and cleaning in the last stages before we left, we had a few things that weren't going to fit in our garbage can.

“Put them in the dumpster over there,” my next door neighbor advised. “Charles always says I can use it.”

Charles, I knew, was the groundskeeper and maintenance person for the church. Though we rarely spoke at any length, we'd wave casually across the two-foot chain link fence to the parking lot.

Mrs. Johnson had told me several times in the past about our access to the dumpster, but I never had had need or interest before now. Isaac and I walked around the charming chain link I'd stared at for almost his lifetime with a couple pieces of Styrofoam we'd evicted from a box we needed to pack Isaac's outside truck fleet in. He skipped ahead of me with a fat tree branch he was planning on propping the dumpster lid open with.

Iz's tool worked well, but before I could toss the second piece of foam in, I heard a voice yelling from not too far away.

“Excuse me! Excuse me! You can't put that there! You can't use that dumpster!”

A man was sprinting toward us from the church. I paused, the foam suspended, Isaac still propping open the lid with his stick. I blinked passively and waited while the man, now within a few feet of us exhausted his script a second time (though he could not possibly have been more exhausted than I was in that moment).

“We were told we could use this,” I said with calm annoyance.

“WHO told you that? WHO told you that?” said the man, still agitated in his valiant defense of the trash receptacle.

“Charles.”

“WHEN did he tell you that?”

This was really getting tiresome. “You'd have to ask my neighbor.” I pointed to Mrs. Johnson who was bent over sweeping leaves up in front of her gate at the time.

“Which house do you live in?” the man demanded.

I pointed to the only other house in striking distance of where we stood.

“Oh, oh,” he said, though his blood pressure didn't quite seem out of the woods yet.

At this point, Mrs. Johnson stood up and took in the scene. She repeated for him what I'd already said but in that bitchy, old lady way that commands respect.

“Sorry, sorry,” the man was saying now. “I didn't know.” “'pologize,” he added in my direction. I grunted and started to turn away.

“So, y'all moving?” he tried, suddenly friendlier.

Clearly, no 16-foot storage POD in front of the house was going to get by this guy's keen observational skills.

“Yeah.”

“You lived there, what? 20 years or something?”

“Four.”

“Oh. Yeah, yeah,” he said, non-commitally.

Isaac and I took our leave. And thanks for saying hi before, I think as we went.

“How you doin', Mrs. Jackson?” the man calls over to my neighbor, still trying to redeem himself, and really, what's in a name anyway?

Here's how we do community in this country: You live beside someone, or someone's church, for four or 20 years. You notice each other, kind of. You don't really try to make contact unless something of yours is threatened – someone encroaches on your property line with their shed, someone's dog poops on your pansies, or someone dares put something in your dumpster.

At the top of our list for reasons to move – searching for community. One that works. One that is not transient. One where young families are visible, and I don't have to drive 7 miles to take my kid to a playdate.

My sidebar has a link to a book I read recently, In the Neighborhood, an interesting look at how our lives have shut down to each other in the decades following the birth of the suburb. The author sets out to get to know his neighbors. Perhaps when I get to where we're going, I'll ring some doorbells and hand out copies.

Monterey County

Elkhorn Slough, with its pieces of driftwood sticking up all over the place like some sort of strange graveyard of antlers

the otters, tagged and preening like floating kittens in the bay

the curry-colored house down the street which once or twice a year hosts a huge event in a tent, piles of shoes outside the flap, saris of every color in and out of the rented port-o-potty

the Salinas Post Office, where I once got to cut the line in exchange for translating (Spanish/English) for another patron

the Monterey Post Office, where they turn on jazz music when the line gets too long

the Pacific Grove Post Office, asleep, like the rest of that town

the Seaside Post Office, most multicultural spot per square inch on the peninsula besides The Breakfast Club restaurant

The Breakfast Club restaurant, with their flat screens rotating advertising for tire places, CoffeeMate, where “Anywhere is fine” and I once saw my favorite clerk from the Seaside Post Office.

the 50-degree July days

Marina, where every Mother's Day weekend the snowy plovers have to compete with the hang gliding demo at the annual kite festival

the homeless man who sits at the busstop on the way from my secret parking space to the Aquarium

the cuttings faires, third Saturday in March, where if you want to know anything about the plants you are taking home you have to ask the man in the white beard

the man from Salinas who delivered my storage POD, what was once surely a gang tattoo on his neck now inked over into a black pool

the ones who didn't deliver my storage POD and ended up buried, gang tattoo intact on their young necks

the summer movies at the Outdoor Forest Theater, bring your own picnic, cozy up to the fire pits

the “controlled” burns to rid the old Fort Ord of unexploded ordinances that send ash raining down on my yard on the most beautiful, fog-free days

the tiny airport that fills to capacity with golfers, conference goers, and where the TSA agents give out stickers to the kids

the conference goers, forever lost in the 1 square mile of downtown, their nametags thumping against their overdressed chests as they cross the street by the Chinese restaurant

Monastery (aka Mortuary) Beach each year sweeping someone from its coarse sand into its dangerous currents

Soledad, where the “It's Happening in Soledad!” sign is followed by the exit for the correctional facility

Carmel's art galleries

the cypress canopies

the baby harbor seals on Hopkins beach

the sea lions barking as you climb Rocky Ridge Trail

the gully at Garapata State Beach filled with calla lilies

the jump houses that fill the miniscule lots

the midnight drag shows at Norma Jean's

the coveted right lane at the Naval Post Graduate School on southbound Del Monte Blvd to avoid getting stuck behind the left turners

the National Steinbeck Center pretending to be dedicated to literature and history as if it's not funded by the big ag(riculture) companies

avocados year-round

the man who runs the old time clock shop whom I never got to interview, everything around him ticking, ticking, family photos from the old country shining in sepia tone from the walls

the Castroville Artichoke Festival

Pfeiffer Beach covered in photographers in waders all snapping images of light through rock windows

These Days

Isaac: These days I've seen people with shopping carts. I mean, not at stores, just people have them, like they must have bought them. Have you seen that man that sits on the ground and he has like hundreds of blankets in a shopping cart?


Me: Yes. That man has those blankets because he doesn't have a home. He uses them when it's cold if he had to sleep outside. 

Doesn't have a home?


He's homeless. Some people choose that life, but other people are homeless because they are having a hard time. Maybe they don't have family to go to or the money to get somewhere to stay. 


He must have friends, though!


Let's hope so.


Because you don't need money to have friends!

Happy Thanksgiving, friends. With much gratitude for all we have, for you and for my son whose wit, innocence, and intuitive intelligence knock me off my feet by the hour. And who has inspired from me so much writing.

after

“Home. There was nothing to do but collect my suitcase and wade into it.”

-- from The Mermaid Chair (Sue Monk Kidd)

 This was the marquee of the church in front of my house when I arrived back in California.

Another crying fit over seemingly nothing.

“Do you think you're missing grandmom?” I ask.

He nods.

“But I'm not missing the castle!” he says through tears. The castle is the Playskool Castle with dragon and dungeon and wee royal family that I had as a little girl. It lived at my mom's house. Isaac adores it.

“The castle is coming to me!”

I am not quite sure if this is him reassuring himself with something he loves, that he's looking forward to, or if maybe it's his way of finally admitting he knows these two things – his grandmom and the castle – are separate entities. That it is possible for one to exist while the other is gone. New territory for him. Kind of like the concept of home feels like for me. How to separate it from mom?

I hate the town where I grew up. I could elaborate on my feelings of loathing, but let's just leave it there. I visited “home” to see my mom. Can there be “home” without her? What is any stronger sense of home than mom? Our first home.

From inside that vessel

that before him I could never have envisioned

providing anyone: the body-- my body-- as home,

a concept so foreign. Me, a base, a safe place

to be...

(from my poem “Could I Hear the Wind?”)

I feel like I am falling. Perpetually falling. There is no ground.

****

It is two weeks ago and I am in Big Sur with Isaac, we have fled there for the afternoon to escape other painful experiences that began this month, trying to dissolve them in the beautiful river, the soft red bark. My phone lights up with my sister's number, then, cell service sketchy at best, the call is lost. I just spoke to her that morning and I wonder if maybe she hit the call button again by accident. If only.

I arrive home to the news of my mother's heart attack. She is in ICU and she is sedated.

I tell Isaac in simple terms. Grandmom is in the hospital. She is very sick.

Isaac gets the concept of death about as well as any five-year-old can. He is well aware he already has a grandfather on the other side. And he has lost a cat. We talk about them. We talk about spirits. About ancestors. He puts one of his plastic horses on my altar next to the rose petals and the pictures of my grandmothers.

As the week progresses I tell him there is a chance his grandmom might die. He begins to cry.

“But what will happen to her stuff?”

“What stuff?”

“What will happen to the stuff in her house if she dies?”

“Then your aunts and uncle and I will sort it out and keep things we'd like and give things away that other people can use.”

The crying intensifies.

“But...”

“What stuff are you thinking of, Isaac?”

“The castle!”

“I bet Grandmom would want you to have the castle.”

The castle remained the focus of his concern through the week, along with how doctors don't think it's yucky when they cut someone open and whether you can keep your clothes on if you have an operation.

****

“From the moment he'd seen the mermaid chair, he'd loved Senara, not just for her mythic life in the sea but for how supposedly she'd heard the prayers of Egret Islanders and saved them, not only from hurricanes but from golf courses.”

-- from The Mermaid Chair

“Tailing the Stars,” one headline read the day I left. I felt murderous. “Tiger vs. Himself,” said another. Indeed, he can definitely go fuck himself.

The US Open in Monterey = I'm lucky to have gotten off this bloody peninsula for under $2500 in trying to get to my mother's death bed. If you ask me, wealth is really wasted on the rich and, surely, there is a special place in hell for golfers.

They had already pretty much lost me when they canceled the farmer's market for US Open parking. Not that the “official” US Open SUVs I encountered around town could actually park. The banners were everywhere as the shuttle drove me out of town: “Welcome Golf Fans!!” They might as well have just hung red lights in all the restaurants and businesses since it essentially comes down to whoring ourselves for the almighty tourist dollar.

I'm done with Monterey. And even as I say that there is a part of me that wants to cling mercilessly to its crumbling rock cliffs, its exotic beauty. But it's time for us to move on. We have been plotting a move for a long time now, and if things go as planned (ha!), it will happen in the first part of next year. The painful piece is that we are moving east. Not to Jersey, but still, we would have been closer to my mom, so much closer.

When I originally told my mom about our plans, you might think she would have responded like so many other mothers and grandmothers. Something to the tune of “Oh! It would be so great to have you closer!” What my mom said was, “Oh! I can't imagine you taking Isaac away from the California coast!”

My mother was difficult to sort out. She put up an ultra-casual, laid-back attitude. Nothing was ever a problem and there was always a next time. Too often I began to believe her hype. I regret that.

****

My mom insisted she was ready to go. And though I was not at all ready to see her go, nor was I prepared for the compression of time – arrive, talk to her about this and that like always, leave the room and return as she took her last breaths – I'm doing my best to take in the fact that this is part of the package. 

I am confused by the people who express their sympathy in ways that would imply it was all unnecessary, a complete surprise. The morning of my mother's heart attack she posted what would be her final blog, about memories, family, about her life. There are pictures on her camera from that afternoon, likely only a couple hours before she dialed 911. They are of her garden. There is life and there is death. We all share this cycle. No one is exempt. I wish I could say I felt as my mom did, that it didn't frighten me, but I'm not there yet. What I do get is that we are all meant to help each other along the way. We are just all meant to help each other. Can it be that hard?

The day before I got on a plane headed for home, for I didn't know what, for a panicked call from my sister (“You need to come straight to the hospital!”) as I waited to see if they'd pluck my name from the stand-by list for an earlier connection, only to be stuck anyway in a two-hour delay in Chicago due to a wicked lightning storm, the precipice to a season of storm, of meltdowns, that is only still just beginning, I had been climbing around on a rocky beach, exploring the Pacific tidepools with Isaac. The juxtaposition is jarring, though I clutched my cell phone through the low tide, though I never really forgot what was going on on the other coast..

It was a class I'd signed him up for ages ago, to have a little more information on the itty-bitty creatures in their wildly elaborate eco-system and a break from preschool, something special to do with his mom. There were about eight three - six-year-olds there with their parents watching crabs and touching sea anemones.

this and the next shot were taken by Isaac. ("I'm like Grandmom. I like to take pictures.")

About half-way through the class, as our troupe clamored over boulders avoiding limpets and barnacles, another five-year-old who happened to be next to me instinctively reached out and took my hand for balance. And I, instinctively, let him. His father couldn't stop apologizing. I kept brushing him off, telling him it was no problem, but he was embarrassed somehow, not willing to let it go. He didn't get it. He didn't get the fact that, for godssakes, we are all in this together.

school search part IV

There is a school where Isaac goes every night while we sleep. He does his best not to wake us, then gets on his dad's bike and rides 50 miles to Big Sur where he meets his friends and Secret School commences.

It's been about five months, I'd say, that we've been hearing about Secret School. There are special keys involved – usually bits of plastic we find around that have no known origin. “That's my key to Secret School!” Isaac will shriek, and dive for it before it his the trashcan.

By all accounts Secret School is a very special place. Very fun. And, of course, very secret. He can't really tell us all the things that go on there. We wouldn't understand anyway.

His preschool teacher has a theory on Secret School. You see, there are five of them – the Fab Five I call them – who've been together now since, well, yes, since they were in diapers. Isaac, two other little boys his age, and a pair of sisters. Theses days, they are the cool cats. The older group at school. Inseparable. We take them to the park and they slide down the slides holding hands. (Yes, I forgot my camera, thank you very much.) And now it seems the group is breaking up. The sisters are moving. The other boys are going to a different kindergarten experience next year while Isaac will stay where he is.

This week is the last for most of them to be all together. Really, it's nothing short of heartbreaking. They've known it was coming, and Isaac's teacher believes that Secret School is their way of staying together. No matter where they live or where they go to school by day, by night they run the show, hanging out among the redwoods, learning only the fun stuff, no grown up rules, nobody has to leave.

Sometimes in the mornings, Isaac will ask us, “Did you hear me 'neak out for Secret School??” Or he might report on who wasn't able to be at Secret School, or even a guest speaker that showed up at Secret School. This morning the story was a new one.

“I didn't go to regular Secret School last night,” he told us.

“Oh, really?”

“Everybody else, they went to the usual Secret School, but I went to a different Secret School. Just to check it out.”

“To check it out, huh?”

“Yeah, you know, see what it was like.”

“And how was it?”

“Good. A lot of the things were the same.”

“There were different kids there though?”

“Yeah. One kid talked like a pirate. You know, 'Get the booty!' Stuff like that.”

“Hmm. So you think you're gonna go to this new Secret School?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

Somewhere in Time

When you visit a town, it's always interesting to imagine if you could live there. I recently had the experience of being simultaneously drawn to and repelled by a locale. It was a small town, something of a throwback if you will, and charming, as small towns tend to be, and horrible, as small towns tend to be.

Mike made a stop into a locally-owned stationery store – an establishment one could refer to as a “corner variety” -- and emerged again, eyes bugging out of his head. “That place closed 20 years ago! It's just that nobody told them!” A serious time travel kind of place where you might expect to find Christopher Reeve (young, whole and alive), meet up with Jane Seymour (always stunning), just don't reach into your pocket for any pennies...Nearby on the street, we watched as a man in a long white beard, reflective vest, shorts and brown knee socks stopped traffic in the main intersection in order to pick up trash in the road.

Food joints are always telling. No matter the place, I can almost always find my cafe – it just takes one – the one with the community journal, the postcards for sale by a local artist, the killer avocado salad, and, if I'm really lucky, even the gluten-free options. I was in one of those cafes recently and while awaiting my tasty treat, a woman of no more than 30 walked in pulling behind her one of those shopping cart-type things which contained one straw hat, one newspaper, one banjo, and one copy of Magic for Dummies. I gasped audibly and clamped my hand over my mouth so that nothing else more offensive would escape. A wave of compassion for the town and this resident in particular rose to engulf my being. A spot that could accommodate this person as well as the tattooed, deep-voiced woman slapping my order on the counter was okay by me.

Dinner is another matter. Often I just give up. In my general experience, if you are following a sandwich board sign and descending stairs to a restaurant, you are headed for some meaty “American” food and a 17-year-old named Tiffany who will be-your-server-this-evening. In other words, you'll be hungry. The wave that engulfs me when Tiffany still hasn't brought the water I asked for 20 minutes ago to wash down the “food” in front of me is pure irritation, which interestingly, banjo-playing magician women forgotten, usually begins to extend to the whole of the human race.

I'm pretty sure that what makes an attribute for a town fall into the charming or horrible categories has much to do with whether or not you have, not just someone to share it with, but perhaps a community of folks to share it with. People who see things the way you see them. You gotta call kitsch kitsch. Otherwise, you may 1) go crazy or 2) loose all perspective and wake up one day to find your chic urban haircut grown out and in its place a bouncy side ponytail.

a funny thing happened on my way to CA

The other day I was talking on the phone to a friend. A friend from California. We started laughing, cracking up about some dumb thing. It was a joke that pretty much made fun of both of us, grabbed up each of our idiosyncrasies and ran for the goal posts. I noticed the moment (because I notice everything; I’m a writer and) because it was unusual, this moment.

And that’s when it hit me. I don’t laugh here.

When I complain about how I miss my friends or how besides the fact that I love where I live, for being somewhere nine and a half years, we still have hardly any close friends, no one that shares our daily muck, what I’m talking about to a large extent is this absence of inside jokes, HUMOR.

Here’s my disclaimer about how I think California rules and I am the first to ponder groovy inner paths, visit retreats featuring meditation halls and yoga classes, and use the word Zen as a verb. But, people, circling toward nirvana is sometimes just not funny. Look, I’ve got west coast in me - my guests threw granola at my wedding, for goodness sake! Okay, so maybe it was a little tongue in cheek (although my father-in-law who has no excuse because he’s from Massachusetts thought the honey-coated seeds in a little satin bag placed in his hand were a snack, but that’s another story all together). Actually, now that I think about it, I think the granola could have been the last really funny thing we did since moving here.

A couple years ago in a writing group I was in we were critiquing a poem I’d brought about my pregnancy which included the line “the child inside me…” One woman’s helpful comment was that the line was ambiguous because people might think I was really talking about my “inner child.” My response? ONLY HERE, FREAK. ONLY IN THIS SPACE. (AND WHEN I SAY SPACE, I WANT YOU TO FLUTTER YOUR HANDS ABOUT YOUR HEAD TO INDICATE YOUR AURA, THE OTHER AURAS INTERACTING WITH YOUR AURA AND THE COSMIC ESSENTIAL BEINGS OF ALL CREATURES, WHATEVER PLANE THEY MAY BE ON BECAUSE WE WISH THEM ALL THE BEST ON THEIR PATH.)

And believe me, I do wish you all the best on your journey, but if you are going to wear THAT HAT for the trip, I am GOING to make fun of you along the way. It’s just that, for now, I seem to have forgotten how.

I wrote a blog about my bi-coastal ambivalence before – here it is. I’m not trying to say that the east coast is funnier than the west coast…exactly…but let’s just review the data. What if “Seinfeld” were set in California? Would it have been as funny? We’ll start north and move down my state –

Seinfeld in Sacramento? (I can’t think of a more humorless place.)
in San Francisco? (“not that there’s anything wrong with that”)
in Santa Cruz? (I don’t see George with a belly button piercing, but it might be funny if you were smoking that weed you got growing in your back yard.)
in L.A.? (The liposuction episode was cut early on.)
in San Diego? (Perpetually beautiful weather and a strong military presence. Not. Funny.)

A mom walks into a bar. Aw crap, no.

A mom walks into her therapist’s office. Definitely not funny.

A mom walks into her therapist’s office drunk. Ah. Now that has potential.

My current job of mom has things in my funny world all screwed up. While the stuff that comes out of a three-year-old’s mouth is some of the funniest material you will ever hear, you spend your day trying NOT to laugh so you don’t scar the kid into thinking you’ll mock his every thought.

Then there’s the other stuff they say – the stuff you want to sell them into hard labor for.

AND the OTHER, OTHER stuff, the stuff of the world that breaks your heart or pisses you off royally because you are a mom and you need to protect this child and the deeply magical qualities he is made of and you are appalled that others would do things to compromise his present state of wonder or his future, whatever that holds, and so you walk around with the figurative keys in one hand ready to gouge the eyes of anyone challenging you while the other hand is lotion-soft and there to cover the eyes of your baby in order to block out unwanted stimuli. As you can see, there isn’t a lot of time left in the day to be funny.

We passed Measure R (just one more endearing thing about my adoptive state, any election is fair game to get the general public to vote on every freakin’ thing someone ever called out in a town meeting). I hope the cops are happy. It means money for them. And although I would have preferred to have lit dollar bills on fire and shoved them up the asses of my local police force, I voted in favor of this measure. I can forgive the satellite station no one ever goes in or out of that’s surrounded by gang graffiti, oh sure. And the fact that there are never any fewer than three cops parked at the local coffee joint doesn’t bother me a bit, I just jimmy around the billy-clubs to get to the stirrers. No problem, boys, really, you make me feel all warm inside knowing you’re close. But then I got the mail one day…

There was a half-sheet color glossy plea for making our town better that featured a photo of one of the parks with glass in the fallen seed pods and paint jobs from the 1960s and another – my fave – of police in flak jackets aiming large automatic weapons into a house. Right away, I grew sympathetic to their cause and, obviously, I left it out on the coffee table so my two-year-old could pick it up and know who the good guys were. I wish the word MORONS had more syllables, so when I yelled it at the top of my lungs I could kind of yodel for extra effect.

I had a good mind to get my mama bear on, march into the station, and drag them around by the ears, maybe even scold them for not washing their hands and eating their veggies.

The truth is though that goofy things happen all day and while a day that regularly includes wiping poop off a small human’s butt has the potential to be simply hilarious, those friends are missing, the ones who get it, who aren’t consumed in wiping poop off other small humans’ butts, or who are and can crack a joke as the small human runs off still poopy and sits on the new couch. All in all, the key seems to be to have someone to share the joke with.

fences and neighbors

I don't yet have a toddler who clutches a toy with his whole body screaming “Mine! Mine! Mine!” Maybe because he doesn't have a sibling (mother-in-law: “He's going to grow up ALL ALONE?” me: “ALL ALONE.”)

Still, Isaac understands ownership. He also understands who is part of his community and who is outside of it. The two concepts are related. He flatly refuses to share his cars with a random boy at the park, but when his friend Joshua whom we've been waiting for arrives, he readily hands them over. Or at the beach recently it was “Girls, too! Girls, too!” as I handed him his cheese stick, and so I third it, giving a piece to my friends' twins and to Isaac.

Ownership and our ideas of property have gone wacky these days. “Share!” we tell the kids. And on what model might they grasp that idea, I wonder? Just look at our “communities.” In a past era, fences meant freedom, used to demarcate land ownership. Only free men could own land. There's a jumbled, ironic feel to all of that, but let's move along. These days, fences aren't keeping anybody free. They are the border between us and them.

I'm interested in exploring fences and neighbors. I've had the idea to make it into a radio program for over a year now.

The last radio show I produced for public radio was on elementary school kids' views of libraries closing in their neighborhood. It aired a few days before Isaac was born. Since then, I've done a few interviews with touring writers, but nothing like the time-consuming endeavor of mobile interview, collection of ambient sound, selection of music, writing intro, transitional and closing texts, tunneling through editing programs in the dark of a studio for hours, slicing up and rearranging my victims' sentences and creating narrative. Perhaps oddly, I crave to go back to that work (or at the very least a life that would afford me such time).

I want to interview the person with the two-foot green chainlink number that has four, count them, Beware of Dog signs on it. Huh?

I want to talk to the person who lives behind a crumbling white picket fence leading to a Pepto-Bismol pink house decked out in peace signs.

I need to get into the mind of the person who constructed a concrete block barricade to their rose garden, leaving planter openings at even intervals along the top, only to see whatever lived in them at one time shrivel to brown sticks and now host a flock of empty beer cans.

Those are the old fences. But people are constantly constructing new fences and walls in my neighborhood too.

The McMansions and renovations all seem to call for a second (or third) floor for the view and towering fences. Wood, brick, iron, take your pick.

Some of the McMansions can be described as nothing short of fortresses. Thick adobe-colored walls squaring off cement patios in a dizzying progression that ride higher and higher lest the inner sanctuary be sullied by the outside eye. There is, of course, a Beware of Dog sign posted prominently on these chateaus of welcome, and – centered over my favorite one – a fat, gold crucifix nailed above the door. (We're Christian, goddammit! Stay back!) The only thing missing is the jagged pieces of bottles poking out along the top of the wall.

I would ask questions about whether they considered their fence decorative, functional, other. I'd talk to them about who knows their neighbors. And how far in each direction they can name them.

Recently, a friend who is looking for a place to rent lamented how he'll probably have to deal with neighbors. “You guys lucked out here,” he told me.

At our house, we have few direct neighbors. There is the church I've written about, the 80+ year-old Johnsons I've written about in passing, and screaming children behind us, though we've never seen them. That would be because on the sides and back of the house there is a six foot high wooden fence topped with another two feet of lattice.

There is also our pseudo neighbor on the other side. His house faces the street perpendicular and he has a big yard that touches ours in just one place really, so were it not for the baby raccoon, we may never have crossed paths without going out of our way to introduce ourselves, which, well, people don't often do and which, well, is part of my point in doing a story, and, well, aren't I always whining about community? I still don't get why he didn't see the raccoon across his empty yard over three days. I'm just gonna throw this out there, and it doesn't mean it explains anything, but, well, he drives a Hummer. Anyway.

Recently we visited both families on the east coast in one week-long trip – something we had sworn we would never do again.

The day after we got home was a beautiful sunny Sunday and we were out in the garden reminding ourselves what our yard looked like when I heard a knocking on the fence.

My eighty-year-old neighbor Mrs Johnson was standing on an upturned bucket, peering through the lattice over the six-foot high barricade. “I said to James, I said, 'That woman with the truck has come a few times already, I better go out and see if she has a key. If she has a key,' I said, 'everything's alright.'”

We had really intended to let them know we were going. Really. We just didn't see them outside and knocking on people's door these days...well, it's that direct thing...don't we all hesitate? (e.g. knocking on the fence).

Despite the fence knocking, what is obvious from this exchange is that Mrs Johnson comes from another generation, where maybe neighbors were important. Not to mention another culture (she is from Salzburg, Austria), where maybe neighbors were important.

For the first three months we lived here, Mr Johnson, also from another generation and another culture (he's from Mississippi) addressed me solely as "neighbor." "Hello, Neighbor!" he would call from beside his light blue Mazda pickup (purchased new, don't ya know, in February of 1973). In truth, he couldn't remember my name, but who cares? How cute is it to be called "Neighbor?"

After we straightened out with Mrs Johnson how long we were gone and that the roses had indeed been watered, the conversation turned to more meaningful matters.

Still straining to hang onto the fence with one hand, Mrs Johnson motioned with the other. “Give me a plate, honey, I made cream puffs.”

Neighbors rock.