brushes

report from the mission

busy busy. here is a photo of chloe's grave. 2 weeks ago maya tossed a ping pong ball into an empty glass bowl and won a little fish named chloe. she was a good little fish who swam swiftly to the surface to eat her food each day, and seemed to enjoy the music she often heard living near the stereo. on friday, however, chloe was found floating, her soul gone, slightly curved. maya cried a little but then got right to the business of mourning. we wrapped chloe's body in a scrap of black flowered fabric, and buried her under the fuschia. maya topped her grave with orange and red flowers, and ran inside to draw a picture of chloe (seen here, wet from the rain). she found that the cement block near the fence was a good place to sit and look at the grave and think about chloe.

all level-headed and calm and purposeful. i remember when miles' frog died he was so inconsolable and angry. i recall hysterics at a similar age when i learned my dutch bunny had died without me. my mom told me that when she was seven she had a year where she was so disturbed by a relative's death that she threw up every night. i hope i can preserve this peacefulness about death in my daughter.

my mom came to town to witness the starr king fireballs' game with ace defender grandson miles-- a good and close soccer game with the powerful sunnyside eagles. we hit a birthday party and my mom and miles and i hiked the glen park canyon loop while maya put on a show with her old buddies. that night we went out for a special dinner at lolo, owned by the parents of another awesome starr king fireball. miles was treated like gold with mini-tacos and sliders while we ate delicious artichokes, tuna tacon, crab tostadas, and felt very special as were comped three glasses of wine. afterwards we wandered to valencia street and ate organic ice cream and bought vanilla beans. spoiled rotten.

today maya and i went to a new friend's for tea. i have walked by the store front pictured above on 24th for over a decade and wondered at the little cut out newspaper faces in the window. this turned out to be our new friend's house, which tourists were examining as we arrived. the pictures are stipple portraits from the wall street journal and to me seem to mark the passage of time somehow. inside was a not so san francisco like space--a storefront, carport, warehouse-y kind of place with little twisty staircases and leaky roof and extra small doors for the kids' rooms and skylights and both high and low ceilings and friendly interesting things to look at everywhere. there was a little monkey bar set up the dad had nailed right into the carport roof. the tea party lasted about 6 minutes but we stayed for five hours as the afternoon evolved into a grill party with the neighbors on the other side of the shared outdoor space, kids running back and forth between houses. we met the neighboring musician and artist couple who put out oysters and fancy cheese while maya and her new friend danced around to the ultra lounge music in tutus shouting "no you can't" in mandarin and shaking their fingers in the air. our friend's parents live right in the warehouse with them half the year and we talked in the space between the houses as the kids played hide and seek and neighborhood kids came out of nowhere to play soccer on the new and enviably wide treat street sidewalk. we ate grilled salmon and mushrooms and cauliflower and talked about fish extinction and architecture and of course our children.

last week someone we know with three little kids was seriously injured by a car--in the ICU paralyzed with a traumatic brain injury. it brought up lots of feelings and i remembered working in the sf general ICU during my internship, people astonished at what had happened to them--shot, strokes, car accidents. i worked side by side with an amazing speech therapist who could jump right in to help people understand what happened and how they were now going to figure out together how to communicate, to eat and drink. once a young woman came in, 21, who had been hit by a car outside a nightclub. she was paralyzed from the head down, tears pouring noiselessly down her cheeks, staring at us, and i almost blacked out but my mentor SLP just stayed calming by her side. she ended up six months later with only a limp, a kind of miracle. the person we know has started to move her hands and feet volitionally, and smiled at her children in the hospital.

incredible that you could smile in a situation like that, but people do. i am thinking about her a lot and hope her recovery will be a good one.

what does this all mean? i wish i knew but i don't.

RIP chloe,

get better, parent friend,

be careful around cars,

and love to you, readers

chapters of randomness! crystal cave!

1. my kids' school: yippee, test scores went waaay up across all the grades and classes, which makes people feel good. i will try to look at this as a very positive thing, rather than think cynically about what these standardized tests and requirements of adequate yearly progress yada yada yada really mean. like, possibly, the destruction of good public education. i do feel proud of the hard-working kids and teachers. let their learning continue to be high-scoring AND joyful.

2. on that note miles' teacher left without a single day's notice. she seemed kinda' unhappy, and we will never know why she quit except that there were "personal reasons". of course. miles has let me know that it doesn't matter if they do homework this year, and that they are not learning anything this year. it is shocking how quickly apathy has set in! the sub seems like a nice man, but is not really teaching. miles has been saying things like " i flew a paper airplane because i wanted to see if mr. X would mind, and he didn't mind tooooo much." hopefully there will be a new teacher soon but in the long run it is all just fine. i had a completely senile teacher in 5th grade who assigned the same homework every day for weeks before parents started to notice something was up-then he disappeared and left in his wake a trail of subs who could not pronounce anyone's name. i remember this year as the first year i was around pot, which was being smoked AT RECESS in a stone pagoda right outside the school.

3. we had an expanded group for mom's first friday out and i love my mom friends! woo hoo. you know it is a good night when you are singing the chorus from that song about canada at the bar (take off, to the great white north,etc.). these same great moms showed up for the soccer practice at potrero del sol on monday and one of them brought her mini-rex bunny with a portable pen for all the kids to pet and commune with--very cool and unexpected.

4. maya got together with her old old old pre-k friends from 3 weeks ago and they played pretty hard for a few hours, rampaging through about 20 changes of clothing. it was REALLY FUN according to maya who informed her friends that kindergarten had a lot of rules including: 1. you have to sit IN your square! 2. you have to sit criss-cross! and 3. you have to LOOK AT YOUR TEACHER THE WHOLE TIME YOU ARE LEARNING!!! (maya was pretty incredulous about this one). she told them that you get to play to learn in english class but in chinese time you just have to learn. there was one upsetting incident involving a lower case "a" that got my mama hackles up but she is sleeping in her uniform right now and seems to be going along with the program.

5. today we met up with our brisbane friends and ended up picking blackberries which were growing dangerously intertwined with poison oak at san bruno state park. this was my first time here (thanks corinne) and we got a good haul of blackberries and saw lots of butterflies and thistles and thistle down seeds and eucalyptus trees and ferns and a little bog and even bumped into an old painter friend from the philly days who now lives in noe valley. there were also four little kids running around with their shirts off making obnoxious jokes and laughing raucously.

6. after that we parked in a mysterious warehouse's parking lot and followed our 7-year-old friend (and graduate of the brisbane hiking camp) up a completely insane trail to the crystal cave. there were several spots which were so steep and narrow that the only way was to hold onto a rope and pull yourself up hand over hand. more poison oak and nettles everywhere. it was so dense and the trail so narrow we really felt we were walking through the brush, and then there it was--crystal cave! high enough to walk in and about, hmm, 15 yards deep. i almost expected to see cave paintings from 10,000 years ago. we were very lucky to have friends who knew had to get to this cave. the kids got out their headlamps and chisels and hammers and we found a whole bunch of beautiful crystals, growing like little teeth or cities out of cracks in rocks. i found the best one, a crystal that was perfectly clear with a perfect point, about as big as a jellybean, but better.