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