secret garden

friday night we went and saw bossy dudes and rainbow moods, short plays by short people, performed at the DeYoung museum, which was once again wonderful and heartwarming and amazing. i laughed, i cried. there are people out there, and they come to MY KID'S SCHOOL who are teaching narrative skills through playmaking and we are all lucky to have them. go stagewrite.

saturday we hiked up potrero hill for our tree-watering team orientation. friends of the urban forest planted nine trees along the sidewalk on coral road by starr king and they will need lots of tlc this summer to survive. so we learned about the bucket and plastic bag method of irrigation, found out where the water could be turned on, and were teamed with a partner family who will join us once every five weeks or so in our quest to keep these slender guys alive. yet another commitment but how can you say no to watering baby trees?

the kids got a peek at the learning garden which is only accessed by 3rd grade at starr king for some mysterious reason. maya and a few kindergarteners were very busy pumping water from the rainwater catchment barrel and pouring it on the plants while miles and his buddies hunched over a table in the bungalow playing yu-gi-oh. it was a beautiful day with blue sky and wind. on the way up maya picked up a dead baby bird she found on the sidewalk by the parking garage. it was very sad, but she decided that if we took care of the trees the birds could make nests in them and the babies would be safer. we are seeing desperate nests all over the place lately, eggs on stone ledges, nests on parking garages. many little birds are flying in and out of the overgrown jasmine in our backyard. one nest of eggs was savaged by a big old raccoon.

then a preschool alumni reunion in glen park followed by the fireballs' last soccer game of the season which...they won. woo hoo.

summer is almost here and i am feeling the call of rivers and big trees and even a faint call for a child-free getaway to a hot springs somewhere up north. i have been obsessively worrying about how my daughter will fare in kindergarten, and trying not to. i think she is feeling it, or feeling the end of preschool,because it has been a time of much yelling and crying and "you don't love me anymore." she is a mess and i assume it is my fault. we need some quality time in nature, or at least i do, getting away from all the arbitrariness of weekdays and weekends and school years.

heard a guy on NPR today talking about how kids who grew up in the 80s were taught that government was incompetent and or bad by watching shows such as the a-team, dukes of hazzard, and even ghostbusters. it was scary how much sense his argument made.

and today in my garden i harvested a bunch of greens, carrots, onions. i planted some tomato plants just as a big wind kicked into the afternoon. whoosh whoosh. miles was picked up and taken to the house of air. maya acted out a story where a sculpey horse and a sculpey snail were cruel to a sculpey sheep. he was perfect and they were either broken or overcooked and they would not be kind to the sheep unless he broke off his ear. which he did not. i put her to bed early and then miles returned from his party. he lay in bed next to me, this often rude little dude, and rocket cuddled between us as i read him two chapters from his surprising new book of interest, the secret garden. i have held on to this copy since childhood. miles may be growing up, and may not want to water trees, or even come play in our own backyard garden often, but i can see that this book holds him in the same way it held me a long long time ago. and that is nice.

gustav klimt's rocker sister

there has been a lot of outside time lately. the garden is growing in the backyard, lots of little seeds sprouting up, pink and white blossoms on the fruit trees, and crazy tall greens that just keep going and going.

work has been rough lately, feeling overextended, but i am trying my best. i find myself involved in miles' school through meetings and email conversations. the teasing and bullying task force. the middle school committee. the garden coordinator political fiasco. miles is doing fine, but there is so much pressure to get test scores up that there doesn't seem to be much time to look at how to engage the kids. they keep assessing the kids to find out what skills they don't have yet that they should. i know this is important but assessment should look at not just what they know and don't know, but how they learn best.

have i mentioned these things before? i think so. project based learning. cooperative learning groups.

anway, we have been learning by getting out and about.

yesterday maya and i walked up and over potrero hill to an art class where she learned about gustav klimt and painted a huge gold background. on the way back we saw this amazing kidserve mural on daniel webster elementary. this is just a section, this thing is huge.

maya experimented with making shadows in the window of this closed down hair studio. she said she was gustav klimt's sister, who was in a rock band.
today we went with friends to the mission science workshop, a big room in mission high with a free for all of musical instruments, projectors, bones, woodworking tools, glue guns, rocks, slices of 540 year old redwood trees, live animals, dead animals, computer parts, you name it. i love this place.
maya made this cool magnet pendulum which showed how magnets can repel each other. the little hanging magnet dances around on its string.
layers of people i knew were at the workshop, and are everywhere we go, really, from the neighborhood, baby class, preschool, even pre-kid life. and outside there was an old friend, alec, looking like the cool sailor engineer that he is, with his dyke march t shirt on, headed to sunny delores park. the park was packed, a green sea of people and dogs, throwing footballs, grilling sausage, giving free capoeira lessons, playing accordion, walking on tightropes. blasting bad rock music from a fender amp, selling ice cream, drinking and smoking weed. i told the kids about how we used to go to this park a lot, and sit on blankets and sometimes play instruments, and how cassie lived nearby.

we watched as a group of people prepared to release a balloon creation into the sky, tethered by fishing line so as not to pollute. it was the size of a small room, red balloons attached to each other in the shape of a heart. the kids were patient as a very sf crowd of older women with some young tattooed women and some men, well, hey, all kinds of people talked about going around the circle and departed love ones and meditation. "the ice cream!!!!!!!!!" screamed maya and the kids ran off hand in hand to buy crappy mexican ice cream from a cart. they returned in time for the release of the heart, which floated higher and higher until it was just a small red shape above delores park, with no destination but, as miles said, "as high as the moon."

little city things

i keep writing serious posts and deleting them. all my worries and interests are being written about so well by many others. i will just keep documenting the little details of our lives in order to try and better understand why we stay here in this expensive earthquake land.

i grew my first batch of sprouts, broccoli sprouts. pretty tasty. just soak, drain, rinse and drain for a few days and here they are, a bowlful of hippie food.

this is a view of the hamilton rec center from the south side of geary. it's a huge sparkling rec center in the western addition, with a playground, soccer fields, batting cage, tennis and basketball courts aaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnd.................

check it out! the pool (and indoor basketball courts and tot area) is in the building glowing in the distance in the previous photo. here is one of two water slides at the very large pool. tough love lifeguards all around, water which was warm enough for all but the smallest of our group (maya is supposed to look cold in this picture), sunny warm air, huge windows. i rode the pictured water slide about ten times, ahhh, eyes closed made it seem even faster. there is another water slide i rode once, which is super fast and high and dumps you out about eight feet above the water. fun but a little painful. afterwards we walked over to the japantown mall and splurged on sushi. miles even ate some avocado. we sat in the peace tower and thought a little about war and peace. miles mentioned that the atom bomb turned the beach to glass, and we bought a book called hello, maggie, about life in a japanese internment camp.

and at starr king last week there was a guest author, maya cristina gonzalez for the books for dinner event. our maya stayed home which was a shame because she would have loved the author's hair. she showed the kids all kinds of secrets she paints into her work--they were entranced.
that's all for now.

love letter

i went and saw rich's band carlton melton play at cafe du nord last night. j mascis played a song with them and it was pretty exciting, especially for rich and andy. a loooonnngg jam.

afterwards i went out to a nice gay bar with a few friends for a quieter drink. we discovered everyone in our group was jewish, at least in theory, and i enjoyed a few hours of talk talk talk. i discovered a good number of jews don't believe in god, but are in it for the community. my brother gave me a ride home and we stopped at el farolito for an unnecessary taco. jam packed at 1:00 a.m. with drunken people scarily walking around ignoring traffic. i gave a skinny homeless woman a buck and felt bad about not giving her my warm plastic bag full of a grilled chicken super taco.

at home i read a little bit of the new yorker at 2 a.m. and skimmed an article about how social connections and interactions create the most happiness for people.

and this morning sipped coffee in a big sunny room with huge windows and watched maya smile her way through her creative movement class at dance mission theater. she "loved it", "it was SO FUN because three girls i know were there."

the mother beside me, hugely pregnant, noted that the girls looked like a lot of little pretty birds.

the thought comes and goes sporadically that this blog is just a long letter to those people i love who don't share much time with me. those folks i fantasized about having an intentional community with at one time. those who have slipped away to places that are hard to travel to.

and check out the carrots! i had been waiting for some spindly carrot tops to grow big and strong in the garden but pulled a few today and discovered these short, thick, very tasty little guys. the potatoes were a surprise, some growing in the dark below the compost. the green onions are amazing roasted with olive oil and salt.

night night

love,

24th street window shopping

i am lucky my brother lives in town. and that his daughter is my daughter's best friend. this morning we walked with the cousins from our house up 24th street to the dance mission theater family dance class open house. it turned into a good hour long walk, with the kids checking out all the sights, smells, and sounds. a new record store with crazy comic books for grown ups! a head shop called purple haze with some (according to miles) extremely ancient egyptian statues in the window. a storefront filled with grim reapers. many pastries with little colored balls on top. skull art. casa de canario with the african gray parrot who looks so wisely into your eyes. posters of creepy adult movies (inception), adorable owl movies (legends of the guardians). a crazy smashed in muni bus shelter. a dog with an army jacket on. smells of donuts and grilled chicken. cacti for sale. hipsters. people speaking spanish. hipsters and their dogs waiting for pop's to open.

we went to the dance studio and miles astounded me by joining in the demo creative movement class for 3-5 year-olds. i said he could be an assistant. skipping, twisting, jumping and shaking his booty he looked so happy and so...huge. especially in his size 10 puffy down jacket.

and a little escape to the backyard this afternoon. i pushed over the compost bin and was amazed to find black, rich, soil. a lot. and a bunch of sweet little potatoes growing at the bottom. i dug, scattered, weeded, pruned, and harvested mint, borage, potatoes, and some green onions while maya played evil gardener with her calico critters and the bright afternoon faded into dusk.

terrible housekeeping--or ultra cool indoor gardening?

i was feeling very back to the land as i gathered some arugula seed pods and let the seeds dry in a little cup on the windowsill by the sink. then i characteristically lost track of my seed project. a few weeks later i found this little arugula sprout growing in the grout by the faucet.

more to look at than read

maya and natalie spying on miles and hayden wrestling on the front lawn of the palace of the legion of honor on veteran's day, 2010.broccoli, chard, kale and a tiny artichoke from the garden. ants like to crawl into the artichokes, so you have to submerge them in water if you want to get the ants out. they come out fast and swim furiously for the sides of the bowl. somehow i feel softhearted about these ants. i put a stick in the bowl and some of them find it and climb out. today outside the palace of the legion of honor maya was letting ants climb all over her arm and calling them cute.

borage, arugula, and a pepino from the garden.

pandora radio music and fancy plant store

i have music in the car now. i forgot how music affects your thoughts as you drive through the world. listening to palace brothers and bon iver as i drove up past glen park canyon in the fog felt very different than driving up with just my own worried little petty thoughts.

it's thursday, my friday. a big sigh of relief as i said goodbye to my last little language-delayed student (who told me a long story i understood pretty much none of, about egg-man, a big ship, and robots) and headed off to pick up my own kids. since i am not allowed to pick up miles before the predetermined pick up time maya and i stopped to browse around flora grubb nursery. i know it is shi shi, and some might hate this place but i love it. all the expensive little glass terrariums full of air plants, and rusty bikes hanging in the air serving as planters, and rocks with holes carved in them growing succulents. what could be more perfect than a plant? we got two pumpkins, one green and one orange. miles is going to make his into calvin's head (from calvin and hobbes that is).