Tustin Lanes

We're here for a visit with Grandma doing the regular stuff. Except it has not stopped raining since I started driving down Interstate 5 on Sunday. So we're doing the regular inside stuff. Which is very limited when your kids don't want to go to the movie theater because they suck. That leaves shopping, an activity that I try to avoid at all cost if I have my children with me, and bowling.

On Tuesday we bowled and it was epic. My daughter developed her own technique - carrying the ball to the lane, setting it down and rolling it as hard as she could. My son would run and then throw the ball with both hands. My parents used to be in a league in the 80s and I used to roam around the bowling alley when I could escape the daycare area, which I almost always could. We'd eat nachos and hot dogs and play video games while grown men and women in silky polyester team shirts flirted, cursed, smoked and bowled their hearts out.  The eighties were so awesome.

We'd go there as teenagers too. And sometimes on college break. So Tustin Lanes holds many vague but happy memories for me. And now maybe it does for them too. My son was especially enamored by the shoes. How many times I contemplated stealing a pair of bowling shoes in high school. I even came a few times with flip flops so I wouldn't miss the shoes left behind. Alas, no hope for this goody two shoes.

Kid-colored lenses

My son loves to play in our car. When I allow it, which is to say when I have time to keep an eye on him from the kitchen or garage, he's happy to play in there for long stretches. When he's done invariably I have to put everything back to its off position - wipers, seat heaters, indicators, hazards - but it's a small price to pay so I indulge this simple pleasure. I wish I could take that much pleasure out of being in my car. Maybe if it wasn't so filthy. Or if I was five.

So recently I've been trying to see the world through kid-colored lenses. Last weekend we took the kids to fly kites. As we were setting up the string and trying to get these things up with little wind, it occurred to me that I had never flown a kite. Or at least I don't remember ever flying a kite. And I found it to be completely exhilarating. At one point I was actually running with my kite (no wind can be a problem) and I'm sure I had one of those golden retriever with his head hanging out a car window kind of grins. Just running with my arms up in the sky waving my kite.

And this weekend I took the kids up to San Francisco for the day to give my husband time to build our murphy bed (more on that later). My son bugs me constantly to take trains. He loves trains. He is enchanted by transportation. So we got on a 10:15 train to San Francisco and he talked the entire seventy-five minutes it took to get there. The color of the tracks. The naughty boy who was skateboarding at the station. The back hoe loader that was next to the tracks. The south going train. The man who collected tickets. He enjoyed every part of the trip especially getting to the final station where there were dozens of trains. But it gets better. I took them on the Muni - the light rail system in San Francisco or the "electric train" as he calls it. So now that we've taken Muni I figure all I need to do is get a trampoline and I can hang up my hat until he goes to college, basking in my "greatest mom on earth" title. Right? We took it five or six stops to the Ferry Building and got off to get some kettle corn at the farmer's market.

We sat at the wharf and ate kettle corn and strawberries and watched the seagulls and the boats and the zillion people buzzing about. I wish I'd had my camera. There was even a guy who writes poems for you on his old school typewriter while you wait. You just give him the topic (and a few bucks is my guess). I wanted to catch the 3:15 train back home (by this point I was back to wearing my mommy-colored lenses) so we didn't stop for a poem on the fly. But the next time we have transportation day I will absolutely take a moment to ask for a poem about taking a moment to enjoy life's simple pleasures.

Wednesday's Child

This past Sunday we hosted the first annual reunion of the Lubell siblings and the Rubin brothers. The Rubins are a family that grew up with us - elementary school, Little League, July 4th parties. You get the idea. The youngest Rubin was three years older than I am and a year younger than my middle brother. The middle Rubin was my oldest brother's age and grade. And the oldest Rubin was two years older than that. So I was significantly younger than all of them. But somehow, when I was about 16, I reconnected with the oldest one, Adam, who was then 24, and he became a kind of mentor to me. We've stayed in pretty good touch over the years even though our brothers, much closer in age, lost touch after Bar Mitzvah season.

Anyway, my husband and I went to Adam's wedding back in March and I got to hang out with his younger brothers - two extremely funny and likable guys. I decided then and there to host the first annual Luby-Ruby reunion and get everyone together with spouses and kids at our house for pizza and beer. Amazingly we found a date that worked for everyone and I have to say it was ridiculously fun to hang out and reminisce. There's something about growing up with people. There's a crazy bond that goes along with living on the same street for ten years or carpooling to Hebrew school with someone that makes you connected forever. And so the Lubells are connected to the Rubins.

But all that is just set-up for what this post is really about. Half an hour into the love fest, the youngest Rubin, Matt, said something like, weren't you kind of brooding and freaky as a little girl? Who remembers that? And the other Rubin brothers chimed in unanimously in agreement. Adam's been telling some version of this narrative for the last twenty years but they went on to paint a picture of me as Violet from the Incredibles - thick-banged, awkward, painfully shy. Or Wednesday from the Adams Family - just plain creepy. Really? I can imagine at social gatherings where I was the youngest by many years I probably didn't have a ton to say. I certainly wasn't playing capture the flag with the rest of the pack. But I wasn't casting voodoo spells on people either. I was too busy lacing their drinks with laxatives. After I defended my endearing, if not peculiar, childhood mystique we moved on to making fun of the size of Adam's hair in the early Eighties.

That's maybe the one downside of childhood friends. Their perceptions of you are locked on a particular moment in time when you were who you were for whatever reason. You had mean brothers. Your parents' friends didn't have any kids your age. You were extremely shy and fiercely independent. You were the only four year old on the planet who wore glasses...where am I going with this...

Oh yes. I even see it now with my own kids - how I already have them labeled the sensitive child and the free-spirit even though there is obviously so much more to each. I'm reminded of one of my favorite quotes by George Bernard Shaw, not to be confused with value vintner Charles Shaw, who wrote:

"The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them."

Family folklore

You know that I actually remember my mom trying to teach me to tie my shoes when I was five years old and becoming totally fed up with me because I insisted on doing it myself and wanted nothing to do with her instruction. And if that meant tying the whole goddamned shoelace around my head, well that's what I was going to do. Man I was annoying. But I did get it, that night in fact. And I got it by myself. And my mom probably poured herself a glass of wine and said to hell with you girlie. Go barefoot for all I care. 

That's my memory of it anyway. I can picture the exact place it all went down. On the floor of the family room, about two feet from the television. And likely an episode of The Brady Bunch was on. Those annoying bastards. 

But memory is a little unreliable isn't it. There's a long-running story in my family that I tried to kill my mother when I was three. I was PISSED about something or other so I put an empty sand bucket in the middle of the kitchen floor, covered it with a dish towel and put a note on top that said "stp in". I "hid" the bucket with the dish rag but then to be sure she didn't miss my target, I wrote explicit instructions to ensure her demise. Can you say BAD SEED?

But when I think about it now, was I really writing sentences at age three? Was I maybe five? Did I even write that note? My mom is somewhat of a hoarder, at least when it comes to letters and email, but that one's not in the pile. Did we make it up as further proof that I was a giant pain in the ass? A misunderstood toddler? A bad speller? Hard to say.

My husband has a similar "folktale" from his youth. He claims to remember learning how to ride a bike when he was three. A two-wheeler. And that the guy who invented those giant Crayola Crayon coin banks taught him on a farm in Israel (that part's actually true and the guy became a trillionaire). But three? Come on! Our daughter, the repository of his genetic code, is nearly 2.5 and still can't pedal a trike. So what' the likelihood that he was free-wheeling at age three? Slim Jim. But we have these stories in our heads and we sometimes even use them as a benchmark for our own kids. My husband was actually getting annoyed at our four-year-old because he wasn't super gung-ho about riding a two-wheeler. And neither of our kids has intentionally tried to kill us yet so they must be delayed! It's probably not the best measuring stick. I'm sure our kids will have the same conversations with their spouses. Why can't he dismantle his cell phone? I was doing that when I was three!