Teacher Nelly

On the way out of Costco the other evening, I bumped into Teacher Nelly, the world’s greatest preschool teacher, who was Eli’s first teacher and then Kai’s first teacher. Nelly is passionate about her program; she’s been teaching preschool for over 20 years (which seems impossible, since she looks like she’s under 30). Why teach preschool that long? Because it’s what she really loves, and because she believes those pre-K years are not just precious but also Big Ones for developing minds.

We fell in love with her when Eli was in her class, and then we feel even deeper when she had Kai. Kai, it turned out, had an anxiety disorder called selective mutism, and though she was a chatterbox at home she did not utter a single word the entire school year.

Nelly had never heard of selective mutism before Kai came along, but she was determined to learn all she could and do everything possible to help Kai thrive. She started an SM file for herself and a duplicate file for us; nearly every time we saw her she’d found a new article or resource. She was so involved and so loving, and she longed with all her heart to see Kai smiling, talking and laughing as we promised she did all the time at home.

We wanted her to see it, too.

So we invited her to Taavi’s birthday party that January, the kind of boisterous family affair where you’d typically find Kai zipping about in characteristic “home” mode: joking, dancing, leaping on furniture – and talking, talking, talking.

This seemed like a logical thing to try. And sure enough it’s considered a treatment technique, referred to in the psych world as stimulus fading.

Or is it the opposite of stimulus fading? I think stimulus fading generally involves having a person or thing that stimulates the desired behavior present in the setting where the child is mute (which would get the child to speak in that setting), and then gradually removing that stimulus. We’d tried that already: I’d hang out in the classroom and play with Kai and the other kids, or let her sit on my lap at story time, or I’d read a book to all the kids. It had only the slightest effect. Kai would cling to me, and when she wanted to tell me something, she’d pull me head down to her mouth and hiss into my ear. If another child her voice, he’d perk up and call out, “Kai talked! I heard Kai talk!” and she’d bury her face in my chest. She played happily with the other students every day, by the way, and considered them her friends. She just wouldn’t talk to them.

Back to our experiment:

It was a fascinating night. When Kai first saw Nelly, her beloved teacher, her eyes lit up and oh, man, you could tell she wanted to impress her. But she couldn’t do it. We all tried so hard to act natural, to not put her in the spotlight. Nelly was eager to hear Kai's voice, but she mingled with the rest of us and let Kai wander off.

Eventually, Kai found herself sitting on my sister’s lap. My irresistibly funny sister, who can turn any of my kids into their silliest, happiest selves. Kai forgot about Nelly and started playing with my sister; from across the room, Nelly snuck a few peeks. Kai saw her once or twice and quieted to a whisper.

But she couldn’t resist the lure of Nelly for much longer – not in this setting where she was so used to being her uninhibited self. She inched toward her teacher, looked her in the eye, climbed onto her lap. Nelly started asking questions about letters and sounds and words, and Kai was dying to let her know how smart she was. There was such a struggle going on inside her.

When she could bear it no longer, she began to answer. One word answers at first, clipped and nervous. Nelly controlled her excitement and encouraged Kai with snippets of praise and new questions: “Oh, you’re so smart! Wow. Do you know what this says?”

Bit by bit, Kai loosened up. The floodgates opened a little at a time, until they were swung wide and Kai’s enormous personality flooded forth. She wasn’t just talking to Nelly, by the end of the night, she was manic, telling her everything she could think of to tell, showing off with bad jokes and physical comedy, dragging her downstairs to show Nelly her bedroom, pleading with her to Not Leave because we had plenty of surfaces where she could sleep for the night.

When Nelly, exhilarated and exhausted, had to go home, we had to pry Kai off her. Hugh and I apologized for Kai swinging so far in the opposite direction, but Nelly's eyes glowed with satisfaction. “I can’t wait to see what happens in class tomorrow!”

Well, guess what? The next day in class, Kai looked at Nelly more directly but otherwise was her usual mute-at-school self. She still couldn’t speak there, at the place where everyone knew her as Kai, The Girl Who Does Not Talk. Where kids jumped up and down and pointed if she let her voice rise when greeting me in the afternoons. Where everything was just fine if she stayed in her silent little bubble.

But something had changed.

That summer, she went to camp at the Berkeley YMCA (Y camp stories of gratitude abound!), and she exhibited some SM symptoms but did talk to the other kids. She had trouble responding to direct questions from the counselors, but she added some speaking to her communication repertoire, even with the adults. And over the course of the summer, it became easier and easier for her to talk.

At the end of the summer, we arranged a sort of play-date with the two kindergarten teachers at the school she’d be going to, so she made friends with them before the school year started. That helped her start kindergarten shy but not SM-anxious, and she's been blossoming ever since, to say the least.

In the Costco parking lot, I gave Nelly a big hug. It’s impossible to say how much of a difference she made; maybe this was just the natural progression of things for Kai. But she was so good and kind and patient with Kai (despite the SM symptoms that make a child seem rude and obstinate), cared so much, and shared so much love with our family that I can never thank her enough.

Shoot, shoot, shoot! (no pun intended)

Mistake of the Week
Darn it! I forgot to record the new Ken Burns World War II documentary, and I really, really want to see it! I think we've only missed the first few episodes, but still...

I made a mental note on Sunday that the first segment was on Monday. I even remarked aloud to Hugh, "We need to program the thingy to record the Ken Burns thingy."

Shoot. This happens more and more as I get older. (And it seems to be accompanied by a creeping inability to quickly call up WORDS I NEED, and more and more I refer to things as thingies and use "really, really" to modify lame adjectives or ALL CAPS to strengthen weak phrases. Oh, and my mind seems to wander more; it's more difficult to focus and stick with the topic at hand. I need my brother John's new invention!)

If I ever do get back to my book, it is going to be hard work.

No time for brevity

Word Count Wednesday
I don’t work on Wednesdays, so today is my day to pack for Italy and get so well-organized for the trip that I stop losing sleep over it. I just dropped Eli and Kai at school, ate their cold, leftover pancakes for breakfast, and am pounding this out before waking Taavi and taking him to daycare. Hugh wants me to spend “just an hour” helping him complete The Grand Garage Cleanout he began yesterday, and I have to be at Mom’s by 11 to go to her lease recertification meeting. Then we’ll go get Mom’s hair cut and find her some comfortable walking boots, but I need to be home by 2:30 so we can be on time for a 3:30 meeting with Caiman’s biology teacher (that’s another story), which is at the high school, where there’s never anywhere to park.

So if that meeting ends by 4:30 there will be an hour before I have to pick up Eli and Kai and get back to Peter and the Starcatchers – the awesome 450 page book I convinced Eli to read for his book report that’s due this Friday by telling him I’d read as much as possible aloud. This reading aloud may or may not occur before 10 pm, what with dinner and all the other homework and Barry Bonds last home game ever with the Giants.

So guess what? I don’t know when I’m going to fit in my packing and super-organizing – so I definitely don’t have time to edit this!

~ 249 words ~

Clown-crushing love

Top Ten Tuesday
Hugh just reminded me of one of my favorite scenes from any TV show ever. It's from Malcolm in the Middle, and the whole family has forgotten Lois's birthday and she is FED UP.

I swear to god it will make you laugh. If it hits home for you as closely as it does for us, you might cry a little, too -- yes, you might cry when BOB SEGER starts singing! (The original high quality clip I posted was removed from YouTube because, well, copyright infringement. Here's an inferior version, but you get the idea.)



Hmm... now I can't decide which route to go for Top Ten Tuesday. You pick one:

What's your favorite television scene or... what's your best clown story?

Andiamo!

Thankful Friday
I had my Dad dream again last night – the one where I see him and talk to him and hug him but know he can’t stay because he’s actually dead. As usual, I woke up crying.

When I got back to sleep, I had another vivid dream, this one about Mom:

I'm watching a black and white movie, a sort of artfully produced news clip about Mom scoring the winning run in a big softball game. She's young and athletic, wearing a ponytail and a short skirt like in A League of Their Own, and the climactic scene is a lovely, low-angle shot from the first base line: Ginger leaping through the air in slow motion – high, high, like a hurdle jumper – and landing on the center of home plate with her leading foot.

Cut away. The next scene is filmed from behind, over the shoulder of her mother. (“There’s Mummu!” I exclaim, delighted to see my grandmother in the movie.) My mom, still young and ponytailed but in a longer, 1950s style skirt, is walking down a wooden boardwalk next to an interviewer, and she’s crying.

“Oh,” says the interviewer, thinking Mom’s crying about the game, “That must have been a very intense moment.”

“It’s not that,” my mother sobs, “it’s that I don’t know if I’ll ever do anything again.”

And that’s when I woke up.

-----------------------------

When Dad was dying, I worried that my mom would never “do anything” when he was gone. It was easy to imagine her permanently paralyzed by grief. So maybe I had that dream because just yesterday she said to me, “I can’t go out at night without Dad.” She wasn't talking about being afraid or unable (tired, maybe, but not unable). She was saying that his absence would weigh too heavily, it would hurt too much.

I think I’d started to take for granted the fact that Mom said YES to our trip to Italy. And now it’s just 10 days away, and it’s hitting me all over again just what a big deal this is.

So today I’m grateful for (and nervous and excited about) our upcoming trip to Italy! Thank you to any and all gods that had a hand in it. Thank you, Cyril, for plotting and planning with me, and for believing in Mom through all my wavering. Thank you, Hugh, for understanding why I'm going to Italy while you stay home with the kids and all the, um... challenges that go along with that.

And thank you, Dad. Mom wouldn’t have said yes without your blessing. You'll be there with her, of course, as you always are, and with me, too.

And most of all, thank you, Mom! In my dreams and in my waking life, you are a STAR.

Ed ora… andiamo!

A "writer's" lament

Mistake of the Week
I actually made this mistake months ago, but was reminded of it yesterday when I found four pages of “my book” tucked into a spiral bound notebook. The mistake? Letting “my book” sink way, way down on my list of priorities even though I was this close to dropping the quotation marks when I spoke of it.

I was more than 100 pages into the first draft. I knew what was going to happen in the middle, and I knew how it was going to end. I had the fever. I was writing late at night and skipping my lunch hour runs to write some more. I was thinking about the story all the time and regaling (torturing?) a chosen few with characters’ back-stories and plot ideas and writing epiphanies. I’d talk a mile a minute about it, hopping up and down like a kid on Christmas morning.

I had this wonderful feeling – for the first and only time in my life – of knowing I was going to finish an entire, novel-length first draft. It was all in me and all I had to do was spit it out. I wasn’t even worried about the editing it would clearly need, and I recognized but didn’t care that it would probably never get published. I was just psyched about the prospect of a complete first draft.

Now I don’t know if I can ever get that back.

But when I read those four pages last night I felt so sad (and guilty, too, for leaving my characters hanging; I was quite fond of them...), and it occurred to me that I should at least try. So I posted the first hundred words here as a sort of stake in the ground.

The next step will be much more difficult: read the whole, dusty manuscript and see whether or not it sucks.

Now that, my friends, is awfully scary...

Chapter one (first hundred words)

Word Count Wednesday

I was working in the dark.

Dark except for the computer screen, and the string of multi-colored miniature Christmas lights that outlined Janelle’s cubicle just beyond my office door.

The kids would be arriving by now, even Michael, and Lucy would be serving cider and wine and hot chocolate. Little Henry would be doing handstands in the living room, and Aidan would be knocking him over, close enough to the tree that Kate would banish them to the playroom, “until Grandpa gets home!”

It was 7:00 on Christmas Eve, and I should have been home an hour ago.

~ 98 words ~

Let’s associate

Top Ten Tuesday
Okay, I’m trying something a little different here. I thought it would be fun to play a free association game, where each commenter responds to the most recent comment. But instead of just a one-word free association, each comment should tell the rest of us something true about you.

For example, if I said, “I had chicken for dinner,” you might say, “I once had a pet chicken,” and the next person might say, “I once had a pet rat,” etc., etc.

Click comments below to play, and respond to the comment at the bottom. No comments yet? Here’s the starting true thing:

On Saturday night, we went to a bar (to celebrate Hugh's birthday, which is TODAY, by the way -- happy birthday, Hugh!) where a 10-foot tall polar bear in a glass case presides over the main room.

My fantastic four

Thankful Friday
It can't be true that my kids are better than yours, right?

I mean, they're definitely not the best behaved kids in town. They're loud and unruly and really hard to keep clean, they fuss about homework and vegetables and sibling v. sibling inequities, and they like to say "fart" and "ass" and "hell." They often tease, push, punch, kick, trip and slap each other. And if you put something on a high, high shelf so they can't get it, they will build a tower of chairs and cereal boxes and they will climb up and get it.

And yet, despite all the evidence to the contrary, I feel in my heart that they are.

This belief seems to reside in me on a molecular level, way down there with my concept of Self, of Right and Wrong, of Existential Yearning. Mixed in there with all my deepest stuff, there's this little nugget of satisfaction, this perfect little gem of knowing: I have the Four Best Kids in the Entire Universe.

Perhaps this is programmed into me -- into all parents? -- the same way we're programmed to respond to the shrieking of a baby. (If you've ever lactated, you know what I mean.) Maybe believing our own kids are best is part of the evolutionary construct, inspiring us to care for them well enough that they blossom and thrive (and procreate).

Maybe that explains why my gut tells me that my kids' imperfections are things that don't matter in any deep or significant way. That their strong points, whatever they may be, are What Really Matters. And what's unique in them not only matters but makes them THE BEST.

Take Caiman, for example: BEST KID EVER!
Caiman goes to great lengths to avoid homework, and his grades show it. But we'd take his character over a 4.0 GPA anyday.

We think the way his brain works is somehow superior, more interesting. We value his sense of humor, the sarcasm he’s been honing since he was two, the way he tears through books – staying up half the night to read, finishing the last Harry Potter in a day, remembering for years the kind of plot details I forget in a month, re-reading books when he doesn’t have a new one handy, treating them like old friends.

Caiman does many things to get into trouble. Playing with matches, playing sick to miss school (see yesterday's post), trying to drive away in the family car on our recent camping trip to Lassen, throwing Chinese food at the classroom window of his Worst Teacher Ever, exploding an ink cartridge by throwing it against a wall because he “wanted to see what was inside,” flooding the boys' locker room at the YMCA by instigating a soapy-water balloon fight, the balloons being plastic bags intended for people’s wet bathing suits. (The ensuing mess was nearly impossible to clean up; when the janitors tried to hose it down the showers filled up with foamy soap bubbles.)

We're anywhere from irked to furious when these incidents occur. But after some time passes and gives us a little perspective, we tend to see his antics as evidence of a unique intelligence. And humor. Zest for life. Moxie!

We believe Caiman is brilliant and destined for some kind of greatness (or possibly jail, but we don't think so). He is THE BEST KID EVER.

And then there's Eli. Guess what? BEST KID EVER!
He has his sulky moments, and he's started resisting homework even when it's simple and should only take him 10 minutes. For some reason, he abhors bathing and must be threatened or whipped before he'll take a bath or shower. He likes to drive Hugh crazy by ignoring him the first five times he's asked to put his dirty socks in the laundry and then, when Hugh yells about it, by moaning like a sick cow, flopping to the floor and wailing. But these things, surely, are not What Really Matters.

Eli amazes, on the other hand, in ways of Great Significance. He is the most compassionate child I know, the one who weeps about sad news stories and sad books and sad movies; the one whose heart broke so visibly when my dad died; the one who stood by me at Dad's funeral, weeping silently the whole way through, all the while the picture of physical beauty in his tiny black suit.

He's the one who comes to my soccer games -- has he any idea what that means to me? -- and to our softball games, too.

Eli is my perfect little baseball player, and you know how I feel about baseball. He's not the star of the team, but he plays with joy and heart, and there's something about the way he runs... People usually think he's faster than he is, but I think it's just that he looks spectacular in motion. I thought he might lose that when he cut his long hair, but guess what? Now you can see his baby blues better, plus these high cheekbones I didn't even know he had. He's charming and impish and instantly loveable. He is THE BEST KID EVER!

Kai? Slam dunk BEST KID EVER!
Let me get this out there: sometimes I think Kai may has a touch of k-k-k-krazy in her. She periodically has these indescribable tantrums that involve high-pitched shrieking, wrenching away from anyone who tries to touch her, blood boiling until her face turns purple-ish red, head spinning and crying almost to the point of puking. These tantrums are set off by things like: telling her she can't have a bag of chips before dinner, removing the knife she was playing with from her possession, or asking her to apologize for ramming Taavi with her scooter even though she did it because he wouldn't stop following her around.

Do we interpret this as demonic possession? Of course not! It's a sign of her creative nature, her passion, her strenth of will. Anyway, we know she's not possessed by a demon because when she's not having a tantrum she is 35 pounds of pure charisma. I've never seen so much personality packed into such a tiny bundle. She's a lap-climber and a smoocher, bursting with love and good cheer, tender and nurturing when you need it most. She brushes her teeth the first time we ask her to (the boys don't do this), or sometimes just because she senses it's time. She coos at Boo and babies, she shows her little brother the ropes.

She's quiet around new people (she was diagnosed with selective mutism when she was four), but once she's even slightly beyond the anxiety you can see the gears turning behind her bright and eager eyes as she figures out ways to delight you.

She flies through the air with the greatest of ease, the monkey bar hero of my world. And if at first she does not succeed, she tries, tries again. She is a determined thing -- another one with moxie!

She will sit and draw for hours, and sometimes she carries her journal around so she can write in it when the mood strikes. This rocks my world -- the girl isn't even SIX yet. There are layers and layers to her, and I can't wait to see how she grows and changes and makes the world a better place. She is THE BEST KID EVER!

Oh, man! Have you met my baby? Taavi is THE BEST KID EVER!
Go ahead, knock him down. He will bound up and kick your ass! This is the baby brother of the three kids I just described: he is the epitome of resilience. It's impossible to say what he was born with and what he's soaked up from Kai and his brothers, but he is defiant and needy and out of control -- and funny and charming and sweet as spun sugar.

He will kiss your lips and you will beg for more, even if he is kind of grubby around the mouth. He gets in trouble at daycare for play-fighting too roughly with his friend Dayton, but you'd never believe it if you were wrapped in one of his super-snuggly love hugs.

"Mummy?" he says, and I say, "What..." and he says, "You're adorable." He is three.

"Taavi?" I say, and he says, "What..." and then he has second thoughts and cries out: "I'm not Taavi! I'm Muscleman!" and he wrestles his head out of the neck hole of his shirt, leaving his arms in so that his chest is bare and his round, Pooh Bear tummy takes center stage.

He plays house with Kai for hours, they are brother and sister or mom and dad or parent and child. He pleads for "one more book," and utters spontaneous phrases that I find so poetic, like “a shiny apple from a shiny tree!” He begs to sleep with us and we can hardly ever resist. He is warm and perfect sleeping between us, and I can't help feeling sad that he's going to outgrow this before we know it. I love this last ever baby of mine. He is THE BEST KID EVER!

So my question to all you parents out there is this: Do all parents have the best kids in the world? Or just the lucky ones, like me?

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice...

Mistake of the Week
There was a staff meeting at Caiman’s high school Wednesday morning, so he didn’t have to be there until 10 a.m. Because we are kind and well-intentioned parents, we decided to let him sleep until nine.

We had places to be by then, though, so Hugh tiptoed into the sleeping boy's room and placed his cell phone strategically close to his pillow. That way, we could leave the house and just call when it was time for him to get up.

When I called him at 9:05, he answered groggily and I launched into my favorite wake-the-kids song. "Was that a good wake up call?" I asked, annoyingly cheerful no doubt.

"It was alright," he said. I told him he had to get up and get himself to school, and he grumbled that he would.

But 10 minutes later he called back. "I don't feel good," he moaned. "I feel like I'm going to throw up."

This scenario was a familiar one, as was the ensuing debate:

Caiman swears he feels like crap.

I doubt him.

He is offended that I don't believe him.

I explain that he's cried wolf to miss school before.

He reiterates that he feels like puking.

I tell him to go to school.

He wheedles.

I waffle.

"I really feel bad," he says.

And I say something like, "Okay, fine, but if you don't throw up I'm going to be SOOOO mad at you!"

In my mind, there was a 95% chance that Caiman was fine and should have been on his way to school. But I buckled because of the 5% chance that he really didn't feel well...

...and the .05% chance that he felt really naseous and would be truly miserable at school.

...and the .005% chance that he was going to throw up in class and be truly miserable and humilated.

I got home early in the afternoon, and went downstairs to check on him. He was in bed. I brushed the hair out of his eyes and asked how he felt. "I'm okay," he mumbled lethargically.

Had I made the right decision after all? I kissed his forehead, gave him a five second back rub and left the room wondering.

Twenty minutes later I got my answer. He came upstairs and began assembling a plate of food that only a teenage boy with a healthy appetite could eat. "You know what?" he said cheerfully, "I think maybe I was just tired."

Shame on me.

You may not understand this, but...

Word Count Wednesday
I’ve been trying to block out the newspaper stories and talk radio banter about football – but it’s September 12 and time to face reality. The Giants season is almost over.

This is not a lament about finishing last in the NL West. It’s about having no baseball in my life for six long months.

So if you catch me sighing now and then, you’ll know why. I’ll be thinking wistfully of Jon Miller on the radio, Matt Cain striking out the side or, most likely of all, a magical Omar Vizquel play* and his ensuing ear-to-ear grin.

~ 98 words ~

* Check out the Omar play that ended last night’s kick-ass win against the D-Backs (even more satisfying than a walk-off, in my book): ‘Vizquel stop starts DP’ in the Giants great plays archive under Sept. 11, Ari @ SF

9/11

Top Ten Tuesday
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Hugh's co-worker called as we were beginning our morning rush and told Hugh to turn on the television.

When we did, what we saw was nearly impossible to believe. I sat, head in my hands, barely daring to look and yet unable to tear my eyes from the screen. It was real.

I was frozen, could hardly breath. I felt a weak-kneed horror and a sort of gut-wrenching sadness, but even more than that I felt lost. Like I didn't know what I was supposed to do next. Like the motions I had to go through to go about my day were foreign and perplexing. Should we all stay home? Not out of fear, but out of respect? It felt wrong to go about our routines.

My biggest dilemma was Caiman, who was seven. On the way to school we had the radio on, and he asked what was happening. I explained it to him, pretty sure I was telling him what I ought to and not scaring him or giving him too much information. I assured him that he'd be fine at school, because New York and Washington and Pennsylvania were all far, far away, way on the other side of our big, huge country, and in any case the people doing this wanted to be noticed; if they were going to attack anywhere it would be very big buildings.

I dropped him off in the usual place and started to drive away. And then I panicked -- I didn't really think terrorists were going to bomb his elementary school, but I was trembling and felt so sad and alone. The thought that he might feel sad and alone -- and abandoned -- made me feel sick. Something inside me sounded an alarm: Wait, wait, wait, don't leave him! Maybe they're going to call off school for the day.

I parked the car and jogged back onto campus. School had started; it was quiet and everything seemed so normal. I rushed into the office and asked the secretary to confirm that classes were being held as usual. They were. I lingered for a few minutes before stumbling out of the office. I called Hugh from a payphone, crying, needing to hear him say that leaving Caiman at school was the right thing to do. Eventually I got back into the car and drove to my job at the Downtown Berkeley YMCA.

The air was buzzing and heavy: "Did you hear --?", "Did you see --?" Everyone had. It took hours to acheive the slightest bit of focus, and then people seemed, for the most part, to fall into their normal routines, but I couldn't shake my unease. So odd, I kept thinking, so odd and wrong. How could we possibly be going about our typical duties while New York fell apart?

When I picked Caiman up that afternoon, he continued our earlier discussion by saying, "You know how you said those guys would only attack big buildings? Well, I was thinking... our school is pretty big."

Oh geez, my poor baby boy, all day long thinking about planes crashing into big buildings and assuming that I'd left him there in a "pretty big building," a possible next target. I'd really messed up. I hugged him for a long, long time.

I didn't know any victims or victims' families, and I've never lived or worked in New York, so 9/11 wasn't as personal for me as it was for so many people. But still, whenever September 11 rolls around, it feels eerie, and sad, and I pause to reflect.

Where were you that day?

The best cat in the whole wide world

Boo wakes me up around 6 a.m., either by rustling paper bedside (annoying) or by batting me on the shoulder with her pretty little paw (charming). Either way, I roll out of bed, descend the stairs like an 80-year-old (my knees and hip are slow to wake up), and pop open a can of wet food. Boo thanks me (“meow”) and begins nibbling delicately at her breakfast.

Upstairs, I close our bedroom door so she can’t return to her paper rustling, and I climb back under the covers for an extra 30, 40, 60 minutes of sleep. When I drag myself back out of bed, I find her curled up outside our door. She wakes from her morning catnap and follows me into the bathroom.

“Meow,” she says.

“Good morning to you,” I answer.

... I am talking to my cat.

My family finds this highly amusing. Growing up I was inattentive at best when it came to family pets (I was kind of scared of cats and dogs, actually), and Hugh and I have always been staunchly anti-pet. Not animal-haters or anything (Hugh speaks disdainfully of dogs but it’s mostly a fun way to raise the hackles of my dog-loving siblings), but truly uninterested in acquiring a four-legged family member.

And then… Boo walked into our lives. Literally. She just started hanging out on our front stoop and waltzing into the house whenever we opened the door.

She belonged to the sister of our across-the-street neighbors. The sister lived with them for a while, and left Boo there when she moved out. Our neighbors already had a couple of cats, and then they got a Great Dane puppy. Boo started spending more time at our house, and one day at Costco I loaded a 25-lb bag of cat food into my cart.

Our neighbors loved Boo, but thought we could give her more attention than they could. They made it official by handing over her belongings: half a dozen cans of cat food, a few cat toys that Taavi promptly co-opted, and a litter box.

Suddenly, we had a cat. An old-lady cat. Boo is like, I don’t know, a thousand cat years old.

She likes peace and quiet, but puts up with our chaos.

She likes sitting on laps; loves being stroked from head to tail and having her chin rubbed. She nuzzles and purrs, and if she’s feeling really mushy she’ll lick you with her sweet little sandpaper tongue.

But enough is enough. She also likes her alone time, and she wanders the neighborhood daily, dropping in on her old housemates (who still feed her if she asks them to) and other neighbors. She saunters down the middle of our street, and when a car comes she gives the driver a long, knowing look before moseying over to the sidewalk.

She enjoys, like all cats, lazing in the sun, so she stretches out and naps on sunny patches of sidewalk or the neighbor’s front porch. Back inside, she sits on the windowsill or curls up on the futon in the room just off the kitchen. She also holes up in the cabinet of the computer desk, content to sleep for hours at a time on the warm, whirring CPU.

She’s not playful like a kitten, or sleek like a Siamese. She’s not a calendar cat and she often pees on the carpet. (She’s old, I tell you. Old and leaky!) But she is so unconditionally sweet, so cool and nonchalant, so perfectly soft and warm.

Boo is the best cat in the world.

This Boo ramble was going to be my intro into a post about how my kids are the best kids in the entire world – no matter how much smarter or cuter or more talented or better mannered anybody else’s kids are. But the Word Count tells me I’d better stop here and save it for next Friday.

The Word Count also tells me I love Boo more than 3,000 words’ worth – more than I even knew!

Because children are starving in Africa?

Mistake of the Week
Why'd I eat that whole sandwich? It was on a roll the size of my head, and there was cheese, and avocado. One bite into the second half I was stuffed completely full. And what about those five, 10, 15 pounds I was hoping to lose so I could play better soccer this season and/or eat a shameful amount of pasta and gelato in Italy?

Welcome to a new weekly feature - Mistake of the Week. Swing by on Thursdays for a dose of that "so I'm not the only idiot on the planet" feeling and, if it'll make you feel any better, chime in with your own latest oops moment.

Soccer practice #1

Word Count Wednesday
Kai’s easy to pick out of a crowd: her blonde hair shines, and she has a charismatic energy you can feel from 50 yards away. But it takes me a minute to realize the tiny blonde girl with two low ponytails is my Kai. The soccer shorts, the long socks and the cleats have changed her somehow. She looks older and more capable, a compact bundle of power and grace.

I’m tempted to draw conclusions: Kai will love soccer, and excel, and love excelling. But instead I detach myself just enough, sit down in the grass and watch.

~ 100 words ~

When I grow up, I wanna be...

Top Ten Tuesday
In honor of Labor Day, today’s Top Ten Tuesday is all about work. I interview myself on the subject below. To play along, leave a comment with your answers to these (or your own) job-related questions.

When you were eight, what did you want to be when you grew up?
A brilliant scientist or a brilliant writer or the first woman to play major league baseball (I didn’t know, then, about the All American Girls Professional Baseball League).

When you were 17, what did you want to be when you grew up?
An engineer of some sort or an astronomer or a brilliant movie director or a brilliant writer.

What are you doing for work, now that you're grown up?
Shoot! Am I grown up already? Because I never got around to getting much of a job. My official title is "senior writer," which is -- sadly -- very, very, very different from brilliant writer.

First job?
Working at my dad’s office for IBM as a Kelly Girl over the summer. The Kelly temp agency referred to their employees as Kelly Girls back then. (Nice, huh?) Other stuff about that job that dates me:

1. The secretaries still used typewriters for almost everything.


2. We had interoffice email but no internet.


3. I had to use DOS on my PC. Remember DOS?

Best thing that's ever happened to you at work?
No doubt you've all heard the story of how I fell for my dispatcher when I was a bike messenger in San Francisco, right? How we fell in love, got married, had a kid, moved to Portland, moved back, had three more kids, etc., etc.? Well, he's still the best thing that's ever happened to me at work.

Worst workday ever?
I did a lot of temping when we lived in Portland, which was kind of nice. I got to know the city by biking to different job locations and had some semi-interesting assignments. One day, though, I ended up in an office where the entire assignment was stuffing envelopes.

For eight hours a day.

All by myself.

(If you’ve done this sort of menial labor, you understand the vast difference between doing it with other humans and doing it in isolation.)

I suppose I’d been temping too long, and during the long, silent hours of folding - stuffing - sealing... folding - stuffing - sealing, I started thinking about how I’d lost all direction, was adrift in the world, and would never be a brilliant anything after all.

By 5 p.m., I felt like I was ready to explode out of that office and run for the hills.

When the supervisor came to check on the status of the mailing, I told her I didn’t think I could come back the next day. She was perplexed and perturbed. Was I ill? Underqualified? Had something happened? What was wrong?

I don’t like to admit it, but there were tears in my eyes and I could barely talk. I stammered something like, "I just can't do another day of this."

“Why? What's the matter?” she demanded, “I don’t understand.” She was offended.

And these were the exact words that came out of my mouth:

“I went to college!”

The woman sneered and shook her head, still not understanding, and that really made me want to cry. How could she not understand?

“Fine,” she said, and I bolted.

The happy ending? That very weekend, my friend and former co-worker Hope (really, that's her name!) called to say she was leaving her job at Blue Shield in San Francisco and asked if I might consider coming back to take her place. And this began a chain of events that led to our return to the Bay Area.

Office with the best view?
Okay, all I had was a cubicle, but it was right next to the window that overlooked the Ferry Building and San Francisco Bay from the 23rd floor at 50 Beale Street. Big windows made for a sweeping view of bay, bridge, waterfront and a whole lot of sky. It never failed to make me happy, even after the arrival of a new, Evil Boss. (I'm not naming names, but her first name rhymed with Smelly and her last name was the name of a certain gay neighborhood we all know and love...)

Best lame job ever?
Like so many 20 and 30-somethings in SF, I worked at a doomed start-up for a year and a half in the late 90s. I was hired as a content writer for a website that never required much content. I was pretty diligent about asking for something to do, but try as I might I had a lot of time on my hands. So...

~ I got the hang of googling long-lost friends, and I joyfully reconnected with my friend Gary (a pessimist, on most days, but funny as hell, one of the smartest people I know and a guy who wrote sentences that kinda made me swoon, not in a romantic way but in a writerly way), my favorite teacher ever (Mr. Slarskey, 5th grade -- it made my year that he remembered me) and… Jen!

~ I made work a family affair by getting my 20-something-year-old VP boss to hire my graphic designer sister (name withheld to protect her privacy, not that she’s famous or anything but she believes my blog, like all the internet, is a stalker magnet) and my little brother Cyril. (Sister was busier than me and my bro -- he was an under-worked content writer like I was.) We sat in adjacent cubicles and didn't mind how dorky we looked when we marched out, three abreast and obviously siblings, for our frequent coffee breaks.

~ Long lunch “hours” running along the Embarc from Howard Street to Crissy Field and back, or swimming at the Embarcadero YMCA - and then spending 10 minutes in the sauna

~ Because the company was trying to be a hip, perk-loaded start-up, and because the co-founders were lifelong soccer players, I was able to convince one of them that we should rent out the gym at the Y every Friday for a friendly game of indoor soccer. You know, for team building. One of the brothers, Ali, was there every Friday, and playing with him was downright intoxicating. He played gorgeous soccer. (Yes, he was also quite foxy, but really, it was his give & go that got me…)

~ I convinced my friend Laura (whom I’d worked with at Blue Shield) to come on board -- not predicting that we'd both be laid off a year later. I hope she never regretted it.

I still hear her laughter when I picture that office.

I still feel the sun when I recall our lunch breaks on the patio at Jimmy Bean’s.

My heart still aches when I remember the brisk walks we took, talking about the really scary stuff after her health took a bad turn.

I'm still & forever grateful for the time we spent together there.

Another thing about Laura: more than anyone she's the person who influenced my philosophy on work. It's because of her that I'm okay with having a job instead of a Big Important Career. A career can surely be one way to do great things, but there are countless other paths to fulfillment. When I think of Laura and how she prioritized family, friends and simple good times, I realize you can be BRILLIANT even if you never make it to the big leagues.

Shine on, baby!