Sunday, July 05, 2009
Why Not The Fourth of July: Everybody Celebrate My Great Weekend!
Commemorations are meant to be memorable - that’s the whole entomology, isn’t it? Co-memorate - to remember together. It’s been a long time, though, since a day as profoundly historical as the Fourth of July has had its ass so totally KICKED by the things I did this past weekend to remember it. I think that the founding fathers should probably come forward in time, see how awesome my weekend was, and then re-establish the basis of the holiday in honor of me and my parties. Oh yeah, Al Hamilton, I’m looking at you. You Jamaican dudes know how to party, eh wot?
We’ll start by recognizing that it was a four-plus day weekend for Daniel that started by leaving work a little early on Weds to see my MD for my annual physical. Other than shrinking a quarter of an inch (and it was my favorite quarter-inch!) in the past year, I’m really doing well. Steady weight, steady cholesterol, and the alien implants are no longer resisting the radiation probe. I’ll have to post a photo of that eventually. More to the point, after my physical Dr Andy and I headed out to Shattuck Ave in Berkeley to enjoy some ‘za and suds at Jupiter, which was appropriately gas-based and super-dense. I’m sorry, I misread my notes, it was - let me see here - delightful and delicious, hanging out on their brick patio with the east bay hipsters, chugging down a quart of beer with my b-q chicken pizza. Thanks, Andy - it’s always a pleasure.
Thursday I got to stay home with Jesse, whose day-care provider was on vacation for the week. We frolicked and traipsed around, visiting playgrounds and coffeeshops for our respective entertainment. Once Kel got home I loaded J into the jogstroller and hauled him out for a really good run in the park, taking the big carriage along my “back route” for the first time. That route has lots of hills and single-track, so it was a bit more challenging to maneuver him through it - and that much more satisfying to have done so. He seemed to have had a good time, and I still can feel the work-out it gave me.
Friday was a day of rest. We started with some time at the Discovery Museum, where we immersed ourselves in Chinese culture in their excellent new exhibit before retiring outdoors to several of their various themed fields, habitats, and play structures. Later that day we hit Target for a whole mess of supplies of the least sexy but most necessary sort. We went in with a very large shopping list and had acquired everything within about an hour, even though they’d re-organized the whole damn place in some misbegotten fit of retail enthusiasm. (Note to Target: If I have to search the whole store to find something, it’s not going to put me in the mood to pick up off-list items as random impulse purchases. More likely, I’ll chuck the whole enterprise and shop elsewhere.) (Except we were already there and had a cart full of toilet cleaners and kiddy toothpaste and coenzyme Q-10 and all that other crap we only buy at Target. So, note to Dan, from Target: Yeah right, see ya next time. And good luck finding the hand sanitizer then.)
Friday night I popped over to a grocery store and got ingredients for lucky glucose squares, and then cranked out a basic double-batch of them with a little “oh you, thinking you can dance and everything” shoehorned in the middle. It’s an easy recipe and I’ve got it pretty well down, so I still got to bed before too late even with all the television. And let me just make a shameful admission. It’s not that I enjoy watching “So Who Says You Can Dance,” that’s already well-enough known. But I have come to have a soft spot in my heart for Cat Deeley, the eight-foot frenchwoman who hosts the show. She’s the sort of person of whom I thought, upon first viewing her, unflattering things. But as time has gone on, I’ve had to reconsider. She comes off very unpretentious and open, for a media creation who’s probably mostly built out of tuille and carbon fiber. Hell, she put Twitch’s grill in her own mouth last season. You can’t be standing on ceremony when another person’s faux choppers are glinting between your jaws.
Moving on, Saturday was the Fourth of July. We got up early enough to meet friends in Woodacre by 11:15. Woodacre is a tiny town in rural west Marin, a land of apple orchards, salmon runs, hidden lakes and friendly people. We met up with Kel’s work friends, stashed our stuff, and wandered down to the “town center” for an authentically small-scale parade. There were tractors, horses (not really in formation), kids on scooters, and a firetruck with santa on it. (He seemed warm.) Everybody sat around in lawn chairs drinking steadily and cheering everything, even the frightened deer that scampered through the middle of town just before the parade began. Z picked up a scadload of thrown candy (a “scadload” just barely fits inside a plastic fireman hat, such as those distributed free to children at rural firehouses on the Fourth of July) and Jesse giggled and chortled enormously, a huge hit in his luau shirt and plastered grin. The parade lasted only about 20 minutes and then we strolled back to the house along small lanes canopied by majestic oaks and sycamores.
Then the gorging began in earnest. Our hosts had set up their b-q grill in the backyard, surrounded by fruit trees and under the watchful eye of innumerable songbirds theretofore unknown to me. I saw a purple finch and got buzzed by hummingbirds and hung out with a chicken in its coop, for heaven’s sake. (Aside: this coop, like all others, had two doors. And why? because if it had four doors it would have been a chicken sedan. O how I amuse myself!) We ate and drank exceptionally well (microbrew in the full keg and fantastic mojitos by the pitcherful, freshly muddled with back-garden mint) but for me the highlight was the company, which was excellent. I was inexplicably a little anxious about meeting all these people again. We’d been there last year too and I have no idea why I repressed how cool everybody was. In particular, there was this one guy. John. Big John. All I remembered from the prior year was that he was like a wall with arms and legs, and those arms were the size of my legs, and were robustly tattooed and actually branded. He’s a bodybuilder and personal trainer, and just at the thought of spending time in his hulking shadow made me inappropriately nervous. He wound up being one of the first people I saw when we arrived there, though, cradling his 15-month-old daughter in his massive arms like I’d carry around a baby guinea pig. I was lugging Jesse and some bags of groceries, and had to switch my boy from one tired arm to the other arm that was ready to get tired again. John gave me a respectful glance and said in a voice that was soft and quiet, “he’s a big one. bet carrying him feels like you’re carrying a hundred pounds.” Hell yeah it does, John, and thanks for recognizing it. From there, things went great. John and I chatted a good bit about the baby-carrying burn and many other random conversational nonpareils, and I was glad for his company while I was out with Jesse amid the gardens and chickencoop while we both were on kid-corral duty. Parade, wildlife, great weather, great food and drink - but good honest human contact was the best part of all, I think. That, and the kids sawing logs in their seats on the ride back home. Gotta love them napping boys.
That night was the Explosion O’er the Ocean - our fireworks are set off above the bay at Pier 39 . In years past Zach has insisted, first, on leaving the display just as it began, because it was too noisy, and then the next year, he bravely sat through a display that was totally obscured by clouds. This time the family split up, with Kel keeping watch over Jesse asleep at home and Z and me going out for the Explodo-rama. He enthusiastically walked a nice long distance from our car to our preferred viewing station, picked a comfortable spot on the berm, and settled down to be a big boy who enjoyed watching things getting blown up.
He did get nervous about the loud noise once the show started and asked to leave a few times, but I held him on my lap and spoke quietly to him and kept him warm and safe. I couldn’t smell the black powder burning or the acrid pyrotechnic stink, but I could smell the fresh flowing tide at our feet and my boy’s hair, all old shampoo with a touch of sweat and enthusiasm. He was warm in my lap though the night was chilly, and we watched the air fill up with color from San Francisco’s two launch sites as well as from Sausalito and Berkeley, both of which were having displays simultaneously with ours. The moment the show ended I handed him a glo-stick he’d been hoarding for months and helped him bend it to initiate the chemical reaction; then I hoisted him to my shoulders for the long walk back to the car. He was heavy on my back and legs but I would not have traded out a single ounce of it. He pointed my way with the glowing stick; I told him stories from when I was a boy; we talked about night vision and night creatures.... the delight of his company far outweighed his paltry avoirdupois. We chatted a little more on the ride home till he mumbled, voice thick with sleep as we left the Presidio, that I should turn on Lake Street, because that was the fastest way home. He was right, but was snoring by the time we got home anyway. I gently extracted him from his car seat, carried his small self upstairs, and slipped him into his bed (we’d taken the precaution of putting him in pj’s to start with). He was asleep before I left the room. I’ve never felt more like a dad, and never been happier to be one.
Which brings us to July 5, or the last day of my four-plus day weekend. How to give it its due? Get up at a leisurely hour (7:20 am, and I’m grateful for every minute of it), play games with the boys for a few hours, and then load up the car for a trip down to Hillsborough. This is a town that is sort of the polar opposite of Woodacre - barely any commerce, but chock-a-block with huge lovely houses. It is tony, upscale, and pants (subgroup: fancy). It’s a bedroom community for both Silicon Valley and San Francisco, and the streets are all named after costly competitions like “Yachtsman Drive” and “Chukker Way” and “Yale-beats-Princeton Place.” Our dear friends MC&E have relocated from their mission farmhouse (that is, their old mission-style farmhouse in SF’s funky mission district) for about six months, during which the plan is that they will totally rehab the place to their own genius design specifications. Meantime, with a little kid and another on the way, they need a safe home for a while so they somehow rented out a five-bathroom mansion in the nicest part of the “nice” suburbs. There, they had us and about a dozen of our closest friends over today for a pool-n-food party. Every one of us felt like we were crashing someone else’s garden party, but like hell we were going to leave. We all hopped into the huge, warm pool (garnished with an enormous inflatable swan that seats two heavily-drinking adults) - even Jesse, who had only been in a pool once before. He began the process with deep and appropriate skepticism, but ended it screaming with glee and dipping his face under water just to feel it pour out his grinning mouth. The food was superb as well - a very well-rounded cheese and pate table; sandwiches made of hot sausage, french fries, grilled onions and harissa aioli (or grilled flank steak if that’s your poison); appropriate summer salads; a wide variety of delicious beverages; and plenty of deadly desserts including strawberry shortcake with handwhipped cream.
By the time we left at 5 pm, the kids were shivering with exhaustion and glee. They got to bed on time and are asleep as I type this. Actually that sounds like a pretty good idea. It’s been a great weekend but it’s clearly time to let it go. Tomorrow things begin anew and I had better be ready for them. At least I have some truly revivifying experiences to look back on when I need a little boost. Blowing up stuff, or even drafting a constitution, is all well and good - but good food, good friends, and good times with my good kids is worthy of a four-day weekend every week of the year in my book.