Searching for Paradise

Eliot's Summer Olympics

2008-08-28T10:19:00.000-07:00

Eliot hates to dive. The sensation of being upside down with his skull hitting the water first is more than the guy can take. But he loves to jump from the diving board. He drops his skinny arms to his sides and jumps straight as a pencil.

Eliot has a tendency to be drawn to the things he was once most afraid of. It’s human nature, and swimming is no exception. I have been teaching him to swim since he was three. I started teaching him to side-breathe early on, but there was a lot of coordination involved. To keep him from lifting his head, I taught him to roll over on his back to take a breath, but he panicked, folded his body, and sank.

The summer he was twelve it all came together. He kept his head down and the side-breathing arm lifted out of the water for the first time. When he held his hand in a fist as he has a tendency to do, I told him to “high-five” the water and he did. He started swimming back and forth across the pool and not listening to anything I had to say.

Then we went to Huntington Lake. In past summers when he was being a pain, we’d throw his bathing suit on and toss him in the lake. But the summer he was twelve he took matters into his own hands. Every morning he jumped in the water and swam back and forth from the dock to a boulder a few yards out, and every afternoon he swam across Line Creek Cove.

Although water skills were critical, the real reason I taught him to swim and ride a bike was to give him the same coping mechanisms I used; starting the day with a run or a swim numbed me to the stress. Being connected to the outdoors was important too, but so was the link of mind, body, and spirit. It was easy for a child with motor difficulties to slip into his own world and operate more from the brain than the body.

We still had to medicate him, though (or as Blue called it, zap him) much as we wished we didn’t. One night at Huntington we accidentally double dosed him; I zapped him after Blue already had. It was actually a blood pressure medication, and on a conscious level I worried I’d killed him. On a more subliminal level I knew I hadn’t, and rather than rousing him from our beds on the deck and driving hours to the nearest hospital, I sat in the car and tried to reach his pediatrician on the cell phone. But I didn't have the night number and kept getting voicemail. I cried when Blue climbed in the car.

“He’s going to be okay,” Blue said. “He’s strong.” I knew he was right, but I kept trying to reach someone. I couldn’t find a working number for the doctor in Big Creek, and called our hospital in Santa Cruz, only to be told they would not give medical advice over the phone. 911 said the same. I left a tearful message for my sister-in-law Connie who was a nurse. She told me later she was glad I left a second, more coherent message, as the first was unintelligible. Good thing my limit was two margaritas or it really would have been unintelligible.

She also told me to call Poison Control next time. We’d had that number taped to the wall when our children were small and eating “berries” they found in the backyard, but over the years we'd forgotten about it.

Blue and I left a voicemail for the pediatrician, turned off the phone, and went to bed, agreeing to check on Eliot each time we got up to use the bathroom. Every time I stood over him in the moonlight he was breathing. When he got up to use the bathroom with Blue, I was relieved and slept in earnest.

In the morning the pediatrician’s assistant relayed a message from Dr. Griger that Eliot would be "a little dizzy" and not to resume medicating him until the following morning. It was hard to wake him, and he stayed in bed longer than usual, but once he was up he was full of piss and vinegar.

He wound up that night. The only good thing about it was that he eventually calmed down without his meds. This helped quell my fears about drug dependency, not just Eliot’s but ours as the parents who medicated him in an effort to cope.

He ended up helping me do the dishes. He even gripped the dish brush, instead of holding it with two fingers to keep his hands from getting soapy.

“You don’t have to like him, only love him,” I told Carly, quoting my friend Elizabeth, when she expressed her frustration about her brother.

“I don’t love him either,” she said. I could see how she felt so I didn’t argue.

There was a brief revival when we climbed into bed that night and Eliot sang at the top of his lungs. But we ignored him, the best tactic whenever possible, and the singing died out after a while. What he sang, over and over, was

“We like our cheese,
we like our cheese,”

and
“We like our friends,
we like our friends…”

Then he brought in his bedtime companion Curious George. “Background singing, George,” he commanded, and the voice went falsetto,

“We like our cheese,
we like our cheese…”

Blue and I lay in our sleeping bags in the moonlight, agreeing it was pretty good bedtime music.

Superstar

2008-07-15T12:14:00.000-07:00

I'm not a very good liar. So when Carly asks me a question point blank, I find a way to answer honestly. This means many of our discussions take me by surprise. True, from the time she was little I've been informing and preparing her, and anything I've left out she learns about at the skate park. But being equipped with hormones is not the same as being equipped with brains, and Carly and I talk a lot about the difference.

Carly has broached topics with Eliot too. She has been fending off his light sabers, nerf guns, or simply his appendages which make good weapons, from the time he could walk. And in a fit of frustration one day she burst out with a new nickname: “Disability brother!”

I sucked in air and looked at Eliot. He had that glimmer in his eye, what Blue calls Dr. Evil.

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t contemplated it before. When he visited the Bay School for the first time, he studied the student self-portraits framed and hanging near the entryway. “Who’s that?” he said, pointing to one, and I read the student’s name. “Does he have a disability?” he asked, and I said yes. We went through this several times, and he never asked the next question, but I could see the wheels turning: Why am *I* here?

My gut tells me if we leave room for a bit of mystery our children will ask the hard questions when they are ready. And Carly has always been relieved to hear the answers. So it was that Eliot seemed to relish his latest nickname, Disability Brother. Probably he figured it would get him out of doing his homework or taking out the compost.

That would explain the lyrics I heard him add to an original song:

“I’m in the grocery store
I don’t know what I’m doing,
Where’s my wife.”

Of course Carly has called him worse, and I come down on her for that. The skate-park may have helped raise our daughter, but I don’t want our special needs child walking around using the F word. Still, even as a die-hard Obama fan, I know the African proverb Hillary Clinton brought to light is true, that it takes a village to raise a child. A lot of people in our community have had a direct hand in shaping Eliot, and what they do I first noticed with his teacher Robin: they love the kids, give them their dignity, and maintain a sense of humor. What these mostly young adults possess, though, that allows them to succeed in the face of behaviors like Eliot’s is much simpler; it is not their gift so much as a willingness.

Eliot has no idea how to relate to the peers he so desperately wants as friends, and adults, I have come to realize, are more easily able to relate to him and facilitate his interactions with other people. He feels safe with these adults, especially the heads of Kid Quest Colleen and Nichole, who provided stability and consistency when his school life was all over the map.

Another critical adult is James, who works with Balance4Kids and is Eliot’s guitar teacher. Seeing Eliot’s resistance to learning chords, James takes a back-door approach to lessons, jamming with Eliot to build calluses and finger strength. Occasionally he slips in a suggestion like, “Dude, I want to see you play one of your power chords during this song.” One afternoon after countless hour-long ear-splitting jam sessions, Eliot hit a power cord and held it through one whole song with James. At the end of the song his teacher erupted: “I have to give you a hug because I heard your power chord and it sounded really good.” James floated out of our house that day.

Eliot may be short on chords but he has all the moves of a rock star. Plus he can sing. He puts on Carly’s Crème, Hendrix, and Sublime cd’s and sings into the microphone for hours. Once in the waiting room of the dentist’s office, while other children listened quietly to their mothers reading tooth fairy books, Eliot sang at the top of his voice, “Those were the days, my friend, I thought they’d never end!”

And when he got tired of that, “NaNUH nanaNUHna NUHna, Tequila!”

But Blue’s and my favorite was Eliot’s refrain during the Bay School’s one week of summer vacation: “School’s OUT for Summer! School’s OUT for EVER!”

Poor kid, we thought, he’s going back next week, but by Sunday he was excited about returning to school.

A few weeks later we took Carly and Eliot to the musical Jesus Christ Superstar at Cabrillo College. There was nothing a museum or play could teach Carly, and she was feigning sleep, but each time she closed her eyes I slapped her leg with the program. Eliot, on the other hand, was riveted. When Jesus was dying he kept asking in a loud voice, ”Is he taking a long time to die?” and “Is he dead yet?” This made me think he might be ready for the opera.

"How did Superstar die?” he asked the next day. I posed the question back to him, and he said, “By drinking the Jesus drink.”

I was about to say no when I realized that in the profound sense it was true. “You’re right,” I said. Besides, in the musical version of the last supper the twelve disciples fell asleep drunk from wine and were lying all over the stage. So you could see how Eliot would come to the conclusion that Superstar died from the Jesus drink.

I decided to leave it at that. Sometimes preserving the mystery is the way to go.

Goodnight Moon

2008-06-24T12:24:00.000-07:00

As expectant parents we paint the nursery walls with stars and planets, hang visually stimulating mobiles above the crib, and plant copies of Goodnight Moon on the bookshelf. Meanwhile the baby grows inside the womb in a genetic stew over which we have little or no control. So it is that each of our children is born into the world with his own set of plans.

Carly was born a survivor. She survived the playgrounds of schools with the lowest test scores, and endured sword and dart gun attacks from her brother. At six she played soccer on the unpaved streets of Colima with kids whose language she recognized but could not speak. And at fifteen she endured the boys at the city skate-park, who dropped x-rated comments as often as they told her to drop in on the half pipe.

Eliot was a different animal; enrolling him in public middle school was like tossing him into the jungle without his trusty light sabers and swords. He couldn’t even enter the sanctuary of the Life Lab Garden, much less the severely handicapped classroom, without erupting. When he was in the sixth grade I pulled him out of public school for good. By the time he started his new school, he had been home with me for a year.

In Santa Cruz and Monterey counties there are a myriad of services for families of children with special needs, including Balance4Kids, San Andreas Regional Center, SPIN, and Easter Seals. There are special education teachers and occupational and speech therapists in all the public schools, many of whom have made a difference in Eliot’s life. But I only know of one school like the Bay School.

Even after the Bay School determined Eliot was a good fit for their behavioral and academic program, the process of enrolling him was not easy. But once he was enrolled staff and administrators told me repeatedly, "We'll work with Eliot," "We want him to be excited about coming to school," and "There is no behavior we haven't seen." They started by setting high but achievable goals for their students. And the sky was the limit in terms of the rewards the students could earn by meeting those goals: in Eliot’s case, a trip to the toy store, a hike, or an in-house concert. Environment and teacher-student relationships were paramount, and the students felt it. "I go to the Bay School," Eliot said with obvious pride after his first visit.

Throughout the day the Bay School used what was called Adaptive Behavior Analysis, documenting all of a student’s behaviors, antecedents to the behaviors, and consequences. Teachers met their students outside the building each morning, and escorted them out to their parents and buses in the afternoon, giving each parent a brief summary of her student’s day.

Blue and I called Eliot’s teacher Alona "unflappable," because her demeanor did not change even when the atmosphere around her became tense. She was exactly what an excitable student needed. Most of the time she came out and said, “Eliot had a great day.” On the days where he was aggressive she said, “He had a great morning,” and then filled us in on the difficult part. Instead of phoning us at home or work, staff members told us immediately after school what Eliot had done, the antecedents to the behavior if there were any, and how they had responded.

“It will get rougher,” Ethan, the director of the school, told me not long after Eliot started. “Most of the time our students meet their goals, which makes it challenging for them.” I appreciated the fact that Ethan was honest and proactive.

And it did get rougher. With Eliot there was no apparent antecedent to the first major incident, only hormones, the full moon, a pain his foot, who knows. I talked for a long time outside the building with his teacher and the psychologist. What they gave me were the specifics of the incident, but what I heard was that they considered it their job to decipher Eliot, and that they would do whatever it took to help him learn self-control. For the first time since Eliot’s third grade teacher Robin, Blue and I were able to let down our guards during school hours.

As Eliot and I walked to the car, I pointed out the hammerhead shark on his t-shirt. I told him this type of shark had an unusually shaped head that gave it acute vision and hearing so that it could more easily detect its prey. And it occurred to me that autistic kids carried their differences like hammerheads, sometimes odd, yet able with their unusual sensitivity to pick up electrical stimuli other beings couldn’t detect.

To me, the full moon was a beautiful orb that shone gold as it rose through the atmosphere, and the summer solstice brought fogless days and south swells. To Eliot, though, the gravitation of the sun and moon at that time of the year tugged at invisible forces within his body and sent it into its own mysterious orbit.

At that moment Carly was out surfing a south swell. Most of the time I had to beg her to hug me back, or let me feel the exquisitely soft skin on her cheek. But Eliot, a different soul altogether, doled out kisses like rain. That afternoon I was grateful he let me take his hand as we walked to the car.

Finding our Way in the Wilderness

2008-04-16T14:09:00.000-07:00

The mountains instill in those who love them an insatiable hunger. When we are not on backcountry treks, we are planning hikes, pouring over maps, ordering moisture-wicking socks, or entering chat rooms to discuss the virtues of peanut butter versus trail mix. Or doing online research and making trips to the bookstore in pursuit of that tome written by yet another lover of the mountains. Anything to feed the hunger.

One summer when Eliot was six, my compadre Kate and I traded in our annual Yosemite adventure for a backpacking trip out of Florence Lake in the Central Sierra. We did not have to hike a long way to be in a complete wonderland of meadows, riverside trails, and astounding vistas.

People who don’t like to backpack wonder why someone would choose to hike miles with a forty-pound pack strapped to her back, only to dine on freeze-dried food and sleep on a half-inch thermo rest pad. But we do it for the views. We do it for the feeling, which car camping with its luxuries cannot replicate, that we don't need all the junk we haul around most of the time. This is not to say we do not love our luxuries. In fact we appreciate them more after one of these trips --as well as during them, when a bite of chocolate or a sip of hot coffee tastes all the better.

One early afternoon in August, Kate and I took the ferry across Florence Lake and started the five-mile trek to our destination. But someone had taken the sign out at the connector to the Pacific Crest Trail. Without the sign we never saw the junction, and with my less than brilliant navigational skills, we headed back toward Florence Lake, crossing the San Joaquin River before I realized my mistake.

Backtracking, we found a junction and headed down what we hoped was the right trail. The map said we needed to head east, and the written description I carried said we followed a “road,” which in reality was a series of tire tracks between stretches of granite. Where there were no tire tracks, we relied on the sun at our backs, bootprints in the dirt, and the occasional concrete pourings over granite.

Most comforting were the trail markers, stacks of rocks other hikers leave on boulders to help people find their way, but even those can be misleading. I started to pray. Between trail markers I stopped and searched for the next stack of rocks. Our eyes swept over grey stretches spanning miles of wilderness. There was nobody around, but their boot tracks assured us they had been there, and as we picked our way across the granite, the stacks got closer and closer together and we walked with more confidence.

After a while the road dropped down into forest and skirted a meadow we identified on the map. As we walked, four-thirty turned to five, and five to five-thirty. We were rapidly losing energy and it would be dark by eight o’clock. We crossed creeks several times, becoming more uncertain the deeper we moved into pine forest. Then out of the trees appeared our trail angel.

She was the first person we had seen since we left the San Joaquin River some four miles back. She had long hair and milky blue eyes and was wearing jeans. She said she worked at the ranch nearby and had come up to the road to look for the supply truck.

Determining that we wouldn’t make it to our destination by dark, I asked how far it was to the first set of campgrounds. She said less than half a mile. Someone had been stealing signs, she said, and we had been following the road which was much longer than the trail.

We followed our trail angel’s directions and arrived in camp at 6:30. We hung the bear bag just before night fell, and set up our tent in the dark. Too tired to eat, we gulped down all the water in our Camelbacks and crawled into the tent.

As I wormed into my sleeping bag I missed Blue. With his navigational skills we would never had been lost. But quickly my thermo-rest pad and down sleeping bag absorbed my body heat, enveloping me in warmth and comfort. I sent up a grateful prayer and fell asleep.

The next morning we prepared to head out. Packed up and without camp chairs, we sat back to back against each other, eating a simple breakfast of apples and cheese.

It was an easy two miles to the next campground, where we had to cross the San Joaquin River to reach our destination. Kate was afraid she would lose her balance and fall, pack and all, into the river. We took our packs off and changed into our Tiva sandals.

Before Kate realized what I was doing, I strapped on her pack and started to cross. The river was thigh-deep in spots and running fast, and several times the frameless pack wobbled on my back, my walking stick slipped on the rocks, and I regained my balance only at the last minute as my stick hit solid ground. I was bent over the rapids, and the water rushing past my face had a dizzying effect. But I made it to the other side, deposited her pack, and returned for my own. Ten minutes later we were setting up camp in a miniature paradise.

Scrambling over the rocks the following afternoon, we found stunning views of the San Joaquin River. There were boulders perched where they had rolled and stopped after some great shift, and rocks wedged together in graduating sizes with moss, grasses, and flowers growing between them, a landscape any gardener would envy. Upriver there was a split where the water ran through rapids on one side of the boulders and flowed deep and crystaline on the other.

We had crossed over into paradise, but getting there had been treacherous. In life with our children, Blue and I were still backtracking from the San Juaquin River to the junction. We hadn’t even reached the camp where Kate and I spent our first night. But we would get there, dropping in exhaustion and waking early to sit with our backs against each other, fortifying for the next phase of our journey.

What Blue and I were hoping, as we moved uncertainly between trail markers spread too far apart, was that our son would make friends and learn to read as rapidly as the adult teeth popping through his gums. But we were on the road, not the trail, and had we known how much longer the road was we might have become discouraged. Thankfully, with the signs ripped out we didn’t know where we were; we only knew we were on the road, and a road is always encouraging.

Eventually we would rejoin the trail and cross the river, where either one of us could be bending under the weight of the other’s pack, dizzy at the sight of the river rushing beneath us. Then we would be safe on the other side, but only until we crossed the river again to make the journey home.

Excavating for a Mine

2008-01-30T11:39:00.000-08:00

“Be here now.” It was an expression I had heard a friend and teacher Ralph use with his students, and one I tried to live by. I used it often with Eliot. When he obsessed on something that had nothing to do with the task at hand I said, “Be here now, buddy." I didn’t explain what it meant, though.

Once when he said he was sorry for having hit someone, I said, “’Sorry’ doesn’t mean much. You are responsible for your behavior. Actions speak louder than words.” A few weeks later he targeted the object of his affection. Belle was an aide to his friend Aaron and worked at Kid Quest, the after-school program where Eliot spent a great deal of time, more so after I pulled him out of public school. I would say Belle was Eliot's first love. He’d had crushes and obsessions before, but this one hung on. He thought about her and wanted to ask her on a date, but when he actually saw her he put his head down and walked past her blushing.

“Can I give her a hug?” he asked when we were alone.

I said, “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you have special feelings for her. And she’s older, so you can only be friends.”

One day on a Kid Quest hike he hit her. We discussed it afterward, many times, and a week later when he brought it up he said, “Words speak louder than words,” (getting it half right). Then he looked at me and said, “Be here now.”

There were a number of people who had helped me and Blue with Eliot, but one of the most indispensable was his third grade teacher Robin. She had introduced Eliot to the visual reading program called Edmark. Through repetition and a series of visual exercises, it combined words into sentences with enough contrast to embed the words into the reader’s memory. For the first time Eliot had begun reading sentences. But Eliot’s fourth and fifth grade teachers tried to teach him phonics, which had never worked. I finally got hold of the Edmark software, and in the winter of his sixth grade year when he was home with me full time, I started him again on Edmark. Within days he was reading sentences, and within a week he was reading stories.

He rolled his eyes at the inane Edmark voice, but he hung in there. At the end of every lesson the voice said, "Great! You did it! You're ready to move on!” (i.e.to the next lesson.) When we were done with our work one day, Eliot burst out of his chair and told the Edmark voice, "I'm moving on!" As in, I'm outa here.

Whether Edmark was drawing out what had always been there, or whether some parts were finally coming together, a mysterious transformation was taking place in Eliot's brain. The Now in the "Be Here" was ever exciting, and Eliot was as enthusiastic about Christmas as he had been about Halloween.

He wanted to put up the Christmas lights the day after Thanksgiving. He was worse than Walgreen’s. In Bed, Bath, and Beyond, he asked if we could buy the gaudy reindeer chips-and-dip plate. He lugged a huge boom box (On Sale!) into the cart. I guess the boom box was part of the Beyond.

But when I sagged at the prospect of Eliot at home full time, I found myself in early December pulling out the Christmas lights to lift my spirits.

Carly was not immune to the celebration either, although at her age Christmas was less exciting and New Year’s Eve intriguing. It wasn't drunken parties she was after, though; she simply pledged to stay up until midnight. Blue and I went to bed as usual sometime after nine, and woke at midnight to the sounds of fireworks and the door to the backyard slamming. Carly had run into the yard with her bongo drums, which she beat on to accompany the pops and booms of another year gone.

Carly's drum teacher gave her Jimmy Hendrix and Cream cd’s, and every week she came home excited about a new beat he had taught her. But her obsession at fourteen was surfing. She wanted to go every day. Some days I had to beg off just to do laundry.

Her screen-saver, the door of her bedroom, the background on her MySpace were covered with pictures of Hawaii. She could tell you all about the salty white-blond boys her age who had joined the pro-circuit. She even took up the ukelele.

On a dark rainy night in January I drove Carly to her first ukelele lesson. Her classmates were all people my age dressed for winter. Not a Hawaiian shirt in sight, although the instructor, “the Uke Lady,” was Hawaiian. As Carly said later, “It’s not very Wahine, just a bunch of people in scarves.”

Carly brought her ukelele when we drove up to Tahoe to ski at the end of January, and we had a concert in the car. Eliot had the coconut banjo his grandmother Sushi had brought him from from Tahiti, which he called his ukelele. He mostly strummed that, but he took his harmonica out once in a while and puffed out a chord.

Carly played the songs she had learned in her class. Her voice, sweet and unpolished, squeaked a bit on the high notes:

“In a cavern, in a canyon,
excaVAting for a mine
dwelt a miner forty-niner
and his daughter Clementine.”

Hawaiian immigrants had worked and died in the mines of the Sierra foothills during the Gold Rush, and undoubtedly sang their stories and songs round many a campfire. Likewise, the song list for Carly's class was a mix of Hawaiian and Mainland.

In “The Saints Go Marching In” she paused on a note change:

“Oh Lord, I want
to be in that -- NUmber.”

Of course the squeaks and pauses made the concert all the sweeter.

It snowed four of the five days we were in the mountains. Two of the days the temperature was in the low twenties, and we floated over fresh powder. This did not bode well for Eliot, who skiied the one day the sun came out. He was genuinely scared, and the weather didn’t help. But there was no turning back. The road up I80 in winter was part of his life now. As his mom, I was more at peace in the mountains than anywhere. It was the one place I even came close to a glimpse of our place in the universe.

"Oh when the saints
Go marching in,
Oh when the saints go marching in,
Oh Lord I want to be in that -- Number,
Oh when the saints go marching in."

A Day in the Life of Mr. Bones

2007-11-19T07:30:00.000-08:00

If fluorescent lights and the pull of the moon affect an autistic child, imagine what puberty does. The confusion of being an in-betweener is magnified for a child with disabilities. In sixth grade when Eliot brought in his guitar for sharing time, he launched into a Jim Hendrix riff (without Jimi Hendrix's precision) then switched to The Wheels on the Bus, as if to say, "Where am I?"

Eliot had been anxious to start middle school, but when he got there he found it noisy, crowded, and overwhelming. His internal barmometer went whacko and so did he. He had learned the previous May that if he acted out he could go home, so he acted out and got sent home, over and over.

By the second month of school I had pulled him out again. We had an IEP meeting scheduled for the end of October, and it would take that long for the school system to offer Eliot the support he needed, support I had been asking for since May.

While he was home I didn't even try to do Edmark or Touch Math. It took all of my energy just to face the bigger picture of where Eliot's education was headed. But teaching opportunities presented themselves. We did the dishes and took the dog for walks. Eliot had gone from holding the dish brush with two fingers to gripping it and swishing it around the pan, and for more strengthening I made him hold the dog's leash. If he mutinied I offered to trade: I'd hold the leash and he could pick up the poop. Worked every time.

We took the dog on a walk through the woods, and Eliot was excited to stand inside a ring of redwood trees. I told him the stump on which he stood was the mama redwood, and after she died or was cut down, her babies grew in a ring from the stump. I pulled the leaf off a bay tree and held it to his nose.

One day we took an upper trail I had never walked. I knew where we would end up, but was unsure where the trail would lead us in the meantime, just as Blue and I didn’t know where we would end up with Eliot.

As we walked he asked dozens of questions.

“Where are we going?” Where indeed.

“Is this the kingdom?” he asked, referring to the forest in The Bridge to Terebithea.

“How do we get there?”

Of course I knew where Blue and I hoped we would end up, not how we would to get there. With Eliot we saw the sky as the limit, but in as many years as he had already lived, the sky would start pushing down on us. That was the reality. I did know one thing, though. My boy was becoming his own person and we needed to listen, to understand that he would arrive at some sort of independence in his early adulthood, but on his own terms as much as ours.

One Saturday Blue and I built Eliot a tree house in our backyard, his own Terebithea. We built a small platform, with steps and ropes for climbing up into the willow tree. After having asked for a tree fort for weeks, he ignored it when we finished it. Finally I took him out and helped him climb the tree. Halfway up, he stopped and asked to come down. He was afraid of heights and I had learned not to push too hard.

“Maybe in a year he’ll climb up,” I told Blue. Then I looked out the window and saw him standing halfway up to the tree fort. He went up and down several times, stopping at eye level with the platform.

A couple of hours later he was in the tree fort. Then he needed help getting down. A day or two later he went outside just before dark. When it got dark and I went to check on him, a small voice from the tree said, “I need help getting down.” The next day he was climbing in and out of the fort by himself, and I brought him and his cousin Neil a picnic lunch in the tree.

At any point in his growing life, Blue and I could build our child a fort in the tree and make sure the steps and platform were secure, but it was up to Eliot when he would climb up and take hold of the tree for himself. Every step a child like Eliot took toward the platform was a miracle.

The IEP was approaching at the end of October, and so was Halloween. Eliot decorated a bag for trick-or-treating. We took our annual trek to the pumpkin patch up the coast, and made soup from a white pumpkin, which Eliot called Halloween soup.

Although we were working with a nutritionist, Eliot was still skin and bones, and a skeleton costume seemed the perfect choice. He wore the costume through much of October. When we took Carly to surf practice, Eliot stood in the street at Pleasure Point in his mask. The steady stream of surfers driving by were duly frightened.

To walk the dog at night with his Dad, Eliot, already in his pajamas, put on a bathrobe and his skeleton mask. In the morning he wore his skeleton hands to eat breakfast. We called Halloween A Day in the Life of Mr. Bones, and took pictures of Eliot in costume walking the dog, riding his bike, playing the guitar. Although he had not heard the song that hit the pop charts when I was his age, he smiled when I sang,

"Me aaaaaaand Mr., Mr. Bones, Mr. Bones,
We got a thiiiiiiiing goin' on...."

"Dad and I are going trick-or-treating," he told me. "You stay home and hand out the candy." I did, gladly. Red wine goes perfectly with lesser-quality Halloween chocolate.

When they returned, I walked with Eliot to the haunted house up the block. Every year our neighbors, who live in a big, old restored Victorian, decorate the lawn elaborately with spider webs, skeletons, graves, lights, and scary music. Trick-or-treaters have to navigate the labyrinth to get to the rickety front porch where a cackling witch hands out candy. In its old-fashioned simplicity, it is the best Halloween display I've seen.

Eliot stood in the walkway of the haunted house for a long time, eyeing the witch, checking out the size of the spider, touching the hand of a skeleton. Then we walked home. After he handed out the last piece of candy, he put on his pajamas and brushed his teeth. As he climbed into bed he asked, “Can you take a picture of Mr. Bones going to bed?”

I did what I always did then, walked the neighborhood checking out people’s displays, moving from lit porch to lit porch like a ghost. A tulle fog hung over the coast that night; it could not have been more perfect.

Before I turned out the porch light, I emptied the pumpkins and moved them to the compost pile, marveling that there had been no tears, no hyperactivity, no meltdowns. The next morning when Eliot ran to the front porch and saw his pumpkins were gone, he cried. So I showed him the Day of the Dead decorations and took him out to the compost pile. I told him we were visiting the pumpkin cemetery for Day of the Dead. He had embraced Halloween from beginning to end, and even gave it a proper mourning.

The next week he returned to school with extensive support from a behavior specialist named Dawn. We agreed on a ten-thirty pick up for the first week or so, working our way to a lunch-time pickup and ultimately back to a full day. The two hours could not have come soon enough. It was not that Eliot’s company wore me down so much; I had enjoyed our time together in October. It was that I missed my time alone, to the point that when the week came for him to return to school I was noticeably depleted. A few days in a row of two solid hours' writing time would do me good. Then a swell came up and I found myself surfing Capitola alone. This never happens. Capitola Village is a swirl of tourists, surfers, and thriving restaurants year round. I guess the surfers were waiting for the tide to drop; it was high tide, but that was my window.

If you surf crowded breaks as I do, surfing alone can be eery. But I must have caught fifteen waves. I was there for forty-five minutes --an eternity-- before two other surfers paddled out, and the three of us took turns catching waves. Not a bad thing when the alternative is some surf-rat grabbing all the waves while routinely dropping the F-bomb. In that one-and-a-half-hour session, I felt my self return to some sense of normality. I did not know what Eliot’s future held, but whatever it was it would be okay.

Long May You Run

2007-09-24T13:13:00.000-07:00

Blue's not much for camping, but when I remind him he has agreed to accompany me around the United States in an Airstream once the kids are on their own, he says, "Yes, and if Eliot's still living with us at thirty he can come too."

Eliot will make a fine traveling companion, but it was Carly who, when she heard of our plan, asked why we were waiting until she left for college to get a camper. Why, indeed, I wondered. Not long after that I bought a 1987 Volkswagon Vanagon Westfalia.

I bought surf racks, and installed a stereo system with a cassette player so I could listen to the old tapes I never played anymore. I found some Hawaiian fabric decorated with classic woody automobiles, and asked my friend Jenifer to help me make curtains. I had the muffler repaired, which improved the noise factor and exhaust emission, without eliminating the good old sound of a Volkswagon engine.

Once when I was crossing the Golden Gate Bridge at night, the headlights stopped working and I had to drive to San Francisco holding one hand on the high beams. The next morning I called a Volkswagon mechanic in Santa Cruz and he said, "That's pretty necessary to fix." He must have been used to people with old hippy vans and no money.

Blue objected to my buying the van at first. He took every opportunity to point out beat-up old VW buses behind tow trucks or broken down on the side of the road. But on our first road trip to Oregon he became a convert.

Our friends Jeff and Elizabeth drove down from Washington, we drove up from California, and we met halfway at a campground on the Rogue River. Like most parents we often had to separate our children in the car, so on the way to Oregon I sat in back with Eliot. I loved sitting in back of the Vanagon on road trips. The view from the fishbowl windows was spectacular.

The vanagon went fifty miles an hour, pedal to the medal and downshifting, on upgrades, but it rode comfortably on the downhill and the flats. If you drove over 75 or hit some wind it shimmied like a sailboat, so I took to driving in the slow lane and letting impatient drivers pass. Blue joked that it would take us twelve hours to get to Grants Pass, Oregon, but it didn’t. We got there in eight and a half. That was when he suggested we take the van to the Surf and Turf.

In September we drove to San Luis Obispo for the Surf and Turf with our friends Tom and Nancy. The event included a surf contest, golf tournament, and a barbecue for a small group of friends. It was the kind of party where there were as many dogs as people. The year before (our first) an old Golden Retriever had laid on his back under the barbecue as the drippings streamed into his wide-open jowls.

The hosts of the party parked their restored woodie in front of the house, longboards sticking out the back. The Vanagon with its woodie curtains fit right in. I swiveled the passenger seat around to face the back seat, pulled out the table, and served margaritas.

The van may have been another romantic idea of mine, but it couldn’t have been more utilitarian. When the kids were little and I had a babysitter in the afternoon, I often parked it down at the cliffs overlooking the ocean, opened my laptop, and spent a couple of hours writing or paying bills. Once I drove down to the cliffs, parked and took a nap, woke up, and drove home.

We called it a house on wheels, a term I had learned from a man in a campground in Oklahoma. Two months before Blue and I were married, my friend Tamara and I had taken a road trip to New Orleans on I-20, camping our way across the southern states. As we set up our tent by a lake somewhere in Oklahoma, a truck with a camper pulled into the site next to ours, although the campground was nearly empty. The back door opened, revealing a scruffy guy in a pair of cutoffs. He cracked open a Budweiser and sat down, legs dangling off the end of his truck as if it were a dock and he was fishing for crawdads.

He watched while Tamara and I argued in loud whispers about whether or not to move. (She wanted to, I didn’t. What was I thinking?) Finally we collapsed our tent and stuck it back of my truck, getting ready to move to a site near some other campers and far away from Crawdad, as he came to be known.

“Y’all aren’t movin’ on account o’ me are you?” he said as we climbed in the truck. “’Cuz if y’are, I can move. Damn, my house is on wheels!”

We kept the Crawdad quote alive for the rest of the trip, and twelve years later I resurrected it when I bought the Westfalia. I took it for repairs to the Volks Cafe ten blocks from my house. I loved to park in the back lot and walk through the garage, picking my way through the carborators and Volkswagon engines spread across the greasy floor. The radio was always tuned to my favorite local station, KPig.

KPig was an eclectic station, part country, part Bluegrass, part rock and blues. You never knew if DJ and KFat founder Laura Ellen was going to play Robert Earl Keen or Sarah McLachlan, the Indigo Girls or Lucinda Williams. The Volks Cafe went up a few notches for me when I heard KPig coming from the mechanics' radio. Peter, the owner, was the top servicing vendor for Vanagons in the country. He and the other guys up front hopped out from behind the counter at a moment’s notice to tighten a mirror or do a test drive .

But my favorite part of the Volks Cafe was the bulletin board for customers selling their vehicles. Here are some of the postings:

“’78 VW van
70k original miles
Champagne edition.
Red/brown
Asking $2700”

“Lilith, the Wonder Van is finally up For Sale.
1977 VW Camper
Sleeps four with fridge, sink, stove
Doesn’t currently run -- needs engine work and new ignition.
Great for living in.
Yours for $500. Call Shalom”

“1966 Volks Baja Bug
Mechanic’s Special.
Blown engine.
$100 O.B.O.
You Tow or I Can for $100”

Seven years after I bought the van, I put up my own For Sale card on the Volks Cafe bulletin board. We had put twenty-thousand miles on the van, and I didn’t have the cash to maintain it anymore. After months of false starts, I received an email from a young woman in Alaska named Becky. She wanted a camper to travel around Texas where she would be attending graduate school.

As we emailed back and forth, it became clear Becky had done her homework. She was the kind of buyer I had been looking for. She paid for an inspection at the Volks Café, then listing the needed repairs, made me an offer. We settled on a price contingent upon a final inspection from her brother.

Her brother Matt was a surfer from San Francisco, who timed his trip to Santa Cruz with the next Northwest swell. Matt inspected the pop-top, the stove, the fold-out beds. As he adjusted the passenger seat for size, I told him I hoped, when they grew up, my son was as nice to my daughter as Matt was to Becky.

“Well,” he admitted, “the deal is I get to use the van until January.”

Matt called his sister with the details of his inspection. As he pressed her number into his cell, he looked at the clouds gathering in the sky and said, “I hope she makes a decision quickly. The wind's starting to come up.” Spoken like a true surfer.

I went inside for a few minutes to give him some privacy. When I came back out, he folded his phone and handed me a cashier’s check. I handed over the title, and the deal was done.

My plan after selling the van was to trade in our company-leased Explorer for one new car that fit all our family needs. I dreamed and searched, but for me there was no camper to replace the Westfalia. A Baja or Bust vehicle just didn’t fit into the immediate plan. What I found instead was what I had sworn I’d never buy: a soccer-mom van.

I chose a Toyota Sienna. My 1940 edition of the Webster’s Dictionary defines sienna as “a ferruginous ocherous earth of a … yellow color, used as a pigment in … painting.” Ferruginous, I found out when I looked it up next, means iron-rich. Except for maybe black, none of the color choices for the Sienna in 2007 was iron-rich. Instead they were various shades of mop water.

How did the Sienna win my heart, if not by the name? It had the extra set of seats in back for transporting Carly’s band to a gig in the Santa Cruz mountains, and those seats folded down to make tons of space for surf bins, duffle bags, ice chests, and a dog. But the real reason I chose the Toyota van was that you could open the back and slide two longboards up the middle. Convenient for the two hour surf getaway.

I couldn’t complain about a new car with good mileage and the best mechanical reputation in the world. But it would take racks, a lot of hibiscus stickers, and Sex Wax smears on the windows to make the Sienna look like a surf van.

As always, Blue understood. When I ordered the new van he said, “Thanks for taking one on the chin for the family.”

There's No Caboose

2007-08-22T16:38:00.000-07:00

I have a passion for train travel, which until recently my family allowed me to indulge. Once Carly and I almost missed a train from New York City to Toronto. We flew to New York, spent just one day, and woke in the morning to the panicked voice of my friend Dennine telling us she had accidentally set the alarm for six p.m. We had fifteen minutes to catch our train. Dennine ran around the apartment stuffing things in our bags while Carly and I threw on our clothes. We dashed down to the street and flagged a cab. The cab driver flew across town, pounding the horn as he ran red light after red light.

We managed to make it to Penn Station alive, with four minutes to spare. Then, within seconds of boarding the train, we were rolling along the Hudson River. The river with its deep green waters soothed and awoke my senses, which had been electrified and shocked dull by the speed of our first two days of travel.

Day passed into night, and still we were on the train. Customs at the border took an inordinately long time, and we pulled into Toronto an hour behind schedule. Still, I’ll take the delays of the train over the geographical jolt of the plane, the disturbing lurch into the future, when I can afford the time. I prefer the distillation of emotion, and even boredom, that slow travel affords the soul.

Victoria Williams wrote a song about the train and its glory days.

"When I was a little kid
I had to sit like most kids did
Counting as the train cars passed
Waiting’ til the very last,

See the old man in his overalls
And his hair all grey
Smiling in the sun.
Nowadays it aint no use,
There’s no caboose."

Once, after celebrating the completion of final exams at University of Oregon, my friends and I piled in a Volkswagon Beetle and drove to the train station. There must have been ten people in that Bug. They stood on the platform and waved as the train set off for points south: Cottage Grove... Medford... Redding... and ultimately my stop in Oakland. Being young, I slept comfortably in the coach seats and ate from the snack car. I loved the entry cars and would stand at the open windows as the train crossed the landscape. That is one of Victoria Williams’ laments: "Windows now sealed up tight, Man can’t breathe and he’s got the right."

Blue does not share my love of trains. Most of the time they are slow, and the rocking gives him vertigo. My theory is that he is too relaxed to need them. I, on the other hand, need the slowing that train travel provides. But even my love of trains has been seriously compromised by Amtrak's recent woes.

Amtrak, which relies heavily on government subsidies, is now losing half a billion dollars a year. U.S. trains outside the Northeast corridor, furthermore, run at an average of fifty miles per hour. On our last Coast Starlight excursion from Tacoma to San Jose, the speed seldom came close to fifty, and when it did I feared for my life as the train flew over tracks in a state of disrepair.

"And what about the tracks they laid
Long ago, they all decayed.
Job for every man,
New tracks across the land.

I feel the need to say a bit more,
Instead of building up for war
Gotta few more healthy chores
For the fellas dressed in gray."

Of course Victoria Williams has a point. Whereas highways and airlines in our country continue to be subsidized without significant challenge, every Republican administration since Ronald Reagan has tried to stop federal funding for Amtrak. Amtrak is expensive; its equipment must be ordered and manufactured, and the company’s labor force is reputably bloated. But Amtrak has enjoyed a long history of support in Congress. Still, it is the short routes connecting major cities that have the most potential to be money makers, not the long distance routes with the dining, sleeping, and bar cars that I have come to appreciate most.

Blue and I took our first excursion together on the Coast Starlight when Carly and Eliot were little. By booking a year in advance, we paid five hundred dollars for a family-size sleeping room. Included in the ticket were three meals in the dining car, plus other amenities. The bathroom and shower were down the hall from our room. We went to the late afternoon wine tasting, and watched the sun set over the Cascade Mountains.

While I tasted wines from the Willamette Valley in the bar car, Carly watched Shrek in the movie car. She watched it three times that trip. The four of us slept well and ate delicious meals in the dining car. We did wait hours for the train to depart. Although freight trains are required by law to give priority to passenger trains, freights normally run when they have accumulated too many cars to pull over at the sidings. As a result, the shorter passenger trains pull over while the freight trains pass.

Today Amtrak operates over 200 commuter trains in California, including the popular Surfline between LA and San Diego, and construction may soon begin on a high-speed train connecting the Bay Area to the Central Valley. At present California spends 63 million dollars a year, five times as much as any other state, to operate its intercity and commuter lines. But it relies on federal funds for the longer routes, and there is talk in Washington of turning these routes over to private companies in the tourist industry.

For now the Coast Starlight suffers, and train lovers suffer along with it. On our most recent family excursion the train departed eight hours behind schedule and took twenty-eight hours instead of twenty-four. The price of the ticket had gone up and the quality of the experience had plumetted. The VCR in the movie car was broken, and there was no air-conditioning in the bar car. Temperatures in my favorite car reached into the nineties in the afternoon, and the wine tasting, which miraculously was still in effect, was a sleepy affair. Gone were the gourmet meals in the dining car; the food was only a notch above airline food.

"They used to have the finest chef,
dining car a nice place to rest."

Amtrak continues at present to receive substantial federal funding. But I imagine it will take private reform to revitalize a long-distance service that for many of us is a labor of love. I look forward to the day when I can once again board an overnight train in the Pacific Northwest, sleep and eat like a queen, and watch the sun set over the Cascade Mountains with a glass of Willamette Valley wine in my hand. I might even convince Blue and the kids to come with me.

"Through fields they ramble,
Over mountains they climb,
Why they could go through every town
Yours and mine."

When the Sheriff Isn't Woody

2007-07-17T14:03:00.000-07:00

Eliot once wrote a story about his heroes from the movie Toy Story. Buzz Lightyear was his favorite, but he liked Woody too. He wrote, “Woody plays the guitar and walks funny.” Two years later, Eliot could have been Woody; he carried a toy gun, played the guitar, and walked funny. Too bad the sheriff who came to see him when he acted out at school wasn’t Woody.

The spring of his fifth grade year things fell apart in the classroom. Eliot was kicking and punching his teachers, and although his strength was not intimidating, the behaviors were. His third grade teacher Robin had showed me what it took to deal with autistic kids’ behaviors: training, love, and confidence. She talked with her students, physically guided them if she needed to, and let them know who was boss. In an age of liability where physical contact with students was all but forbidden, Robin understood its importance. With Mitchell who used behaviors to communicate the emotions he couldn’t express with words, Robin sat with him on the therapy ball during circle time. She put her arms around him and sang. It was impromptu physical therapy and bodily control, and Robin used it intuitively. By understanding Mitch, she not only controlled his behaviors but allowed him to thrive in the classroom. There was no lawsuit when the parent was happy.

The more Eliot kicked and punched, the more power he gained and the teachers lost. Eliot’s teacher called for me to come pick him up. At first I refused, telling the teacher (whose name I will not use for the sake of her privacy) that for Eliot being picked up early was a reward. I hoped she and her advisors would come up with strategies to turn Eliot’s behavior in a positive direction. But the kicking and punching continued. Blue and I ended up picking him up many times, and the teacher began putting him in restraint.

Restraint was the last resort, and knowing this, Eliot’s teacher went to her supervisor for help. The supervisor suggested suspension. I was appalled. Going home, which was a reward for Eliot, was not a solution.

I called for a Functional Analysis and Behavior Intervention Plan, which we had last implemented when Eliot was in kindergarten. It meant that a behaviorist came into the classroom and worked with the teacher to turn the student around. The strategies devised would become part of Eliot's education plan for years to come.

Despite several requests for the functional Analysis, which I also put in writing, it took three weeks for Eliot's IEP team to secure the first meeting. By then repeated restraints had traumatized Eliot, and the same supervisor who had called for suspension made another unimaginative suggestion. She said it was time to call the sheriff. Was this the best the administration could come up with in a severely handicapped classroom, which Eliot attended for behaviors in the first place?

Fear of litigation was the real reason teachers were required to call the sheriff when a student became physical, but if the administration took a proactive approach to special education, they wouldn’t have to spend so much time doing what Mitch’s mom referred to as “putting out fires.”

Eliot didn’t understand the seriousness of the sheriff’s visit, and he obsessed on the sheriff’s gun. Anticipating this, I had asked the sheriff if he could leave the gun in the car, which of course he could not. After his visit with Eliot he called me to let me know how concerned he was about Eliot’s obsession. I understood his concern, but knew he had missed the point when I had to convince him Eliot wasn’t going to show up in a trench coat the next day and mow everybody down.

The day I pulled Eliot out of school was the day his teachers called the sheriff the third time. I was there when the sheriff, a woman this time, pulled up. She was the opposite of the first one. She stood leaning against the gate enclosing the yard outside Eliot’s classroom so that he could not see her gun. She asked him if he understood how serious it was that she had to come to an elementary school to talk with him, when there were people out there doing really bad things she needed to deal with.

“How bad,” he asked.

“Really bad,” she said.

“Do you have a gun?”

She was smart enough not to answer that question right away.

“Are you going to take me to jail?” This must be what the other helpful officer had said.

“No, I’m not going to take you to jail,” she said.

I walked her out to her car and thanked her for being understanding with Eliot. I told her about the first sheriff’s reaction to Eliot’s obsession, and she shook her head. “The first things students always ask me about is my gun,” she said.

So it was that for the last three weeks of the school year I did Touch Math with Eliot every morning. This was not something I would have chosen. It was not just that I coveted my weekday surfing hours, but that I felt that a little stress in school helped Eliot deal with stress in life. But the key words were “a little.” If he was kicking and punching on a regular basis, something was stressing him too much. I had to reclaim the guy I knew.

We called it Mommy School. We did pages of math, watered the garden, and walked the dog. We did dishes, which he hated, and finished reading The Indian in the Cupboard. This was an unfortunate choice, with all the weapons in the story, but I was convinced Eliot had reached an age where he needed to distinguish between fantasy and reality. He needed to play out his toy weapon fantasies and move beyond them. He needed to know that in real life weapons were dangerous, and in most cases only made bad situations worse. He needed time to work through who he was on his own.

So it was that we had the following conversation after he had been playing with his nerf gun at the livingroom window:

“I went duck hunting for insects. I shot a fly. It was disgusting. I washed my hand in the bathroom.”

Then, “It was huge. Taller than you.”

And later, “I shot a bee.”

“No bees!” I said. “Bees are good!”

To which he said, “I apologized to the bee.”

When the target of his sponge bullets was Carly instead of an insect, I took his nerf gun away. He cried until his face had what Blue calls “mumps and measles.” He took his guitar and sat in his rocking chair facing the French doors to the back yard.

“Play a sad song,” Blue said, and Eliot started singing Freebird:

“If I leave here tomorrow…”

But Eliot didn’t actually play any chords, and as long as he couldn’t play a lick of music the electric guitar, like the gun, was fantasy. That was why we found him a guitar teacher. We owed it to our son to help him move into the real world, to the best of his abilities, even if we wouldn’t know for years to come what those abilities were. In the meantime he spent hours adjusting equipment and plugging his guitar into his amp. I figured if the musician thing didn’t work out, he could be a roadie.

The next year when Eliot returned to school he would be in junior high. This was strange since he still talked like a six year old, but something in him had shifted. He said he wanted to shave his head. I tried to talk him out of it, but he wouldn’t back down. He laughed while the hair cutter shaved swaths of hair from his head, and he laughed all the way home. And actually, the crew cut looked good. It was a definite statement about who he had become. He was a preadolescent. Even if he still couldn’t read.

Cross Stepping

2007-06-28T11:09:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite songs played regularly on our local radio station KPig in Freedom, California, is the Seconds Flat tune: “Will you please dance on my grave, with your bare feet on the ground…” It gets to the heart of what a good memorial service is about, which is remembering what it was about a person that gave us joy. The best memorial I have ever attended in that regard was the one for Robert Jones.

Robert, a forty-eight year old police officer, was riding his bike on Highway One three years ago when he was hit by a car. It took him three and a half months to wake from the coma, and when he did his wife Toni took him home. I didn’t know Robert personally, but I had surfed with him many times at Pleasure Point. He charged the biggest waves and had a smile for everyone out there, not just the best surfers or the people he knew. Having spent my first few years of surfing being ignored or bullied in the lineup, I was grateful for Robert’s attitude. Little did he know the people he affected, and so it was that I asked to be part of a group of volunteers helping him at home.

The day I heard about Robert, I packed my surfboard and headed out to Steamer Lane. I wanted to surf with him in mind as a kind of prayer. Waist to chest high waves were coming through the Indicator off Steamer Lane, a good day to practice walking the nose, which I had yet to master. That day I stopped clumsily sidestepping to the front of the board and started cross-stepping.

Sidestepping up to the nose was the ultimate in uncool, but for a reason: cross-stepping was about grace. It had as much to do with the mind as it did with the board. It had to do with the day as a gift, just as Robert’s presence in the water always had been.

I got to be with Robert several times during the first period of his recovery. Toni proved to be an amazing woman, strong, prayerful, and committed. She brought him home -– to their dream home they had bought just two weeks before the accident –– determined to help him walk, talk, and eat again on his own. Robert, once a driven athlete and police officer, now used his eyes and different sounds to communicate joy, anger, pain, “yes,” and “no.”

During my visits, I helped get Robert changed and out of the house for walks around the block in his wheelchair. I helped hoist him and his wheelchair up the ramp into the van Toni had bought and adapted for him. I delivered the family a dinner or two. A year after Robert’s accident, Toni decided to continue on without the regular help of the church team.

Two years later Toni and a support team pushed Robert in his wheelchair all the way to San Luis Obisbo, using the less busy side roads, to raise funds for the Fallen Officers’ Foundation. By then Toni had stopped most of the physical therapy because of seizures that regularly interrupted Robert’s progress. “He’s just taking a different path,” she said.

Robert was excited and motivated to make the trip. But from the outset Toni said they would stop if it put too much of a strain on him. Although at times he got tired, he and the team of people pushing him made it to San Luis Obispo.

Toni said she couldn’t have coped if Robert had died the day of the accident, and that he stuck around because he knew that. In the spring, only a few months after their trek to San Luis Obispo, she told Robert she was ready to let him go, and one week later he died. Even without spoken language and the muscular body he’d used to surf, bike, and practice martial arts, Robert was intuitive, kind, and strong. As Toni said, “He was all about love.”

On a bright, clear Saturday morning in May, a group of surfers gathered for a Paddle Out at Robert’s favorite spot, Steamer Lane. The plan was to paddle out the Chardonnay, a popular charter sailboat carrying friends and family of Robert and Toni’s. The ocean was calm and glassy as we waited on the grass by the lighthouse to see the Chardonnay leave the yacht harbor. Just as we spotted the top of her sail skirting along the jetty, the wind came up to push her along, and by the time we paddled out past the kelp beds, the Chardonnay was there to meet us.

Toni sat at the bottom of the stern wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a lei of fresh flowers. Robert’s friend Annette blew a conch shell in greeting. Another friend, Quentin, wearing a Hawaiian shirt over his wetsuit, climbed onto the boat and gave his friends big wet bear hugs. Quentin, who’d been living in Santa Rosa at the time of the accident, had moved back to Santa Cruz to be closer to Robert.

We formed a circle next to the boat, and friends told stories. One of Robert’s boards, which Quentin had pushed out to the Chardonnay, floated in the middle of the circle. A few people held baggies of his ashes, which we divided and, at the sound of the conch shell, flung into the water.

We waved to the Chardonnay as it pulled away, paddled back through the kelp, and waited under the cliff for a set to come through. Robert’s friend Rim Partridge caught the wave of the day on Robert’s board. By the handful, we caught tiny waves on a low tide, and as I floated in the channel beneath the big rock on shore, something caught my eye: the waving kelp of the tidepools reflecting the sunlight and creating flashes of deep beautiful blue. That was how I had known Robert, a miraculous bright spot in a lineup where adversity was as common as the northwest swells.

For Toni, letting go of Robert was hard, but after what they had been through the last three years of his life, she had to let those ashes fly. After the paddle-out, we gathered at their house for a celebration. A crew of chefs grilled food for an amazing lunch spread, and a Hawaiian band played ukelele and sang. Toni had set up tables outside, and had photocopied a collage of photos for each of us to take home. But what struck me most was a tile hanging above the kitchen, which a friend had made for Toni when Robert went into the hospital for the last time. It said, “And they lived happily ever after.”

Kiddie Pool

2007-06-07T14:27:00.000-07:00

Blue and I are not proud of the sheer yardage of petroleum products we accumulated when Carly and Eliot were little, but the truth is the toddler stage of parenting can easily involve a lot of of plastic.

It started with the kiddy pool we bought when Carly was two. I went for the sturdy model with the built-in slide, not considering when I rolled it up to the cash register that durability might not be compatible with pack-ability. Ten minutes later in the Kiddie World parking lot, I was opening windows and folding down the seats in the Explorer in an effort to wedge in the pool. In the end we left the pool at Kiddie World, drove home, and called Blue, who picked it up in a George H. Wilson truck. Not just any truck, but the one with the huge bed for carrying ducts and equipment. There were miles of space around the kiddie pool in the bed of that truck.

To Carly it was a serious pool, too humongous to fit in an SUV. It would be years before it looked to her the way it had to me the day Blue brought it home, dwarfed in the bed of the George H. Wilson truck.

About that time Blue’s mom bought us a play structure at Costco, another monolith of plastic that entertained the kids for hours at a time in the backyard. In the summer we moved the play structure so that on hot days Carly and Eliot could careen down its grander slide into the kiddy pool.

By the time Eliot was ten he was longer than the diameter of the pool. I filled it up one hot day, but he spent hours playing under the redwood tree instead. Probably if he had slid down the slide, his feet would have jammed up against the other end of the pool. And Carly? She was inside checking out a friend's MySpace.

The following weekend Blue and I got the pool and play structure ready for our nephew Chase, who within a year would be climbing and sliding. We brushed off the spider webs and scrubbed the dirt that had splashed up on the sides through a winter of rain. We scoured and sweated, opting not to dismantle the structure to fit it through our back gate. Instead, we lifted it over our neighbor's fence and carried it down her driveway to the truck.

We were tying down the plastic in the back of the truck when Eliot came out on the front porch in tears. He wanted his pool! We were taking his slide. He wanted them back! He let me hold him for about five seconds before he broke away.

I knew why he was crying. It was not that he had plans to use the pool or play structure anymore. It was that he knew as well as anyone: he was watching a chunk of his childhood slip away in the back of a George H. Wilson truck.

Searching for Paradise

2007-05-01T14:20:00.000-07:00

When my mom was little, my grandmother took her camping every summer, setting up an elaborate spot on the shores of Lake Tahoe with my mother, my uncle, and other adventurous families. My grandmother brought carpets, which she rolled out over the dirt and swept every morning. My grandfather stayed home, happily spending his days at work and his evenings reading alone in his den.

History seems to dictate that the husbands in our family not like camping. My dad never liked it and neither does Blue. Although I notice he doesn’t mind the full-sized mattress I set up using the car battery, nor sleeping separately from the kids in a tent big enough to stand in.

My mother and I solved this dilemma easily enough by going camping together. We camped on rivers all over Northern California. One summer as she was approaching her eightieth birthday, she said she would like to camp at the Lake Tahoe of her childhood. So we did, staying within a stone’s throw of Emerald Bay and walking the Rubicon Trail. As per tradition, we set up an inviting camp, cooked gourmet meals, and read our books by flashlight in the tent. Still, my mother had had enough of the manual labor involved in camping, the extreme afternoon temperatures, and squatting to get in and out of the tent. A few summers before, she had treated my brother Timothy, an artful fly fisherman, to a few days on the McKenzie River in Oregon. My mother, who had fished pristine rivers in Canada and the Rockies, said the McKenzie River was her favorite, partly, I think, because of the planted section where fishers could catch their trout to cook over a fire.

I could pretend I was concerned that summer for my mother’s welfare, but the real reason I kept asking about the cabin on the McKenzie River was to secure an invitation myself. Thus it was that my mother spent her last camping trip on the shores of the same lake where she had camped as a child, and the following July we flew to Oregon.

As a woman of eighty-plus years who camped and fly fished, my mother was but a fledgling. We were going to have dinner with her friend Dixie, who at ninety-six ruled the waters on the northern McKenzie. Dixie had spent her summers in a cabin on the river with her husband, and after he died she went there to recover. Now she lived half the year in the cabin that had not changed since the 30’s when it was built. When we arrived for dinner, the kitchen windows were thrown open to the woods and the sounds of the river rushing by. A turkey breast warmed in the convection oven, and orzo cooked in an electric crock-pot on the deck.

We had cocktails on the deck, a ritual which, despite our enthusiasm for it, Blue and I could never pull of with the same formality or regularity as our parents. While we had our drinks, some of Dixie’s animal friends came to visit. The stellar jays swept in for the peanuts in the shell she had put out. A chipmunk dashed in from behind a Douglas Fir, grabbed a peanut, and scurried off.

Dixie said that when she arrived back in California in November, she put out the peanuts and called to the Stellar Jays, “Come get your dinner!” In five minutes her Jay friends were back.

Dixie told us the trees surrounding her cabin were Douglas Fir, Aspen, Vine Maple, and Big Leaf Maple. The next day on the river, our guide Wade pointed out Red Cedar, Incense Cedar, two varieties of the river duck, as well as mallards, swallows, and kingfishers. Once when we were anchored at a rocky spot where the trout were feeding, a flock of geese flew past us, and a few minutes later a goose came floating downstream calling for her friends. She must have had an injured wing because the call was clear: “Where are you guys? Wait for me!” Like Dixie’s “Come get your dinner!” that after six months drew the jays back within minutes, the languages of humans and other animals were not as far apart as we liked to think.

Dixie said that in her next life she wanted to come back as an oozle, the small birds that bobbed up and down on dry rocks in the middle of the river, diving for insects and staying underwater for long periods of time.

“I’d like to come back as an osprey,” I said, as one flew overhead looking for fish.

“They migrate,” Dixie said. “Oozles,” she added with a twinkle in her eye, “Stay year round.”

Wade, Dixie's guide, had a sturdy aluminum boat with huge oars he used to navigate the rapids and place us in position over holes and banks to give us the optimal lines. It was the ultimate in fly fishing.

The first day one of us stood at the front of the boat fishing with two dry flies on the line, while the other sat nymphing on a fly reel with monofilament line. We lost count of how many fish we caught, catching as many on the flies as the nymph. All but two were planted rainbows, ten to fourteen inches. We kept a few for lunch and released the rest. We released two wild trout about eight inches in length. The next day we gave up nymphing and took turns dry fly fishing.

At lunch we pulled up to an island where the guides had built a fire ring in the sand with stones from the river. Wade set up a table and chairs, cleaned the fish, covered them in onion salt, and fried them in a long handled iron skillet which he had heated over the fire and filled with a generous amount of margarine. The fish, which we ate with chips and fruit, was delicious.

That night at the bar, I heard the ultimate Fish That Got Away story from a young man who had gone fishing to unwind after work. He said he hooked a twenty-four inch rainbow on a fly, only to have it jump the hook before he could reel in and release it. He was nursing his disappointment with a couple of shots of tequila. I asked him about wild versus planted trout, and he said that while they didn’t plant as high up as he was fishing, the planted ones did swim upstream, and that while you had to be quick with the wild trout, who barely mouthed the hook when they rolled over it, they loved the flies.

When I repeated the Fish That Got Away story to Wade he said, “How did he know it was twenty four inches? If it was, it was one of the three biggest fish on the river.”

After our four days on the McKenzie River, Mom and I drove to Portland, where she caught a plane home and I met Blue, Carly, and Eliot for adventures farther north. A week after our fishing trip, Mom and Dad were moving from the San Francisco home where they had lived for fifty years, to a retirement community in the warmer city of Palo Alto.

Blue, Carly, Eliot, and I traveled to Vancouver Island, where we stayed with our friends Scott and Sal and their sons Jared and Josh. We ate vine-ripened raspberries the size of golf balls, swam in the cold clear pools of a river, and stuck our heads under a waterfall. From British Columbia we drove to Tacoma, where we stayed with our friends Jeff and Elizabeth. We ate sushi, went for long walks, and swam in a pool with a 180-degree view of Puget Sound.

The day before we boarded the train bound for California, Mom and Dad were descending for the last time the three flights of stairs they had walked tens of thousands of times. I spoke with her on the phone as they were packing the last boxes. She said every time she needed an emotional lift, she thought of our days on the McKenzie River. I knew what she meant. Even though I was filled to the top from our time with friends, my favorite days with those with my Mom. As the train pulled away from Tacoma, I rejoiced that Eugene, Oregon, where she and I had turned east for the McKenzie River, still lay ahead of us on the tracks heading home.

Being Thirteen

2007-03-17T15:03:00.000-07:00

Carly wrote this essay for her 8th grade Core class, and I thought it was better than any description I could come up with for this part of adolescence. I've reprinted it with her permission.

Being thirteen is very stressful, but can also be very fun. These days, being cool and popular is everything. Thirteen year olds have many things on their minds, like school, homework, music, sports, friends, girlfriends or boyfriends, peer pressure, responsibilities or chores, and family problems. Thirteen year olds often get headaches, stomach aches, and growth pains. Being thirteen is like switching a light on and off. Sometimes you feel great, and other times depressed and busy. It is also a really fun age because you get a lot more freedom. When you turn thirteen, you are finally considered a teenager.

For some thirteen year olds, being thirteen is all positive aspects. When you are thirteen, your parents consider you much older. They now decide to give you much more independence. For me, I get a lot of freedom. I am allowed to go many places with my friends, ride bikes, and be out in the real world. I am no longer always with my parents. It makes being thirteen pretty fun. My parents always have to know where I am, which makes me bring up technology. Cell phones, for an example, are very positive. They are positive for parents to keep in touch with their teens, and for their teens to keep in touch with them if they need help, or are in trouble. I also think that our school can be very positive toward teens with sport teams and clubs. For me, signing up for surf club, or basketball is very enjoyable for me to be with friends, but also learn and do new things. Our school has almost every sport team or club that I can think of. I think this is all very positive, because many teens’ parents can’t afford to sign them up for recreational sports. Everyone is welcome to join sports at my school.

Although it seems like being thirteen is great, for some thirteen year olds, it’s very difficult. There are many negatives about being thirteen. For me and some of my friends, we get headaches often. I also think that technology can be negative sometimes, because some teens think of their cell phones as talking to their friends. They will spend all their time text messaging their friends during school, at home, and even while adults are trying to talk to them. It can be very rude. The computer can also be negative. I think that most thirteen year olds think of the internet as myspace, or what they go on when they’re bored. Myspace and other things on the internet can turn out dangerous, because some teens post things on the internet that they shouldn’t. The internet can also be negative because you may get excluded out of many things. Girls can be so mean that you never know when they will backstab someone. I think of being a thirteen year old girl as much harder than being a thirteen year old boy, because girls can be so excluding, and just plain mean.

When I was younger, I never really thought about what it would be like to be thirteen. I always thought of thirteen year olds as “Big kids”. But being thirteen is much more complicated than that. The movies about puberty that we used to watch in school talked about how hard it is to be thirteen, but really, it’s not too hard. When I was younger, I thought that when I was thirteen I would get so much homework, but really, we don’t get too much homework. The one thing that I didn’t really think about when I was young is being popular. In elementary school, there were no popular groups, or nerd groups. Now, when you’re thirteen, there are many groups with different people. Although I didn’t think about it much, it’s for sure different than I imagined it to be.

Being thirteen seems very difficult right now, but I am hoping that in a couple years it will be easier. Being thirteen is like when a light bulb dies, you replace it with a new one, and everything is bright again.

Roller Queen

2007-03-06T10:28:00.000-08:00

I have a thing about elaborate kid birthday parties. The birthday girl or boy opens a mound of presents, plastic wrap and paper flying, and the gift each child has carefully selected gets lost in the shuffle. Then there are the gift bags the invitees take home, in most cases a substitute for hand-written Thank You notes. The truth is that it’s possible to throw a birthday party without Toys R Us.

Eliot wanted to have his eleventh birthday party at the roller rink. For two hours we had the rink to ourselves, although for less money you can rent a table and hold your party during open skate time. With Eliot the quieter rink was the way to go. We had pizza and veggies and cupcakes, and I requested No Gifts, because as Carly said, “We are the Weird Family.”

But No Gifts birthday parties are great because kids bring drawings instead. Josh from Eliot’s baseball team drew a picture of the two of them playing baseball, and at the top wrote, “Happy Birthday, Eliot.” Eliot’s friend Cailin drew a card with a pink five-tiered Seussean birthday cake. Mitch and Mariah’s dad, a professional photographer, brought an 8 1/2 by 11 inch photograph of Eliot and Mitch in their Halloween costumes, flanked by their teaching assistants dressed as mimes and waving white-gloved hands. There is a whole story in that picture, in a classroom where many students have little or no language, and like mimes rely on hand signals and facial expressions to make their needs known.

Eliot’s friend Aaron came, and his mom put on her skates and pushed Aaron around the rink in his super high-tech wheelchair. Mitch’s sister Mariah skated around the rink so fast I couldn't keep up. Her mom is a hockey player who grew up with five brothers, and Mariah is growing up with two. When I asked if she played hockey with her mom she said, “Sometimes in the house.”

Blue and I laced up the double-wheel skates with the worn toe brakes and took a turn around the rink. Blue half-walked, half-skated, arms waving wildly. He wouldn’t let me hold his hand. Neither would Eliot, who made his way slowly around the rink clinging to the bars. Then, in the last fifteen minutes, Eliot held out his hand.

By then the other kids were doing the Limbo, and I made Eliot do it too. Together we skated toward the Limbo bar. The first time he fell on his knees, but the second time he squatted down and skated under the bar. The few adults watching from the sidelines of our blissfully small party broke into applause.

After the party Mariah came over to play. In platform heels with fur lining, she ran around the backyard with a laser gun, squatting behind bushes and rising up to spray Eliot with a litany of laser beams. Then they played hide-and-seek laser tag inside. Mariah hid and Eliot counted. For ten minutes he looked for her. Finally I went to help him. Under his ¾ height bunk bed, where he had gone first, a lumpy blanket sat in the corner.

“You need to look more carefully under your bed,” I said. He got under the bed and sat on the blanket.

“First you couldn’t find me,” Mariah said, lifting the blanket off her head, “and now you’re sitting on me!”

When it was time to take Mariah home I said, “Do you want to say anything to your guest?” thinking Eliot would say goodbye. But he walked over and gave her a kiss on the forehead.

They had been friends since Mariah was five. Now that she was nine she was soaring ahead, but I tried to keep the flame going. A couple of months later, I took them to the movies. When we dropped her off at her house afterward, I told Eliot to walk her to her door.

“He doesn’t have a clue,” I thought, but when I looked up he had taken her hand to cross the street. To him it was a safety precaution, but it didn’t matter. “Thank you for coming with me to the movies,” he said. “I enjoyed it. Did you?”

Turned out there was hope for him and the Roller Queen yet.

On Fire

2007-02-13T12:18:00.000-08:00

When I was growing up and taking special weekend trips to the snow with my parents, I had a ready-made skiing companion in my sister Shelley. She was not even two years younger, and we took countless trips on the chairlift, skis dangling, heads tilted in collusion over a song or something we thought was funny. We pretended not to know how to disembark from the chairlift, feigning just enough lack of coordination to laugh ourselves silly, but not enough to stop the chair. This seems ironic now, given that Blue, in a heroic attempt to embrace skiing during our dating years, once derailed a chairlift. Or maybe it’s just karma, since my own son is now learning to control his body in a manner my able-bodied sister and I once found so hilarious.

There’s irony in this too, however, since Shelley was born without a hand. But she didn’t let it slow her down. She skied with one pole, bombing down the mountain, her body swaying in lieu of a pole plant, in beautiful arcing turns.

Those days with Shelley were fresh in my mind when Carly, Eliot, and I ventured into a dry mountain landscape in January 2007. In 2006 the Sierra Nevada had received above average snowfall, while the Rockies had experienced severe drought. The following year the Rockies were inundated with snow, while the Sierra Nevada had received sixty percent of normal snowfall by the beginning of February.

At the same time I was well aware of the implications of the drought into which we ventured, I was fascinated by the rocky outcroppings exposed to the sky on the highest peaks. Seeing them from the chairlift, I was reminded of the geologic rumblings that had pushed them to the surface, whereas when they were muffled in snow I did not think much about how they got there. This was brought home most dramatically when, unfamiliar with the landmarks not buried in snow and not the greatest navigator to begin with, I missed the turnoff to Squaw Valley I had taken countless times the past thirty winters. We began the descent to Reno, where I was struck by huge rock formations towering over the highway and seemingly close enough to touch.

As Eliot said after three days of skiing, “There’s a fire out there. Under the rocks. It’s so sad. There’s not enough snow to cover the rocks.”

There would be no tree skiing on this trip. Normally one to seek out the steep and the deep, I stuck to the groomed runs where every turn was effortless, once in a while finding a few moguls of soft snow tucked in under the trees. By our third day at Alpine Meadows where Eliot was enrolled in the Adaptive Ski program, I had covered most if not all the skiable terrain. But I was doing something more fulfilling than powder skiing; I was skiing with my kids. Carly and I were companions in the snow, riding the chairlift time and again as I had with my sister Shelley.

When I recalled Shelley’s and my skiing antics, Carly said, “I wish I had a sister. Instead of Annoying Eliot.”

I couldn’t blame her. But since two kids was my limit, I would have to provide her with the companionship I had been blessed with in my siblings, at least until she and her brother were old enough to be friends. In the meantime, Carly turned to snowboarding and began carving beautiful turns. As for Eliot, he was on fire.

When he was ten he had spent much of the time clinging to the pole his instructor Laura held alongside him. This was a year later, though, and I caught up with him toward the end of his second lesson to snap some pictures. But I use the word “caught up” only figuratively, because in my digital shots he was a blur. Straight-legged and bent at the butt like a jackknife, he shot down the bunny slopes, using his newfound snowplow skills to minimal effect.

As we parted with his instructor Carol, she gave me the red glove, the “hand” at the end of the ski pole that he was supposed to follow, turning when she turned. “He needs to learn control,” she said, “so he can truly be independent.” I agreed wholeheartedly, and as he and I got on the chair lift together, I held the pole with the red glove attached. But when we got to the top of the bunny run Eliot took off, and I skied ten feet behind, waving the pole uselessly and yelling, “Follow the hand!”

After two runs I gave up, leaving the red-gloved pole at the bottom of the run. It was from his instructor that he would have to learn control. From his mother and aunt he had learned all too well: the best way to ski was to Let ‘er Rip.

Being Twelve

2007-01-22T10:48:00.000-08:00

I tell myself it’s a compliment when my child volunteers me for things. Like the time she signed me up to bring fruit salad to a seventh grade class party that was happening the next morning. She must see me as reliable. And it’s true that the last minute notice wasn’t a problem, since we live two blocks from a handful of grocery stores.

I rode to the store before dinner and returned home with a flat of strawberries bungeed to the back of my bike. I got back from a run the next morning just in time to deliver the strawberries to her classroom.

“You’re wearing that?” she asked. I was wearing the sweatpants she hated. By my standards they weren’t bad. I had thrown away the pair that were six sizes too big, because no amount of comfort justified pants that big. The sweatpants I had kept actually fit me.

None of this mattered to Carly. “Aren’t you going to change?” she asked.

“I just got back from a run,” I said. “This is what I’m wearing.”

I waited in the driveway while she ran back inside for a jacket. When she reappeared scowling, Blue came up behind her with a look of glee on his face. Once you hit your forties, you're usually comfortable enough with yourself to laugh quietly at your child’s embarrassment over your apparent shortcomings.

Still I offered to ride ahead. I saw the conflict cross her face, the desire to be rid of me at the same time she knew I had the cache of strawberries.

I ended up letting her go first, my daughter in a green corduroy jacket, rolled up bell bottom jeans with her cute little butt, a shocking pink helmet she’d bought with her own allowance to declare her femininity, and a bright green cruiser she’d gotten for her twelfth birthday. The contrast was notable; I plodded along behind in my sweatpants, a baggy sweatshirt, and my hair still damp with sweat under my baseball cap. But at my age all that sweat just made me feel good.

“You lock your bike, I’ll go ahead of you to your classroom,” I assured her when we got to her school.

But I couldn’t find her classroom, and had to stand in the quad and wait for her. She pointed, and I walked toward what I thought was the right room. I walked in on a group of eighth grade boys from her surf club, their longish hair side-parted like something straight out of The Endless Summer. Translation: cute boys. If my wandering in the quad had embarrassed her, imagine how she felt about my stumbling upon a bunch of cute older boys.

Once I rode home from the grocery store dangerously close to the time school let out, with a forty pound bag of dogfood, a twelve pack of beer, and two sixteen packs of toilet paper. I wobbled home with this mountain of supplies, making it to the house just two minutes before a boy she liked rode by. Had I been any later, he would have seen not one but two mega packs of toilet paper strapped to my rack, and the packaging which bragged: “Sixteen GIANT rolls! The same as FORTY regular rolls!”

That time Carly had been spared the humiliation.

Finally I found the right classroom and delivered the strawberries. As I rode away I thought about our conversation. “Nobody cares,” I’d told her when she scowled at my sweatpants. “Everybody cares,” she had said. And when you’re twelve, it’s true. Everyone cares.

Navigator

2007-01-08T13:41:00.000-08:00

When people visit Eliot's classroom, where at least one child is making strange noises while another swings wildly on the therapeutic swing, they see my son with his French Irish good looks sitting quietly, and they think he is out of place. But if they stayed a while they would see he is not.

Eliot has quirky behaviors. He will be sailing along when something (not always detectable to us) sets him off. Once before he could talk, the lighting in the grocery store upset him and he shrieked his way through the checkout line.

By the time he was nine he talked constantly, but in most ways he was more six than nine. Teaching him to read, or getting him to do any difficult task, was challenging at best. When I told him he needed to learn to read so that one day when he took his girlfriend to dinner he would be able to read the menu, he said, “I’m not taking her out to dinner. I’m taking her to the movies.”

One Sunday something in Eliot went haywire. Barometric pressure? Too much dairy? It was not always easy to tell.

That night we went out to dinner. After years of practice, Eliot had the “going out to dinner” routine down, which was a good thing, because not having to cook or clean up while being served soothing alcoholic beverages was one of my favorite Sunday evening activities. But this particular Sunday it was amazing we made it through the meal without an incident. On the way home in the car, he started beating up on Carly.

As soon as we got off the freeway, Blue pulled over so Eliot and I could walk home. This was a tactic we often used. When we went to a restaurant within walking distance, we did it no matter what, and Eliot showed me the way home. Eliot had proven himself an excellent navigator, and I preferred walking to driving as much as he did.

Although we were ten blocks from home when Blue dropped us off, it was the first time I had seen Eliot unsure of the way. But I did not tell him, he pointed in the right direction, and off we went. Until we reached Carly’s school, he seemed unsure, yet he always pointed us in the right direction.

Now, I can find my way home from anywhere in my stomping grounds, but take me out of my familiar surroundings and I am lost. Blue, on the other hand, need only visit a place once and he can find his way. I have been grateful many times for the fact that, of all the traits inherent in Eliot’s genetic makeup, his father’s navigating skills are among them. As he led me home, I hoped one day if I was not there and he was lost, this exercise would help him.

He took one look at Carly’s school, gasped, and said, “This way! Can we cross here? Come on!”

When he had guided me across the street he said, “You know the way?! I show you!” And he took off running.

As I walked behind him in the dark, it occurred to me that most people walk right arm swinging with the left leg, left arm swinging with the right leg. This is the sequence for those whose brains and bodies are intact. This is not how Eliot ran. His left arms swung, but his right arm jerked out perpendicular to his torso. A perfect metaphor for who he was. Some parts intact and seemingly normal, other parts jerking away in an unconventional direction. And so in his own unique way, Eliot showed me the way home.

Chapter Two from Mexico: Pilgrimage to Europa

2006-12-14T13:41:00.000-08:00

In San Miguel de Allende, my mom who was seventy-nine, did not have to organize or cook for Christmas. She was the queen, la reigna. My dad bought a pair of white tennis shoes for the cobblestone streets, and with Mom in the shoes she used for walking to the gym, they were a beautiful pair.

Our first excursion upon their arrival was a mass pilgrimage to the liquor store off the Jardin. We decided that, with a full range of Spanish and Chilean wines and the name Europa, it had to be open on Sunday. So it was that at midday, some twenty-four Tatums descended upon the liquor store, which was indeed open. Ten minutes later we emerged with a cashe that required flagging down a cab, and two able bodies to lift the box of liquor. This Sunday outing proved that in our family, the cocktail hour was a religion bordering on fanatacism.

The Tatum family dynamic was wonderful and, like most families, consuming. I had insomnia starting the night before they arrived. At home I went to yoga classes and did plenty of surfing in order to ensure a full night’s sleep, but I couldn’t do that in San Miguel. Thank God for Blue. Crawling into bed with him was like climbing from swirling water onto a rock that had been warmed by a full day’s sun.

From the bedroom window of our palacio, we looked out on the hillside of cactus and sagebrush. Two men in cowboy hats walked down the trail to get to work. The hill was covered in trails which, when Carly and I moved, I started running. The trails all lead to the same place, as if people couldn’t go the same way twice. There was trash everywhere, even human excrement. Los pobres walking into town, I supposed. In town there was work, and the stray dogs wandering in the Jardin were well fed.

As Christmas approached, I had a conversation with my six-year-old nephew Ben:

B: “I wonder why they call it San Miguel de Allende.”

T: “Well, a lot of people in Mexico are Catholic, which means they believe in God, and Catholics have lots of saints, which are people who are close to God. San Miguel was a saint.”

B: “Hmmmm.... There’s this one guy, I think his name is a bad word? ‘Friggin’’ or something?”

T: “Hmmm....”

B: “I think they hung him on the cross?”

T: “Oh you mean, Jesus!”

The celebration of Jesus's biuth culminated but did not end on the twenty-fourth. It was the night of the last Posada, with a pinata and bags of goodies for the kids, followed by ten and eleven o’clock mass. In the moment that all the Tatums gathered for Christmas eve on the patio of our palacio, everything came together. The sun was setting, the cousins were breaking Carly’s pinatas, and the adults were drinking margaritas. All the women were taking pictures, not because they couldn’t be in the moment but because they recognized it as that.

The people of Mexico know how to be in the moment. Long after we had gone to bed, the fireworks and festivities went on. From our bedroom I could see the lights in the window of a church on the hillside, flashing like fire against the adobe walls.

On Christmas day, I walked down the hill and through the Jardin, where there was a life size creche and a pen full of goats. I ducked into the Templo in the middle of mass. The altar was lit with blinking Christmas lights, which had a cheesy effect. The church was full, but I found a seat on the side.

The sermon and prayers were about the redemptive power of Jesus and its ability to transcend poverty, powerlessness, hopelessness, joblessness. Knowing I was closer in San Miguel to more poverty, more powerlessness, than surrounded me in my home town, I got down on my knees and prayed.

Chapter One from Mexico: La Revolucion

2006-12-14T13:16:00.000-08:00

Living in a state that borders Mexico, and a neighborhood where my children attend schools with a large Hispanic population, means experiencing the Mexican culture on a daily basis. Carly and Eliot have been to birthday parties and baptisms with Spanish-speaking classmates and babysitters, which has given them a sense of Mexican tradition, an ear for the Spanish language, and a taste for arroz con pollo. When they were little, we spent a week with our babysitter in Colima. And when Carly was ten, she and I spent two weeks studying Spanish in San Miguel de Allende, before Blue, Eliot, and most of my family joined us for Christmas.

I was worried about the family with whom Carly and I would be placed. What if they were mean or the house were dark and cavernous? But the Olveras couldn’t have been more delightful. Senora Olvera was an incredible cook, and she spent many hours in conversation with us, gently correcting my Spanish. The Olveras’ house was a few blocks from the Jardin, or center of town, and the rooms of the house surrounded a courtyard lush with citrus trees. Their house was also right next door to Carly’s school. Que conveniente!

San Miguel de Allende sits in high desert at 6500 feet. Visitors in winter should bring fleece, kleenex, slippers, and chapstick. I bought a pair of wool gloves for reading in bed! Los Mexicanos don´t always heat their homes, as gas and electricity are very expensive, even though Mexico is the world´s fourth largest producer of petrol and electricity in the world.

San Miguel is a Spanish colonial city with old fortress-like buildings and narrow streets and sidewalks. One has to press up against buildings to avoid being squashed by a passing bus. Cars are loud and emit massive quantities of exhaust. There are many expatriates who contribute to a tolerant atmosphere; one need not feel bad about looking like a tourist because so many people are. People are generally well educated. In early December at six-thirty in the morning when school began, the streets were full of students in school uniform. That would change as December progressed and celebrations of la Virgen de Guadelupe began.

There were internet cafes everywhere in San Miguel, but Carly’s and my favorite was one not far from the Jardin that was actually the owner´s livingroom. In addition to internet access lo mas barato en San Miguel, he had an espresso bar and an extensive collection of homemade cd´s, featuring anything from classical to hip hop in Spanish. His wife cooked meals in the kitchen on the other side of a curtain, and would make meals for customers. The owner was often holding his baby as he made cappucinos, changed cd's, or helped cutomers with the computers.

One morning Carly and I were awakened by church bells at six-thirty, followed by explosions that echoed off the hillsides. These explosions continued for half an hour while Carly and I huddled in my bed. I thought it was la nueva revoluccion.

When they ended promptly at seven o´clock, I put on my running clothes and poked my head out the front door. Carly was convinced I was entering a war zone and would leave her an orphan, but I assured her no revoluccion began and ended promptly on the half hour, and I showed her the children dressed in uniform walking to school. Senora Olvera told us at breakfast that it was the first of many celebrations para la Virgen de Guadalupe.

Most mornings I ran up into the Atascadero neighborhood, where twenty-four Tatums would be renting two palacios para la Navidad. It was a steady mile uphill from the Olveras´ house, after which it leveled off. It felt surprisingly good, perhaps because I was rooming with a ten-year-old who every night at seven turned into Godzilla. We had been able to negotiate our way out of conflict, however, and she was an excellent traveling companion.

Carly made pinatas at school, which she filled with Mexican candies and saved to break open with her cousins on Christmas. She hung them on her bedposts and told me they were dream-catchers. One Sunday we watched a league basketball game in the park, played on an ancient teeter-totter, and played multiple games of chess in the Olveras’ courtyard. Another day we visited some local hot springs, and ate lunch at a roadside restaurant where they roasted a pig in the front yard.

My school was a fifteen-minute walk from the Olveras’ house. The first day I arrived late after getting Carly settled, and was ushered into a room to converse with profesora Socorro. While she figured out where to place me, a man in dark glasses stood in the corner like a Mexican Severus Snape.

Profesor Snape turned out to be my teacher. Socorro had placed me in an intermediate class, which was good. I needed the grammar. Leave la literatura to the young revolutionaries.

The first days of celebrations para la Virgen, the fireworks went until midnight and resumed early the next morning, when the local schools were closed. As I set off on my run, I heard singing in the Jardin. Beautiful singing, Christmas carols, echoing up into the hills. "My hours are all wrong," I thought. "When I am sleeping, los Mexicanos are partying. When I am running some ludicrous course a mile uphill on cobblestone, they are singing in the streets." Loca Norte Americana. By the time I walked to school, the Jardin had emptied out and everyone had gone home to sleep.

One night Carly and I joined the Posada in the Jardin. There was a massive Christmas tree decorated with ornaments made by the children of San Miguel, and a crowd was gathered around the plaza, standing a safe distance from where the fireworks were set up. The people of Mexico were very polite; they didn´t push or shove, and that night in the Jardin, people waited in the bitter cold for something to happen. The wind was blowing the pinatas and decorations, and every once in a while a colorful strip of paper tore loose and floated above us.

The smart people were wearing bufandas, wool scarves wrapped around their faces. I envied the babies wrapped in those thick, brightly colored blankets. Eliot had one Maria from Colima had given him when he was a baby, and at eight years old he still came out it in the morning, naked and wrapped in it like an Indian man.

A choir group sang Christmas songs, but there seemed an interminable wait between songs. The microphones barely amplified their voices. Carly and I moved close to hear, finding a spot easily since no one crowded. In anticipation of my family's arrival, I closed my eyes and sang along to our favorite, “Gloooooooooooooooria, In Excelsus Deo!”

Then the choir was finished, and boom, on came the lights of the Christmas tree, the lights on the church and the cross at the top. The crowd whistled loudly. They had waited and now was the official time to let loose. Boom! The fireworks on the plaza exploded into the air. The crowd whistled loudly again. Boom! The most formidable fireworks I have ever heard exploded in the sky above the church. I would be lying if I said it was a religious experience; it was just unimaginably exciting.

And then it was over. Carly and I walked back to the house and went to bed. At five the next morning the loudest fireworks yet went off. Why at five in the morning I could not imagine, but Senor Snape said it worked for Mexicanos who didn´t use alarm clocks.

Dick Cheney and SUV’s

2006-11-28T09:32:00.000-08:00

My boy Eliot is hypersensitive and obsessive, and at ten years old one of his fears and obsessions was insects. As soon as he got home from school, he took his five-dollar light saber in the back yard and swatted at the insects. Between swarms of fruit flies from the compost, or whatever hatches occur in the late afternoon in an urban garden, he waved his light saber slowly and artfully like a jedi knight. That was when I saw the connection between one's fears and weapons.

If Eliot is able to translate his boyhood love of weapons into nothing more violent than duck hunting with his dad when he is older, my biggest worry will be safety. I can only hope he will have a better track record than our vice president Dick Cheney. Not only do I want my son to grow into a peace-loving guy, but I also want him to know the basic rules of hunting safety, which Dick Cheney failed to observe when he struck his quail hunting companion in the cheek. At first when it was reported that the pellets had “knocked flat” fellow hunter Whittington but had not seriously harmed him, it was fodder for jokes. But when we found out later that a pellet had lodged in Whittington’s heart and caused a minor heart attack, it was alarming. If this wasn’t a metaphor for a vice president’s games gone awry, I don’t know what was. Meanwhile, my son was tucking his flashlight into his holster to ward off the dark as he took the compost out after dinner.

While Eliot was taking out the compost, we were watching the Winter Olympics, and automobile advertisements showing SUV’s perched atop glaciers. Did the advertisers know they were making a statement about our irreversible plunge toward global warming? My twelve-year old daughter Carly did not appreciate our family efforts to burn fewer fossil fuels. She was upset that we did not drive her the three blocks to school, no matter how much I ranted and raved about overweight students slouching in SUV’s, and the dangerous snarl of traffic in front of the school, where many students waited longer for rides than it would have taken them to walk home.

She was especially incensed when she asked for a ride to school on rainy days and we handed her an umbrella. Then I told her she would be walking the five blocks to her drum lesson with her cymbals, and she went ballistic.

“What? Why can’t you drive me like normal people! I can’t believe you’d make me walk in the rain. People are going to see me and think I’m neglected!” (Carrying fifty dollar cymbals and a cell phone.)

“Why don’t you try walking five blocks with heavy cymbals?” she asked.

“Good idea,” I said. “ I’ll walk the dog over at the end of your lesson and carry the cymbals home for you.”

When she arrived at her drum lesson she called me.

“Are you there yet?” I asked her.

“No! The street’s so flooded I’m still looking for a place to cross!”

I stood my ground. If I were battling just Carly, the opposition would have been formidable, but in my mind I was battling Dick Cheney and George W., and the oil lords were defenseless in the face of a mother on a mission. In my own backyard I was victorious.

The answer to Carly’s plea, “Why can’t you be like normal parents?” was simple; if that’s what normal was, I didn’t want to be.

Or as Eliot, fighting the insects on the Dark Side, said, “Let the forest be with you!”

Meet the Parents

2006-11-14T09:47:00.000-08:00

The story begins long before I met my prospective in-laws. Even before Blue formally introduced me to his parents, I met them at a cocktail party they hosted for a mutual friend of ours, the woman who ended up introducing me and Blue a year later.

I came to the cocktail party with a date, although I am sure he wasn’t invited. He was a surfer from Marin County, and we met body surfing at Red Rock Beach north of San Francisco. We traipsed around together on the rocky hillsides above Stinson Beach, the kind of thing I was prone to do.

Blue and our mutual friend Diane grew up next door to each other in Pasatiempo, a golf course nestled in the hills just north of the city of Santa Cruz. Blue’s childhood home backed up to a canyon through which ran the Carbonera Creek, where Diane and I went wading when we were nine years old. I had no idea when I waded in that creek that my future husband was growing up in the house above the canyon. I came to the cocktail party nearly twenty years later intent on finding the waterfall Diane and I had slid down in our underwear.

Blue likes to point out that he would never have dated me if he had met me before he did, and that night with my surfer friend is for him further proof. Clearly, if I brought Bill the surfer, I was not looking for a man. But would I not have wanted to make a positive impression on my future mother-in-law? She told me, when I asked her to recall for this story the first time she met me, that I was not dressed appropriately for a cocktail party. And it’s no wonder. Bill and I spent the evening traipsing around in the poison oak down by the creek as if we were there for a hike.

Still the connection precedes me, Blue, and Diane. Diane’s dad VKB, her uncle Lew, and Blue’s dad Jim grew up next door to each other on that same drive in Pasatiempo. My grandmother was a golfer who joined Pasatiempo, and her daughter (my mother) spent her summers at the Pasatiempo pool. She spent many an afternoon in a one-piece suit with red polkadots, swimming and lounging by the pool with Jim, VKB, and Lew. This was confirmed for me some forty-five years later when my mother was living in France, and I wrote her a letter in which I told her I was dating Blue Wilson and asked if she knew his father. The answer in her return letter was definitive: “Of course I know Jimmy Wilson!”

The truth is I don’t remember Blue introducing me to his parents. Blue says that it’s probably because they were so welcoming and easy going, and I am sure this is true. “We’re the Reception Committee, not the Selection Committee,” Blue’s mom likes to say. Certainly she hadn’t “selected” me the night she saw me trekking through her courtyard. If it surprised her a year later when her son, a cornflake-eating redhead who won the Citizenship award in sixth grade, brought me home, she didn’t show it. She accepted me into the family, and the meeting went smoothly, with not even a traumatic event to help cement it in my memory.

Blue remembers with much more clarity the night he met my parents, perhaps because the Tatums are bristlier than the Wilsons and prone toward lively, even combative, discussions at the dinner table. Plus he was subject to an interrogation like the sports test the boy in the movie Diner insists his fiance pass before he will marry her; my older brother Tim started a running commentary on the San Francisco Giants, hoping Blue would jump in. This was my brother’s back-handed way of finding out what kind of a boy I had brought home.

“1987 was when the Giants won the Pennant,” Blue says, hopping out of bed when I ask him to recall the first time he met my parents. He opens a drawer and pulls out a Giant’s t-shirt I bought him at the Championship game. He turns it over and reads the names on the back: “Will Clark, Kevin Mitchell, Jeffery Leonard. Chili Davis. Candyman. The Kruk.” That was before we got married and had kids, when I knew the stats and every player’s position and listened to entire Giants’ games on the radio.

After he aced the sports test with my brother, Blue had to face my dad. We were all waiting for Dad to come home from playing golf so we could start the cocktail hour. When he pulled into the driveway, he tooted the horn and Barb, bristly mother of the lot of us, said, “Finally!”

“I played two rounds,” Dad said, after he shook Blue’s hand, meaning he had played thirty-six holes of golf.

“Wow,” Blue said. “You must have had a fast cart.”

My father, who is passionate about golf and often compares it to the Holy Grail, responded with a lecture. Someday, he told Blue, hopefully not in the near future, he might have to use one, but in the meantime, golf carts were a beast of burden and the death of the caddie. This was mortifying for Blue, whose friends loaded the golf cart with a case of Budweiser.

It was a short cocktail hour with no hors d’houvres and a long dinner, Blue recalls. “The opposite of my family,” he says, “Where the cocktail hour is long with lots of hors d’houvres, and the meal is short because people eat instead of talking. I listened to your family take turns interrupting each other.”

Lively family dinners and a mother-in-law who loves unconditionally the women her sons have chosen, these are the rocks upon which Blue and I have built our marriage. Neither one of us doubts that it is the polarity in our respective genes that attracts us. Just as it brought together around the pool some sixty years ago a red-headed boy and a girl in a polka-dot bathing suit.

Blessed Soul

2006-10-31T09:22:00.000-08:00

I have heard there are two kinds of Labrador, the English and the American variety. The English variety, big-headed and stalky, is what Bud was. Our five-year-old lab Shoe is apparently the American variety, a field dog with smaller head and body and a more wiry temperament. Shoe was hard to get used to at first after Bud, but at five years old, Shoe is obedient, adorable, and perpetually happy. This story, however, is about his predecessor.

Bud was eleven weeks old when we moved together into my new house in West Berkeley. The house was sagging and badly in need of renovation, and I slept on a futon on the living room floor while I helped the contractors and painters jack up, support, and paint the house. Every morning at five, Buddy would rise and whimper until I too rose and took him out for a walk. And every morning as his head towered above the futon, I swear my pup’s skull had grown another two inches in the night.

Bud was five months old when he accompanied me on a solo trek in the Desolation Wilderness. His five-month old legs were so tired when we reached our first night’s destination that he curled up in the one level spot in our camp and did not move even when I pitched the tent on top of him. That night as I crawled into my sleeping bag, he stood outside the tent with his head inside the opening, waiting to be invited in. I patted the floor of the tent, and he curled up against my down bag.

The next day when we hiked farther into the wilderness, eventually lost the trail and wandered scared in the woods, arriving back in camp eighteen miles later in the near dark, I discovered the fundamental truth about our dogs: they will follow us to the ends of the earth or until their own deaths, whichever comes first.

Buddy’s pads had rubbed raw somewhere in those eighteen miles, but he limped with me to the end. Twelve years later he spent an entire Sunday afternoon running between two guys throwing a frisbee on the beach. (In all his years he never lost hope that with his short legs he might catch one.) The next morning, with acute tendonitus in a shoulder and knee, hip displasia, and unbeknownst to us, cancer in the lungs, Bud decided to trek back toward Capitola in hopes of rekindling his day on the beach. Despite having lost his cajones years earlier, Bud, his legs too short to jump a fence, dug his way under our gate to pursue his wanderings. That Monday morning he delivered the newspaper to the front porch, and seeing no action coming from the house, headed down the block to his favorite dumpster behind Tacos Morenos. Returning long enough to bury a package of tortillas in the back yard, he observed that there was still no action coming from the house and headed off toward Capitola.

When the SPCA picked him up in the afternoon, he was within blocks of his destination at Potbelly Beach. Blue drove to the SPCA to retrieve him. Blue arrived just as our dog was lapping from a bucket of cool water and accepting a biscuit from the SPCA employee who escorted him to his jail cell. We had hoped for a more stringent prison life for our escapee, but the only punishment went to us: a fat fine to bail him out.

That summer when we took our annual family vacation to Huntington Lake, I noticed what I had not in the chaos of home life, that Buddy had lost a lot of weight. His ribs were showing, and when we arrived in the mountains, he lay down outside the car and didn’t move. The altitude was too much for what turned out to be the mastosis covering his lungs, and I took him down the mountain to the vet in Auberry, where he was immediately more comfortable.

Monday morning the vet called me to confirm what she had suspected about his red blood cell count, and asked if I would consider putting him to sleep.

“If you’re sure he’s going to die,” I said.

“I’m sure,” she said.

It was a blessing to have a week in the mountains to say goodbye to a beloved friend. I drove back down to Auberry remembering the night Bud was a pup, and he slept in my lap on the drive back home across the Bay Bridge.

The vet told me dogs sometimes let out a moan or a sigh right before they die, but Bud in his typical fashion laid his head between his paws and waited while she injected him. I could still feel his heartbeat when she said he was gone. Too mellow to make a sound, he passed into death without a fight, and I stood outside his cage sobbing and calling his name, as if by calling up who he was I could bring him back.

Blessed souls die quietly, the breath just stopping, a Buddhist text says, and Buddy was blessed.

A year or two before he died, Buddy lost his hearing, and I learned to communicate without spoken language. When it was time for a walk I whistled, he lifted his head, I patted my side, and he came. Words of the Bible, the text I deem sacred, do not fit the spirit of the animal: spiritual in the unspoken.

A week after Buddy died, I packed his ashes in the bicycle bag and rode along the cool windy coast to Potbelly Beach, where my family was waiting for me. Together with some of his canine and human friends, we spilled his ashes into the ocean. "Spread" is the not the word for what the ashes really did. They bunched in the bag, blew back at me in the wind, and clung to my legs. So it was that Bud stayed with me, messy and gristly and sticking to the salt water on my legs.

When we remove a pup from the litter and bring him home, we become his pack. Our dogs are always there. Bud was such a regular part of the school in Oakland where I taught that the staff dedicated the yearbook to him. "In all humility," they wrote, "we dedicate this yearbook to Bud Tatum." They quoted Hermione Gingold, who said this:

“To call him a dog hardly seems to do him justice, though
in as much as he had four legs, a tail and barked I admit he was,
to all outward appearances. But to those of us who knew him
well, he was a perfect gentleman.”

An Amazing Teacher

2006-10-12T11:43:00.000-07:00

Blue and I learned first-hand that our nation's public schools were chalk full of teachers who performed miracles on a daily basis, often with only their students as witnesses. Both our children were blessed with good teachers, but Robin came along at a critical juncture in Eliot’s life.

If only the public school system could clone her. She was fun and unflappable. Her magic was based on a simple formula: treat disabled persons with love and dignity, while at the same time challenging them. Robin never let her kids fall back on their disabilities where they had the capacity to grow.

Robin turned on the music, handed her kids instruments, and sang with them. In Robin's classroom, music, art, cooking, doing dishes, and housekeeping were not activities that were set aside when these students entered the elementary grades. While in 2005 these activities were all but dead in our public school programs due to a lack of funding and our focus on standardized tests, they were precisely what activated kids' brains for math and reading. Robin's music, both literally and figuratively, primed her students for learning, and more importantly, made them happy, thriving human beings.

There were times when Eliot's medication wasn't working and he was disruptive, but instead of calling us and telling us to come pick up our son, Robin found a way to work around Eliot's difficulties. Being able to walk away from her classroom in the morning knowing she embraced my son with all of his challenges gave me immeasurable comfort. Despite the havoc her students could wreak, she carried on, and as a result, her students carried on. Robin's classroom was a safe haven for her students and their families.

Parents who are put off by the "extreme sports" atmosphere of the severely handicapped classroom could learn a great deal from a teacher like Robin. She set aside any fears she may have had of communicating with a severely autistic child, and accomplished amazing feats, namely figuring out how to get through to her students.

"I love my new school," Eliot said shortly after joining Robin's classroom. And it's no wonder. We loved Robin too.

After a year and a half in Eliot’s classroom, Robin moved back to San Diego to be close to her family, and her brother who was having a lung transplant. We were crushed to see her go, but grateful she had come into our lives. My faith had taught me that, if she was leaving, there must have been even greater things in store for Eliot.

On Robin’s second to last day in the classroom, Eliot ran away from her, and when another adult went after him, he said he wanted only Robin to chase him.

Watching him run with one arm bent, one arm flailing, and legs whipping like eggbeaters, Robin had a hard time being angry. When she caught up with him she said, “This is not goodbye. We can email each other. And I’ll see you when you come to San Diego this summer.”

That night I showed him the pictures of Robin in action, which I had taken and put in a book as a gift for her. He looked at them for a long time and said, “I want to keep her.”

He also said, “I don’t want to say goodbye to her.”

And, “She fine! She has to stay here and enjoy!”

He spent the rest of the night looking at the pictures. I believe he was saying goodbye.

But she was right. It wasn’t goodbye. We see Robin every summer when she visits us or we visit her. Robin and I keep in regular touch, and as of this year, Eliot has a wonderful new teacher. Best of all, last Spring I nominated Robin for the San Andreas Regional Center’s Teacher of the Year award, and she won. Next weekend she comes up to Northern California, with her husband and grown children, to accept her award. It is good to see a teacher publicly acknowledged for the work she does, so much of the time with no audience but her students bouncing around the room.

Surfing and Massage

2006-10-02T15:19:00.000-07:00

Tortilla chips and salsa fresca. Margaritas and salt. Surfing and a massage. These are for me delicious pairings. If all six of these occur in the span of one day, it’s a heavenly experience. But if you had told me two years ago that I would find my masseuse at church I would not have believed you.

I had been treating myself to a massage once a month since I had my babies, until they turned four and seven years old and my beloved masseuese moved to the East Coast. That was when I found out Jeannie was a masseuse. But mentally I could not make the transition from sitting with her on a couch covered in Scotch Presbyterian plaid while the Deacons served tea, to sprawling naked under her hands on a massage table.

Then one day in church she gave me a hug. This quiet unassuming woman who could slip unnoticed from the room hugged like a linebacker. Played fiddle in a Celtic band on Sunday morning as if she were at an Irish wedding. And belted out hymns in the choir as if her singing voice bore no relation to the one we strained to hear when she made an announcement from the pulpit. Suddenly I saw this woman for who she was and I drew one conclusion: deep tissue massage.

The first time she gave me a massage I had to ask her to let up.

Fridays are the days I treat myself. I surf whenever possible on Fridays. I book my massage on Fridays. The best Fridays are the ones where I do both.

Surfing is a physical and spiritual experience that surpasses all others. Surfing requires physical strength. It requires courage and humility, both the ability to take on the hazards inherent in the ocean and the acknowledgment than it is more powerful than you are. Surfing is meditation. It is an activity that allows you to be utterly consumed in the moment. When you are sitting in the lineup, you are focused on the next wave and nothing else.

Surfing is like making love. The more days you surf the more you want to. It is a total sensory experience, where all the nerve endings are awakened and soothed when they are immersed in water. And climbing into bed after surfing, the body is satiated and relaxed and lulled into sleep. Surfing and massage are a perfect combination.

One Friday in June, I drove up the coast from Santa Cruz and surfed a well-known “secret” spot. It turned out to be a good day, with shoulder high sets at about five minute intervals. But when I reached for my wetsuit I realized I had left it at home.

Surfing the Pacific Ocean on Northern California’s coast almost certainly requires a wetsuit. Some souls brave it in shorts or a bikini, but they don’t last an hour. And conditions are windier, colder, and rougher north of Santa Cruz than they are in town. I scoured my van for every piece of warmth, and ended up in the water in a blistering wind, wearing a pair of board shorts, a polar rash guard, hood, and booties. To paddle out there in so little neoprene I had to have been out of mind.

At first I stayed warm catching waves, but the when wind kicked up even stronger and knocked down the waves, I froze. After ten minutes of sitting, I knew if I didn’t catch a wave right away I would be too stiff to paddle. It wouldn’t take long to become hypothermic in those waters. I paddled toward the rocks and caught one inside to the beach.

The sun-warmed sand protected from the wind by a stand of rocks would have thawed me out in no time, but I had a massage to get to. I kept my hood on as I walked back to the van.

Jeannie’s massages were so heavenly I had recently started forking out the extra money for an additional half hour. An hour massage was not long enough. A one and a half hour full body massage was perfect; it left you wanting more but feeling good and relaxed. Relaxed like jelly. Relaxed like driving home you were a hazard on the road.

When I arrived at Jeannie’s house after surfing up the coast in a pair of board shorts, she turned on the heater and gave me a blanket. After a good while I warmed up, except for my “extremities.” Customarily after I have been surfing, she warms towels on the space heater and wraps them around my feet. On this particular day she put the warm towels on my buns.

I told Jeannie right then that she was already the world’s best masseuse, but when she ccreated the bun warmers, she became royalty in my eyes.

Glimpses of Green and a Broken Nose

2006-09-19T10:37:00.000-07:00

Everything about the house where I grew up with five brothers and sisters was tall: the four stories of steps, the high ceilings, the pointed roof. We lived two blocks from San Francisco’s Presidio, where the U.S. Army had planted eucalyptus and cypress trees on what were once dunes and marshland. I didn’t know about the dunes when I grew up, only that on the other side of a stone wall was a world where many days we lost ourselves in a tangle of trails, woods, and playground.

We used to climb fire escape from the deck on the second floor, pulling ourselves to the top of the roof, where we had a view of the Presidio and the line of roofs leading up to it. I have always sought these views as a means of rejuvenation from urban life. After I moved to Santa Cruz, it was the ocean that revived me from the life we live near the corner of a busy intersection. And once she turned eleven, when I loaded my surfboard into the van, Carly was often with me.

When she was still training for her black belt in Tae Kwon Do, Carly signed up for a tournament in San Francisco. It would be the last time we stayed at my childhood home before my parents sold it and moved to a warmer town nearby. I strapped our boards to the car so we could surf a spot up the coast on our way to the city. But the waves were big for Carly and she got scared. I paddled her back in before catching a quick unproductive session myself. As we walked back to the van, I told her that frustrating days where you did nothing but paddle made you a better surfer, that even the days without a wave were good.

The next day at her tournament, she missed the gold medal by a tenth of a point and spent the rest of the day waiting to spar. Finally at the end of the day she and her opponent took the ring, heavily padded. Not a minute into the match, her opponent threw a roundhouse kick, going for the three point head shot, and kicked Carly in the nose. Carly went down.

We pulled her from the ring, carried her to the tournament doctor, and applied ice. She was crying, but her nose wasn’t broken. I drove her back to my parents’ house, rented a movie, and ordered Chinese takeout.

While Carly was watching the movie, I opened the door to the deck on the second floor of my childhood home and looked up at the sky. The fire escape beckoned. I climbed onto the ledge I had always used to reach the first rung, but I had trouble pulling myself up to the second rung, even though I was probably stronger now from surfing. I pulled myself up on the second try, hands stinging, stocking feet wrapped painfully around the metal rungs. We used to climb onto the shed roof of the dormer window from there and hoist ourselves up to the top of the gable roof, but that night standing on the fire escape in my stocking feet, even the shed roof looked too risky. I would have to be satisfied with peering over the fences into the neighbors’ yards.

As I climbed back down the fire escape, it occurred to me that my parents were some of the last people I knew left on the block. At one time we had known more than half the families on both sides of the street. Some had since died, but most had moved away. A new generation of families was moving in, and my parents were moving on to a warmer climate. I lowered myself from the fire escape and went back inside.

When I tucked Carly into bed that night she said, “Why did the tournament have to end that way.”

I almost launched into a lecture about how the endings we don’t anticipate are the ones that make us stronger. But I’d already given that speech the day before walking up the beach with our surfboards. Besides, to her getting kicked in the nose was all there was. That was the lesson, and I would learn it from my daughter. The now was all there was, and it was more than enough.

Dogtown and Z Boys

2006-08-30T13:33:00.000-07:00

It’s hard not to feel foolish after taking a spill when you are a forty-two year old mother skateboarding in front of your house. Add to this the fact that you live on a busy street where inevitably someone you know drives by as your board slides out from under you and bounces off the tire of a passing car. Your only saving grace is the armor covering your extremities: elbow pads, gloves, and a helmet firmly strapped to the noggin some may feel no longer possesses much sense. Having been brought down a notch by your spectacular spill, you can only nod when your ten year old daughter rolls up on skateboard to ask if you are okay. But when all is said and done you feel proud, because how many forty-two year old mothers do you know who skateboard? The fact is there are more than you think.

I was fifteen when I took my first spill on a skateboard, and the culprit was gravelly terrain on a road near San Francisco’s Julius Kahn Park that took a chunk out of my elbow. It was the road that betrayed me, not the equipment, which was the finest the ‘70’s had to offer, a Santa Cruz fiberglass board with sticky orange wheels that gripped the pavement and bore the nickname “o.j.’s.” I wore pads and gloves, and normally sought out the smooth surfaces of newly paved streets. I had gotten good enough at turns to negotiate the sidewalks of San Francisco’s steeper hills. I hung out with boys because I was the only girl I knew who skated.

In 2002 surfer/skater Stacy Peralta produced and directed “Dogtown and Z Boys,” the movie about the birth of pool skating in a gritty section of Santa Monica in the 70’s. I was one of the first in line to see it, and my only disappointment (which lingered after I saw the fictional version, “Lords of Dogtown”) was that there was so little footage of Peggy Oki, the one girl on the Z Boys’ skateboard team. Was she shy about being in front of the camera? Or was Stacy Peralta (in my estimation a brilliant director) too consumed in the story of his own Z Boyhood to pay much attention to what was happening to the few girls who hit the pavement with their boards in the 70’s?

In “Dogtown and Z Boys,” Peralta mixed footage of the Z Boys in the ‘70’s with interviews of team members as adults. The former team members claimed to be imitating the style of one surfer whose moves were particularly innovative; when a skater carved turns low to the ground, planting a hand on the pavement and pivoting on his hand, he was imitating the surfer who swept a hand through the wave as he carved a turn across its face. But planting a hand on the pavement when arcing a turn is intuitive, because in 1976 I was doing just that on the hills of San Francisco, and I had never been on a surfboard.

I surfed my first wave at thirty-seven, and like most who try it I fell in love with it. At that point I had all but abandoned skateboarding. But not long after I started surfing, when the Pacific coast was cursed with flat summer conditions, I couldn’t resist the urge to hop on my old Santa Cruz skateboard, which my kids were using to roll up and down the sidewalk on their bellies. It felt good, and it wasn’t long before I bought myself a Sector Nine, a longboard with a flexible deck. The underside of the deck was covered in a photograph of perfect peeling waves, and it had wide trucks that cranked out turns. After my purchase I looked for any excuse to hop on the board, strapping my son Eliot, who was three at the time, into the jogging stroller, and pushing him around town on errands.

I remember the concrete gully, long since overgrown with weeds, a sort of half pipe off a drain on Highway One near San Andreas Road in Santa Cruz, which I visited on weekends in high school. But these days I have no interest in skate parks or ramps. Instead, I seek out the newly paved surfaces (albeit flatter ones) and turn up and down the curves of people’s driveways as if I were still a renegade high school kid. As my body gets less agile and the turns stiffer, I skate less, and the day will come when I give it up altogether. Then I will be all the more grateful for the ocean.

My daughter Carly uses the old Santa Cruz skateboard now, as well as the Gravity board we bought her a few years ago. At thirteen she surfs the point breaks with me, and recently rode tandem with the surf- dog son of a shaper in San Onofre. Despite its PG-13 rating, she watched “Dogtown and Z Boys” a couple of years ago.

My friend Nana was also first in line to see “Dogtown and Z Boys.” She went with me, because neither of our men had no interest in seeing a movie about skateboarding. In 1976 Nana was the only girl she knew skateboarding the streets of Los Gatos. As we walked home from the movie, Nana and I agreed we were glad we had found each other. I hope Peggy Oki has her own surfing and skating sister, or better yet, a whole posse of ‘em.

Kid Quest Day with Ride-a-Wave

2006-07-19T11:28:00.000-07:00

I met Nicole and Colleen when they were the teacher’s aide and occupational therapist for the Special Day class my son Eliot attended. A year later they started Kid Quest, which provides a variety of after-school and summer classes for children with special needs. Kid Quest is a dream come true for the parent of a child like Eliot. How many times has such a parent searched for a cooking class or a music class that would accommodate a quirky kid who showed a passion for cooking and music, hiking and rock climbing, or art and swimming? I was both ecstatic and relieved to enroll Eliot in Kid Quest.

Kid Quest falls under the umbrella of an equally heroic organization called Balance for Kids, which provides tuition for classes through the government-funded San Andreas Regional Center. In a slow economy and less-than-perfect public schools, it is comforting to know that youth of all abilities are still being served by our community. Our schools and community centers are full of people who --in what all too often is an uphill battle-- give their time and energy to serve our children. The volunteers for Santa Cruz’s Ride-a-Wave program are no exception.

Following on the heels of Foster Anderson’s Shared Adventures, a beach day for disabled people of all ages, Ride-a-Wave hosts smaller beach events for disabled youth. Sponsored by the Santa Clara City Fire Fighters, Ride-a-Wave is made up of fire fighters, paramedics, surfers, and many others dedicated to making this day at the beach a special event for youth with disabilities.

For many years I did not take advantage of the opportunity Eliot had to attend these beach days. He hated crowds and was afraid of the ocean, and contrary to my own nature, I didn’t push it. We were in San Diego on a church youth surf trip when I first witnessed such a beach day. Former champion longboard surfer Israel Paskowitz and his wife Danielle started Surfers Healing after Israel paddled out one day with his autistic son Isaiah. Being in the ocean, especially catching waves on a tandem board with his dad, did more to calm Isaiah’s sensory overload than anything else.

I had the good fortune to meet the Paskowitzes on the beach that day, and I talked with Israel.

“I’ve been waiting for Eliot to be ready,” I said. “He’s afraid.”

“We have kids who scream and cry all the way out there,” Israel said, ” but once they catch their first wave, they’re all smiles.”

I was in the water when the surfers paddled out with the kids. Each volunteer paddled a child on a twelve foot board, and when he caught a wave he pulled the child to his feet, holding the back of the kid’s life jacket. If a child couldn’t stand, there were all kinds of adjustments that could be made. I saw more kids smiling than crying.

The following Spring when the invitation came from Balance for Kids for a day with Ride-a-Wave, I signed up for Eliot. I did not think he would voluntarily surf. I imagined they would have to carry him out. But I knew once he caught a wave he would love it.

The morning of the event we were greeted at Cowell’s Beach by typical summer weather: fog in the morning followed by sunshine, and the additional bonus of a mild swell delivering two to three foot waves. Balance for Kids assigned two “beach buddies” to each child. Eliot’s beach buddies were Mary and Dylan.

Ride-a-Wave offered kayaking, boogy boarding, and surfing to all the children that day. I wanted Eliot to surf. When it was his turn, I carried him out to the surfers waiting for him just beyond the break, but he refused to get on the board. I had to carry him back in and put him at the bottom of the rotation. The second time he again refused to get on the board. I carried him back in with a mounting sense of disappointment. I felt the opportunity was before us and we needed to seize it. I was impatient. I was, as parents usually are in a high pressure situation with their offspring, too emotionally invested.

I left him with his buddies Mary and Dylan, and walked to the other end of the beach to collect myself. I was glad my sunglasses and hat hid the fact that I was crying on a perfectly lovely day. After a while I walked back down the beach to where Eliot was playing in the water. “I want to go on the surfboard with the chair,” he said.

The board with the chair was for kids whose physical disabilities made sitting easier than lying down. But Jonathon Steinberg, who was in charge of making sure every kid who wanted to surf had the chance, said, “He can go out on the board with the chair.”

So it was that ten minutes later my son walked down the beach holding volunteer Tim Loomis’s hand. No screaming or crying, no needing to be picked up and carried into the water as I had envisioned. When it was time for Tim, who was tall with an open, friendly face, to carry him into the water, Eliot let go of his hand and lay back in his arms, his legs relaxed and swinging against Tim’s side. No monkey legs wrapped around my waist and clinging for life.

Lesson number one hundred and one for Mom. Once again Eliot would do it his way. He would do it in his own time, and he would do it willingly before I expected. Next year, I told Mary and Dylan and Jonathon, I will leave Eliot with his beach buddies and paddle into the surf to help other kids catch their first wave. Or their second or third.

I had let myself forget how Eliot approached the ocean. When he was a baby he cried if we went anywhere near the beach. The sand hurt his feet, and from his perspective the waves were tsunamis. By the time he was three he played happily in the sand by the water, and when he was seven he played in the ocean up to his knees. I taught him to swim, but knowing his arms were not as strong as his legs, I did not push ocean swimming in the wild surf. I knew he had all his life to master ocean swimming. I had let myself forget he had all his life to fall in love with surfing too.

I walked down the beach to get closer to where Mike Gerhardt had paddled out with Eliot in the chair. I spotted the chair atop the board, bobbing on the waves. Then I saw Mike turn around and paddle into a wave that peeled toward the wharf. I started to cry, but this time out of happiness. There, enthroned like King Kaumuali’I, was my boy, sliding down the face of a glorious wave.

When the wave finally died, they bobbed for a moment in the surf. Then Mike turned the board around and paddled back out. I knew exactly what Eliot had said.

“Let’s do that again.”

The Croup

2006-06-27T09:09:00.000-07:00

The first time Eliot rode his bike without training wheels, he got to pick out a new toy, and he chose Buzz Lightyear from the movie Toy Story. Buzz is a robust guy who wears a space suit and says, “To Infinity and Beyond!” Once he acquired Buzz, and his cowboy sheriff friend Woody, Eliot abandoned his other toys. Like the boy in the movie, he took Woody and Buzz with him everywhere. He was fascinated by the lasers Buzz could shoot from his belt, and by the fact that, if the shield were lifted on Buzz’s space helmet, he would run out of oxygen.

Not long into the school year, Eliot caught a cold, and I kept him home for a few days. Saturday morning when I was getting ready to go surfing, I heard him cough. I didn’t think much about it, except that it sounded as if his cold were getting worse. Later in the morning Carly heard Eliot coughing and went in to check on him. That was when she called Blue and they took Eliot to Urgent Care. I have saved the details of that event for Carly’s version of the story below.

The doctor at Urgent Care recognized Eliot’s cough as a symptom of the Croup. She gave Eliot a shot of steroids to open the windpipe, and strapped a mask on his face to get him the oxygen he needed. Once the windpipe opened, Eliot, who had been fighting for his breath, fell asleep in exhaustion, and they kept him there resting.

By the time I arrived, Eliot was fully awake and revved up from the steroids. We took him home, fed him, and put him in front of a movie to calm him down. Then we launched into the day’s chores. Blue went to work for a couple of hours, and I started on some work in the garden. Blue came home, loaded the truck with debris from the yard, and took Carly, and Eliot, who was still revved up, for a dump run. I took a shower and made a cake for my sister Shelley’s birthday. The notes, which Blue had taken at the doctor’s and which we were to discuss, sat on the kitchen counter.

That night we sent Carly out for a bite to eat with the sitter, and took Eliot with us to my parents’ house at the beach, where we put him to bed and had a birthday dinner with Shelley. We opened the window to let in the cold night air (the best thing for keeping the windpipe open) and checked on him several times. There was never another incident with his breathing.

Monday morning I took Eliot to the doctor as per Blue’s written instructions. As I sat with him waiting for Dr. Griger, I realized Blue and I had never interfaced about the two hours he and Carly spent in Urgent Care with Eliot. Worse than not being able to properly answer Dr. Griger’s questions, I had brushed aside what had been for Carly, Blue, and Eliot a traumatic event.

Fortunately Cindy, Dr. Griger’s assistant, whisked in with Eliot’s file and a copy of the doctor’s notes from Saturday. Dr. Griger and I talked at length, she checked Eliot and said his lungs were clear, and we left the office. I called Blue from the parking lot.

“I’m sorry,” I said. What shocked me most was how easy it was to get caught up in the everyday chaos and lose sight of what was important. It was possible that the next time something like this happened I would miss the signs again. It made me feel heavy and sad.

All in all Eliot missed a week of school, and every day he watched Toy Story II. In that movie there is a scene where Woody lifts the shield on the space helmet of “the wrong Buzz Lightyear,” and Buzz is groping for breath. Now Eliot could identify with his hero.

Below is Carly’s version, which she wrote for an autobiographical assignment in sixth grade. We still talk about the time Carly saved Eliot’s life. I have added her story just as she wrote it.

Cough, cough, cough….I could hear my brother coughing. I got out of bed and went to check on him. His face was purple the color of my pajamas. He was coughing a lot. He said his throat was hurting, but I couldn’t really understand him because his cough made him not be able to breathe or talk. “Dad,” I called from downstairs, “Eliot is coughing and he can’t breathe.” But my dad just said he was fine. I ran upstairs and told him that I was serious. My dad had just gotten out of bed, but he ran downstairs. The next thing I knew my dad said, “Get dressed, we’re going to Urgent Care.”

On our way to the doctor Eliot was in tears, and my dad and I were very nervous at the same time. My mom had no clue what was going on because she was out surfing and having a great time.

When we got to the doctor they put us in immediately. The doctor said that my brother was going to be fine. We were in relief, but I was still scared. The doctor was putting some air in my brother. It was just a tube with what looked like steam coming out of it. They put it near my brother’s mouth. My brother threw up a few times. The only good part about this day was that I got to have pop tarts and chips from the vending machine.

When I walked back into the room, my brother was sound asleep. Thirty minutes later he woke up. He was fine! He had a little cough but that’s all.

This experience made me and my dad very worried, and for my brother it was really painful. I learned that I love and care about my brother a lot and I hope it never happens again.

Riding with Eliot

2006-06-12T10:39:00.000-07:00

The greatest thing Blue and I did for our six-year old son wasn’t the special education classes, the occupational or speech therapy. It wasn’t the wheat and dairy free diet or the gum stimulating exercises. It was the Trailbike we bought that attached to the back of mine so Eliot and I could pedal the streets together.

There was the private occupational therapy where Eliot could not attend, or chose not to follow directions, until Miranda adopted an approach whereby she followed Eliot’s lead. She developed sequences where fine motor activities like cutting with scissors, which he disliked because they were difficult, were sandwiched between the gross motor activtites like slide and trampoline, which he loved. She said he couldn’t jump until he learned to unlock his knees. It took having a child like Eliot for me to see that bending the knees was an intrinsic part of jumping and landing.

There were exercises like crawling through tunnels, and rolling Eliot into a blanket until he was wrapped tightly like a burrito, which Miranda used to ground and center Eliot. There was the occupational and speech therapy at school. Cheryl’s exercises, coaxing Eliot’s tongue to places in the mouth his did not naturally go, were one of the reasons for his remarkable progress in speech.

But perhaps our single greatest triumph as parents of a child with motor delays was the trailbike we bought when he was six. We were inspired by Blue’s brother Tom and his wife Connie who are road-bike warriors. Every morning at 5:30 Tommy rides his bike to work in Harvey West Park. He rides on winter mornings when it's dark and the temperatures fall below freezing. For downpours, he and Connie wear raincoats and yellow rain pants on their bikes. After dark they turn on mega battery-powered lights. Connie rides regularly from Santa Cruz to Capitola on errands.

When their daughters Margaret and Abbey were little, Tom and Connie towed them behind the bicycle, two bobbing helmets in a trailer. After Margaret and Abbey (who have since graduated from college) grew out of the trailer, I acquired it. It held Carly and Eliot, then until he got too heavy, just Eliot.

Although I drove to Capitola, and when it rained I took the car, we used bikes as much as we could to get around town. It beat getting in the car and sitting in what had become intolerable traffic. But one day I decided I had towed Eliot up my last hill. His weight pulling the trailer back downhill as I pedaled up had become unbearable. I went to the Bicycle Trip and bought a bike that attached to the back of mine. It had a rear wheel, seat, and handlebars, and when Eliot pedaled it turned the back wheel.

In preschool, Eliot pushed his bike with his feet on the ground. This combatted his gravitational insecurity and allowed him to go fast. By kindergarten he was pushing the pedals 180 degrees clockwise, then half a turn counter-clockwise. The Trail Bike helped Eliot balance and master the art of pedaling. Best of all, when he was on the Trail Bike, he helped me up the hills.

Only once the Trailbike failed us. Or rather I failed the Trailbike. I had ridden many times to Potbelly Beach from our house, with and without the kids, when Eliot and I set off one recent Sunday afternoon. We made it to within a couple of miles when we had a flat tire. I had a cell phone but knew Blue and my parents didn't have their cell phones on. The walls of the tire were shredded which is what caused the flat. A bicycle pump might have gotten us to Potbelly Beach, but I wasn’t carrying one, and we were far from a gas station. So we got off the bike and walked.

We walked west on the railroad tracks from Capitola Village to the next beach. Halfway there, Eliot, who was wearing shoes but no socks, had a blister on his heel. I took off my sock and put it on him. He limped down the railroad tracks. Another quarter mile and Eliot had a blister on the other heel. I took off the other sock and put it on him. Then he climbed onto the bike and I walked him. But the railroad tracks were bumpy, and after a few bounces his eyes got wide. “Woah,” he said, and climbed off the bike, deciding he preferred the pain of blisters.

Approaching the campground above New Brighton Beach, we found a steep path dropping down to the road. Craving smooth pavement, we took the path. There was a six-inch opening between masses of poison oak. I carried Eliot down first, then the bike. It occurred to me that in my younger days I would have gone crashing through the brush in order to get it over with. At forty-six I maneuvered down slowly, trying to maintain control of the bike on a steep and slippery incline. It’s amazing I didn’t end up in the brush anyway. Approaching middle age we may be holding down the brakes with our hands, but we still don’t have much control.

Once we were on the smooth pavement, Eliot climbed on the bike again and I pulled. When we reached the campground, we left the bike with the host and headed for the beach trail. I hadn’t been on this trail since I was a kid exploring the woods above Potbelly Beach. An Indian family was walking up, a mom in a sari holding a beach umbrella, a little boy running behind her, then his dad holding a plastic shovel and bucket.

The trail dropped down into the cove where the sun sparkled on a blue-green ocean, and waves from a south swell fanned their white water across the sand. We headed for the shore, where we took off our shoes and waded to wash away the poison oak. Growing up exploring the woods above the beach, we had always plunged in the ocean first thing upon our return, letting the salt water wash the poison oak oil from our skin.

We walked along the shore to Potbelly Beach, where Blue and Carly were relieved to see us. Of course they had worried. A ride that normally took an hour had taken two and a half. But Eliot had never complained, not about blisters or poison oak or the male anatomy on bumpy tracks.

The next day on our way to school, we saw the AIDS Ride cyclists leaving Santa Cruz. Every year in June they ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles to raise awareness and funds for AIDS research. I explained to Eliot who the bicyclists were and why we were waving. He wanted to join. I knew from our hikes and walks, and from our misadventure the day before, that some day he would do it. He would hike or cycle five or six hundred miles in the name of a cause, and he would never complain.

So it was that a misadventure on the Trailbike with my son allowed me a glimpse of his future.

Summer Ritual

2006-05-30T11:32:00.000-07:00

When I was growing up, our parents took us to the Boardwalk at night. I remember the excitement that consumed me as we waited for the day to pass. And as I remember it, the anticipation wasn’t overblown; the Boardwalk truly delivered.

As an adult, I found it loud and overstimulating, and riding the Giant Dipper gave me a headache. But I took vicarious pleasure from watching my daughter take the ride-induced adrenaline high to new levels, levels to which I had never aspired.

When she was nine, Carly headed for the seats at the very back of the Pirate Ship, where it rocked to a complete vertical. She held her hands up high over her head, even when the ship dropped down and terror momentarily crossed her face. Standing under the Pirate Ship, watching my daughter’s face change from surprise to fear to sheer happiness, was as much a pleasure as were the twilight evenings of my childhood, when I had walked hand in hand with my dad and my brother Timothy won me a china cat at a game booth.

Eliot’s approach to the Boardwalk was different; his required acute observation and, like most everything else he did, lots of time. He spent the summer of his seventh year carrying around a photograph of Carly and her friend Jessica on the Giant Dipper. Only because he knew he was not tall enough, he kept saying (with mischief in his eyes, because until he met the height requirement he knew we couldn’t call him on it) “I want to go on the Big Dipper.”

At seven, he rejected the kiddy rides and went straight for the Log Ride, where he strolled confidently through the line. But he yelled, “Get me out!” as soon as our log boat reached the top and plunged into the snaking trough of water high above the beach. When it was over, he parked himself safely at the bottom of the ride and laughed at each boat as it careened down the final drop.

After that he took my hand and led me to the roller coaster. Although it was a roller coaster for little people, it went fast and had plenty of dips and turns. He waited patiently in a long line. There was no pulling on my arm or devious behavior. When finally it was our turn we climbed on, and the roller coaster started its wild ride.

I was acutely aware of the air underneath us, how far we were off the ground, the dizzying effects of the turns; while riding with my son who was gravitationally insecure, I was totally empathetic. He cried out and grabbed my arm, but when the ride was over he laughed as if it was the greatest thing he’d ever done. The next year he steered clear of the Log Ride and the Little Dipper and went back to the kiddy rides.

For most of us, the Boardwalk was about sugar and adrenaline, anticipation and fulfillment. It was about riding high under a sky full of stars. But for Eliot it was about staying on the ground. Both literally and figuratively. It was about learning to wait in line, trying new things, figuring out what you liked and didn’t like. It was about learning to say No Thanks to the Log Ride, and Yes Please to the Giant Dipper where you didn’t stand a chance of being allowed on. It was about vicarious pleasure and saving face.

I had always thought Eliot stared at the picture of Jessica on the Big Dipper because he was in love with her, her deep brown eyes and her three years up on him. But that wasn’t it. Carrying that picture was his own private initiation into the world as he knew it. It was his way of figuring out where he fit in.

On the Bus

2006-05-15T08:55:00.000-07:00

Most people were still asleep when Lisa Mohary started her day. She got up at four forty-four a.m., "angel time,” as she called it. That way she could have a cup of coffee in peace and quiet before heading out to pick up a bus full of kids.

Lisa was not the only driver with early morning duty. When her Toyota Camry with Kentucky plates pulled into the parking lot at Santa Cruz City Schools, the other drivers were already climbing into their buses for the morning safety check.

A smattering of clouds on the horizon turned bright pink as the sun rose behind them. The day had not even begun, but Lisa teared up as she tried to describe what her job meant to her. The students she transported were, for the most part, physically or learning disabled.

"I can't put it into words," she said, as she started her morning safety check. "A lot of people think, 'They're just bus drivers, don’t get behind them, they'll cut you off,' but every kid is my own. It makes me cry from happiness that I get to spend time with them."

“Can’t you just drive him to school?” my husband Blue asked apprehensively the first time little yellow school bus pulled up in front of our house. But Eliot loved the bus, and I loved his drivers. Lisa was Eliot’s driver for three years. One hundred percent Hungarian blood, she had the long straight hair of a child of the sixties, and the easy smile of a woman who rolled with the punches.

Lisa’s safety inspection took fifteen minutes. She lifted the hood and checked the oil, then walked around the outside of the bus checking her tires, her stop sign and splashguards. She climbed back in the bus, opened, closed, and locked the emergency doors, checked and covered the wheelchair lift. Then she drove the bus to the front of the lot to test the brakes, parked, and greeted her friend Tony the Irrigation Specialist. Dressed in shorts and work boots, he poured her a cup of espresso from a stainless steel thermos. This too was part of her morning ritual. On her way to her mailbox, she greeted her boss, the electrician, a maintenance worker, and her fellow drivers.

Lisa headed back out to her bus, pulled into traffic on Mission Street, and drove toward the East side for her first pick-up. She waved to a man she didn’t know standing at a metro bus stop.

Her first stop was an apartment complex off of Ocean Street by the river levee. She honked the horn to the tune of “Shave and a haircut,” her trademark beep. Several students emerged from the apartments and boarded the bus.

By the time Lisa pulled up in front of our house at ten minutes to eight, the bus was full. Most mornings as I escorted Eliot onto the bus, our local station, KPig in Freedom, California, was playing on her radio, Tom Waits with his gravely voice, or Emmy Lou Harris belting out some soulful, earthy tune. "Good morning, Mama Tory," she would say.

On the bus with Eliot was a hodgepodge of kids, including the group of first through third graders who made up his class at De Laveaga School. There was Carla,* a dark eyed beauty with a long braid down her back and a penchant for mischief. There was Brittany, who loudly announced all infractions to Lisa while her classmates tried to hide behind the wall of seats. There was Yesenia, and there was Cecilia, who had open heart surgery as an infant and had grown only a little bit. Yesenia’s giant palm encircled her tiny hand.

Taller and more mature than her bus mates, Yesenia told her driver, "Turn here, you need to pick up Juan." Lisa called Yesenia her "guide," and dropped her off last so they could talk.

When Yesenia got off the bus, Lisa told her she loved her. Yesenia always said "I love you" back. This was Lisa’s intent. She called it resonance, or love that spread like sound waves.

After she dropped Eliot and his crew at De Laveaga, Lisa headed to Bayview School for what she called her “Westside sweep.” Then she headed back down Mission Street. At two o’clock she would trace the same route she followed in the morning, only backwards. The kids were “still asleep” in the morning, but in the afternoon they would be loud and cranky. Arguments would break out, and my son would call Juan, who was nine, “Baby,” over and over until Juan couldn’t stand it and screamed for Eliot to stop. But Eliot would not stop. Then Lisa would get on her radio and call me, letting me know she was dropping off Eliot first. She had been driving my boy since he was three, none worse for the wear although Eliot could be challenging. “Everyone deserves equal respect,” she said.

“We are family,” she sang, when tensions rose and her passengers threatened mutiny. When she’d been off for a few days, she said, she had to mold them into family again.

Next to her mirror on the bus, she had taped a picture of her daughter’s fifteen-month old girl, and next to that was the picture of Eliot we had given her. Her own life was slowly moving toward Kentucky, where she and her boyfriend owned a house, and where they could be close to her daughter in Nashville. She grew up “off the turnpike” in New Jersey, but she felt more of an affinity with Kentucky.

When Eliot was in preschool, she played kids’ tapes on the bus and sang along with him. One day my neighbor heard a grown voice singing, "Quack, quack quack!" and looked up to see the little yellow bus rounding the corner. There in the driver’s seat with the window wide open was Lisa, singing loudly to The Farmer and the Dell.

When Eliot was obsessed with boats, she drove him past the yacht harbor after she picked him up from his preschool. Once he started going to school closer to home, she drove past an old boat on a trailer far from the ocean.

"I tell him I'm going to take him on that boat some day if the water comes high enough,” she said. The kids knew the routine, and when they passed it they’d say, “There's the old boat.”

After she moved I would miss her. I would miss her ability to embrace all of our children, the ones who disrupted the classroom and confounded their teachers.

"Every kid that comes in my circle," she told me, " is there for a reason. I drove this one kid who wore a bee-keeping outfit with rubber gloves. No one else could handle him but I loved him. He played heavy metal on his boom box. I try to let my kids be themselves. We’re just a melting pot driving down the road. “

“I'll drive anybody," she said. "I'll drive the undrivable, and we'll have a good time."

*(The names of Eliot's busmates are fictional.)

Tahoe Adaptive Ski Program

2006-05-01T11:35:00.000-07:00

It was by chance that we stumbled upon the Tahoe Adaptive Ski Program at Alpine Meadows. We had been taking our son Eliot to ski school at a different resort, where the head of the program went out of her way to line us up with her best instructors. Still, Eliot spent the greater part of the expensive lessons inside drinking hot chocolate.

I was bemoaning this fact to my friend Scott, a mogul hoppin’ skier with a disabled son of his own, when he told me about the Tahoe Adaptive Ski Program where he had just skied in a benefit race. Scott didn’t say so, but I guessed part of his motivation for skiing the race was that his son Travis, who was born with Stickler’s Syndrome, had died when he was seven years old.

Tahoe Adaptive Ski Program is designed for skiers of all ages with all kinds of abilities, from veteran skiers who have suffered strokes, to children with severe physical or mental disabilities. Often the lessons are booked by Special Day Classes like the one we saw our first time there. Crowded onto the sofa and benches in the waiting area of the small cabin at the foot of Alpine Meadows was a group of middle school students from the Bay Area, many of whom were seeing snow for the first time. They were from an SED class (Severely Emotionally Disturbed) and they had earned the trip with good behavior. After their lesson they were heading back to the Bay Area. Their teacher, who had driven them to the snow in his Suburban, opened a garbage bag and started distributing ski clothes. He handed one boy a pair of gloves and some bibs (ski overalls) that were the teacher’s own.

That day there was a foot of new powder, and coming down from Scott Chair’s double black diamond slope was one of the program’s instructors. A paraplegic, he was strapped onto what was essentially a seat on skis, with miniature skis attached to his poles. He came flying off the mountain, jubilant and covered from head to toe in fresh powder.

The equipment room at the Tahoe Adaptive Ski Program is loaded with specially adapted skis and poles like the ones the instructor used venturing down Scott Chair. For Eliot there were the clamps screwed onto the tips of the skis that kept them from crossing. Learning to snow plow happens at a particular developmental stage, and at ten Eliot was still trying to master it. The clamps forced his skis into a V, so that the following year and a few lessons later when his instructor Laura took them off, he snow plowed on his own. Laura called it muscle memory.

Before his first lesson at the Tahoe Adaptive Ski Program, Eliot was apprehensive. He stood at the base of the chair lift for a long time, listing for Laura all the reasons he did not want to get on the chair. In fact, it wasn’t until the following year that he surprised us by letting go of his death grip and skiing by himself (well, partially let go; he held onto the ski pole with nobody on the other end.) Not only that, instead of spending the entire lesson asking when it would be over, he burned through the two and a half hours --in a total blizzard.

“He’s unstoppable,” Laura said.

The next morning Eliot got up and put on his ski clothes. He insisted on eating breakfast in his ski boots and goggles. He was ready to go two hours before the mountain opened.

Our last morning in the snow, we woke to partly cloudy skies and fresh powder. It was Sunday and we were scheduled to leave before noon. Having packed most of our stuff the night before, I snatched up a two-hour Mom’s getaway, and I was in line for the Funitel before it opened. This was something I had never attempted with the kids. The pushing and shoving with other early birds hyped up on caffeine and adrenaline was something I could have done without, but the rewards were rich; I was skiing powder on the other side of the mountain before nine a.m.

At the top of the mountain I was stunned by the view of Lake Tahoe and the snowy peaks behind it. To think that I had considered staying in that morning. I had gone through all the inner dialogues: I didn’t have time; Blue and the kids were waiting; what if the other side of the mountain was closed? But I had pushed through the doubt and was rendered breathless by the beauty I took in. It was not unlike the joy experienced by Tahoe Adaptive skiers when they overcame challenges and took on the mountain.

By ten o’clock what little terrain was open on the other side of the mountain was skied out. I started down the mountain run, putting the skis in cruise control. Halfway down I saw the chairlift that runs across the high camp and gives skiers access to the less crowded bowls and chutes on the front portion of the mountain. I had never taken this chair. I could easily have continued my mountain run, but again I pushed through the inner dialogue and hopped on the chair. There were only two or three other people on the lift, and the lift operator gave me sinister smile. But by then I was committed.

I need not have worried. What awaited me was an east-facing slope, more crust than powder but doable, that funneled back into the mountain run. (There were other more adventurous routes, but they did not lead to the bottom.) What I did that morning was what Tahoe Adaptive Ski instructors did every day: they helped countless skiers push through their fear; they made the run down the mountain a piece of cake.

I turned in my ticket while others were still finishing breakfast, and we were on the road by eleven-thirty. All the way over the summit I listened to the Indigo Girls. What better music for the snow than acoustic guitar riffs and harmonies and the occasional violin? I felt the pure high that comes from exhilaration in the mountains, and the Indigo Girls were singing. Eliot was singing too. He said he wanted to stay in the mountains forever.

By the time we hit 4000 feet, Eliot was anticipating our next adventure, a complimentary trip to Disneyland. As we watched the snow disappear around us, he sang a combination of It’s a Small World and We Wish You a Merry Christmas:

“It’s a Small World After All, So bring it right here!”

It could have been the Tahoe Adaptive Theme song.

2006-04-17T09:37:00.000-07:00

Shopping with Eliot

Our son Eliot was born with speech and motor delays, and some unnerving impulsive behaviors. For instance, when he was five he screeched in the grocery store. One Friday afternoon, the day before Blue’s birthday, Carly was invited to a friend’s house. Perfect, I thought, Eliot and I will walk to the store to buy food for the birthday dinner, then we’ll come home and make a cake. I envisioned an idyllic afternoon with my son.

As soon as we left the house he mutinied, playing the game where he refused to walk, one most children play for a year or two but which Eliot had been playing for four years. A block into it, he was pulling and yanking on my hand, remarkably like the dog on its leash, whom I’d had the brilliant idea to bring along with us. I had tried before letting go of Eliot’s hand and walking on alone, but he just stood still. I could not leave my son standing alone on the sidewalk.

When my children were little they taught me that if I clung too tightly to my agenda when they had their own goals we ended up in a headlock. This is a lesson I learned not once but time and again. So I resorted to pulling Eliot along by the collar down the main artery through town where on any given day two or three different people I know might drive by. Rift of imaginative ideas for dealing with my son, I decided not to look at the windshields of the passing cars, thus remaining blissfully ignorant of which friend or aquaintance might be witnessing our less than ideal family scene.

When we reached our neighborhood natural food store, I tied our dog Shoe to the post outside and told Eliot to get himself one of the miniature carts designed for happy shopping children. At this point, family bliss was restored as Eliot followed me up and down the aisles, depositing in his cart the items we needed for dinner. When we got to the checkout counter, I saw a woman buying dog biscuits and thought, “What a great idea, I’ll get one for Shoe.” I told Eliot to pick out a nice bone- shaped biscuit, which we paid for with our groceries and took outside.

“Is that your dog?” a man on the sidewalk said, “People have been feeding him,” and I realized with horror that the dog biscuits the woman had bought had been for Shoe. He chomped on the one biscuit I had bought him that would accompany the handful of large ones that had just landed in his stomach courtesy of a stranger. Maybe she had seen me dragging my son down the street and had taken pity, imagining if that was how I treated my son how did I treat my dog?

Shoe, Eliot, and I were halfway down the block when the woman came flying out of the grocery store waving a package of turkey from the deli counter. “Does your dog want this turkey?” she called out.

I accepted the turkey (I’m not sure why -- I think I was in shock) but said, “People have been feeding my dog.”

“That would be me,” she said, motioning proudly to herself.

I resolved when I got home to affix a small sign to his collar that said, “I know I’m cute, but please don’t feed me.”

When we were in the grocery store I had bought raisins, Eliot’s favorite treat, in order to lure him home in a more humane manner. But as we walked away from the turkey incident, Shoe (no doubt seeking relief from the huge treat he had enjoyed) took a dump. I picked it up with the plastic bag I always carried for such purposes. I was now carrying the bag of raisins in one hand and a bag of poo in the other. After depositing the one bag in the garbage, I was not about to reach into the bag of raisins and feed my son with my bare hands. Without the raisins he mutineed, and we proceeded back down the street, with me once again dragging him by the collar.

I tried to avoid going to the grocery store with my children, but sometimes it was unavoidable. When Eliot was in preschool he went through a phase of screaming indoors because he knew he wasn’t supposed to. Nothing we told him, even “Quiet voice indoors,” made any difference. Once he started screeching in Safeway just as I unloaded my groceries onto the belt. I ignored him (which sometimes worked) and wrote my check as fast as I could. The merciful checker, bless her, called for a bagger, saying, “I am sure this woman would love to get out of the store as quickly as possible.”

Five minutes later as we were loading our groceries into the trailer on the back of my bike, an older woman came up to me. She had gone out of her way to end up at the bike racks and she said, “I just want to let you know that I think you could have handled differently your son’s screaming in the grocery store.”

Not wanting to use my son’s disability as an excuse --since we did teach him that screaming in stores was not okay-- I looked her in the eye and said, “How dare you tell me how to handle my child.”

Looking right back at me, she was rude enough to continue, “It was disturbing to those of us in the store.”

“And you think it wasn’t disturbing to me?” I asked.

She didn’t dissolve, as I hoped she would, but she did walk away, leaving me to wonder what possesses people to walk up to strangers and give them advice on child rearing, or to seize their dogs and feed them massive quantities of food. Parents struggle every day in the raising and loving of their children, and, in the process, they need unsolicited advice about as much as a carful of dog biscuits.

Our Stuffed Companions

2006-04-03T09:48:00.000-07:00

Our childhood attachment to stuffed companions isn’t wholly rational when you consider how odd many of them are. Maybe at a very young age we are able to recognize in our companions a unique trait we possess ourselves. Eliot’s stuffed penguin is a perfect example. Anyone who has seen March of the Penguins knows that these creatures have an inordinate amount of patience. They can stand on the outside of a mass of penguins for long periods of time being assaulted by ice and wind, knowing that eventually they will shuffle to the inside of the circle while the warmed penguins take their shift on the outside. And being equitable, one mate takes a very long turn covering the egg while the other embarks on the journey for food, then, like the huddlers, they switch.

When Eliot was two, our friend Susan gave him a foot high penguin for Christmas, and Eliot spent all his time locked in a bear hug with Penguin. Penguin got a thousand kisses a day. Eliot dragged him around the house by the wing. At night he slept with an arm thrown around Penguin. Several nights in a row I found the two of them asleep in exactly the same position. Once it was Eliot and Penguin facing the same way, Penguin spooning up against him. Once it was Eliot asleep on his side with an arm thrown over his face, Penguin behind him also on his side, a wing thrown over his head.

There was a synchronicity to Eliot and Penguin. Eliot rarely got frustrated with his own shortcomings, and instead, artfully avoided difficult tasks. With a lot of coaxing from us, he took on these tasks when he was ready. Like the penguin, his progress was slow, steady, and amazing.

Around the time Eliot started talking, his grandmother Sushi gave him a stuffed Curious George, and Penguin had to make room for George. George had his own voice, a deeper, hollower version of Eliot’s. He sounded a lot like Mister Bill from old Saturday Night Live episodes. In fact his life was a lot like Mr. Bill’s. George “fell” in the fishpond and he fell in the toilet. George landed on the burner (turned off) and he landed in the pancake griddle. You knew when you heard George’s panicked call for help that he had been pitched into a dangerous spot.

Carly’s stuffed companion was a doll Blue and I bought in Oaxaca before she was born. He was “Man” to us, but when Carly adopted him he became Little Man. Little Man has red cloth skin and a black yarn mohawk. He represents the part of Carly that thinks outside the box.

I recently sewed Little Man’s head back on for the second time. It was late at night and I was sewing in bed, so when I finished I slipped him onto the pillow facing Carly’s sleeping head. Being twelve made her no less elated when she woke in the middle of the night to the outline of his mohawk in the dark.

Little Man has been through many transformations. First he lost his clothes and was naked Little Man. Then his arm fell off and I sewed it back on. Then his head fell off (the first time) and our friend Dr. Weber, a neurologist, sewed it back on. Then his arm fell off again, and since Carly’s aunt Shelley was born with one hand, we decided Little Man didn’t need his other arm either.

Our stuffed creatures provide comfort and security in a sometimes frightening world, all the more so in adolescence. We are very young when we first notice that the world around us is constantly changing. I was pregnant with Eliot when I moved Carly out of the crib and into her own room. In the newfound freedom of her room, she played until she fell asleep. Once I found her conked out on her back, spread eagle in a pair of cowboy boots. But one night she climbed into the crib, bereft as it was of blankets or animals or even a mattress cover. She wrapped herself in her blanket, rolled like a taco over the bars, and thumped down onto the bare mattress.

I had always wanted to crawl into the crib with her but had wondered if it would hold my weight. Now, nine months pregnant, I didn’t hesitate. I climbed in, and it held. I put my arms around her and cried. I thought about how she was giving up her place of safety. It seemed she would rather have that place in its cold plastic nakedness than not at all.

A few days later when it had quieted down in her room at nap time, I went to check on her and found her in the crib, cheek plastered to the cold coverless mattress. She had brought her books with her, and Little Man. While she slept, Little Man sat propped up against the crib bars, guarding the shrine of books.

I never found her in the crib again. What I found a few nights later was Carly asleep in her bed and her Lego people in the crib, face down side by side. As if only now that she had made her pilgrimages to the crib, was she able to make room for the little person she had been told would emerge from her mother’s belly.

Dogs and Children

2006-03-18T12:38:00.000-08:00

It must have been my dog that made Blue decide to date me. His family had raised a few Labrador retrievers, and at the time I met him his dad Jim had a black lab named Covey, as in Willie Mc Covey. Covey had paws the size of baseballs, which served him well when he escaped from Jim’s office to chase ducks on the San Lorenzo River. As soon as he tired of running, Covey jumped in the river for a ride downstream to the Boardwalk, where he stole corndogs from innocent children.

With this family history, it should have been no surprise when Blue ordered my dog his own burger at In “N Out. Bud traveled in the right rear corner of my Toyota shortbed truck, his head hanging out the camper shell window. Blue ordered an extra burger no fixings, no bun, thus giving new meaning to the term “drive-through,” as the camper shell and Buddy’s head passed the drive-through window.

When I packed my belongings into the truck and moved from West Berkeley to Santa Cruz to be with Blue, I saved space in the right rear corner of the camper shell for Bud. He was as happy about the move as I.

Wherever Blue and I lived, we set up Bud’s bed under a table, giving him the cave-like quarters dogs need. He had free reign of the backyard where we settled to raise our family, chasing cats and, unqualified guard dog that he was, wagging his tail at intruders. But even docile ones like Bud have an uncanny sense of danger and adventure. They know before we pack our bags if we are going on a trip, and watch vigilantly to be sure they aren’t left behind. If someone is dangerous but gives no outward signs our human senses can detect, dogs who are normally docile sniff it out, growling and barking. Our retrievers, despite the occasional false alarm --a bronze dog statue or a log that looks like a bear-- are our deliverers and our angels.
Like Covey, Bud was a wanderer. He couldn’t jump the fence with his stubby legs, but he dug under the fence instead or chewed his way through. He was living testimony to the fact that labradors should be fixed. Bud, however, lost his balls with little glory.

Glory or no glory, Bud was my fertility angel when, early in my pregnancy with Carly, I walked into the vet’s office and Dr. Miller asked me if I wanted to breed him. Dr. Miller’s labrador Rosie conceived with Bud just two weeks before the truant was impounded and taken in a prison van to the vet’s, where by strict orders of the SPCA, I was not allowed to see him until he was neutered. Bud had a rap sheet with the SPCA three pages long.

Shortly after the fateful impounding, my friend Jim’s wife Helen called out of the blue and said her family was ready for a puppy. “What timing,” I said, and a few months later Helen, pregnant with her first son and accompanied by her daughters, went home with Buddy’s son Buster.

Bud was my fertility angel when Carly was born two weeks ahead of her predicted due date. A couple of nights before, he tried to scratch his way through the sheetrock to get out of the garage. Being an animal, he smelled what was going on. I let him out, stood in the dark while he peed, and an hour later my water broke.

The morning after Bud ate through the sheetrock, I met our midwife Mary Ann at her office. “Go home and get ready,” she said, “The contractions will start this afternoon.”

I went to the drugstore and picked up the necessary supplies. I got my hair cut. I put Jimmy Cliff in the tape deck of my truck and sang “Many Rivers to Cross” to the baby preparing to enter the world.

Strong contractions started sweeping over me that afternoon when I was standing in line at Safeway. I waited my turn, but inside I was yelling, “Get out of my way! I’m in labor!”

At two in the morning we drove to the hospital. By noon I was fully dilated, but I pushed for four hours. Mary Ann arrived before dawn and stayed all day. My mother came and hung out with me in the sunny courtyard, where I rode out the steadily increasing contractions on the lawn. Connie, my sister-in-law and a labor and delivery nurse, came in on her day off. Mary the nurse on duty was there. When Mary’s shift ended she stayed, and Connie’s friend Nancy came on. Thirty-six hours after our arrival, Carly was born in the company of her parents and four amazing women.

The Old Testament and ancient Hindu texts make reference to midwives. From this we can infer that women have always had midwives. I believe every birthing mother should have, if not a midwife, a few women in the room.

I put Carly in the old fashioned pram passed down from Blue’s mom and pushed the pram into the backyard. I parked Bud next to the pram for protection and slipped on my gardening gloves. Carly gazed up at the giant redwood tree and sucked on her pacifier for long stretches while I gardened. When her hands started flailing I knew the binky had popped out. I slipped off my gloves, popped the binky back in, and returned to my work. When Carly started walking, she and her pram protector were best friends. They played tug-of-war with the stick before she could talk.

I attribute Carly’s independence as a baby to her feeling safe in the world. Her brother Eliot did not feel so secure. From the day he was born he needed us close by. When he started to walk, Bud’s wagging tail was a grave threat. Bud was old and slow by then, but it didn’t matter to Eliot. He dodged Buddy’s wildly wagging tail like a point guard on a full court press.

Eliot’s birth was not the blink-and-it’s-over delivery I was hoping for after the Carly marathon. I had heard stories of women giving birth to their second babies before the midwife could get there, so the five hours of labor with Eliot seemed like an eternity. He was also born two weeks past his due date. Eliot grew in the womb at his own pace, just as he continued to develop thereafter, teaching me to put away my own time line and go by his.

Nor was he the idyllic water birth I had envisioned. After an hour in the hospital tub I abandoned my water dream and moved to the bed. Eliot was born face up which made pushing more painful, but at least the second time around I knew what to do. There are things they don’t think to tell you in the birthing class.

When I was in the bath Blue fanned me with a towel. I told him I felt as if he were fanning me with banana leaves and feeding me figs. While I was in the shower letting the hot water run on my lower back, he washed my feet, like Jesus washing the feet of his disciples.

Carly and Eliot were little when Buddy died. For Carly the sorrow came a year later, and she cried a lot at bedtime. For Eliot the sorrow came seven years later when he was ten. That was the way his developmental delay worked; he went through the same major stages Carly did, only much later and for longer. So it was that his best friend was Buddy’s successor Shoe.

Shoe had long legs that could have propelled him over any fence, but he showed no proclivity to wander. This was probably because he was neutered as a pup, but there were personality factors at work as well. Bud had a block of a head that hung so low his nose was always to the ground, and the scents he picked up naturally lead him away from us. Unlike Buddy, Shoe was a bundle of energy but he was unfailingly loyal to his pack: me, Blue, Carly, and Eliot.

Shoe waited for Eliot to get home from school, and the two of them walked around the backyard together for hours. That was the miracle: Shoe walked. Eliot held the stick and Shoe followed calmly until he gave it up. By the time Eliot was ten he carried on long conversations with anyone who would listen, but up until then Shoe was the only one outside his family with whom he talked at length. As they walked around the backyard, Eliot held what were not so much monologues as dialogues with one person talking. While Eliot talked, Shoe rolled his eyes up at him and wagged his tail limply.

There were three possible reasons for this. One, they exchanged testosterone like Ritalin and were mutually sedated. Two, animal soul saw into human soul and visa versa. And three, Bud may have left this earth but his soul resided in our yard, assuring us that he was still part of the family.