Parenting, No. 785

I went to visit Henry this afternoon at his new job. He's a server at a funky little place in Venice. Maybe I shouldn't use the word funky anymore since very recently, like yesterday, Oliver told me that it was embarrassing. Maybe he didn't use the word embarrassing, but he repeated the word funky in a voice that I guess is mine, at least the voice that both sons use when they imitate me, and while I imagine there's fondness in the teasing, it still takes me by surprise that I'm considered painfully uncool and old. Both brothers have jobs this summer (Oliver actually works nearly full-time all year round, recently opened a Charles Schwab trading account and has bought stocks -- no joke), and I'm very proud of them. It's been a long time since I've included them on the old blog, and just now I was looking for past posts in a kind of nostalgic way, and boy -- some of those posts were damn funny. I sat down at the bar of this little restaurant where Henry works, next to a younger woman who was drinking a glass of wine and eating a salad. Since I'm the chattiest person on the planet and the proudest, most embarrassing mother, I introduced myself to the woman and told her that Henry was my son. She told me that she had a four year old son, and that he was in a challenging stage. I told her that I remember well those challenging stages, but I found those times to be more physically challenging and the teenaged and young adult years more emotionally challenging. I didn't tell her this story, but Reader, I 'll tell you. Just the other night, we were sitting at the table eating dinner -- takeout Vietnamese because making dinner in the summer is just not my thing -- and the usual conversation between The Brothers began, and this entailed arguing about whether LeBron James or Michael Jordan was the greatest basketball player of all time and then something about the baseball player Mike Trout and Teslas and Elon Musk and then you're an idiot and you're an asshole and you don't know what you're talking about, and just when I was wishing that one day we would have a conversation about -- let's say -- the greatest living poet or how much better a film-maker Fellini is than Tarantino, Sophie had a large seizure that I just know was a result of the anger in the air and maybe even how boring her brothers' arguments can be (Sophie and I are the same about these things, I am certain, but she seizes instead of dying a little inside at the general clusterfuckery). I probably said as much, because now that they're 17 and nearly 20, I don't bite my tongue as often as I might have when they were younger. Enough is enough.

But here's the thing. Those boys jumped up and into action helping me to help Sophie, and I realized that I am, perhaps, the luckiest mother in the world.

"A good practical sort of immortality"

Just a couple of hours outside of Los Angeles, you pass through the most incredible landscape of farms and hills and endless road. It's where most of your produce is grown, folks, and last I heard, a lot of California farmland is filled with rotting produce because of that goon in office and his henchmen, busy Making America Great. They've cracked down on brown immigrants who work the fields, and the Real Americans are not stepping up to do the work. You can read about that here.

That isn't fake news either. But this isn't a post about the Pussy Grabber in Chief or his racist Attorney General Keebler Elf, so let's move on.

We stopped in the town of Earlimart to get gas and victuals.

The gas station had the best moniker I've ever seen yet was in direct sight of the Earlimart Market for World Peace.

Doesn't she make you want to pile the Bud into the trunk of your car and drive backward to when America was truly great?

Bless her heart.

Cast my memory back there Lord, sometimes I'm overcome --

Despite the Goon in Chief and his Band of Billionaires, you can pass through a lot of California now and see only a few "white" faces. This evidently terrifies a lot of people.

I find it thrilling that boundaries are blurry.

You can drive approximately five hours from Los Angeles, the sprawling home to over 8 million humans of every color, creed and culture and reach the south entrance of Yosemite National Park. My friend Cara, her two girls and my two boys have been numerous times together, and this year we stayed in a little cabin in the woods inside the park in an area called Wawona. We largely avoid the crowds in the valley and stay up and around the secret places near the park entrance.

We don't do much of anything, really, but wander around and look up and down, float on the river and lay on our backs on sun-warmed rocks. We laugh a lot, mostly at Oliver who can imitate anything and anyone. We all have riotous senses of humor. The girls balance the boys, while Cara and I eschew exercise and adopt the life patterns of marmots for the most part. Oliver did not let us forget our general "cringiness." If you need a translation, let me know.

We do this kind of thing:

and a little of this kind of thing:

and some of this kind of thing:

We even had a roadside "adventure" this year. Cara's car had an electrical short, we think, so we were mysteriously locked out of her car in the middle of Nowhere just after finishing up a roadside picnic. Our purses and phones were locked inside the car, and the teenagers, despite their phone appendages, were not connected to the world wide webs or the vast cell satellites arcing overhead, so we basically did one of those survival kind of things and put our privileged heads together to try to figure out WHAT TO DO.

I can tell you that everyone has an idea or opinion on how to break into a car.

You know what? We city slickers now marvel at just how hard it is to break into a car. Given how many of ours have been broken into in the big shitty, who knew that the windows are virtually indestructible, the locks un-pickable, the whole American metal machine invulnerable?

A few tourists did try to help, offering hangers and various tools. I have actually quite successfully broken into several of my cars, during days of yore, but my tried and true techniques just didn't hack it. I'm a woman of twentieth century crime, I guess. Other tourists just stared at us and took videos. Stupide americaines.  Our favorite samaritans were two women with blue hair and heavy Eastern Europeanish/Russian accents (think female versions, just barely, of what you might imagine our goon-in-chief's best Russian buddy sounds like)who walked over with crow bars from their rental and said, in what became a sort of anthem that Oliver repeated, over and over for the rest of the trip: Let me help you break open car.

Henry, who had otherwise made the women, men and children of Yosemite swoon everywhere we went, had no luck with a rock and muscle, and neither did the rest of us. I thought, in my optimistic way, that a solution would come to us, eventually, that we wouldn't perish with so much cheese and crackers and cans of limonata in the cooler and surely two marmots and a passel of teenagers wouldn't be attacked by any animal or human should it get dark.

Eventually, though, a couple of rangers pulled up on the scene, hammered a few wedges in the doors and saved us. To be fair, it did take them at least twenty minutes, and they were armed. We secretly hoped they'd shoot the car open, but that didn't happen.

We also did some more of this:

Oh yeah, and this:

I know. I know. It's almost ridiculous, except it's not. It is respite and wildness, air and water and earth and fire. I honestly think Yosemite is one, if not the holiest places on the planet, and my gratitude both for its proximity and my privilege to visit it, over and over, is boundless.

Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality. 

John Muir,  My First Summer in the Sierra, 1911

Love It Or Leave It

Remember that saying? I think it's what the conservatives said to the protesters in the sixties. Not a day goes by that I don't think about where I'd like to move if I could move. I don't know why I don't have a strong sense of "country," or even a modicum of patriotism. I consider myself blessed to have been born here to a life of relative privilege and am grateful for how my parents brought me up, but I don't think of America as the greatest country on earth nor am I grateful for my country in the abstract.  The older I get, the less inclined I am to feeling proud of being American, given that I can sometimes only summon up the observation that we (so far) can go to the polls and vote and not get shot. Lately I'm just sort of overwhelmed by what's going on with the gun control clusterf*^k, the Drumpf thing, the fact that each summer gets hotter (it was 108 degrees in my driveway yesterday) yet people I know are climate change deniers, that the treatment for infantile spasms is roughly the same in 2016 as it was in 1995 yet millions of dollars have been spent for research, and that I don't have anything in particular for Sophie to do this summer, the 22nd of her life.

Let's talk about that last thing first. The LAUSD messed up as per usual and didn't assign an aide who knows Sophie to accompany her to summer school. When I made a modest stink about it during the last week of school, I got the runaround with the usual requests for me to speak to Downtown. For those of you living in the hinterlands, Downtown is where The LAUSD headquarters are, and I imagine it to be a box similar to the one in Oz where one ridiculous man stands behind a curtain and fiddles with a bunch of knobs. I did attempt to reach Downtown but never got a call back, and repeated requests for Sophie's school's Special Education Office to help me only resulted in the advice to call Downtown or to accept the fact that we are not required to supply an aide that knows Sophie. 

Today I got a notice in the mail letting me know that if Sophie doesn't show up at her assigned Summer School Location next Monday, she will be withdrawn from the system.

Cue Mrs. Braddock's screaming laugher.

Reader, I've folded.

I've given up.

I realize that asking for the obvious from The Man Behind the Curtain was a fool's errand. Yes, I could have packed a proverbial pistol and fought The Man with my silver tongue, but I'm plumb sick of fighting for mediocrity. Sophie's home this summer, and you should know that for young adults like her with severe developmental disabilities, there are few programs and not much to do. I'm not saying or even thinking that we're somehow entitled to programs. I'm just stating the facts. This is what life for the severely developmentally disabled young adult looks like in Amerika. The programs that do exist are often very expensive. I did sign Sophie up for one day a week of what looks to be a terrific summer camp, but the daily rate is about a million dollars, so I'm going to have to get creative for the rest of week. Saint Mirtha will be coming to help entertain and take care of Sophie, and damn, I'm grateful to have the means to pay her.  I'm grateful for everything I have because I know that many people don't have even a third of what I do, yet they keep on keeping on. We'll keep on keeping on, too. That picture up there is Sophie trying out the swing in the gym where the camp is going to be.

I started this tedious post by kvetching about moving from the country, how not a day goes by that I don't have some sort of fantasy of packing it all in and heading to Costa Rica or an adapted watchtower in one of the Canadian national parks or a hut somewhere in Mexico. I'll bring one pair of jeans, one bathing suit, a couple of black tee-shirts, a few bare dresses and maybe some panties and a bra but not much else. Does anyone want to join me?

Despite the Heat, It'll be Alright

Dang. Let's get some mileage from the weather here in the shitty. It's after 5:00 in the afternoon and still 95 degrees outside. It feels like God is blowing some giant blowdryer at us with all the lemon leaves curled up, the dogs' tongues, the palm fronds lethargic yet valiant and the crows silent. At last. I do dislike a crow. We're digging our new little smoothie/bullet/what the hell do you call it machine, mixing up coffee and ice and milk for me, protein powder, berries and yogurt for The Brothers. Lovin Spoonful or Joe Cocker? I have a funky right eye that's crusted over in the morning and tender during the day. The eye doctor says it's allergies, not infection, and the dry air. Stripped and parched, even my eyes.

Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty.

Here's Joe: