Roaring in San Francisco

Friday, I left FF for the first time. I am writing from Napa Valley, via San Francisco, where I spent my twenties bartending and kissing strangers. And I am visiting my former San Franciso roommate Eve, who was complicit in many of the crimes committed.

This is an old roomie trip, one of the very best kind.

It was a little tough to leave the Fox.  I endangered myself and others by calling M on my cell as I drove to the airport. I then started to cry.

“Are you okay?” he said.

“Yes, I’m just so happy to be going and so grateful you supported me going and I’m going to miss you both so much.” I said.

I cried in the airport, also. Just a little. On the plane. Sitting with Caroline and Eve in Farley’s café in Portrero Hill and then I was here.

God, I love this city.

We walked the sidewalks in the Mission, past the chi-chi antique shops that are now sharing elbow room with the Latin grocery stores and their warm fruits. Two guys in hats and sunglasses were leaning out the top window of a blocky building, rapping to the world. Eve started to dance, a low-down elbow boogie and the guys roared and then rapped their approval.

“It’s like being serenaded,” she said.

We went to Haight street and got carded and the door man whispered to me as I walked past “You don’t look your age.” I didn’t feel it. I felt 21 again, seeing Haight street for the first time, wanting nothing more than to live in one of the second floor, bay window apartments and wake to the street’s morning music every day. We drank snakebites at what used to be the Achilles Heel and talked with the bartender about what a “snakebite” was, vs. a “black satin,” vs. a “black velvet.” (And in case you have ever wondered: Is it a “black and tan” without Harp’s? The answer is: No. It is not.)  Who cares about names? We liked our pints of pear cider layered with Guinness.

We realized that it was – OMG! – 18 years ago that we lived here. Eve called it “A Jurassic Age” since we used to get all thundered up and go down to the Mad Dog in the Fog. A lot has happened. And we talked about many of those things. But the main thing was the earthquake called “Motherhood,” which has ripped us both up and laid us back down again. It has weathered us and polished us and made us closer. I welled up again. Eve raised her glass. The dark layer of Guinness floated on the sparkly layer of pear cider, both so essential to the character of the drink.

“To Motherhood,” she said.

"To Motherhood,” I answered.

THE CHICKADEES ARE BACK!

The chickadees are back.

I haven't wanted to mention it. Afraid to jinx it or something. Every morning, I sip my coffee, tense until I look out and see that they are still there, still coming and going from the nest box on our gatepost. 

But we are into it now. We are past nest-building and egg warming. There are babies in there. The mama and papa are flying in and out of the nest box faster than BP executives trying to shift the blame. Last night at dusk, which lasts so nice and long as we near the solstice, I took a huge stockpot of compost down to my worm bin. But to get there, I have to go through the back gate. Actually, I don’t. I could have gone around through the side door, but I thought I’d just lift the latch sooo quietly…and as I walked through I heard the soft whoosh of the chickadee leaving the nest and wondered if I’d done it again. If I’d scared the adult off the nest for the night and doomed the babies. If you don’t know what I am talking about, you can do one of two things: You can read my post “Bad hair color and roasted chickadees,” or you can just trust me. My life is an arrow, aimed at nurturing the wild in the city, but last summer I misfired and I have a karmic debt to the chickadee gods.

But they are back and I can hear at least one little baby in there, making his bid for the bug of the hour. The box is so close to the path of our life. It’s in a stupid place, one of the many mistakes I have and will make in this attempt to live in a finer way. But I will keep trying. When winter comes, I’ll move the box. But I want so much for this year’s nestlings to fledge. I want to look up from my kitchen sink and see one hop out into the crabapple branches, test his weight in the world and decide to fly. 

Happy Birthday Forest

A couple days ago, some jerk cut me off on the I-5 on-ramp. He was in an old, medium blue America sedan and he was bald. We were merging, but I was clearly ahead of him and he sped up. “Don’t be an asshole,” I said, as I floored it and my mommy van ripped just enough head of him to cut in before the ramp narrowed to one lane. I merged fast on to I-5, just to prove that I wasn’t going to cut him off and lollygag. To prove, really, that I was just as fast and aggressive as him. Then I felt a little disgusted with myself. Decided that I was over it. Imagined him, now coming up on the right, needing to get into my lane and how I would slow down and wave him in with a magnanimous, languid, maybe just a little bit sexy wave. I was feeling very Buddha. He came up on the right, his face contorted in rage and pressed to the glass, yelling at me. He was almost past me when my Buddha bubble popped and I flipped him off.

And then he slowed down. Dropped right back into my blind spot. I tried to see him in my rearview mirror, flicking my eyes so he couldn’t se me looking. My heart was thumping a little bit. Was he next to me? I looked in the fisheye in the side mirror. Yes. Right there. Pacing me. He pulled up a little. He had a bright yellow ear plug in his left ear, like one might wear at, say, a firing range. He dropped back again. I needed to merge right. I dropped speed fast, darted behind him then over. Then I lost him, merging right and exiting on Lakeview Blvd. But when I stopped at the sign at the bottom of the ramp, there he was. One car ahead of me. He turned right. I turned left. All the way to my writing group, I watched my rearview mirror. Did he turn around? I made a second turn. I imagined that he had my license plate number. I went inside. And all of this was different than it would have been two years ago. When the man in the blue sedan slowed, when he started pacing me, my first reaction was what it always was: “Fuck you. If you are coming after me, come on.” But right on the tails of that, like a new eraser over old soft lead, came this: “What about Forest?”

The day before, Forest had turned two. All day long, I sang Happy Birthday to him. Every one of the 27 different times , his face split wide open with the very first words. Last year, he was barely talking. This year he stared at my slice of Palermo pepperoni, gorgonzola and mushroom pizza with extra sauce and garlic crust. I could practically see his cogs turning. Then he looked at me and beamed and said “The steam is coming UP!”

He has changed so much. And he has changed me. Not just cured my macho death wishes, (although apparently this change is still making its way to my accelerator foot)  but softened me like meat tenderizer on a bee sting, and toughened me like fruit left long in the sun.

Now, he is two. I am almost 40. These 38 years that are between Forest and I will never change. They are an iron bar, separating us on the racetrack, forever holding us that much apart, and somewhere up there is a cliff, and I will go over first. Please, please, please Gods, let me go over first. I survived ten years of environmental politics like a daily vaccination of despair. I survived walking home along through San Francisco’s lower Haight every night after work, 2:30 or 3 am, smoothed out by the shot and beer back I got from my fellow bartender, walking past all those dark doorways with nothing but luck and my belief that a confident strut would unmark me as a target. I survived teaching myself to drive on the highway at 14, bored after school and later, driving so drunk on the dark Arizona roads that my best friend in the passenger seat braced both feet on the dash board.

“Am I swerving?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t tell if it’s me or the car.”

“Me neither,” I said, and we both laughed, alive with our stupid fearlessness. I am not fearless now. I don’t mean to be a downer, but I’ll tell you this: Back then I thought the worst thing that could happen was that I would die. Now I know that the worst thing is that I would survive Forest. 

"What about Forest?" 

This question is a new compass, a shift in my North Pole. It is the awful and wonderful power of this love and it just keeps getting bigger. Happy Birthday, Forest.  I love you so very, very much.

The Green God and the Vehicular Vatican

I’ve been thinking about trees and trucks. Green Gods and big motorized vehicles. If I didn’t know that Satan was an invention of the Pope’s umpteenth century Madison Avenue ad firm… If I didn’t know that, I would call trucks Satan.

But I like Satan better than trucks. In the first place, Satan was modeled on a guy who I actually really love, who has variously been called the Green Man, Pan, the Horned God and some other stuff depending on whether you are Celtic or Sumerian. I like the Green God. It sums up most of what is important for me about the male divine. This is a pagan thing. Well, it’s a human thing, actually, to divide our gods into male ones and female ones. The system I use gives the female part all the usual stuff: Eternity, the source of Life. Basically the ability to go on forever, which might also be called continuous multiple orgasms of creation. 

I like this in a deity. 

Then her lover/son gets to be the principle of change, growth, death and rebirth. We don’t worry about the incest that might possibly be implied here. Not because we wrote memos to the bishops saying “Cover this up asap,” (Can you say, Ratzinger?) But because the male part is, like Jesus, born at winter solstice. Unlike Jesus, every year our young green man finds himself fucking by May 1 and dying old and decrepit by Halloween. (The Green God doesn’t mind profanity, for the record.) He is all men, all women, all humans that live and die. Plus, he has horns and moss in his beard, which I also like in a deity.

But I was talking about Satan.

You see the resemblance, though, right? The horns, in charge of sex and death… Whoops, I mean “sinful temptation and punishment.” Satan’s just a rebrand of the Green God. A way to bring the locals on board– in addition to the legions, that is.

(Have I mentioned that I can get on a little bit of a rant about the Roman Catholic Church? Ratzy in particular really sets me off.)

So. Instead of associating my feelings about trucks with Satan, which would be a bum rap for the guy with the horns, let’s go ahead and say “Vatican.” It’s really not about the individual. It’s the institution. The steamroller of power and incredible collection and consumption of resources that is not always but far too often used for bullshit purposes like killing bunnies and raping little boys.

There. I said it.

Thing is, the Fox loves trucks. All vehicles actually. Given how foamy I just was about the pope, it’s probably hard to believe that what I am about to tell you is true.

I am making peace with this. The trucks, I mean. I even have a little song about it. Want to hear it? Okay, sing along to Bonnie Raitt “I can’t make you love me if you don’t”

I can’t make you hate trucks if you don’t

I can’t make your heart loathe something it won’t

Dumptrucks will bang

Diggers devour

I can show you the books

Exclaim at flowers

But I can’t make you hate trucks if you don’t.

So, I’ve decided to use the principles of positive discipline and spell-casting, which are one and the same. (Put that in your Montessori pipe and smoke it.) Basically, it boils down to focusing on manifesting what you want. Today, this looked like going to the beach at Lincoln Park.

The parking lot is next to a wooded meadow. That’s where I put Alexis, our 11 year old semi-trashed minivan – friend Michele laughs every time she says “Ella drives A-Lexis.” And before you say anything, I get that I am part of the problem with my very own vehicle. Focus, please. We park next to the meadow. And we begin by saying “Hello” to Mr. Big Leaf Maple, a ginormous, mossy representative of the Green God touchable right now. He is in bloom, which is cool. Long, lime green boas of flowers swaying from gnarly 90ft branches, kind of like a Mr. Big Leaf Maple drag queen.

Then we walk down to the beach, and throw rocks and play with clam shells and the Fox ogles the biggest, baddest Vehicular Vatican around, because the Washington State Ferries dock right there.

The he chases crows. The other day he did this really cool thing. After asking me several times to make them hold still – “Mama!” Pointing at crow, “Down! Pet! Please!” ­  – he realized I was not going to make it happen for him. So, he walked towards a particularly glossy black character, put both hands straight out and said “Be Still!" Then he whispered, "Magic trick.” 

Maurice Sendak, anyone?

My heart just about exploded.

After the beach, we go back up the trail to Mr. Big Leaf. We sit on the mossy armchair his roots have created just for us and I get out the surprise, which is whatever dead crab, string of seaweed or cool rock I managed to sneak into my pocket down on the beach. This started out as a way to lure the Fox into running back to the tree because he weighs about as much as five bowling balls and I don’t want to carry his ass up the hill. But now it’s a little ritual. He sits in my lap, we talk about what we saw at the beach. I mention diving mergansers more than motorized boats and we soak up tree love and watch the grass daisies whiten the meadow like almost-May magic snow. I don’t know. I’m just not fighting the vehicle thing anymore. Ferries, trucks and buses. The arm of the Vehicle Vatican is long. But the reach of the tree love, the mossy, bossy smell of spring is right here, right now. This is older, wiser and stronger. This is magic that I don’t have to fight for. I just have to show him where the wild things are.

Bad Hair Color and Smoked Chickadees

Part One

The other night, I went to see mythologist Michael Meade give a talk, wherein he said that the job of every caring person is to go out and get into the “right kind of trouble.”

This made me think of bad hair color and smoked chickadees.

I was in church full of Vashon Island hippies, the bearded and the flowy. Maybe that’s why I had hair on my mind. Even though I’m pretty sure this wasn’t what Meade had in mind, I couldn’t help but think of the night I said to myself the words no woman should ever say:

“I’m not too drunk to color my own hair.”

I had been on the way to Safeway, to buy a box of hair color. I had been stalking that box for weeks. I wanted a dark, but distinctly red brown. I was sick of my light brown highlighted hair. I wanted it to be just the slightest bit edgy, you know, but still tolerable at work the next morning at my big presentation. Somehow be the up-and-coming PR girl who seems like she has a secret life as a punk rock jazz singer. As I turned the corner to walk up to Safeway, my friend Ward pulled up to the stoplight in his battered, scary-looking, robin’s egg blue van and said, “Hey, gorgeous. Whatcha doin’?” And I said “Having a pint with you.” And hopped in.

Well. One pint turned into three. But it was the height of summer. When he dropped me off that night, it was still light outside and I always find it hard to believe I’m drunk when there’s still daylight. So I said those fated words, bought my box of cherry cola hair color and went home to pour chemicals on my scalp.

When I woke up the next morning, Monday morning, I hoped it wasn’t as bad as I remembered, but really, it was worse. I had a halo of hot pink, saturating the roots of my hair from my scalp to out about two inches. Then the pink continued in splotches, long streaks and stripes that smeared through the rest of my hair. I looked like a flamingo that had gotten stuck in a superfund site. I decided to fake it. “A French twist,” I said to myself “can fix anything.”

I got five seconds into what was supposed to be my big moment at the firm. My description of my first big press conference: coverage in the Times, the P-I, the Daily Journal of Commerce. I’m talking above the fold. It was a room full of press whores and not one of those jerks was listening. They were staring, a little slack-jawed. I think they were waiting for me to explain. Then Tim, the labor union guy, raised his hand. “Yes, Tim?” I said. “What the hell happened to your hair?” he said.

But, I don’t think that this is the “right kind of trouble” Meade was talking about. I mean, I believe in playing a part. I believe in Halloween everyday as a proactive approach to creating the story of your life. I do in my better times. But, in my worse times, when the plug has fallen out of the wall and I don’t feel the current any more, when that happens, I do shit even stupider than saying those fateful, flamingo-hair-producing words at 8 o’clock a summer night. When I’m out of the rush and I can’t feel it anymore, I start multi-tasking and not paying attention and living too fast.

I start smoking chickadees.

I put the nest box up four years ago. It’s on the north side of a fence post, above the gate into the backyard. My book said it should be at least six feet off the ground, in partial sun. It’s basically a honeymoon timeshare for chickadees without the scam meeting: a box about 10” tall, maybe 4” wide and 5” deep. A round entry hole just larger than a quarter. You hang it up and it gives the chickadees a substitute for their ordinary habitat: a hole in a standing dead tree. I can see the box from my kitchen window. Looked down on it for two years. Nothing. February and March came and went without a single shopper. And then it happened. They started checking it out. Landed on the little roof. Started going in, coming back out again. Checking it out from all vantage points. Is this a safe place to raise my kids? I bet it never occurred to them to worry about the cement pad just inside the gate. Not until July. Barbecue season.

We were past nest-building by then. No more sticks and grass, no more flying a spring relay-race of homemaking. We were past the brooding phase, where one parent is on the nest at all times and the other is flying to the supermarket to buy ice cream and pickles, or, if she was anything like me, lemons and raw pineapple. Now, it was feeding time. There was at least one chick in there. Every time a parent left the screaming started: chirp!chirp!chirp!chirp!chirp! They both ran ragged, beaks full of bugs. I watched from my window. Greedy for all signs. I’d pinned my hopes to those chickadees. I’d left my PR job far behind, as disillusioned with environmental politics as I was with home hair color, but no less concerned about the future. Like a woman trying to get over a bad buzz cut, I retreated while things grew out. I stayed home, became a mother and tried to make up for not being politically active for mother nature by helping nature be a mother in my own garden. A nest box. Finally occupied! Hope in my own backyard. My own backyard, where, overtasking, strung out, sleepless me grilled two steaks on the barbie on the cement pad. The plume of smoke rose like a hot pink chemical flume, killing every bird in the nest.

High-Heeled Hope and Clean Cars

I got some good news this week. The last campaign I worked on, which passed cleaner auto emission standards for Washington state, that campaign just went national. Obama announced that he is adopting the Washington, Oregon and California standards for the country. This is good news, people. This makes me think of reggae legend Jimmy Cliff who breaks down politics in the following way: “Poli means people. And a tick is a bloodsucking parasite. So politics is the people’s ticks.”

 And I think Jimmy’s right some of the time. But today, and I hope tomorrow, I think he is wrong. I think we can have democracy and business and wildness and deep green ethics at the very same time. I didn’t always feel this way. Once upon a time, I was pretty firm about the divide. You can put your wild, perfect nature over here and your dirty, inherently evil technology over there. It’s the hobbits vs. Saruman’s tree-eating pits. Although Tolkien always maintained that that was not what he meant. And, anyway, I was never as bad as my ex-roommate Bob, who wouldn’t allow the use of electricity in our San Francisco flat. He wanted everything to be candlelit. But he also shaved off all the hair on his body and walked around moaning the lyrics to his band’s songs, along the lines of “I am walking backward down the spiral staircase of deaaaaaaaath.

So, Bob had other problems.

Anyway, today, I’m feeling pretty darnn giddy. Mix it up! We can do this! Combining the wild with industry can, no must be part of the solution. And there is good reason to hope that our deepest wildest selves, our very genetic programming, can combine with market forces to become a powerful and good thing. More reason than just the new emission standards, I mean. Take, for example, the fact that very bendy ankles made our female ape ancestors super sexy. Did you know that? It’s true. Major turn-on. Female apes with more extendable ankles could forage and leap from tree to tree that much better, provide better for their ape kiddies, Darwin, etc, Darwin. And look, we’ve still got that good old-fashioned feeling! Maybe I’ve just watched too many episodes of “Sex and the City,” but the fact that our ancient bendy ankle lust can become an industry that employs many, many makers of high-heeled shoes…

Well, that makes me downright optimistic.

Thanks, President Obama.! Way to go Clean Car team! More power to you, Manolo!

Pointing to "Yes."

Like so many other things, parenting turns out to be about tickling my own underbelly first, finding the hollow in my own dragon skin. A hollow like answering “What do you want?” instead of “What do you want to stop?”

Witness the poop scoop. I won’t get too detailed here. But owning dogs involves a certain amount of fecal maintenance and it kept building up because I was trying to get it done in the nap hours, which list of things to-do also included: shower, get dressed, put away laundry, feed self and write. And, if the night was nasty, take a nap. (This list reveals some of the awesome pajama-time perks of working at home. ) So, I decided that what I wanted, – see, I learn, – that what I wanted was to take care of these things with the Fox during the waking hours. So, I took the Fox down into the backyard one day with my own little positive discipline plan.

I figured I had reason to be optimistic. I was thinking of last fall when we gathered fallen chestnuts. He took to it like he had been waiting for it all his short life: he loved the hunting and the way I clapped when he found one and just being outside together.  His hand slipped the chestnuts into my pocket one by one like a little warm animals. 

I figured scooping would be almost the same thing. You probably see this coming.

Our back yard has a good set up, if poor upkeep. On the outside, fenced beds with fruit trees, raspberries, blueberries and strawberries. In the middle, play chips, which are eminently scoopable. So, I say to the Fox, “Can you help mama find the poop?” He is about three feet closer to the target than I am. This has advantages and disadvantages. Advantages are: He sees stuff I don’t.  I’ve got implements with handles and a pail, so that’s all right. But here comes the disadvantage to him being closer than I. It sounds like this: 

“Good job, honey! Point, don’t touch. Point, don’t touch. Stop. Stop! StopstopSTOPSTOPSTOP!”

And then we go inside and wash hands.

See, he gets “Point.” And he gets “Touch.” He doesn’t get “Don’t”

Now, he does gets a tiny bit better at holding back, and I get a lot faster. (He also gets a violent, purgative stomach flu a couple days after, one time, when implementation of the plan had been pretty darn good, we got distracted by kicking the ball, and I missed a hand washing, and I forgot to tell his dad and found the two of them in the kitchen, eating with their hands. But, probably, this is a coincidence. Probably not a reason for mommy jail, as some of his other friends got sick the same week. Right?)

Anyway, this got me thinking. Right here, and so many times, “Don’t” is the problem. Well, "Don't" and bacteria. But I am trying to talk about Pointing to Yes. This idea is upheld by many old and new traditions, from  Christianity to the teachings of Joseph Campbell to Oprah’s followers of “The Secret.” It's not "Ask not and you shall receive not." It's not "Follow your distaste." It's the hard, hard work of being able to truthfully answer the question, What do you want? And for me, mothering is the hard, hard work of figuring out the "Yes." 

Plus handwashing.

At this point, let me just say for the record: I do believe in the power of an appropriate "No.” Parents who can’t say "No" are not employing positive discipline. They are limp. There is a difference, people.  But “No,” is a lousy compass for a child or a life, though it is a surprisingly easy one. I tried it for a few years, back when I was doing environmental work. “No” to everything from cars to computer parts. “No” to much of modern life.

Living with that kind of focus put the “mental” in environmental. 

So these days, I’m saying “Yes” all the time. “Yes” to city gardening for wildlife. “Yes” to local food. And since, with the Fox, “Yes” has to be physical, I’m asking the Fox to point to things all the time. When he sees a cigarette butt on the sidewalk, and he bends to touch it, I say, “Point with your finger and touch with your shoe.” And he does. When I am trying to dress him, and he’s got a yen for legos instead, I say, “Honey, can you point to your pants?”  And it works. He settles. Maybe you’ve caught me in an overly optimistic moment, but I believe that I am teaching him that he can choose his focus. He can live a "Yes" life.

 And isn’t that what makes happiness.? Isn’t that a life skill that a mama could be proud of?

(I’m still working on a "Yes" for the scooping. There is a metaphor in this, I know. )

So, dear friend, do you know? What do you want? What are you saying “yes” to?