The Burrow

There are some moments in time which catch my heart. It's unexpected, a piece of the action which brings me back 30 years in one glance. He's four and a half helping his 2-years-younger-the-same-age-as-FlapJilly-right-now into The Golden Nugget on Clark Street.  We were breakfast regulars; Big Cuter knew just how heavy the front doors could be.   Can you feel the proprietary nature of his relationship to the door and the little girl?   He's balanced and careful and nurturing and allowing her to feel as independent as she'd like to be. That worked for his sister and it works for his niece.   Still, his hand is quite firmly ensconced in her tiny pink mitten; she's cocky but not stupid, after all. I can't stop looking at it. It's the wallpaper on my smart phone.  His holding the door below the push plate so that FlapJilly wouldn't have to lean. He's keeping it all accessible to her, down at 3 feet above the ground. She...

Big Cuter is appalled.  He's having a hard time justifying his love affair with professional football in America.  His Sunday-on-the-phone-talking-football-with-Dad call was tinged with sadness.  The Carolina Panthers allowed Greg Hardy to practice with the team this week, after a judge found him guilty of domestic violence, Sure, he's appealing, but right now he's a convicted felon... how can they let him play? How can his 49'ers allow Ray McDonald to take the field when there are pictures of his pregnant fiancée's bruised arms and neck all over the internet?  "Pay him and sit him out, but don't put him out there....." There was pain in his voice. Sports aren't supposed to showcase the ugly underbelly of society this way.  Not in such a concentrated period of time, with such abhorrent, visually revolting, morally repellent actions. Adrian Peterson's abs have been the source of much sighing. The notion of him standing over a screaming 4...

I love it when people cook for me.  One of the perks of getting shot was home cooked meals delivered six days a week.  Every night, TBG and I dined on something new and interesting which I did not have to think about, or shop for, or prepare.  Everything came in disposable containers; had we eaten on paper plates there wouldn't have been any clean up at all.  I didn't appreciate the effort it took for G'ma to live up to Ladies Home Journal and Daddooooo's mom, the world's most judgmental mother-in-law.  G'ma wrote out the week's menus and went to the Kosher butcher once a week, collecting minute steaks (arguably the toughest cut of meat on the poor dead beast) and chickens and ground beef.  If it was Tuesday, it was spaghetti and tiny, rock hard meatballs with Ragu heated up on the stove.  She became a better cook once the kids were out of the house, but I never entered into the "My Mom is a Better Cook Than Your Mom" contests.  I didn't ...

They met in the fourth grade. Two very very very bright boys with very very very different temperaments, sitting in the back row, bored to tears.  One, Big Cuter, solved the problem of the uninvested teacher by hiding 700 page fantasy paperbacks on his knees, below his desk. ACE, less able to sit still than my son, found new and ever more challenging ways of annoying the teacher. By the time his mother and I decided to take matters into our own hands, and began in-class tutoring, the boys had forged an alliance. They were smart, and they knew it. They played (and play)  Magic: The Gathering  and Axis and Allies and Risk  and Battleship and Warhammer, from fourth grade   all through high school and college ...different schools but still friends. And they read. Not just the sports pages (this was in 1992, denizens, when newspapers not the interwebs brought information to your door), but the front page and the editorials. They read everything the teachers assig...

He's always been a student. Since his first minutes on the planet, Big Cuter's eyes have been open and searching.  Born "sunny side up," he was looking around the delivery room, wondering what he'd missed while passing through the birth canal.  The doctor and nurse were amazed. He looked curious. A reluctant reader until necessity (Dad wasn't around to read Princess of Mars  and he wanted to know how it ended) forced his hand, his apartment now contains a bed, a couch, a chair and books.  Lots and lots and lots of books.  Robert Jordan and Steven Erikson and Michael Lewis and J.K. Rowling and George R. R. Martin share the bookshelves with Patrick O'Brian and Tom Clancy and his law texts.  This is a kid who loves to read.  He just came to it later than made me comfortable. Letting go of expectations - he never crawled, he stood up and ran - has been the hardest part of parenting for me.  I like to know the rules, see the path, have a plan. ...

All the parental units attached to this little person were at work yesterday.  That's really saying something, since there are four of them involved in his life right now and two of them do shift work. There's usually somebody around when he bounds off the bus.  But Wednesdays are proving particularly difficult this semester, what with his  "early out" release and their overtime making meeting him at 1:45pm a challenge.  Sure, I'm glad to help.  I know the security code to open the garage door and Amster's dining room table is a lovely spot on which to type.  The dogs are in the backyard and require no attention at all.  His brother didn't feel well and went to rest at work with mom. It was just the two of us.  I was stoked. Listening to Mr. 8 is like having the grade school Big Cuter back in my life all over again.  Curious, serious, thoughtful and smart, there's nothing like a latency age boy to make my heart soar.  And soar i...

When he was younger, his curls were golden brown.  When asked to identify the parts of his head, he'd point to "my eyes, my nose, my ears, and my beautiful" as he got to his hair. Now, he's sitting on Douglas, twirling a few strands over and over just above his left ear. My dad did the same thing.  I'd sit in the back seat behind my father, watching as his hands gesticulated and pointed and twirled and did everything but guide the car.  It drove me crazy. Now my son, my nearly-a-lawyer, grins his fiendish grin as his father dodges the mister fan the kid has unearthed from beneath my bathroom sink. It must be generational.  We are bred to make one another nutty. He will sit beside his sister, his finger a millimeter away from her arm, declaring with that fiendish grin that he's not touching her.  Think about it - is it possible not to flinch when someone is telling you that he is not touching you?  I don't think so. Yet his joy is so pure, his del...

Helicopter Parent. Rocky was describing herself that way last night as she worried about her senior in college with a 3.8 GPA and no job prospects. She knows she's powerless. She knows it's his issue. She knows he's a grown-up and he has to take responsibility for his own future. She knows all this and yet she's panic stricken because his life is unsettled and insecure. She needs to fix it and she knows that she shouldn't and, worse than that, she knows that she can't. These thoughts co-exist uneasily. Princess Myrtle is headed to Yemen for a month, after promising the only parent she was brave enough to tell that she wouldn't leave the capital city. Apparently, working during the day and taking Arabic at night while living in an apartment in Cairo wasn't enough of an immersion program. I've asked her to let me worry. MTF's daughter's plan to visit 50 states and 50 countries by the time she's 50 has taken her to hotels where you ...

Allow myself to introduce… myself. (and let that be a lesson to ANYONE who uses “myself” erroneously. When in doubt, use a different pronoun). I am known around these parts as “the big cuter”. I go by a nick-name in the real world, so, given the tendency towards pseudonyms in this blog I’ll comfortably hide behind that moniker. As an aside, Ashleigh has done a good job of discussing her thoughts on pen names, and if I’m ever called on again for a guest post I’ll happily share mine. Until that time, myself’s (wink, wink) name will be “the big cuter”. A little bit about me, at least as is relevant to this post: I’m an avid, nay, rabid football fan. I care way too much about the success of my beloved San Francisco 49 ers . I jokingly, but with far too much seriousness, state that half of my t-shirts are 9 ers (the other half are Georgetown). I’ ve created detailed booklets** explaining the basics and not-so-basics of football to initiate the uninitiated into the game. I’m currently ret...

The Big Cuter is quite upset with my next post. In the interest of full disclosure - dedicated to my big boy and all the rest of you who don't like snakes - today's main post contains photographs of a real live actual living in my yard snake. You can't say you weren't warned.

(That could actually be the theme of this week's posts, don't you agree?) The Big Cuter kvetched* on the phone last Sunday that I was "the second person today who was talking about Halloween." It's not that he hates Halloween -- it's actually his favorite holiday. It's the fact that it is still September and we should still be in first month of school mode. Rushing from Back-to-School to Valentines Day was not always the norm. When I was a girl (!!), merchants took their time and displayed their seasonal wares during the appropriate season. Holidays were allowed to come and go before their merchandise was discounted. Then, again, it used to be possible to buy a bathing suit in July in New York - now, if you wait that long, you're looking at displays of corduroy car coats and woolen knit mittens. I used to shop at JoAnn Fabrics in Marin for all my holiday supplies. They had shelf after shelf of inexpensive but must have items - wooden scarecrows and h...

It's 6:43 post meridian as I type this and I am sad. It's getting dark already. Our sun is omnipresent here in the desert southwest, and we come to expect her to warm the driveway as we pad out in our slippers to get the morning paper and to bake G'mas's thin skin in the middle of the afternoon and to reflect off the gas grill as I make a late dinner. I'd gotten used to having her around until 8 or 8:00 every night and now she's not and I'm sad. Summer is really over. The days are getting shorter. And there's way more dark than I'd like. The Big Cuter is in San Francisco now, so we share a time zone in the summer. But we're at the eastern end and he's at the western end and last night he called to tell us that the sunset was gorgeous on a fog-less evening. I was amused that he'd called to comment about the view (remembering his "Do we have to stop and look again " wails from the back seat on car trips) but I was also terminally...

You just never know. In high school he was smart and funny and kind but never really stood out in a crowd. Now, you'd instantly recognize his name. Our parents were better friends than we were; he didn't sign my yearbook. He played basketball and he was good and tall (my favorite basketball coach's quote: "You can't teach height." ) and recruited to play D-I ball, but, after all, it was Marin basketball we'd seen him play. Not exactly The Bronx. Now he's playing right field in the Majors. She was literary editor of the yearbook, and as she inscribed in mine, .." there's always a certain person who we like to talk about." Now she's married to that certain person and her books are in Barnes and Noble next to Tolstoy and Twain. Some I expected to do well - the valedictorian who went on to be an editor of the Harvard Law Review, the hotel magnate's sons who run companies and produce movies. There's comfort in the knowledge that ...

I've known her for all but 6 weeks of her 26 years on this earth, and I've loved her for every one of them. Just 4 weeks to the day older than the Big Cuter, she was a girly-girl in love with Ariel who didn't mind getting dirty. Seret taught her to swim, and she was a dolphin. She played tennis in the cul-de-sac and had a stroke to die for. She was brave and thoughtful and curious and the only girl in Play Group. Everybody aways wanted to sit next to her; little boys were bitten over the right to do just that. Her smile lit up a room and a McDonald's commercial and the Jumbotron at Kaufman Stadium*. Through it all, she remained the same wide-eyed kid I'd pushed in a stroller. The Twins thought that they were pretty good baseball players until they caught for her at Stinson Beach. Her dad tried to give them the catcher's mitt, but, hey... we're 13 and totally cool and she's a girl throwing a softball and that lasted exactly one pitch. By the end of her w...