Back Bay View: August 2022

Wednesday, August 31, 2022

Back to school

Goodbye to August! Farewell to summer! Farewell, children, freedom, time!

All of the children who still go to school are now in school, and I have started teaching at a new school, as well. The start of a new school year is always exciting - new books, new pencils, new paper, new shoes, new teacher, new friends. . . it a time marked with potential - to form relationships, to reform habits, to discover opportunities to serve and, of course, to learn.

And yet it is also marked with mourning, as we say good-bye to the big kids and the freedom of summer.

Mrs. Darwin wrote about mourning her college kids' departures on her blog, and her description of finding a quiet place to cry struck a chord. I commented that I had a similar experience as I watched my husband drive away with our fifth child to take him to college. I had to sit down on the front step and catch my breath as the car pulled away and they were no longer waving back at me. I felt walloped in the gut. I needed one more hug. I had made him breakfast and helped go over his checklist, and then we had an hour or so of scurrying around the house and checking up on the to do list before it was time to head out the door. Why didn't we get one more hug in? Why didn't we sit and talk about important and meaningful things instead of loading the dishes and tidying up the kitchen?

Usually I am the one that takes the kids to move in. This was the first send off I wasn't the parent driving off to the airport. The busyness of those weekends, checking off the lists of stuff, the physical labor of moving bags and boxes and catching flights and renting cars, usually is so exhausting that saying good bye is not so emotional - although I've shed a few tears in those rental cars.

But seeing this fifth child off hit me hard. He's a part of the "littles." It was a hard year for him, and he had made it through, and we had grown closer in the process, I think. So I called the boy up for one more goodbye, one more blessing, even though he and his dad weren't even to the highway yet. And good thing - they had driven off without the key to the storage locker where the older brother's hand-me-down futon, fridge, cheap carpet, and other sundries were locked up and waiting. So I got to speed off with the key to hand over and to grab that last hug at the interstate exit where they were waiting.

I'm sure there's a meme about how saying good-bye doesn't get any easier with practice . . .

This past weekend, I was the one flying off and renting a car to help our oldest daughter move back into her apartment at college. She spent the summer in San Diego, couch surfing and house sitting and working for the rec center. The moment of saying goodbye was back in June, when I was sad and hurt that she didn't want to spend the summer with us, but totally understanding of the reasons why. When I was 20, I wanted independence, too. In fact, that was the summer I spent in the UP working at a camp for kids with special needs. Bay Cliff Health Camp it was called, and it was a magical, wonderful summer, but that's another story.

I think my daughter relished her summer, too. She went sailing and surfing and to the horse races and made dinners for herself and for her friends and got herself around town. She lived on her own dime and made it. When I arrived on Friday, we went for a walk and got lunch, did some shopping for apartment stuff, and then split up to spend time with our local friends one more time. Saturday morning we ran a fundraiser race together (with a couple of my mom friends along, too) and then drove up to her campus - after a stop at another friend's new house for lunch. Traffic through LA was a slog, so we had time to catch up and talk about the future, etc, before arriving for the move-in, which was much easier this time around, compared to last year, which was her sophomore year, but first year on campus.

This year she has an apartment on campus that she shares with 3 other girls. She stayed there Saturday night, but I drove up to the base, about 35 mins away to stay in the Navy Lodge, because I was too cheap to pay for a Malibu hotel and to worried about sketchy environs to get a more affordable hotel near the highway. (I was questioning that choice after the rental car company gave me a huge truck, the "upgrade" I didn't want, that was not cheap to fill up.) Then Sunday after Mass and brunch we did a little thrifting for kitchen items, but not too much, since the other roommates were still arriving and decorating will happen later. We had a time for a short walk and sandwiches before I had to make the slog back to the airport.

The whole weekend felt somewhat surreal. I have now been back to San Diego 5 times since we moved a year ago. That's a lot - an unusual amount because of college moving, college visiting, and the graduation event. My friends were teasing me about when my next quarterly visit was going to be. I've practically socialized more with those friends far away than I have with people we are getting to know here. And perhaps it has prevented me from rooting here. I am still questioning the decisions we made last spring, and while everything is fine, good even, I miss the friendships that took years to develop, sunsets over the ocean with hills silhouetted in lavender, walking on the beach and to the library and Mass. I feel in limbo about investing in life here because I don't want to stay put. Sometimes I just have to stop thinking. I know if I read back over this blog, I would find post after post about feeling displaced, about looking forward to the next thing. I am truly grateful for the opportunities we had to discover new places, and although I complained here about rootlessness - isn't that part of the purpose of journaling, to exorcise the complaints? - I did appreciate what we had at the time. But maybe not enough. This lack of gratitude, this pining for elsewhere, is a sin, a failing, a fatal flaw, I'll spend my life fighting.

Even now I am pining for the summer back. For the years back with the children small again. For the days when we took up a whole pew at Mass. Saturdays at the soccer fields. Friday night football. Camping trips. Beach days. Museum days. Birthdays. Reading at bedtime. Wasting time at the playground. Did I appreciate those years enough? Of course not, although I am grateful for being able to relive preschool days with the youngest, and now third grade...

Ah melancholia. This has been my little indulgence, now it's back to work. I have lessons to plan, poetry to read, grading, email, etc, etc. And then two more kids at home to enjoy for a short time.

A last day outing: First the Elizabet Ney castle. She was a German sculptor who immigrated to Texas in the late 1870s. Made her career during busts of famous people and patrons.

Her home is now a museum. It's really a very small castle, but an interesting place to visit.

A life cast of an infant. Why didn't I do this with all our kids?

Last BBQ lunch at Blacks

And now a college student, doing his own laundry!

The third grader and junior off for their first day!

Posing

Feeling sad to say goodbye

Spending time with the older daughter

Apartment style living

Malibu waves and sunshine make it hard to leave

Thursday, August 18, 2022

Reading notes

I've read two interesting books lately, both semi-autobiographical books of young people starting out in life: Chicago by Brian Doyle and Either/Or by Elif Batuman. Neither of these books were quick reads, but both were engrossing, so I read them hungrily. Despite the similarity of being semi-autobiographical novels about young people finding their way in life, they are quite different novels.

I love Brian Doyle's writing, and Chicago did not disappoint. Doyle writes so lyrically and joyfully about places and people. The book is slim on plot, but it is rich in character sketches. The main character is a young college graduate who moves to Chicago to work for a Catholic periodical (very similar to Doyle's own path). He finds an apartment in a building near downtown, where he gets to know his fellow renters, the building owner, the caretaker who is in love with the owner, and the caretaker's dog, who is the wisest individual in the book. The book has a touch of magical realism - the dog communicates clearly, people meet and form relationships easily and raise money for each other, the building inhabitants all get along magically well. The main character, who remains unnamed, wanders the city and its alleys, plays pick-up basketball on inner city courts, discovers bars and restaurants and helps the sisters who live nearby. He forms a friendship with the caretaker and his dog, goes to baseball games with his neighbors, and falls quietly in love. He walks the city for miles, exploring the place but also contemplating life. As with other Doyle books, Doyle's lyrical style of writing makes Chicago almost a poem, creating an image of a particular slice of life in the city, describing the people and the place as they enlarge both the narrator's understanding of life and the reader's. The narrator transitions from a somewhat clueless young man, to a young adult who appreciates kindness and generosity, who sees the goodness/light rather than the dark. It's a book full of wonder.

Elif Batuman's narrator considers becoming a flaneur, or a walker about town, also, but despite a few similarities in curiosity and exploration, the two narrators are very different personalities. I had not read Elif Batuman's books before, but Either/Or kept me engaged because it was such a curious presentation of the mind of a young woman on the cusp of adulthood. The semi-autobiographical work is a follow up to her book The Idiot, which I have not read, and now I'm not sure if I will since I was able to piece together what happened in that first novel, the story of Selin's first year of college, so there would be no suspense about the outcome of the book.

Batuman's narrator, Selin, is Turkish American, a sophomore at Harvard trying to make sense of life. She is naive, but also very book smart, and becomes cynical about her classmates' obsession with pairing off, even as she herself is recovering from heart break and interested in discovering what makes sex so fascinating. She turns to books to discover the meaning of life and Kierkegaard's Either/Or, which contrasts the moral life and the aesthetic life, is a formative book for Selin. She begins to experiment with living an aesthetic life, and continues to find insights and guidance from the books she reads for class and for pleasure that help her escape the malaise she has been in since her boyfriend form the first novel broke up with her. She chooses classes based on how interesting they sound and whether they will help her become a novelist. Her roommates and best friend, who is also Eastern European, drag her out of her room and out and about so that she will get over her broken heart, but they are continuously pairing off with guys they meet at drunken parties, which doesn't appeal to her while she is still in mourning. But eventually she discovers someone is attracted to her, and so she decides to leave a party with him. Since she is seeking experiences while testing the aesthetic life, she barely questions the morality of what she is doing when she calls him back a week or two later so she can lose - or just get rid of - her virginity..

The second half of the novel follows Selin as she travels Turkey as a writer for Let's Go - which funds her visit back to visit extended family. Soon after she heads out to the locations designated by the Let's Go people, she finds herself in a relationship with a guide, who turns out to be not a decent guy, but then she falls into the clutches of several questionable characters whom she tries to shake, but doesn't always succeed. Her inability to stand up for her own feelings allows her to be victimized by some creeps - Selin talks herself into letting them have her way with her because she can't think of a reason to say no. Even though she studies Russian, she must not have come across Ivan Karamazov's rationalizing that if there is no God, everything is permitted. Or maybe that's what she is testing out.

The novel ends in such a way that I suspect future sequels are in the works. No terrible tragedy befalls Selin in Turkey, and she should have lots of material for her own novel, or at least for a Let's Go Guide to Turkey. As a reader, I both pitied Selin and also recognized similar twisty ways of thinking about what I was reading and how I should apply it to my life - which is the big question she is trying to decide. A peril of reading too much is having no way or too many ways of determining a map to life. But then if someone reads too narrowly, perhaps some wisdom or insight might be overlooked. And then there's all that knowledge and potential wisdom to be found in relationships and experiences . . . or the confusion/loss of sensitivity when one has too many experiences...

Saturday, August 13, 2022

What I did on my summer vacation

My friends, we have one more weekend of summer vacation left. The kids start school on Monday. All of those plans for summer? We only accomplished a few. Where has the summer gone?

But those few events were pretty major. For example, we just returned from North Carolina. We spent the week before last week in Charlotte and Greensboro (staying at an inn in Elon), where we traveled to watch our daughter run in the Junior Olympic National meet. Initially, I thought it might be a trip that involved the runner and a parent, but because we have cousins and college friends in the area, the meet provided impetus to take the whole family for a summer vacation trip.

The meet started on Monday and ended on Saturday, and our daughter was supposed to run Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and maybe Saturday, which gave us Sunday and Tuesday and part of the other days for visiting. So we spent most of the first part of the week enjoying the company of our cousins, talking, laughing, swimming, and eating some delicious food. These are cousins on my husband's side, a set of five siblings who have kids all roughly in the 6-16 year old age range, and who all, miraculously, live within 5 miles of their parents and each other and get along. They have a family band and lots of projects. We have seen them rarely since we moved from Virginia in 2009, about the same time that the "wedding years" of our generation of cousins petered out, but over the last couple of years, we've reconnected - travel is easier, my husband designed a mountain house for them, and they came to Coronado and Austin a couple of times. And now we are starting to enter the "funeral years" of our parents' generation, sad to say - but soon enough the wedding years of our kids simultaneously, offering more opportunities to gather.

On Tuesday, we went out to eat with our college friends, a couple who started dating about the same time we did. It was like no time at all had passed between the last time we saw each other, which was back in our Chicagoland days nearly 20 years ago, when we all lived in the suburbs and occasionally met up when our babies were little. We were pregnant together a couple of times in those years. Over delicious food - all the vegetables! - and drinks, we laughed and talked and parted reluctantly with the comforting knowledge that good friends are for a lifetime.

The next few days were spent mostly at the track. My parents drove down to join us in cheering, and we stayed at a cute inn on the beautiful campus of Elon University, which looks just what a southern college should look like with big, shady trees and red brick buildings, about 30 mins from the track. We picked Elon because all of the affordable hotels in Greensboro were booked by the families of the other 14,999 athletes. It was hot and muggy, but the sun was out, and I love a good race, so the days went by quickly. Our daughter placed 8th, which gets a medal, in the 800 m and 4th in the 4x 800 relay, which also earned a medal. In the 4x 400, her team placed 16th in the semi-finals, so no medal, and they did not place high enough to get a spot in the finals, which were supposed to be on Saturday.

Our original plan was that we'd fly the 5 members of the family living at home this summer out for the first part of the week for a visit with the cousins, and then my husband and the 2 kids not running would fly back on Thursday evening to return to work/life and to save money, since we knew the runner might not run on Saturday. As it turned out, their Thursday flight became one of the summer travel cancellation statistics, so they were able to stay one more day and watch the Friday race.

When we found out their flight was changed, and we knew that she wasn't running on Saturday, I called the airline to find out their rescheduling policy. After waiting and waiting to talk to a live person from the airline, I made the decision to rebook on the same flight as the rest of the family since when the receptionist said there was no charge to change. As soon as I did, though, I had a sinking feeling about cutting short our vacation. NOOOOO!, my inner critic yelled, What have I done?! I had just canceled our second visit with our college friends, with whom we were planning to stay Saturday night! I could have rebooked for Saturday afternoon, so I would still have had the rest of Friday for a day of relaxing, potentially going for a hike in the woods of North Carolina, and then meeting our friends for dinner. Now I had just cancelled my fun!

So for a few days I wallowed in a cesspool of self-pity - or maybe it was just post-party depression - because our most recent summer vacation trip was cut short by a day and a half. Why do I second guess my decisions all the time? While I had been waiting on the phone to speak to someone, I had been doing calculations -- I figured there would be a fee to rebook the flight, so I wasn't really thinking about the reality of the decision. I also knew I would save money on a night in a hotel if I was able to rebook. Then I was balancing spending the extra time with friends whom we had already had dinner with earlier in the week with spending the extra time with the kids, who had some invitations for the weekend, and I have a list of stuff to get done before school starts, as well. When the airline phone attendant said there was no fee and asked if she should go ahead, I said yes, not thinking about how disappointed I would feel to give up the extra visit and the time alone with just the one daughter.

As I am writing this, I am questioning why I am still ruminating on this decision - there is a lesson here for me. I often choose what seems to be the responsible thing to do, but isn't always the thing I want to do. We are at the point that we can spend money on a vacation and the kids don't need as much hands-on supervision, and yet I haven't mentally released myself from that mindset of saving money and watching kids. I am frustrated by missing out on the last day of vacation, but also for overthinking my inability to think clearly about decisions like this. I need a policy - like always say YES to friend and family time! But then, it's also family time back here. . . so while having a policy sounds good, it also is hard to apply. I still need to practice not overthinking - perhaps by setting priorities based on values to help guide decisions, and sticking with those values by deciding without rethinking. As someone who chronically second guesses decisions, knowing WHY I decide something would help me decide and move on.

The fact that I was sad to go is evidence of how much we loved North Carolina - it was so green and lush, and the family time was restorative. It was a wonderful way to end the summer.

Reading on our early morning flight - which also had to be rebooked when our original flight was cancelled on the way to NC - fortunately, we were able to rebook on an earlier flight, although getting up at 3:30 am was painful.