All Along the Mountain's Spine

I drove a carful of thirteen-year-old girls to camp today, and they never stopped talking the entire two hours of driving along freeways, up over mountain passes, or through deepening redwood forests. It was as if our magnificent surroundings held little interest to them as they gossiped, talked about how pretty various actresses are, complained about how photogenic or not they considered themselves to be, how many shoes they had, what was on their Facebook pages, and other important matters.

Once there, deep in the Santa Cruz Mountains, I helped several groups of kids pitch their tents and pointed out the nearby deer tracks along the edge of a muddy creek. About 40 kids and a handful of adults are camping there for the next three nights, an annual event at their school.

The school year is ending around here. The boys are finishing up their exams; after tomorrow, their school years are essentially over. The struggle to get them to pass math is one of the most relentlessly depressing themes of recent weeks and months.

They just don't think math matters.

It's ironic because we live in a time when, arguably, math matters more than ever before, at least if you want to get a good job. You need at least to comprehend what an algorithm is!

A week from tomorrow is my first meeting with one of the two auditors I have to deal with this season. I'm almost ready, just waiting on a couple last records from the bank, which hopefully will arrive in time.

It's a hot night. Two minutes after dropping the boys at their Mom's and returning here, a large boom came from nearby. I shuddered; about a year ago on a similar warm Tuesday night, my neighbor was shot and killed out front.

But this boom was far louder, so if from a gun, would have had to be a shotgun not a pistol.

But it must have been something else, because this time there were no police cars, no flashing red lights, no ambulances, no body bags.

The Giants are winning games. My fantasy baseball team has one of the biggest leads over the rest of the league ever seen in our 14-team group. I don't know how this happened, actually; my team is a perpetual loser.

Maybe the math is on my side in this one small way.

Summer begins. So many questions hang over me and my family, it's hard to relax and enjoy it. But, as always, I'm happy for the kids.

Driving alone up a long stretch of lonely highway today, with hardly any other cars in sight, I wished mightily I'd had a partner in the car with me. Someone to share the beauty of California with. We could have stopped at one point, climbed a ridge, and sat together in the high grasses, enjoying the view and each other.

But that was just a dream, just a dream.

No one sits beside me, in my car or anywhere. I am on my own, a loner not by choice but by fate. Unlike on the drive south, when four voices never ceased sounding, not a word was spoken on the long drive back north. No one said anything because there was no one to hear it.

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