Saturday Musing

I suppose in the end we are all simply the sum or our memories, fantasies, dreams and accomplishments. We probably have photos and journals and other evidence of how we felt in the moment, and as I age, I find these old things more and more valuable.

Real-time living is much trickier.

But this morning was a good morning, with all three younger kids here. Aidan cooked himself his specialty breakfast -- egg yokes, egg whites, and ground turkey.

Dylan had some cereal.

Julia had sourdough toast.

I has coffee and tea.

Aidan is trying to figure out his major at Missoula -- nutrition, physical therapy, etc. The problem with the latter, which is current choice, is it requires a ton of difficult physics, chemistry and math courses. (I'm not sure why.)

The good thing is he recognizes this coming fall semester will be challenging for him and he needs to develop some new study habits. He is considering joining a study group or getting a tutor.

To me those things are evidence of a maturity that may have been lacking in the past.

Julia is, of course, about to go off to boarding school. I miss her already. We will have a family send-off dinner Tuesday night. I cannot tell whether she is scared, excited or both.

Dylan has decided to *not* take community college courses but to get a job. I  am grateful he will be around this fall, because I always love our conversations and he is a great helper.

Sadly, I have grown old and feeble. It is so difficult to do the things I used to do. I knew this day would arrive but I'd hoped it would be later than age 68. That did not prove to be the case.

Then again, today, I did the wash, the dishes, and some business duties. So I guess I am not done yet!

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A Brave and Humble Hero

Today I met Kim Chambers, the first women to swim all the way from the Farallon Islands off of Northern California, which is a well-documented white shark feeding ground, to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Kiwi woman completes shark-infested Golden Gate swim - CNN Video

It's a 30-mile swim that took over 17 hours to complete.

One of my friends, Melissa, was on Kim's crew during the swim. She brought her by my office after she appeared on our radio talk show, Forum, this morning.

It was a real honor to meet such a brave person, who also is humble and so able to make her experience emotionally accessible to those of us who would never be able to do such a think. Her radio interview was actually quite amazing.

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Vacation

So my three youngest are down in Santa Cruz with their Mom for a little vacation before school starts back up. As I transferred them all some money to make the trip more affordable, I thought back over my vacations over the years.

I used to love those trips. But the last one I remember was to the Grand Canyon in, I think, 2009. That was also near the end of the time I had a partner.

When people at work ask me whether I will take a vacation soon, I never know how to answer. Where would I go? What would I do? Who would I see?

For the past six years all I have done is work, try to save money, and take care of my kids. I have never taken any kind of break.

At this point, I doubt I ever will.

Why?

I always depended on my partner, whether a wife or girlfriend, to arrange those trips. I guess I never figured out how to do something like that on my own. Usually we did what she wanted to do. Maybe I never really had any real idea where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do.

And now it is way too late. I am super-focused on saving money, like my Scots grandfather taught me, so my kids have something when I am gone. It is increasingly difficult just to manage the day to day, on my own.

So I have no vacation plan and furthermore, have no fantasy or vision of any kind of vacation I would even like to take. Home and work is all I have, all I can handle.

So, over and out on that front. I am here, at home and work, paying for everything I can out of my relatively modest public broadcasting salary.

But no complaints.

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First Bank Account

On a rare humid and overcast day here in San Francisco, I used my lunch hour to take Julia to Wells Fargo Bank here in the Mission District near where we live.

We were immediately greeted by a friendly Latina woman.

"My daughter is moving awy to school and I want to open a linked bank account for her," I said. She gestured for us to sit down, and we did.

Then, over the next half hour or so, we accomplished our purpose. I transferred to her account an initial $100 (which becomes official tomorrow) and she was given her very first ATM card.

She also has a new savings account.

I could tell this was one of those grown-up moments for Julia.

"Now I never again will have to sign over a check in order to get it cashed!" she said. She also smiled a lot.

Being a teenager can be so hard at times, you just have to cherish moments like these.

A week from tomorrow she moves to boarding school in Napa.

I loved what the head banker said to her when he was called over to meet her and greet her as the latest WFB customer in our family:

"Your next steps may be establishing credit and buying a car. We can help with those!"

She just nodded; he obviously did not know he was talking to a 16-year-old who does not yet have a driver's license (or a credit card.)

But such is capitalism. And such is life. For Julia, I suspect this was a big day.

For me too. It is the sixth time I have done this. Learning to manage your own finances, as I mentioned to her afterwards, is a big part of growing up. I look forward to going on that adventure with her.

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Recommendations & Life Stories

I relocated my mother's story this morning, the one she dictated to my oldest sister a few months before she died 13 years ago. (She would have turned 100 a few days ago.) We called her Grandma Anne in our family and although my older kids remember her well, my younger ones cannot so much.

Julia, who wasn't even four when Mom passed away, has no effective memory of her at all.

But she does have something else -- a healthy dose of ironic appreciation for that letter of recommendation her art teacher wrote.

When I asked her about it yesterday, here is what she had to say:

"So I read it and I was blown away. I mean, she's a great writer, my teacher, but when I read all those things she had to say about me, all I could think was 'this is my first letter of recommendation and she's put all of that in there already?' 'What about when I really need someone to say something nice like when I am trying to get into college?'"

I gently suggested that she might approach the same teacher then. I'm sure she filed that suggestion away.

Thinking back over Julia's childhood, and going through some old pictures, I realize how her artistic impulses have been the constant theme running through everything. I mean art in a very large sense, one that includes all of us. In this sense, we are all artists, even if we do not think of ourselves that way.

There was the way from when she was very young she insisted on dressing in a certain style. There was the way she designed her room. There were the details she noticed as we traversed this city -- that house, this window, that color here or there. Always looking and always seeing.

Then there were all of her projects. In the photo above, when she was maybe 5 or 6, she was painting sand dollars from Ocean Beach. Where did she get that idea?

As she grew older and showed what others call "artistic talent" we hired art teachers to help her improve her techniques.

Then was her response to not getting into the School of the Arts: refusing to take her opportunity for a second chance because she felt offended as a 14-year-old feminist. (That school has since been investigated and sued for its admission practices.) That is one of the few moments I recall her acting like a drama queen. But it was Christmas Eve and she was disappointed.

But now she is about to return to art as a lens for her development. As we were shopping for her Oxbow School supplies yesterday, I was just along for the ride, but I noticed how she eschewed the dramatic colors of sheets and towels in favor of zeroing in on the subtle shades or grays and textures that were not the plushest or most expensive but practical.

It turns out you can spend hundreds of dollars on sheets or towels, and with me there to pay, had she chosen that option, it would have been okay. But I am my mother's son, a Scot, and I know I flinched when she was handling the more expensive options -- and I know she noticed.

In the end she chose some mid-range options and then she produced a 20% off coupon that further reduced the final cost by +$50. She had met her Mom before hand to get that coupon.

Today, as I reflect back on all of this, I can only think about how proud Grandma Anne would be of Julia. Whatever any of us may be doing with ourselves, it is the art of living that really matters.

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