Prom Photo

After much prodding, tonight Dylan shared a photo of his prom night and his date, Izzy. We celebrated his graduation tonight with a party and about 30 old friends. Everyone loves Dylan and it's easy to see why. He's a very smart and funny young man, who is gentle and kind to everyone. He has lots of ideas and interests. He gives great hugs.

As I watched all of the Moms and Dad and friends come over to congratulate him tonight, hug him and hand him envelopes with cards and checks, the emotions were so palpably genuine that I know he knows that people see him for who he is and love him exactly for being such an unusual character in our lives.

There's nothing phony about this young man. I don't know the girl in the photo, Izzy, but she has very good taste, IMHO, is choosing her prom date.

Dylan is now trying to decide between his two remaining college options -- Santa Barbara Community College and the University of Montana.

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Graduation Day

Congratulations, Dylan! Class of 2014 Lowell High School.

What an emotional day it is to witness your child reach this kind of milestone. This is my fifth high school graduation: Laila at Lowell, Sarah at Redwood, Peter at Redwood, Aidan last year at Balboa, and Dylan tonight at Lowell. Still to come: Julia in three years, presumably at Gateway, where she is wrapping up her freshman year.

I admit that I cried in the darkened auditorium in the early part of the ceremony, but I do not believe anyone noticed. I'm sure other parents did too.

Four years ago, this brilliant young son of mine was so excited when he got admitted to Lowell, which is a merit school, rated as one of the ten best in the world (according to its principal.)

The academic experience for him was clearly mixed. But socially he thrived, making good friends and going to lots of parties.

The odd part of all that is if you would have asked me I would have predicted the academics would have turned him on, and the social part might have been challenging.

But parents never truly know their children's realities; we just glimpse what is shared with us.

One thing I truly appreciate about Dylan, as I watched him walk up there on stage tonight in his cap and gown and old tennis shoes, is the conversations we have always been able to have. He shares his life with me, his thoughts and feelings.

Much of the past few years, these conversations have included his reasons for not trying to do well in class, a kind of intellectual rebellion I've had trouble arguing against, even though I knew he was limiting his college options in the process.

His test scores remain so very high. He reads constantly. He has ideas about everything. But he only has a couple of college options and he is not sure how to choose.

We'll figure this out together. For tonight I am just glad high school is over for him, and as his lovely smile in the photos shows, so is he.

On to his future!

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Memories in the Wind

At the back of my apartment there are a series of three windows. The big ones let you see out and let you see in. They are in the laundry room. The little one is clouded, if that is the right word, in other words you cannot see in or out.

It is in my bathroom.

Against that clouded window, branches pass. Sometimes they seem to caress the glass, much like a finger against a naked body.

There are two types of branches that can reach this window, one from an apple tree and the other from a bamboo plant.

I think of them, given my experience, as warring women -- my American lovers and my Asian lovers. As they blow in the wind, making their case, I remember each and every one of the women I have loved. Each was beautiful and now their surrogates brush across my cloudy window.

Suddenly I open the window up and all becomes clear.

None of you are here. All that is left for me is my imagination and my memory.

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Saratoga Saturday Morning

My daughter and I arose early while the boys slept in and drove down the peninsula to her game. On the way she told me of her concerns for the upcoming round of final exams that will round out her freshman year in high school.

From the windy cool gray city we emerged into a hot suburban high school field. We both got a bit sunburned. Afterward, we stopped at a gas station so she could get an ice tea.

Back in the city, the layer of marine air plus the wind keeps everything here cool. I know at some point she'll choose to stop playing soccer but until then, I'll treasure these times together.

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Heat Wave in San Francisco

It's around 80 degrees today and tonight during a very hot week for this part of the world. After soccer practice, Julia knuckled down on her homework. My A+ student has developed the best study habits of any kid I have known for a while, and it is paying off for her.

Just a couple weeks left in her freshman year.

Dylan's senior year is almost complete (they don't take final exams) and his graduation is two weeks from tomorrow night.

Aidan is at the gym; he's expanded his workout regime from an hour to 1.5 hours per session.

At work we got a hold of some Medicare billing data and we have a team preparing a big piece for Thursday. We also have a big investigative look at police-involved shootings in a smaller city in the Bay Area.

At Dylan's request, I cooked spaghetti tonight, a turkey, onion, egg, soy sauce, spice and tomato sauce over small penne pasta.

They all liked it.

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Mother's Day

My mother's life was so different from mine, spanning the years 1915-2002. Born in a village in Scotland, arriving here as a schoolchild, a teenager in the Depression, Valedictorian of her large inner-city high school in Detroit, not allowed to go to college by her father, and a mother and divorced by age 19.

She raised me to at least know the rudimentary skills of cooking, cleaning and clothes washing, though I've never excelled at any of those.

Today I'm thinking of her and all of the other mothers past and present who do so much to shape the lives of their children, for better and for worse.

It's a tough job. I've got two adult daughters who are among the best Moms I've ever observed in action. Between them they are raising four boys and two girls, day in and day out. One is a single Mom, the hardest state of all.

This may be a symbolic holiday in many ways but a good day to remember the people who matter to us all the most.

Happy Mother's Day to everyone who is a Mom and everyone who has had one. That would be all of us.

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Baseball Season Sunday

I'm usually at my happiest during baseball season, even more so when the Giants are playing well. The Giants are playing very well, in first place in their division, with 20 wins and 12 losses, a .625 winning percentage. That would translate into 101 wins for the season, which rarely happens in major league baseball.

The team swept Atlanta this weekend with three straight wins by the scores of 2-1, 3-1 and 4-1.

But as all baseball fans know, it's early, there are 130 games left. And last year the Giants lost more games than they won and fell far behind their arch-rival LA Dodgers, who won the division easily.

Besides baseball, I love numbers and at least some parts of math. My fantasy baseball team, the Mud Lake Mafia, is off to a rocky start, in 8th place in a league of fourteen teams. I keep the stats for my team and study them every day.

I project forward how the team ought to perform, and frequently drop and add players in order to maximize the team's chances. This is a game -- fantasy baseball -- that makes your brain work. You need math, pattern recognition, intuition and risk-taking.

I believe my team should finish higher in the standings, probably fourth. In order to be better than that, they need to accumulate 5,000 points over the 162 game schedule. (Fantasy baseball tracks actual MLB games, so your "team" is a list of actual players in the league and your results are whatever they do day to day.)

They've not been doing that well. As of yesterday I projected them to only accumulate 4,470 points, which would probably achieve 7th place.

You have more players on your roster than can play each day, so you also have to figure out who to put into the lineup that particular day, depending on the pitcher-hitter matchups and other factors.

Athletes have good streaks and bad streaks, like all of the rest of us. Immersing myself in baseball, fantasy baseball, and math is one of the few ways I have found to find peace in a stressful world.

But I don't like the sound of 7th place. I like the sound of first place.

I also like my garden (above).

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