Mid-Summer Celebrating

A year ago this weekend, it was time to celebrate two grandsons' birthdays and we did so in a park in the East Day.

That Two-Birthday-Weekend has rolled around again, so we're off to a party for the boy who turns two tomorrow today, followed by a party for the boy who turns three today tomorrow.

If you can follow all of that, you can also decode the concerned story about the fate of caged pigeons written by my young SPCA camper. "If I were rich, I'd adopt all of the animals at the SPCA," she told me.

We have a list of cruelty free companies on the refrigerator now. She si auditing everything I buy by brand -- from shampoo to kitchen products.

She's been making clay models lately.

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A Young Storyteller Appears

Storytellers come in all shapes and sizes, of course, and ages and colors, races, religions, genders, and they can show up at any time and any place.

Today, during a play date with my almost-three-year-old companion, who's truly become one of my best friends over the past year or so, on a very hot East Bay day, in an uncrowded park, while we were sitting on a bench, a little girl walked over to say hi.

"Is that his bike?" she asked me, eying the small contraption parked nearby. Given that he was decked out in a bright turquoise helmet and knee pads, this was a logical inference on her part.

And I confirmed that it was, indeed, his bike.

"Would you like to try it out?" I asked her.

She narrowed her dark brown eyes, evaluating Luca's expression, and didn't answer.

Luca got a distant look in his large blue eyes, looked off in the distance, and said softly, "I don't know. She would have to wear these (tapping his knee pads) and this (touching his helmet)."

"She a big girl," I answered, "and I bet she knows how to ride a bike already, where as you are just learning."

"How old are you?" I asked her. "Five?"

"I'm eight," she said, with a frown. She had very long hair, sort of brown with hints of sunshine, tied in braids, with long bangs that partially hid her eyes from view, except when she swept them aside, which was often.

"I have a bike, my Dad got it for me, after my first one was stolen. That one was a Barby bike, my new one is, um, a Lady Bug bike."

[Intermission] Note to reader: Hang in there, this story gets much better soon.

"Why don't you take it for a ride," I suggested to her, as I turned to my grandson. "It's okay, right, Luca."

He nodded.

She did, under his watchful gaze, then came back and parked it next to us. The two children climbed on a sort-of three-way teeter-totter and bounced around for a while, in silence, though he laughed a lot. When the girl got off and walked over to the nearby swings, Luca got off and jogged along right behind her, like a puppy.

When she climbed on the one big-kid swing, however, he stopped, watching her for a while, then slowly came back over to me. "She's swinging," he sighed.

We played in the sandbox for a few minutes; then the girl returned.

"How old is he?" she asked me, again fixing her eyes on little Luca as if she were trying to make sense of him. (He's big for his age and he has a very large vocabulary.)

"I'm two and a half," piped up Luca. "Actually, you are 362/365ths," I corrected, being the math-nerd-Grandpa that I am, and told her, "He'll be three on Saturday."

"A raccoon visited my yard," he suddenly blurted out.

The girl came closer to once again study him, now with a furrowed brow. "A family of raccoons live on my roof," she said. "My Grandpa got a ladder and went up to repair the roof. One of the baby raccoons fell off the roof."

"Oh wow," I said. "Was it hurt? Did it land on its feet?"

"No," she said. "I caught it."

"You caught a baby raccoon as it fell off of your roof? How big was it?"

She indicated it was a few inches long.

By this point, Luca was mesmerized. Maybe I was too. Raccoons have been a very big deal for both of us over recent months, ever since he found out from his Papa that these nocturnal creatures sometimes visit his yard. On several occasions, I have pointed out their paw prints in the mud to him. One night, he even saw one!

But to catch a baby raccoon falling through space as this girl said she had done was a tale so far out of either of our imaginations until today that it seemed, well, imaginary.

Were we dreaming this story?

I took a closer look at our visitor. She was quite small for an 8-year-old and looked like she might be part Latina.

"I grew up in Florida," she offered, as if reading my mind. "I speak Spanish and English." We broke into a bit of Spanish, which she then thoughtfully translated for Luca.

"He speaks French," I told her, "but he usually won't do it when asked."

"I can't speak French," she said, "but my Mom is teaching me Chinese." She then proceeded to count to ten in Chinese (perfectly) and I spoke a few simple words (hello, thank you) back to her.

"My hair is really long, see?" She undid her braids and shook it free, and it fell halfway down her body. "I'm never going to cut it."

After that, she was off, disappearing across the park out of our view.

"She's gone," said Luca.

"Did you hear what she said about catching that baby raccoon?" I asked him.

He looked up at me.

"I was impressed, Grandpa," he said.
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The Champions!

News has reached us from Denmark that the San Francisco Seals-Pyros have won their division championship in the Dana Cup!

The champs getting ready to move on to the Gothia Cup in Sweden.

Aidan (in red shoes) & friends playing around in the street in the rain.


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Post # 2,000

If life could be reduced to numbers, mathematicians would be our story-tellers, not writers. But it's too late for that, since as a species we seem to have chosen words over digits, although as far as I'm concerned, either form of language would have been fine.

I'm a 1-2-4-8-16-32-64-128-256-512-1024-2048-4096-8192 kind of guy and always have been. People will tell you all kinds of things about themselves in words, weaving a narrative that, depending on their personality, may be modest or arrogant.

But, as the cliche has it, the numbers never lie.

As I look back over my life, I could have gone either way. I could have followed my math brain, as my father wanted me to do, and become an actuary or some other sort of stat-head (official scorer for a baseball team would have been a nice option).

But I didn't.

Instead, somehow I flopped in calculus in my freshman year of college, and escaped from slide rules to my college newspaper, The Michigan Daily.

***

Google claims this is the 2,000th post to this blogsite. I cannot even imagine how this could be true, but when it comes to numbers, I do trust Google. Somehow, I have done that in what by my count has been only 1,924 days. So for five years, three months, and seven days now I have averaged roughly 1.0395 posts per day.

Who knows who reads these posts -- every now and again someone besides the few who choose to comment publicly contact me to say so -- but everyone is and has always been welcome to both read and interact with the content posted here.

I feel like for a while now I've been slowing down, losing my passion for this kind of communication. No one writes only for himself, or if he does, she's a different kind of writer than me.

But even though I always hope my words may offer some comfort or sense of connectedness with another, the main experience I've taken away from blogging is it is not much different from any other kind of writing. It's just me staring at a blank screen, just as much as it was just me 40 years ago staring at a blank piece of paper.

What on earth could make me possibly think any of this matters?

It is exceptionally risky to blog. This may be a relatively young and primitive communication channel, but it also is an art form. Traditional artists work in well-established fields, where the rules are clear and the results easily evaluated by critics, as well as those who commission and view/purchase/witness their art.

Here, in the world of blogging, there are neither rules nor awards. You can have no sense of whether you are good or bad, useful or useless, achieving greatness or mediocrity. You're just another common blogger.

Maybe, in the end, that's the point.

The Player

The neck injury he sustained in that final game of the spring season has healed. Advil and ice; Advil and ice. He eventually got into some light action Thursday afternoon when he got back to practice with his team for the first time since that very scary injury.

Now, he's all set for a great adventure. Early Sunday morning, he'll fly to Europe, where over the following two weeks he will compete first in the Dana Cup in Denmark, then in the Gothia Cup in Sweden.

The second tournament is huge -- his will be one of 1570 teams from 73 nations around the world, and they will be playing in front of crowds half again as big (60,000) as anything he has witnessed rooting for his San Francisco Giants' baseball team, for example.

What he is about to experience, at the tender age of 16, is the dawn of awareness that there is a big world out there, where many of his personal choices, like to play soccer instead of baseball or basketball or track -- all of which he easily could compete in at a star-level at the high school level -- will allow him to experience the world in a more expansive way.

Another of his choices -- to attend a 94 percent "minority" high school, where he is in fact a distinct minority as a Caucasian -- will be validated as he competes with other 16-year-olds of every race and color the earth knows.

Today, as his excitement started becoming evident in his voice and his fidgeting, we visited a local sports store to get him more soccer socks, shorts and sweat pants. This is an adventure he has truly earned, not only through his athleticism but through his personal commitment to pay as much of his own way there as he could.

Thus, he has held soccer clinics, walked dogs, babysat, cleaned houses, gardened, served as a soccer coach at a camp, and run errands for many months now. He also composed his own (very sweet) fund-raising letter, which I let him send to a small group of friends and relatives, almost all of whom contributed.

As a result, over 50 percent of the cost of his trip is being paid by him! Mom and Dad only have to shoulder about 25 percent each.

My only regret about this whole experience is that I will not be there to witness him playing in these tournaments. I've rarely missed any game he's played in, and I could have gone to Europe (I had sufficient "mileage" on an airline), but it somehow seemed better that he go on this adventure on his own, without his over-protective Dad hovering along the sidelines for once.

Besides, months ago I made other plans for those miles. I decided to donate them to a good cause, to help someone else dealing with adversity, and although my previous attempts to do so failed, I'll eventually succeed in that quest. On top of these reasons, there are his two younger siblings who need me around in order to get to and from their daily camps and jobs and parties, and often to get the one solid meal a day they'll fit into their own busy social schedules.

Not to mention the fact that I am launching a company, my clients need me, and my technology blog has started to attract a large audience and is gaining traction here at the center of the third great tech boom of the past two decades. So to be a responsible adult, this is where I have to be, here in the greatest city on earth.

So I won't be over there watching him; rather, I'll wait on messages through whatever channels may exist, to learn how his team fares, how he performs, and to make sure he stays safe, healthy, and happy.

Probably somewhere on the trip, in the middle of some game against some team from a distant corner of the planet, he'll be in his crouch, waiting to strip the ball from an oncoming striker, and he'll hear a voice out in that huge crowd, maybe someone who just happens to sound a bit like me.

That voice will be urging him on to do what he always does so well. Defend. And he will.

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Thursday Night

Giants 2 Padres 1

As the first half of the season draws to a close this weekend, the World Champs are in first place, looking to repeat.

(All shots from Club Field Level, section 108.)

East of the Fog, West of the Bay

The western side of the city is cold and foggy, but here in the Mission, it's more like what most people consider summer, and has been for days. Ours is a family where children take care of children, older and younger. There are a breath-taking array of relationships across the age ranges.

Babysitting a baby just a few months old can be a demanding experience. I know how to change a diaper, still, but trying to give her a bottle might have been more successful had I noticed that there was a cap preventing her from getting the milk. Much crying ensued. But a 12-year-old took over, rocking her, singing to her, and ultimately succeeding in calming her down.

My assistant gardener sprayed the plants in yesterday's heat. He also sprayed the rocks.

Today's a special day -- my oldest son's 30th birthday. Happy Birthday, Peter! Enjoy Cape Cod!

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