Bernal Heights Park

We like Bernal Heights Park so much it deserves its own blog post. Also I need to make it to 50 to fulfill my yearly blogging goal. :) The park is on the peak of quite a high hill: you find your way up from the surrounding neighborhood using one of any number of little access paths.

 Once at the top the city is at your feet.

The Golden Gate Bridge looks short from here. Dad's neighborhood is on the other side of the green hill, not far from the base of the bridge.

 This is a view of Holly Park, another park on a peak a couple blocks from Jes and Deena's house, the closest spot to take a walk or throw a frisbee.

 Someone made this cool rock pattern on a flat area of scree.

 A coyote lives up here somewhere, but all we saw was dogs.

Then we skipped back down the hill to go home.

SF: Old things

It would not feel right to come here without visiting the old places. We stopped by Dad’s old house. There’s not much to see from the street, and it was painful to be there, because it felt like we were visiting nothing. A hole. The community garden up the street, on the other hand, felt full of life. I have had thirteen years to get used to visiting there in memory of my mom.

We had promised ourselves that we would come back to the Richmond district for dim sum and donuts.

We made ourselves a great picnic at the library, and went home feeling fulfilled.

I think this needs doing, because it’s either go to the old places or avoid going to the old places, and avoidance doesn’t seem right. But I’m glad to spend most of our time on the fun new stuff.

SF: New things

I was worried about our trip to SF for winter break this year, because it was during this same trip last year that we got Dad’s diagnosis, and this would be the first time we stay anywhere other than Dad's house. But I'm so glad we stuck to our plan, because it’s been a great week. We enjoy traveling together. 



And there are all kinds of new things to enjoy. Staying with Jes and Deena is fun; we cook and laugh and go for walks and play games.



They live in a terrific neighborhood in a completely different part of the city – a sunny part of the city, for one thing. Here we are climbing to the top of Bernal Heights, an excellent walk with an unbeatable view at the top.

Living with Jes and Deena helps me experience this visit as the beginning of a new era, rather than brooding on loss and absence. We have found all kinds of interesting things to do that we’ve never done before. For example, in Sausalito, there is a working hydraulic scale model of the San Francisco Bay, which up until a few years ago was used for research. It’s enormous!



We went to a terrific Judaica store in Berkeley and chose Jordan’s bar mitzvah tallit. It is a present from Jes and Deena, and Jes cried in a wonderfully grandparent way when he tried it on.

And we attended the Sound of Music Sing-Along at the Castro Theater, which was a total blast. We sang our guts out, waved the little white flowers and other items in the goody bag at appropriate moments, and laughed hysterically at the well-placed audience comments. What a great time.

I'm looking forward to continuing this travel tradition.

Snow day

Last Friday, before Jordan got his fever, there was a snow day. This was the answer to Aaron's prayers -- he had literally prayed for snow on Thursday night, asking for all of us to be quiet while he did so, and Friday morning there it was, a couple inches, which is plenty for a Seattle kid to be thankful for. By 6:30am the kids were outside shouting with joy, sledding down our ramp and building a big snowman. 

However, by 9am there was NOTHING TO DO. Aaron was sobbing because Jordan wouldn't play outside with him anymore, and Jordan was as if dead from sheer ennui. 

I tried making them a list of snow day activities but they did not find it inspiring.

Professions

Aaron amused himself designing houses today, meaning floor plans. This was inspired by a math lesson in which there was some debate about whether there could be a trapezoidal room in a house. Aaron proposed that triangular closets would do the trick. He really enjoyed this. The picture is an example of an original floor plan of his, complete with the area of each room, including an L-shaped yard (area 112) surrounding a patio (area 28).

On the ride home we had something like this conversation:

Aaron: I think I might like to be an architect. But there are also other things I want to do. Most of all I want to help with some big problems, like maybe I’ll be an environmentalist first, and then I’ll be a money scientist to take care of poverty. I want a job that helps with problems.
Rachel: You really want to help people.
Aaron: I would like to help with some big problems first. Like maybe first I could be an environmentalist. Then maybe after the big problems are solved, or at least on a good track, I could move on to a different area. Then after all the big problems in all the different areas are on a good track, I could do something that is more just for my own interest, like be an architect or a scientist.
Rachel: You have a lot of different interests and you want a chance to do a lot of different things.
Aaron: Yes. Like maybe I could be an environmentalist on Mondays and Wednesdays, and be an architect on Tuesdays, and a scientist on Thursdays and Fridays.
Rachel: Education is very important. Solving big problems takes a lot of knowledge. You have to have good ideas, but also you have to know what people have tried already and what is likely to work the best.
Aaron: I would like to get multiple PhDs and do a lot of different things so that I could help with a lot of different things.
Rachel: You might be able to help with more than one thing at the same time. For example, some architects are working on how to give a lot of people a good kind of house to live in; that can help with all the people that don’t have a good place to live, which is a very important problem. Or how to make a house that is good for the environment. Then you are an environmentalist and an architect.
Aaron: Or like how to make stuff out of bamboo, because bamboo grows very fast.

Fever

Poor Jordan has had a fever for five days, along with a cough, congestion, and an eye infection. The fever is in the 100-102 range, which is officially “slight,” but at 102 he feels pretty lousy. He has missed an entire week of school. This has never happened before. Fortunately, this is a week when I’ve been able to just work from home. He isn’t much trouble; mostly he just lies around. I bring him tea and juice and bananas and empty his bin of tissues. He is very appreciative and tries to be cheerful, though it does get frustrating, lying there day after day. As far as we can tell it’s viral, so there’s nothing to do but wait it out. 

This would be a performance weekend (Lessons and Carols) if he was well enough to participate, but he’s missing at least two of his eight performances. I hear there are a number of other boys sick too. Somehow the rest of us are fine… may it continue to be so.

Edible cell

In science, Aaron modeled cells with candies on a graham cracker substrate. He ate the animal cell at school but saved the plant cell for me to see. Then he and Jordan ate the plant cell with breakfast.

Twizzlers: cell wall & cell membrane

Hershey's thing: nucleus, with nuclear membrane (shell) and DNA (letters)

Chocolate chips: endoplasmic reticulum (carefully arranged in a Z shape because in real life it has a zigzag structure)

Mento: Golgi body

Smarties: mitochondria

Green sprinkles: chloroplasts

Chocolate frosting: vacuole

Vanilla frosting: cytoplasm

Who's invited

I overheard some friends of mine talking about a difficulty that their twelve-year-old daughters were having with each other. It was about who was invited to whose bat mitzvah. Not only that, it was about who knew who was invited to whose bat mitzvah, and what each of them thought it meant that certain people were invited, and what the people who knew who was invited were going to do with that information, and so on. I had to laugh, because there is nothing like that at our house at all. My kids just do things with their friends. They are quite emotionally intelligent (in my opinion), but they do not spend time thinking about the possible implications or alternative interpretations of their social actions. They invite people or they don’t invite people, and that’s pretty much all there is to it.

I told Jordan what I had overheard my friends talking about and he cracked up. He said he never thinks about anything like that. “It’s so stupid,” he said, not in a mean way, more of a “why do people drive themselves crazy for no reason” kind of way. I said that I think this kind of thinking is more common among girls, not that boys can’t also do it (I know several who are masters), but it does seem to be more of a girl style in many cases.

Jordan: Yes. The girls. They are so weird about things like this. If you want to be friends with a girl you have to do nothing wrong for like a week.
Rachel: What do you mean, do nothing wrong?
Aaron: Like finish your math homework?
Jordan: No, not like that. Like one of my friends likes to do these fancy moves like slide down a handrail, but more often he falls off backwards, and we say “Very smooth, Billy.”* Girls don’t want you to do anything wrong like that. Although strangely enough that guy is friends with lots of girls.

I think Jordan’s point was that girls have social requirements, in which actions are (pointlessly, in his opinion) interpreted in terms of what they mean for the relationship.

Having been a girl myself, I totally get this. I remember in middle school and high school, my friends and I obsessed over what someone else’s behavior said about our friendship/romance/enmity/whatever. When we felt bold we even quizzed boys about what it meant when they said that thing, or declined to say a thing. The boys were always maddeningly enigmatic – or at least that’s how I saw them at the time. Now I think they just literally had no idea what we were talking about.

* Billy is not a person; he is their “everyman.”

All the feelings

The other night while Jordan was out at a choir thing, Dale and I watched Beauty and the Beast with Aaron. He had never seen it. He was especially charmed by the animated household things, and delighted at how closely they resembled the humans they eventually turned back into. He said, “If I was going to turn into something I think it would be a piano. Because a piano has all the feelings. It can be happy,” he said, plunking out a happy little ditty on the actual piano; “it can be sad, or angry, or anything,” playing corresponding chord progressions as he spoke. I love this idea, and I love how he feels about piano.