My Birdies

We were talking about running. We were talking about Berkeley.

"I used to do the Strawberry Canyon trail," I said.

"That's significant," Max said. "Seven miles of straight uphill from our house."

"Yeah, and it's a pretty steep trail too. Is that where you trained for the marathon?"

"I ran it a lot –"

"And then your Dad and I would bike up Spruce Street around Grizzly Canyon, and back down Claremont. It was so beautiful. The terrain is like burnished on my mind. But I imagine it's all built up now and I wouldn't recognize it."

Max laughed. "Last time Dad was in the Bay Area, he and I did Diablo. And I kept saying, 'Are you sure you don't want me to map it?' And he kept saying, 'No, I know that route like the back of my hand.' But when we got there, there was just all this suburban sprawl, and poor Dad was like hideously lost.

"And he just kept saying, baffled, 'But it didn't look like that then.' And kept talking about what it looked like then."

I laughed. "Well, that's the one of the hardest things about getting old, honey. The world really should have stopping changing when I was 35! I have to stop myself constantly from saying, 'Why, sonny, back in my day, we didn't have this new-fangled fill-in-the-blank –' I have to remind myself what a cliché that is –"

"That's even a cliché!" Max said. "Reminding yourself."

"We had fun, though," I said. "Except I couldn't ride as fast as your Dad so he'd go far ahead and then come back down and start circling me when I was huffing and puffing up a hill –"

"That vulture thing!" Liza said. "I hate that!"

We laughed.

I loved Liza the moment I set eyes on her. I felt as though I'd known her forever.