One of those days
Sep. 4th, 2004 10:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraI still can’t figure out how to use the new camera and it’s driving me apeshit because I’m all about photo opportunities.
Shaky day yesterday. It’s odd what happens when you give yourself permission to go a little nuts – at first, it’s a conscious decision: I am going to be petulant and difficult at the breakfast table just to fuck with their heads. But then as the ganglia overheat, your own erratic behavior becomes harder and harder to control. There were errands to do – restock inventory, buy Kraft bags. I lost myself for an hour at Ralph’s wandering around the vast empty supermarket, looking at all the things on the shelves. I took the dogs to the beach, picked up trash that had washed ashore with the high tide, my daily mitzvah.
I went home and started cooking. Nothing elaborate. Whatever was in the fridge. Marinated some strip steaks in a funky combination of soy sauce, red wine, maple syrup and garlic (tastes better than it sounds.) Made bread dough, put in the yeast, set it aside to rise. Peeled, cored and sliced the apples Maya had brought us from the dying orchard in Coralitos. Threw them in a Pyrex dish, sprinkled them with flour, butter, brown sugar and cinnamon.
Then Robin came home from school, trailing his new posse. We’ve lost Kodiak and my heart grieves. At the end of school last year, his mother decided to dump her kids and move to Hawaii. “It’s something she’s always wanted to do,” Kodiak told us gamely. Stoic doesn’t even begin to describe Kodiak, he was cheerful and resolute in the midst of parental neglect.
The older sister elected to stay in Monterey with the grandparents. But Kodiak decided to accompany his father – the Brazilian martial arts instructor with the mysterious wasting disease – to his new life in Laurel Canyon where Dad was practicing to become Masseur to the Stars.
“I’m going to have my own shed!” he told me.
“Your own shed,” I echoed. “Kodiak. You’re sleeping in the shed?”
“There’s no room in the house,” said Kodiak cheerfully. “Cause you know there’s my dad and his girlfriend and all their stuff.”
“Does the shed have electricity? I mean you need light, you need heat.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. But I can always use candles. And you know, one of those portable things.”
So a year from now I can read about him in one of those newspaper sidebars – Child Dies In Fire or maybe Child Succumbs To Carbon Monoxide Poisoning.
For a couple of days, half-seriously, I batted around the idea of approaching Kodiak’s mother: why don’t you just give him to me?
Just what I need. Another dependent.
I miss him. He was a great kid. Probably still is.
Robin’s new best friend is Iljin whose parents come from South Korea. Iljin is probably a great kid too but I can’t understand half of what comes out of his mouth plus I’m always afraid that what he’s really using Robin’s computer for is not downloading free Korean geek games at all but classified information about nuclear technology from the Lawrence Livermore Lab whose security codes he and Robin have cracked.
Robin’s second best friend is Willie who refuses to tell anyone his real name. Willie is the son of Egyptian restaurant owners, deeply conflicted about his religion. Sometimes he sneaks pork products. “Today I had bacon,” he tells me with deep and melancholy satisfaction. “And then I got bad luck. Two detentions.”
I like the way the ten-year-old mind works. The detentions had nothing to do with the homework assignment he refused to complete or the cartoon he drew in class in which Ms. Burns – the fifth grade teacher’s – breasts shot poison darts. No. It was all about pigs.
Cooked the strip steaks, baked the bread and apple crisp. Threw the kids out around five so I could cart Robin off to his karate class. He’s testing for his red belt on October 2. If he can get a black belt before he’s 16, then I can stop worrying about how badly he does in school. He can always be a martial arts instructor when he grows up. Like Kodiak’s father.
When I came back from dropping Robin off, I discovered that Milo the dog had climbed up on to the kitchen table and eaten all the apple crisp. His tail wagged joyfully, he was happy to see me. Maybe I would let him at the steaks.
And I just totally lost it. Wept hysterically for fifteen minutes while Milo howled balefully from his bad dog crate. How pathetic is my life? I thought. I’m fifty-two years old. Surely my kitchen décor should be something more than dismembered Homer Simpsons and my dead mother’s plants. Surely when I cook something, I should have the expectation if not of eating it myself than of feeding it to others who will commend me for my cooking skills and modesty.
Football season has started. I have a major bug up my ass about attending all the Special Events in my offspring’s’ lives. Max’s team, the RLS Pirates, were competing in something called the Jamboree, a yearly event in which all the local high school teams establish the pecking order for the game season to come. Naturally I had to go. Naturally I had to drag Robin. Not altogether unpleasant standing there as the long golden wavelengths of the day shortened into nothingness, watching a group of young men – handsome as gods – try to beat and pummel each other into unconsciousness. Still, I was in the grip of a profound melancholy. It should mean something. It doesn’t.
Then afterwards I drove home, inching the van – which I hate to drive but the signal lights are funky on the red bug – down through the vast labyrinth darkness of Skyline Forest. The hill scares me. Very twisty. I went fifteen miles an hour. At the bottom of the hill, a frustrated driver trapped in my wake finally got the chance to zoom past me. “You are the worst fucking driver in the world!” he screamed and I thought to myself, Oh baby. If only you knew.
Shaky day yesterday. It’s odd what happens when you give yourself permission to go a little nuts – at first, it’s a conscious decision: I am going to be petulant and difficult at the breakfast table just to fuck with their heads. But then as the ganglia overheat, your own erratic behavior becomes harder and harder to control. There were errands to do – restock inventory, buy Kraft bags. I lost myself for an hour at Ralph’s wandering around the vast empty supermarket, looking at all the things on the shelves. I took the dogs to the beach, picked up trash that had washed ashore with the high tide, my daily mitzvah.
I went home and started cooking. Nothing elaborate. Whatever was in the fridge. Marinated some strip steaks in a funky combination of soy sauce, red wine, maple syrup and garlic (tastes better than it sounds.) Made bread dough, put in the yeast, set it aside to rise. Peeled, cored and sliced the apples Maya had brought us from the dying orchard in Coralitos. Threw them in a Pyrex dish, sprinkled them with flour, butter, brown sugar and cinnamon.
Then Robin came home from school, trailing his new posse. We’ve lost Kodiak and my heart grieves. At the end of school last year, his mother decided to dump her kids and move to Hawaii. “It’s something she’s always wanted to do,” Kodiak told us gamely. Stoic doesn’t even begin to describe Kodiak, he was cheerful and resolute in the midst of parental neglect.
The older sister elected to stay in Monterey with the grandparents. But Kodiak decided to accompany his father – the Brazilian martial arts instructor with the mysterious wasting disease – to his new life in Laurel Canyon where Dad was practicing to become Masseur to the Stars.
“I’m going to have my own shed!” he told me.
“Your own shed,” I echoed. “Kodiak. You’re sleeping in the shed?”
“There’s no room in the house,” said Kodiak cheerfully. “Cause you know there’s my dad and his girlfriend and all their stuff.”
“Does the shed have electricity? I mean you need light, you need heat.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. But I can always use candles. And you know, one of those portable things.”
So a year from now I can read about him in one of those newspaper sidebars – Child Dies In Fire or maybe Child Succumbs To Carbon Monoxide Poisoning.
For a couple of days, half-seriously, I batted around the idea of approaching Kodiak’s mother: why don’t you just give him to me?
Just what I need. Another dependent.
I miss him. He was a great kid. Probably still is.
Robin’s new best friend is Iljin whose parents come from South Korea. Iljin is probably a great kid too but I can’t understand half of what comes out of his mouth plus I’m always afraid that what he’s really using Robin’s computer for is not downloading free Korean geek games at all but classified information about nuclear technology from the Lawrence Livermore Lab whose security codes he and Robin have cracked.
Robin’s second best friend is Willie who refuses to tell anyone his real name. Willie is the son of Egyptian restaurant owners, deeply conflicted about his religion. Sometimes he sneaks pork products. “Today I had bacon,” he tells me with deep and melancholy satisfaction. “And then I got bad luck. Two detentions.”
I like the way the ten-year-old mind works. The detentions had nothing to do with the homework assignment he refused to complete or the cartoon he drew in class in which Ms. Burns – the fifth grade teacher’s – breasts shot poison darts. No. It was all about pigs.
Cooked the strip steaks, baked the bread and apple crisp. Threw the kids out around five so I could cart Robin off to his karate class. He’s testing for his red belt on October 2. If he can get a black belt before he’s 16, then I can stop worrying about how badly he does in school. He can always be a martial arts instructor when he grows up. Like Kodiak’s father.
When I came back from dropping Robin off, I discovered that Milo the dog had climbed up on to the kitchen table and eaten all the apple crisp. His tail wagged joyfully, he was happy to see me. Maybe I would let him at the steaks.
And I just totally lost it. Wept hysterically for fifteen minutes while Milo howled balefully from his bad dog crate. How pathetic is my life? I thought. I’m fifty-two years old. Surely my kitchen décor should be something more than dismembered Homer Simpsons and my dead mother’s plants. Surely when I cook something, I should have the expectation if not of eating it myself than of feeding it to others who will commend me for my cooking skills and modesty.
Football season has started. I have a major bug up my ass about attending all the Special Events in my offspring’s’ lives. Max’s team, the RLS Pirates, were competing in something called the Jamboree, a yearly event in which all the local high school teams establish the pecking order for the game season to come. Naturally I had to go. Naturally I had to drag Robin. Not altogether unpleasant standing there as the long golden wavelengths of the day shortened into nothingness, watching a group of young men – handsome as gods – try to beat and pummel each other into unconsciousness. Still, I was in the grip of a profound melancholy. It should mean something. It doesn’t.
Then afterwards I drove home, inching the van – which I hate to drive but the signal lights are funky on the red bug – down through the vast labyrinth darkness of Skyline Forest. The hill scares me. Very twisty. I went fifteen miles an hour. At the bottom of the hill, a frustrated driver trapped in my wake finally got the chance to zoom past me. “You are the worst fucking driver in the world!” he screamed and I thought to myself, Oh baby. If only you knew.
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Date: 2004-09-06 07:36 am (UTC)