Retirée

It has been a while.

I am not sure if I have been getting used to California again or if I have just become accustomed to the Summer Vacation Lifestyle of staying at my mother’s, in my childhood and adolescent bedroom, watching TV and sitting around the deck. Now with the addition of a bottle of beer.

Maya with electric lines (or whatever)

The view has gotten better. They have cut down the trees in front of the house and now the only thing marring the strangely enticing view of the freeway and the bay is the collection of thick, low-arching electric lines. Electric or telephone, I guess I don’t know, but they are definitely there.

I have been escaping quite a bit, to San Francisco and Oakland, Santa Cruz and Monterey, a fledgling music and cabaret festival on the Russian River. I still have a lot of friends here. Last week I made myself stay home for ten days, telling myself that I had to get down to good old brass tacks, send off thousands of resumés and get moving. Also I spent ten dollars on a promotional ten days of Bikram and Power yoga in order to force the issue. I bought a new yoga mat that my mother laughed at. It’s brown and she says it looks like poop. She is a bit obsessed with poop. She also says my cat, who has an asymmetrical spot on her muzzle, looks like she has been eating poop. I always said Nutella, but mom won’t let it go. 

Dolores Park, on a day without bubbles but with Mime Troupe

The other night I was in San Francisco with my friend Charlotte, we ate take out in Dolores Park between some hippies from Denmark in neon green jumpsuits and multicolored dreadlocks and some homeless guys with an all-terrain skateboard and a dog that tried to eat Charlotte’s falafel. There was a band with a battery-powered amp and someone with a bubble machine. When it got cold and we got tired of posing for a modern-day Maupin novel, we walked to the apartment Charlotte was subletting between circus contracts and she made us tea. We laughed a lot and very hard.

Charlotte and I have a relationship that started when I first moved to France, she was taking time off from a math degree at Berkeley, doing modern dance and sharing an apartment with a French ballerina-type. There was a sheet dividing their rooms if I remember correctly. I had known her ex-boyfriend back in Santa Cruz and we shared many a vegan mush dinner. She returned to Europe after completing her degree, this time to Brussels where she studied handstands 8 hours a day. We’d see each other at least once a year, when she came through on a field trip or a contract, or when I had a visiting friend who wanted to take a train ride out of France, but not so far as Amsterdam. We hung out in Paris right before I came back to California. Last week’s festival- Charlotte was my in- was the first time we had seen each other on this continent.

Charlotte, waffle-ironing.

So yeah, we laughed a lot. The place she was renting had a fake mural on the wall of the kitchen and a fold-out ironing board. I took pictures of Charlotte posing with a waffle iron (we couldn’t find the clothes kind). We talked about our love lives, our work lives, our plans for the future and our lack of plans for now. We talked about things we had done and she reminded me of conversations we had had (somehow I am never the one who remembers). There is something so nice about knowing someone for so long. It was very hard to leave her behind. If I remember correctly, we refilled the teapot six times.

I have been getting this feeling a lot lately, the feeling of sharing life by sharing time. Everyone is becoming an old friend and the bar is getting higher for meeting new people. If I haven’t known you for an approximate decade, you had better be really interesting or attractive, or there is little chance that I will remember your name. I met one girl three times last week. I felt pretty guilty, until I found out she is a twin, then I figured she was probably used to it.

I am definitely going to become crotchety before I hit 35. Maybe the Summer Vacation Lifestyle is really just a glimpse into Retirement.

(While writing this entry, my mother began talking about our genetically high insteps and their relation to loose joints and hip problems. I told her that, as of yet, these are not problems for me. Her words: “Well, you’re a child.” So I guess I’m complaining about nothing. I take it all back.)

Fog

It is very foggy in the Bay Area.

You would think I would remember this, that 8+ years living away would not have wiped my memory of this integral fact, but it seems to have slipped through the cracks. The window that looks out onto the bay from the dining room at my mother's house here in Mill Valley is white with fog, criss-crossed with telephone lines and bordered with leafy green. And red. And greygreenred.

I went jogging today on the bike path that runs under the freeway, to Sausalito and San Francisco, and was almost trampled by a woman with an industrial-sized baby buggy and golden retriever.  They came out of nowhere. Manifested out of the white. I dodged them, barely. Must remember the sporty yuppy factor when in Marin. Not so much a problem back in Paris. In Paris jogging threats were mostly limited to guys overexcited about the idea of a woman with stamina. Or people picnicking on the canal. Or my own incapacity to multitask (unzipping my sweatshirt, changing my music, and keeping my feet going on uneven terrain having ended in bloody knees on more than one occasion). Here it seems the fog can hide all sorts of forgotten threats.

In the strong visibility of of the living room, my cats are having a face-off. Paris trying to gain terrain on California. Shady, so named by one of my college housemates for her ability to sneak around and grab at people's ankles from under beds and tables and couches, is trying to hold her home turf. Her low-pitched threats sound impressive, at least for a cat protected by the slats and legs of the piano chair. Shady is the matriarch. I left her here with my mother in 2003, when I went to Paris "for a year or so" to check things out. Shady has since been joined by Kittyton, the lumbering star of my brother's youtube channel, and now Maya, straight off the plane from France, has come to rattle the delicate balance. Right now Maya is lying on the floor, about five feet away, watching. Every now and then she sneaks closer, bridging the gap, working on reducing the space between them. 

I imagine them outside, in a ring covered in white fog, darting in and out, circling and hissing, until they decide it's not worth it and lie down in a dogpile. Well... catpile.

While the cats try to get used to each other, my brother is lying on the couch, watching baseball. He and my mother are teasing me for my lack of player and stat knowledge. I tell them that it's not that I am not a fan, I just don't particularly care. My mother says it's only a matter of time. That soon enough I'll be sporting orange and black, shouting at the TV and refusing to go to the kitchen to replenish snacks when it's my turn. Maybe so. 

But for now the fog is too much for me.