Swarm

Made our way over to the west side today to run last minute errands before the trip. Mainly just buying pita at Ali Babas and tortillas at Central Market. (Hey, in South Carolina you can only lean on the Piggly Wiggly so much.) Got to Babas a little early so we had to cruise the strip mall looking for fun things to do. And it was here -- right down the complex from the line that was beginning to grow outside the AT&T store for the much anticipated iphone debut -- that I began to notice the crickets.

First we saw one sitting on the store window ledge, and my son marveled over its chirping and chased it a few feet before we ran into another and another and another. Before I knew it they were multiplying by the hundreds on the ground, up the wall and clinging to the ceiling -- covering my flip flops and falling into my hair. I felt like Janet Leigh in the playground scene in The Birds. Old Navy was our only respite from the swarm that was forming like black clouds, apparently ready to get their fash' on. The store had stationed a sales girl at the door to sweep them out as they attempted to dive smack dab into the 50% off summer sale.

I have never seen crickets do this. It was shocking and smelly and it made me realize that if the animal kingdom ever decided to rise up en mass and freak us (the human race) out, it would be pretty easy. Like some insect Dawn of the Dead, grown women ran screaming into the Ross for Less just to escape the madness. I, on the other hand, thought it was hysterical, and tried as hard as I could to not squish any on the way back to the car.

Perhaps they were swarming to get away from the rains. Perhaps it is a sign that the end is near. Maybe they just wanted to pick up some swimming trunks and get a peek at the iphone. Who knows. But it certainly did make for an entertaining morning in the otherwise vast wasteland of suburbia.

Elephant

It seems every moment of the day is slightly tainted by the elephant in the neighborhood... Our home for sale. It's been almost 40 days and still, no offers. Everyone has lots of great feedback... talks about how the house is reasonably priced... how much work we've done... but nobody seems to like the layout. The weird thing is we love the layout. Everyone who has ever walked in that house previous to it going on sale has said it has a great layout. So what is the problem? I guess it is just gonna take the right family walking in and loving it... and with so much for sale in the hood (my, is it getting chilly in here or is it just me?), we might be waiting for a while. It's OK. We're in no rush. That Roth IRA we were hoping to start and our son's college saving account can wait. Plus, it has been raining nonstop like forever now... (open house day, every weekend, etc.) and nobody likes to do anything when the state is soaked. Alamo Heights Blvd. was a literal river this afternoon, and at 6 p.m., the ball fields in the basin were totally flooded and all roads leading in blocked off.

Vacation is two days away, and I am just hoping we can get away and enjoy the sun (though weather.com is predicting rain, rain and more rain for S.C.) and forget about all our property woes for a while.

Quit

It's amazing what one person can do for another just by talking. Had lunch today with a dear friend and convinced her to quit her lame job in pursuit of more lofty endeavors. It felt good. Getting her fired up got me fired up, and I am totally jacked about everything. Life is so great when you get to do what you want. Above all else, that is what I'm gonna teach my son. You have to make a living somehow. Make sure it is doing something you love.

Coyote

Thankfully we've been getting out to the farm on the weekends, so my son is getting in the habit of taking dusk drives of the property in search of Texas flora and fauna. (My husband and I started the tradition while living out there, but our childless version included midnight spotlighting jaunts with beers to go and a million watt candle bulb.)The dusk version is better for our kid, as if 7:30 is his in-town bedtime... it is more like 9 out at the farm. (Oh...so much to see, so much to do..)

Usually, we spot a few deer, some jackrabbits, coons and/or cottontails, and the little one marvels over the wildflowers and the cactus. But last night as we were coming up the dirt road along the fence line, we heard the unmistakable bellows of a coyote. At first we thought it was our neighbor's dogs, but then we realised in between the yelps of Fido, there was indeed a coyote giggling back.... and it sounded close. We cut the engine and my husband tiptoed over to the fence and sure enough... there was a coyote... stalking back and forth in the field, hopping up and down every few feet to get a better look at the dogs he was hounding.

A friend later told us that sometimes coyotes will try and lure domesticated dogs into the woods or away from their homes to get them to fight or, better yet, join the pack. I have never heard of this before, and I most certainly had never seen this type of behaviour in a coyote with my own two eyes. My husband and I spent many a night out on our deck listening to them call to each other in the distance. We've seen them only twice before, once eating the carcass of a pig we dumped in the north forty and once hunkered down and then scramming deep in the cedar.

But we must have stood by that fence 15 minutes watching the coyote run back and forth, edging closer and closer and then moving back. It was very cool. I have to assume he was so engrossed in taunting the dogs, that he didn't notice us in rear, even though his gigantic ears kept pricking up every time we whispered to each other.

Our son gets jacked about seeing any living thing, so when it came time to pass along the story, he was just as excited talking about the coyote as he was describing the grasshopper that landed on the windshield. Luckily, my husband and I know how special it was getting to watch that coyote so close for so long. With all the development out there, I imagine we'll be having more and more nature encounters. Lots of people hate the coyotes, but I think is is so wonderful that something so shy and mysterious lives so close to people and manages to hardly ever get spotted.

Now we just hope our fox-like friend doesn't end up compost for eating our neighbor's chickens and corrupting their dogs.

Tequila

Funny story. The very petite and adorable woman who scrubs our tub twice a month was here this morning. Though she speaks little English, the dear heart is a true doll and does a fine job. She's worked for my sister-in-law for years, and though she has only been with us just under a year, I love her. Because of her, my son is learning the names of all the animals en español, and she is on his list of top favorite people. Plus she makes us tamales at the holidays!

So this morning, while she is in the kitchen cleaning and I am trying to get dressed in the bedroom, my son toddles in with an unfamiliar bottle of tequila in hand. Though my husband and I have been known to sip a margarita on our nights out a Guajillos at 410 and Blanco, there is no tequila in our liquor cabinet. Our days of shots and mixing our own are long gone. Anyway... I immediately got really embarrassed and just told my son to put it back where he got it. He left the room and came back empty handed so I have to assume he put it back in her bag or wherever he got it from.

Now... if our wee housekeeper is nipping the juice on duty, I have no problem with that. Who am I to fault how she chooses to get through days that are probably tedious and thankless. I trust her totally, and she's never seemed drunk to me, so what the hell.

I phoned my sister-in-law (who is of Mexican descent, speaks Spanish and is most definitely closer to her than I'll ever be) and she laughed out loud when I told her. She assured me that this woman would never ever ever in a million years be a drunk, and she wanted me to drive home and confront her about it in a funny way immediately. To which I said hell no, fearing my lame to nonexistent Spanish-speaking skills would cause a horrible disagreement which would end in my having to clean our toilets. She said she couldn't even imagine her having a drinking problem, and said there was probably a perfectly normal explanation for why she would bring a half-empty bottle of tequila to work with her. Maybe she uses it to get bubblegum out of carpet or something... who knows.

Anyway... Having grown up with my share of boozers in the family... should I be worried? Should I laugh it off? Should I never think of it again? Who knows, but I suppose now I know what to get her for Christmas.

Island

Less than two weeks before the brood hits the airport headed to my hometown in South Carolina. Kissing the dogs, fish, hamster, mouse and blazing heat goodbye to say hello to the beach, sand, surf, fireworks, my whole family, 4th of July holiday, blazing heat and humidity. Ahhh. Spending all those years in New York, I almost forgot I was a child of the sweaty/stifling/clammy/lava invoking southern wasteland of air conditioners, spaghetti straps and bottomless iced teas. (What a kick in the ass that was arriving in NYC to find that you actually had to pay for refills of a drink that costs pennies per glass to produce. Damn yanks.)

So yeah, we are headed, en mass, to the beach of my childhood, and I couldn't be more excited. Though, technically, I only spent 10 years there, they were the formative ones and that is what counts. I wanted to get my son back there as much as possible, so he could at least get a taste of the idealic spanish moss/ crabbing in the creek/ floating on the waves/ sea shells searching childhood I had. Sure, I was raised in a house full of crazy people... by a single mom and lived in my own personal nightmare, but that's really beside the point. The physical place... that part still stuns me with how perfect it was. 20 acres right on the creek with a view of the ocean. Dense oak trees and dogwoods trees and camilla bushes and a pond with bullfrogs and turtles and cottonmouths and a barn and horses. Sure the company and the circumstances sucked in the southern gothic tradition, but who knew hell looked this good.

Thankfully, when I look back on that time, tthe landscape is what I rememeber. Talk to my eldest sister though, and she'll sing another tune. I don't think she's been back there since we moved away around '84 (wait, she did go to a good friend's funeral a year or so later) and she hates the place. I am really shocked that she agreed to go back, but I doubt either of my sisters would ever turn down the chance to frolic in the surf with their nephew. The little guys is blessed with a bevy of woman who adore him.

So, my mom, my two sisters, my 93-year-old grandmother, one sister's boyfriend and my two guys in a beach front house we probably can't afford ($5000 a week... go figure!) on the busiest beach holiday of the year in the sweltering heat.... who knows what might happen. Considering it comes out to be a little over $700 a day... ka-ching... I'm not gonna let anything sour a good time. The first person who yells at me or near me is getting booted out the door... but the sad thing is... I'll probably be the one who starts the fighting.

I love my mother. She is my soul mate and the love of my life, but god, she makes me so angry sometimes. But I've promised my husband, I'll not let anything get to me... and so.... The peace line is drawn in the literal sand.

I am planning on getting so much sun, the top five layers of my skin peel off. I am planning on teaching my son how to catch a crab with just a piece of string, a chicken neck and a net. I am planning on drinking red wine until the whites of my eyes turn purple. And I'm going to enjoy it when my mother wants to rock my kid to sleep to the sound of the waves crashing. I'm sure there will be some eating and sleeping and reading mixed in there too, but I have my priorities. A promise is a promise.

Dad

So I am officially no longer Mama... I am now Mom. Just this week leading up to father's day, my husband commented and asked if I had noticed our two-year-old calling me Mom rather than the more babyish Mama -- which I had not. Like not noticing the exact moment your child changed from baby to toddler to child to teenager to young man and so on. You know people always think it is so funny when I make the observation that I only have 16 years left with my kid at home.... But when I think about how quickly the last two years flew by... 16 years doesn't seem that long.

When I was preggers, I remembering seeing in some book a cut up, pie version of a mommy's life. The illustration was supposed to make you feel better about having kids. Like look... having your child at home is barely 1/4 of your total life, so don't think your life is over just because you decided to procreate. The childhood slice of the pie seemed small in that context.

Today is my husband's third father's day, and yet it seems as if our son was born yesterday. I think of the man my husband was 8 years ago when we fell in love and I see him now, and he is a completely different person. Somehow in the flash of an eye, several lifetimes have passed between the first time I said "I love you" and the moment I handed him his son for the first time. Are we even the same people? And if we aren't, have we even noticed?

While my son is having long summer days and endless school years, my husband and I will be speeding along -- caught in that neverending wheel of "have to" that keeps us moving from one moment to the next barely noticing that our children have stopped calling us one thing and started calling us another...

Basketcase

All the streetlights in San Antonio could go out and it would probably still look like daytime outside from the secondhand glow of all the TVs that are on right now. Nothing more tedious than watching the playoffs in one of the teams' hometowns. My husband is one of those guys that likes to talk sports more than he likes to watch them. He keeps his ear to the buzz throughout the season without actually watching a game, then tunes in when the match-offs arrive. Which is fine with me. On some level I can get into the cheering the team to the finish line. I've been to Yankee Stadium. I know the thrill of the fans screaming and all that. But watching sports on TV ad nauseam and being in a stadium are two different things. If I had to come home to sports on the TV several times a week, I'd certainly not be married at this moment.

That said, I'm secretly hoping my son won't be one of those sports guys. (Unless it is soccer, of course, because I would totally be into that as starting with my first love in sixth grade, most of all boyfriends until I was 22 were soccer players.) I say this knowing full well that if he did end up a baseball boy, I'd be the one out there mixing the Gatorade and screaming obscenities at the umpire. And I have to admit being someone who plays sports would be way way way cooler than him being someone who just watches them. Though signs are already starting to point in the non-sports direction. Even now at his little gymnastics classes, my son is the only one in his age group that can't really jump. He's cute with the lead in... "I'm hopping like a rabbit.... jumping like a kangaroo... hopping like a frog...." but the ultimate lift-off usually only entails one foot making it off the ground. Let's just say he's a talker, not a jumper.

I have memories of PE in elementary school when I couldn't even do one chin up on the monkey bars while other girls would wow the boys with 5, 10 even 20. I admit, I was envious. Back then, boys were too shy to talk to you or show too much attention, but somehow if you were a girl and excelled at sports, that made it OK. It wasn't until years later when you might have actually wanted to play on a team that guys got all macho. So... knowing that sports pressure is probably ten-fold for boys, I don't want my little dude to be a total weenie. And, ultimately, he'll be who he wants to be... I can still hope though. Barring being captain of the soccer team, ultimate frisbee would be nice... or maybe hackysack... is that still cool?

Rascal

Sometimes it is easy as a parent to feel caged in like an animal. But then again, I suppose you could say that about any situation in life. When I was working, I felt caged in by work. When I was traveling, I felt caged in by not having a home or a job. When I was in NYC, I felt caged in by the city. Now that I have all the space I could want, I feel caged in here too. Ahhh to just be happy with what you have.

Don't you just love it when you meet people who seem to be one hundred percent happy in their own skin? Maybe I'm kidding myself. Maybe those people are just good at acting as if they are happy in their own skin. Lord knows that I've been in that place before... had people look at me and think I was the happiest person in the world. And the truth is, I am probably one of the happiest people I know. I can find a laugh in just about anything -- most of all myself. Sure, I stress and worry and moan just as much as the other guy, but I'm pretty content for the most part. Then why this constant questioning? Who knows. Perhaps being the spawn of a drama queen and king makes me a little more dramatic about things than I need to be.

Not to sound new-agey, but my yoga instructor said something interesting this weekend. She said that people have 60,000 thoughts a day.... and then went on to say that you have complete control over which of those thoughts actually become feelings. That you can make the decision as to what you are gonna worry about and what is gonna get you up or down. I suppose that is my problem.... those damn thoughts, each and every one of them becomes a feeling. It's like a rollercoaster that never ends, it just goes up and down and up and down and around and up. Again, this is the perfect moment when being simple in the brain would be good. Complicated is so just that. Exhausting really.

Rented a Little Rascals DVD to show my son and tonight I watched as Spanky, Alfalfa and the gang tried to break up the impending marriage of their school teacher and a young man who is threatening to take her away. Really, life doesn't get less complicated than Our Gang. I mean the jokes are just so basic and universal and kids are adorable. If you turn a blind eye to the period politics, sexism and racism.... it's hard to find fault with the world when you get sucked into that one. It's like that one truth in life mantra I've often talked about. Finding one truth in life and that will be your lot and your fortune. I think the Little Rascals kind of caught lightning in a bottle with that one. The Little Rascals are truth incarnate.

When it comes to thinking, less is more.

Folks

After almost five years in San Antonio, we finally made it to the Texas Folk Life Festival tonight. My husband has fond memories of going there as a kid. Partly because they would serve minors alcohol and mainly because it really was kinda cool. I'm always hesitant when it comes to joining the masses in the heat. The ante just gets upped when there is beer involved, but I was shocked at how civilized and organized the whole thing was. I learned a lot about Texas cultures... for one, you haven't really lived until you've seen a Scottish bagpipe troop do the Texas fight song. Even though it’s my husband's alma mater, I must be the last person in the state to find out that it sounds just like "I've Been Workin on the Railroad". I suppose now, I'm a true Texan!

There was a certain level of cheese, but if you waded through it, the payoff was big. My son learned how dairy farmers recycle cow manure and saw a cow get milked right before his eyes. He just kept pointing and screaming, "Look at that!" He saw a real live shoot-out reenactment complete with loud sheriff, drunken judge and slaughtered vaquero. The blanks were a little too loud for the kid, but he seemed to like watching the "cowboys" all the same. Since my husband works for one of the sponsors, we were invited to the hospitality tent where we were helped to what was essentially a bottomless cup of Shiner Light. Awesome.

My favorite moment came in the dulcimer shed. There was a group of about eight people playing and getting down as only those who play the dulcimer can... One youngish girl was particularly good and my little guy had fun dancing for a while in front of her instrument. When they were done, an older woman stood up and said she'd been doing this at the festival for 20 years and that the young woman and her sister grew up coming here and that they made there own instruments and that she was just so proud of them... and it was a really sweet and intimate moment and it was nice to be a part of it. Just that people can be so passionate about something like that I find is so cool.

Anyways... there were folks from the Texas Buffalo Soldiers Society...cowhands demonstrating branding techniques... quilters... my son got to decorn a cob with an old hand-crank machine.... farriors and leather smiths.... bread makers and lumberjacks.... so many cool things to see... Toward the end, we parked on a steep green hill in the shadow of the Tower of the Americas with a view of the Alamodome.... the sound of cowboy poets floating from some far off stage.... our son found a gang of kids and spent our last half hour racing up and down the hill giggling like a drunken sailor of leave with a weekend pass to Bangkok. Sure, it was just an echo of simpler times, but if you managed to stay away from the McDonald's booth and the Wiggle Waggle (don't ask) you could imagine my husband there at 16... a Lone Star in hand... seeing the real Texas as it used to be. Sweet.

Summer

Looks like summer is really here, though you wouldn't know it from all these crazy April showers we are still having. I swear as my husband and I were driving back from the farm Sunday night, I thought we were stuck in the middle of a tornado. We had just reached the airport on Wetmore and all of a sudden, the wind went crazy and all the lights around us went out and I saw these freaky dark shadows in the sky. I started having the closest thing to an anxiety attack that I've ever had. My heart was racing, and my mind was busy trying to figure out how I was gonna save the boy. I mean, I remember when I was wee they told us to get out of the car and lie flat in a ditch. Is that really what you do?

When my sisters and I would spot an area in the sky that my mom called a "tornado line" (which is when a black line of clouds forms) we would get all jacked and pray one would come down right in front of us and take the whole car away just like in The Wizard of Oz. That was decidedly NOT the reaction I was having the other night. Once again being plagued with that "This is it..." feeling and wondering how the hell I was gonna get us out of there. Luckily, it was just a lot of scary wind and freaky weather.

We'd just spent the day out at the farm, and it was an understatement to say it was magical. With the house finally up for sale, we have are weekends back. Saturday was filled with birthday parties and the pool, and Sunday morning we drove out Blanco and spent the day getting the farmhouse ready for the summer. It was alot of work, but it felt good to be back and putting things in order.

We hung with Mary Ann and marveled at 12 newborn chicks that had taken over the front drive. After playing with her two six-week-old kittens and attempting to name every baby goat we could see, we retired to cold beer and the kittie pool I set up on the front porch. It was heaven. On our way out at dusk, we drove the property on the animal hunt and saw two bucks, a jack rabbit, a cottontail, one skink and a raccoon... much to my son's screaming delight. The best part was, as we were pulling down the drive to leave, we saw that up under the oaks lightning bugs were swarming and I think that just about blew the kid's mind. It was still a little light out but the sky was that midnight/royal blue with the storm coming so it was really eerie and cool. Quite a way to end the day.

Oh by the way, that's my boy going all Keith Moon. It doesn't have anything to do with anything. I just thought it was a cool shot.