Saturday in the 'Set

In my pockets: nothing, wearing sweatshorts. These things were staples during both pregnancies and are taking their place in the rotation once again. My husband is so lucky.

Status of children: all asleep, thank goodness Hallelujah.

Just spent the last hour cleaning the kitchen. Which is annoying because I spent an hour of my "free" time yesterday cleaning the stupid kitchen. It's hard to move on to other super messy parts of the house when the kitchen keeps needing to be cleaned. I tried turning it into a meditation, focusing on the feel of the water rather than the end goal of having a clean kitchen.

Today our family of six drove into San Francisco to attend Sunset Mercantile. I'm not sure if it was a fundraiser or a neighborhood builder or something else but it was a series of tents and food trucks set up in the school yard of Francis Scott Key, an elementary school on 42nd and Kirkham. That was our bus stop growing up. We lived about ten blocks away but went to school at Lakeshore, over by Lake Merced, Lowell High School and Stonestown Galleria. It somehow never occurred to me that that was a result of a decision my parents had made. It never occurred to me that our bus stop could have been our school--it was our neighborhood school after all. My parents chose Lakeshore because someone important (whose name and position I forget) named it as the best example of a racially diverse school in the area. He said that no one race felt like it was their school because there were many different ethnicities and cultures represented. The funny thing is that years later I said to someone that there hadn't really been many black people at my elementary school. And then I looked at a class picture and laughed because there were lots of black students in my class. I think I just didn't notice.

At today's event my mom was telling stories. My friend and her boyfriend traveled up for a quick trip from LA (not for this event but to see me and my family). My dad came up on his scooter from his house several blocks down the hill. My husband and I arrived shaking the wailing and moaning of the hour-long car trip out of our ears. Usually the car is a safe place but today was not a good day for the way back female passenger of our tribe. We drove past the city on the freeway, avoiding the St. Patrick's Day parade and exiting on John Daly. Down the coast with the Pacific on our left. Past the zoo and into the avenues, taking a straight shot down 42nd. Which I'd never done in my life because my dad taught me to drive and I only go the ways he showed me--the ways with the fewest stop signs and the fewest blind intersections. 42nd had a lot of stop signs but no blind intersections and it took us past an alphabet of blocks full of almost-identical houses. Few trees. When I returned from living abroad I thought my neighborhood was so ugly. Bare and uninteresting. Later I appreciated it for it's beachy vibe, it's old-school, family, settled in vibe. It's not beautiful like other parts of the city. There aren't many gardens out front. Mostly cement. Lots of parking spaces, though those are getting taken up more now that it's one of the trendiest neighborhoods in SF. There are boutique coffee shops, great restaurants, lots of young families. Places that serve fancy toast, which is apparently a thing these days?

We parked, walked down the hill. My husband held the hands of our big twins; I blinked and it was my dad holding the hands of me and my sister. I pushed the stroller, laden with bag, Ergos, bananas, layers for the ever changing weather.

The toddlers sat for a tiny bit of storytelling, with Lily climbing up onto Olive the storyteller's lap. The storyteller is her Nana. You could see her trying to take it all in--why were all these kids sitting in front of her Nana, listening to her talk? She listened for a while and then I took her away because she wanted to claim the crystal ball my mom was holding up for one of her stories. We joined her brother and dad at the play structure, where we stayed for the remainder of our visit. No exploring the tents. One quick trip to grab some food but mostly stationary. In that time we saw: the husband of my old best friend; (who also attended Lakeshore), my dad's second cousin who I'd met before (she had heard about us and our two sets of twins from my other best friend--their kids go to the same nursery school in a completely different part of town. Didn't know they knew one another); a woman who runs the very popular Devil's Teeth bakery (whom I'd never met but who also has four young kids and still managed to open and run a bakery and now a new brewery. We exchanged 'holy shit, how do you do its"), a newish mom who was with my brother in the Peace Corps in Ghana several years ago, the head of my old nursery school (who was a parent when I went there but now runs the place), a friend named Andy who runs San Franpsycho (look it up, it's awesome) and a man who asked me if I was Olive's daughter. Meanwhile Cyrus claimed a pink convertible push car and sat in it almost the whole time, Lily went up and down the stairs and slides, and Cleo and Daphne got passed around from arms to arms. It was chaos and comforting.

There were so many children. I remembered my mom doing pull ups on the top bar of a broken chain link fence while we waited for the bus. I remembered gray mornings. The other families we saw there. It was one of the touchstones of the community of my childhood. It felt good to be back.