Mom Thoughts
Been thinking about my mom, who's turning ??? years old today, and how she's not perfect (but who is?!), but that that's okay, because she loves me. And you need a mom's love around, floating like a gas, just in case you ever have to breathe it in—like on those really tough mornings when you didn't sleep, just turned over and over until your legs were all tangled up in the sheets, and coffee isn't nearly enough to do battle with the kinda day facing down on you. That's what you need a mom's love for. And you need her for her potato salad recipe.
Also, it's bonus mom goodness if you can get her to cry at your wedding (as above, at my big sis's wedding). Love you, mom!
Denver I Do
After I walked up the side of a mountain and gasped in the razor-thin air; after I ate an all-veg meal from my parents' large garden; after I skated Lafayette park in ungodly heat with Ben and some Midwest road warriors; after I stood outside watching the night sky flash like a pink strobe light with the thunder rolling around in my rib cage; after I smelled fresh rain on hot dirt; after I drank too much wine and played very many matches of ping pong, which is an odd game requiring infinite finesse ... after all that, I watched my big sister get married in her backyard in the city of Denver in the state of Colorado.
If you don't believe in love as a politico-religious institution, then you're in good company. But all you gotta do is watch closely and see the way two people can look at eachother with flashing eyes to know that there's some real-love stuff in this universe (although it gets confused with lots of other of things, I think).
Aaanyway, Melissa and Sarah climbed up in front of a small crowd of people and read some lines they'd written about each other—talked about being a family, about knowing themselves better in the face of each other, about overcoming their own deficiencies in order to form a more perfect kind of whole. Some of us trembled and gripped our hands over our hearts. Some of us blinked away big tears. Say what you want—this lay-your-souls-bare shit is pretty heavy when it's real. The rest of the night was a blur of champagne and ganache. And for real, can you believe we live in a country/world where peeps won't give these two the right to enter into the social contract that is marriage?!
Sarah and Melissa—civil union number 440 in the state of Colorado!
Sizzling at Lafayette, but SO fun.
I never go stag to a wedding.
Wedding DJ of the future!
Summer To-Do List
1. Attend a Fourth of July BBQ. Play with sparklers.
2. Float the river. Obvi, right? But last summer I didn't do it once.
3. Live off watermelons and beer for a while.
4. Cut out everything in my life that isn't absolutely awesome—including the toxic shit and the shit that's of zero note.
5. Drink my first cold-press coffee.
6. Host a backyard cookout under sparkly strings of lights.
7. Take the dog on a road trip somewhere hot. Roll down all the windows, let the air fill the car.
8. Skate more backyard mini ramps. There's just no such thing as too much here.
9. Watch my big sister tie the knot. Maybe cry?
Big Pat
As a non-kid haver, I'm gonna argue here that age 8-11 is the best window to hang out with other people's kids. I had some family in town recently, including 8-year old nephew Patrick. Most of my favorite moments from the visit were spent just me and him, walking the dog and talking about stuff he's seen and stuff he thinks. No toddler fussiness. No teenager attitude. At this age, they're just cruising around being little humans. It's refreshing.
Adios
As I may have mentioned before, this here log cabin—the house I grew up in; the one my dad and grand dad built back in the '70s when I was just a sliver of a pine cone inside my parents' tinder box—was bulldozed recently to make room for a mansion-y type thing. Vacation home for the owner of the San Diego Padres I think? I could be wrong, I don't follow sports. Anyhoo, I'm not sad about it. It's sad to say goodbye to your roots, but I did that a long time ago. What's nice is to think about the place and all the happy, wild days I had running around barefoot in the middle-of-nowhere mountains.
-Shot the plate-glass window out of the green house with a BB gun during an ill-fated target practice and got in the kind of trouble you still remember 24 years later.
-Climbed on the roof regularly to sit atop the chimney and feel free.
-Fell in the creek countless times—never drowned.
-Crept around in the pastures eating bugs and examining plant life.
-Woke up early on the first day of summer—smelled the green grass smell; heard the crop duster flying overhead spraying mosquitos—and knew instinctively that everything desirable was already around me in abundance.