The Salinas Valley was amazing. Miles of it. For most of the day out of San Luis Obispo, after we crested some mountains and went across an Air Force base with big rockets (missiles?) loaded up on launch pads and descended back into the valley, we drove by food. It was the produce isle in the grocery store, still in the ground. It was a little difficult to call exactly what each the crops were, but they were small, leafy, and bountiful. Sometimes you’d see the tractors preparing the ground, sometimes there would be crews harvesting the food. Lettuce, cabbage, cauliflower, green onions, collards, mustard, kale, it was all out there. There were even some strawberry rows, and occasionally raspberry’s under hooped white shade houses, acres of it. It was all irrigated, and there were trailers full of aluminum pipe, ready to deploy. We saw a few processing sheds with tanks and plumbing around the buildings. The whole place was buzzing with industrial food production, and it made me want to eat a big salad.
Next up was Oakland. Moez picked us up in his Toyota Tercel, which set a record for the smallest car we all got into. We put two bags on the roof rack, filled the trunk, and I sat up front with the Helicon in my lap. Did I mention that Moez had managed to score a couple of booster seats for the kids, so we were even legal? Definitely a record.
The next day we went over to the City (San Francisco) to visit the Somethinganother museum at Golden Gate Park on Free Day. We love free day because it’s free. We don’t love free day because it makes us feel that we should do the free thing, and then when it doesn’t work out, we feel like we are somehow dumber or less cultured or just lazier than we were before free day. All the museums we don’t visit on regular price day don’t give us that special sense of failure, but museums we don’t visit on free day actually subtract from our worth as a family. So if the kids don’t get that full academic scholarship to Stanford, you can trace the reason all the way back to free day in San Francisco.
All of us, Moez, Sara, Dureau, Cheryl, Zephyr, Eureka, and myself pile in two cars and drive to San Francisco. Because our cars are so full, we get to drive in the HOV lanes, which saves five bucks on the trip across the Bay Bridge. But there are plenty of people, most of them solo in a car, who are willing to pay the necessary five bucks to cross the bay. Moez says there are places where you can pull up and pick up a ridesharer to take across the bay, and if you have at least 3 people in the car, you can HOV it across. But most people would rather pay the five bucks than meet a stranger carpooling. If I had to drive across the Bay Bridge everyday, I’d jump in front of a BART, but in the meantime I’d definitely pick up a ridesharer or two.
We got to see the new bay bridge, which is not double decker so if it fails in the earthquake everyone will plunge directly into the water, instead of taking out a commuter on the lower level first. It looks good, but if I were going to build a new bridge across the bay, I might have chosen a different color. The golden gate bridge guys got it right and picked a nice color, but of course now they have to paint it all the time and each paint job costs much more than the bridge cost to build originally. Maybe “concrete” is an appropriate color after all.
We get to the Golden Gate park, and start driving around looking for a parking spot. We finally get two, right by each other, all the way that direction from where we wanted to be. As we were getting out and heading for the Museum, we see Moez and Sara’s friends who we were meeting. They had arrived at the same time, and parked in the same place, all without cell phone assisted management. Their son’s name is Soda Pop.
We all walked towards the museum. Zephyr insisted on pushing Soda Pop’s stroller. Zeph pretty much wants to push or pull anything that rolls all the time. Every time we enter an Amtrak station, grocery store, or nursing home, he immediately grabs a cart and rolls it around. We trust his driving, but we definitely get some hairy eyeballs from city drivers. People who drove tractors as a kid don’t seem to mind as much.
As we neared the entrance to the museum, we saw the “full” light come on at the parking garage. The line to get in the garage was stopped before the light changed, and after it changed everyone stayed where they were, not moving, hoping that some how the light didn’t mean them. But then the guys came out of the garage with the orange barricade, placed the barricade in front of the waiting line, and then left, and the cars all zip off to beat each other to the next parking spot, except still this one guy who sat there idling his car, unable to believe that his parking spot had been denied him. We had already parked, and felt superior in our choice.
We get around the bend and we see the museum. Its huge and sciencey and has the sort of architecture that makes you believe whatever is written on the interpretive cards inside. And it has a line in front of it that is massive. At this point it became obvious that we weren’t the only people who had heard that this was free day at the big smart museum. So we start walking towards the end of the line, which disappears around the bend. The lines snakes into the shade, where we are immediately cold.
Apparently this happens in San Francisco, even in the summer, because it has a “married time” weather pattern, which means it can be really chilly and cold underneath a warm, sunny looking exterior. Never heard of it. But it really works. We were cold the entire time we were in San Fran. L.A. was a little chillier than we expected, and the water was to cold for me to swim in Malibu, but S.F. was downright frigid. Of course everyone knows that, and even now you are probably typing that Mark Twain quote into the comments box, but truthfully the weather related bitchiness is like motion sickness — your eyes are telling you one thing (sunny California!) and your other senses are telling something else entirely (yes, numbskull, you should have packed that thermal shirt) and the disconnect is where the trouble comes about.
So we keep on walking and after a lot of trekking and collective sharp intakes of breath as Zephyr pushed Soda Pop right up to the edge of the crossing before stopping, we finally come to the end of the line. Where a nice helpful young man tells us that it’s and hour and a half wait from that point (it seems like it took us that long just to walk it), if they don’t start metering, at which point all bets are off and we would be at the mercy of the dawdling crowds leaving the museum, which could take a while because most of them looked very smart, like they may be reading the interpretive cards in all three languages.
That’s when we decided to do something else, like go play in the famous playground at Golden Gate Park. Which was a pretty good choice. It was a big playground with lots to do, a great place to people watch. Lots of summer campers with matching t-shirts. I overheard a counselor pointing out that several camps had selected the day-glo green as their shirt color, which created confusion that had been carefully planned away.
I saw an over weight woman with a dyed hairdo and a punkish fashion sense and a HUGE purse, actually a messenger bag that was so huge it must have had a messenger in it, with two kids who were in furry harnesses with leashes gripped tightly by the woman, and she just sort of led them around the edge of the play area on the trail, never letting go enough to let them play.
I saw the guy at the hot dog cart, who had a lanky california build and longish, well kept hair under a hat, who moved crisply and deliberately as he served, adding a little flourish to every movement, like banging the kraut off the tongs before rehanging them or wiping the sweat off the cold pop can before plopping it on the counter in front of the customer.
I took a cat nap in the sun and soon enough it was time to get back to nap out the younger kids, and we walked back by the tennis courts full of kids getting lessons and got into the car. And it wasn’t until then that Eureka realized that we hadn’t just postponed going to the museum, but canceled the trip altogether, and she got really disappointed and started to cry, and I felt so bad because she was so set on learning, and in her patient way she could have weathered the line and gone in and seen something new and it would have opened up her mind in some specific way that she would remember forever, but we parents had been impatient and had projected our own frustrations with big lecture filled buildings onto our kids and decided that they would be better off playing on the jungle gym.
I realize what a crap-shoot it all is, whether a kid gets the stimulation that will turn him or her into the person they want to be, or whether a child is stymied at every turn, a slave to circumstance, unable to take the things they feel they need due to money or time or whatever intervening obstacle presents itself. And how it comes down to what each kid tell herself about it, whether each frustrated need becomes an obstacle to success, or a boost in a different direction. And there isn’t really a lot I can do about it, but keep it coming.
All I can do is present the world to my children the way I see it. The most helpful thing is to be comfortable in my place, and invite my children to share it with me. I hope that whether we’re teaching or learning, playing or working, struggling or cruising, what rubs off is, at the very least, happy.