Dick Cheney and SUV’s

My boy Eliot is hypersensitive and obsessive, and at ten years old one of his fears and obsessions was insects. As soon as he got home from school, he took his five-dollar light saber in the back yard and swatted at the insects. Between swarms of fruit flies from the compost, or whatever hatches occur in the late afternoon in an urban garden, he waved his light saber slowly and artfully like a jedi knight. That was when I saw the connection between one's fears and weapons.

If Eliot is able to translate his boyhood love of weapons into nothing more violent than duck hunting with his dad when he is older, my biggest worry will be safety. I can only hope he will have a better track record than our vice president Dick Cheney. Not only do I want my son to grow into a peace-loving guy, but I also want him to know the basic rules of hunting safety, which Dick Cheney failed to observe when he struck his quail hunting companion in the cheek. At first when it was reported that the pellets had “knocked flat” fellow hunter Whittington but had not seriously harmed him, it was fodder for jokes. But when we found out later that a pellet had lodged in Whittington’s heart and caused a minor heart attack, it was alarming. If this wasn’t a metaphor for a vice president’s games gone awry, I don’t know what was. Meanwhile, my son was tucking his flashlight into his holster to ward off the dark as he took the compost out after dinner.

While Eliot was taking out the compost, we were watching the Winter Olympics, and automobile advertisements showing SUV’s perched atop glaciers. Did the advertisers know they were making a statement about our irreversible plunge toward global warming? My twelve-year old daughter Carly did not appreciate our family efforts to burn fewer fossil fuels. She was upset that we did not drive her the three blocks to school, no matter how much I ranted and raved about overweight students slouching in SUV’s, and the dangerous snarl of traffic in front of the school, where many students waited longer for rides than it would have taken them to walk home.

She was especially incensed when she asked for a ride to school on rainy days and we handed her an umbrella. Then I told her she would be walking the five blocks to her drum lesson with her cymbals, and she went ballistic.

“What? Why can’t you drive me like normal people! I can’t believe you’d make me walk in the rain. People are going to see me and think I’m neglected!” (Carrying fifty dollar cymbals and a cell phone.)

“Why don’t you try walking five blocks with heavy cymbals?” she asked.

“Good idea,” I said. “ I’ll walk the dog over at the end of your lesson and carry the cymbals home for you.”

When she arrived at her drum lesson she called me.

“Are you there yet?” I asked her.

“No! The street’s so flooded I’m still looking for a place to cross!”

I stood my ground. If I were battling just Carly, the opposition would have been formidable, but in my mind I was battling Dick Cheney and George W., and the oil lords were defenseless in the face of a mother on a mission. In my own backyard I was victorious.

The answer to Carly’s plea, “Why can’t you be like normal parents?” was simple; if that’s what normal was, I didn’t want to be.

Or as Eliot, fighting the insects on the Dark Side, said, “Let the forest be with you!”

Meet the Parents

The story begins long before I met my prospective in-laws. Even before Blue formally introduced me to his parents, I met them at a cocktail party they hosted for a mutual friend of ours, the woman who ended up introducing me and Blue a year later.

I came to the cocktail party with a date, although I am sure he wasn’t invited. He was a surfer from Marin County, and we met body surfing at Red Rock Beach north of San Francisco. We traipsed around together on the rocky hillsides above Stinson Beach, the kind of thing I was prone to do.

Blue and our mutual friend Diane grew up next door to each other in Pasatiempo, a golf course nestled in the hills just north of the city of Santa Cruz. Blue’s childhood home backed up to a canyon through which ran the Carbonera Creek, where Diane and I went wading when we were nine years old. I had no idea when I waded in that creek that my future husband was growing up in the house above the canyon. I came to the cocktail party nearly twenty years later intent on finding the waterfall Diane and I had slid down in our underwear.

Blue likes to point out that he would never have dated me if he had met me before he did, and that night with my surfer friend is for him further proof. Clearly, if I brought Bill the surfer, I was not looking for a man. But would I not have wanted to make a positive impression on my future mother-in-law? She told me, when I asked her to recall for this story the first time she met me, that I was not dressed appropriately for a cocktail party. And it’s no wonder. Bill and I spent the evening traipsing around in the poison oak down by the creek as if we were there for a hike.

Still the connection precedes me, Blue, and Diane. Diane’s dad VKB, her uncle Lew, and Blue’s dad Jim grew up next door to each other on that same drive in Pasatiempo. My grandmother was a golfer who joined Pasatiempo, and her daughter (my mother) spent her summers at the Pasatiempo pool. She spent many an afternoon in a one-piece suit with red polkadots, swimming and lounging by the pool with Jim, VKB, and Lew. This was confirmed for me some forty-five years later when my mother was living in France, and I wrote her a letter in which I told her I was dating Blue Wilson and asked if she knew his father. The answer in her return letter was definitive: “Of course I know Jimmy Wilson!”

The truth is I don’t remember Blue introducing me to his parents. Blue says that it’s probably because they were so welcoming and easy going, and I am sure this is true. “We’re the Reception Committee, not the Selection Committee,” Blue’s mom likes to say. Certainly she hadn’t “selected” me the night she saw me trekking through her courtyard. If it surprised her a year later when her son, a cornflake-eating redhead who won the Citizenship award in sixth grade, brought me home, she didn’t show it. She accepted me into the family, and the meeting went smoothly, with not even a traumatic event to help cement it in my memory.

Blue remembers with much more clarity the night he met my parents, perhaps because the Tatums are bristlier than the Wilsons and prone toward lively, even combative, discussions at the dinner table. Plus he was subject to an interrogation like the sports test the boy in the movie Diner insists his fiance pass before he will marry her; my older brother Tim started a running commentary on the San Francisco Giants, hoping Blue would jump in. This was my brother’s back-handed way of finding out what kind of a boy I had brought home.

“1987 was when the Giants won the Pennant,” Blue says, hopping out of bed when I ask him to recall the first time he met my parents. He opens a drawer and pulls out a Giant’s t-shirt I bought him at the Championship game. He turns it over and reads the names on the back: “Will Clark, Kevin Mitchell, Jeffery Leonard. Chili Davis. Candyman. The Kruk.” That was before we got married and had kids, when I knew the stats and every player’s position and listened to entire Giants’ games on the radio.

After he aced the sports test with my brother, Blue had to face my dad. We were all waiting for Dad to come home from playing golf so we could start the cocktail hour. When he pulled into the driveway, he tooted the horn and Barb, bristly mother of the lot of us, said, “Finally!”

“I played two rounds,” Dad said, after he shook Blue’s hand, meaning he had played thirty-six holes of golf.

“Wow,” Blue said. “You must have had a fast cart.”

My father, who is passionate about golf and often compares it to the Holy Grail, responded with a lecture. Someday, he told Blue, hopefully not in the near future, he might have to use one, but in the meantime, golf carts were a beast of burden and the death of the caddie. This was mortifying for Blue, whose friends loaded the golf cart with a case of Budweiser.

It was a short cocktail hour with no hors d’houvres and a long dinner, Blue recalls. “The opposite of my family,” he says, “Where the cocktail hour is long with lots of hors d’houvres, and the meal is short because people eat instead of talking. I listened to your family take turns interrupting each other.”

Lively family dinners and a mother-in-law who loves unconditionally the women her sons have chosen, these are the rocks upon which Blue and I have built our marriage. Neither one of us doubts that it is the polarity in our respective genes that attracts us. Just as it brought together around the pool some sixty years ago a red-headed boy and a girl in a polka-dot bathing suit.