Ford

09.27.07

Fountain Soccer
Daily, Ford, Photos (25)

Golden Gate Park.
09.27.07

It’s kinda lame mom didn’t blog about you on your 6th birthday, huh?
Daily, Ford (8)

Oh, my beautiful boy. It’s partly because I’m speechless….but mostly because I’m disorganized. You know me.

Let me just say tonight, before I go to bed, that you refused to believe you weren’t six at 7:20 pm when you knew you were. I told you, “But Ford, you weren’t born until 8:11pm, six years ago. We were in the hospital, watching the first episode of Star Trek Enterprise, and just when daddy was getting really comfortable with Jolene Blalock’s tight vulcan silhouette, YOU started being born. And a few minutes later, there you were. Just like that. And with your conehead, you could have been an extra on the show. Your head was really pretty funny looking when you came out.”

“I’m still 6.”

6 hours later, I can say with all my heart that yes, you indeed are. Happy Birthday, Ford!

xoxo,
Mama
08.28.07

To Ford, After Your first Day of Big Boy School
Daily, Exploring, Ford (15)

Ford, little man, I’m so in your dust.

Monday morning I overslept with just enough time to pack your lunch and shovel a bowl of food down your gullet, mostly against your will. It took me ten minutes just to find clean socks and another ten to find your shoes, tripping all the while over the mountains of camping laundry from the weekend, but in the nick of time we were out the door, and not looking back once at the red canoe still atop the car. I had a hard time focusing without the coffee I forgot to brew, wading through the muck of my anxieties, and keeping up with you. Down the sidewalk you skipped with your dad, as if already saying “seeyabye!” It just didn’t last long enough; I really wanted to hold onto the weekend, but Monday just slammed her big fat ass down in the drivers seat and I barely had time to grab the ‘oh shit!’ handles. And there we went.
Down the street.

We were a little early. You waited in the courtyard and watched little girls walk down the sidewalk, trailering Disney luggage on wheels. My eyes followed you as you measured every child that passed by. You asessed everything carefully, occasionally drawing attention but mostly appraising the morning as you bit your lip, squinted your eyes and surveyed the kinderscape.

We waited in the cafeteria for our orientation. You took a picture of me freaking out behind a plastic smile and I wondered how thankful you were to finally be free of my hysterics for 7 hours each day:

And, judging by your expression, I’d say you are pretty grateful!

After a brief Q&A in your homeroom, you kinderfolk rendezvoused to your new desks, and you were the first to start grabbing crayons and drawing on a piece of busywork coloring paper. The other kids mostly watched you start working, but within five minutes every child was eagerly coloring in the lines. We listening to a sappy book on saying goodbies on the first day of school, gross overkill with the best intentions from your sweet teacher, and as she read we watched you embellish your work.
Nice detail, Michaelangelo:

And despite the “Parent To Do List” that was written on the chalkboard, I was overcome with an uncontrolled bewilderment, a vacancy before me that I couldn’t ignore, and I had to put on shades in order to disguise my feelings, though I’m sure it only attracted sympathy from Damon, who managed to capture my first steps alone without you by my side, placing all my hopes in a basket before the teacher: that your spirit remain unbroken; that you never consider coloring as anything but busywork and fine motor practice; that you never stop asking questions; that your confidence doesn’t diminish; that you never stop trying; that you keep having fun; that you know life is school and the classroom is just structure, a place to bouce off ideas, not simply adopt them.

That’s it, roll those big brown eyes. Just don’t forget I’m crazy about you. CrAZY!!!
Love,
Mama
08.10.07

Sticky Situation
Chas, Daily, Ford, Mama Says Om (76)

Ikea has the cheapest breakfast outside of the home. In fifteen minutes we can be at the table, dunking french toast sticks into a bowl of maple syrup (not ideal, but Ford’s ideal, which he serves up himself) and feeling the warm sunlight pour through the floor-to-ceiling windows, penetrating the pores, the caffeine from the Swedish coffee slipping instantly into your bloodstream as if by DMSO. The eggs are synthetic but oddly satisfying, since we are always starving and they are always served steaming hot. There are beads of syrup on the table, collecting on their t-shirts, smeared between fingers. I sit there, across the table, sipping my coffee and wondering how they can stand their filth. Judging from the quiet, they couldn’t be more content with it.

Mama says Om.
08.07.07

I heart kid’s art
Chas, Daily, Ford, Young @ Art (15)

Both children have the most charming creative style. They like to have, at all times, paper on their easels, and they like to let me know when it’s time to refresh the canvas. So I clamp a piece of paper onto the easel, and the kids do all the rest.

While I’m on the phone in the studio, Ford is kneeling on the floor before his easel, oil crayon in hand, gracefully weaving arabesques onto white paper like a dancer, partly like an experienced surgeon. He amazes me with his consistency and experimentation. At his age, I was drawing pure representation: rooms and school buses and horses, familiar things. Ford, thirty years later, has the same hair and chin, but the picture is completely different. He fills the page, works at will, picks up where he leaves off, whenever he chooses. One piece may hang, awaiting completion, for three days. He will flit back into the mudroom when I take a break to read mail, and will deliberately choose a medium, often something new that week, and experiment with the flow of the material on paper, the texture of its friction. Sometimes, he’ll add a Dalek, or a robot, or some other recognizable icon of current obsession.
Here, a Dalek for sure:

His abstract, expressionistic style has remainded consistent since he began making collages, at 18 months. Then, we used to sit at the dinette in the airstream, paper on the table and both weilding glue sticks. I’d ask him where this piece of torn paper wanted to go? Where does that piece belong? Do you think it belongs on the paper? Like conversation, documented in layers and textures, and I’ll remember this with a certain piognancy, as I remember his first steps (which he took in the same trailer!)

Chas is the same. Whether he has taken cues from Ford or not, he is also uninhibited. But while Ford’s marks bear a signature pattern, Chas’ style is vigorously expressive in one moment, exquisitely drawn in another. His hand bears dramatic pressure here, a faint scrawl there. Many times, lately, he is drawing something important to him, something concrete. A sea anemone, for example:

I look at them and grin, thinking to myself that it couldn’t get any better than this. It’s one of my most passionate goals, taht they retain this sense of urgency to create, to be free with their ability, uninhibited by convention. We will always keep a space for them, wherever we are, where their mind can pause (with or without the castaway shoes and fallen markers) and play with materials at hand.

I wish this for you, too.
08.03.07

Routine Assessment
Chas, Daily, Exploring, Ford, Thinking, Uncategorized (3)

Once in a while, I have a day, maybe a few days, of dysfunctional funk. Sometimes I think it’s my mind’s clever way of alleviating boredom. The day is inevitably sunny, my children are particularly joyful, my husband–syrupy kind. It matters none that he’s remarked n how beautiful he thought I looked, nor that my dinner was delicious. It matters none that I sat on the floor and played Legos with my children, made a lego woman for chas with boobs, made a rocket with Ford; nor does it matter that I rocked and read and rocked and read and read in bed with happy pillows tossed at my head, midafternoon. It isn’t enough that I was able to watch them paint in the garden, watch them paint their toes, then their feet, their legs, their tummies: a robot here, a Dalek there, a rainblow of tempera-covered rocks beneath a wet easel. Smiles, laughter. Running, oh the running: unhinged and impulsive, a Thoroughbred on fresh green grass, and then the wind kicks up, and he bolts, breakneck, a half-eaten mouthful of grass falls at your feet. Or a string cheese wrapper.

On days like this, I pore over yesterday’s photographs. I rediscover beauty to validate my perception. See? I noticed that! I’m not dead. I SAW that!

I noticed a jumble of sea-jewels,

a tangle of mermaid thread,

grass, whispering along our walk

I caught the salty smell of Chas, whirring past me on the trail

and the soothing lull of a calm Pacific afternoon, heavy sand, horizontal bliss

a little vertical tension.

and the coastal summer smells of dried wildflowers, trampled ice plant, baby seal poo and low tide, trailing on the sweet sound of swaying grass and Ford, who had just told me this was his new favorite beach ever.

So why the dull face, woman?

Just throw the ball. I’m here all day! How about you?
08.02.07

Music to my Eyes
Daily, Ford, Young @ Art (3)

He doesn’t have an agenda, he just wants to draw. His strokes are deliberate. Confident. I don’t believe he is attempting to represent anything in his latest series of drawings, only experiment with lines. It is immeasurable my pride as I watch him proceed from page to page, dancing with lines and pattern, like watching snow fall. It’s quiet, graceful, unrehearsed yet somehow choreographed subconsciously. Some would say this is scribbling. I call it music to my eyes.
07.11.07

The Young Man’s Leisure Guide, Ch.1: On Enjoying a Driveway, Installment No. 1
Chas, Daily, Ford (3)

Ford is practicing basic board maneuvers. He circumnavigates the driveway in rough squares of measured effort, propelling himself faster each time. His legs are slightly bent and his form conveys assurance and ease, but his arms carry some tension. They coil upwards toward lifted shoulders, bearing fear’s weight in two invisible buckets. All the while, joy and satisfaction beams through his proud, young face.

Chas soars above the ground, speeding faster than the sound of his rolling bearnings. He clicks over twigs in the driveway, sometimes rolling over the board as it stops dead beneath him. He laughs, I laugh. His palms are black from asphalt soot and his nubby toes are fearlessly worn smooth and black, too. I can hear him acting out an action scene, his voice trails behind him as he flies across the blacktop, exaggerated cries of help and pleas for mercy, ending with a thud as he slams into the woodpile, throwing himself in a heap onto the ground. He lies spread-eagle beside his skateboard, looking up into the walnut boughs above him, swaying in the hot afternoon breeze.

After a three minute meditation, watching the leaves flutter and sway, he mounts his hovercraft and soars back across the driveway, his own little cosmos

to flail himself into the jasmine, in another utterly romantic gesture of bravado. His heart just couldn’t beat any louder.

Ford and I laugh again. We follow no particular path, only minding not to run in to each other. Sometimes we glide just so close, knock knuckles, smile again. There is no two o’clock school traffic on our street to mark our passage through the afternoon. Chas is in his own world but he sometimes shows us where he’s been. Sometimes he shows us where he’s going. And then, like us, you can catch him just gelling with the afternoon. At that moment you know he’s off any agenda and he’s just somewhere in the middle of a summer afternoon in the driveway.
04.18.07

Easter weekend
Chas, Daily, Exploring, Ford (0)

It rained last night, throughout the night and into the morning, until the sun poked through the snivelling stratus and proclaimed that it was no longer a time of grieving. So the rain packed up and moved eastward, I’m told. And in its wake, the starlings came back out of hiding among the ivy boughs, and the quail promenaded atop the dewy lawn, properly.

For the past three weeks we have had occasional rains, and each time the pitter pattering begins above our heads on this old roof, we tell ourselves, “This is the last rain of the season.” That was the last rain of the season.

Speaking of proper, this is a blog where I am obliged to to log a chronicle of events, and I missed the holy weekend of Easter. I’ve been called on this, so let me indulge you people on what you missed, heretofore two weeks.

Alis threw Seth an Easter rager. Thirty-odd toddlers turned every stone and log looking for eggs and chocolate on the Whitman commons that straddle Skyline ridge. She spent the week beforehand sewing fleece easter bunnies and dying eggs in pots of boiled beets and onionskins and cabbageleaves. On other nights, she wrapped heirloom seeds in tulle and tied them to colorful tongue depressors, and when she was busy wrapping little pots of violas and wheatgrass with tissue paper and hand-painted yarn, she enlisted friends to string wooden beaded bracelets into the wee hours or, as in my case, stand in her kitchen, slackjawed and dumbfounded, to gawk at all the hard work she really put into this fete while she dyed yet more gorgeous eggs.

Which is all to say that my boys cared neither here nor there about any of this, on that particular day, the day of the hunt, as they poked and prodded through the Lamb’s Ears and Lilies until they found all forms of chocolate, but that we girls, and by that I mean me( because I was trying not to notice my younger competition) secretly dashed through the garden like a pixie, collecting shiny glass beads and seed packets, purple-and-orange violas and wheatgrass pots, slipping them inconspicuously into Chas’ easter basket while he gorged on his gold, his precious chocolate. Occasionally I’d urge him to pick up a seed packet that I’d found, and he’d probe the entire area first for chocolate, certain that I had scouted for nothing other, and finally reach for the only thing hidden in the foliage, which was indeed the seed packet and which he indeed picked up. For me!

And so, with seeds to plant, I’m faced by the bare patches of three quarterempty flowerbeds, spared just for such purpose, and the blank face of a front and back yard, freshly plowed by a thirty year-old and rusting tractor with a likewise rusted and ringing plow, just days ago before the rain fell. I see mounds upon which to plant two to three ppumpkins seeds apiece. Give or take a melon.

I have tenacious, hard callouses on my hands from three weekends ago, when we spent the rest of Easter weekend in Pebble Beach, playing drunk barefoot tennis doubles into the black of night. I’m not sure how I didn’t bleed through my feet by bedfall, on those heavy, luxurious sheets; on the contrary, my feet tingled as if they’d been freshly shorn of three old inches of thick hide. Perhaps they were?. Indeed, the rest of me felt that idyllic; it’s fun having rich friends with third homes nestled in the surreal beauty of California’s monterrey bay peninsula. We drove home along the coastal highway bisecting the prim acres of golfing lawn and the rugged, emerald blue jumble of ocean and guano-stained rock and the white froth of my amazement. Acres upon acres of blooming artichoke and fruiting strawberries, laborers scattered along the endless rows that stretched inland, hunched over the produce like props. Surreal produce signs with enormous specimens that seemed to shine from the light of the sun itself, which glared down sternly upon us as we shook off the two day hangover that only an irresponsible weekend in someone else’s mansion in someone else’s neighborhood could bring.
03.13.07

SPC: Flickr tools #2
Daily, Exploring, Ford, Photos, Self Portrait Tuesday (0)

With little difference to the stiff neck I felt yesterday morning, I drove the kids down to the beach. All the elation that nearly winded me on the drive down to Half Moon Bay fizzled once I started lifting Chas out of deep tide pools and stretching to capture fossils embedded in the rocks. I remember the swirling panorama of beached seals and hungry surf, thinking, This is a very bad place to be with a stiff neck and two exploring preschoolers.

So I let both of the kids clamber their way back to the beach on their own (Chas is getting surprisingly nimble) and then rested in the tent while they bouldered and threw rocks at the incoming tide. This overexposed shot is taken from my little infirmary. I like the way it captures the heat, unforgiving light and pain (although I might be the only one to look at this picture and feel it). It also has a nice retro tint. What’s your impression? I’m obliged to use these flickr tools for SPC’s current challenge but I’m not sure I’d use these tools in my own. It lacks authenticity. Not sure I like that, although it has a home somewhere.

My advice to anyone waking up in the morning with a stiff neck is to traction yourself to a board for the rest of the day and hook yourself up to an IV and catheter. Don’t drive a long, winding road to the beach, set up a tent, wrangle children across the rocks at low tide and then press reverse. That was a recipe for disaster. Damon says it wouldn’t matter; that the muscle would spaz no matter what.
I wonder if he’s right.

If you want to learn more about online photoediting tools , check out a gallery exhibiting some at SPC.

Category

Ford

recent posts

Archives

Categories

tweet tweet