Can't Not

Not post, I mean. No time to create anything. But I feel like a-musing, though it won't be amusing.

The child euphemistically referred to in the past as Sk8tr turned 21 yesterday. I have a digital picture nearby of he and I having drinks at a bar but I'm not going to take the time to post it. We took him and his lady love to dinner, and had (not enough) presents afterwards, and his friends came by, and this morning there was a pyramid of beer cans in the back yard.

My marriage is rapidly evolving into new phases, but I don't mention it as a prelude to giving out details, but only because my heart is full all the time, like a cup that will spill if I'm not careful, and this inspires me to say something, anything, and that was it.

Last weekend we went downtown to get him a gift certificate for a really cool clothing store and I got myself a leather vest for just over twenty bucks -- me in a leather vest? so gay -- and we walked along J St under the arches of trees that meet in the middle, in the hot springtime shade where houses have been converted into bars and restaurants and the clientele have all discovered the joys of going out on vintage bicycles and sitting out in the air having tapas and mojitos and beer, and though they mostly looked like children to me I was so happy to see all these people out having fun, miles away from air conditioning, from cars, from strip malls, from chain restaurants. It was fuckin' wonderful and we sat outside too and had carnitas and margaritas and smiled and laughed and held hands and discussed divorce and exercise and her emerging beauty and confidence and how she really doesn't need me in her life anymore, even while we clasped sweaty palms and got carded at a beer joint that was a family home about the time my grandfather was shipping off to France. She tries, we both try various attitudes, try them on like shoes and walk around the store a couple times trying out a new state of being to see how it fits.

My grandfather was a pack rat, as is my father and as am I, and last weekend I went through some boxes my father didn't want anymore and found not just pictures of my folks taken in 1948 before they got married (so young!) and my dad at a Naval technical school in Chicago in 1944 and my dad and his mother taken in 1932 but even my grandfather's graduation diplomas from Cal (1915) and Livermore High School (1911). Stuff that goes further back, and stuff that doesn't go so far back, like Father's Day and Valentine's Day cards I sent my daddy when I was a little boy, and my heart filled again as I thought about my mother making sure we got cards and wrote in them and sent them to him; and I cried a little when I found a postcard we sent from Yellowstone on that trip my mother's parents took her on to get over her failed marriage, my brother and I being 7 and 5 at that moment in time, and it was addressed to him at his parents' house, I guess because she couldn't know reliably what other address he might have. We said the simple things little boys say, "I saw a squirrel," something like that, and I wonder at the emotions my beautiful mother must have been having out there a thousand miles from home with parents learning to lose their otherwise wonderful son-in-law, bitter over his affair, grieving her lost first-born, yet making sure us little ones sent him a postcard.

Tomorrow we take the truck to Irvine so that the next day it is loaded with the contents of a college dormroom and, within minutes of the end of his last final, the UC kid (Skzx, in that former bloglife) can be brought home. There's no partying one more night with his friends and coming home over the weekend, he wants to come back immediately and we are there to make it so. Thus I will drive the 444 miles starting about six o'clock in the afternoon, and it is well I don't get drowsy like I used to, and that there is no dearth of caffeine products along the way.

Whoops, I'm at work. Enough of this.