Color me happy

 

I had dinner with three wonderful gentlemen tonight at Tokyo Café—sons Colin and Jamie, with grandson Jacob in the middle. Of course, the boys recounted many tales of their misspent youth, but they interspersed sage advice on how to handle college—lessons they wish they had learned earlier. Jamie has long been a sushi fan, but I didn’t realize both Colin and Jacob would do so well on it. I was piggy—shared the cucumber salad with Jamie and then had salmon sashimi and beef and broccoli. All of it so good.

On the way home, Jamie wanted to stop at Eatzi’s and emerged with chocolate mousse, rich with whipped cream, banana pudding, and a blueberry cake of some sort. I could not even finish my portion of the mousse—so rich!

Tonight as I write, Jacob is studying, and Colin and Jamie are in my cottage having some sort of impassioned discussion that I have tuned out. But it is a joy to have them in the same room—and sleeping under the same roof. Well, the adjacent roof If not really mine.

Today Colin and I took Sophie to the vet for a checkup. This was a bit of a challenge for me, because Colin drives a humongous pickup, and I couldn’t figure how he would manage me, my walker, and the dog. All he would say, as I did my usual fret and wring my hands, was, “Trust me.” He had brought a stool for me to climb up to the truck—the third time I think I mastered it. Meantime, Sophie, who hates to go to the vet with memories of her two-week-plus incarceration there, behaved beautifully. She got a clean bill of health after extensive, expensive blood work.

Sophie has not, however, been behaving as well at home. She adores having my boys here. So last night she woke me to go out at two and six, to be fed at seven, to go out at seven-thirty. When Colin finally came to give her the morning insulin shot, I begged him to take her back in the house with him, so I could get another hour of sleep. Most of her trips, I am sure, were not because she needed to go potty but because she wanted attention from Colin. Now, tonight, with both boys here, she’s liable to be more difficult than ever. I guess it’s the price I pay for having them here.

Colin has been working remotely every day. This apparently is a bad week, with heavy financial deadlines, so he is reluctant to take much time off. On the other hand, Jamie, who is between positions and not at all worried about it, is devoting his life to yoga and will go to a class tomorrow and another Thursday morning. Tomorrow I will call and see if it’s a good day for us to visit my brother in rehab.

And maybe there’s a delicatessen lunch in our future. Colin particularly loves Carshon’s, where he’s been going since before he can remember. For him, no trip home to Fort Worth is complete without a Rebecca sandwich. I think I’d like a tongue sandwich, which sends the rest of my family into rigors. But I grew up eating tongue, and I like it. Kidneys too, but we won’t go into that discussion. Jamie may however sneak off to Ernesto’s for a much-needed fix.

Visiting me, both boys are returning to the city where they grew up. I notice every time I get out that things change daily—to often, it’s an unfortunate stretch of look-alike houses that make me despair for the mid-century bungalows and their history that are now gone. Here a new building, there another gone. So if I notice these changes on a daily or weekly basis, the changes they see every six months or so are amazing. Colin today saw the new TCU Hyatt Hotel which he apparently had never noticed before, even though it’s right across the street from my old office. Fun to watch them discover the changes, and yet Colin and I agreed on the drive home from the vet that Fort Worth is, as always, a pretty city. We were driving down Hulen where it goes downhill toward Bellaire Drive, overlooking lush green treetops for a good distance.

As you can gather, these are happy days for me. I am keeping up with my office—emails and the like and making a few stabs at new connections—but this is pretty much time out for me. Meanwhile, Jordan reports from San Miguel that they are having a wonderful time. Life is good all around.

A Day of Daughters and some confusion

            Today started out with unexpected storm warning which I thought a bad omen, but it turned out to be a good day. I had visits from two “daughters” who are part of my extended family. As an adoptive parent, I have long believed that it is less blood than love that ties us to people, so it is, to me, perfectly logical that I have daughters that are not part of my immediate family, daughters that I did not raise.

At noon today I welcomed Kate, my goddaughter, and her significant other, Taran. I have not seen Kate probably in almost twenty years—she was born in Fort Worth, but her family moved away when she was five, and shame on them, shame on me—we barely kept in touch, although we had a few visits. But this spring I had a lovely visit from her mom that rekindled our friendship and made me realize how much I had missed that family.

Kate was in the Metroplex for the wedding of a friend she and Taran know from graduate school, and I was delighted that she put Fort Worth on her agenda. Thirty years old, she works for an international company in niche marketing—something that I try to grasp and can’t. What it means is she focuses on one product. Taran is a follower of the Sikh religion from India but has been here for four years. They met at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and today he works for Intuit in the San Francisco area.

Twenty years didn’t make a bit of difference. We reminisced, although her memories of Fort Worth are vague, and we talked about everything from food—Taran did a year in culinary school—to politics—Kate is knowledgeable and passionate on the subject. Both spent a lot of time loving on Sophie and said they wished they had a dog. Their lifestyle intrigues me. Neither one owns a car—in San Francisco there is no need, and they Uber everywhere. When they left today, I asked if they’d called their Uber, and Kate said no, they’d walk around the neighborhood a bit and then tell the Uber where to meet them. They were headed for the Kimbell Museum and then the Stockyards, so Taran could see the Fort Worth herd.

Bright young people, and they brightened my day.

This evening Sue and Teddy came for happy hour, though we got so mixed up on time that I thought they weren’t coming and put away the appetizers just before they arrived. We had miscommunicated about the time. Sue declared me her Fort Worth mom years ago because her mom is in Ottawa, Ontario, so I call her my Canadian daughter. They have just been to Santa Fe and Taos—to my dismay, they didn’t like Santa Fe so well, but they are hikers and outdoors people, and Taos put them closer to the opportunities they wanted. Me? I prefer the shops and restaurants of Santa Fe and told them in half a day they didn’t give the town a fair chance, nor did they get beneath the tourist level. I asked if they’d go back, and they said no, once they visit a place, they strike it off their bucket list and move on to the next place. Again a foreign thought to me—when I’ve been somewhere and liked it, I want to go back. Hence my countless trips to Santa Fe.

After Sue and Teddy headed out to try a new Italian restaurant, the evening fell apart. Volkswagen called to say my car is ready. But I had no way to get it. Jordan was off at the high school graduation of a friend’s son, and Christian had car troubles of his own. He was stranded, waiting for repairs on Jordan’s car to be complete. He had to Uber to pick up the car and then drive to Central Market for my groceries. By then, curbside pickup was closed, and he had some confusion before he finally went into the service counter and asked for my groceries. They handed him two bags but said there was a third bag in the cooler and they didn’t know if it was mine. It had shrimp, so Christian assured them it was not mine—I’m allergic to shrimp. It was almost eight o’clock by the time he got home, and I had given up and eaten my leftover half of a chicken salad croissant for supper. But we had a lovely visit over wine.

We’ll try to get the car first thing in the morning. Meantime, good publishing news, about which I’ll write more later. I’m sort of floating on air and pinching myself tonight.