July 2015 – Frozen Grapes Are Not Dessert

Fleet-Footed Tomorrow

“With black bears, you make lots of noise. With brown bears, you play dead,” my daughters told me as we drove away from the campground’s check-in booth.

The ranger had warned us that bears had been active in the campground throughout the week. Make a lot of noise, the children said. How do they know these things? Maybe it comes from being a native Coloradan, something that sings in their blood, something I can never be, though I’ve lived here more than a dozen years. When I read the information signs, they were absolutely right. Make noise, clap your hands, yell. I’m glad the Rockies are black bear country, because relying on playing dead seems less than ideal.

When I was little, we went to Vermont annually to stretch our legs and fill our souls, a get away from suburban Boston. I have memory vignettes from those trips. A specific apple tree, laden with fruit, at the bottom of a hill. The wood beams of a cabin. Those memories are sweet because they’re a little faded around the edges, full of vintage appeal. It’s a reminder that when our family packs up for a weekend of mountain camping, when we escape suburban Denver for the idyllic appeal of the mountains, it matters.

More and more, I’m faced with reminders that my children are growing up and that the decisions we make now are teaching them lessons and priorities in ways that feel alarmingly real sometimes. (And even more alarming, it is real. Life has no dress rehearsal). While children are sponges for knowledge from the moment they’re born, there’s something about the age where suddenly your child, still very much a child, true, but older every day, has learned facts that you didn’t teach them. Even if it’s just from 8:35 to 3:30 weekdays, you begin to realize that they’re on their own out there in the world, and they’re doing just fine. Suddenly, they know what to do if they see a black bear, and you realize that you have to defer to their greater knowledge. The day rapidly approaches where, just as your restaurant dinner is served, your child announces they have to use the bathroom. You sigh a little, look fondly at your just delivered, currently hot dinner, fold your napkin and begin to scoot out of the booth when that child says, “I know where it is, Mom.” Not Mama, not Mommy. But, “I know where it is, Mom.”

Part of camping in the mountains is hiking in the mountains. Visually, you can’t go wrong any direction you turn and what’s better when you’re camping than coming back ravenous to a campfire dinner of THE BEST FOOD YOU’VE EVER EATEN. While our family rambles around Denver and calls it hiking, we planned a fairly ambitious hike for the mountains. An alpine lake was 2.8 miles away from the trailhead, which also made it 2.8 miles back. We were prepared to take all day if we needed it; the goal was the hike, not a timed event.

Going to Rocky Mountain National Park is about escaping into the wilderness. It’s about seeing deer and elk and dozens of chipmunks in their home, while you are just a visitor. It’s about wildflowers and giant boulders as old as the mountains in the middle of your path. Potentially, it’s about bears, though we didn’t see one. Rocky Mountain National Park is the quintessential model of the park system. It’s stepping into an Ansel Adams photograph, in color. A photograph that 3.8 million people visit a year. Wilderness it may still be, when the people go home at night, but it’s not exactly a lonely planet sojourn. As we hiked, we passed people, and people passed us. Groups of high school students, other young families, couples who had been hiking for fifty years more than we had. There were some amazing moments, when we saw clearly the complex artistry of spiderwebs, marveled at sun blanched, uprooted tree roots taller than a child, and jumped from rock to rock downstream of a thundering waterfall. And there were some lackluster moments. Tired legs and aching feet, how-much-farthers and flaring tempers. We made it to the lake, though, and for an hour and a half, all the aches were forgotten, splashing in the cold ice-melt waters, warming back up on the sun-soaked rocks. On the way back down, still energized from the lake, we passed another family with children still hiking up and the parents said, “Look at these children, hiking without complaining!” We all smiled knowingly at each other, members of the same club. Parents of children who were toddling just yesterday, and hiking today.

What will become my children’s wild Vermont apple tree? The nostalgic trigger for a childhood we’re currently defining? I wish I could know, to be able to stop in that rose-colored moment and indulge in it, delighted in the foreknowledge of their wistful reminiscence. I wish I could know what will shape them the most, what will define their memories. As parents, the not knowing keeps us up at night, hoping we’re getting it right, but also means we also get to live childhood again, with the knowledge of how fleeting it really is.

Run It Out

It’s Tuesday night, but it feels like it should already be Friday, or maybe even next Tuesday, as far as the weight of the week. Such is life, sometimes. Because Tuesdays are the night that both our children have dance, plus our youngest has soccer, I ended up geographically at the Rec Center, waiting for dance class. And you know what the Rec Center has? An entire complex devoted to sweating it out. And so I did. For what it’s worth, treadmill running is so much harder than outside running. I thought it would be the opposite, so that was a surprise.

Tomorrow is still going to be a slog. Thursday promises to be a little worse. But the end of this long day still saw family dinner, even if it was at 8pm, the last of the leftover cheesecake, for which I’ve compromised my dairy-free stance, and a little time for snuggles. Running — changing clothes, listening to music a little too loud, and watching at once a Sepp Blatter documentary, HGTV’s Flip This House and the Big Bang Theory (treadmills are truly always as metaphoric as they are literal)– was a definitive line between “the day” and “the life.” And after crossing that definitive line, the day was just a collection of Office-esque vignettes and life was flowing on, as it does.

Not every day lends itself to balance, but we can still tip the scales a little more in our favor.

Back to It

When we were on vacation, I packed my running shoes, as I have for many other vacations, and — for a change — I used them. Running in rural Minnesota is truly ideal. It was a surprise to me, but I’ve found that my favorite time of day to run is early morning. 6am or so. This might be because it’s summer, and I don’t particularly like the idea of running in the heat of the afternoon, and it might be because this is the time that’s available to me, so I love it out of necessity. But there’s something about the whole brand-new-day factor. “Fresh, with no mistakes in it.” I find that you meet fewer people, which I like, because I become a little proprietary about where I run, and the people you do meet are friendly in a non-intrusive, 6am, we’re all in this together sort of way. On a Saturday at 6am in rural Minnesota, you’ve pretty much got the roads to yourself, which is ideal in my opinion. John Muir said, “Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.” There’s just something about a dirt road that sings to the soul. Minnesota at 6am on a dirt road is a beautiful thing, for the eyes and for the soul.

Western South Dakota is also a gorgeously beautiful, mostly rural place to run. Unless, of course, you’re staying at a hotel with an attached water park in the business loop of Rapid City. I asked the front desk how to get out of the overflowing parking lot and into the neighborhood behind us. The answer was, You can’t, on foot. And while I could have gone back to our room, retrieved the car keys, driven to a neighborhood, or driven to somewhere beyond the neighborhood, I took the front desk’s advice to use the frontage road next to the hotel. Having just come from my nearly poetic Minnesota run, the frontage road of I-90 wasn’t quite as ideal. In Minnesota at 6am, the only sounds were birds, and roosters, and the dogs I woke up by running by (oops). I-90 isn’t crazy busy at 6am, but there’s still the sound of traffic. Really, I’m listening to music anyway, so I have no business complaining about ambient noise. But there is a definite difference. And the I-90 frontage road was fine. Paved. Safe. It’s sort of motivating to mark time by billboards. They seem close together when you’re driving by, but there are actually quite a few steps between them. There’s certainly no proprietary sense of owning the 6am morning, or owning the road, with interstate traffic speeding by beside you. But as you run by the stark black and white Who Is Jesus billboard, next to the Smoking Gun Indoor Range, you definitely have things to think about. And beyond both of those things, there’s a very pretty view of rolling green hills. You just have to work a little harder for it.

Returning to Colorado, pretty proud of myself for having kept up on running, even on vacation, I promptly got the kind of summer cold that makes you question every healthy thing you’re doing for your body, because obviously your body is a traitor who hates you, and why are you even attempting to make life better for that jerk? And so, for a week, when my alarm went off at 6am, I fought off the Nyquil haze only long enough to push aside the fluffy white pile of tissues beside me to hit snooze, and went back to bed. By Friday evening, I probably could have run but I opted for a phone call, sushi and a glass (and a half) of wine instead. Which I still think was a good choice. But Saturday is a new week, and 6am found me tying up my running shoes. “I probably won’t be gone long,” I told my husband. “It’s been a week, so I’m probably back to zero again.” But you know? I wasn’t. I was maybe an 8 out of 10, if you generously put where I was before the backstabbing summer cold as a 10. But beyond being a bit more expectorant-y, a little more out of breath, my body carried me through. Maybe it doesn’t hate me after all. Sorry I called you a traitor.

When the Stars Align

Months ago, a Vedic astrologist told me that July 13, 2015 would be important for me. “Big,” she said, as she starred the date. “Big.”

Why was I at a Vedic astrologist, might be your next question. And the answer, really, is — why not? Life is confusing, and sometimes hard, and full of amazing moments that we hesitate to believe in because expectation begets disappointment, we’ve learned, and we think that if we can just “figure it out,” we’ll be … happy, content, better. We’re untapped potential, if only we knew how to secure it. We’re Mozart with a paint brush. If only someone had thought to give us an orchestra. Who are we; what does it all mean? Is this it? Am I doing it right? These questions have given us George Bailey running through town, realizing that life is worth living. It’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s 42, and Curly’s “one thing.” Kafka said the meaning of life is that it stops. Frost said that the meaning of life is that it goes on.

Walking into a little Tibetan shop with one of my closest friends, we weren’t expecting to stumble upon the meaning of life, but we were open to the idea of experiencing a new facet of it, and we didn’t hate the idea of a great happy hour just across the street. During an astrology reading, it’s all about you, which is gratifying on a very basic level. For every believer in anything, there is a doubter, but we both left the shop feeling that fun tingle of new possibilities. My reading had said that I was entering a period of change and growth, and that 13 years ago, I’d been in the same phase, but had walked away from it. Since I’d definitely made some poor decisions 13 years ago, lucky guess or stars aligned, the idea that now was the right time to begin planting some of those latent seeds rang true. The reading also said that birds and the color blue were both important to me, and since I didn’t have an “I love blue birds” pendant on, but I do have a living room decorated with silhouetted blue birds, I took note. And July 13 would be “big.” Very big.

Leaving the reading, the only thing I knew for sure about July 13 was that I had a dental appointment, because I’d recently scheduled it, six months out. But, there were still 23 hours left in the day. Anything could happen. Meanwhile, I took on a bigger assignment at work, took charge of my health and started this blog as a creative outlet to balance the bigger but decidedly non-creative atmosphere at work. Spring came, wet and cool, and summer did the same. First and third grade ended for my children, I surprised myself by nursing an orchid back to life, and my youngest learned how to ride a bike, tutored patiently by my eldest.

And the day arrived. July 13. I won’t say I nearly forgot about it. Because I didn’t. Even if the astrologist had simply done the math to know that 13 years ago, I likely graduated from college, and I clearly wasn’t wearing nice enough jewelry to have a wildly successful career under my belt. Even if two-thirds of the population gravitate toward the color blue, there’s still something intriguing about a starred date on the calendar.

I woke up on July 12 with a summer cold, which seemed inopportune and unlikely to resolve itself in a day. And I still had a dentist appointment and not only was July 13 a Monday, but my first day back in the office in nearly two weeks. It seemed like a lot of competing factors. And what, I realized, late at night, if “big” didn’t mean good? I’d been assuming, based on the positive nature of the rest of the reading, that big equaled good. Suddenly, not only did I have sniffles and a sore throat, but also a somewhat paralyzing fear.

And what did happen on July 13? I hit snooze a couple times, for the first time in a while, because my summer cold was definitely lingering. Even so, I got to work a little earlier than usual because the children were agreeable, and I worked until my dentist appointment, which went smoothly and where my mouth was pronounced “boring,” which is really what you want in a dental visit. Blueberries were on sale at the grocery store, although when I got home, I was told I should have gotten oranges, and I was left to make dinner while everyone else half-napped in front of the tv, universally tired out by the first day back to routine. I drank tea and policed bedtime.

Maybe the beauty of July 13 is that I’m in a pretty good place, anyway. I’m not George Bailey, searching and despondent. I don’t particularly need a sign. And if I’m stopping by astrology readings before happy hour, wondering what ways lead on to ways, it keeps life interesting and provides a little motivation to sow some new seeds. We all need a little what if wonder in our lives. On July 13, I lived a day in the life. A day in my life. And it was as big as my husband, my relay partner of a decade, and our children, who were babies just a blink ago, and a job that keeps me busy, and a circle of friends who feel like family, and family whom I count as friends. If I could kick this cold, it would be even better, but what’s basic good health without a cold now and then to remind you of it?

Maybe July 13 was just a random day starred on a calendar. An astrological dart in a year of just-as-likely days. But I’ll still remember this day more vividly for having taken the time to focus on it, to treat it with intention. Maybe I’m not Mozart with an orchestra, or even with a paint brush. But maybe I’m getting a little closer to doing it right.

The Losing Effort of Being Good

The wonderful thing about vacation is that it’s a departure from your daily routine. This is exactly why we love it, for the most part. We spend the days and even weeks leading up to vacation daydreaming about not being at work, not setting an alarm, not cooking, not cleaning, about friendly servers presenting wine lists to peruse and hotel room service, or I suppose, kayaking white waters or learning the subway system of Tokyo, whatever vacation scenario fits your daydream. You can become the parent who says yes to ice cream twice a day, the person who sleeps in because hotels invest in the blackout curtains you haven’t gotten around to yet. “Yes” is easier on vacation.

Vacation is wonderful, and taxing. It’s also late nights for children, unfamiliar surroundings, getting lost on new roads and being out of your daily routine. What we daydream isn’t always utopian in practice. Knowing that many of my routines have become a bit specific, and that the rural Midwest might not be as friendly to that routine as urban Denver, I gave myself some options. I packed low-sugar Kind bars, and cashews, and raisins, and my running shoes.

Our vacation began with a couple days in Minnesota with my husband’s family. En route, our airport meal was surprisingly easy. I’ve learned throughout this dietary shift that you can pretty much ask for what you want. If you go to KFC in an airport and ask for a grilled chicken breast with lettuce and tomato, they will happily give you just that, charge you for the grilled chicken sandwich, and move to the next person in line. Summer bbq’s are also pretty easy, because there is always grilled something, salad and fruit, and if I’m the one bringing the salad (and the sour cream and cheddar chips), that’s an easy contribution. So, food as sustenance isn’t really the issue.

More at the heart of the matter when visiting family is that the most natural thing in the world is to show love with food. Breaking out the special recipes means, you matter to me. And turning down special recipes and noting that you no longer eat gluten, dairy or corn feels awkward. Like you’re turning down love. And let me be clear, this is all on me. This is me feeling guilt that hasn’t been assigned because we’re culturally programmed to give and receive food. It feels disobliging to turn down homemade cookies.

At the same time, the most frequent phrase I heard throughout vacation, even from my husband who has been at ground zero during this re-envisioning, was, “You’re being so good!”

I think the idea of being good and bad when it comes to eating is a disservice to us all. As my 7-year-old said after a day of virtuous behavior evaporated in a landslide of boredom-inspired trouble-making, “It’s just too hard to be good all the time!” And it really is. If we’re weighing each choice we make as good or bad, we’re bound to feel like when we’ve tipped the balance enough to the good, we’re due for some bad. But for the first time in my life, I’ve started making choices not on how good or bad they are considered universally, but how good and bad they make me feel. And in that sense, vacation is the absolute worst scenario to be “bad.” If I’m on an unfamiliar road on a stretch of highway that goes 30 miles between exits, I’m absolutely not going to tempt fate by having “just one” of what I’ve discovered are definite triggers to feeling digestively awful. This isn’t me being “good.” Being the person who is always “good” feels obnoxious. No one wants that mantle. This is in no way a virtuous decision of steely self-control. I’m still at odds with my self-control, which is why I can only bring those sour cream and cheddar chips to bbq’s and not have them in my house. Nope, it’s not willpower but an entirely selfish decision, and one that I’d make again because spending 1700 miles in the car with my family without a desperate search for a dubious public bathroom has nothing to do with being good, and everything to do with feeling well.

For the record, once I was safely at home, I overdosed on the amazing smelling roasted (i.e., sugar encrusted) almonds we bought during the trip, and promptly felt awful. And then did it again the next day, just to make sure it was the sugar. It was. Ten steps forward, one step back.

The American Road Trip, or How to Make Memories

The American road trip summer vacation. I assume other countries also road trip, but Woody Guthrie was on to something when he sang about America. From the redwood forests, to the Gulfstream waters, there is a lot to see here, and in fact we looked those lyrics up in their entirety on our recent road trip. Driving across the country fuels patriotism.

I think everyone has a road trip story. Childhood is full of road trips. We’re totally dependent at this point. The car is packed, and away we go. If we’re lucky, there are an abundance of snacks to make up for our childhood powerlessness. I have very vivid memories of driving the 9 hours to my grandparents’ house when I was young. It was a different era, so one kid was always rotating into the “way back” of the station wagon, and as such the dynamic up in the front changed a bit, keeping it fresh. I remember a lot of singing (we were that family), and a lot of stories on tape (stories I can still tell today, and that my brothers and I break out lines from like great comedy sketches), and there were those games with the little red vinyl windows where you marked if you saw a cow, a semi, a church…

As adults, we are more in charge of the destination, and thankfully there are still snacks. In college, road trips changed slightly… up to Niagara Falls (Canada side, where the drinking age was lower and we could go OUT), to the Shore, to home and to friends parents’ houses when we needed to be reminded that food didn’t always come in take-out containers or industrial-sized steel vats. As an adult, I drove to and from Colorado from the Eastern Time Zone a few times before moving here for good. My husband proved his mettle with my family while we were still dating by spontaneously driving us the 20 hours from Colorado to Ohio when our Christmas flight was canceled. Our bags were already packed, and what’s 20 hours in a 13-miles-per-gallon Dodge Ram when you’re young and in love?

Spontaneous proofs of commitment notwithstanding, there are two types of road trips. One is the meandering, hells yes, let’s stop at the 60-foot-Jolly-Green-Giant road trip, and the other is the drive-straight-through hyped up on caffeine and possibly an ice bath to the back of the neck when all else fails (this is stupid and dangerous, obviously; never get to this point). When you add children into a road trip equation, the latter option is pretty much off the table. And suddenly, it’s a childhood road trip again, but it’s no longer YOUR childhood road trip. It’s THEIRS. And because you, now the driving, snack-dispensing, responsible adult, remember your childhood road trips, you have the added weight of knowing that you really are MAKING MEMORIES. The great American road trip has begun.

At the risk of sounding old and crotchety, the road trip is totally different for kids ‘these days’ than it was in our childhood. As we packed up for our 2015 trek, we packed books, and crayons and paper and magnetic tangram puzzles, and withheld the kids’ monthly magazine subscriptions until we were on the road. It could have been 1988. But today’s children also have Chrome books and Netflix and mobile hotspots, and since my children are – they will tell you – deprived enough to not have their own cell phones, they have the second-best chorus of, “Can I play on your phone?” More than once, my husband and I said, “When we were kids….” And, much like ourselves as children, I’m sure, we were largely ignored. And yet, somewhere in western Minnesota, my youngest started counting windmills. And then there were too many windmills to count, so she started to count red barns. Road trips are like that, no matter how much technology is along. My husband and I tried to interest the girls in the license plate game, but the highways in eastern South Dakota are long and empty. While they quickly grew bored of checking the one or two cars that passed every 20 minutes, my husband and I doubled down to really invest in it (we got 42/50, including Alaska, plus 5 Canadian provinces, so we kinda rocked it, just saying).

In our non-road trip lives, we live in a suburban metropolis. Because we live next to a park and have a mountain view, I sometimes forget, until I spend some time in rural Minnesota and South Dakota, that we live in a crowded people soup. It’s not an exaggeration to say that we rarely have to go more than 5 minutes to accomplish our daily lives. Sometimes for soccer games it stretches to 15 minutes, but we grumble about that. By deciding to drive 1700 miles in less than a week, we were definitely making a gamble. I should note that I have two very different children. One is, as a friend said in reminding me to be a road trip palm tree (not an oak), energy incarnate. The other is an introspective, contemplative child who processes much more internally, and who, luckily enough, can sleep almost any time she is in a car.

Do you know where Rapid City is located in South Dakota? I’m going to be honest. I did not. I never gave it any thought, even when my husband proposed and planned this road trip. We were in South Dakota when it occurred to me to wonder. It turns out Rapid City is in western South Dakota. Pretty far west. Pretty much across the entire state, if you’re starting from Minnesota. But it also turns out that as soon as you cross the Missouri River (about mid-South Dakota, for those geography buffs), the entire landscape changes. Instead of flat farmland, it becomes green rolling hills and buttes. It’s a change so dramatic that it focuses you on the landscape and, since there aren’t many other vehicles on the road with you, you can’t help but imagine what the change meant to wagon trains 200 years ago. You mean we just lost half our number crossing that river, and now we need enough horses or cattle to ranch? It’s no wonder the allure of gold was so strong (as opposed to today, when the allure of easy money has totally lost its luster).

About the time that the scenery got really picturesque, our oldest woke up car sick from her most recent nap, since we were somehow better about carrying Dramamine around as a cup of water on a bonfire, rather than dispensing it preventatively. Our youngest, always ready to push boundaries and fight boredom with pugnacious mischief-making, was thrilled to have a newly conscious target, and, already feeling below par, her sister wasn’t about to turn the other cheek. This was the tightrope that we spent the last five road-winding hours walking. Children know that you have no true, immediate discipline options on a road trip, in a car. Our route included multiple stops to break up the day, which meant that a 9-hour drive stretched to 15. It’s a lot of together time and, my helpful comparisons to the size and time and distance of wagon trains aside, the car grew smaller as the hours grew longer. Come ON, kids! We’re making MEMORIES here! “Can I play on your phone?” “No. Well, yes. But at least LOOK outside while I get it out.”

A funny thing happened, though. After that 15 hour drive, our bar reset. How far is it? About 30 minutes. No comment. How far is it? Two hours. Shrug. We spent a lot of time in the car and for the majority of it, we were – I think – making memories. When we drove through Custer State Park and got caught in a traffic jam of buffalo, the girls were exhilarated, joyous in their wonder at these giants in our midst. “It was only 2 hours,” they pleaded, “Can we do it again?”

By the drive home, maybe we’d found our groove, or maybe we were all just tired and mellow. The 6-hour-drive took about 12, including an hour-and-a-half tour of the Wind Cave, a sizable stop at a wild mustang sanctuary, lunch and dinner. Our youngest created an entire world with the stuffed horse she’d gotten at the sanctuary and named Isabella; our oldest mostly napped, that enviable talent. As we pulled into our driveway, unbending our stiff legs and backs, thrilled to be home, but glad to have left, the youngest of us summed it up perfectly: “Good job, family!”