Low Points and High Points

The ever-useful, ever-informative Point-Interface email list in Point Roberts has today brought us to a summer low point (which in itself is informative and, perhaps, useful): someone has absentmindedly (?) left a mattress in the parking lot of the Trinity Lutheran Church and someone else has absentmindedly (?) left a dead sea lion on the beach in Lighthouse Park. Is this the natural pathway of a spectacularly downhill-sliding trash collection problem? And if so, what is next? Non-functional ferries left on South Beach (rather than over in B.C. near Deas Slough, where they rightly belong)? Cargo containers gathering up on the baseball field (instead of Mitchell Island) as a result of Americans' failure to buy enough from Chinese manufacturers? Perhaps we’ll start finding excessively amorous Republican office holders cluttering up the corners of the Post Office, creating their own dead letter office.

Hard Times, indeed.

On the other hand, there are high points. I, myself, have just watched a son and daughter-in-law leave after a wonderful visit in which the absolute pleasure of their company was absolutely amplified by their generous willingness to help us along in our twilight years by rebuilding a cement block pathway; doing a lot of maintenance on the frog pond; providing us with a pair of perfectly-engineered hummingbird feeders; and giving me and teaching me how to use a Kindle. All those years of childcare repaid in a flash!

And now I have to go read my new book, walk on the new walkway, admire the much cleaner and better arranged frog pond, and feed a hummingbird before they leave, too. And mop up a few, discrete tears.

Mother's Day Gift

Mother’s Day here on the Point was celebrated with a tea at the Community Center which was sponsored by the Senior Center Group. They did it last year, too, as I recall, and it was well attended and so repeated this year. I was over at the library when the organizers brought in a raft of beautiful flower centerpieces. Of course, that’s the beauty of Mother’s Day; i.e., the date. It comes with the best flowers of the year. Ironically, the organizers of the tea were, for the most part, mothers old enough that they're likely to be without mothers of their own. Maybe their purpose in organizing the tea was to ensure that their children would have someplace reasonable to take them.

In any case, it’s a truly strange holiday, I think. I have passed way beyond any need to think about it or celebrate it. My own mother has been dead for almost a decade, and even when she was alive, there wasn’t much ado about it for her; not at least once we had all left home. A phone call, perhaps. My own three children usually call or write on Mother’s Day, but we all call or write each other frequently, so it does tend to feel like a ceremonial or symbolic event where, instead of the customary conversation, we talk at great length about the weather in order to make it feel different.

On the other hand, when my kids were little, Mother’s Day had a goofy kind of charm, as the kids made cards or cooked breakfast or wrote a poem: did something, provided a kind of gift--if not the kind that Hallmark was planning for--that rose above the daily-ness of our lives. And, of course, that’s what ends up being the problem of rising income in a society that is very insistent upon the need to give gifts for a great variety of occasions. How do you manage to give someone something they want when, if they wanted it, they would already have just gone out and bought it? They already have what they want. That’s the pleasure of being solidly middle class. Oh, there’s always a month in Tahiti or a 6 karat diamond or something that someone might vaguely long for but doesn’t expect ever to get, and you are not likely to be buying it for them on Mother’s Day in any case.

So, I’m grateful that we’ve gone past the presents and if they lived here, I think I’d have been spared going out for tea (although perhaps not for dinner). When they were little, they’d always say, ‘When are we going to have Kids’ Day?’, and I would routinely reply, ‘Well, every day is kids’ day!” And they would groan. But I would now have to tell them that actually, every day is mother’s day. Every day I think about them out there in the bigger world that I am now far away from; wonder what they are doing and thinking, imagine their lives from the inside by thinking about my own life when I was their age. They are the novel I am always reading, always thinking about, always wondering how it will all come out. Not to mention that they are the three most interesting people I’ve ever known. Known them all their lives, and they’re still in large part a mystery to me. As it should be. That’s a Mother’s Day gift I am happy to have.

They're Singing! They're Dancing!

It is the Christmas Season, so I suppose there is no particular reason to avoid any sentimental moment that is out there to be indulged in, although I’m pretty immune to the shopping stuff. Today I was over in Tsawwassen and after doing the laundry at the laundromat and spending $3.00 each at the Dollar Store and the Thrift Store, I was ready to call it a Christmas shopping day and get back across the border where there is consumer safety. But the sentimental moments are different from shopping. There is, for example, the local school’s Christmas Program, which was held tonight from 6-7 p.m.

Actually, it went on rather longer and may have started earlier, but we arrived for the main event and left just as Santa Claus arrived to bestow his goods. The kids in Point Roberts who are actually in public school in Point Roberts are few in number. And the number is exactly 12, and each of the 12 has a pretty exotic name. We are not doing Mary’s or John’s or even Emma’s up here. More like Trinity and Marisol and Tristian.

It is just grades K-2; after that, they have to take the bus over and across the border to Blaine, or betake themselves to some private school in Canada. The school building here on the Point is small, but relatively new because up until fairly recently, they all went down to Blaine on the bus. They have a single teacher for their tiny school house (and maybe a volunteer assistant), but she surely has one of the best jobs in the world, although one that leaves her plenty tired by the end of each school day, I imagine.

The Christmas program tonight appeared to feature everybody in the school. Everyone got a speaking part, everyone got a singing part, and, finest of all, everyone got a dancing part. The evening began with a play about snow coming to Point Roberts and a few kids deciding to build a snowman; other kids wanted to join in, but they were sent off to their own activities until the original snowman builders figured out that they really needed more hands for this job than they had. Then everybody joined in, the snowman got built, the value of solidarity was established. Touched by the solidarity, the snow fairy came, during the night, and tapped the snowman with her magic wand so he could be alive. And when the kids came to school the next morning, they all, children and snowman, danced for joy. The end. I’ve seen this play before; we’ve all seen it, but it’s a play I’m happy to see over and over.

After that, the kids sang some songs and recited some poems and then ended the evening with a rousing singing-dancing rendition of, as the program named it, “La Ku Ka Ra Cha” (which made it look like it might be going to be a what? Korean? version of this Mexican classic). I don’t believe I have ever seen a Christmas program that included La Cucaracha, but it makes an excellent finale. Maybe it should always be included for Christmas; maybe ‘The Nutcracker’ performances could stick it in as an additional dance?

I don’t know how many children's Christmas programs I’ve seen by this time in my life: my own, my sisters’ and brothers’, my children's, my friends’ children's, my grandchildren's. And now I’m going to kids’ Christmas programs where I know not a kid among the performers. But it’s always just as wonderful as the first time. The kids are so intent, so enthusiastic, so visibly nervous. But at the same time, they are obviously just killing themselves to do a good job. And a good job it always is.

They’re all at home by now, still flushed with excitement, trying hard not to let go of it as they also try to go to sleep. It’s like the old joke (although the joke is originally about elephants, it's truer of children): How can you get children out of the theater? You can’t. It’s in their blood.

Summer at the Cottage

August brings the flood of family and friends for those who live in Point Roberts and all the other resort communities around. Houses slightly too small for the number suddenly accommodated; tight quarters at the dinner table, not quite enough beds, and an endless amount of dishes constantly gathering up in the sink. Grandchildren who are amazingly bigger and older than they were when last seen. Hard to know why this is so amazing, but somehow it always is. Surely we don’t expect them to grow smaller or even stay the same? I think it is more that they are so amazingly themselves at, say, ten, we can’t quite imagine they will give all that up to become some other amazingly themself person of eleven.

And then they get to be old enough to be one of the grownups, or at least almost one. A near 18-year-old grandchild seems to be thinking about whether she’ll ever be considered an adult, while all the grownups are thinking about how very adult she suddenly has become. Point Roberts is full of people who have been coming here for summers all their lives and their parents and even grandparents share that history. Thus, it seems that summers are particularly the time where you are aware of all that family history, of who they were and who they are becoming and who they indeed have solidly become. I’m not particularly interested in genealogy or in nostalgia, but both begin to fight for room in my field of attention on these occasions.

I find myself glancing at a grown daughter and suddenly noticing for the first time ever that she looks, from the side, rather like my aunt, my mother’s younger sister, a woman who has been dead for 15 years and whom I have not seen for 45 years. Her image is there inside my brain though because we spent summer vacations at her house in southern California for a few years after the war. A grandchild, we all suddenly notice, looks surprisingly like an older cousin, whom we never before thought she looked like. When did this happen? Is it something new or had we been unobservant before? It is all that history of summer vacations rattling around inside our heads, I think, mixing up our memories, comparing and reassessing our memories.

Today, we went to Maple Beach at low tide on a cloudy and occasionally rainy day, and, as time passed, we found ourselves in more water than I had expected, resulting in soaked shoes and socks and my long pants rolled up above my knees to stay dry. Walking back through eel-grass filled deep water, I was surprised at how strong the tide was, moving me along. But that’s how this week feels: the tide coming in strong and much more quickly than I had expected.