Seattle-ites are locavores, which means people who live here are very big on consuming things that are locally sourced, produced, marketed and sold. That includes food, wine, music groups, medical marijuana and – as you see from the sign in a nearby shop window – socks.
Are locally made socks better than other socks? Who knows. But they are made here, and for some Seattle consumers, that’s good enough. 
Minga’s grandson Luisito is in the seventh grade, and he’s not only had a growth spurt. He’s had a manliness spurt.
“Luisito” in Spanish means “little Louis.” Luisito’s father is also named Luis, so adding the suffix makes it easier to know which Mr. Betancourt is being spoken to.
But I’m thinking it might be time for Luisito to become just plain Luis as well. What do you think?
Luisito in the sixth grade.
Luisito now, in the seventh grade.
Amy’s Aunt Joyce and Uncle Ray passed through Seattle on their way to a boat trip, and of course they made time for Archie and all of us.
There’s something wonderfully sweet about Lil Man’s fuzzy curls.
Jeannette Wall’s memoir The Glass Castle is a chilling narrative of a hardscrabble childhood spent with a very borderline mother and a dreamy, ineffectual father. Toward the end of the memoir Walls, by then a grown woman and a successul writer, sees her now homeless and widowed mother dumpster diving in New York City.
An update in the Times says that Walls has made a home for her mother in a separate cottage on the grounds of the author’s estate, which strikes me as extraordinary charitable and forgiving.
My mother always wanted assurances that one of her three daughters would take her in, and none of us were able or willing to give that to her. I always said I would see to it that she had a place to live and people to care for her, but I never volunteered that it would be in my home or that I would be the caregiver. She often pressed the point, once asking if she only had three weeks to live, would that make a difference and would I take her in then? I repeated my mantra about always seeing that she would be well cared for, and it surely wasn’t enough.
Jeannette Walls is a kinder and more charitable soul than I.
Bob knows he can’t grab Archie’s snacks. A cracker or goldfish that falls on the ground is fair game, but no snatching out of the dish is allowed.
You know Bob is thinking about it.
The look on Archie’s face when he sees Aunt Sara arriving is precious. And then the two start in, with giggles all around.
These are the small moments of joy that prompted my move to Seattle. I wanted to be part of all of this in real time.
I’ve had a houseguest for the past week and so have been on hiatus from working on the memoir. I’m back at it now, and plan to take some writing time over the holiday weekend simply because I’m enjoying the work of teasing out a coherent story.
I’m not sure a life story feels coherent as we’re living it, especially for those of us who lead busy lives. When my kids were younger and i was working and Jerry and I had a marriage to tend to and I enjoyed doing things with friends and I had family at a distance I felt more like a performer keeping a lot of spinning plates in the air. My life story feels more coherent now because I’m looking back, and writing the narrative from point to point as I remember it.
I wonder how that lived experience fits with the belief that many Christians hold that God has a plan for them – i.e. a coherent story? There is one God in Christian belief, and about 7 billion people alive on the planet right now. That doesn’t count all the people who’ve ever lived, or will live. By any count, that’s a lot of individual plans.
I’m not trying to be sarcastic here, just curious. If any of you believe that God has a plan for your life, is that some sort of a metaphor? Or do you think it’s the literal truth? I can see the value in believing that your life unfolds according to a Supreme Being’s plan. That belief might remove the existential fear of suspecting that nobody knows what’s going to happen in the next five minutes, much less many years into the future, and that the responsibility for figuring out what to do is all on you.
I prefer the metaphor of an empty page, which doesn’t have meaning until I fill the page up with words. There’s something very freeing in the experience of being a writer.
Lots of great writers – Flannery O’Connor for example – were people of faith too, so I guess the choice of metaphor isn’t either/or. Plan or empty page or some combination of both; we all get to choose.
I have no idea what’s making me wax so philosophical on the eve of a long holiday weekend, but there it is. Your comments are welcome.
This is one of the more unusual fish we saw during our visit to the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla. Of course I don’t remember its name. Cool fish, though, don’t you think?
I’m back to being in good health, having recovered from this most recent respiratory infection. So Archie and I are back to our regular routine: I pick him up from day care, and we go home to play for an hour or two until Amy or Matt come home. Archie has a small snack. We take Bob up to the roof deck where there is a doggie pad for pooches to relieve themselves. Back downstairs we give Bob fresh water, and check to see that the cats have food and water. Then Archie picks up some toys and begins to play. I’m struck by how intent he is. Play for toddlers is serious stuff.
Until he giggles, that is. Then it’s the purest form of fun.
I’m both a good listener and personally reserved in what I need to say. So I wind up learning more about other people than they learn about me. That’s not intentional; I see no merit in being mysterious or obscure. But the pattern is longstanding.
In one of the early memoir chapters I talk about that, acknowledging my reserve. I’m surprised at the degree to which some of my early readers have agreed. They say they are learning more about me through my stories in the memoir than they’ve ever known before, even those with whom I’ve been friends for a long time.
That’s a good thing, yes?
