Changes in attitude,
nothing remains quite the same,
with all of our running and all of our cunning,
if we couldn't laugh we would all go insane!
It's been about 15 years since I first met my buddy Scotty, he had (and still has) a custom license plate that read PAROTHD. I wondered what the hell a "pair-oth-ed" was and finally asked him. Scotty had a good laugh and explained it was "Parrot Head" I still didn't get it. So he broke it down even further and explained that parrot heads and fruitcakes are Jimmy Buffett fans. Fan might be way too well tempered a word to describe the sun longing revelers that flock to Buffett concerts.
With no Jimmy Buffett concert anywhere in the area and Gabriel not being able to fly to Jamaica or the Keys, Beth and I decided to head for Half Moon Bay. We needed a major change of attitude and thought the Pacific might do it. Our last contact with the scheduler had depleted what little hope we had left "we don't want you headed back to Idaho so hopefully we'll get you in next Friday." Beth and I have been around long enough to read between the lines, that's a carrot to keep us here one more week. This is a tough position as a parent, losing control due to responsible advocacy. After first becoming aware of Gabriel's situation we wanted him in the best place possible since we could not do anything other than place him in the very best hands. So we did and he is and we have relinquished all other control. Our schedule, our son's life, our other children's schedule, Grandparents life; all are in the hands of the Doctors at Lucile Packard.
Tired of the parking lot we drove 30 minutes to the coast and changed our front yard.
One of us stays in the motorhome while the other can walk around and enjoy the area a bit, but at least the one in the motorhome has a good view. On Sunday we were both inside the motorhome when Beth squealed delightedly "dolphins!" I grabbed the camera and walked down the jetty to find a good vantage point. I tried to get a decent shot but the lense wasn't up to the occasion so I sat on the jetty and watched the dolphins jump and play. I enjoyed the sun and listened to island themed music wafting across the air from a bar about a 1/4 mile away. About 20 minutes passed before I realized this was a stolen reverie. Beth had spotted the dolphins and I literally stole her moment in the sun. I returned to the motorhome and asked if she'd like to switch, although now the dolphins were gone.
Half Moon Bay is a beautiful place, if I were to design the perfect Earle ocean place this would be a finalist. A beautiful bay, nice beach, surf spot, jetty and harbor.
Jetties are cool. When I was a kid my sister and I used to spend hours and hours searching the Seward, Alaska jetty for treasures. We never came back empty handed, sometimes we found a pocket knife, one time my sister found a Japanese glass float, often it was some sort of tackle, but always a reward. Our goal was always to make it to the end of the jetty but rain and seas dictated how far we got. I can't remember what my parents were doing or what we told them about our whereabouts, maybe we were all a bit more naive, maybe more oblivious, maybe each of us more selfish and none wanted to ruin their good thing and so no one volunteered nor asked. I don't know, but jetties have always been cool to me. Our motorhome is parked almost directly in line with the jetty, the Pacific as a front yard is a pretty good view.
The jetty shelters about a 1/4 of the bay in a well protected harbor split into two 3 sections; mooring buoys, the commercial boats and the private boats. Unfortunately for me the private boat ramp is locked and accessible only to boat owners and their guests. I love to walk docks and peer and gawk and lust and drool and critique boats, especially those with masts erupting from their topsides. All boats inspire romantic dreams of adventure but sailboats are the pinups of floating vessels.
The domes and antennas on the hilltop decrease the aesthetics of the place but thankfully the fog obscures them most mornings and evenings.
South of the jetty is the beach and nice swells that break into great surfing waves.
and in the midst of it all is our home, which seems a little bleak without the other two members of our family.
When the wind has subsided we've taken Gabriel out for a little fresh air.
We found Powell's toddler hat in a drawer, so Gabriel decided to work it a bit.
Does this hat make my chin look fat?
The ice plants are in bloom and cover the dunes with pink and yellow flowers. Seemed like a nice spot to photograph Gabriel and try to grasp onto those little good moments. It is hard to focus on the positive because so much is beyond our control.
We started collecting a few odds and ends to send home to the kids in a care package, salt water taffy, cheese chips... yep. This snack is like designed for Powell.
Monday morning I took a walk along the beach to find some seashells for Isabella. She has numerous collections; animal bones, rocks, but her most significant and most often accessed is her shell collection. She routinely takes the shells out and spreads them throughout her room. She knows the variety and name of each shell, where it was found or if purchased or given then where it was purchased or who gifted the shell. Each time though she reorganizes them in slightly different variation; location the shells came from or maybe found versus purchased or by color or by species, it's always interesting because her classification changes each time, no boring Linnaeus taxonomy here. Makes me think instead of the Akan gold weights used for centuries in West Africa. Anyways, I needed to find some shells for her. I headed down the beach, head down and focused. Several hundred meters down the beach and I wasn't finding anything, a few broken sand dollars and some ragged mussel shells. This was going to be a bust. Then I spotted the tiniest sand dollar...
and recognized this as another metaphor for living, focus on the large expanse of beach searching and moving or slow down and enjoy the little details right at your feet. We have Gabriel now, we hope he outlives us but the only definitive way to be sure is rather extreme for Beth and I, although I do know that if suicide is an option drowning really isn't too bad of a way to go. I do think we'll shelve terminal options for the time being though. This has probably been the hardest on Beth. We all have normal expectations, most of us expect to grow into adulthood, meet someone to mate with, mate, rear young, observe their mating habits and young rearing, die. For the most part in that order, some people like to repeat some of the steps (maybe "like" would be inaccurate). With Gabriel though everything is indeterminate. He has 3 open heart surgeries he has to make it through and then we'll see how his heart is as a teenager. We might outlive him and it sucks and it sucks knowing this!
Baby water, "made for mixing" "with minerals added for taste" I'm reading these incongruous claims and thinking this is nuts. They charge twice the amount for water because it is especially for babies. The taste is negated if you're mixing it with formula and it's really irrelevant if you're feeding it to our baby via a tube (and therefore right past the taste buds) and "made for mixing" what do they add or is it simply that that is what water is? The great solvent! I'm thinking about how we are constantly bombarded with advertising and spun things just to pry a little more money from our hands and that people fall for this crap all the time, as I'm walking to the motorhome with two gallons Gerber Pure water.
With at least several days until Friday but with realistically over a week (we knew we weren't getting in this Friday) we thought maybe we should try a different venue. The beach was amazing but babies don't like the wind and it was too damp most of the time to bring Gabriel outside. We thought the redwoods would (NPI= no pun intended) be awesome but 5-6 hours away seemed a bit too far, Yosemite though was only 180 miles away, that seemed reasonable. 180 miles on Idaho roads would be 3 hours give or take a little, California though pushes it up around 5 hours with traffic, hindsight speaking as we would not have ventured if we would have known hours were to be spent creeping along at 20(-)mph. Why live in this? So we travelled through and discovered Valero fuel stations, probably the most predatory of any gas station I have ever seen. When located in an area in which they are surrounded by other stations they are the cheapest by 10 cents but when located alone or either as the last or first in a series of stations (relevant by traveller perspective) they are almost always the most expensive. Why does the dollar and money and thus power drive so many people to victimize other people so significantly? This isn't simply about corporations and capitalists it is also about they who profess to support the common people; about our entertainers who are no less covetous of our dollar as are the Corporate mongerers. Name a hollywood celeb, your favorite musician, athlete, talk show or news host that ain't siphoning every penny possible into one of their beach houses or mtn. "cabins." These folks are the latest wolves and don't even realize what they are or what they're dining on; just flesh, just the manifestation of human flesh, that's all you're eating Oprah. Bon Appettite! Please do not think I am waxing political for in the last few years I have realized there is no "political" in this country, we are all in a case of constant distraction in which we are "politically" pitted against one another. We all want the same crap; we want to work and earn and be proud of our living, we want a little place to call our own, we want our kids to be proud of us and want them to invite us in for career day. We want to watch our kids hit in the park, move in chess club or draw in art class. We want another parent to give us the occasional nod. We don't want a lot, but we need a little.
The last bit of the trip Gabriel started getting fussy, we checked his temperature and found he was running a low grade fever around 100 degrees. The campsites in the park were full so we found a site (with cell coverage) about 20 miles out of the park. The next morning Gabriel woke with a congested cough and we got scared. His oxygen saturation has been in the high 70's and if anything happens to his lungs his sats will decrease further. We monitored him and headed back for Palo Alto, chastising ourselves for being so far away. They were able to take us into the Cardiology Center and found his lungs were clear and he was looking OK other than the cough (no more fever). But.... surgery would be postponed until this cold runs it's course, 3-4 weeks away. On the positive side we can go home and see our kids and hand deliver our quirky care package, but... we need to stick around for several days to make sure he doesn't get any worse and goes downhill somewhere in the middle of Nevada.
So we tucked him in and he slept OK and hopefully tomorrow we can go home and see the kids and then come back here in a few weeks.
This is hard.
1 comment:
Hard. Yes, it is. I liked the positive spin you put on things along the way. And I'm glad that Half Moon Bay is one tiny spot of peace in that world of hurry that you are in down there.
Safe travels home.
Post a Comment