more creative life

Marcus doesn’t consider a day complete unless he can…

1. Bark  loudly into your face a hundred times or so to show you how glad he is to see you.
2. Run by you at top speed and lick you on any available piece of bare skin.
3. Sneeze on you, focusing on your face or any patches of bare skin that he didn’t get to lick.
4. Jump up on the couch as soon as you leave the room and drink your coffee, spilling most of it onto the upholstery.
5. Help you put on his leash by jumping up and down, barking, and twisting in all directions while you try to fasten the leash snap to his collar.
6. Sneak into the bedrooms, where he is forbidden to go, eat a pack of gum still in its wrappers, then vomit up the whole thing onto the wool carpet.
7. Bark in his “stranger danger” voice at the man of the house, who has lived with Marcus for 11 years, as he comes up to the kitchen door.
8. Bark at the turkeys who hang around in the yard, or the deer who come up from the canyon, or cats passing by, or (his favorite) at nothing at all.

Years ago, I found a baseball cap covered with insanely bright kitty cat fabric at the thrift store. I bought it over my daughters’ strenuous protests and wore for hiking or around town — anywhere I needed to make a fashion statement, really. It was one of my favorite thrift shop finds. I wore it for years.

Basketball Girl recently  bought me a new Oakland Raiders hat but insisted that I must promise to get rid of the kitty cat cap. I consigned it sadly to the giveaway pile.

Where my nephew Peter saw it. “I’ll take that!” he said. “That hat is cool!”

I thought he was joking, but he wasn’t. So now I’m the proud owner of a stylin’ Raiders hat, and Peter is the proud owner of a vintage Kitty Cat cap. I think it has warped him already.

Here’s the side view, which gives you a better view of the awesomeness of the hat. I guess even a cat hat may have nine lives.

And here’s the poem we heard at church this morning, which I think perfectly expresses the Easter spirit:

i thank You God for most this amazing day
By e e cummings

i thank You God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginably You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

It’s goodbye to cheerleading for the year (at least to wearing the cute uniform and going to games. Tumbling torture practice goes on year round.) The high school boys basketball team lost in the semifinal round of the state championship, going down to a hated rival by three painful points in overtime. It broke my heart to watch it. The girls’ team made it to the state championship finals, but also lost to the southern district champions. Ouch!

This photo shows Basketball Girl just before the girls’ final game, when everything was still possible.

This year was our first encounter with the modern sport of cheerleading, and I have to say I liked it. I feel so much better about seeing my daughter sacked out on the couch in front of Netflix when I know she just did a hundred pushups and situps at tumbling practice. Basketball Girl has found something she excels at if she works hard. Now if only some of that strenuous exercise would rub off on me.

One of the things I like best about living in northern California is that spring really starts in early or mid February. These crocuses came up a few days ago, along with our first daffodils and grape hyacinths. I do miss winter, though.

And when spring arrives, our family’s fancy turns to… the family Christmas letter! We started our 2012 letter during the actual Christmas season, but left it unfinished in the press of other goings on. But eventually my husband’s patience gives out and he gets in a snit points out that 2012 is long over and nothing has been done. So we held an emergency Christmas letter workshop last weekend and got the thing finished. My husband has already sent his out by email, but I really prefer to send it out the old-fashioned way, which means that mine probably won’t get out for another couple of months. And what to call it then?

I don’t think I’ve mentioned here that Basketball Girl has joined the cheerleading team at her high school. And when I say “team,” I really mean it. Her team competes all over the West and usually wins the national championships in its division, so it is very serious business — nothing at all like the popular-girl style of cheerleading that prevailed in the prehistoric days when I was in high school.

She only went to the tryouts to provide moral support for one of her friends who wanted to try out, and ended up as one of just a few freshmen on the team. Having never taken dance or gymnastics before, she was really starting from zero. In just a few months, she has mastered the splits, roundoffs, back walkovers, (almost) back handsprings, and all the cheerleader jumps. It’s been a big challenge for her, and we have been proud of  how hard she’s worked to learn all the cheers and tumbling moves. Here she is (on the left) with some of the other girls from the team:

But this blog is really all about me (MMMEEEEEE!), and what this means for me is that I’ve been going to a lot of basketball games to watch Basketball Girl cheer.

Luckily for me, the basketball team at her high school is a top-ranked team and very exciting to watch. Sitting in the stands brings back memories of when I was in high school and my friends and I drove all over the Chicago suburbs in my friend Pat’s 1950s Chevy to watch our high school team play basketball. I’ve even been able to get Sunny to come to a couple of games with me. She brings her knitting needles and alternately knits and cheers. We also like to admire our team’s very handsome coaches.

This was the big game against the hated arch-rival high school:

The priest on the right is another knitter, watching the big game:

And here’s the team warming up for a tournament at which they beat the even-more-hated arch-rival team from the rich suburbs (especially satisfying since we’re the poor school from the ‘hood):

It’s bittersweet to see these kids just starting out, so disciplined and full of purpose, and realize that I’m never again going to be where they are. Of course, where I am is pretty good, too. But I won’t be young again.

I took Sunny and her cousin Peter to see the Harlem Globetrotters this afternoon. They are more like a circus than a real basketball team, but they have been in business, it turns out, since 1927! After the game I’ve been reading up on their history, and discovered that they were featured in a must-watch TV movie that I swear I will find, no matter what it takes:  The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island.

Sunny, as we’re driving along I-5 to Portland, Oregon: “What are all those filing cabinets doing next to the road?”

Me: “You mean those bee hives?”

This is a kid who went to a Waldorf school and spent a whole week at a real life farm, milking cows, etc., when she was in third grade. Guess it didn’t sink in as well as we’d hoped.

Post photo by Jim Champion. Used under Creative Commons license.