Four

My eldest leaves on a Friday night redeye to work a Saturday morning shift at a busy Chicago caterer. We are not sure when he will have more time off to spend with us but we make the most of his 48 hours. Spuds is here still until Monday and we have a busy art and food agenda planned. It's been a long time since it's been just the four of us. There are no spats nor gushy professions of familial ardor. We laze on the couch struggling to find TV that no one has seen and that everyone will like. The kids make the vegetables and mashed potatoes and I make an abridged version of the usual stuff.  There is no enthusiasm for yams but otherwise, it's the same menu in dinky portions.

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I have a week off from teaching but I spend two days on campus in a workgroup trying to revise promotional testing materials. I am left alone for my own 1B level and am given approval to create a digital version when I assure the powers that be that it is also printable. The previous iteration is created over twenty years ago and assuming that what we're creating will also have a long shelf life it seems a waste not to prepare for classes full of digital natives. But, most of the teachers work weird split shifts. We're all underpaid and mandated to perform tests and teach from outdated materials that are not in the students' best interest. I'm at it for only a couple of months but I imagine that if I'd slogged through a couple of bullshit laden decades I'd be on automatic pilot.  I wouldn't want to be bothered with implementing a big change.

Many of my students from my current and previous class send Thanksgiving greetings. Lesson planning is always at the back of my mind and creates an undercurrent of anxiety. If a lesson fails to make the imprint I'd intended, I chew it around for days and days. I struggle to duplicate things that have worked and fret about keeping forty plus students of wildly varying educational levels engaged. But I miss having dinner at home with Himself and curling up with a book or bingeing on crap TV. I wonder for how much longer I'll have the stamina to keep doing this thing that I love.

The kids and I visit two small museums in Pasadena. An exhibit of Mexican art from the 80s and 90s at The Armory doesn't blow me away but reminds me how I yearn to spend time in Mexico. The Pasadena Museum of California Art has impressionistic landscapes, mainly of the Monterey Bay area and some stunning liturgical pieces by the woman painter, E. Charlton Fortune. There is correspondence referring to the artist as “Mr. Fortune,” as the cagey moniker disguises the artist's gender. I am enchanted by a display of Cuban silkscreen posters made to promote screenings of American films, smuggled in somehow to subvert the U.S. embargo.

Browsing the bookstore we discover a book of photorealistic paintings called 100 Not So Famous Views of L.A. by Barbara Thomason. The Shakespeare Bridge, the old Van DeCamp's building, Western Exterminators...iconic images painted from strangely poignant angles. My eldest thumbs through it tenderly. “I'd like to have this when I'm homesick.” I lived out of Los Angeles briefly as a college student but otherwise, I am a native and I've stayed. Once in a while on a longer trip I feel a strong yearning for home but I know that I can and will return. My children have made their lives far away. They are happy exploring their new surroundings but sometimes wistful in knowing their roots are thousands of miles away.

With girlfriends coming and going and time marching I wonder when again, if ever, it will be just the four of us. I have no desire to sequester my little family from others who love us but there is an ease like no other when it is just four. We manage in our short time together to cobble out times in different permutations. It's been a long time since it was just me and the kids. Or the kids together. Or Himself with one or both of his sons. I guess it would have been a comfort through exhausting childhood and fraught adolescence to know how very much I would like who they would become. I do the dance befitting my age. Mortality. Fatigue. Turning off lights. Berating myself for not filling the car before the gas light comes on. Clipping coupons. There are so many fewer days ahead of me than behind but they are infused with warmth. Perhaps oldness is wasted on the old.