Flamethrower, or Why I Don't Drink

Last night, Jack had to work and Claire-Adele had her boyfriend over for dinner. Claire-Adele, Roberto, the Boy and I ate outside on the deck and chatted until it became dark.

"Let's get some candles," I said. Claire-Adele ran inside, picked out her favorite candles from my collection and put them on the table. Before I had kids, I was a bit of a pyro. I gave up my addiction to fire after Claire-Adele was born, but I've slowly started back again with my old habit.

The Boy and Claire-Adele started bickering over who would light which candles, when the Boy talked about camp. Claire-Adele and Roberto were both interns there this summer.

"At camp we made a flamethrower out of Pam," the Boy said. 

"Those Teen Expedition kids are the wildest," said Roberto.

"I can imagine," I said.

"Can I make a flamethrower out of our cooking spray in the backyard?" the Boy asked. He was asking in a natural, normal voice, as if he were asking for ice cream for dessert. He wasn't being a sociopath, either. His dream employers are NASA, SpaceX or JPL. The Boy was in rocket club for the past three years, and according to him a rocket is nothing but a "sustained, controlled explosion."

"No," I said.

"Why?" he asked.

"It hasn't rained since June and the grass might catch on fire," I said. "Plus it is dark out and you might not see what you are going to burn."

"How about the kitchen?" he asked again.

"No," I said. "You might set the house on fire."

"How about if I do it over the sink?" he said.

"No, you might catch my orchids on fire." 

"Oh," he said. "Okay." He went off and did something else before I could ask him to load the dishwasher.

If I had a glass of wine or beer with dinner, I might have said at this point. "Oh my fucking god, are you crazy?" The kid was perfectly serious and thought it is rational to want to start a fire in the house. I remember reading somewhere that the teenage brain has some serious gaps while it is being pruned and rewired for adulthood. Someone did a study and they asked a group of teens if they would rather do something dangerous and potentially fatal versus something mildly disgusting, like choose between swimming in a pool with sharks or eating an earthworm. The teenagers actually had to think about this. The answer was not obvious as it would be to sane adults.

So here I am, last night confronted with my son's own rational-irrationality. To him, making a flamethrower in the middle of the kitchen seemed like a perfectly normal thing to do. If I flipped out, he would have thought I was the crazy one.

Commuting, or Cost v Time

I am three weeks into my new job, and I've ridden by bike to work three times. I didn't want to try bike commuting during my first two weeks because I wanted to show up on time and not stinking when I walked in the door, so I rode the bus instead.

Evan, my physical therapist, would be proud of me. At my last physical therapy appointment, he told me I needed to join an exercise class or club. "If you settle into a desk job and never exercise, you will have blown all of the work you have done for the past year and a half and probably re-injure yourself skiing again. Please get yourself into an organized activity that forces you to get off your butt several times a week."

He didn't say exactly that, but that was the gist. I have biked a lot in my life, but I had never ridden from my home into Belltown where my new office is located. Before I rode to work, I practiced twice on the weekend on two different routes in case there was a problem. Last Saturday and Sunday, I didn't make it into downtown because there was construction on one route and Hempfest on the other.

Why was I inspired to ride my bike to work, besides Evan's admonishment to not sit still? First, I am a fan of not driving when I don't have to. When I lived in Chicago in my twenties, I didn't own a car. I took a bus everywhere and my life was perfectly fine. While Seattle doesn't have sufficient public transportation infrastructure, I still believe in riding buses and trains. The challenge is my bus route leaves me with a twenty minute walk from the stop into my office. In the summer, the walk in spendid through Pike Street Market.

View on my way into work. This is a hazy picture, taken when Seattle was getting the smoke from the wildfires in British Columbia.

In the dark and damp months, the walk might be less pleasant, so I thought I'd try to find different ways to get to work. My office has lots of bike commuters, and there is even an indoor bike parking area next to the lunch room which is great for so many reasons. Bikes won't get stolen, vandalized or wet inside the office.

I loaded up my panniers rode to work Monday, Tuesday and Thursday of this past week. It took me about forty minutes to ride in. I have a moderate uphill climb before I get into the office, so when I arrive, I am not gently perspiring. I am sweating like a pig, my hair dripping under my helmet. Each day I rode, I hoped and prayed that I brought all of the right clothes in my bags. I didn't want to get into the office and discover I forgot a clean bra or pair of underpants.

Wednesday, I took another way into work. I drove. I typically don't like driving in rush hour, especially in the last few years as traffic has gotten worse in Seattle. I had to be back home by 6:00 p.m. for a meeting with the cross country coach at my kids' high school. I was worried the bus and biking would be too slow, so I took the car. Driving out of my neighborhood, I was stuck behind a driver going five miles an hour. Another person "forgot" to merge into the lane they needed to be in, and then blocked my lane of traffic while no one let this jerk in. In both cases, I was cussing up a storm and my heart rate was about the same as when I was biking uphills.

And then I got to the office, twenty five minutes door-to-door. The drive home was shorter. The stress of driving went away when I realized I had saved between 25 and 45 minutes from my other modes of transportation. Financially, the other ways are less expensive. It cost $14 a day to park, but the bus costs $5.50 a day, making driving only $8.50 more expensive than public transportation. Here, I saw a new equation:

Time Saving > Cost

The amount of time I saved greatly outweighed the adjusted price of $8.50 it cost to park. As I walked into the office unsweaty and unwrinkled, I realized how old I have become, in good ways and bad. When I was in my twenties, I couldn't afford a car in Chicago, so driving was out of the question. Back then, even though I didn't really know it, the old equation was

Cost > Time Saving

where how much money I spent was more important than how long something took. Here I am, a middle-aged woman whose husband makes a decent salary. I can afford to drive when I want to. I don't need to nickle and dime everything, and I can easily justify spending money to make life easier. I thought "This is why god invented money" as I handed the parking attendant my Visa. On the way home, I drove past Lower Woodland, home turf for my kids' cross country meets this fall. It took me ten minutes to get there from the office.

So therein lies my privlege. I should have felt worse about driving, but I didn't. Instead, it felt awesome. I can drive if I want to, damn it. Plus, my butt was sore from riding between 14 and 20 miles a day for the previous four days.

My consciousness came back Thursday and Friday. Evan's voice and my memories of years of riding public transportation pulled me back to the bike and bus. The siren of the car will still be there, but I am hopeful that I am strong even to resist, but sensible enough to drive when I need to.

Ma Famille

A few months ago, I spit into a vial and mailed it off to Ancestry.com where I would await information about my ethnic heritage and be linked up with others who shared my genes. For many people, the results would be predictable, but for me, not entirely. My mom was adopted at birth in 1944. My father's side showed up on my family tree, but my mom's side was empty.

Until a few weeks ago.

I hadn't been to the ancestry website in ages, but I thought I'd check in. I had gotten an inner-ancestry message from another member. Ancestry had sent me an email a few months ago telling me I had a message, but I didn't open it thinking it was a sales pitch to upgrade my membership. The message was from a possible third or fourth cousin asking if I knew so-and-so, her delict grandfather who impregnated her grandmother and left. She wanted to find out about the scoundrel before she died. I had no recollection of hearing stories about a distant relative who scoundrel, but I replied anyway, even though I had no idea how we were connected.

Then, I saw I had a new "close" relative, someone who popped up between my aunt and my cousin. I called my dad to see if this woman was on his tree. She wasn't, which meant she was on my mom's side of the family.

I had been a little skeptical about spitting into the cup in the first place. What if there were people out there who didn't know that their grandma had a child out of wedlock or whatever seventy plus years ago, and now an entire family may have a bunch of skeletons uncovered. My mom's bio-mother was named Emily Corona and when Emily had a baby in 1944, she never could have imaged that in 2017 people would be able to track all of this down via technology that wasn't even imaged at the time. Would I want to ruin a bunch of people's lives that I didn't know?

I called my dad and asked what he thought. He thought it was cool. This was the fruit he had been wanting this tree to bear. He asked if he could be a custodian (or something) of my account so he could contact possible relatives of my mother. Since my mother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's a few years ago, he has amped up his search for her family since she couldn't do it herself. She couldn't even spit into a cup to enter her own DNA into Ancestry.com, so my father needed me to be the conduit.

My Aunt Lorraine came to visit Seattle with my cousin at the time I found about this new possible relative. This was the first time I had seen my aunt in eight years. My family and I were busy with their visit, so I put Ancestry.com on the back burner. Two weeks later, my dad came to town--the first time he has had a break or vacation in five years. Even though my mom is in a nursing home, he had been afraid to leave town in case something bad might happen to her while he was gone. We didn't think about the Ancestry.com stuff, either.

The day my father flew back to Ohio, I got a message from Marissa, the possible relative.

"Do you know Emily Corona?" That was all it said. I wanted to talk to my dad before I replied, but he was on a plane. Before I contacted Marissa, I wanted to know if he had contacted her first. When we talked Thursday, he told me he hadn't talked to her.

I was nervous about replying. What if Emily were her mother or aunt, and she never knew one of her family members had another kid?

It turns out Marissa was adopted, too, and her bio-mother was Emily Corona. I figured that Marissa was my mom's half-sister since in the DNA stack-up she was not as close as my Aunt Lorraine but closer than my cousin. I emailed Marissa and told her my dad would likely be in touch. My dad called me yesterday afternoon saying he had talked to Marissa on the phone for an hour.

"What do think of all of this?" asked Jack. "It is not like you know her. She is a stranger. All you have in common is DNA. You have more in common with our neighbors, with Kate and Christy."

I was thinking about this. Now that we live in the hinterlands of the Pacific Northwest, we don't see our families very often. This spring, we saw Jack's sister when we went to Philadelphia. It was the first time we had seen her eight years. My aunt just visited, as did my dad. My son didn't know that my Aunt Lorraine was my dad's sister. He missed the memo, but why would he otherwise know? He met my aunt once when he was seven and my dad wasn't there. When I was a kid, all of my extended family except for my Uncle Bob all lived in the Chicago area. I'd see them for Christmas, Easter, Fourth of July, birthdays, graduations, and ballet recitals, plus major events like weddings and funerals. Even after my parents moved to Ohio, we'd trek to Chicago several times and year. I moved there for college and stayed for years.

My kids didn't grow up with family in town. They have to get on a plane to see relatives--long-drawn out, expensive flights with multiple time zones changes. It is not simple to pop into Ohio for the weekend as it takes a day to get there and a day to get back.

So what do I think of this? As far as my kids are concerned, they have never met my Uncle Bob or many of Jack's aunts and uncles. Jack has family in Thailand that he met once and my kids have never met. We still consider them family, but I wonder what my kids will think of family when they are older. Our family is pretty much just the four of us.

So where does Marissa fall into this?

I think of her perhaps as a new fourth or fifth or sixth branch of my family. I have my dad's side and my mom's adopted side who I knew growing up. I am part of Jack's family--I know both his mother's and father's sides. I have my kids with Jack. My Grandma Conti will always be my grandma -- the one who always bought Eggo blueberry waffles when my brother and I came to visit. My Grandpa Conti made braciole for Christmas dinner. When my Grandpa Conti died in 1997, my mom gave me some money from his estate. When I told her I was going to use the money to take a trip to Thailand and buy a ticket for Jack's mom who hadn't seen her own mother in twenty-seven years, my mom said it was a good investment. She had never been to Sicily with her father, and she wished she had. She thought it was important that I should meet the family that my future children would be a part of, to understand the culture from which Jack's mother came.

Families grow and families contract. Marissa is a new branch, like a new shoot popping off a rose bush or orchid. She doesn't take anything away from my current family, just as I don't take anything away from hers. She is new to me, but so was Jack at one point, and Claire-Adele and the Boy.