Week 17: Another car?

July 23, 2020

How many cars does one household need?

For the last four years, we’ve been an outlier among our friends. In 2015, we added a third driver. In 2018, we added a fourth. At some point, our 16-year-old will get in the last of her driving lessons and take the test and we’ll add a fifth driver.

We still have two cars.

The only reason this is possible is that my husband, Bill, likes to ride his bicycle to work. He’s spent entire summers, when one or both boys were at home, barely getting behind the wheel. These days, all five of us are home, and there have been weeks, when the bike path was closed, when Bill had to drive every day. That was fine, though. The rest of us had nowhere to go anyway.

But even though cases are going through the proverbial roof in L.A., we’re also moving around more these days. Part of that is we’re stir-crazy. But it’s also true that we don’t know anyone who is sick with the virus. We did back in March.

I think I had it, but I tested negative for the virus and for antibodies, and so my “illness” is a source of fierce debate around this house. But leaving me aside, we knew quite a few other people who fell ill with odd respiratory symptoms, and some of them did test positive. The germs felt pervasive, and universal.

Today? There’s no sign of it except in the news. This makes me feel bad, because I suspect that’s a sign of affluence. My husband and my physician friends tell me COVID is rampaging through poor households, and that the hospitals are filled with Latino patients. I heard a story today of one such household — a nuclear family of a mother, asthmatic father and three little kids; a grandma and a grandpa with a lung condition; and two uncles, all sharing a four bedroom apartment. The mother and the asthmatic father and the grandmother all have tested positive for COVID, and the mom, dad and three kids have spent the last two weeks in one room together, trying to shelter from the others.

Same city as me. Different world altogether.

This is not fair. Of course not. None of this is fair. Not only can I afford a third car when many Angelenos can’t even afford one. But now, it turns out, my family and I can afford to not know anyone who is ill. Our privilege surrounds us like a vast ocean, lapping away from us all the way to the horizon.

Some days, I feel like the very fact of this virus will crush me. But that’s me being fragile. Imaginative. Too drenched in the news. The truth is, I have time and space to worry about possible exposure at a time when there are so many cases, L.A. is running out of tests.

Meanwhile, I’ve got three kids who try very hard to stay safe. They wear masks. They socially distance. They keep their friend circles small and somewhat exclusive. But they’ve also been cooped up here for months, and the last thing I want is three depressed young adults on my hands. So at the moment, their lives are — how shall I put this — not exactly isolated.

One of these days, Sarah will drive, too. I suspect it may be time to break down and get that third car, if just to avoid the ear-splitting arguments when everyone’s back home in December and there aren’t nearly enough wheels to go around.

We have one hybrid already, a Ford Fusion. Liam, who studies environmental economics, insists our third car be green as well. I don’t want to lavish a lot of money on this thing and anyway, our insurance tells me if I get them a car that’s new or new-ish, my insurance bill will leap by 5K annually once Sarah gets her license. But if I get them a seven or eight year old car, it’ll inch up by $600. At the moment, I have my eye on a 2012 Lincoln hybrid sedan. Not too sexy (sorry, guys) but not too thirsty, either, and what a deal, because who else would want it?

I’m not sure I do, either. But life is getting busy, and soon there will be five of us vying for the driver’s seat.

Week 10: Memorial Day

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Our street organized a COVID-style, Memorial Day barbeque last night: bring out your own chairs to the sidewalk, sit at least six feet apart from your neighbors, slap on a mask, and remove it only long enough to eat the food you brought from your own home.

I was so excited about this I looked forward to it all day. But as with many things lockdown-related, the anticipation and the experience itself were hardly universal in my household.

I first sensed trouble when it was time to grab dinner. Bill, the boys and I had set up our chairs; Sarah was still inside, doing a dance class on Zoom. As the boys headed in to get the falafel boxes I’d picked up for them earlier in the day, I asked if they could also bring out one for their father. He looked so relaxed and happy sitting there in that chair. His life — treating COVID patients, worrying about treating COVID patients — has been so stressful these last few months. Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, not to break this spell?

But the boys, striding up the walk, refused.

“It’s okay, Con,” my husband said, getting up. “I can do it.”

But all I could think, watching Liam walk away, was this was the same kid who rode Bill’s bike every day high up into the mountains and down by the ocean and along city streets while his father, who cherishes his bike rides to work, drove his car instead. So I strode after him, yelling that this would not do, that he needed to show respect, that he’d better not, or… or…

Soon I had Bill enraged as well. The younger brother, Eli — an expert at evading responsibility — scooped up his food and slipped back outside. Meanwhile, Liam and Bill and I hollered at each other in the kitchen. Sarah, trying to dance in the next room, slammed the adjoining door, but not before whisper-yelling at us that we were humiliating her in front of her studio.

Finally, I told Liam please, please, please go to your room.

He did so, after throwing a few choice words at us on his way out.

“Oh my God,” Sarah said, sticking her head through the door. “You guys have to stop. Now.”

We didn’t see Liam for the next three hours. He missed the “barbeque,” and another one of our neighborhood, COVID birthday celebrations afterward.

As Bill and I loaded up the dishwasher at the end of the night, I reminded him of how I’d gotten so incensed with our younger son on Mother’s Day. Eli has turned my home office in the garage into his music studio. This is no small transformation either — he practices jazz trombone day and night. I’d asked for the space back for Mother’s Day, and when the time came, I requested that he move my chair back in for me. But he said he was too busy, and anyway, it was enough he’d cleaned up and vacated for the day.

What is wrong, I said, with both these boys, taking our precious possessions as if they were their birthright, not even pausing once to thank us or even remark upon our sacrifice?

This was a parenting fail, we agreed. And it was ending tonight. We started plotting a meeting of the four of us (Sarah being full of her own righteous indignation at her interrupted dance session, deflecting apologies with a blink and a mutter). You defend me to the younger son, I suggested to Bill, and I’ll defend you to the older one.

Then the older one walked in the kitchen.

“I don’t think I was treated fairly,” he said, plopping down on the banquette.

I thought he was treated more than fairly, but I was also glad he was talking and not yelling or cursing at me anymore. I took a deep breath. “Okay,” I said. “Why?”

We started again, around and around. At some juncture — many of the finer points of the argument having become a blur, just 12 hours later — Liam said that Bill and I couldn’t possibly understand what he was going through because our lives haven’t changed at all in the last few weeks.

“I lost my office!” I said.

Okay, he said, he would give me that. But Dad — look at him, the same work routine, nothing changed one iota.

I could hear my voice rising as I reminded Liam about how the very nature of his father’s work had transformed, from a job where he was helping patients in need to one in which every person who walked through his door was a potential lethal threat.

“But he still goes to work every day,” Liam insisted.

“I don’t know why I’m giving my bike up for this,” Bill said, his words clipped and sharp.

“Look,” Liam said. “I lost Africa. I lost my summer internship in D.C. The bike is all I have.”

Oh, I thought.

And the office-cum-studio is all Eli has. And the dancing classes are one of Sarah’s only reprieves from the hellscape that is 10th grade online.

The boys have watched junior year abroad vanish and spring of freshman year evaporate. Liam doesn’t get that summer in the nation’s capital that he’s talked about since high school. Eli’s valiant attempts to learn guitar won’t bear fruit this summer because there’s no sleep away camp, so he won’t be a song leader. And Sarah… well, this isn’t what 16 is supposed to be like. Or should be like, for that matter.

The bike is all he has, I thought. And I started to cry.

“Mom?” Liam shifted in his seat.

“Aww, no, here she goes,” my husband said. “Honey?”

I could really have let loose. All I had to do was think about how a few months, or even a year, lost in your 50s is easily replicable, later on down the line. But the same time lost at my kids’ iconic ages — 21, 19 and 16 — is time gone forever.

At 21, I spent the entire spring semester in Oxford, England, during which I memorized granular details about 19th Century English parliamentary dramas; fell in love and got my heart broken; traveled across Europe and the Soviet Union on my spring break; and made one of the best friends of my life (hello, Orley).

At 19, I walked hand in hand with my first boyfriend across the Berkeley campus, and cemented new friendships at my sorority, and reveled in huge lecture classes where no one knew my name.

At 16, I loved attending my A.P. Euro History classes and writing articles for the school paper and hanging out with friends on the lawn at Westlake Girls School. I hated just about everything else that year, but at least I got to hate it in person.

Meanwhile, my three are home. And though I despair at the thought of what they’re missing, I have to admit to a greedy satisfaction at having them all under our roof again.

My gain. But surely, their loss.

I stopped crying after a sob or two. Liam apologized for his behavior, and thanked Bill for the ongoing loan of the bike. We both told Liam how sorry we are for his losses.

Then he headed back to his room. Time for another phone call with another buddy, who’s somewhere that isn’t here.

I’ve heard from so many friends these days who say their kids are sulking, or angry, or just plain rude. And I know we all know this, but still, it bears repeating: they are grieving. And they have more to grieve than we do.

I hope the five of us can make something beautiful out of this time together, something we will even cherish when we look back on it, years from now. But that’s tomorrow’s judgement. Today we have to muddle through, remembering what should have been, knowing it would have been great.

Sunday Interview: Liam

May 17, 2020

My oldest son, Liam, was supposed to spend this spring in Ghana. Then the coronavirus hit, and he took up bike riding instead.

Since he landed at LAX on March 17, on a plane from Accra, Ghana by way of Dulles International, he’s logged roughly 1,700 miles on his dad’s bike (a Surly Straggler, for those who care about such things). He’s ridden south to Redondo and north to Malibu; up Benedict Canyon and down Coldwater; east as far as Pasadena, and northwest into Agoura. Last week, he hit a personal goal with a 106 mile ride that took him over the Sepulveda Pass, through the San Fernando and Conejo Valleys, across the hilly farmland separating Thousand Oaks and Camarillo, and to the campus of Cal State Channel Islands, where he spent last summer working as a counselor at a sleep-away camp. Then he wound through more farmland to Pacific Coast Highway, until he climbed up Temescal in the Pacific Palisades and headed home to Mar Vista — seven hours total (Bill — my husband, his dad — and his younger brother were his wingmen, meeting him along the way with food and drink).

I’ve watched all this from my dining room desk, him riding while I type away. And I’ve observed it from the couch or the bed, him riding while I rest, either ill with a virus or, later, recovering from it. I can’t believe he’s done all this. I’m proud that he’s done all this. I envy him to Pasadena and back again.

Especially those first few weeks, when we all huddled inside, afraid to go anywhere or see anyone, sure the virus lurked around every corner — and in our house, it probably did — Liam had the streets of Los Angeles to himself. Mandeville Canyon was empty. The hills of Hollywood were empty. He flew down Venice Boulevard with a handful of cars and a stray bus or two. For many of us, this quarantine has been a time of confinement. For my 21-year-old son — his schoolwork from Ghana minimal at most — it’s been a period of freedom, the likes of which he may never see again.

He wasn’t born an athlete. When he was a toddler, he needed occupational therapy to learn how to walk and run without stumbling, because he strongly favored his right side over his left. It took him years to learn how to reliably dunk a basketball through a hoop. He struggled through four years of cross-country in high school and still, by senior year, hadn’t quite gotten the hang of it.

.”In cross-country, I was the worst boy on the team,” he said. “Here I don’t know how I compare, but it doesn’t matter. I know I’m good, because I put in so much time and effort. And I enjoy it.”

His dad has ridden thousands of miles over the course of his five-plus decades on this planet, but Liam fell in love with riding at that same sleepaway camp last summer, climbing the nearby mountains on camp bikes with his supervisor Adam, on their hours off. Then, this past winter break, he began looping down to the beach in the morning, just to get in some exercise. When he left for Ghana in January, he figured that was that — he only planned to linger here a couple of weeks in May, in between his time abroad and a summer internship in Washington, D.C.

Then, over the course of a week in March, the plans changed. Ghana is seven hours ahead of Los Angeles, so when Liam got home his internal clock was all off. He went to bed early and woke up at 6 a.m., the sun just beginning to brighten the sky. For weeks, his Ghanaian professors didn’t assign any work at all. The days stretched before him, long and empty. But there was the Surly, waiting in the garage.

I started exploring the beach bike path. Sometimes, I would go up to the Pacific Palisades to see my cousins. Sometimes, I’d ride down to Redondo. That was the first two weeks.

But then they closed the bike path, and I was like, shoot, I don’t know where else I’m going to bike. Because L.A. is not a biking city. I thought I might be done.

The next day I went to check out Sullivan Ridge [a bike trail in the Santa Monica Mountains above the Palisades]. Dad had mentioned it to me and I thought it might be a good ride. But when I got to the top, I was winded, and so I headed back down without doing the trail. The next day, I got up there and I was all ready to ride the trail, but they’d closed all the trails, too. I thought, Well, this kind of stinks.

I rode down the mountain and stopped in at my grandfather’s house in the Palisades. He said, “Oh, you should check out Mandeville Canyon [in nearby Brentwood]. I know people bike there.” So the next day I did that. And it was very hard, the hardest ride I’d done so far. When I got to the top, I was winded, so I sat down, and this guy who was riding behind me the whole way sat down nearby. I asked him where he’d been, and he said he’d gone up Nichols Canyon, then down Benedict…. And I thought, Oh my gosh, there are so many canyons for me to do!

Soon he found himself biking along Mulholland Drive (“I would’ve thought it was out of reach as a bike destination. I couldn’t believe I’d ridden there. It was very pretty.”). He tried out Sepulveda Boulevard, and decided that even in the time of quarantine and coronavirus, it was a little too much of a speedway for his taste. He rode Coldwater instead, to the San Fernando Valley and back . He did a 50-mile roundtrip to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, that involved a return through Silverlake and Griffith Park, to say hi to a friend living in the Hollywood hills.

I felt like I had a good amount of freedom, even though I didn’t come close to anybody. It was nice to expand my radius, especially when my radius was so restricted by quarantine. The city felt pretty empty. It’s odd now, to see the traffic picking up again. There are so many people out on Ocean Park boulevard, at the beaches. It feels odd to me, because I’m used to seeing it so empty. I know that this is part of an apocalyptic feel for some people, but I liked it when it was cloudy out and everything was empty, and the city felt chill.

He was doing about 125 miles a week at this point. His dad said, “You know, serious riders do 200 miles,” and Liam thought he could probably get up to that. He started by riding to Topanga.

When I was in high school, I dated a girl who lived in Calabasas, so I’d do that drive all the time. I’d see cyclists out on the road and I always wondered what it would be like to do that. It turned out, it wasn’t a terribly difficult ride. I had a new lens through which I judged my ability. And it was around this time, around mid-April, that I decided I was going to do 100 miles.

He began to train, riding PCH out to the Ventura County line and back. He did Topanga a second time. Finally, a week and a half before the Big Ride, he mapped out a 75-miler over Kanan in Agoura. It turned out to be the hardest ride of all, the upward slope of the mountain not steep but relentless. He nearly passed out in the tunnel from exhaustion and worried he was in trouble when he started to get the chills despite the heat. Nearly out of water, he ate his apple to stave off dehydration and was fine (it’s good to be 21!).

On Saturday, May 9th, he did his 100-miler. There were lots of highlights, but the best part may have come at the very end.

When I was a kid, I could never get up Grand View (a street that climbs Mar Vista Hill, near our house). On the way back home, though, I set a personal record – two minutes and 28 seconds, Venice to Palms.

These days, he’s still riding, still considering his next big jaunt. Santa Barbara calls.

The days I don’t go on bike rides, I go crazy because I can’t go. But sometimes I need to rest. It’s nice to be outside and exercise and listen to my podcasts as I go [he recommends The Daily, Pod Save the World, Stuff You Should Know, Rabbit Hole, and Oh, Hello]. I really like junk food, especially cheesy gordita crunch and strawberry freeze at Taco Bell. I love Taco Bell so much. I don’t have to worry about eating it now, because I’m biking so much.

I asked him if, in a way, this quarantine has been a blessing for him.

I don’t know about a blessing. It’s not what I thought was going to happen. But it’s been nice.

Day 33: Summer?

April 29, 2020

Summer’s creeping closer and we have no plan.

There’s no vacation booked.

The 21-year-old, who was supposed to intern at a congressional office in Washington, D.C., will be living at home, instead. Just like he’s been here since March, instead of studying in Ghana. No idea at all how he’ll fill those three months. If I ask him, he changes the subject.

The 19-year-old obsessively tracks news about sleep-away camps. He was supposed to be a counselor and song leader at our family’s beloved Jewish camp, Gindling Hilltop. Last year, Hilltop and its sister camp, Hess Kramer, had to scramble after a fire burned down their longtime Malibu homes. But the camps persevered, and found a new, temporary spot on the campus of Cal State Channel Islands in Camarillo. It seemed like the worst was behind them — until the coronavirus hit. Now our son waits each day to see what camp administrators will decide. If camp is cancelled, he says, he’ll stay home and do more trombone practice (really? that’s even possible?) and take a gen ed class or two at Santa Monica College. He seems kind of excited about the possibility — until someone tells him camp might be on, and then a new light sparks in his eyes.

The 16-year-old’s grand summer plan was to get a job at Brooke Rodd, a women’s clothing boutique on Ocean Park Blvd in Santa Monica, about a 15 minute bus ride from our house. The lovely ladies at Brooke Rodd didn’t know about her dream, but it didn’t seem like an unreasonable ambition to me. Now Brooke Rodd has been closed since mid-March. When they re-open, if they re-open, will they want a rising high school junior whose resume consists of babysitting jobs and a stint as a teacher’s assistant in the four-year-old classroom at Temple Isaiah’s religious school?

My mantra these days is Try Not to Worry. I do, I really do try. But it’s nearly May 1st. The 19-year-old is one final away from finishing his freshman year of college. Tomorrow, he’ll have nothing but time on his hands. In a few weeks, his sister will follow.

The 21-year-old has a few essays due to Ghanian professors to wrap up his credits from there. In the meantime, he continues to ride his bike.

All three of our kids are ambitious. At the moment, the middle one channels that into his music classes and trombone playing. Our youngest is determined to slay her A.P. exams. The oldest has nothing to prove these days — the essays are pretty easy and straightforward — so, it seems, he created something. Once a week, every week, he bikes a little further.

Today he rode from our house to Agoura, down to Malibu, and up Temescal home. Here are his stats, for those of you who are into such things:

I’m grateful he’s found such a productive way to take these lemons and make lemonade. I hope the summer, for all three of them, goes this smoothly. The hardest part — for me, anyway — is I don’t know how bad it’s going to be. Will we only have to make minor adjustments? Will the summer be just like the spring — which feels unbearable? (Though I know I will bear it, because there’s no other choice.)

Usually, when one of them pops up against a new obstacle, either their dad or I has been there before, and has some advice to offer. But we’ve never seen this before, either.

We may all be groping through the dark together.