Brown sugar cookies and WTF crashing a stranger’s memorial service whoops sorry

Gargantubaby, my 4-year-old, has been declaring that he is a man with a plan. I’m a man with a plan, he cries happily from the back seat on our way to day care.

After years of refusing to speak Spanish at home, he now has a teddy bear he's named Manzana, Spanish for apple, and he speaks Spanish when it suits him.

"Con permiso," he says to his sister when he needs to get past her on the dinner bench. "That means move."

He wants to play with my keyring because he likes the brass cowboy hat. But we're on our way out the door and I need to drive, so I’m protesting and trying to keep it out of his reach. He holds up his palm and gives me serious eyes.

Mommy, Mommy, he says, frowning. Tranquilo.

Jenny, musing to myself as I dig in my purse: Why is everything I always want on the bottom?

GB: Because you put it in first?

GB: Mommy, when I’m your age I’ll be able to drive!

Jenny: Yes, but first you need to learn how to drive.

GB: I already know how to drive. I know how the steering wheel works.

Jenny: OK, sure. But what about the pedals? What does the one on the left do?

GB: Slow down.

Jenny: Oh. Well, what does the one on the right do?

GB: Keeps goin'.

I take GB to Heron's Head Park so he can ride his bike. At the beginning of the path, he says, Mommy, where are we headed?

We’re just headed into the park, I say. There’s lots of places to bike around. We'll go where the wind takes us.

He makes a funny face and laughs and takes off on his bike.

No, Mommy, he calls. We'll go wherever WE want to go

***

I'm serious about this switch to taking care of my mental health. Although I'm behind on everything, including our 2020 taxes and pages of to-do lists, I stop work every night at 6 p.m. sharp. I no longer work on the weekends and instead spend time with my family and friends THIS IS HUGE, including my son, who moved up another stripe in karate and learned how to ride a bike.

FAMILY

FRIENDS

I meal-plan every week so I can have yummy dinners to look forward to and shop every weekend so I don't need to run errands during the week. I was burned out on bread for breakfast BREAD BREAD MORE BREAD, so even though it takes longer, I make a healthier, more filling bowl of whole-milk yogurt with raspberries, strawberries, walnuts, chopped raw ginger, and honey from our backyard. 

Best of all, I walk every morning at Heron's Head Park, a restored coastal wetland five minutes from our house where I can see snowy egrets, great egrets, great blue herons, cormorants, brown pelicans, regular ducks, fancy ducks, and lots of birds with long skinny beaks every day. I am now part of the 9 a.m. crew, which includes two middle-aged women alternately walking a small dog or a medium-size dog; SJ's bookkeeper, her partner and their dog; a middle-aged jogging couple with jogging hats and the cutest Labradoodle who jogs alongside them and veers toward me with round hopeful eyes when I pass; and a very tall man with a sweet pit bull who told me to tell SJ that a Black man is chasing me, which, when you haven't been hit on in two years, feels fine. 

One morning I walk past a woman having a phone conversation. Just as I pass, she laments: I’m not living up to my potential.

I realize what's happening: I have lived up to my potential. I have a great family. I have a house that keeps out the weather. I have a job I’m proud of. I published a book. I'm practicing nonviolent communication every day. What else is there?

I need to stop trying to live up to my potential, because I already did that. Instead, I need to CHILL.

In addition to breathing in rich, ionic ocean air at Heron's Head every morning, I play “Sonata in C Major” on the piano I bought for Gargantubaby but actually bought for myself. Did you know I play the piano pretty well and can sight-read? Why would you? Former Jenny did not do anything without a POINT.

The pointless piano.

It's October, so the life-size plastic skeleton, Bob, is out of the garage, and SJ, Beloved Stepdaughter, now 12, and I have commenced our annual tradition of hiding it in the house to try to scare each other. They hid it in the tub and waited gleefully in the kitchen to see if I would scream; I hid it in Shane's armoire; Shane propped it up on my office chair and scared himself twice; I propped it next to GB's bed where Shane was sleeping; I climbed up in BD's loft and hid it under her covers; she propped it next to the piano facing the hall after I went to bed, which I maintain is the best hiding place yet, except when I walked out in the morning it was still dark and I didn't have my contacts in so I didn't see it and I just realized I don't know where it is right now, which means I have a surprise in my future.

Just to be clear, that’s Shane in the bed, not my 4-year-old.

I've also started using social media way less, and using it for more personal stuff rather than book marketing, and Instagram threw me a bone: After teasing me with 1,999 followers for DAYS, IG swept 800 of my "followers," which I KNEW were bots, so now I’m down to just over 1,100 actual people, which I prefer BOO MARKETING I JUST WANT TO BE A REGULAR PERSON.

And, as I mentioned, I've been seeing friends, including GB's favorite person on the planet, Kathy. 

 ***

Last Saturday, the day before the "atmospheric river," GB and I met Kathy at Bay Natives, the outdoor nursery across the street from the Heron’s Head parking lot on Jennings.

Gargantubaby and Kathy at Bay Natives, before we realized we were crashing a memorial service.

I had called Bay Natives the week before, and the guy on the other end had assured me they were back to having live music and oysters every Saturday and Sunday from 2-6 p.m. I’d never been able to make it, but with my new program of self-care, I would make time. During the pandemic, I’d often taken GB to Bay Natives to see the chickens, which run freely on the other side of the nursery, amid a Burning Man-ish collection of handmade wooden xylophones and benches and a massive rocking horse, and now there were goats, too. A great way to kill an hour.

We met Kathy in the parking lot and wandered into the nursery, where, lo and behold, for the first time ever, I saw a crowd! It was happening! There was the live music, just on a break: A group of musicians wearing face paint and gold lamé chatted on the stage beneath a pavilion. A little girl with long brown hair held an orange chicken to her chest. I noticed that everyone seemed to be talking in groups and appeared to know each other. I also noticed that some of these groups turned to look at us and didn’t smile, but this happens often enough in the NIMBY Bay Area that it didn’t tip me off. Remember: BAY NATIVES TOLD ME THERE WOULD BE OYSTERS.

GB demanded that Kathy follow him up the few wooden steps into the psychedelically painted camera obscura. After that lost its luster, we wandered through the crowd, where — yes! — people were drinking from cans of beer. I looked for a temporary bar but didn’t see one. We made it to the far side, where a brand-new, slatted-wood room with more hand-hewn furniture had been constructed. Goats munched straw on the other side of a fence. The small group of women here was what began a dull ringing in the back of my head: I was preceded by an enormously cute 4-year-old with his hair in a topknot and a pink sweatshirt and rain boots, and these women had no smile for him. Hmm.

I told Kathy I would get us a couple of beers and moved back into the crowd toward a white tent with buffet tables. I looked at everything. No oysters, the alcohol was in a cooler, and there was nowhere to pay. I thought more and more that this must be a private party. Oh, well: Let’s see if anyone tells me not to take the beers. Nope!

We took up residence on a chair so wide Kathy and I both sat on it and GB climbed up the back. Beside the chair was a huge framed photo of a woman, smiling and about my age, standing in a garden. Kathy pointed to the picture and said to GB, “Look, she’s in a garden. Like at your house.”

I looked at the picture. The ringing got louder.

“The size of that photo makes me think somebody died,” I said to Kathy. She widened her eyes at me.

That’s when a woman sitting at a nearby table leaned her elbow on the back of her chair and said, “How did you know Fran?”

I put my hand over my eyes.

Marjorie with the big brown eyes was incredibly gracious when I told her we were here for oysters and music, not a memorial service. No worry, she said. Their friend had loved community and would have wanted it this way, people wandering in and having a nice time. And it wasn’t a funeral, it was a celebration.

Still, we stood up and moved toward the exit. But the thing about 4-year-olds is, they don’t give a shit about propriety.

On our way toward the parking lot, GB took a left turn and found a stairway to a small platform that looked out over the nursery. Two men were up there already, so as GB lifted his knees high to climb to the top, Kathy and I loitered at the bottom. One man gestured us up and we met Andy, the new owner of the newer half of Bay Natives. I admitted we’d stumbled onto the memorial service. He said, “We have live music all the time. You should come back tomorrow, there’s a memorial for somebody who died at age 70.” He was serious.

He asked if we’d been in the low building behind us, which I hadn’t known was open to the public. Kathy murmured to me, "Public space. What a concept.”

Andy led us all down the stairs and into the building, a cavernous open space that smelled like cigarette smoke, dark but for muted light coming through a handful of open doorways, carpet squares and rugs layered beneath old couches and bookshelves filled with dusty hardbacks, paintings and wooden sculptures and a harpsichord and a piano and two huge teddy bears taking up adjacent arm chairs. A bar lined one wall, and in the middle of the room a teenage boy played electric guitar as a man with a long, gray ponytail wailed on the harmonica. A single observer sat deep in a couch, tippling his beer.

Andy told us the bar had once been called the Farm, and before that belonged to the Hell’s Angels, and before that used to have noontime lingerie shows for people who worked at the docks. Through a wall was a loft with a hookah and shards of mirror glued to a drop ceiling.

GB was in heaven. He hugged the teddy bears and sat on the couch with an old Mad magazine and marched around in his rain boots. As Kathy and I perched on stools and watched the music, I whispered to her, “I feel like I’m in San Francisco for the first time in a long time.” Kathy, who lived through the ‘60s and ‘70s here and once drove a MUNI bus down Geary Avenue stoned, agreed.

Eventually Andy led us out one of the doors and back to the party, where he pulled a tarp off shelves of kids’ books for GB. We took our leave, and as we passed through the crowd a final time, Marjorie appeared at my elbow.

“Thanks for coming!” she said, laughing.

Whoops.

***

I play an old favorite on my new piano.

SJ: That was a pretty piece.

Jenny: It's the second movement from a very well-known piece by Mozart, “Sonata in C Major.”

SJ: What's brown and sticky and sits on a piano bench?

Jenny: I'm sure I don't know.

SJ: Beethoven's last movement.

One morning I’m just about to say something to SJ about the THREE — THREE — laundry baskets he’s left in the living room for DAYS — DAYS — and which I have scooted into one corner so we can use the floor.

But then he wanders in and announces, I call this … Laundry-opolis.

OK, I say, laughing. That gets you another day.

I don’t see my friend Lindsey enough. She sent me this photo to make me laugh. It worked.

***

I have never made a cookie recipe that requires you to freeze the dough, because I never wanted to wait that long. With my new regimen of Not Doing Shit, this was not an issue. Also, baking cookies was my stepdaughter’s idea, and because I was not tethered to my computer for once, I can honestly say that we made these together, every step of the way. It was lovely and they were delicious and because I’m the only one who likes the texture of cornmeal, I GOT THEM ALL. This is the first recipe I’ve cooked from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, which is 996 pages and which Shane just confirmed he did NOT buy me (“It would have been very big of me if I did, because I resent your vegetarianism”), so thank you to whichever ex-partner bought me this. You need:

• 1/2 lb. (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened

• 1/2 cup dark packed brown sugar (I think we had light? But I don’t really know)

• 1 egg yolk

• 1 cup semolina flour (the internet said you can substitute cornmeal, so I did)

• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour (if you don’t like the texture of cornmeal, you can just use all all-purpose flour)

• 1/4 tsp. salt

• About 1 tsp. coarse sea salt for sprinkling (I guess we had this because at some point we ended up with one of those Trader Joe’s grinders for pink Himalayan salt, but we just used more Kosher salt)

You need to:

• Use an electric mixer on low speed to mix the butter and sugar together just until combined, 30 seconds or so. Still on low speed, beat in the egg yolk, then the flours and salt, until the mixture barely holds together; this will take a few minutes.

• Turn the dough out onto a clean work surface and shape it into a round, triangular, or rectangular log about 1 inch in diameter; wrap it in plastic wrap and refrigerate or freeze until firm, about 30 minutes. (Or freeze the log, well wrapped, for up to 3 months.)

• Preheat the oven to 325°F. Unwrap the dough and slice it 1/4-inch thick, put the slices on an ungreased baking sheet, sprinkle each with a little sea salt, and bake right away until the cookies are firm but not browning, 15 to 20 minutes. Remove from the oven, let them cool in the pan for a minute or two, and then transfer the cookies to a rack to cool. Store in an airtight container for up to 2 days.