The nights are colder, the days are shorter, and hard to believe it, but the stores are already peddling their Halloween stuff. The goggles and sunscreen are still out but so are the soccer balls and the kids are back at school.##M:[more]## It’s a sad time of year in the way transitions tend to be. You may be eager to move onto the next chapter of life, but man, was the last one really good and it’s over. There’s a song called “Photographs and Memories” playing in my head right now. Another summer, another season of our lives is gone, and all that’s left to remind us of it is photographs and memories.
Snapshot: I’m flying on a bicycle, legs straight out, wind tossing my hair and I’m zooming, delighting in the joy of muscle memory that reminds me of how much fun I used to have doing this and relief that I can still remember how. After seven years of being off the air, I went back on TV in San Francisco where I spent years as an on-air reporter. Thanks to old friends in the business, I spent seven days reporting for the CBS affiliate.
My first story back was the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. My cameraman and I were sent to Japantown to talk to survivors of that horrific day in history. I also covered the Archbishop’s farewell homily to his San Francisco congregation before he left to assume his new job at the Vatican. I covered a protest in Sacramento staged by teachers, policemen, firemen, and state workers against the “Govenator” as they not so affectionately refer to Arnold Schwarzenneger.
I interviewed friends and neighbors of Cindy Sheehan who started a national anti-war movement with her vigil outside President Bush’s summer house in Texas. I talked to supporters of both Israel and Palestine on the day the Israeli settlers were forced to leave the Gaza Strip. I reported on the escalating crime in East Palo Alto, where some of the poorest residents of California live next door to some of the richest who go to Stanford University. News still courses through my veins, and boy was it a glorious feeling to be back out there covering it again.
Snapshot: Speaking of bicycles, Bill and his bike buddies in their serious bike gear, smiling sweatily after their 35-mile through the hills and valleys of Healdsburg in Sonoma County. Molly, looking tiny among them, but still strong and grinning after doing her 25-mile version of the same ride and leaving the teenaged boy with them in the dust.
Snapshot: Katie, in her official job as sports intern, delivering Roundtable Pizza to the set of “The Last Honest Sports Show,” a weekly roundup of Bay Area sports highlights on CBS. Katie, in her official job as sports intern, on TV on the set of the Last Honest Sports Show, asking former San Francisco 49er Bubba Paris what he misses most about football.
Snapshot: William with the look that defines six-year-olds around the world. He lost three teeth in our first six days in California, including his two front teeth and one on the bottom. We won’t need a jack-o-lantern this Halloween. We’ll just put him in the window and make him flash his gigantically gap-toothed grin.
Snapshot: Polar Bear Children. Molly and Will, seemingly impervious to cold, plunging into the frigid waters all over San Francisco. Ocean Beach: the surfers are out there in wetsuits. My children are cavorting in the T-shirts and shorts they wore on the airplane leaving New Jersey. Marina Beach, San Francisco Bay: Katie and our former au pair shivering in all the sweatshirts they can pile on. Molly and Will frolicking in the water behind them. The Russian River: the polar bear children find tadpoles in the water and drag me in so I can look at them too. A couple on the shore take a picture to document that mom was also in the water. The photo doesn’t capture the blue lips or goosebumps but it proves I was there.
Snapshot: My photographer friend Joe bouncing his baby boy on his knee. Joe and I used to cover stories together for NBC’s 11 o’clock news. One of my many openly gay friends, I would often drive him home to his apartment near the Castro district when we finished work. A talented photographer with an instinct for the story and an eye for detail, he was one of the first people I looked up when I got back to town. They told me he had quit his job three months earlier to become a full-time dad. He had put down the camera and picked up the baby bottle, he and his partner adopting an African-American infant born to a teenaged mother who told doctors she didn’t know she was pregnant until the day she gave birth. Now eight months old, Dooley is a chubby and happy little boy. There will be questions and some difficult answers as he grows up, but he’s basking in the love of two parents, which is more than many other babies may have.
Meanwhile, the irony isn’t lost on me: Joe looking for deeper meaning in his life by quitting news to raise a child and me looking for deeper meaning in my life by thinking about jumping back into news. I haven’t figured out exactly what that means. I’m not sure that I will, except that all the friends with whom I reconnected in California are still trying to figure out the balance between work and family and life in general, while striving to find meaning and happiness. As we say goodbye to another summer we should remember, as that catchy children’s song puts it so succinctly, that’s what it’s all about.
The Suburban Mom’s blog is at suburbanmom.typepad.com. She welcomes comments and suggestions for future column ideas.
