Your Mom Doesn't Throw Like a Girl

I think I'm the same age in this picture as you are now, T Junior. I wonder if you'll look at your baby pictures when you are in your 30s and think Why in the heck did you choose that wallpaper, Mom? (Except, it'll be about paint or some other home decorating item because I don't do wallpaper. I think it's clear now where my aversion to the stuff came from.)

It looks like I'm toddling around, which is what you are starting to do. You are gaining confidence right now. In the last few days, you've taken as many as nine wobbly steps! It's so strange to see you walking. It catches me off guard.

You might be wondering about the red hat with the T on it in this picture. That's your Grandpa S's hat. Before I was born, your Grandpa S played for a minor league baseball team owned by the Texas Rangers. I have a baseball signed by Dale Murphy, who played for the Atlanta Braves, and a pitcher named Tom Boggs, who played for the Rangers and the Braves. I don't know where the ball is. I think it might be in the attic at one of your grandparents' houses.

When I find it, it's yours.

Your Grandpa S always wanted me to love playing baseball. Softball, actually, because I am a girl and when I grew up there really was only a softball league for girls. Anyway, he always wanted me to play softball. I like it just fine, but I wasn't passionate about the sport like I was about soccer. I loved soccer.

The cool thing about having a former baseball player for a dad, though, was that he taught me to throw like a boy. I thought that was the coolest thing, and even into my 20s I enjoyed showing off my I-don't-throw-like-a-girl skills.

When you get older, like after college and you're married and live far away from your family (please, oh, please stay close), you don't get to hang out with your parents like you did when you were younger. The goofy thing is, though, when you were younger, you didn't want to hang out with your parents. When you get older, you miss just sitting around with them. I know you don't believe me, but you do.

There's a line in the movie City Slickers that I like. The film is a classic. It's about these three middle-age friends from the city who go on a cattle drive...you'll just have to believe me. Anyway, they are talking about how much they love baseball, and the man named Phil says, "...I guess it's childish. But when I was about 18 and my dad and I couldn't communicate about anything at all, we could still talk about baseball."

It's a great line. And, I think it's true for a lot of boys. I didn't talk about baseball with your Grandpa, though. We played catch. On the asphalt driveway in front of the house or on the beach in Carmel-By-the-Sea.

I used to play catch with my dad a lot. When you get bigger, you can play catch with your dad.

And your mom, too, because she doesn't throw like a girl.

I've Held a Duck More than Once

Grandma and Grandpa S built a house in the early 1980s.

The custom California ranch had horizontal wood siding that was painted dirt brown with mud trim. It was the first one on a rural cul-de-sac in an area of Roseville, Calif., called Granite Bay. Beyond this new street was a dirt road. An actual dirt road that led to long and winding gravel driveways bordered by split-rail fences and oak trees. Personable horses that thought they were dogs greeted cars and whinnied hello as you weaved between potholes on your 10-speed.

Our narrow house stretched long, slicing through a sloping two-acre square that touched the new asphalt at the top, crossed a creek at the bottom and ended somewhere in a tumble of blackberry bushes and dry California oaks on the other side. Looking up the hill from back yard (on the tame side), the house towered like an office building, but from the road, my eyes were level with its gabled roof.

We moved in when I was six or seven. Auntie W would have been two or three. Auntie L wouldn't be born until another year or two, and Auntie H wouldn't arrive for five or six. Grandpa S killed a rattler with a 2-by-4 in the front yard on the first day. He held it up in front of his buddies like a prize.

I spent most of my childhood at Miners Meadows Court, riding horses, making treasure maps and throwing Barbie numerous parties. Most of the time, though, I played in the creek. Its level changed with the seasons, but in the late spring and during the summer it only came up to a first-grader's knees. It was lazy, too; perfect for catching crawdads or tadpoles with Auntie W and the other neighborhood girls and boys.

Sometimes beavers would stack hundreds of crooked oak branches right in front of the 3-foot waterfall that dumped the creek from our property into the yard next door. Grandpa S would grumble, pull on his camo-green rubber overalls and head down the hill clutching the wooden-handle rake he used to dismantle dams.

There were several consecutive springs that Grandma S drove to the local feed store to buy us girls a group of ducklings for Easter. First, we cared for them in a cage inside the cool garage. Then, we let them run around inside a low makeshift wire fence out in the yard like puppies. Later, we held them up and tossed them out, encouraging the teenage ducks to explore the creek and, eventually, fly away.

It was a happy feeling when one of us spotted them with their own babies the next year. I wonder how many generations of ducks have returned to that creek since then, more than two decades since the first group was introduced to it.

Do they quack stories like this to their children? Or, excuse me: wa-wa-wa-wa-wa. Yes, that's what the ducky says.

Dart de Triomphe!

See that tree on the left side of the picture? I've been there.

This is L'Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France. I'm not positive what kind of tree that is.

When your mom was 16, she went on a trip to Switzerland as a summer foreign exchange student. During that time, the host family took me to Paris. It wasn't that far. In fact me and Marianne (my host sister) took the train from Neuchatel, Switzerland, to Paris to meet up with another family that was hosting one of my schoolmates.

We did a lot of sightseeing and I am sorry to say that, even though I loved getting to go to all these places, I didn't take full advantage of it. I'm blaming it on my age. We went to The Louvre and saw the Mona Lisa, Moulin Rouge (just the outside), Notre Dame (also just the outside since it was being restored indoors), Sacre-Coeur and many other historical landmarks. One of the highlights was Printemps, a huge department store, and d'avenue Champs-Elysee, the most famous street in Paris with tons of fabulous stores and cafes. Of course, we also went up Le Tour Eiffel.

My story of l'Arc De Triomphe goes like this:

Marianne sprained her ankle the second day I was there so she was on crutches. When we were in Paris, we toured all around and she never complained. Then, Me, Marianne, Michelle and Marie approached l'Arc de Triomphe and were preplexed as how to get to it. You see, there is a multi-lane round-a-bout circling the arch. Cars whizzed by us, round and round and round. We stood under that tree (up there in the left of the photo), and we saw other tourists on the island where the arch stood, but we could not figure out how they got there.

So...

Marianne climbed up on my back (your mom used to be a lot more fit in those days), and Michelle grabbed her crutches.

Then...

We waited for a break in the action and we ran for it. Cars honked and swerved as I dashed in and out of their path with Marianne on my back. (It looked like Frogger, not that you know what that is.) Since it was Europe, nobody really slowed down. Not even for four dumb teenage girls.

Once we made it there, we noticed stairs coming up from an underground tunnel.

Of course. That makes more sense.