Dear Talia, here is your 50th birthday card

You are cute and tough and unfussy and strong and opinionated and beautiful and adventurous and well traveled and a great friend and you smell good and you party and you like to drive and you photograph well and your attractive children look like you. Also, you are an eater and a reader and an athlete and brave. You are good with babies and you are adorable and you are warm in bed and and you know what you like and you are not unwilling to look foolish and you are a good daughter-in-law. You are loyal and a very good parent and you are ridiculously popular and I love your smile and you have excellent taste in clothes and know what metadata is. You can carry a lot and you mix a good martini and are not afraid to get your hands dirty and you have great feet and you make eye contact and you do more than your fair share and don't even get me started about your figure. And you are tolerant to a point and you dance and you love to camp and you will go anywhere and you are cool and know interesting people and you are aging beautifully and you think for yourself and you love to cook and are good at it. Most important, and most you, you have the biggest biggest heart. The proof is right here: in hundreds of pictures there is love in your eyes. I can blog and one day may even say it: I am so grateful to have you as my partner in this life and to have already had so many years with you. Happy Birthday, wonderful you.

Mother love

 

My mother loved me. That is a central fact of my life and, I hope, of yours: a parent's love, perhaps even two. 

My mother was also a source of great irritation to me. I love my children. I am also a source of great irritation to them. Irritation is an inevitable side effect of being close--we are none of us perfectly smooth. But the irritation a child feels toward a parent is, I think, often a direct product of the parent's love, of having someone else care as much or even more than you yourself do about your successes and your failures, about your actions and decisions, about your hurts and healing. It is deeply intrusive, thus, again, irritating.

Irritation demands a response. Many children respond to the irritation of a parent's love by taking space from it, or trying to. It is part of what makes the teen years so fractious: the desire to take space is there, the ability to do so is limited. Later, we move, leaving our parents behind with their love. But absence, they say, only makes the heart grow fonder. A terrifying thought.

I left my mother and now, many decades later, she has left me. Still, my mother loved me, and that fact remains.

Found art

Gid's bestie took these voice clips from his voicemail, set them to music and video clips, and turned them in for an English assignment. I trust he got an A. I don't know what Gid did for this same assignment.

I think this is an homage, but note that the friend's updated voicemail greeting specifically requests that if the caller is Gideon, he not leave a message. Too much of a good thing, I guess.

Aging

We all fall down

As adults, we get older, for the most part, without really noticing it. Yes, I recognize I am fifty-whatever, but I don't see a lot of difference between fifty this and fifty that, or even forty something. The milestones of birthdays have long since lost their meaning, becoming just another day in which we are fractionally creakier than we were the day before.

So I am surprised to find myself suddenly feeling distinctively older than I have ever felt before. It is the unwelcome product of a bunch of unwelcome events. It started when I broke my collarbone playing in the Pacific surf some weeks ago. That was debilitating and though I think I am healing well, I am not the same. I'm also recovering from COVID, my first bout and not a terrible one by that yardstick, but draining. Isolation, bed time, it makes you feel smaller.

But it's not just health. In the midst of this I traveled to help with my mother, who was very sick and who died within a week of this last visit to her. That death obviously contributes to this feeling, but so did watching my siblings cope with that, and so does watching the family plan the funeral and make the arrangements. Funerals have before always been something to attend, not something to make decisions about.

The kids are great, but college looms, forcing we parents to think about time and its passage and the future and its implications. And the kids aren't just great, they're also challenging, and not in that simple why-won't-you-leave-me-alone-for-a-minute way they were when they were younger. Really challenging. Like, "we parents need to think about this and when we do we don't necessarily come up with the right response" challenging, not suddenly but quite pointedly at the moment.

And then there are the projects, or rather, Projects. Each is so big, and they all require management and money, and they come, as the picture above suggests, pell-mell and not necessarily when you have the capacity to deal with them. And, for us, they inevitably include lots of time spent wrestling with bureaucracy and that shit does not make you feel any more alive.

And for some reason there are lots of spiders around these days. Really big ones.

Aging happens gradually, silently for the most part, but sometimes it happens with an audible "snap."

The Family Xmas Letter, 2022

Family, looking back on 2022

Last year's Family Xmas Letter was authored by several of the humans who together make up this Family. This year, in the spirit of inspiration and laziness, we tried replacing ourselves with a non-human/non-canine author, the state of the art ChatGPT, current darling in Artificial Intelligence circles. "Write the Family Xmas Letter in the style of brekkieusa.blogspot.com" we commanded this genie, to which it replied:

Yeah, try again, robot! This might be any other family's Xmas letter (in particular, some family that has gotten around to naming its new baby but not themselves) but it is surely not ours. No, ours goes more like...

QUBIT:

Schnog shot

Banned from Peebook for sh!tposting, Qubit decided to go halvsies with Elon Musk to buy Twitter. Though delighted to have yet more space where she can express her opeenions freely, she was disappointed when her business partner refused to rename it--yes, you guessed it!--Quitter. Unfortunately, while no one knows you're a dog on the Internet, it is pretty obvious if a dog is running it. Undaunted by her disastrous foray into social media ownership, Qubit launched several other ventures this year including TakeMeForAWalkX, The Boring Day Because Nobody Walked Me Company, Neuroticlink, and Tesla.

TALIA:

Testing station

Did you know you can get COVID tests in bulk? Did you know you can do it repeatedly, and that no matter how often you test after that you will never use them all up? Did you know that's why we have a barn, which is not only handy for storing COVID tests but also for storing COVID people? Did you know that it is actually nicer to live in the barn than it is to live in our house (see section on home rebuild, below)? Well Talia knows all this because she moved to the barn to be with her tests in early December and has scarcely been seen since. Perhaps due to decreased time spent with family-left-behind-in-house Talia is enjoying much success at work and has achieved her life goal of ignoring the mess in her closet.

FELIX:

Felix, attempting to escape from family

Part of being a teenager, as you may recall, is establishing independence from your family even while they continue to pay for everything, cook all your food, and drive you places. Felix, it must be said, is doing a great job of this. His formula: explain to your family, gently but firmly, that they "kinda suck," and then don't worry about the rest because, like the suckers they are, they will continue to love you. Kinda. When not busy playing to stereotype, Felix is editing metadata or gutting wild pigs or misreading cues from the many girls in his life or possibly, as an outside chance, climbing something. New this year: a mobile phone and, with it, our first annual count of phones destroyed...to date, one.

EL GID:

First-mover advantage

The thing about our second child is that he's the first. The first person to school every day, the first person up on the weekend looking for the TV remote, and, not least, the first person to ever open a golf course in Landers, CA. It's these kind of weird details that keep you readers coming back! And Gid's all about weird details. Why, this year alone he invented the fried-chicken-and-fried-fish sandwich, was complimented on his outfit by David Sedaris, and took possession of the biggest lava lamp you've ever seen. Details, details, the essence remains the same: teen trumpeter talks too much while wearing Walkman.

ALEC:

Hey, look at me!

"What shall I write about me?" the author asked his obnoxious assistant, to which the latter replied, "Very little." Fine, I'll keep it short: new stereo repair man, new sweater, new DVD release, new scars and broken bones (three separate incidents, sigh), new job as data whisperer, new willingness to drive Gid to school...NOT.

THE HOUSE:

Drilling 50' hole in our lawn as totally normal part of house rebuild process

Inspired by a misbegotten faith in our project management skills the collective You keep asking, "How's it going with the home renovation?" The honest answer is that it is going backwards. To build here in Fairfax one creates a design, finds a builder, jumps through a labyrinth of bureaucratic hoops, and conjures up, say, a million dollars, all of which we have done, more or less. However, to build in Fairfax next to a creek is much harder. Indeed, it may prove impossible, which is the question before us at the time of writing. We hope--and fear--there will be lots more news about this in the 2023 Family Xmas Letter...and will take no further questions until that time.

THE VACATIONS:

This year's vacations produced the best crop of photos ever (because mobile phone cameras keep improving). Here, the best of the best, all 100% unedited (because none of us know how to use filters):

To quote our AI assistant, "We hope that you have [sic] a wonderful Christmas and that the new year brings you health, happiness, and lots of love. With love, (Your name)."