A Surprising Mother's Day Gift

From Recently Updated

I've received my share of memorable Mother's Day gifts over the years, despite occasional snarky comments about the “Hallmark Card” nature of the holiday. Casts of my children's handprints, hand-made pillows and vases, and the “Mom's Day Off” button that wasn't as effective as it promised, have all brought a smile to my face.

But this year I received an unusual gift, and it came, rather surprisingly, from my husband.

“How would you like to go for a bike ride?” he asked me as I drank my morning coffee. I thought about it and looked outside to see one of those perfect Northern California spring days --sunny but mild.

“Okay,” I agreed. Where shall we go?” He coaxed me to try some hills, telling me that after months of working out at the gym's “virtual reality” bikes, I was in better shape than I imagined.

Feeling both challenged and a bit nervous, I set out with him towards the Santa Cruz Mountains. As we hit the first slopes on the bike path, my husband told me to downshift. Breathing fast I did so and we made it to the end of the path at the underpass of I-280.

Here we turned left and started up the real hills following a series of side streets that eventually would take us to Page Mill Road, the route serious bikers take up to Skyline Ridge or even over the mountains to the Pacific. Now I was on my lowest gear and just focusing on my mantra: “One more foot of asphalt, Just one more foot. Keep pedaling. Keep breathing.”

To give you a sense of why I was so much on my mettle during this ride I have to explain about my long-running love/hate relationship with the bicycle. To me the bicycle represents a perfect balance of yin and yang: the thrill of speed and the peril of losing life and limb.

There are home movies of my Dad returning from his daily bike ride to pick up a newspaper with me tucked on one arm, while he used his other arm to steer.

When I was a little bigger I used to ride on the back of the bike on a seat my father made out of an arm rest. I often rode without shoes until the day I caught my heel in the spokes of the back wheel and gained a scar I carry to this day, and after that, Dad threatened me with a switch if he caught me out biking barefoot.

From My Pictures

At three I rode my tricycle so fast around curves that I frequently tipped over, scraping knees and elbows. At five, free of training wheels, I rode my bike around a bend in the sidewalk, hit a piece of concrete that had been lifted by tree roots and chipped my brand-new front permanent tooth on the handlebars.

By the time I was in my teens, I was riding far afield, still seeking the thrill of speed. There weren't many hills around my house, but I did find one with a decent incline. Unfortunately, the city buses used to run along the road at the bottom, and my brakes were not reliable so there inevitably came that “Oh my God” moment when I sailed in front of a bus driver with inches to spare.

But my real fear on this particular Mother's Day came from the memory of having attempted this same ride years ago on a ten-speed. Then I had downshifted to the lowest gear only to find that I was basically pedaling in place. I finally had to get off and push the bike up the steepest part as other bikers flew past, and the humiliation was too much. I was twenty-something and already too old for biking.

Now, sweating and making my painstaking way up another steep slope I thought that while nearly twenty more years had passed, I was actually making it this time.

We finally reached our intersection with Page Mill Road, and my husband was still urging me onwards. “It's only another half mile to Foothill Park,” he told me. “We're almost to Foothill Park?” I thought to myself incredulously. Now I had to keep going and I did, feeling a huge and surprising sense of accomplishment. I'd not only conquered a hill; I'd conquered about four miles of hill.

The best part, however, was yet to come. “Do you want to go back down Page Mill?” my husband asked me. I readily agreed and shifted to third so I could stay in better control of my speed. I turned my bike around and set off, transported back to my childhood self, the speed demon, heedless of possible scrapes and bruises, with the wind rushing past me and the cars barely passing me, and many glorious miles of descent unimpeded by red lights, stop signs, or city buses.

It's not often you find yourself physically upstaging your twenty-something former self, and I can attest, it feels like you've had a taste of immortality when it happens. So here's to more bike rides and a Mother's Day gift that didn't make me feel like a mom at all but just like being a kid again.

Has the Marriage Debate Reached a Tipping Point?

Photo courtesy of Sarah Parker. All rights reserved.

For the past few years Americans have been consumed with discussions about the legalization of same-sex marriage, first as a political wedge issue, but more recently as a legal phenomenon that seems to be gaining momentum.

Americans were simultaneously incredulous, elated, transfixed and horrified when San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome began his impromptu issuing of marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples in February 2004, a mere three months before Massachusetts became the first state in the union to legalize same-sex marriage. Before that only Vermont allowed couples of the same sex to gain any kind of legal recognition and then only under the rubric of “civil unions,” a term purposely created to avoid the religious and cultural sensitivities that surround the word “marriage.”

It's ironic in a way that marriage has become such a social and political bone of contention when the general movement of heterosexual couples over the past thirty to forty years has been away from marriage as both a legal and religious symbol. Beginning with rising rates of divorce in the 1960's and 70's, the number of couples dissolving their marriages reached a peak in 1981 (5.3 for every 1,000 people) before beginning a modest decline.

At the same time, increasing numbers of couples, particularly among the young, began to choose to co-habit or “live together” rather than marry, so much so that the 2000 census had to replace its quaint acronym, POSSLQ (Person of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters) with the more accurate “unmarried partner,” which could cover both same-sex and different-sex couples. In 2005, the United States Census Bureau reported 4.85 million cohabiting couples, up more than 1,000 percent from 1960, when there were only 439,000 such couples.

So it seems a bit strange that heterosexual couples, who seem less inclined to marry or to stay married themselves, should get so exorcised over the desire of same-sex couples to participate in a type of legal union heterosexual couples increasingly reject. Indeed, there is a certain “dog in the manger” quality to heterosexual arguments against same-sex marriage.

At best, these arguments offer same-sex couples the alternative of “civil union” as a kind of “separate but equal” institution for marriage, even though these same legally married couples bridle at the thought of making all “marriages” into “civil unions” for legal and governmental purposes. They want to stay “married” not “CUed” (civilly-unioned).

At worst, these arguments use a kind of “marriage in wonderland” logic to allege that same-sex marriages will somehow harm the marriages of heterosexual couples.

And that's the Achilles' heel of the argument against same-sex marriage.

We've been living with same-sex marriage in the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, South Africa, and Sweden as well as a host of other countries who offer civil unions that carry the full rights and responsibilities as those provided by marriage. Yet Western civilization as we know it has not come to an end, there has been no mass expression of moral outrage, no uptick in the number of children declaring themselves “gay” because their parents are “gay,” no discernible effects on families whatsoever, except for gay couples and their children, who finally can exercise the legal rights other families take for granted.

You know that the hysteria over gay marriage has reached its last gasps when the “threatening” scenario of an advertisement like “The Gathering Storm” provokes more laughter and parody than nods of agreement. Opposition to gay marriage has long seemed like a powerful political stance for conservatives; now politicians who express strong disapproval of gay marriage risk seeming merely silly and out of touch.

In demographic terms, I represent a divide between members of an older generation that finds it hard to accept the idea of same-sex marriage and younger people who increasingly take it for granted that some of their peers will want to marry someone of the same sex. According to a recent ABC/Washington Post poll: “Support for gay marriage has grown somewhat among voters over age 65, from 15 percent to 28 percent, but six in ten remain strongly opposed. Among those under 35, though, two-thirds support it, up from 53 percent in 2006, and nearly half support it strongly."

For those who fear the rising tide of public support for same-sex marriage as well as the expanding enfranchisement of same-sex couples to marry in more states, time is not on their side. Same-sex marriage will gain more acceptance, and although I'm not often given to prediction, I believe that by the time more than half of states legalize such marriages, the response of the public will be a collective yawn.

Now it's spring, the wedding season is upon us, and I myself will soon be attending the nuptials of my niece who is marrying a man. Frankly, it would make no difference to me if she were marrying another woman. Having attended at least one same-sex marriage, commitment ceremony, what you will, I can safely say that the beauty of a marriage celebration comes from sharing in the happiness of the couple who are pledging their faith in front of friends and families and not whether that couple is gay or straight. Some day I hope it won't even be an issue.

Nothing Says Summer Like a Day at the Beach, Any Time of Year

We had a brief heat wave a couple of weekends ago when Bay Area cities broke records, and then we descended back into wintry weather with cloudy skies, wind gusts, and temperatures that barely broke into the 60's and 70's. Even I agreed to turn on the heat the other day when the rest of the family got out of bed and started putting on parkas and two layers of sweatshirts over their pajamas.

We're in the middle of spring, and in Palo Alto, that means we should at least be getting a taste of summer. True the roses are in bloom, and the pollen count is up, but it's often been too cold to be outside without a jacket and we've had more clouds and rain than I can remember for this time of year. For a region that's been plagued by drought, this is good news, but there's a part of me that's still insists stubbornly that this is not exactly the merry month of May.

So I'm looking back with nostalgia at photos from a weekend we spent at the beach in the middle of April when we had a brief respite from rain and clouds. We had one perfect day on the coast in Carmel: the sun was out, the sky was a brilliant blue, and the kids felt warm enough to risk getting splashed by cold Pacific waves.

We started out by climbing along the rocks and tidal pools at the Point Lobos State Park Reserve. My youngest soon left me behind as he scrambled up sharp inclines like a mountain goat, reminding me of my own father's penchant for climbing rocks, and getting himself into perches overlooking waterfalls or ravines that were clearly out of bounds. “Dad, the ranger's coming,” I found myself yelling at him once when were in Yosemite, hoping it would scare him back down into safer territory.

There was no hope of that today. I hadn't seen a single park official anywhere, but one of the mothers who was with us, filled in that role, telling her kids not to follow mine out onto the rocks where a rogue wave could sweep them off. She was perfectly right to be concerned since her two boys were much younger than mine. My fifteen-year-old was keeping an eye on his adventuresome younger brother, and my husband was also looking out for them, when he wasn't concentrating on getting a perfect shot of the waves and the pelicans that kept sweeping across just above them in swift-moving arcs. I had sighted a playful sea otter with my binoculars and had no intention of going anywhere as long as it stayed in view.

Now that I'm on my third son and resigned to the fact that he's an intrepid climber, my attitude towards child safety has shifted considerably towards: “Don't ask, don't look.” I know the odds are that they will make it out of childhood with no more than scrapes and bruises (and so far one broken arm), and following them around telling them to be careful is just going to drive them towards steeper cliffs and more dangerous surf. As it turned out, my boys did move off the furthest rock about one minute before a wave swept over it, but my husband reassured me that they would just have been soaked (most likely).

From Springs to Mind

In search of safer beaches, we climbed up the trail towards China Beach, a protected cove with white sand that shines under turquoise waters as if you had suddenly found yourself in Jamaica, only with much, much colder water. There was no chance of playing in these waters, however, because the beach had been taken over by mother harbor seals who were still nursing their pups. We watched one pair emerge onto the beach and lumber up onto the sand, and then with the binoculars we began to discern at least four or five more pairs, and one pup who was old enough to be on her own. The young ones flopped and wriggled while their mothers occasionally batted them with a flipper as if to say, “Enough already. Can't you see I'm trying to take a nap?”

Tomas, my fifteen-year-old, was still determined to make it to beach where there were waves he could play in so we all piled back into our respective mini-vans and headed about a quarter mile north on Highway 1 to Monastery Beach, officially known as the Carmel River State Beach, and referred to by local divers as “Mortuary” Beach because just about every year there are fatalities due to rip tides, rogue waves, or divers who lose track of their depth.

The geology of beach is fascinating because as you look at the cliffs behind where the Carmelite monastery is located, you don't realize that you're on the edge of an enormous canyon, big enough to hold several Grand Canyons. The steep slope of the beach means that waves often crash directly onto the sand, particularly in the middle where the slope is steepest.

That didn't stop Tomas from playing in the freezing surf, keeping a watchful eye on the younger ones who ran up to the waves and then away from them cackling with glee. All of them got soaked eventually, but the cold and wet couldn't dampen the joy on their faces. With Tomas guarding them from behind and the rest of the adults watching them from above, we whiled away a perfect warm sunny afternoon as the tide came in and children ran shrieking from advancing waves, stopping only to refuel on cookies and grapes before they ran back for more and more.

From Springs to Mind