Claire, 2003:

Julia, 2006:

Claire, 2003:

Julia, 2006:

I certainly wasn’t expecting to reap the benefits of two children at, what is it? Ten weeks? (How can it be only ten weeks?) But Julia loves Claire so much, it’s nuts. Jeremy dragged the bouncy chair down from the attic, so these days Julia spends her mornings watching Claire eat her breakfast. If Claire goes out of sight, Jules makes heartbroken complaints. When she’s turned towards her sister, she coos and gurgles adoringly.

Claire is taking the hero-worship in her stride.

Claire likes to play in Appleworks. I keep a document on the desktop for her, and sometimes we type in our own names. This morning she scrolled back through the document and found everyone’s names.

“That’s Daddy!” she said, pointing to the word Jeremy. “And me! No, Julia! That’s Julia and that’s me! And that’s Mummy!”

Jeremy and I stared at each other in amazement; then there were high fives all round.

Jamey: Are you at the park… in Berkeley?

R: Yes, we’re all here… in Berkeley.

J: Great! I’ll meet you there! In Berkeley!

R: Cool. We’ll see you soon, in Berkeley.

Grant reminded me recently of a great Kushner quip: “Heaven is a place much like San Francisco.” Claire has been reading the Miroslav Sasek book “This is San Francisco”, and so nowadays whenever she sees the Golden Gate Bridge or Alcatraz or a cable car, she asks “Can we go to San Francisco?” I sound like a trendy vicar when I tell her: “Honey, San Francisco is all around us.”

I mention this because today we went to a clothing swap at my yoga instructor’s sister’s house, and it turns out that my yoga instructor’s sister is married to Brewster Kahle of Internet archive fame. They live in one of the old officer’s residences in the Presidio with this quite awesome view out over the Palace of Fine Arts and the bay. Claire played the piano and while we all frantically tried things on, Julia slept beatifically amid the piles and piles of clothes.

Afterwards Carole, Jamey and I took the kids down to the Warming Hut, and Claire lost part of her cheese sandwich when she was mugged by a starling.

On Kevin Kelly’s recommendation I just watched one of the most amazing films I’ve ever seen. “Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life” is a 1925 documentary by Merian Cooper, who went on to make King Kong. The filmmakers travelled from Turkey across Arabia to what is now Southern Iraq, then followed the migration of a Bakhtiari tribe over the Zagros mountains. You watch fifty thousand people walking barefoot over Zard Kuh, the highest peak.

I close with a witty observation uniting these various anecdotes, an observation I haven’t thought of just yet.

Last night I put Claire to bed.

“I wanted to look at the necklaces,” she said.

“You sure did.”

“The man was putting colours on the animal.”

“That’s right. We were in the Mayan art store on 24th Street. The man had a wooden rhinoceros, and he was covering it with tiny glass beads.”

“Very sharp.”

“That pointy thing he was using to pick up the beads? Yeah, that did look sharp.”

“I wanted a necklace.”

“You did, and I didn’t buy you one.”

“And I cried and cried and cried, ALL the way home.”

“Yep. You bothered everyone on the bus.”

“I went like this: uh-HUH, uh-HUH.”

“Uh-HUH.”

“Uh-HUH!”

“UH-HUH!”

We both collapsed in giggles.

Three-year-olds are challenging. Quite literally: it’s their job to make you nuts, because they’re experimenting with how far they can push people before people go nuts. I’ve had to be far more patient and creative with Claire these last few weeks than I ever have before. It’s mind-bending. I’ve taken good degrees at good universities, ridden half-broken Arabians across Turkey, apologized to people I’ve wronged: I am no stranger to the difficult. But raising that kid is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

What makes it worth it is that moment (and it is rare) just after I get something right, after I don’t snap at her, after I think of something to distract her or charm her or make her laugh; that space that opens up between us, full of possibility. In my mind I call it glad grace, like the silence after a perfect cadence, when the voices of the choir seem to hang in the empty air.

Jeepers, what a day. Dropped Claire at school and Jeremy at the station, consigned books and clothes on Cortland, met Blanca and Milo on the way to the playground. Left the car at home, caught the bus to City Hall, picked up Julia’s birth certificate, had lunch at Arlequin (shepherds pie! yum!) and made it back to City Hall just in time for the Rec & Park meeting.

The open space at the top of Bernal Hill was wilderness, then goat paddocks, then just waste land until a group of concerned residents (Bernal is awash in concerned residents) organized the transfer of most of it from San Francisco’s Department of Public Works to Rec & Park in 1975. For some reason they left off a lot on the north-west side, outside the boulevard. Today it’s all grassland and trees and habitat for the hawks and their prey.

Public Works wanted to sell it off to help pay the city’s debt.

I’m conflicted, especially after the first 75 minutes of the meeting covered the city budget in great and intriguing detail. I missed a lot of it while Jules was squeaking (I think Prop 13 offends her sense of civic responsibility), but I was impressed both at the sheer amount of money it takes to run a city and at the tenacity of the people who are trying to do it.

Golf pays an awful lot of the bills here.

I’m a bit conservative fiscally and would like the city to balance its budget (saner property taxes would greatly help), but frankly, I’m not prepared to sacrifice that particular chunk of land. I drive past it on the way to Claire’s school in the mornings. The light shines on the green green grass and the red clay path winding its way up to the summit. It’s totally Middle-earth.

So various people got up and declared their passion for the acre, pointing out that Bernal has narrow streets and tiny lots and that we all live on top of each other and need our open space. A woman called Melanie, who had brought her three-year-old Margaret to the meeting, was particularly good. She’d dug up various other proposals to develop the hill, and submitted the evidence that the Board of Supes had rejected them all.

A counter-proposal to transfer this last chunk of land to Rec and Park was one of twenty or so items included on what was called a consent calendar. At the end, the commissioners took a single vote on all the items and came to a unanimous agreement. After all that impassioned testimony the actual vote was business-like and cryptic.

“Was that it?” I asked Bernal personality Gail Sainsbury when we got out. “Did we save the park?”

“Yes we did!” said Gail.

I felt very mildly euphoric. I’m very glad I went. It’s always fun to watch public America in action, like reading a book by Sarah Vowell. I got the impression that Gloria Bonilla is decent and likeable and that Jim Lazarus is extremely sharp.

Carved inside the City Hall dome: “O glorious City of our hearts that has been tried and not found wanting, go thou with like spirit to make the future thine.” I’m totally sentimental about San Francisco. The United Nations, gay rights, the Interwebs – half the things I care about were invented here.

Met Quinn and Bryan at Ritual, picked up a panettone from Lucca and Claire from school, caught the bus home, made gnocchi with a sun-dried tomato pesto and cream sauce (delicious). Chasing two kids makes me nuts – when one stops crying the other one starts – but today Jules learned why taxes can be a good thing (“Stop smirking young lady! In this family we are for libraries”), and we saved Middle-earth and ate pie and drank chai. We’ll all sleep well tonight.

Julia has found her hands. She stroked her burp cloth and pulled it up to her mouth to chew.

I remember when Claire was this age, and I went shopping at Rainbow carrying her in her sling. She picked up a green bean and held it tightly as we walked around. When I got home I told Jeremy: “Claire held a bean.”

Still brings tears to my eyes.

R: Do you like my new purse?

S: This is new?

R: Yes!

S: How is it different from your old one?

R: Remember where my old one had a zip? Look, velcro. And the lining?

S: Gray.

R: The old one was black!

S: …

R: …

S: I can see this is a time of great personal change.

R: Purse-onal change?

S: I totally meant that.

I left the kids with their besotted babysitter and went out alone. Alone! I dropped off library books, bought an Armani wool coat at Buffalo Exchange, had lunch at Herbivore and soaked in the tub at Osento. The whole time, no one vomited on me or screamed in my ear. It was heaven, I tell you, heaven.

I came back an hour early because I missed the little monsters.

Yesterday we drove down to Santa Cruz and saw Josh, Cate, Alexa and Zachary, who live two blocks away from us in San Francisco. Oh well. Julia got to meet her namesake, hereinafter known as Big Julia, and we took pictures of the two of them together, hereinafter known as the Julia Set.

I was crosseyed with tiredness when I got home last night, so what made me think I could get both girls to the playground on foot without Jeremy this morning is a mystery. Salome asked the obvious question – Why didn’t I take the brand-new twin stroller? – to which I had no adequate reply. I ended up carrying them all the way, a combined 42 pounds of daughter. There were tears and recriminations on all sides. When Jamey met me at the playground she immediately confiscated both kids and made me sit in the sun with a book of Ros Chast comics. Somebody give the woman her nursing degree already!

After lunch we walked the rest of the way up Bernal Hill; I can’t remember the last time I was up there. Quite a view, from Candlestick Park to the Golden Gate Bridge, the air clear and bright. Red-tailed hawks, over-excited toddlers, fighting kites. Jeremy borrowed a kite and immediately slew two hapless rivals. Beneath his mild-mannered exterior, &c. I sat and watched him and thought of my dad, former president of the Australian Kiteflyers Society, and how I used to sit and watch him fly kites at Tanya Park.

Oh, and Jamey, Carole and Rowan are hereinafter known as the S’mores, because they’re warm and sweet.

12 noon, C: Mummy! Daddy! An orange sock! It’s very dangerous!

9pm, J: Claire passed me a piece of curled-up orange thread and said: “Look! It’s an antler!”

I seem to have picked up Claire’s cold. It’s mostly manifesting as a fiercely sore throat. All hail over-the-counter painkillers. If it weren’t for the Tylenol I’ve been knocking back this evening, the girls would have been given away.

The best part of the day was sitting on the floor of the preschool, chatting to Molly, Ethan, Ada and Claire. Although shopping with Quinn at Rainbow was also fun. I bought pie!

When I woke up this morning, Jules was curled into me like a barnacle.

Also today: Claire’s first pair of Levi’s, Julia’s first laugh.

I was really tired, so I invited Jamey, Rowan, Shannon, Bryan, Cian, Ruairi, Salome, Jack and Milo over for dinner. Yeah, I know.

After a play at Aquatic Park in Berkeley yesterday – Jamey was going to meet us, but went to Aquatic Park in San Francisco by mistake – I succumbed to the siren song of Rockridge Kids, my favourite store for Claire-n-Jules stuff in spite of the fact that it’s RILLY RILLY EXPENSIVE. They carry all my favourite brands, Britax and Zutano and New Native and Maclaren, this last one being the point, because I really needed to replace the ancient Kolkraft double stroller now on its fourth family.

I love my marigold Volo with a foolish passion, so I didn’t even look at the (far cheaper) Peg or Graco twin strollers. (In my defense, I didn’t look at the much spendier Bugaboo or Stokke Xplory either.) While I was examining the Maclaren Rally Twin, Claire found the matching doll stroller, both blue-ringed like octopi. I wasn’t sure about the design until Jeremy said he liked it; then, because I am impressionable, I liked it too.

Turns out the doll and twin strollers were both the last of that design, so we bought the floor models for ten percent off! Yay! So this morning Claire loaded one doll into the stroller and another into her doll sling and said “Two babies! Like mummy!”

Julia was surprised!

“You have a spooky nose. No, you have a sharp nose. I have a sharp nose too. Daddy has a sharp nose. Julia has a sharp, little nose.”

Last night we took down the Christmas tree, and today the recyclers picked it up for mulch. We bought it from Delancey Street, so I feel like it did good deeds coming and going. It was also amazingly beautiful, festooned with lights and inexpensive ornaments from IKEA. Thank you, tree.

Claire’s language is coming along at the speed of light, and I have ridiculous nostalgia for the baby talk she no longer uses. She used to hold her arms up and say “Tawwy!” Now it’s, “I want to be carried, please.” She still says “Twick or tweet!” and “I like it the playground” and when drawing attention to something will repeat it without drawing breath, for emphasis: “A moon a moon!” But her verb forms and gender pronouns are conforming to standard English and soon her rich baby patois will disappear, the only traces of it being the tender in-jokes Jeremy and I trade.

It’s been an intense winter, what with Julia arriving and Mrs Bud dying and me setting foot in a church again. It’s pretty clear to me that I no longer believe in the virgin birth or the resurrection, if I ever did, but I do believe in the incarnation. My faith boils down to this: unto us a child is born. Any child, anywhere; every child a potential prince of peace. And even if it is, it can count on being hounded to death.

Nevertheless. Kids are the hope bombs we lob into the unknowable future, and not for ourselves alone, but for everyone we love and have loved.

Tuchman’s The Proud Tower was an exquisitely timely pick. Pesce just finished her A Distant Mirror, and I picked up Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation, which references The Proud Tower on page seven. (Claire liked The Proud Tower too. She tore into it this morning, but Jeremy fixed it with Scotch tape.)

Julia has added two new moods to asleep and surprised! – perturbation and delight. Perturbation, which is rare, is expressed in a series of stern bleats addressed to any person or persons suspected of withholding milk or cuddles. Delight is even rarer, and results in mild beaming. Mostly, though, she continues to be asleep or surprised!

So what do I do all day, with Claire at preschool and Julia sleeping contentedly in her sling? I read, and I think curmudgeonly thoughts. I caught up on what are supposed to have been some good recent novels: Empire Falls, Middlesex and The Hours. All three featured some nice unflashy realist prose that was completely undercut by wildly implausible yet cinematic deaths seventy minutes in. Literary fiction has dwindled into the film treatment.

I fled to the nineteenth century, where George Eliot took me in her arms. I haven’t read her masterpiece Middlemarch in fifteen years, and in that time I have almost completed the transition from Dorothea to (I hope) a Tertius Lydgate who made a sensible marriage. What an aggravating prig Dorothea can be. I actually feel very sorry for Casaubon, whose reach merely exceeded his grasp.

Dorothea should have married Lydgate. Would there, then, have been a novel? Lydgate’s gradual slide into debt and dishonour is brilliantly and convincingly portrayed, so much so that it made me anxious. The oddest thing about Middlemarch is that, to me, it reads more like Trollope’s best novel than anything written by the author of The Mill on the Floss or Adam Bede. I don’t mean that a woman couldn’t have written it; just that it examines Trollope’s real interests (and mine) – money and career – more than the somewhat sentimental affection for the landless that seems to dominate Eliot’s other books.

Rocket Boys was a Christmas gift from Jeremy. In the last days of this pregnancy we finally got the NetFlix queue moving again, and after three spectacularly good picks – The Station Agent, The Triplets of Belleville and The Barbarian Invasions – we watched October Sky, the film and also anagram of Rocket Boys. The script was so ploddingly awful I had to throw cushions at the TV to alleviate my impotent rage, but the book is engrossing, as much for its portrait of a dying West Virginia coal town as for the rocketry.

In order to get out, Homer Hickham had to go to college; and that basic truth underpins Locked in the Cabinet, the memoir of Robert Reich, labor secretary in the first Clinton Administration. Reich’s modest, funny, fascinating book (much better than Stephanopoulos’s All Too Human) plots the political failures of 1992-96: how deficit hawks killed Reich’s dreams of investment in job training and education to expand the skilled US workforce; how Reich’s own naivete undermined his position and left him isolated at the far left of the Cabinet; how Clinton’s early ambitions eroded before the pressure of securing re-election.

It is uncomfortable reading, especially when Reich describes the ideologues elected in the 1994 midterms. There was no negotiating with Gingrich and his cronies Armey and Delay, who came to Washington brandishing the Contract With America and determined to wrest power away from the Democrats for good. They succeeded. It was the beginning of the godawful mess we’re in now.

JFK was reading Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and some credit it with helping him keep his nerve. (The Bob McNamara documentary The Fog of War, another great Netflix pick, is terrifying on Cuba.) Tuchman’s The Proud Tower has a chapter on the anarchist movement at the turn of the last century, describing the theorists pressing in print for “the propaganda of the deed” and the bombers and assassins who took them at their word.

The parallels with Islamofascism (and Christofascism for that matter) – decentralized and feeding on a dispossessed and emasculated populace, practically impossible to contain – are unsettling. As Ian pointed out to me the other day, there’s no way to monitor what’s going on inside someone’s mind, and it’s amazing the kinds of havoc lone gunmen can achieve these days. Ah, progress.

Julia is awake. Julia is surprised!

“And then the dragon and the ice bat. And they went ALL the way UP in the CLOUDS. And then asleep. Then awake! Sleep. Awake! And then Mummy, and Daddy, and Cian, and Rowan, and Ada: and then they went to SCHOOL!”