Day Trip: San Juan Capistrano

I was eager to get out of town for Mother's Day, to take a drive and see some new sights. The Husband had a few suggestions: Idyllwild? Shoreline Village in Long Beach? Old Town Orange? All lovely, and all places I've been  plenty of times. (In fact, we used to live in walking distance of Old Town Orange, which is not to imply that we lived in the beautiful historic neighborhood near the Circle. )

But I was craving something new, and so suggested the historic district of San Juan Capistrano. Located in southern Orange County, the town is most famous for the mission and its swallows, but we didn't tour the mission.  I'd visited Capistrano before as a child several times and toured the mission, but it's been years since my last visit. 

It was a hot hot toasty day on that Sunday, and though SJC is near the coast, it was far enough inland that it was still plenty hot.We stayed primarily in the Los Rios section, which is the oldest residential neighborhood in the entire state. Below are lots of photos to give you the flavor of this historic place.

Our trip took us over the steep and winding Ortega Highway, which runs from eastern San Juan Capistrano, over the mountains of the Cleveland National Forest, to Lake Elsinore. (From Elsinore you can continue on Highway 74 all the way to Palm Desert.)

A garden with mexican primrose, cactus and drought-tolerant plants.

The Montanez Adobe below was built around 1850.

Another old adobe, owned by the Los Rios family:

Another funky cool old house:
Detail of Pancho Villa on the front door. According to my grandmother, her father (my great-grandfather) rode with Villla in Mexico. 

Cute retail shops, tea rooms and restaurants line the street. We didn't eat at any of the cafes; the one I liked was only offering a Mother's Day Brunch menu at $50 per person, no matter the age. Um, no to the $200 brunch. 

Me and my monkeys on the train tracks. (Popular photo-op spot. We had to wait for a great big family taking pics here.) 

 Here are some old, crumbling walls at the Mission, taken from the sidewalk outside the high walls.

I would like to go back on a day that's not quite so hot, and not quite so crowded, to spend more time, check out more of the shops, and tour the mission. There's also a cute and very kid-friendly petting zoo on the outskirts of the Los Rios district. No doubt the kids would've loved that, but it was Mother's Day after all. I wasn't up to standing in the heat, in my dress, for over an hour while the kids did their thing. I'm selfish like that.

Another take-away: everyone in our family was inspired by the Metrolink and Amtrack trains pulling into the old depot. We ate lunch at the (very stuffy) restaurant inside the depot and got to watch all the trains. It would be awesome to take a ride up the coast somewhere! None of our family has ever used the train as transportation to somewhere else.  How fun. Another item for our to-do list.

For the trip home, we went down the 5 freeway and caught the 76 east in Oceanside.  We quickly moved from heat and blazing sun, to dense and chilly fog:

Another great day trip, and another great Mother's Day with my sweet little family.

Hello, Monday {pinks & blues}

Hola! It's hot hot hot in SoCal today, especially out here in the Inland valley where I live. I've already kicked off the summer season by earning my first sun-rash -- anytime I spend too long baking outdoors without sunblock, I get these slightly raised bumps on my inner forearms and thighs the next day. Weird.  It started about 5 years ago -- another benefit of aging, I guess.

Anyway. I titled this post "Pinks & Blues," in honor of how I spent the weekend. It was a really, really nice one, beginning with the Husband letting me & Lily sleep in on Saturday and not have to hustle out the door for Tucker's early soccer game. I didn't actually sleep in, but not having to be dressed and out the door at 7:30 was huge. I'm so not a morning person...

Instead, I enjoyed my leisurely coffee and then went out to the backyard to tend and prune my roses. I so don't have a green thumb either, but somehow these roses keep thriving year after year. (We didn't plant them, they came with the house.)

Hello, gorgeous pink and apricot roses. The bees sure love you, too.   

 Just look at that color --- these pics are all shot from my phone, but I didn't use any filters. Bonus: these roses actually smell like roses, too. Not like the scentless varieties usually sold in grocery stores.

 After an hour of work, I had this big pile of dead and fading blooms. Clearly I need to prune much more often, but they don't seem too worse for my neglect. 

 After the gardening, it was time to clean up and get to Lily's soccer game...where she scored her first goal in three seasons. Whoop whoop! It was a big moment. Fist bumps and high fives all around.  This photo celebrates blue (her team is the Blue Thunder) and pink. Just look at her sweaty, blotchy face. It was hot out there. (This is when I sat out in the sun for an hour and earned my sun-rash.)

Hello my proud and happy, hard-playing girl.

 Afterward, it was time to cool down by visiting our HOA pool for the first time this year. See this below? Me and my toes in the shade, watching the clouds float by while the kids played. Big life change in Mom-World: when I don't have to hover and be in the pool to keep anyone from drowning. For years I've eyed those moms in the shade, with their cold drinks and magazines, with jealousy. And now it's my turn!

Hello to blue skies and aqua blue water.  Do those palm trees below look familiar? They're the same ones I use up there on my blog banner.

 Hello, sweet children. I came upon them drying off and holding hands. Not a staged pose, I swear. A scene to warm any mother's heart.

 Finally, hello to pink and pinker bougainvillea, growing on an arbor above a white-picket fence. For Mother's Day, we drove across the Ortega Highway to the old town of San Juan Capistrano in south Orange County.

After my hints about Mother's Day, you knew we were going go somewhere. More on our trip to SJC soon.

Hello to a hot Monday.  Hello to only 4 more weeks left in our school year! I better get that cleaning-out and organizing I want to tackle done soon.

Hello to iced coffee this morning and flip-flops and walking to get some fro-yo tonight after dinner.

Hello to getting back to writing again. Just a short break last week, and it's hard to pick it back up. 

Hello to another week that's going to fly by too fast.  So Gather ye rose buds while ye may/Old Time is still a-flying: And this same flower that smiles to-day/Tomorrow will be dying.  

Don't my rose bushes know it!

Linking up with Lisa Leonard for Hello, Mondays

Mother's Day for the Soccer Mom

Mother's Day.  What are your plans?  I don't have any, that I know of. And since my husband isn't a planner, I'm confident there aren't "secret plans" in the works.

I can tell you that I really hope to get the hell out town and go somewhere. The tyranny of our soccer Saturdays has got me down. Frankly, I don't know how other parents handle having multiple kids in competitive league sports. My own kids just play recreational soccer, which means that in 2 weeks, we'll be finished with games and practices for 3 months, until "Fall" season starts up in late August.

But kids in league/club/competitive teams play all year. No stopping. Like the Energizer Bunny, the sport keeps going and going and going, with constant practices, camps, games, tournaments, charity games, etc. I have no worries that Lily will play competitive sports  any time soon, but Tucker....he's pretty darn good at soccer, and he likes it a lot, and he's young.  He's already been recruited once to play competitive, and we said no at the time.  But that threat looms out there, in the future. Should we choose to go there. It's a big, big commitment. (Financially, too.)  I don't want to think about it yet.

My point is that, with kids in competitive league sports, your weekends pretty much get dictated for you. And your job as a parent is to be a good sport and support them and consider the other team parents like a 2nd family and shut up and drive them around. No offense, but that sounds...horrible.  Call me selfish, but I prefer to have our weekends free as a family, to go here, or there, to wander someplace new, or visit favorite getaways.

In light of Mother's Day, here are a couple of old, old slide photos of getaways with me and my mom. She doesn't know I have a blog, so I don't think it's quite fair to put her face out there on the 'net.  But she's pretty much in shadow in both of these shots, yet not so much in shadow that you can't appreciate her rockin' early-'70s style.

Here we are, down in Baja, probably in the fishing village of San Felipe.  My grandpa used to take our family down there every spring. Those trips are some of very earliest memories, and definitely my earliest memories of being at the ocean. 

And here we are, somewhere in the Eastern Sierras. The slide reel says "Mammoth," but there are some Yosemite shots in there, too.

Two ladies in hats. And, are you pausing to marvel at my awesome tic-tac-toe pants?  Yeah.

Finally, here's a shot of me welcoming my grandma to our house. That's my grandpa's awesome camper, and I think they're coming over to help prep and pack for our trip down to Baja. The sight of that camper invokes such nostalgia AND such wanderlust, that I can't even handle it.

Truly, I don't care about going to a fancy, overpriced brunch for Mother's Day.  But I really hope my husband has topped off the tank and is ready to get outta town. Hint, hint, honey. (Hey, at least I'm not linking to expensive jewelry on my Pinterest boards.) 

Have a good weekend. Soccer on Saturday, but who knows where Sunday may take us...

Poem for a Hot Friday

Hola. You know where I've been, write?  Wink wink.  I'm not supposed to bore y'all to death by talking about it, but on the other hand...

I'm raising a glass to myself this week, for finishing a piece for the first time in...oh, a decade? It's a personal memoir essay, and could've been longer, but I edited it down to about 4,400 words.  There was a deadline involved, as I'd seen a call for submissions online, which is why I worked hard to actually finish and submit it in time. 

It's about...shopping. Specifically, the lost era of great department stores, the ones unique to Southern California. But it's also about the women in my family, and me, and how our relationships changed (and not for the better) over the course of my childhood & teenage years. I wrote of bygone places where I spent hours and hours of my life, like here:

Image via.

In other news, the past two days have been wonderfully hot and toasty. On Tuesday night, the stiff  breezes from the ocean pushed in the clouds inland, and I sat in my car during Tucker's soccer practice because it was so chilly. And also,  I wanted to finish typing the essay into my laptop, and would feel like a pretentious twat doing that in my folding chair on the sidelines, with the other moms who actually talk to each other. 

But last night, I wore shorts and basked in the setting sun, and read a magazine. The golden light was beautiful. Mmmmm....heat wave.

Finally, here's a Google Search poem for you. Have you heard of them? You create them all the time, when you enter a search term into Google, and see the drop-down list of some of its more frequent searches/suggestions for you. They are often unintentionally eloquent.  On Wednesday, wrapping up my essay, I did a search to find out when two favorite department stores closed for good. 

And here's mine:

When did The B
Berlin Wall Fall?

When did the
Beatles break up?

When did the 
Big Bang occur?

When did the
Black Death start?

A little dark, but it's got a good rhythm. (And if you're from around these parts, you can probably figure out what store I was typing in.)  If you'd like to read more of these poems, written by all us Googling chimps at a billion keyboards, check out this Tumblr page, Google Poetics.

Happy Friday! See you next week.

He Stopped Loving Her Today

A Friday music post, but not about an L.A.-based artist. Instead, I woke up this morning to the news that George Jones has died.

Well, goddamn. I wasn't too surprised -- thanks to his fan page on Facebook, I knew he was in the hospital.  What was shocking to me is how old he was -- 81.  That's a long time to hang on with the lifestyle Jones lived --- he was kind of the Ozzy Osbourne of country when it came to substance abuse and hard drinking and wild living. (I don't think there's any story about snorting ants, but he did shoot out the floor of his tour bus.)

My daddy lived a similar kind of lifestyle (sans the cocaine abuse), and like George, slowed down and cleaned up a bit in his later years -- but my dad's later years only lasted until he was 64.  It was six years ago this month that he passed away. I sometimes joked with my dad that he had the devil on his side, but that seems to be much more true with George.  I mean, scientists should really have access to study the man's iron liver.

I mention my dad so much because George Jones will always remind me of him -- my dad loved his music, and played it loudly, sometimes so loud that the neighbors could enjoy it too. In the early 1980s, George's career had a big resurgence at the same time that my dad went through a series of meltdowns and binges and bad decisions, and Jones and a handful of other country artists provided the soundtrack.

Jones' voice was a honky-tonk yowl of pain and heartbreak and late nights after last call with nowhere to go. His songs remind me of that time in my family's history, and oh, the stories I could tell.

My dad's own favorite George Jones song was his classic "He Stopped Loving Her Today," about a man who vowed, "I'll love her 'til I die."  When that song came out, it took me forever to figure out that the man had actually died: "I went to see him just today/oh but I didn't see no tears/all dressed up to go away/first time I'd seen him smile in years."  But I didn't need anyone to explain the sadness of that warble, or why my dad would dab at this eyes when the song was through.

But I'm not going to link to that song, and I'm not going to play you the song that most reminds me personally of my daddy, "Bartender's Blues," because that song hits too close and too precisely on all my hurting places. It's barely noon here, people. I can't start drinking this early, even if it is Friday.

So here's a happy medium, or rather, here's a maudlin one:
If Drinking Don't Kill Me, Her Memory Will.

This song triggers a lot of memories for me, too. But not quite enough to make me chuck the afternoon away and instead go down to the 7-11 for a pack of Marlboros and a pint of Beam.

Happy Friday, folks. Have a good weekend, and go call your daddy while you still can. If not, listen to some George, and wallow with me.

Hello, Monday {Mirrors}

I pinky-swear I'm not going to start every single post for the rest of the year talking about writing, but indulge me again today. It's what I've been up to, so there's that.

Also, we've been laying pretty low as a family, not doing too much or going anywhere. We have soccer practices 4 nights a week (2 kids, doing Tues/Thurs  and Wed/Fri), plus 2 games every Saturday. So that alone has eaten up a huge chunk of free family time. (Also, I'm already sick of our quickie dinners that we prepare and choke down by 5:30 on practice days.)

So, the writing and the soccer are looming large as part of my routine.  With all the time spent alone with pen and paper, and the time spent alone on the sidelines, or in my car during practice, I'm feeling even extra introverted and thoughtful.

As I've mentioned to a few people and here on the blog, I'm writing a memoir. Because navel-gazing and oversharing here on the internet is just not enough!  I need more!  (That's a joke.)

But it does mean that I'm looking at myself, my life, my story, very closely.  Not to give too much away, but one could say that I had an awfully interesting childhood.  And it wasn't because I was (or am) so very interesting myself.

Conversely, I give you this Flannery O'Connor quote:  "Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days."  We've all got a story to tell, whatever the amount or lack of perceived drama.

What is proving difficult is writing about people who have the gall to still be alive and leading their own interesting lives.  I mean, the nerve, right? And I'm trying to temper what I know now, with what I knew then, and who I was and who they used to be. Confused? Yeah, me too.

As I look into the rear-view mirror of the past, I want to be kind. I want to be large-hearted and take the longer view, rather than the short-term one, which easily could lead down a path of anger and bitterness.  Lord knows, there's been enough of that in my family to go around.

On the other hand, I think of the great line of advice I got up at the memoir retreat last month: Write as though you've been dead for 6 months.  Dead, where nobody's wrath or disappointment or disagreement with what you have to say can touch you anymore. You are floating above the fray.

So hello this Monday, to remembering that honesty is one of my best traits. And hello, to knowing that avoiding conflict is one of my worst habits.  Hello to wrestling with both, up in my brain and down on the page.

Hello and hurray, to finishing the first draft of an essay that I hope to submit to an anthology. Even if writing the last sentence made me cry.

Hello, and hurray, to deadlines. How else would this procrastinator get anything done?

Hello to sunny days and breezy evenings, watching my children run and run after a ball. Such a simple thing, and I'm grateful for these simple days, of sun and soccer and trying everyday to do and be your best self. Emphasis on the trying.

Linking up with Lisa Leonard for Hello, Mondays