This morning is perfect that way. A little autumn briskness in the air, beautiful clear day, and nothing much to do except pad around the house, take care of things that need taking care of, and be together. It’s great to be busy (and we are busy, starting around lunchtime), but sort of magic to start the day with family and no real commitments. And nice especially because it was Kathy & my 11th wedding anniversary yesterday. (And incredibly, we’ve known each other more than 26 years now. Doesn’t seem like there was ever a time when we didn’t.)

So we’ve got music on shuffle and on comes Simon & Garfunkel — a little old school, but still amazing. “Kathy’s Song” came on — one of my favorite songs of all time. And reminded me a lot of my favorite blog post that I’ve ever written.

Anyway, for me Halloween always marks a transition into the part of the year that’s a headlong rush through Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year — love the season, but it’s a bit of a sprint from here.

Nice to get ready for it with a quiet morning together.

It’s tragic to lose him — he was just 45, was an amazing husband and father and friend and practically an uncle to SPL. Tragic that he left behind an amazing wife and 6 year old daughter. And made more tragic because he died at his own hand, after suffering from depression.

Kathy & I have really been struggling with it as everything’s unfolded this week — not even in the same universe as how the family’s affected, of course, but it’s caused a lot of soul searching and emotionally tough time.

There are so many different aspects, each of which seems too gigantic to really get a handle on. How to understand it in the context of his life? How to help his wife and daughter? How to talk about it with SPL, who loved him so much? And how to think about it all in the context of our own lives?

I think not too many of those questions are answerable quickly, or maybe at all, really. For myself, I have 3 main things I’m thinking about while Kathy’s at the memorial, celebrating his life.

1. Life can change profoundly for us in the space of a day, or an hour or a minute. Need to pay attention to now, need to enjoy those around us.

2. It’s an amazing thing to be with friends during a time of extreme emotional distress — it’s obviously so, so hard, but it’s also an opportunity for profound grace and dignity to show through, and that’s what’s manifestly evident this week with his wife and daughter. Such grace and strength in the face of so much uncertainty ahead.

But mostly, we’ll miss him and the influence he had on everyone around him. He was always so generous, so engaged, so happy to share time and joy. Kathy & SPL especially loved spending time with him and his family so much.

It was our first game of the season, and since we have an uneven number of teams in the league, we had a bye week – so we traveled to another nearby region to scrimmage their bye team, too.

We went to the wrong field, as did all the other parents, so we had about half the boys show up. They play by different rules (bigger goals, goalies, 5×5, instead of small goals, no keepers, 4×4). We were all late. No referee, first game of the season, and some emotional reactions to getting scored on by some bigger kids on the other side. And really no subs for our squad, which made for a pretty long 40 minutes.

First half was tough; second half was a lot better, and the boys really worked hard at getting better — the effort and focus showed; I was very proud of all of them. Some were a little discouraged at the end, but the snack and talking for a few minutes about what each of us did really well and the effort we gave helped a bunch.

But then everyone was off to the play structure and was happy. Best thing about traveling to a new region/school/playground is the novelty of their play structure.

Just a simple, Saturday morning reminder that lots of things don’t go like you want them to, lots of situations spin out of control from the start. But it’s all good if you get out and try your best, learn something, and get a little time with your friends on the play structure at the end.

Also, it’s a humbling thing to try to coach 10 6 year olds. Seems like such a small, constrained set of things to think about — not many kids on the field, not too much action at one time, no real strategy. But I’ll tell you: the games and practices seem to fly right by — it’s so much to pay attention to all happening at once — trying to nudge so many kids in the right direction, while they’re all learning so incredibly fast. It’s an amazing thing — always feels pretty chaotic, but also deeply rewarding.

It’s about the bittersweetness and ephemeral nature of being a parent — the overwhelming feeling that I’ve had ever since SPL was born is happiness mixed with an acute awareness of how quickly time moves, how quickly SPL is changing and growing and developing.

It seems to me that the essential nature of being a parent is building and creating, and then always letting go. Letting go of the kid that lived in your house yesterday, accepting that they’ve changed and are becoming the person they’ll be tomorrow. It’s been hard for me to explain to people without kids; it’s been universally & immediately understood by my friends with kids.

I’ll talk about it here in the context of our trip to Disneyland this summer.

Now, it’s easy to be cynical about The Walt Disney Company and the various parks and properties that they run — and I’m often cynical myself about them. But I have to say that I really love going to Disney World and Disneyland — I always have — and I really, really love going with Kathy & SPL. I love being there, I love exploring with them, and none of the machinery of manipulation of the place really bothers me all that much.

This year, with SPL being 6, was a fun mix of wanting to venture out on his own and wanting to hug tight to Kathy and me. It felt like we’re crossing a line towards more and more independence.

So here’s a story in 4 pictures.

Above and beyond everything else, the trip is a time that the three of us get concentrated, dedicated time with not much to worry about other than just being a family.

One of the best parts about an experience like this is the combination of familiar and completely new things to experience together. Above is a picture of SPL & me watching one of the parades, talking about what we saw together, processing it together.

At just 6 years old, SPL still gets excited by the characters, loves hugs and holding close. We didn’t get too many pictures of it, but lots of times SPL grabbed onto Kathy and me — he’s still small enough that he wants the safety of his parents, and isn’t really 100% ready to take on the experiences by himself.

Still, my favorite picture of the trip this year is this one:

It’s on one of the smaller roller coasters in the park — in Toon Town, and this was the very first time he was able to ride the coaster by himself (I was in the seat behind, obviously).

I just love this picture because it represents so much about the way SPL is beginning to engage with the world now — in an “arms up, even though it’s a little scary for me” mode.

And as hard as it is when on the 2nd day of kindergarten he shoos you out of the room or runs away from you across the playground — and it is hard, and emotional — again, tough to describe to anyone without kids.

As hard as that feeling is to experience, it’s also exactly, exactly the thing you want for your child. An eagerness to engage with the new, to run unafraid towards the unknown.

So for me, that’s the essential quality of being a parent. Spending endless hours building and caring, and then just letting go and watching. The wisest thing anyone’s said to me since SPL was born is this: “The days are long, but the years are short.” That seems awfully right to me, and sort of wonderful, too.

–

Kathy’s been gone to Kentucky for a few days for her grandmother’s funeral (and celebration of a vibrant life well-lived), which means that SPL and I have been on our own. It’s the first time that he and I have been on our own for more than about a day, and it’s been a really interesting experience. And really good for us, I think — I’m coming to a bunch of different realizations.

First off, a prosaic one that’s going to sound completely obvious: being the sole adult responsible for a child is an incredible, consuming responsibility. There are no real breaks, there aren’t any times when you’re able to totally think about non-kid-related work. You’re always either just coming in from dropping him off somewhere or about to pick him up, or wondering whether you remembered to put his lunch together or reminded him to wear socks or some other damn thing. It’s constant, in ways that I’m not used to. And it’s a lot of work. So many things to keep track of.

Now, don’t misunderstand. I know that lots of people deal with lots more complex lives than my life with just one essentially well-behaved five year old. I’ll tell you candidly: I have no idea how single parents with more than 1 kid do it. Profound, profound respect for those that do.

Second, also obvious: Kathy makes everything go here; she makes everything possible. I feel like I’m a very involved dad, but man, the stuff that she takes care of all day long every day is just about rocket science for me to remember. Let’s just say that SPL would be a significantly hungrier, more sunburned, and more hatless kid if I were in charge. Kathy’s everything here.

But beyond all the details of making a kid’s life work and balancing that with your own work, I’m learning a lot by being with SPL so many more hours each day. Since it’s just the two of us, we sort of process our days with each other exclusively (he does it by talking about which super-villians we’re pretending to be, but you know, he’s five. It’s cool.).

I’m finding that without Kathy, I tend to be too focused on getting things done, getting all our chores done, making use of the time we have. Today was a busy day and we did a lot, including ordering new glasses for me (5 years overdue), replacing my 9 year old car, getting haircuts for both of us, doing a workout, and various other chores. We played a little Lego Star Wars, too, which is good, but I can’t really figure out how to get past this one level in Episode 1, so I might have to do some research tonight. SPL did amazingly well throughout, but by the end of the day he was a little more fragile emotionally than usual. I think it’s because I didn’t build in a bunch of down time in the schedule just to play and be five. There’s a harder, more focused edge to the way I think about time that probably doesn’t give SPL everything he needs. So I’m a little too focused, I think.

Interestingly, I’m finding I’m also not focused enough — that is, I’m not focused quite enough on the right things about some of our interactions. I’m too distracted, thinking about too many other things.

My takeaway here, other than the obvious one that Kathy does so much to make our family work, and that the three of us form a really special and functional unit, is that I want to reorient what I focus on, that I need to struggle again (and always) to be more present and in the moment. None of this is that new, it’s just more profoundly and acutely felt when you get a few days together with another soul — and that’s another takeaway: dedicated, exclusive, coherent time with your family moves relationships ahead unlike anything else.

So: we’re missing Kathy and are glad she’ll be back tomorrow; have gotten a ton of stuff done; are planning on not doing much at all tomorrow until Kathy gets back into SFO; and: I’m a lucky, lucky guy, for lots of reasons, chief of which are Kathy and SPL.

So we were pretty overjoyed about it, and still are. Of course, like in any endeavor, you celebrate and move on, and now we’re puzzling over any number of implications and next steps.

As we’ve been talking about it with other parents, everyone has been hugely supportive and congratulatory, and ask how we’re feeling about it. And as we’ve been answering, what’s become clear to me is this: parenting is a series of decisions that could have profound implications years from now that you have no way of really, truly understanding now. There’s an unfortunate lack of data on what works in education generally, let alone in language immersion programs.

(Although it’s important to say this: we know a LOT more about what works in education than we actually use in practice. Lots and lots of reasons for this: many are industry structural, many are cultural — we have a lot to learn about best practices in teaching still, in a data-and-outcome-oriented way — but it would be a big step to be able to use what we DO know.)

In the case of SPL and Mandarin, we really are excited about it, and SPL is, too. But it’s very hard to tell what it will mean in the long term. It’s been really clear so far that learning Chinese and English at the same time (since he was about 3) has been challenging, and that it’s affected the order of his skill development (in particular in terms of reading and writing, since he’s learning a couple of very different systems simultaneously). There’s some new research that suggests that in general, dual-language learners develop more slowly in terms of reading & writing until about 4th grade, at which point they catch up and develop normally. There’s other literature that suggests that kids who grow up bilingual have better executive function as adults, presumably because their brains become good at making snap decisions on which language to use in any given situation.

But in truth, who the hell knows? The data sets we have on this stuff are vanishingly small. As I wrote about Ohlone, in our experience there just aren’t any other schools that are constructivist and whole child and Mandarin immersion — so the data we have to look at is really just the 4 classes that have come before us. So we’ll see.

I’m not saying we haven’t worked the angles on this. Like so many of our friends, we can be a little, um…detail-obsessed and maybe even have OCD tendencies. And since Kathy’s a teacher, you might imagine that we’ve done a lot of thinking and talking about this with lots of friends and educators. And so we have good feelings about it, based on pretty good reasoning.

In that way, parenting is sort of like trying to operate a startup. You never have nearly the information you need to make decisions; and lots of times when you’re trying to make certain decisions you not only don’t even understand the implications of what you’re deciding, but often don’t even really understand the data that you think you do.

So now we’re off to the races. Will SPL embrace his Chinese over the years? Will he work in China 20 years from now? Will he reject it like so many kids reject piano lessons? How will it affect the way he thinks, the way he looks at the world, the way he makes his own way?

We don’t know — we’ve really got no idea at all. But that’s sort of the mystery and the magic of it. We’ll learn as we go. Nobody’s seen this particular movie before, and that’ll make it challenging, and interesting, and human.

It was a nice service, and nice weekend with my family – a group that I love and admire so much. Everyone who spoke about Gigi talked about her sense of humor, and her sharp tongue. And when the church pastor, during the homily for your funeral, mentions how sharp your sense of humor is, well, that’s something distinctive. (He quoted Jack as saying, “She could bury you with a single word.”) Makes me smile to think of that – and I guess I know that I myself come by that particular character trait honestly.

And of course, books and Gigi reading them to kids, were featured prominently.

There were probably a couple hundred people there, from the island, from Brunswick, from Jacksonville and beyond. I think we had the service that she wanted. (And in fact, I know that we did, as she left extremely detailed instructions regarding, well, pretty much all the details. Also characteristic of her.)

And while only my brother David and I will really feel this, it’ll always be hard to think of this weekend without thinking about another day in August in south Georgia when we buried my dad’s father (Grandee is what we called him) 15 years ago.

The two experiences were incredibly different from each other – just as different as the two families are, really. Quitman, where Grandee lived most of his life and where my dad grew up, is a tiny, tiny town about 60 miles north of Tallahassee – and what I remember the most from those days was the funeral procession through the town, with the police at the intersections with their hats over their hearts, and then how impossibly light he was in the coffin was when we laid him to rest.

Gigi’s service was very different, though – she was cremated a couple of weeks ago, and before the larger church service we had a very small gathering of just the family and the pastor to put her ashes in the memorial garden of the church. No body, no pall bearers like at Grandee’s funeral, just us, with my uncles and brother putting her ashes into the garden. It was a good remembrance, and honored who she was.

What connects the two events most viscerally for me, other than the obvious relationship, is that I think I’ll always remember how hot and humid it was both times – a characteristic Georgia heat that makes you sweat almost immediately when you step outside – and all of us in our ties and dresses and nice clothes.

Anyway, two completely different experiences, different families, separated by 15 years. But for my brother and me, these two August days will always be connected by the heat of the Georgia summer, and of remembering and honoring our grandparents.

But I’ve been struggling with moving between roles the past few days — and it’s got nothing to do with online life — but I would wager is a decidedly non-modern one.

Kathy & I took SPL to Disneyland for his first trip there. We’d been on some smaller outings, like to Legoland, but I’ve really wanted to take him to Anaheim for quite a while. There are lots of reasons to be cynical about Disney and Disneyland/Disney World, but I’m not — I really love it there. I love how it feels, even with crowds. I love all the colliding mythologies. Most of all, I love how it makes kids feel when they ride Space Mountain or interact with characters during the parades or watch the fireworks over Sleeping Beauty Castle.

I’ve been to the parks in Anaheim and Orlando both many times, but obviously it was our first trip as the parents of a 5 year old — so lots of new things to consider in that role.

But we knew earlier in the week that Gigi was in the hospital and might not make it out — and Friday morning before we left the hotel I got a call from Mom about Gi’s prognosis; a few hours later Mom called again to let me know that Gigi had passed away. We were in line for a ride at the California Adventure side of the park (bumper cars for the Bug’s Life section), but the specifics aren’t that important, really.

What is important was that at that moment, a bunch of roles I have all crashed into each other at once. I was trying to be a good son for my mother, who had just said good-bye to her own mother. And I was trying to communicate at least a little bit with Kathy, my partner in all things, so she would know what was happening. The line was moving, though, and SPL was anxious to get into the seat of the bumper car so we could crash into his mother’s car — and so I wanted to be a good attentive dad for him. Over the top of all that, though, and of course, I was mostly Gigi’s grandson, and mostly Gigi’s grandson just felt sad.

I felt those roles all collide with each other a lot over the next couple of days — sort of like waves crashing at the beach one would come in, and then later be overwhelmed by a different one. It was a hard set of feelings to really understand and process and deal with appropriately — I don’t honestly know whether I’ve processed this much yet at all. (Which is one of the reasons that I’m  blogging it — to be able to understand it a little bit better.)

I do know that I was much more aware of the roles that I play in life this week — and in particular, the roles that really, really matter a lot to me. I think it helped me clarify some of the things I love about being a father, a husband, a son — but I know this is all a bit of a moving target. Things change, relationships change.

Mostly, I was very happy to be able to spend so much time with Kathy & SPL at a difficult juncture for me. That, I know for sure.

She was my mother’s mother, and I never knew her as May, really, but rather “Gigi,” a name she gave herself when I was born. It came from the old Pogo comic – there’s a character called Grundoon in it – a wrinkly baby woodchuck that always spoke in gibberish – and she thought I looked a little like that. Thus G.G. for “Grundoon’s Grandmother.” I’ve never really known what to make of that story (although, in retrospect, not really all that flattering) but she’s always just been Gigi to me.

A couple of little glimpses into my memories of her:

When I was growing up, she always used to send cards for about every holiday — birthday, Christmas, Easter, Halloween, whatever – and they always had a dollar bill in them. She moved to two dollars in the eighties, when I was in my teens and able to spend with more velocity. Those cards continued into college for me, and even after. In 1997, after I’d been working at Trilogy and then Apple, we saw each other at my Mom’s graduation ceremony (for her Masters in Library Science) and I remember proudly giving Gigi one of my Apple business cards. Without missing a beat, she said, “I’ve been sending $2 to a Senior Scientist at Apple??” Pretty funny. She was always super quick and super sharp with her humor — so that, at least, I come by honestly. She’s been sending SPL cards with a couple of dollars in them since he was born. A nice tradition and connection to her that always made me smile.

But the thing that I really remember about her is all the books. She owned a bookstore on St. Simons called The Shorebird, and one of my favorite things to do was to go to work with her. I would sit in the back and read everything back there, for what seemed like hours (but probably wasn’t) and remember feeling like I was a very lucky kid – and, of course, that’s exactly right.

I’ve been thinking about her a bunch the last few days, naturally, but especially because we’ve been at Disneyland, for SPL’s first visit there. One of my earliest memories is going to Walt Disney World with Gigi and the rest of the family (since they lived pretty close to Orlando), and it brings a lot of things full circle for me to be here now. More on that in a bit.

She leaves behind such a good family — my mom and her two brothers, who have been wonderful uncles (and now great uncles), and the seven grandkids (my cousins, my brother, and me), who are such a smart, funny, diverse, and talented group. No small feat.

Anyway, Gigi lived a good life, and I’ll miss her a lot.

R.I.P., May Pearce Korb, 1923 – 2010

I’ve been thinking a lot about books lately — obviously because of the developments of eBooks, but also because I’ve been home sick the past few days, reading as I get better, and just generally around all my books more of the time.

I happened to walk by a shelf in our living room filled with books from our family — mostly older books, and mostly from my dad’s mother (she was always “Grandmother” to me). When she died, I inherited a number of her Latin books, since I really loved learning Latin, and it was something that was important to her, too. For whatever reason, I picked one up off the shelf today — Cooper’s Virgil — an annotated collection of the writing of Virgil (who wrote The Aeneid, among other things).

Just picking it up, a million different things came up in my mind. Some reverence for how old it is. Fondness for the Latin work and friends I had in high school. Memories of Grandmother, always teaching, and pretty often whipping me in double solitaire, which I’m starting to teach SPL now.

Here’s the back cover page (you can click through to see it bigger):

Now the first thing you’ll notice is that the book is old. It looks like Gussie Raysor acquired it (or just signed it) on May 26, 1895, just about 115 years ago now.

Think of that. 1895 was when the first movie projector was patented. Queen Victoria was still alive, and Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t yet President of the United States. The Ford Motor Company wouldn’t be founded for another 8 years.

The next thing that I noticed was the name at the top — Laura Lilly — who is definitely not my grandmother, but instead was her sister-in-law — my grandfather’s sister. So that’s a little bit of humor there. I guess my grandfather stole the book from his sister (although I have to say that I can’t really imagine him giving much of a damn about Latin — unless it was some sort of prank, which I can imagine him caring about), and then the book got absorbed into Grandmother’s collection (given her love of language and learning and books, not too surprising). Gussie Raysor was my grandfather’s mother.

And so through this artifact that I’ve moved around several times over the past couple of decades, and that surely frustrated any number of Lillys as they tried to learn their declensions and conjugations and gerunds — through this simple artifact, a connection across the years was made. And with real impact and emotion in the present day.

That is a hell of a thing. It’s just really astonishing in simplicity and power.

Now, I’m not very nostalgic about books, I have to say. I thought I would be — I thought I’d miss their paper & binding shape with the advent of eBooks. But I really don’t — not at all, honestly. I prefer, in most cases, to read books on my Kindle now — which tells me, as I’ve written elsewhere, that what I really love is reading, not the physical forms themselves.

Still:

There’s something about physical artifacts that reaches across the ages. As I look around my own house and think about what objects with meaning will persist and SPL’s grandchildren will look at a hundred years from now, I’m not sure there are very many at all. There are lots of electronic artifacts, like this blog, even, if we can manage to keep them alive and safe from inevitable(?) bit-rot. But precious few things that will make it through the childhoods and moves and marriages and storms and whatever else that the next 100 years will bring.

So I’m glad to have these books of my grandmother’s with me. They mean something and they change who I am and how I experience the world because they’re here with me. And it’s probably time to think a little bit not in the backwards direction, but in the forwards direction, about what we want people to reflect over a hundred years hence.

Inspired by the movie trailers & John Hodgman’s tweets, I downloaded Coraline to my Kindle this weekend and read the book — it’s a short & fun read — took me less than a day.

It’s a fun story aimed at kids — a little dark, naturally — and I liked it a lot. Better, I thought, than his recent The Graveyard Book.

I’m getting more & more interested in stories and fairy tales for kids as SPL starts to experiment with points of view and narratives — so have been thinking a lot about Narnia, of course, and Tolkein, and Alice, and on and on. Thinking about the characteristics of the most memorable serial stories — I think the very best of these were basically constructed on the fly with an audience of 1 or 2 specific kids in mind.

I’m trying out modeling some of our nighttime stories on ones that I’ve read; sometimes it works, sometimes not so much. But it’s fun to think about, fun to experiment. It’s such a cliché to talk about “seeing through the eyes of a child,” but I have to tell you that it’s one of the chief aspects of being a parent — trying to understand how things must seem to the kid, what will be fun, what will be scary, what will make sense, what will teach. It’s a neat activity, and changing the way that my interactions work throughout my life, really.

Every so often I find myself in a situation with family or work and realize that something’s different, something’s new — and I try to take myself out of the moment a little bit to notice it.

This morning at the breakfast table, as I was packing up and getting ready to head into work, I was half-listening to SPL and his babysitter — they were talking in Mandarin to each other — but when I looked up, the subject matter was one of my own books from when I was a kid: Richard Scarry’s Busytown. And that caused me to think about how many of the little vignettes of our morning were incredibly traditional, but also incredibly modern.

- Kathy & I had already read the morning’s news — but me from my laptop news reader and Kathy was scanning through on her iPhone — we haven’t gotten a daily or weekly newspaper for probably 10 years

- We were all dressed appropriately for the weather — but not because of information in the paper or the morning TV news, but over the Web, naturally

- SPL & his babysitter, reading Busytown, but talking about it in Mandarin

Anyway, today felt like a rich combination of new and old to me — and, really, something that felt very California modern. I have a sense/hope that 20 years from now the differences will be not so much about information usage but about materials and energy usage. We’ll see, I suppose.

A few months back, my grandfather Monte (my mom’s father) and his wife Myra came to visit us here. (From now on, though, I’ll call him “Bampa,” which I named him back about a million years ago.) This was no small feat — they rode Amtrak out from Georgia — up through Washington, DC, over to Chicago, down to Austin to spend a few days with my brother’s family, and then west all the way to Los Angeles, where I picked them up. I’d been looking forward to spending time with them, and had been meaning to have Bampa tell me more about his life. He’s led an interesting life, growing up mostly in Washington State, but really moving around a lot, was a GI in WWII, got his engineering degree at Georgia Tech, worked at Bethlehem Steel in Baltimore in the 50s, in the rocket engineering field in the 50s & 60s, and eventually settling down for good in St. Simons Island & Brunswick, GA, where they live now, and he’s still a practicing civil engineer, at 85 years old. He’s also the person who was most influential in convincing me to apply to Stanford for college, and that’s had obvious & far-reaching implications for my career and life.

So we were touched and excited that Bampa & Myra went to such an effort to visit David’s family and then ours. It’s one thing to go visit your family; it’s another to be able to share with them some part of your own adult life, and learn about theirs in kind. My dad’s parents both passed away before I had really established much of my own life; my mom’s mother is past the point of being able to travel out to California (although she did when Kathy & I were married in 2000, which I’m grateful for). Sometimes I feel very distant out here on the left coast. Most of both Kathy’s & my family live so far east of here: my brother in Austin, Kathy’s folks in San Antonio, my parents in Nashville and Atlanta, most of my extended family in Georgia. Being able to share some of it when our parents visit is wonderful — and it was great to be able to share some with Bampa.

On the drive up, we drove along the coast for a while, then inland — and drove by Camp Roberts, where Bampa was actually stationed in the 1940s, and he told us some stories about that. Yet another reminder that we all walk an earth that’s been traveled much before us.

The whole week was wonderful. We spent an afternoon at Stanford — sat in on a d.school class that I helped with (a tiny, tiny bit). It was projects that had a real focus on Facebook — not sure Bampa totally got it, but he understood the design process very well — recognized it from his own experience — which was great. We spent time in the Marin Headlands (beautiful as always). We went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium (top five favorite places anywhere). Had a just-about-perfect Italian dinner in North Beach. Couldn’t have been better, really.

What I didn’t really anticipate is how it felt to see things simultaneously through Bampa’s 80+ year old eyes and through SPL’s 3 year old eyes. Old & new, experiencing the same things. Just a reminder that the world is both incredibly modern in many ways, and the same as it’s ever been in so many others. It was just a really good time we all had together, and was great to share it with family.

So now to Tokyo — gotta figure out what some very interesting bloggers in Japan will be interested in hearing about from Mozilla.

I’ve mentioned Adam before — he & I were in 7th grade together, a million years ago in Las Vegas. We were great friends at particularly itinerant parts of our lives, and the time we spent together in school and outside (playing Enchanter & such) was really meaningful to me.

Anyway, in what is maybe an unsurprising twist of fate, we’re both nerds now, working in technology — and so he was in San Francisco this weekend for some training and was kind enough to come over for dinner.

We had a great time — it’s amazing to us how much in common we have, even after 25 years, and how comfortable it was to sit and visit together again. Really awesome, and I feel very fortunate to be able to connect. Wonderful weekend.

[ps -- decided I was interested in revisiting Enchanter et. al. -- any ideas for the z-files?]

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I’m finding it both harder to really understand how I feel about time lately, and easier to just enjoy its passing. Yesterday was a rocky day, with the aforementioned naplessness — and SPL subsequently falling asleep in my arms when we walked around the block later. But after a short nap & dinner, the two of us just kicked around the backyard, throwing the frisbee & kicking the soccer ball — and time could have stood still, for all I noticed. It was just a sweet, carefree bit of experience we shared — the type of time that I’m learning to appreciate more & more.

Anyway, because of Independence day, this is my third day off, with a couple of weekend days to look forward to — I’ve found that adjusting to “kid time” takes a couple of days — getting used to not being too worried about getting anything done on a timeline — but that once you’re there it’s a great thing.

2 is a tough age — lots of new capabilities, growing language & understanding of the world, and lots of random emotions that are tough for a kid (and his parents) to sort out.

But he’s such a generous, happy, funny kid that I know we’ll miss this random time — such a good ime of exploration and coming into his own.