Generaniums

Just another weekend of epochal proportions. Clean the house, weed the garden, play a drum, bake bread, plant geraniums, celebrate the non-Hallmark Mother's Day holiday and the daughter's twenty-fifth birthday. Another week, another quarter-century of life as we know it. This season within a season could be named Offspring.

Every time I get the urge to be somewhere else, I am reminded how many attachments I have in central Swingstate. After topping off the compost pile with weeds in the morning, I went to the biweekly drum circle at the rec center, and I knew about half of the people there. I guess I'm not the new guy anymore. Two of three of the regulars I've seen at other events in other places, so there is more of a community-like context, which adds texture, and we'll see where, if anywhere, that goes.

Because I was in the neighborhood (and out of flour), I went to the coop, where I saw two more familiar faces. The nursery was on my way home, so I stopped to buy geraniums, and wouldn't you know it, I ran into a former co-worker who is an avid gardener. We chatted awhile - our gardens, other co-workers, my kids, her kids - and she returned to her reverie in the perennials while I picked out two flats of annuals.

After pulling more weeds - there are always more weeds - Gven and I went to Zelda's house for a birthday party. Her housemate David also had a birthday this week, so they cleaned the house and had a lot of people over. We arrived early and left early, had one drink, nibbled on Cheez-its, mixed with a few of their friends, and met a couple new ones. One, coincidentally, I had seen last weekend at a rest stop on I-80 in the middle of Pennsylvania. She was coming back from a film festival in New York, and I was on my way to New York to visit Zelda's brother Jessi. What are the odds? I figure it's the red hair.

Church on Sunday was focused on the theme of imperfection and the value of failure, in stark contrast to the safe, suburban liberalism that I see around me, which should be no surprise, since I undoubtedly project that same risk-averse attitude among that same congregation, whom I chose to hang out with, so pardon the digression. [Note to self: pick up Bruno Bettelheim's A Good Enough Parent.]

Since it was Mother's Day, after all, it was imperative that I go home and get busy potting geraniums in window boxes, the ritual that began some time in the 1980s and has become a sacred seasonal rite. The process is getting a little easier too. This time I used a square-bladed shovel to mix old potting soil in a wheel barrow, then filled several pots with soil and little plants from 4-packs, watered them in, and there you go. Just like Dad used to do back in Michigan.

I had to get it done quickly and efficiently because Gven and I had plans to go out to dinner with Zelda at the Tip-Top downtown, her choice of restaurant. The two of them decided to celebrate her birthday and Mother's Day together, and I had no objection. It felt entirely appropriate, as they have entered a new phase in the mother-daughter relationship, which, for lack of another term I will call friendship. It is quite a sight to behold.