Monocular

Day 255: Monocular

Today was a food day. A morning spent picking up my eighth of a grass-fed cow with my sister and Joe, a convergence of several aspects of my life: staff members from the Botanical Gardens, from the Bentley and from my extended family. A finger-chilling activity, splitting up 700 pounds of frozen meat.

Next, baking cake. and brownies Cake! Emma turns eighteen (eighteen!) on Wednesday. Her first birthday away from home.

Tonight will be an odd birthday celebration. Cake first at 5 pm, immediately followed by dinner. That's so my brother and sister-in-law can have their dinner date, have Emma as their babysitter, and eat cake in honor of her birthday. The upside is that I get to tell the kids that they can only have brussels sprouts if they eat all their cake. The downside is that the house smells like brussels sprouts instead of cake.

Today I'm getting rid of the  monocular that I bought for my trip to Kenya, over twenty years ago. My brother was living in Kenya at the time, teaching at an American school mostly for embassy kids and other expats. The monocular seemed like a brilliant idea, because I'm blind in one eye. Why carry the extra weight of a pair of binoculars when all I do is close my left eye anyway? Monoculars are hard to come by; I bought this one in a pawn shop in the Tenderloin. I haven't used the monocular since that trip to Kenya, but it still seems like a really good idea. That's why I haven't gotten rid of it. But I'm starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel, and it's causing me to question why I'm holding on to things that represent ideas that are better in concept than in fact. I even carried this monocular around in the side pocket of my car for a few years, thinking it would come in handy on road trips. But I just never used it.

Maybe the monocular is an emblem of the transition of my relationship with my folks, from being a kid asserting my independence to being a grown-up who doesn't mind spending some time hanging out with her parents. I spent a week of my three weeks in Kenya with my parents, on safari in Masai Mara, and it stands out as one of the most outstanding trips of my life. Everything about Kenya was awesome. The animals, of course. Seeing African animals in the wild was beyond anything I'd ever imagined. I'd just spent a few months working in San Diego on a performance audit for the Sheriff's Department, and we'd visited the San Diego Zoo more than one. The San Diego Zoo is lauded for recreating the animals' wild habitat, but of course, the true wild habitat is nothing like the San Diego Zoo.

And the Masai people, with their rheumy eyes, their manure huts, their ringed villages that help keep the lions out. The lack of health care, the lack of vegetables, the lack of clean water. The feeling of lawlessness in Nairobi, with its rampant poverty, people hanging off the outsides of the little private busses, cars running stop signs (and people getting killed because of it), potholes in the roads, police officers pulling you over to demand bribes, children out of school, children out of shoes, and pictures of the president in every establishment. How the whole thing awakened me to government, and how local government is where all the good things happen for us here in the United States. I've never complained about property taxes. Not once.

Anyway, that trip marked my first adult trip with my parents. I was reminded of it today, with Emma in the kitchen, cheerfully helping me bake and ice her own birthday cake. It pleases my sensibilities somehow that Emma will be able to vote in the next election. Tomorrow, she'll pack up the clean clothes she washed herself, and drive herself off to college once again, where she'll celebrate her birthday away from home. On Wednesday. Eighteen.