A Girl...

It was hot this weekend. Hot like it gets only a few times during the year here in the temperate Mediterranean zone of Norther California. It was 84 in Oakland when I left work on Friday and so full of sun and shine was I that instead of going straight home to drool in front of the tube, Simon and I detoured for a burger and spicy curly fries and a walk up and down Piedmont Avenue, me forced into a few moments of marvelling at what a community-within-a-community blogging has given me, even where I don't expect it. Across the aveune from the tea shop owned by a friend I met through a fellow blogger is a coffeeshop currently featuring the artwork of another online friend. Then, in the magazine shop around the corner, I found a table spread with books by Keri Smith, whom I have never met but have followed online and admired from afar at BlogHer. Friends popping up like wildflowers. My world felt small and close and friendly.

I was about two seconds away from finally buying a copy of Wreck This Journal (some of the exercises are so antithetical to my attitude toward books--and toward life itself--(e.g., one of the pages says "Lose this page. Accept the loss.") that I know I need it) but the store itself--half a story underground and full of people celebrating an art opening--suddenly got suffocatingly small and close and hot, and when I told Simon I had to get out of there right now, he responded with the same seriousness with which he is lately responding to all of my requests/demands/observations. I'm hot. I'm hungry. I need to pee. Say the word and consider it assuaged. Perhaps the time has come to ask for that pony...

On Sunday we had to stop at the Castro Safeway on the way home from the city because a certain bladder had reached critical mass, and after looking around for the restrooms for five minutes with no luck, Simon took command: he marched up to an employee, explained that he had a pregnant lady who needed a bathroom immediately, and boy, you should have seen the hustle in the guy who took us back through the stock room into the employee area where the "clean" restrooms were. (Um, no, NOT CLEAN BY ANY STANDARDS. Ew.) You also should have seen the look on the guy's face when he saw that I was not the gigantic and bulging pregnant lady he had expected. (Being still relatively low-fat and yet somehow certifiably pregnant, I find myself looking at other women differently; who else is in the "gestating the miracle of life right this very second yet nobody would knows it by looking at me" phase too?)

Quiz: Was I a little upset and embarrassed that Simon, who'd had to pee almost as bad as I, was garnering special treatment for himself by taking advantage of my interesting condition? I mean, he was basically exploiting me, and more, exploiting our child, even before it's out in the world and able to trade on its own good looks! Was I ashamed? Or was I instead charmed that he referred to me in public as his "pregnant lady" (much better than "vessel," which is what he calls me in private (and for good reason)) and in that gesture, and in many others, made me feel as though the world revolved around me?

Answer: I was a wee bit embarrassed but mostly charmed (and relieved! because yes, it's true, my uterus is getting a little pushy in there).

Although I continue to find Simon wonderful and amazing on a daily basis, there's something particuarly lovely about being charmed anew by someone whose tricks I now know so well that it's hard to be surprised by them anymore. I've grown to expect his clever quips, I've grown used to his million tiny kindnesses, to myself and others, and although I appreciate those things about him always, and love him more for them, they are by and large expected now, particularly because they're so much a part of who he is.

This weekend, though, he did something so charming that, had I been wearing pants (it's skirt weather! yahoo!), my pants would have been charmed right off, as the saying goes. On Sunday I suggested we go enjoy the nice weather in Golden Gate Park, even though we'd spent Saturday in the city too (at the Marina beach, as seen in the movie Nine Months), and while I concerned myself with packing a picnic, he busied himself making a cardboard sign that read "Advice" in big block letters. After an hour or so of wandering and adventuring through the park, I laid out on a blanket to eat and read and drink lemonade out of the plastic pineapple Simon had packed, and meanwhile he was setting up a table, two chairs, and his "Advice" sign at an intersection, waiting for takers. Before the cold fog rolled in and spilled down on the meadow over the tops of the eucalyptus, he'd had a good run of Q&A with perfect strangers, as I lurked behind a hedge nearby, altogether tickled with the public's reaction, with the idea itself, and with the guy--my guy--who'd thought of it out of nowhere. He didn't really want me to write about this, but I begged because it's too great not to share.

So that--plus a little gardening--is what we did on the first hot weekend of the year. Pretty girls in pretty dresses, more sailboats than I have ever seen at one time, fresh lemonade, and holding hands in the park. Perfection.

Finally, to those of you who have tried to comfort my fear of a December baby with the silver lining that at least I won't be hugely pregnant over the long, hot summer: thanks for at least trying. The reality is that summer in the Bay Area is hardly ever "hot"; it gets warm right smack in the middle of the afternoon but mornings and evenings are always jacket-worthy. Mark Twain is quoted ad eye-rolleum (that's Latin) during the summer months 'round these parts, and he's a man who knows what he's talking about; indeed, our summers can freeze your toes off if you're fool enough to wear your Birkenstocks sans socks. Our "hot" months are September, October, and November, when I will be seven, eight, and nine months pregnant, respectively, after which the rains descend and we freeze until February, our only source of warmth a single gas fireplace and the meager heat generated by our own vigorous complaining. Although I am very much looking forward to a newborn, however and whenever it comes, I am simultaneously dreading the combination of winter weather + newborn and have already considered alternate plans that involve scrapping the idea of turning the current library into the nursery in favor of putting the baby in a cast-iron skillet over the stove burner. We can suspend a mobile from the overhead vent and warm our hands on his/her belly while a pot of stew bubbles merrily nearby.