Toes on the Nose: Paddling towards Puberty

Eliot is not what I would call a fox trotter; he’s more of a head-bobbing booty-shaker, but he expressed a serious interest in the Cotillion Class I signed him up for just after his sixteenth birthday. He talked about impressing the ladies.

He also had a lot of questions, like “What are the rules? Will they post the rules on the door?”

When I read him the schedule (learning how to eat soup in one class, spaghetti in another, a formal dinner dance at the end), he wanted to know if he could pick up his soup bowl with his hands.

“Will I escort my partner to dinner? Will we use a spoon to eat spaghetti?”

One afternoon on the beach I drew a square in the sand and worked with him on the box step. He did well, no klutzier, I thought, than any other boy in the class. But I hadn’t met Cormac or William yet.

Cormac shook Eliot's hand and launched into conversation.

“Do you play an instrument?”

“Yeah,” Eliot said. “I play the guitar.”

“Do you have any hobbies?”

Eliot shrugged.

“I do. I collect stamps. I play all sorts of instruments. I play the piano, the violin, the trumpet, and the drums.”

Eliot raised his eyebrows.

We were gathered in the carpeted conference room of a hotel in Scotts Valley, not a grand ballroom but perfect for a small group. All the students took seats against the wall in the main room. All except William. Skinny and handsome in glasses and a tie, William sat alone in the adjoining room drumming his hands on his knees. Our host Mrs. Lavigne asked him to join us. He sat down next to fifth-grader Louise and stared straight ahead. Possibly asthmatic, he kept coughing (making rasberries) with his mouth closed.

Mrs. Lavigne had brought her family to round out the class: Mr. Lavigne, their middle-school aged children Sam and Fiona, and their older son Matt who was in charge of music. She had everybody form a circle and paired them off. After instructing students to introduce themselves each time they changed partners, Mrs. Lavigne showed them the steps for the waltz.

Fighting valiantly against his aversion to eye contact, Cormac mastered the waltz quickly. So did William, stepping wide with soldier-straight legs but looking as if he’d taken the class before. Matt started the music, the pairs circled, and Eliot’s “Nice to meet you” rang out each time they changed partners. Mrs. Lavigne encouraged the girls to lead any boys who needed help, and Maddie, a seventh grade dancing diva, swung Eliot through the moves.

Then Mrs. Lavigne taught them the Swing. Matt changed the CD, and the upbeat Big Band sound of “In the Mood” filled the room.

When Eliot forgot to break hands on the swing, Mr. Lavigne stepped in and showed him. He turned out to be the perfect guy to offer Eliot a few extra pointers. Mrs. Lavigne told the girls to add a turn under the boy’s arm. The blazer Blue and I had bought in the Men’s Department swung off Eliot’s shoulders, and he kept hitching up his room-to-grow pants before launching into the next move.

The finale for the evening was the Electric Slide, a line dance with no partners needed. Ready for some flare, Maddie busted loose. The steps were a little fast, and every time the kids rotated to face the next wall, Eliot was left facing them, but he had the chicken arms down. Recognizing a free-form dancer when he saw one, Mr. Lavigne slid into line and did the chicken head-bob with Eliot.

Blue had said we should pay one class at a time and see how it went, but Eliot was in for the duration. He proudly escorted his partner to the punch table, and was already talking about signing up for the next year's classes. I took out my checkbook and paid in full.

Sixteen is a turning point in life, and was even more so for Eliot. He wasn’t surfing anymore because he had become too anxious. Dreading every Wednesday, he'd started inventing a cough or a headache, and I had to let it go.

“Surfing's supposed to be fun,” I said. “ If it makes you feel anxious we shouldn't do it anymore. We'll just swim laps on Wednesdays.”

It was the right thing to do. When we were still surfing he’d complained about his shoulder during swimming, which worried me, but when we stopped surfing he was so relieved he swam with relish and without complaint. I kept track of both our laps as we swam, and each time he passed me, he waved under water.

When I stopped at the wall I said, “How many laps?” Most times he knew, but he always asked, “How many left?” When it got close to five he took off, counting down, sprinting the last few lengths to be done with it.

One afternoon we ran into Blue at the pool. Happy as ever to see his dad, Eliot plunged into the lane next to him, and I swam in the adjoining lane. Blue and I were, in fact, counting down with him: two and a half years left of high school, two years of community college, and somewhere in there a chance to live independently, near the nurturing community for disabled adults we had found ten minutes from our home. Exactly how it would fall into place we didn't know, but we knew that in our adjoining lanes we would keep swimming. And all the while, Eliot would be waving at us under water.

Blue and I were dating the first time I saw the deep, slow waters of the Fall River. He claims he decided he’d marry me after we got along for all six and a half of the hours it took to get there in the car. One of those evenings on the river, Lew, the childhood friend of Blue’s dad Jim, took Blue and me by canoe about a mile upstream to Rick’s Lodge for dinner. Later he guided us back down in the dark, the stars reflected in the placid ink waters below our canoe.

We returned to the Fall River as Lew’s guest several times, once when Carly was two and Lew and Jim’s surgeon friend Barrett sewed the head back on Carly’s red-clothed Little Man. We’d long since started calling our parents’ friends by their first names, yet after he sewed Little Man’s head back on, Barrett was Dr. Weber to me.

Carly was seventeen when Blue and I returned to the Fall --this time as partners on the ranch through which the river flowed-- with Lew and Sheana, Jim and Sue, and Barrett. Barrett had lost his wife Beasie to cancer less than a year before, and my dad, who was ninety, had just finished six weeks of radiation on his vocal cords. When Lew and I had organized the weekend, I had invited my parents. Then Dad started radiation that would end the week before our gathering, and we wondered if he’d be able to make the trip. I prayed for a miracle. As the six weeks wore on he felt increasingly worse, but a week before he finished, a medication change made him feel better. He was uncomfortable and exhausted, but he told my mom he would like to make the trip.

Blue and I met my parents in Vacaville, where I hopped in their car and drove them the rest of the way. Three hours later, after we turned off the I-5, we stopped at a gas station on the highway heading east. The gas pump was part of an old supermarket, and the bathroom was in the back of the market. After he filled the tank Dad went inside. Ten minutes later he still hadn’t returned. Picturing him wandering around trying to find the bathroom, I went looking for him. As I passed the checkout stands I heard the rustle of a plastic shopping bag and looked up to see Dad, a notorious sweet-tooth, exiting the market with the bag. He opened it so I could see the stash of chocolate inside.

“I should have known,” I said. “Here I was worried you couldn’t find the bathroom.”

"It did take me a while to find it," he said.

The following morning Mom and I hired a guide with a boat to take us out on the river. He showed us how to properly fish a dry fly on a slow current, and when each of us lost a big fish by pulling back too hard on the rod, he said that even with lots of line on the water it only took a small tug to set the hook. Later I caught a thirteen-inch rainbow on a sinking nymph, but the guide was puzzled that the fish were feeding, yet weren’t taking the mayflies he spotted on the surface. Mom, who had fished many days on the McKenzie and the Snake Rivers, was mystified by the slow current. But that was the allure of the Fall River.

The next morning Blue and Lewis got up at dawn to duck-hunt the pond just across the river from the cabins. Jim whose shoulder prevented him from lifting a gun, and Dr. Weber who was taking medication for several serious maladies, waited until the sun came up, then drove out to the pond. Two hours later Lewis and Blue returned not having fired a shot. They walked back with Jim, while Barrett stayed in the blind with his gun. Jim left the car parked next to the pond for Barrett.

As per tradition, the hunters prepared a late morning breakfast for the rest of us. We were all gathered around the table and the sun was high in the sky when we started to wonder about Barrett. Blue picked up the binoculars and pointed them across the river.

“I can still see the car,” he said.

Five minutes later Jim got up and put on his hat.

“Are you going to look for him?” I asked, and Jim nodded. Blue jumped up and followed his dad.

I cleared and washed some dishes and went outside, where I found Lew peering across the river through the binoculars.

“Blue and Jim are walking over there,” I said. “Eliot and I are going to catch up to them.”

“Are they worried about Barrett?” he asked, still peering through the binoculars.

“Yeah. Aren’t you?”

“What, do they think he shot himself?” He said it in the half-jokingly, but it had crossed my mind.

I returned to our cabin, where Eliot was just getting dressed. “Let’s go find Dr. Weber,” I said, and we walked back downstream and across the bridge.

Eliot and I were crossing the field when we saw Jim’s car approaching us on the road. Squinting into the sun, I saw two heads inside the car, Jim and Barrett’s. Then Barrett stuck a mallard out the window, holding it by the neck like a trophy. The man had gunned down the sole prize of the morning. Laughing, Eliot and I followed the car back to the cabin, where Barrett, posing for pictures with the duck, couldn’t wipe the “Can you believe it?” grin from his face.

The story went that, after sitting so long at the pond Barrett needed to pee, but just as he turned to do so a flock of ducks passed overhead. Indisposed, he shot at them anyway. He missed but got his duck a while later.

That afternoon Blue, Eliot, and I canoed upstream to the restaurant that used to be Rick’s Lodge. Lew followed with Mom and Dad in the battery-operated boat, while Barret, Sheana, and Sue went by car. The plan was to sit at the bar and watch the Giants in the first game of the National League playoffs, then move to a table for dinner. Eliot ordered a salad and French fries, while the rest of us watched the Giants’ Cody Ross hit another homerun, having hit back-to-back homers in the previous game. Then Blue and I took Eliot back downstream by canoe. Overhead a handful of pink clouds floated and flocks of geese flew in V formation. A pair of owls called to each other in the Ponderosa pines along the river.

After dropping Eliot at the cabin Blue and I drove back to the lodge. On the way we listened through the crackle of bad radio reception, leaning into the dashboard, to the Giants take a one-run lead in the seventh inning. We entered the restaurant just as the Cable went out and people started tapping into the game on their cell phones. Blue went back out to the car. When I heard the Giants’ closer Brian Wilson strike out the last two batters, but only by walking a batter first, I knew Blue was yelling at the radio.

After dinner I went down to the dock to see Mom and Dad off safely with Lew. Lew, used to sitting on a cushion on the bench of the boat, had attached two brand new folding seats to the benches for Mom and Dad. The boat rocked wildly as Dad and Mom crawled in, and Dad’s chair, secured by wing nuts that had not been fastened tightly, tipped and landed him sideways on the bench. I tried to tighten the wingnuts and waved them off.

Lew had given Mom a high-beamed flashlight, directing her to shine it off the bow toward every piling and branch, around which he deftly guided the boat. But I wondered how many times those new chairs would tip over. When Blue and I got back to the cabins we headed down to the dock. All was quiet except for the sound of two owls in the distance. Then came the cawing of a blue heron as the approaching boat ferreted it from its roost in the tulles. A band of light moved across the bridge, then steady, its light shone like a bright star, a second one reflected on the river. It was a beacon that, this time, they had made it safely, and we stood on the dock waiting to greet them.

When I first heard about it, I thought I understood what Food, What?! founder Doron Comochero meant by “youth empowerment.” It meant turning around high school kids’ attitude about school and their futures, and changing their eating habits to better themselves and their planet. It turns out that was only the half of it. On a beautiful fall evening recently, the Food, What?! staff held a fundraising dinner on the UCSC farm. Food, What?! “staff” as in the students enrolled in the program.

While City Schools board members, parents, and other Food, What?! supporters enjoyed a delicious meal prepared and served by students from the produce they had grown, student interns stood one by one to tell their stories. One intern had arrived in the program speaking only Spanish, and had learned to speak English working side by side with other students. Another intern said, “I wanted to look good in other kids’ eyes,” and Food, What?! taught him to see himself in a positive light. “It’s a life skill,” he said, “Lending ourselves to all that positivity.” Positivity versus negativity; instead of complaining about fog, wind, heavy labor, and stinging insects, students withstood the tough working environment by encouraging each other. Clearly Doron had been talking with them about more than chard.

Doron and fellow Food, What?! founder Abby Bell also helped their interns to see themselves in a positive light by teaching them public speaking. Which was why --while we enjoyed baked polenta made from farm-grown corn, as well as vegetable kebabs, bean salad, and apple crisp all made from farm produce—the interns were standing one by one to tell their stories.

One student, a graduate of the program, spoke about her mom raising her and her brother single-handedly while working full-time. Her mom had a culinary background and was a great cook, yet with little money and a full-time job, she had fallen into the habit of providing fast food dinners. But the stories her daughter brought home from Food, What?! began to change how they ate. The way her daughter described it, instead of giving what money they had to a fast food chain, they increased the value of their dollar by giving it back to the community and preparing simple, healthy meals with the produce they bought.

Doron calls it “youth dollar power” and a vote for Food Justice. And that dollar goes both ways: Students enter the program as paid interns for the spring, summer, or fall; they open checking accounts and learn to manage their money; and as Food, What?! “staff,” they hold Board Meetings at the end of every year to discuss what has gone well and what needs improving.

Below the UCSC campus in public elementary schools, students of different races mix in the classroom and on the playground. But as they grow older a separation often occurs. Not so on the Food, What?! Farm, where students of diverse backgrounds labor side by side and prepare their meals together. They and Doron and Abby think of each other as family.

But Food Justice is flourishing in our elementary schools as well. This fall City Schools’ chef Jamie Smith raised the number of families applying for free and reduced lunch by 300 students or ten percent. This gives a needed boost to school lunch funding and brings more students together around the table. And with studies showing that good nutrition raises academic performance, our new school food program may even make the proponents of standardized tests happy. Meanwhile, Food, What?! interns deliver CSA produce to the Beach Flats neighborhood and at least one local elementary school, further unifying the community behind something that’s good for all of us.

I should never have taken a fourteen-year-old boy to a remote mountain cabin without first stocking up at Costco. Just a couple of weeks before our vacation, he was five-foot-two and a hundred pounds, but by the time we left for Huntington Lake in July, Eliot was five-foot-three and a hundred and ten. Every time we made a bowl of guacamole he used his chip like a backhoe to scoop up half the bowl, and if we pulled it away so his sister and his cousin Erin could have some, he chased the bowl around gripping his chip like the teenaged Hulk. “I’m starving!” he bellowed in his newly deepened voice.

Around the time he gained the next ten pounds he started acting up, kicking and punching and obsessively repeating himself. It was no coincidence that behaviors accompanied his growth. During the 4^th of July when all sixteen Wilsons were together in a two-bedroom cabin, my plan was to shadow him more closely and ride it out. This was as much about keeping my temper under control as it was about Eliot.

Blue and I took turns fielding Eliot’s bouts of wildness, and when we needed a break, one or both of us took a walk down to the lake. That’s when I saw the water skeeter scooting across the surface and thought, “That’s us with Eliot.” We didn’t soar over the water like the osprey scouting for fish; we didn’t even glide under the surface like the trout. We skirted along the top, sometimes pausing, sometimes darting. Our progress was slower, but progress none-the-less.

I only yelled once over the 4^th of July. Blue and I were in the kitchen talking to his brother Tommy when Eliot pounced on his dad, repeating obsessively, “I want to go on John and Martha’s boat. I want to go on John and Martha’s boat! I want to go on John and Martha’s boat!”

That was all it took to get me fired up.

“He has got to stop!” I barked at Blue, who looked at me in surprise.

“It’s not your fault,” I said, “But he’s out of control!”

I took hold of Eliot and grabbed his swimsuit “Let’s go,” I said.

By then he knew himself what to do and followed willingly. Down at the dock I helped him change into his swimsuit.

“Where are my googles and my wetsuit?” he asked.

“No goggles, no wetsuit, just go,” I said, and he did. He jumped into the icy snowmelt water, swam a few yards to a boulder, and sat catching his breath. He knew why we were there. Cajones submerged in the icy water, he said, “Calms my engine down.”

I apologized to the Wilsons for losing my temper, but they only gave me hugs and high marks. Blue and I had weathered enough rough periods with Eliot among family that we were all on the same page now.

The rest of the day his engine was calm. In fact, somewhere in the middle of all the hikes and swims we took, he settled in. He even went alone with Carly and Erin to Line Creek Cove. As they left he turned and said with obvious pride, “I’m going to Line Creek Cove with the girls.”

Another day the three of them made a music video, and he was Snoop Dog. He had to sit in the background while the girls danced, and right on cue he danced up to the camera. They faded back and he hip-hopped through Snoop Dog’s lines.

He had talked for days about going swimming with the girls after dark, and on the last night the three of them grabbed their towels and walked down to the lake. I stood on the porch and listened.

For a while I didn’t hear anything. Then I heard Eliot’s gravelly voice. “I’m going in!” he said, and there was a splash. Followed by the whoops and splashes of the girls.

Erin told me he had stood there for a long time. “The water’s dark,” he said. “I can’t see. I’m not going.”

“If you go in,” she’d said, “We’ll go up to your fort with you.” It was something he had asked them to do countless times a day and which they’d mostly politely declined. As soon as Erin offered that, he threw off his towel and jumped in.

Then Eliot lead them back up the trail, the flashlight he held cutting through the dark that to him had once seemed blacker.

“My hair is wet,” he said happily as he climbed into his sleeping bag.

Two days after we got home my dad would turn ninety. He was a man who had never let obstacles stop him from what he wanted to accomplish, and he was much of the reason I was the person I was. On our last day at the lake I rigged the windsurfer we stored under the cabin, as I had every summer for twenty years. Before that day Blue had only bailed me out once, and it was because the wind had died.

This time I sailed across the lake, but when I tried to sail back the windsurfer languished, and I drifted farther down the lake. I tacked back and forth but made it no closer to the dock. Boats sailed blissfully past on a strong wind.

My hip started hurting and my lower back ached. Fifty was just a number, yet it had marked the sudden onset of all kinds of changes in me, including menopause. I chalked up my struggle to a sudden inability to windsurf.

Stuck in the middle of the lake, I prayed. “Help me,” I said, and started to cry. That’s when a gust of wind carried me to the shore, and I took advantage of the shallows to paddle against the wind toward the dock. It was slow, and I had made it fifty yards when I looked up and saw Blue and Eliot on the dock. I waved and Blue waved back as he climbed into the boat. Relieved, I sat on the board and paddled slowly to stay in place. By then in our marriage I had learned how to accept help. As the boat approached I saw Shoe up in the bow. He never missed a chance for a ride.

Blue threw me a rope which I tied to the front of the windsurfer, and he towed me to the dock. As we lifted the board out of the water, I saw the reason I had been unable to sail back across the lake. It wasn’t menopause that made my body ache that day; it was the rudder which I had failed to lower.

In our lives the rudder was key. There were gusts of wind --­­­growth spurts, leaps and bounds in development—that enabled our darts across the surface of the water. There were our neighbors who loaned us the board, like the myriad of people who had helped Eliot along the way. There was the strength we had to hold onto the boom when the gusts threatened to pull the sail from our hands. But without the rudder, the board wouldn’t point in the right direction.

The rudder was the determination I had learned from a man who was about to turn ninety. He had taught me to keep going --away from safety of the dock and back-- as many times as it took to keep the wind pushing at the sails.

When Jamie Oliver set out to change the eating habits of people in Huntington, West Virginia, he cut up a whole raw chicken in front of a group of school children. He started by removing the breasts, legs, and wings and separating them from the leftover carcass. Then he asked the children which pile contained the best parts of the chicken, and they pointed to the good pile. Then he put the other pile, the skin and carcass, in a blender and pulverized it.

When he told the kids those were the parts used to make chicken nuggets, they all said, “Ewww!” But when he formed the blended bone and cartilage into patties, fried them, and asked who would like one, a bunch of hands shot up.

We who live in the land of the Edible Schoolyard like to think this would only happen in Huntington, West Virginia, but that is far from the case. Santa Cruz High School student Nick Morris recently filmed students in the lunchroom at one of Santa Cruz’s public elementary schools as they approached the new salad bar. The kindergarteners, along with a few first graders, moved right in and filled their plates with fresh organic lettuce and raw vegetables. But the older students’ eyes never even met the salad bar.

"Kids in our schools are conditioned," says Santa Cruz City Schools’ Food Director Jamie Smith, “to eat food that is either brown or white. I can put anything out there,” he says, “but that doesn’t mean they’re going to eat it.”

Like the kindergarteners who were Santa Cruz City Schools’ first dual immersion class and are now the program’s first sixth graders, our students’ palates are going to take time to develop. That is why education is such an important component of the national movement toward healthy school meals. And that is why Doron Comerchero’s “Food, What?!” program is so powerful. Doron is not waiting, any more than Jamie Smith is, for those first salad bar tasters to grow up; he’s educating teens now in what he calls “ a youth empowerment program using food through sustainable agriculture and health.” And students enrolled in “Food, What?!” recently hosted their annual Strawberry Blast at the UCSC Farm, inviting two to three hundred middle and high schoolers from the area to an event featuring organic strawberries grown on the farm.

On the day of the Strawberry Blast, Jorge, a Costanoa senior and one of Food What’s biggest proponents, was helping run Fast Food Jeapordy, with groups of students from different schools competing for a flat of organic strawberries. One of the Jeapordy questions was: Which has the most calories? A six-inch turkey sandwich with veggies on wheat, a small strawberry smoothie, or a large coke? One group said the sandwich. Another group said the smoothie. Nobody had the right answer, the large coke.

Not far from the Jeapordy game, Jamie Smith was serving Agua Fresca made from organic strawberries and agave nectar, but students had to work for those strawberries too.

“Pick a word,” Jamie told a student, pointing to a stack of papers.

She picked up one that said “potatoes.”

“What do you think of first when you see that word?”

“Fries,” she said.

“Fries. Do you cook them yourself at home?”

“Yes,” she said. “Out of the package.”

It was the opportunity Jamie had been waiting for. He encouraged her to try making the fries from scratch so that she could see how much oil it took. And every time a new group of students approached the table, Jamie asked them how they liked the new food at school, Most of them said they didn’t.

“I don’t take it as an insult,” he said. “It’s a process. There are so many rules from the USDA I have to follow. But the food’s going to get better every year, and I’m going to break more and more rules.”

That’s why they call it a Food Revolution. That’s why "justice" is one of the key words in Food What’s mission statement. Organic healthy food isn’t just for Chez Panisse worshipers like this writer, whose offspring makes crepes with olive tapenade, and organic healthy food isn’t just for students whose school meals are subsidized. Until all of our students gather around the same table for organic food grown in their own communities, the parents and teachers talking about it are like the adults we can't understand in a Charlie Brown movie. Kids do what their friends are doing. Jamie Oliver knows it, and so does Jamie Smith. The revolution begins and ends with our youth.

I know how the state and federal government could save money on public schools: get rid of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children. By law the parent of a child with disabilities has the right to waive the test, but how many parents realize beforehand how devastating it will be? I for one did not.

For two years Eliot had been at The Bay School, a nonpublic school with whom we had a contract through our district, and he was happy. Every morning he entered the building with the confident swagger of a fourteen-year-old, and every afternoon he strolled out laughing and high-fiving his teacher.

He hadn’t started out that way. Once when two teachers were escorting him to the car at the end of the school day, he started kicking. Quickly Andy, one of the teachers, reached down and grabbed Eliot’s pant-legs below the knee so that he could walk but not kick. I thought it was brilliant. Within days of meeting him, his teachers at The Bay School had figured out that any reaction from them reinforced his behaviors. Without a word, Andy and the other teacher got him in the car.

That was back when he’d spent a good part of the day kicking, punching, and spitting his way out of doing his work. His teachers, intensively trained in the most unobtrusive way to restrain a child so that he didn’t hurt himself or others, tried to ignore the behaviors, and provided rewards and incentives for compliance.

Two years later Eliot was high-fiving the same teacher who’d grabbed his pant-legs on the way to the car. Although the women in his life (mom, teachers…) played a great part in his progress, Eliot lived for the male-bonding moments. He complied most of the time at home just for the reward of being tucked in by his dad. On guitar lesson days, he waited in the window for his teacher James to arrive for their jam session. At school when he noticed Andy and another teacher shaved their heads, he shaved his too. More importantly, he was doing his schoolwork. He still watched the clock for break time, but he was most engaged during the academic periods. This was the opposite of how he’d started at The Bay School, when he’d lived for the breaks. He was learning to read, do math, tell digital time, and play the card-game War.

Then came the three-year assessment. A panel of specialists, including a psychologist and a speech pathologist for our district, tested Eliot and observed him at school. Then we met as an IEP team to discuss the results. Having Eliot’s academic and behavioral ups and downs discussed by a roomful of adults, some of whom I saw once a year or never, usually made me feel like the insect from his namesake T.S. Eliot’s poem, pinned and wriggling on the wall. But I understood the importance of IEP’s for securing all of the services a child received in a Special Day Class, and usually after an hour and a half it was over.

This time, the introductory remarks about Eliot’s strengths, which I usually enjoyed (who doesn’t want to hear what people like about her kid?) felt like a token. And it was. For the better part of three hours, the psychologist and the speech pathologist summarized their in-depth reports.

“In conclusion,” the psychologist said, after having administered Intelligence, Differential, and Diagnostic tests to my son, “Eliot is in the first percentile cognitively in relation to his normal-aged peers.”

Instead of being relieved as I usually was that the IEP was almost over, I was irritated. Blue and I were well aware of Eliot’s deficits, as was Eliot; his feelings of inadequacy in comparison to his normal-aged peers was part of what made him act out in the first place. His Bay School teachers had worked with him for 229 days a year (the public school year was more like 170), and I did not need a panel of experts, who spent ten hours with him in the classroom, to tell me how he performed cognitively.

A more useful assessment would have identified his learning strengths versus his deficits. At one point when the psychologist reported that he had failed a Recall of Objects tests, the nonpublic school coordinator, God bless her, wondered how he would have scored had the test asked him to recall visually instead of orally. I knew the answer to that. At home I was reading aloud the fourth book in the Harry Potter series. When we had started the series, I had bribed Eliot with jellybeans. By the fourth book, he was listening quietly with no more reward than a five-minute view of the Weather Channel at the end of our reading session. If I stopped reading and asked him to recall something that had just happened, he often couldn’t recall anything. But if I asked him to open the picture book he had of all the characters from the movies, he could point to the character who had just entered the story and tell me what had happened.

The speech pathologist and the psychologist concluded that Eliot was operating at the level of a five-year-old. But Eliot was not just five years old; he was also nine and fourteen. Part of the reason he was still doing five year-old academic work was that between the ages of six and twelve he’d been in a different classroom every year. Even the best teacher needs more than one year to make lasting behavioral and academic progress with a student as challenged as Eliot.

“Eliot’s speech is in line with his cognitive age,” the speech pathologist said during our meeting. “Therefore I recommend his teachers stop working on articulation and focus exclusively on vocabulary.”

I looked at her to be sure I had heard right.

“I do not want to stop working on articulation,” I said. Eliot needed to be understood! He needed to know how to pronounce words before he could learn how to spell them. If I had matched my expectations to the results of the “cognitive” tests he had been given over the years, Eliot would not have made as much progress he had.

Furthermore, he was five, and nine, and fourteen. Only a month before I had said, “Eliot, you need to come brush your teeth by the count of three if you want George tonight.” Curious George was the stuffed friend who, up until then, had worked time and again as a reward.

This time Eliot gave me a look that said, “I don’t have to do what you tell me.” That’s when the light went on. I would never have told my sixteen-year-old to do something by the count of three, so why her brother? I stopped counting to three and started appealing to Eliot as a fourteen-year-old, and he started complying again.

After Eliot’s three-year assessment, Andrea the Director of Education at The Bay School talked with me at length about my misgivings. She listened to my worries and explained how the assessments worked, what she thought was useful versus what was not.

“I’m like a mama lion,” she said. “I won’t let anything happen with my students if I think it’s not right for them.” Those were the people I wanted advising me about my son, the people who spent every day with him. Those were the ones for whom Eliot would work, because those were the people he trusted and loved.

So here’s the math: multiply the number of hours spent administering nominative cognitive tests by the number of specialists giving them, then multiply by the number of students in our nation attending Special Day classes. Multiply again by four, which is the average number of times each student will take the test before completing high school, and you have a large chunk of money. I know a lot of teachers who could find a better way to spend it.

     More than six hours into a snow trip to Northern California, I felt something hard hit one of the tires.

     “What was that?” I asked Blue.

      Two years before, we had realized a dream when our friend Lew had invited us to become partners with eleven other families, in a few cabins fifty miles from Mt. Shasta on the Fall River.

     “We’re never going to get there,” Carly moaned.

     “It’s not Tahoe,” I said. But she had already realized that at In N Out Burger, when she looked surprised at a boy in line who wore heavy cowboy boots, a camoflauge baseball cap, and a mullet halfway down his back.

     “In some ways this is the real America,” I said as we sat down next to a family with five children. The oldest, maybe seven, said a prayer before they tucked into their burgers. I should have said one too.

     It was dark and rainy when we left I-5 and headed east. At a thousand feet the rain turned to sleet. Every time a truck passed us on the two-lane road, it splashed a blinding load of water onto our windshield. Soon the sleet turned to snow. A snowplow spread salt on the road, and it crackled against the underbelly of our van. But whatever hit the tire wasn’t salt.

     We made it over the 4000-foot pass, but soon after that the tire started thumping and we pulled over on the side of the road. Blue grabbed the flashlight as he and I hopped out of the car. He shone it on a six-inch wad of iron sticking out of the rear tire. Once again I was grateful for his pragmatism; he had told me to pack the flashlight.

     While I called for a tow truck, Blue asked Carly to pull the owner’s manual out of the glove compartment. After finding the tire iron, he shone the flashlight under the van. Then he pulled up the flooring and showed Carly how to loosen the bolt that held the spare tire under the car. Had I been alone, I would still have been trying to decipher the owner’s manual.

     “Let’s just get there!” Eliot said, picking up on the fear inside the car and reaching over to honk the horn.

     “Get back!” I snapped.

     “I want to get out!” he said, pushing the door open while cars and trucks whizzed by.

     “Get back in the car!” Blue yelled, shoving him back into the seat. Blue seldom lost his temper, which is partly why just then the synapses connected for Eliot. I saw it in his eyes. He slumped back in the seat, body relaxed, and looked out the window. That was how things were different with him now.

     Five minutes later when he asked, calmly this time, to get out of the car, I walked him a few steps up to the end of the turnout. A thousand feet below on the other side of the guardrail was the Pit River power plant. Above us was Orion.

     “See those starts up there?” I pointed.

     “Yeah.”

     “Those three in a row--” I said, but Eliot’s eyes were riveted on headlights approaching us from the highway.

     I shielded his eyes. “Look up,” I said, but once again his eyes veered toward the headlights. We walked back to the car.

     During the hour we waited for Triple A, three different people stopped to ask if we needed help. Then a pair of headlights slowed coming round the corner, and the tow truck pulled up behind us.

     “I got the spare out and loosened the lug nuts,” Blue said as the driver hopped out and examined the tire.

     “Brownie points for you,” he said smiling. He was tall and thin and looked to be in his seventies.  

     “You from McArthur?” Blue asked.

     “Yep. Where are you folks from?” He pulled a jack out of his truck and pumped it under the van.

     “Santa Cruz. My name’s Blue.”

     “Lawrence,” he said, pulling off the tire. “Where are you staying?”

     “Fall River,” Blue said. “You know Lew Butler?”

     “Lew and I have known each other a long time,” Lawrence said. An hour before we had been crawling along a wet, dark road with little sense of what lay ahead, and now we were being set right by a man who we found out later was a legend in the Fall River Valley. The garage he owned had opened in 1924, and Lawrence was still the one who showed up in the middle of the night.

     But that was only the beginning of our adventure. Inundated with snow, Mt. Shasta Ski Park was closed all week with no power. On our last day we passed crews of men with heavily equipped trucks at the base of Shasta, working in six-foot snow banks to restore the power. It looked like an impossible task.  

     “It could be two weeks,” Lawrence told me. “That’s the way we like it around here.”

     In search of skiing, we crossed the California border into Oregon. From Fall River we drove an hour of deserted highway, trees heavy with snow, before reaching I-5. Then we drove another hour over a six thousand-foot pass to reach Mt. Ashland, where we put on chains to climb the eight miles to the ski resort.

     “Why can’t we see?” Eliot asked when we reached the top of the road to Mt. Ashland.

     “We’re in the clouds,” Blue said.

     In the parking lot we opened the car door and were slammed by thirty mile-an-hour winds and snow blowing sideways. We scrambled into our ski boots and fumbled toward the lodge, which we couldn’t see.

     When we walked to the bottom of the beginner lift, Eliot started to cry and refused to step into his skis.

     “My face hurts,” he wailed. After years of cajoling him onto chairlifts and down ski runs, I knew to let it go. I had already released Blue from the sport he hated years before. He grabbed Eliot’s skis and they turned for the lodge.

     Carly and I asked a snowboarder how to get to the intermediate run Blue had heard was protected from the wind. I wasn’t about to pull out the trail map in howling winds, and it wouldn’t have helped when we couldn’t see more than ten yards in front of us. We made our way toward the fading figures of snowboarders heading down a hill, and found ourselves at the bottom of a chairlift where everything was still.

     The trees were too tightly packed for deep-powder skiing, but the slopes were packed with snow and a six-inch layer of fluffy powder. I was in heaven. But Carly, adept on her new snowboard, wanted to find the terrain park, which we did. She floated a couple of feet into the air off of a hump of snow and grabbed her tail. I sailed a couple of feet in the air too and made a soft landing in perfect snow.

     “Eliot’s probably being bad right now,” she said after only a few runs. “We should go back.”

     “I agree,” I said. Asking directions at every turn, we groped our way back. And there on the sheltered side of the lodge were Blue and Eliot playing in the snow. 

     Unable to find a snow-free spot at the bottom of the road to pull over, Blue and I ended up removing the chains on I-5 with semis roaring past. By the time we made it back over the pass through wind and sleet, I had had enough. The rest of the family had been done when we’d reached Mt. Ashland. But at any cost, I loved the loneliness of a chairlift sailing through the bluster of trees.

     That night, snug in our motel under Mt. Shasta, which was hidden in fog, Blue and I spent twenty minutes alone, with two top-shelf margaritas in giant cactus glasses. If Lawrence was in his seventies, our waitress in the motel dining room was ten years older. Her name was Elodie (rhymes with Melody) and she was the best waitress I’ve ever had. She had been waiting tables in the motel for twenty years, and had her own following.

     Like everyone else in the town, Elodie had been without power most of the week, and with no power to pump her well, had to melt snow for water.

     “How much snow for an inch of water?” Blue asked.

    “They say ten inches,” she said, “But I say it’s twelve.”

     Throughout the state we were measuring the snow in feet and the rain in inches, and a thirsty California drank. All the while in the north, legends like Lawrence and Elodie got up and went to work.  And the great volcanos of the Cascade Range, obscured in fog, pulled at us even more.

Caitlin Flanagan is right: I am an educated, middle-class woman whose school voluntarism is “a locus of (my) fathomless energies.” When I see students whose support system, for a myriad of reasons, has failed them, I want to do something about it. And I am one of the Alice Waters groupies Flanagan talks about in her January 2010 Atlantic Monthly article, so when I want to effect change, one of the places I turn is the Life Lab garden Flanagan writes is “cheating our most vulnerable students.”

Flanagan points to classroom-centered programs like Cal Prep that draw low-income students into the arena of higher learning, and there are few people who could argue with the success of such a program. As an English teacher with a daughter in public school, I am painfully aware of how little the current standards for high school English prepare our students to write college-level essays. But the teach-to-test, No Child Left Behind method has so far failed in our public schools; I once watched students in a middle school Life Lab class fill out nutrition workbooks designed to increase their “literacy.” How could a workbook have been a substitute for digging up and tasting organic carrots they had planted themselves?

Flanagan argues that the only way to effect educational change is through books, but I have seen enough students to know that each person is ignited by a different fire, whether it be academic or athletic, artistic or ROP. I once tutored a student I’ll call Daniel in high school Algebra. At least I would have if he had shown up. With an antiquated textbook, an overcrowded math class, and no electricity in the trailer where he might otherwise have been able to do his homework at night, Daniel had little motivation to learn Algebra. A year ago Daniel died at age 25 in a homeless camp. If during his high school years someone had shepherded him to an ROP program, things might have turned out differently.

Jorge is a student I know who, like Daniel, was adrift in the public school system and saw little reason to attend class. It was the physical work of his Regional Occupation Program in Agriculture that turned him around. “I love being outside,” he told me. “It’s my favorite way of learning…I’d rather do heavy work outside than work in the classroom.” Jorge wasn’t just returning to the fields to labor with food, as Flanagan claims; he was learning about nutrition, agriculture, and the environment.

“I’d rather have my family eating something fresh and homegrown” he said, “than food that comes from far away and is expensive.” Jorge was educated in the garden, not the classroom, about locally grown food, and that education spurred him toward community college. Next year at Cabrillo College he plans to take “a bunch of agriculture classes… Sustainable Landscaping… Green Roofs, Solar Panels, Water Catchers... to learn how to install solar panels. Or learn how to make them, that would be even better.” Jorge’s high school education only began with laboring in the garden; from there it progressed to the science behind sustainable living.

Rather than keeping them in the fields as Flanagan claims, laboring with students in the garden attempts to free them from a sedentary lifestyle of teach-to-test curricula, fast-food style school lunch, and too many hours in front of the television or video games. As Kurt Michael Friese points out in his own Civil Eats response to Flanagan’s article: “Throughout most of human history the rich were fat and the poor were skinny, yet today in America it is quite the opposite. Fixing that requires direct experience and interaction with our food, something no schoolroom lecture can provide.”

On the eve of his fifteenth year, Eliot’s math was still shaky. “Tonight it’s 2009,” I told him, explaining not for the first time the significance of the birthday he shared with his aunt Jeffery. “It will be next year when you wake up tomorrow on your birthday. What year will it be?”

“2008,” he said.

It was true 2008 had been a better year than 2010 was likely to be. The morning of the 31^st, as city workers blocked off the main drag of our coastal town for the New Year’s Eve parade, more than the usual number of wanderers whose sole possessions fit in their backpacks walked the streets a full twelve hours before the festivities were set to begin. The sirens started before dark and continued into the night. Outside my house kids set off M-80’s well before midnight. After safely ferrying our sixteen-year-old from one New Year’s celebration to the next, Blue and I lay awake and listened to the explosion of fireworks that marked the passing of 2009. But despite the state of the world and the economy, in our house it had been a good year.

Eliot had ushered out the old year with his favorite Christmas song, belting into the microphone,

“Oh what fun it is to ride

In a one ho’ open sleigh!”

Since all over Facebook adolescent girls were dressing like a ho’s for Christmas, I thought his lyrics were perfect.

Next to the microphone in our livingroom were the Christmas cards we had received, including our favorite from Eliot’s teacher Alana, who had spent the last year teaching school in Namibia, Southern Africa. Alana had posted updates on her website about her teaching post in the village of Bunya, where on rainy days her students huddled in the one corner of the classroom that didn't have a leaky roof. She had started an online campaign with friends and family to raise funds for two new classrooms, and Blue and I had sent twenty dollars. At the end of October a community of workers, students, teachers, and volunteers had finished building two classrooms with simple wood beams, aluminum roofs, and walls made of cement mixed with sand and stones from the river.

The card we received at Christmas had a student’s color drawing of the classroom and a hand-written note:

“Dear: Wilson family

Thank you for helping us build our new classroom we like them very much

We are happy we only have one door so we won’t get wet in class.

Yours faithfully

Kasivi CS Grade 5 and 6”

There was a photo of all the students holding signs that spelled, “Thank you, Mpandu, Wilson Family.” Blue and I had sent twenty dollars. When after a few weeks’ holiday back home, Alana returned to Africa for another year of teaching, we understood why.

It’s hard for children in our culture of plenty, even in a time of deep recession, to understand how much they have, and all the harder for a sixteen-year-old, but when Carly saw the photograph, she got it.

Now that I was handing over my car keys to Carly on a regular basis, the afternoons were Eliot’s, and out from under the shadow of his older sibling he flourished. Once a week I took him to the surf and pushed him into waves alongside members of the Shoreline Middle School surf team. He rode most of the waves on his belly, and I encouraged him to pop up to his knees. A friend and parent from the Shoreline Surf Team gave him a team sweatshirt, and he wore it with pride.

Then one overcast day after Christmas, I pushed him into a wave, and unprompted by me, he stood up as he rode the wave to shore. Surprised, I threw my arms in the air and cheered.

“I stood up,” he told Carly as soon as we got home, and her congratulations were genuine. Most of the time she wanted nothing to do with him and his pestering ways. Often she yelled, and sometimes --although less and less as she approached the second half of sixteen-- I yelled too.

When that happened Eliot said, “I like it quiet and silent.”

At times Eliot annoyed us to the breaking point, but his pestering was nothing compared to what it had been. When he was in preschool he had pulled Carly’s hair until she cried. Now, on a rainy night when Blue and Carly went outside for a hot tub, he locked them out of the house. It seemed benign compared to the past. Unmedicated some six months, he had turned mysteriously mellow.

The morning of his fourteenth birthday, I got up hours before he would and gazed out the window at the five-story redwood in our backyard, feeling an overwhelming sense of gratitude. Only a week before on Christmas, my brother Pete and my nephew Ian had held an impromptu bluegrass concert at our family gathering, and we were about to gather again to celebrate my sister Jeffery’s 60th birthday. In a few hours, the birthday boy and his sister would wake up, Blue would return from a New Year’s morning round of golf, and I would hand over my keys to the sixteen-year-old for her daily surf session. After that, there would be nothing left to do but light the candles on the cake --which Eliot, in his newly-croaking voice, had insisted I adorn with gummi worms-- and watch my alma mater Oregon Ducks in the Rose Bowl.

And it just so happened that the Ducks had been in a New Year’s Day bowl fourteen years before at the moment --not the last time he would do things on his own time rather than ours—that Eliot had finally chosen to enter the world.

One morning I came out of our house just as Jorge, a young man I knew, shuffled by in baggy pants. He was pouring a bag of Skittles into his mouth.

“Jorge!” I said. “Is that your breakfast?”

He nodded sheepishly. I may not have had any sway over his breakfast that morning, but I had a plan. And I took comfort in the fact that I lived on a busy street where from time to time I ran into Jorge, whom I’d known since he was in kindergarten. Down the block from our house was the elementary school he had attended with my daughter Carly. That school was no longer, but the campus housed a number of smaller schools, including Costanoa, a district-run program for students who had fallen behind at the bigger high schools. The morning of his Skittle breakfast, Jorge was a sophomore at Costanoa.

Some months later I ran into his mom. She lived with her family in the apartments down the hill from our house, and over the years I had talked with her often as she walked by with Jorge’s younger siblings.

“How’s Jorge?” I asked.

“He’s doing well,” she said in Spanish. “He’s working in the ROP garden at school, and he loves it so much he wants to apply to the horticulture program at Cabrillo.” When Costanoa had moved to our campus, they had expanded the Life Lab garden halfway across the playing field. Students on campus labored in the garden and cooked from the bounty.

“He’s looking for space to start a vegetable garden for the family,” she said. Holding a cloth shopping bag, she said she was on her way to the natural food store to buy produce.

Jorge was a senior when I saw the flyer with his name on it. In conjunction with Food What, a food and health program using sustainable agriculture to empower youth, Jorge and his schoolmates were hosting a Harvest Festival at the Life Lab on the UCSC campus. As a member of our district Wellness Committee, I planned on attending the event to help Jamie Smith, our district’s new Director of Food Services, cook farm-fresh pizzas in a wood-burning oven.

It was a clear morning in October when I walked up the hill to the Life Lab garden overlooking the Monterey Bay. High school students were busy setting up stations for the festival, including one for carving pumpkins grown in the garden, one for tasting honey produced by the resident bees, and what turned out to be Jorge’s favorite, a hayride along the hill overlooking the ocean.

I found Frannie, who helps run the garden, stoking a fire in the wood-burning oven, a hive-like structure made of hay and mud. On a table next to the oven were jars of tomato sauce made from the Life Lab’s tomatoes, plus vegetables and herbs from the garden.

By ten when the students arrived, Jamie and Frannie were slinging the pizza dough Jamie had made early that morning, and students were eating slices with pumpkin, chard, onions, peppers, herbs, and even figs, faster than we could make them. The pumpkin tasted so sweet one student asked if it was pineapple.

“It went by really smooth,” Jorge said when I tracked him down a week later at Costanoa. “I was just the flow master most of the time because it was going so well.”

He agreed to talk with me about his experience with Food What and the Agriculture program at Costanoa.

I asked him how he ended up at Costanoa and he said, “When I went to (regular high school) I started ditching class because … it felt like my teachers didn’t know how to teach a whole group of people. I felt like I was getting left behind. I stopped going to school, started hanging out with friends. We would all ditch together, eat at Del Pueblo, walk to the park.

"The days I showed up at school … I would always feel lost…The principal met with my parents because of my low attendance. I hadn’t even attended a third of the year. He said I had to go to alternative school to make up the credits. My brother, who’s twenty now, was at Costanoa and I wanted to try it.”

I asked him about getting involved with Life Lab.

“At Costanoa I signed up for the Agriculture ROP class. I remember the garden (from elementary school) but it was totally different…I always wanted to work with plants; my dad has been in landscaping for twenty years. But it’s much more fun starting plants from seed, watching them grow, taking them outside and seeing them thrive. I love being outside. It’s my favorite way of learning…I’d rather do heavy work outside than work in the classroom.

“When Doron (director of Food What) came to Cosatnoa, he kept making jokes and throwing apples from his farm to the kids. My friend said, ‘You’re a farmer, you should try that.’ The next thing I know I was working during the spring internships.... after school with other Costanoa kids at UCSC Farm. I remember the chickens and the Venus Flycatchers from (field trips) when I was a kid. But when I came this time, the feeling of being there…it was like a relief. You forget about everything.”

“Tell me about the garden you started at your grandma’s house,” I said.

“Two inches under the dirt at our apartments is concrete…so my dad put plants in pots. But the manager said no plants in pots. So we took to them to my grandma’s house. She has a huge back yard. I was thinking, ‘Why not start a garden?’ The first year (the plants) didn’t grow because of too much shade from the trees. Then my brother cut down the apple tree in the middle, and the next season I grew all kinds of vegetables.

"All the water came from the creek running through her backyard. I planted forty tomato seedlings from Lisa Glick (ROP teacher) all around the border. That made me always want to be there, made me want to keep growing food for my family. I’d rather have my family eating something fresh and homegrown than food that comes from far away and is expensive."

”How have you changed since you started the ag program at Costanoa?”

“It made me grow up and think of something to reach for, a goal in life. Before I didn’t even care. I thought, ‘Why finish high school… College is where everything starts happening…’ It’s good I matured early so I could fix those mistakes that happened earlier. High school is where everything starts. I was introduced to so many things in high school.”

“You’re graduating in the spring. Will you continue the horticulture program at Cabrillo?”

“Last year I took Edible Landscaping (at Cabrillo.) Next year I want to take a bunch of agriculture classes (like) Sustainable Landscaping. Green roofs, solar panel, water catchers, especially here with six-month drought season. I’d like to learn how to install solar panels, or learn how to make them, that would be even better.”

“How have the ROP class and Food What changed the way you eat?”

“It makes me focus on eating vegetables. After I learned about methane gas and the carbon footprint of cows, I didn’t eat beef for one and a half months. Then I went to a party and there was all this beef and I couldn’t help it. But now I eat less meat than I used to.”

“Do you still eat Skittles for breakfast?” I asked.

(Laugh.) “No.”

In the thirteen years I had known Jorge, I had watched both him and the life lab garden at his school grow. Now I looked forward to being part of the expansion of the Life Lab at our neighborhood Branciforte Middle School, where federal stimulus dollars would pay for a new playing field that would include a garden large enough to accommodate all the science classes. Because if students were offered Skittles when they were hungry or craving something sweet, they would eat them. But if they were offered farm-fresh pizza with pumpkin that tasted like pineapple, they’d eat that too. And if they were taught about the sustainably grown pumpkin, they would learn how to grow it along with all kinds of other organic produce. They would taste the bounty of their labor and would want their families to taste it. Those students, who might otherwise grow obese from government-issued lunches, who might otherwise drop out of school because they didn’t see the point of sitting in a crowded classroom, would become invested in their own health, and not incidentally, their own future. As a member of the Wellness Committee aiming to change the lunches and nutrition education in our district, I looked forward to being a part of that future.

Being invited to write for Civileats has caused me to consider more seriously the role I play in my community helping to educate middle and high school students about nutrition. This article, about changes Blue and I made at home, first appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle in May, 2008.

In neighborhoods around the globe people gather on their front porches to commune, but our busy street, while friendly, is not like that. Yet a landscape change Blue and I made for environmental reasons brought us unexpectedly closer to our own community.

A few summers ago we took out our front lawn, and by removing the weed and gopher-ridden turf and disabling the sprinkler system, we started saving 18,000 gallons of water a year. We put in a drip system whose sprinkler heads consumed a couple of gallons per watering, versus the hundreds per watering of conventional sprinklers.

We replaced the lawn with vegetable beds that soaked up the sun bathing the front of our house. My brother-in-law Eamon built an arbor over the picket fence, and we planted kiwi and grape vines to grow up over the arbor and provide a covering, thereby discouraging passers-by on our busy street from picking the vegetables. The vines would take a few years to form a covering, though, and in that time we never lost so much as a tomato.

Our son Eliot (whose placement somewhere on the autistic spectrum made him act younger than his ten years) helped me plant tomatoes, lemon cucumbers, and blueberries in the new beds. He watered the seedlings and helped me release a can of ladybugs on their leaves in the evening. I told him the ladybugs stay overnight and lay their eggs on the plants, which propagate new ladybugs to eat the “bad bugs” eating the seedlings. Eliot was fascinated with insects, partly based on fear and his ability to take the minute and make it larger. He spent a lot of time in the garden scouting the insects and watching his beloved bees gather pollen in the flowers, which he called “rosenflowers.”

But the best part about our new garden was that it got us out in front of the house with our neighbors. The evening we released the ladybugs, our neighbor Grandfather Tea walked by. His granddaughter was a quiet, bright girl whom our daughter Carly had known since kindergarten, and with whom she had become closer friends in middle school. While her parents worked full time in a Chinese restaurant, Carly's friend lived with her grandparents just around the corner from us, but it wasn't until Grandfather Tea walked by the front yard where I was picking vegetables that he and I had our first conversation.

One afternoon that summer I started digging out the weeds pushing through the cracks in the sidewalk in front of our house. It was painstaking work bending over a flathead shovel in the heat, scraping at the concrete. When work with the flathead shovel produced little more than lower back issues, I got down on my knees with a tool and dug at the roots deep in the cracks.

It was when I was on my knees that I spoke for the first time with two different people who had been walking by my house every day for years. One was a neighbor who lived with his mother, but hung out on the streets and talked to himself as he passed my house. We’d never said more than hello. But the day I was on my knees digging at the cracks in the sidewalk, he passed by and said, “That’s hard work. I know, I’ve done it.”

I stood and saw the neighbor who often sat on the curb where I was now raking up weeds and dirt. He hand-rolled cigarettes and stared at the figures that raced across his vision, and for which he was heavily medicated. Most days he was lost in a fog, but when he was lucid he was always friendly. The day I raked my weeds, he looked up and waved.

I got down on my knees again to dig deeper in the cracks, and the man who always wore a helmet walked by. I imagine he wore the helmet for medical reasons to protect his head from falls. We had never spoken, although we’d said hello. This time he bent down until his eyes were level with mine, and we talked for a moment about the weeding. Before he stood to go, he patted me on the shoulder and said. “Keep up the good work.”

Two of the neighbors with whom I exchanged greetings that day had lives that revolved around the street, and by being in the street myself I was blessed by their presence. Christians are taught to find the holy in unexpected places, and certainly that day I did.

It was lunchtime at Harbor High School, and the cars were backed up three stories down to the parking lot at the bottom of campus. The thump of the bass resonated from jacked-up trucks and Toyota Forerunners as students tried to break out for a burrito or at Joe’s sub before their afternoon classes started. At the top of the hill on the other side of campus, a throng of teenagers waited to cross over to the gas station that sells slurpies and Hot Cheetos. These students, including my daughter Carly, hadn’t heard that chef Jamie Smith was at that very moment serving noodle bowls with the veggies he’d stir-fried in the Harbor High kitchen.

Jamie is not just flipping broccoli; he’s trying to “make it cool to eat at school.” He knows it is healthier on multiple levels for high school students --not just at Harbor but all across the country-- to stay on campus during lunch.

The fare Jamie is serving is not the same school-issued slice of pizza, bag of Doritos, and blue-dye drink of the past years. There were a myriad of reasons for that lunch, including paltry federal subsidies and the Department of Agriculture regulations: fat maximums with no limit on carbohydrates. Thanks to a nationwide movement to fight obesity, those regulations are changing, but for years the chips and sugar drink met the calorie minimums at a bargain price.

We literally sell our kids short if we imagine they only have a taste for junk food. I once found Carly, back when she was in elementary school, in the kitchen making crepes with cheese and olive tapenade as an after-school snack. It shouldn’t have surprised me, since when I lived in Berkeley my favorite stomping grounds were the dining porch of the two-story flat that houses the Chez Panisse Cafe. Alice Waters has always been my hero, but now I have two new heroes: Ann Cooper who, with Waters’ help revamped the lunch program for the Berkeley Unified School District, and Jamie Smith who is helping revamp ours.

For the past year the Wellness Committee for our Santa Cruz City Schools has been meeting in an effort to overhaul the federally mandated lunch program, whose high fat and sugar content has been causing nationwide obesity and diabetes and leaving students unable to focus in the classroom. This fall the district has contracted with Oakland-based Revolution Foods to provide healthy meals to our elementary, middle, and high school students while we look at the feasibility of returning to cooking in our own facilities’ kitchens.

Checking out the new food at my neighborhood Branciforte Middle School, I read the weekly menu provided by Revolution Foods, which included burritos, spaghetti, burgers, and pizza, all made with whole-wheat flour. Every day there was a vegetarian option, and all meals included fresh fruit and hormone-free milk. Kids were walking away from the food window with barbecued chicken sandwiches, Chinese chicken salad, apples or carrots, chocolate chip cookies, and slushies. One kid had bought two slushies, but I doubt he was able to finish both before the bell without getting a brain freeze.

The slushies, made with 100% juice and no sugar, are an attempt to compete with 7-11 and the gas station. “We’d rather have the students buy their food from us,” Jamie told me. But in the future smoothies made with fresh fruit may replace the slushies. The kids at Harbor are responding to Jamie’s veggie bowls; the number of students buying lunch on campus is rising, and the number of kids participating at Branciforte Middle School is climbing as well.

I decided to try the food myself, and as I ate my chicken sandwich, I asked a few tables of Branciforte students how they liked the new lunch. They didn’t like the chicken sandwich, but it tasted okay to me, and I felt better afterward than I would have if I’d been offered chicken nuggets. They liked the chocolate chip cookies, which they may not have realized were made with whole wheat. But what they were responding to was the homemade food Jackie made in the Branciforte kitchen, and that was the ultimate goal of our Wellness Committee.

“The kids are soaking it up,” says Jackie Russell, who has worked for the district in food service, most recently at Branciforte, for seventeen years. “We’re cooking breakfast for them twice a week, homemade muffins and bread made with fruit and whole wheat flour. The kids love it.”

The fruit Jackie is putting in the bread, in fact all of the produce in the new lunch program, comes from one source: Alba near Salinas, which provides 100% local organic fruits and vegetables in season. By buying from this one source, our district food service is actually saving money on produce, and the kids are getting healthier food. In the past, food service has lost money because federal subsidies do not meet the cost of food in our area. This year food service has raised its prices to reflect that reality. The next step is to increase student participation.

Jackie says she’s glad to see the food coming back to where it was. That’s what Ann Cooper did in 2005 for the Berkeley Unified School District brought it back to scratch cooking. But even in the land of the Edible Schoolyard, Cooper had to make concessions. She had to use commodity meat to feed that volume of students in a federally subsidized program, and when her students rebelled against fresh vegetables in the pizza sauce, she met them halfway by pureeing the vegetables into the sauce.

Ann Cooper not only cooked from scratch, but also harvested from the Edible Schoolyard, and in Santa Cruz, Life Lab needs to be an integral part of the nutrition program as well. I have witnessed the benefits of hands-on labor in the garden; not only do students gain a better understanding of where their food comes from --or should come from-- but many who are unable to focus in the classroom are mentally and physically engaged in the garden. Currently only a small percentage of Branciforte students have access to Life Lab, but when the new athletic field --paid for 100% by federal stimulus dollars-- is completed, it will include a garden large enough to accommodate all science classes.

Last year two food service consultants from Local Plates conducted a full assessment of our district’s food program, and they made it clear that an eventual overhaul of the district-wide program was not only fiscally possible but also sustainable, while the current program was not sustainable from either a fiscal or a wellness point of view. Our Wellness Committee is committed to feeding students so that they can focus on their schoolwork. Even in the midst of financial crisis, we will use the funding resources we have to better meet the students’ nutritional needs. We will use our physical resources as one of the richest farming communities in the world. And we will use the enthusiasm we have as a community to teach our students about sources of healthy, nutritious, and organic foods.

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We had left the coast of Ventura and were curving inland toward Oxnard when we saw it, the rocky landscape of mountains, and the Malibu Canyon tumbling toward the sea. I hadn’t been to Malibu since I was a kid, but my dad had grown up in Los Angeles, and I relished the chance to reconnect with some of the family that had multiplied since he’d moved and settled in Northern California.

The last time I’d been to Malibu I was younger than Carly, and at a Malibu beach house, my sister Shelley had changed into her bathing suit and left her prosthetic arm with her clothes. That was when my cousin Missy’s daughter Terese, who was two at the time and supposed to be napping, had slipped out of bed to try it on. But it had gotten stuck, and she’d emerged in tears in the kitchen, where Missy had helped her extract the prosthesis from her hand.

I carry that story with me because it is a testament to Terese’s empathy, and maybe even a little hard-headedness she shares with my sister Shelley. The bond between cousins is an unfolding discovery, and not only have I felt the excitement of that discovery many times, but I have witnessed it in the generation below me. Carly and I didn’t know it yet, but we were about to forge another connection.

We were in Malibu for a September surf contest, and we set up our tent in a campground at the edge of the canyon overlooking the Pacific Ocean. We saw hawks and deer and cottontail rabbits. At dawn I emerged just as an owl flew into the tree above our site, calling to an owl in a distant tree. But the work involved in tent camping sometimes outweighs the benefits of nature, and that was the case at the Malibu Beach RV Resort, where we camped above the RV’s with a lot of European tourists. Carly was horrified when a fellow camper emerged from his tent in sandals and speedo-tight underwear and proceeded to make his breakfast.

We had to use little carts to wheel our stuff to our sites from our cars, and the bag with my pillows was the one I dropped in the dirt. By morning our mattress had deflated, and every night we carried it awkwardly to the car to reinflate it using the car battery and a pump. This only reinforced Carly’s dislike of camping, despite my luxury set-up, and I dubbed her, not for the first time, the princess. On our last morning when I was sweating in the humidity, stuffing sleeping bags and taking down the tent, she was in the bathroom charging her cell-phone.

I couldn’t get mad, though. She was doing what I called the job of being sixteen years old. Only the week before, I’d received a desperate phone call from her after school. She had been riding her bike home in flip-flops and had wiped out in road-work gravel, ripping open the skin on her big toe. If she was surprised I showed up to rescue her on my bike, not in the car, she didn’t show it. Wisely, she had stopped in front of her aunt Julie’s a few blocks from our house, and I led her over to Julie’s lawn, where I used the hose to clean up her toe before wrapping it in gauze and band-aids. But within seconds of collapsing on Julie’s lawn with blood dripping from her toe, she had her cell phone out and was thumbing away.

“You’re texting someone right now?” I asked, incredulous.

She acknowledged the absurdity of this with half a smile. But I kept going; I took advantage of the bike ride home to lecture her on the stupidity of riding a bike in flip-flops, and the gratitude I felt that it was only her toe and not her helmet-less head that had been injured.

“Mom!” she said. “I can’t believe you’re getting mad at me when I’m injured!” Indeed I was, and basking in the parental opportunity.

We were camped at the RV Resort for a longboard contest at Surfrider Beach. We were happy to see so many more young women surfers in Southern California than in our part of the state, but Carly got outsurfed and was lucky to make it to the second round. Still, she spent time with friends she had made on the surfing circuit, and more importantly, met a new cousin. Zayla lived with her mom Helen and the rest of her family, her cousin Chaconne, and her grandmother Missy in an upscale mobile home park in Malibu. Two years before Missy’s daughter Parrish had died of cancer, and Missy had taken in Parrish’s daughter Chaconne, who was not much older than Carly. Missy made it her home, painting the walls Flamingo pink, adorning the front porch with two pink chairs and a canvas of a cactus painted by Terese. We walked over to the pool, where Missy had a grocery bag of snacks for the girls.

It was Carly’s first time meeting Zayla, her first time in Malibu, and on the way home, her first time surfing Rincon in Santa Barbara, which was firing sets of overhead waves. That September there were firsts for Eliot as well. His lap swimming in the summer, his swims from dock to dock at the lake, and calm seas all converged on Labor Day weekend in his first foray out over his head in the ocean with Carly and their cousin Sarah. That same morning Carly had agreed to jam with him in the garage, something she had done only once before, although he’d asked a zillion times. He busted out his two songs, then went into his improvisational mode. Carly lasted through five minutes of improvisation, which I considered more than fair, and with each of his songs she created a compatible beat.

The best drummers were the ones who adjusted their beats to their bandmates’ guitars and didn’t overpower them. Carly did this with her brother every day, without the drums, sometimes to her own detriment. But in the end her heartbeat, though hidden, was in tune with his. It made me think of Todd, another Southern California Tatum, one of the best drummers I knew. It made me think of Missy’s granddaughters Chaconne, and Aurora who was autistic, and their mom Parrish who two years before --even though she didn’t want to-- had left two girls, her boyfriend, her sisters, and especially Missy, sick with grief. Like a drum the heart pounds. So it was, that with her hands drumming impatiently on the school desk while the waves broke on without her, Carly continued the genetic line of cousins and grandparents and great-great grandparents, beating on, all the way back to her immigrant ancestors.

When Eliot was a baby Blue and I took him to San Francisco for an MRI we hoped would shed some light on his developmental delay. The results did not reveal anything unusual, other than a Chiari Malformation which the neurologist, and two neurologists since, assured us was not related to his disability. The Chiari meant the cerebellar tonsils at the base of Eliot’s skull were pushing on his spinal chord, which the neurologist told us might cause headaches during his "second and third decade." Right on target at thirteen, when his voice got croaky and he hit a major growth spurt, Eliot began experiencing those headaches.

From the day he was born Eliot has been a lesson in faith. Twice before he could talk and during that period when we had the first MRI, he looked up at me and his face told me not to worry. This time when the headaches came on, I was not worried. There are some things a mother knows, and I knew. But I had to help him any way I could, so I made an appointment with his pediatrician Dr. Griger, and she arranged for our appointment with a neurologist in Palo Alto. While we waited for the appointment day to arrive, I tried reducing, and eventually eliminating, the two medications Eliot was taking for impulse control. Without the meds, the headaches persisted but the behaviors stopped. This was nothing short of a miracle. We had tried going off the meds before and had always restarted them to control behaviors. The months of summer went by, and still there were no behaviors we couldn’t manage. Puberty was probably the biggest contributor, but school, the work we did at home, and his increased ability to self-regulate helped too. We continued without the meds, kept them close at hand, and hoped we wouldn’t have to use them again.

“What is the matter with him?” Carly asked, every time he burst into her room and grabbed her computer or threw something at her.

But she was his only target, so instead of telling her we’d taken him off the meds, an action she would have interpreted as an attempt on our part to torture her, we told her the other truth. “He adores you,” I said. “And this in the only way he knows how to tell you.”

As Dr. Griger and I anticipated, the neurologist in Palo Alto called for an MRI at Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital. Since there was no way even in his best state Eliot could remain still for longer than ten minutes, she called for anesthesia as well. Although I knew it was necessary, it was this, not the MRI, that worried me. But at Lucille Packard we were in the hands of experts from the beginning. First they sent us a letter which included the URL for an interactive website for kids. Eliot watched the page on anesthesia, which walked him through everything he would experience from the time he entered the waiting room to the anesthetic put him to asleep, over and over again.

The earliest slot in the day we could book the MRI was noon, which meant Eliot would have nothing but Gatorade in his belly for the duration of the morning. But from the moment Blue, Eliot, and I entered the waiting room, the nurses and staff waltzed us through the pre-op procedures. When the nurse practitioner came into the exam room where Eliot was to change into his scrubs, he stood up, looked her in the eye, and answered each of her questions without hesitation. It was so automatic and appropriate that I knew the conversations his teachers practiced with him at school, in preparation for just such an encounter, had paid off.

I was most anxious to talk with the anesthesiologist, even though I had already talked with a nurse over the phone about the medications Eliot would receive. We met her right before they put him under, and she was wiry, intelligent, and forthcoming, in a word, competent. She told me the first medication they gave him in liquid form was Versed, which would help him relax in preparation for the mask. The medication they administered from the mask was Cevo, which would put him to sleep. Then came the big one, Propofol. In the waiting room I had just read a newspaper article about what killed Michael Jackson. In fact the dose of Propofol, which Michael Jackson used to sleep, was fairly low, but in combination with the other drugs his doctor had administered every two hours during the night, it had killed him.

The anesthesiologist had barely uttered the word Propofol when she zeroed in on my unspoken fears. “The dose they gave Michael Jackson was actually low,” she said. “It was all the other drugs combined with it that did it. Not only that, I don’t know how the doctor could have left the room after administering the Propofol. I will be here throughout the MRI monitering Eliot’s breathing and administering oxygen as needed.”

“Worst case scenario, what would you need to do?” I asked.

“It is common for the Propofol to affect breathing, and worst case scenario I would administer oxygen,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

“Are we ready?” she asked Eliot, who had drunk the Versed and was watching the Disney Channel with bleary eyes.

“Ready,” he said. He was holding his “best buddy in the whole world,” Curious George. He knew from the interactive website that George would stay with him throughout the MRI.

The nurses and anesthesiologist wheeled Eliot in his bed to the pre-op room, where they got ready strap on the mask. From there they would go on without us. I grabbed Eliot’s hand with my right and Blue’s with my left.

”Ready to be beamed up?” the anesthesiologist asked Eliot.

“Yeah,” he said, and within seconds of having the mask strapped on he was out.

That was when I cried, as I knew I would. The MRI, and our reasons for being there, were minimal compared with the procedures other children and their parents were enduring all around us. But there’s something about seeing your kid being put under that is hard to bear.

Cell phone on and hospital-administered pager in hand, Blue and I left the building and crossed under a bright sun to the restaurant across the street. After lunch we returned to the waiting room, where the board indicated Eliot had completed the MRI. Within half an hour, hospital staff escorted us to the recovery room, where Eliot slept soundly with Curious George at his side. His toes stuck out the bottom of the sheet.

After half an hour the nurse attempted to wake him, speaking in his ear and tickling his jaw. He turned his head back and forth and fell back asleep. Finally after twenty minutes he started to turn over, twisting until the wires attached to his chest and the IV attached to his hand were wrapped twice around his body. I lifted his wilting body and held him, giving him bites of a grape popsicle. Then we untangled him and started to help him dress. At the last minute the nurse removed the I.V.

“Is it time for the MRI?” he drawled.

Another nurse brought a wheelchair and we lifted him in, said our goodbyes, and pushed him out to the car. Our instructions were to start with clear liquids, then move to a milkshake, then if all went well, progress to solid food.

“I want a burrito,” Eliot slurred from the backseat like a drunken frat boy.

When we got home we planted him in front of the t.v., and I started feeding him liquids, and eventually mac and cheese. By the time he went to bed he had fully recovered.

When Blue and I had that first appointment with the neurologist in San Francisco, he'd neglected to tell us to make a follow-up appointment to discuss the results of the MRI. After the MRI I tried to reach him by phone. The receptionist told me I needed to book an appointment, and the soonest slot she could offer me was a month away. I booked the appointment and continued to leave messages for the neurologist, none of which he returned.

When Dr. Cheyette ordered the MRI at Lucille Packard, she told me to call her as soon as we’d had the MRI, and she would read the results. I told her about the neurologist in San Francisco.

“I have no problem reading the results to you over the phone,” she said, “Considering how far you’ve come.” We had driven only fifty minutes.

The afternoon of the MRI I called her office and left a message. She called the next day and told me what I had expected: the MRI revealed nothing more than the Chiari. I told Eliot we just had to gut it out 'til he stopped growing, and that we could use Tylenol when we needed it.

Eliot had recently begun telling me, “Mom, don’t be OCD.” OCD meaning obsessive compulsive, which we all were, except Blue. I told Eliot I didn’t need to have it pointed out when I was already feeling uptight, and his moniker only made me feel more so.

So he changed it to “Mom, don’t be off the corners.”

That was easier to take. And I knew what it meant. It was the thirteen-year-old version of what he’d tried to tell me when he was a baby. He was telling me not to worry.

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Until now, my blog entries have been excerpted from two memoirs, "Fly Fishing the Indian Pools" and "Toes on the Nose." The second memoir, Toes on the Nose, ended when Carly reached an age where writing about her would have been an invasion of privacy. This new entry is part of a third memoir, "Paradise Continued."

I took my mother-in-law to a rock concert in June. It was Eliot’s solo performance at the Bay School, which he earned every time he had five good days in a row. Eliot’s teachers had him wear a stopwatch that taught him not just digital time but also appointment-keeping. The Bay School was one big digital stopwatch; they wasted not a moment in motivating students toward their academic goals. The solo concerts hooked Eliot for life. He talked about school even the five weeks a year he was on vacation.

On a hot afternoon, Carly, Eliot’s grandmother Sushi, and I arrived forty-five minutes before school let out to find white chairs lined up outside, and Eliot’s equipment set up and waiting. At 2 p.m. Eliot appeared, and his audience started ambling in: a motley crew of autistic students and their teachers. As Eliot started to play, his classmates propelled out of their seats, gazing off in different directions, generally away from the performer, absorbing the music from their own private worlds. Their teachers prodded them back to their seats with treats and gentle encouragement.

Eliot launched into his two hit songs. Each song had a couple of simple chords and original lyrics, so original they changed with the scenery. After he had finished his opening numbers, he ran through twenty improvisational tunes. Carly’s eyes were rolling back in her head and Sushi was wilting in the heat. Eliot's classmates wandered off one by one with their teachers. I told the director of education Andrea that I didn’t know how many more songs I could take.

“Eliot earned every minute of his concert,” she said, rocking to the music as if he were Bruce Springstein. “He worked hard for this.”

That was how I felt about his five weeks off from school; I wanted each of those vacations to be special. So at the end of June I took him up to Fall River east of Mt. Shasta, where Blue and I had become partners with a number of other families on a ranch that had recently won a conservation easement. Temperatures at Fall River reached a hundred in the summer, but spring had brought rain to that part of the state, and when we arrived everything was green. We spent three days dipping into the glacial runoff, and sleeping on a screened-in porch that kept the mosquitoes out, but not the calling of owls at night.

From Fall River we drove to Bend, Oregon, where Eliot fell in love with my cousin Melantha’s shepherd mix, Zeppelin. Once a rescued dog, Zeppelin had a way of perking his ears and fixing a glassy brown gaze upon you that had stolen Melantha’s heart. We stayed with Melantha and her husband Michael in the house they had built on the Deschutes River. Even when Eliot was basking on the rocks of the river, he kept saying, “I want to go back to Zeppelin’s house.”

After we said goodbye to Zeppelin, we drove past the snowy calderas of Mt. Bachelor and the three Sisters. The Sisters gripped me the way mountains always do, caldera or not. We passed Mt. Hoodoo, where thirty years before I had earned two units of college credit in a weekly excursion to the ski slopes for an all-day P.E. class.

From Hoodoo we dropped down to the McKenzie River, where our friend Dixie spent her summers in a cabin on the river, and had just celebrated her hundredth birthday in Paris. Three summers before, I had met her when my mother took me fishing in Oregon. Dixie and I had started a correspondence, and when she asked if I was coming back to the McKenzie, I had said, “One of these summers.” “Well don’t wait too long,” she’d said. It was by repeating this conversation to my mother that I’d secured my second invitation to the McKenzie River.

My mother loved to fish the planted section of the McKenzie because at lunch our guide Wade pulled up to an island and pan-fried our catch over a fire. I would rather have fished the wild part of the river and been outsmarted, but fishing the planted section turned out to be the best of both worlds; we ate our catch and once in while caught and released a native trout.

On my second visit to the McKenzie River, Mom fished with Wade and Dixie, and Dad and I fished with a guide named Greg. Wade and Greg weaved their boats in and out of each other’s paths in an unspoken dance. That day I caught most of my ten to twelve inch planted trout, and four of the smaller natives, on a dry fly. But Dad, who didn’t care about catching fish and only loved it because Mom did, caught twice as many. Every time he landed one, he’d exclaim with inflated enthusiasm, “Holy smokes, I caught another one.”

Dixie, who never cast the wet flies, continued to fly fish standing against the bow of the boat as it bounced through the rapids. As Wade said, “They just don’t make them like Dixie.”

When Eliot and I arrived at her cabin on the morning of the fourth of July, she greeted us in a red and white checked shirt with white pants. She had hung an American flag off her porch. Eliot sat in the cabin in front of the open windows, mesmerized by the rapids. When he finally joined us on the porch, he gobbled down the chocolate chip cookies and lemonade Dixie had made. Then she handed him a bag tied with a string. Inside was a baseball cap with the words McKenzie River and a fly fisherman stitched on the front. Eliot wore the hat all the way home, and to school the next week. When we said goodbye to Dixie he walked up and gave her a hug.

But Dixie was not the only female in Oregon to charm Eliot that day. He and I stopped for milkshakes and onion rings in Rice Hill south of Eugene. Next to us at the picnic tables was a girl no more than five having a milkshake with her grandparents, and Eliot kept looking over at her. With his quirks, the age difference was just about right. But I was proud of him because he didn’t stare. He said quietly to me, “She has beautiful hair.” It was the kind he liked, fluffy and curly. As we got up to leave, he caught her eye and winked.

What stole his heart, though, more than Dixie or the girl with the milkshake, was Mt. Shasta. As we crossed the border into California and gazed up her icy walls, Eliot asked about climbing Shasta. I told him someday we could, but that it was dangerous and would take a lot of training. In the meantime, I said, we would be downhill skiing the lower slopes in winter.

“Will we have a teacher?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “That’s the sad part. Your Adaptive Ski School is in Tahoe, not Shasta.” I assured him we’d have fun anyway. The next day when we got home “Wasting All My Time” had new lyrics:

“Wasting all my time

Skiing Shasta with no teacher….”

I understood the allure. Like the snowmelt of the Sisters roaring past Dixie’s porch, Shasta was beautiful and dangerous, triumphant and deadly. And more than Zeppelin or the girl with the milkshake, more than a solo rock performance, Eliot was in the power of its shadow.

     Somewhere between junior high and high school, Carly hit the cusp of her youthful surfing career. On a big wave day when we were surfing the Capitola jetty, I got caught inside, and rather than duck under five or six waves, I turned and rode the white water in to catch my breath. Sitting on the beach getting ready to paddle back out, I scanned the water for Carly. At that point I was still afraid for her life and assumed she had gotten caught inside too. Then I saw her, on the outside where the biggest sets were, take off and ride a thumping overhead wave.

     I didn’t worry about her in the water after that. She proved fairly quickly she could have any wave she set her mind to. She was taking it on herself, and I was letting go. It was like public high school: campus wide as the ocean, with social rituals and new academic pressures looming like a six-wave set of thumpers. By the halfway mark of high school she was dropping into those waves (chemistry, pre-calculus, friends who did stuff I didn’t even know existed at 16) and I was coaching from the beach a distance away.

     As parents of an adolescent, Blue and I struggled with the normal stuff. I made her ride her bike but she refused to wear a helmet. Sometimes I gave in to images of her head squashed like a melon on the pavement and picked her up in the car. I tried to get her to walk home from school on rainy days, but adolescents would rather get soaked than be seen carrying an umbrella or wearing a raincoat. Back when I was at Berkeley, a good friend of mine, Mike LaHorgue, had a moped he used to zip around campus, and his motto was “Why walk when you can ride?” Carly didn’t know LaHorgue, so it must have been karma when, the last time we argued about her walking home, she said to me, ”Why walk when you can get a ride?”

     She was still Eliot’s number-one hero, while the gap between her surliness and his innocence remained wide. I sent up a tiny prayer of thanks every time he failed to correctly imitate her vocabulary. For the f-word he said “Poker!” And when he stared at her in the bathroom and she called him a perv, it came back at her later as “Perk!”

     Then there was the time he left his two-way radios on and heard some kids on the same channel exchanging expletives. I had just told him he needed to expand his vocabulary beyond, “Dad, do you copy? Over,” which he repeated multiple times, so when he picked up the radios again, he got that Dr. Evil gleam in his eye and asked, “Can I say bad words?” I ignored him, and the next thing I heard was “Shut up, over?” Then he looked at me and said, “Oops.”

     But even with Eliot there was some letting go. After two great days in February with his instructor at the Tahoe Adaptive Ski program, I took him to the bunny slopes at the top of the Squaw Valley Funitel. That was when he fell apart and refused to snap his boots into his skis. I stood with my arms around him while he sobbed and I cajoled for half an hour. Finally I said, “I’m going to wait in line for the chairlift and you come when you’re ready.” I turned, and skied just a few feet away, and the next thing I knew he had his skis on and was standing beside me. 

     On and off the mountain, he was on a different time-table, and sooner or later his normally-developing friends passed him by. His friend Mariah played roller hockey in the kitchen with her mom, and had run around the backyard in fur-lined heels playing laser tag with Eliot after his twelfth birthday party. A year later she was wearing make-up when we picked her up for the movies, and it was more like two girlfriends (she and I) and Eliot than a date. But she was still Mariah. Outside the car it was raining and the wind was howling, and she said, “I love storms. I love thunder and lightening. If you lie on the floor of your room during a thunder storm you can almost feel it.”

     A week later she and Eliot and Blue went for a hike in the rain. Eliot lived for the storms that flooded the streets so that he could hike along swollen forest creeks with his dad. This time he refused to wear a hat because Mariah preferred to have her head exposed to the elements.

     “Is this a date?” Eliot asked when they went for onion rings afterward, and Mariah said, “No.” And she was right. I told Eliot later that they were good friends. “Why?” he asked.

     “Because you’re older now,” I said, “And friends are good.” What I was thinking was that Mariah was older. But they all were, Carly, Mariah, and Eliot, and I was proud about the one thing of which I felt sure, that hat or no hat, each of them would always take on the biggest storms our Pacific had to offer.

Still filled with gratitude for the people who have helped Eliot and other kids like him, I've posted a second slideshow. Like the first slideshow, it does not include everyone --in this case, teachers-- who have helped us along the way. It begins with his third grade teacher Robin Ross, continues to the time after she moved back to San Diego and we went to visit her, and finishes with some of the good people we see every day at the Bay School.

In May 2009 I ran in the Human Race to raise money for Balance4Kids, an organization near and dear to my heart supporting kids with disabilities in Santa Cruz County. For inspiration I listened to a song by Travis Osbourne, Redemption, and thought about how all of us, young, old, disabled, or able-bodied, need each other to make it in this life. This slideshow includes some, but by no means all, of the people who have helped Eliot become the person he is.

     The year I graduated from Berkeley, I made what would become a lifelong friendship with Leona Gonsalves. Leona grew up in the east bay suburb of Concord with two sisters and parents who were natives of Kauai. Her mom, Carol, was Japanese and her dad, Bert, was Spanish, Puerto Rican, and German. On weekends we often made the trek to Concord to do laundry and hang out. Carol fed us all day long, and I ate copious quantities of her sushi and chocolate chip cookies, but what nourished me most was her pigeon humor and her infinite hospitality.  

     Much of what I learned about the aloha spirit I learned from Leona’s parents. Leona’s talk about Kauai made me want to go, but it was many years before I had the chance.

     When the oldest of her grandchildren was twenty-six and the youngest was three, Blue’s mom took the whole family to Kauai for Christmas. We stayed in cottages near a sugar plantation on the west side of the island. As it turned out, it was the plantation where Leona’s grandfather had worked, and where, when the plantation shut down, he’d bought the house in which they had been living. Just before our trip to Kauai, Bert had come to the island to move his elderly mother to the mainland and their house in Concord.

     The cottages, simple wood structures like the one where Bert’s parents had lived, were clustered under a tall stand of palm trees within a hundred yards of the ocean, with kitchens and front porches for viewing a vast array of stars at night. Screens covered the open windows, and the trade winds flowed through day and night, cooling the humid air to a perfect temperature. Roosters wandered the grounds digging for grubs and rousing the guests at sunrise.

     Before we joined Blue’s mom and dad, it rained nonstop on Kauai for a week. Red mud seeped across the roads and down rivers to the sea, and sharks gathered in the muddy waters, attracted by the pigs and goats that had washed downstream in the floods.

     When we arrived the heavy rains had stopped, although the ocean was brown at the rivers. Before seeking out bluer waters, I found an eight-foot fiberglass board to rent at a south side surf shop, and Carly and I headed to Lawai to meet Mike Wellman, a California transplant who had been shaping surfboards on Kauai for thirty years. The south side shop, Dr. Ding’s, rented boards, while Mike shaped boards and sold them, but he pulled out a used surfboard for Carly, one that was shorter and wider than hers at home.

   "How is it on cutbacks?" she asked. As if she needed to.

     “On a dime it’ll give you nine cents change,” he said. He suggested we try it for the afternoon and bring it back if it didn’t work out.

     After one phone call to him from the mainland and a ten-minute visit to his shop, we took off with the board without having left so much as a phone number. It was clear to me that Mike Wellman, who displayed the Christian fish on his surfboards, and was busy supplying the lifeguard stations around the island with rescue boards, had his own way of running a shop. When I told him this later, he said it would have been different if I’d had “a bunch of tats and smelled bad.” But the truth was he ran his business with intention.

     We found blue waters and a chest-high wind swell at Leona’s favorite beach, where Carly looked to be collecting her nine cents’ change. It was a far cry from where we had been two days before, when she wondered if she would get to surf warm waters in a bikini “with dead pigs in the water.”

     We were in paradise, yet Eliot hadn’t acclimated. He was loud, whiny, and agitated, which made it hard for the rest of us to acclimate. On Christmas Eve Blue and I decided to take him on a hike. I scoured the guidebook for one we could accomplish in an afternoon, and settled on a hike that followed the Waimea Canyon trail to Waipo’o Falls. What the guidebook didn’t tell us was that the canyon portion of the trail was a stone’s throw from a 3500 foot drop. Had I been with different hiking companions it might have been spectacular, but I was with Blue and Eliot who were afraid of heights. When Blue saw where the trail was going, he hung back and waited for me and Eliot to complete the hike on our own.

     He expressed remorse later about abandoning his family, but I assured him he had done the right thing. Toward the end Eliot had mutinied, and with a mother’s empathy I felt terrified for him. I left him in a safe spot off the trail, where a mother with young children and a woman with two knee braces (who had obviously had not been forewarned either) struggled past.

     I went as far as the first waterfall, a small pool that had once been a remote swimmer’s paradise but was now a well-trafficked spot with a sign warning of high bacteria count. I sprinted back up to Eliot, who was complaining of being tired, and bribed him with the prospect of seeing his dad, his favorite person, a half-mile back up the trail. Blue’s and my immediate predicament, being temporarily separated on a harrowing trail, felt like the greater predicament of having a child who, although used to travel, had been unable to acclimate for three days.

     Eliot’s biggest problem was assimilating with the larger group, but I had seen that enough times to know what to do. I told him he could stay at the cottage and watch t.v. if he put on his Christmas-in-Hawaii clothes and visited his grandparents’ cottage long enough to give them a Merry Christmas hug. He agreed, and his relief at not having to stay with the larger group was palpable.

     Whether it was the hike (as much emotionally exhausting as physically for him), or the agreement we had struck, Christmas Eve night Eliot shifted. The next night he even stayed at his grandparents’ cottage long enough to take a load of pictures with his auntie Gloria’s digital camera, before returning to our cottage to watch the Disney Channel’s hundredth rerun of Drake and Josh. It made me sad that he related better to characters in a television show than to those closest to him, but I knew this was how he attempted to understand the world, and that the camera, whether the television camera or the less remote digital one, gave him the distance he needed to try to interpret those around him.

     We did have more rain while we were on the island, great floating clouds, and a fog over the Hanapepe Valley that cast rainbows across the sugar cane fields. But my favorite were the showers that fell on me and Carly as we surfed Leona’s favorite beach on Christmas Day. An hour later I went to get lunch while Carly stayed with our stuff, and driving to the shrimp truck parked at the next beach down, I listened to a Hawaiian version of one of the most beautiful Christmas songs, Holy Night, on the local radio station. I was floored by the clear voice that blew through me like the trade winds pervading the islands.

Fall on your knees, oh hear the angel voices

Oh night divine

Oh night when Christ was born

      It was like the rain on blue water, great splattering drops flashing white all around us in the blinding sun. The brown seas had subsided, and it was true what I had told Carly, floating in those waters in nothing but a bikini and board shorts as the warm rain fell: “This is one of the best moments of my life.”

     Blue and I were swimming in the Pacific Ocean when we talked about naming our daughter Carly. We weren't pregnant, but we must have been married because we had discussed and disagreed on several names, which is why I remember where we were when we agreed on the name Carly. But since I hadn't yet discovered surfing, our ocean dreams that day portended more than we could possibly have known.

     By the time she was fifteen, Carly and I had been surfing together for half her life. October rolled around, Blue went duck-hunting, and I had a few women friends over for Girls’ Night In. We had wine and what we considered the three most important components of dinner: appetizers, salad, and dessert. After my friends left the house felt very quiet, too quiet. Eliot was in bed, and Carly was in her room with the door closed. But as I was cleaning up, she opened the door and flopped back on her bed with her laptop. There was no conversation, but I felt profoundly grateful for that open door.

    Of course, before I went to bed I told her, “Thank you for keeping me company while I did the dishes,” and she gave me a look that said, “You thought I opened the door for you?”

     My daughter was small when Sally at our local women’s surf shop helped put on the first Women on Waves contest in Capitola. Not wanting to abandon Blue at home with two kids for the duration, I promised myself one day Carly and I would enter together. It was a couple of months after our Girls’ Night In that I made good on my promise.

     In the Women on Waves, contestants ride longboards and perform feats like walking the nose, one of the most beautiful surfing maneuvers. Most of the women I know are longboarders, although there are many young women, Carly among them, who ride short boards which require more guts and strength. The ratio of men to women in the surf is easily three to one, but if you are in that lesser population the women tend to stand out.  I have forged many friendships in the water, and have watched female shortboarders bring Carly, as she fights boy grommets for waves, under their wing. To see those women gathered at one surf spot for a day, with their brothers-in-surf cheering them on, is a powerful thing. What is more, the proceeds from the event benefit WomenCARE, a non-profit supporting women with cancer, Women's Crisis Support, and three partial Cabrillo College scholarships.

     Neither Carly nor I advanced in the contest that day. In the thigh-high surf I had one wave. But the spirit of the women in my heat was inspiring. Nell Newman, who ended up taking second in her division, would catch a wave, paddle back out, and call for someone else in the heat to grab the next one. With a score based on a surfer's three best waves, women in our heat kept asking, “Who needs another wave?”

     The competition took place to the “right” of the jetty. After Carly and I tanked our heats, we lifted our sprits by paddling out to the left of the jetty and surfing knee-high nose-riders.

     After a delicious Mexican food lunch included in the price of the contest, I took off for the Cal-Stanford football game, an event I looked forward to for the chance it gave me to see old friends. Driving north, I thought about Carly, who’d stayed at the contest to participate in the consolation event, a paddleboard race. I had the same feeling I’d had the night she opened her door, when I realized she was a mere three years from leaving the nest, a profound sense of connection and loss. My son was my greatest challenge, my forever boy who never withheld kisses or hugs, but something in me became part of my daughter when she was born.

     As I crowded into the Berkeley stadium with friends, I pulled out my iphone and sent Carly a text message: “How was the paddleboard race?”

     “K,” the response popped up on my screen, “Only 3 peep.” Text shorthand for people.

     Then came another text: “I got second,  but we don’t get to go to the finals so now I’m really Board.” The perfect unintentional pun.

     A week later, on my forty-ninth birthday, I went surfing at Pleasure Point. I normally hung off the longboard break at the second peak, but on this day there were only a few people between the first and second peak where the head-high sets were rolling in, so I paddled over. Where the other surf bums were I don’t know, but I caught waves until my arms were ready to fall off. I have surfed on my birthday many times and never had a session like that. Adults usually make their own birthdays, and I made mine. I went out to lunch with Carly, bought a cushy new bike seat, and picked up champagne and cracked crab for dinner. More than once a cashier said, “Have a great day” and actually meant it, and I thought, “I am.”

     The next day I went to early morning yoga class, and while we were in child’s pose, knees and body folded, forehead to the floor, our teacher talked to us. “Let the world go on without you,” she said. “Imagine you are a barnacle on a whale, not moving, firmly fixed to the whale as the water washes over you.” When she said it, I felt a connection with the other barnacles in the room, yoga friends crouched side by side on the whale of a floor. It was the same connection I felt with my women friends in the surf, with my own daughter, with the people who had said, “Have a great day,” when they could not have known what their wish meant to me, on that particular day.

Blue and I didn't have a proposal story to tell, other than that he asked me to marry him and I said yes. I teased him about the sunset picnic we had taken once, and how he could have proposed then. For years I longed for such a story. Knowing this, Blue said he was going to spring one on me someday. But one morning when I was swimming laps, I realized I had something better than a romantic proposal. I had a man who backed me unconditionally, who never failed to say at the end of the evening meal, "Thanks for making dinner." This kind of support was far more valuable than a sunset proposal that might not hold up when the dishes stacked up in the sink, or his daughter, who was playing Little League then, asked him to play catch.

I imagined that in his typical manner he would wait a long time and pop the question when I least expected it. But after we came out of the fog of our children's early years, other things about us came up unexpectedly instead.

Once at Huntington Lake, I rigged up the old dinosaur windsurfer and set out on the lake at the end of the day, which was not a good time to sail. Every morning in summer the wind came up around nine or ten and died around five. I sailed down the lake for a while, then headed back up toward the dock, which is when the wind died. I hugged the middle of the lake and tacked often in an effort to inch my way upwind. As I tacked I drifted farther and farther from the dock.

After a long time I thought about calling for Blue, but I figured the sound would carry enough for everyone else to hear as well, and I was too proud for that. Once in a while the wind came up and pushed at my sail and I let out a prayer of thanks. Osprey sent their calls across the lake, one diving low and skimming the water in front of me.

As the sun dipped close to the trees, Carly came down to the dock and called to me, "Mommy, do you need help?"

"I think I'm okay," I yelled back, ever the optimist. Carly sat by the boat and waited, the last of the sun bouncing off her yellow head. She gave me great comfort sitting there. Finally my pride faded enough for me to call out, "Go ask Daddy to come down!"

Carly ran for Blue and he came down with the keys to the boat. A moment later, they were motoring across the lake. Blue threw the ski rope, I grabbed it, standing upright with the sail, and they towed me toward the dock.

"It's good to be needed," Blue said when I thanked him for rescuing me. This answer surprised me, but it shouldn't have. He was the guy who waited with the boat keys while I teased every last breath of wind off the lake.

Of course the story would be different if Carly had been a teenager at the time. She'd have been listening to music on her laptop and wouldn't have even noticed I was gone.

But she wasn't. She was nine, and still catching fish with nite crawlers off the dock. In her middle years, she would get skunked, and return from the dock dejected. Then she would turn fourteen, learn to drive the boat, and come back from trolling near dark with a fish or two. It was the fishing equivalent of middle school, social hell, and high school, when things were a little easier.

Blue did surprise me again, on our nineteenth anniversary. He took me to the Huntington Hotel in San Francisco, where we had spent our wedding night.

We were going to a 25th wedding anniversary party for my friend Nita, and were planning to stay at a perfectly reasonable hotel in what I called the pit of Union Square. Knowing I was picky about rooms, Blue said he had reserved the room next to the garbage chute. I laughed, as I had right before we were married, when he said he'd made reservations for the Travel Lodge at Fisherman's Wharf.

I didn't suspect anything, even when we pulled up to the Huntington Hotel. I didn't get it until the doorman started pulling our bags out of the car. He was a teaser, that Blue, and he got me again.

As expectant parents we paint the nursery walls with stars and planets, hang visually stimulating mobiles above the crib, and plant copies of Goodnight Moon on the bookshelf. Meanwhile the baby grows inside the womb in a genetic stew over which we have little or no control. So it is that each of our children is born into the world with his own set of plans.

Carly was born a survivor. She survived the playgrounds of schools with the lowest test scores, and endured sword and dart gun attacks from her brother. At six she played soccer on the unpaved streets of Colima with kids whose language she recognized but could not speak. And at fifteen she endured the boys at the city skate-park, who dropped x-rated comments as often as they told her to drop in on the half pipe.

Eliot was a different animal; enrolling him in public middle school was like tossing him into the jungle without his trusty light sabers and swords. He couldn’t even enter the sanctuary of the Life Lab Garden, much less the severely handicapped classroom, without erupting. When he was in the sixth grade I pulled him out of public school for good. By the time he started his new school, he had been home with me for a year.

In Santa Cruz and Monterey counties there are a myriad of services for families of children with special needs, including Balance4Kids, San Andreas Regional Center, SPIN, and Easter Seals. There are special education teachers and occupational and speech therapists in all the public schools, many of whom have made a difference in Eliot’s life. But I only know of one school like the Bay School.

Even after the Bay School determined Eliot was a good fit for their behavioral and academic program, the process of enrolling him was not easy. But once he was enrolled staff and administrators told me repeatedly, "We'll work with Eliot," "We want him to be excited about coming to school," and "There is no behavior we haven't seen." They started by setting high but achievable goals for their students. And the sky was the limit in terms of the rewards the students could earn by meeting those goals: in Eliot’s case, a trip to the toy store, a hike, or an in-house concert. Environment and teacher-student relationships were paramount, and the students felt it. "I go to the Bay School," Eliot said with obvious pride after his first visit.

Throughout the day the Bay School used what was called Applied Behavior Analysis, documenting all of a student’s behaviors, antecedents to the behaviors, and consequences. Teachers met their students outside the building each morning, and escorted them out to their parents and buses in the afternoon, giving each parent a brief summary of her student’s day.

Blue and I called Eliot’s teacher Alona "unflappable," because her demeanor did not change even when the atmosphere around her became tense. She was exactly what an excitable student needed. Most of the time she came out and said, “Eliot had a great day.” On the days where he was aggressive she said, “He had a great morning,” and then filled us in on the difficult part. Instead of phoning us at home or work, staff members told us immediately after school what Eliot had done, the antecedents to the behavior if there were any, and how they had responded.

“It will get rougher,” Ethan, the director of the school, told me not long after Eliot started. “Most of the time our students meet their goals, which makes it challenging for them.” I appreciated the fact that Ethan was honest and proactive.

And it did get rougher. With Eliot there was no apparent antecedent to the first major incident, only hormones, the full moon, a pain his foot, who knows. I talked for a long time outside the building with his teacher and the psychologist. What they gave me were the specifics of the incident, but what I heard was that they considered it their job to decipher Eliot, and that they would do whatever it took to help him learn self-control. For the first time since Eliot’s third grade teacher Robin, Blue and I were able to let down our guards during school hours.

As Eliot and I walked to the car, I pointed out the hammerhead shark on his t-shirt. I told him this type of shark had an unusually shaped head that gave it acute vision and hearing so that it could more easily detect its prey. And it occurred to me that autistic kids carried their differences like hammerheads, sometimes odd, yet able with their unusual sensitivity to pick up electrical stimuli other beings couldn’t detect.

To me, the full moon was a beautiful orb that shone gold as it rose through the atmosphere, and the summer solstice brought fogless days and south swells. To Eliot, though, the gravitation of the sun and moon at that time of the year tugged at invisible forces within his body and sent it into its own mysterious orbit.

At that moment Carly was out surfing a south swell. Most of the time I had to beg her to hug me back, or let me feel the exquisitely soft skin on her cheek. But Eliot, a different soul altogether, doled out kisses like rain. That afternoon I was grateful he let me take his hand as we walked to the car.