to santa barbara

One of the cats of my friend, former roommate, and Cinny-auntie, Joni. This little fluff snuggled me to sleep on my last night in Oakland. I think he is like Cinny’s cousin.

After a couple of days with my parents in Angwin, I spent some time visiting with friends in San Francisco and Oakland. I soaked up the magic of my biannual touch-ins with loved ones, appreciating how we get to watch each other grow when there is space in between.

Seeing friends when I am in the Bay Area returns me to myself, to the present moment of my life. My family feels like this mystical not-quite-real thing, full of layers of language and meaning and feeling that are sedimented so finely and so deeply that each moment hums with a kind of time-traveling, space-warping song. Two days with my parents felt like a generation, not because it was arduous, but because the alchemical ratio of gesture to meaning—and the effervescent potential for transformation attached to that ratio—is an order of magnitude beyond my regular experience of time, space, and matter.

I saw my sister on my last night in Oakland, after the parent and friend visits. We walked up and down College Ave for hours, talking about love and how our brains work. We are so different, and so separate, and yet so shaped by each other.

A memory fragment painting from my high school project set – of my sister and I as children in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, looking out at the water.

Afterward, on my way out, I snuck through the night to my old co-op home on 41^st and Broadway, where Cinny’s kittenhood took place. I walked under the redwoods outside of my old attic bedroom window, down the sidewalks Cinny used to chase me along, through the garden he presided over, and I felt the world away that was our coming-of-age together.

I couldn't feel Cinny there this time, at that home, or even myself. I used to feel Cinny’s ghost at that co-op even even when he and I were living only 15 blocks away in a new spot during the pandemic. I wept the first time I stopped by the co-op to visit my old housemates and he wasn’t there, waiting for him to swagger along the fence-line or dart out of a bush, even though I knew exactly where he was, napping in our new house. In those moments, we occupied different universes. I worried the quantum mechanics between us would pause and he wouldn’t be napping at home when I got back. That was my first experience of grieving Cinny.

During my nighttime foray, I stopped by that second home in Oakland, too, recreating our migration path. I couldn’t feel him there either, or myself.

One of my friends in San Francisco offered to connect me to an animal communicator she had worked with to inquire whether her missing cat was still alive. Though I thought about it, I’m not ready. I’m still following the trail of Cinny’s spirit, forwards and backwards, to our homes together and into unknown lands down south. I want to go where I can find him.

The following morning, I took the Starlight Express from Emeryville to Santa Barbara. I almost missed the train, but I did not!

The California coast means so much to me.

I made a wonderful acquaintance named PJ during lunchtime on the train. We were seated together by the lunch host, which is apparently how Amtrak deals with single passengers. PJ told me all about his work as a hydraulic engineer in large-scale California agriculture, and we talked about what it means to farm and trade and eat. We also talked about land, migration, caring for our elders, and how to engage in healthy relational conflict. I love strangers.

My grandmother picked me up from the train station in Santa Barbara. It was dark out and we both cried a bit when I reached her, though I hid my emotion, still on guard, I suppose. We had both aged so much in the 10+ years since we had last seen one another. Aging happens fast at our ages. She drove me back to her house and right away I saw a little snail by the front door. I remembered visiting her house as a kid and spending hours exploring the snail-filled shrubbery around her home and garden. I was obsessed. It was nice to share that memory aloud with her—it made me realize that I so often hold memories in like treasures, afraid of what they will break if they come out. The snail helped me understand that memories simply are, and that they are already out, and that speaking them aloud is not an act of treason.

I spent the night in my father’s childhood bedroom. I cannot describe what the scent of that room evokes in me.

Before bed, my grandmother and I ate dinner and spoke for a while, tentatively. There were land mines everywhere, and she was a foreign government to me, a distant entity I had heard broken stories about once or twice. It was hard to decipher what she was trying to communicate during that conversation, but in retrospect I understand that she was expressing something akin to shame, and something else akin to pride.

What stood out to me were these words:

• I always wanted to be independent. I had to find a way to be independent. I was a single mom with three boys. And I thought, how am I going to take care of these boys?

• I’m not good with kids. I wasn’t nurturing enough.

• I guess I’m “mixed-race” but it feels so far removed from me.

• How did I get through? I felt blessed by God. I feel very grateful. I truly believe I have a personal relationship with the Lord.

She expressed over and over again, tearfully, how pleased and surprised she was that I had come to visit. It was difficult to respond to, because I knew she meant more than she said, and that I meant more than I was.

At the end of our conversation, my grandmother gave me a typewritten photocopy of a talk she had given at her church years ago, where she detailed her journey through medical school and raising her three sons. The account is largely a critique of her own parenting, and a humble veneration of her triumph in building a medical career as a poor (her words), Christian single mother. The narrative builds one of these stories at the expense of the other.

Before reading the account, I went into a frenzy for hours exploring my father’s childhood bedroom, pulling out every photograph my grandmother had stored in the closets and drawers, a living museum of her perception of his development.

My father’s kindergarten class in Anchorage, Alaska.

My grandmother and her three sons at their home in Santa Barbara.

My father and his siblings in a musical quintet at their home in Santa Barbara.

My father, a teenager, dating.

My father’s high school report card (one of) from his Christian boarding school.

A newspaper article about my father getting kicked out of summer school for observing the Seventh Day Adventist Sabbath.

My father, his grandmother, and his mother.

My grandmother’s husband writes my father (his stepson) a recommendation letter for university admissions.

My father graduates university. His two brothers.

Mail addressed to my father in his capacity as a young professional. A very sweet letter about his friendship with an unknown (to me) mentor (I assume).

My parents’ wedding invitation.

My sister comes onto the scene!

My father and my sister, at my grandmother’s house in Santa Barbara.

I am born! Apparently, a girl.

My father and me.

We are identical.

For fun: me in the absolute pits of my awkward stage. My family, a bit more grown up, with my grandmother, her husband, and two people I don’t know or recognize.

Something sweet I learned about my father through this little research project was that he has always loved photography. He had hundreds of prints and negatives in his bedroom drawers, which I imagine are the only objects in the room that are, at this point, actually from “his” point of view. I tried to peer into the negatives without too much luck, but based on the titles, most of his photos were of travels, friends, animals, and everyday life. Snooping through my father’s younger years, I didn’t find all too much in common between us – but his apparent dedication to friendship and his love for quotidian photography warmed my heart.

I was mining my grandmother’s account of him, a mother’s view of her son, but of course I was looking for clues everywhere of the man who shaped me, a daughter’s view of her father. It was nearly impossible to comprehend that he fully existed before I was born, though that is obvious. I was struck by the opaqueness of the fact that he is sort of just a random guy who lived a childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood that I can’t understand or relate to at all--though each of those foreign years of his life impacted me, because that random guy, who was also raised by random people, raised me, another random person. And so we are all made by each other, randomly, generation after generation!

Another little watercolour from my memory art project in high school – a painting of a photo I took of my father where we lived in Ohio, which I painted a few years later where we lived in San Francisco.

It amazes me to know that my father, and my grandmother, and their fathers and grandmothers before them, also lived the chunk of years I am living now, taking photos that meant so much at the time, cherishing letters from friends and crushes and mentors, and leaving those letters and photos behind to forgotten bedroom drawers and memory. I can’t imagine a future where these years are lost to me, but then, I am young and my years are still so concentrated and not yet devoid of firsts.

After my photo journey, I read my grandmother’s narrative, slept like a catacomb, and woke up the next morning to drive onward to my next destination. Along the highway, I saw the sign for Laurel Canyon, and I thought of Brandi Carlile and Joni Mitchell, and I remembered that amidst the massive river of the sky and memory, I have friends in nearby places.