It’s me again.  Following her around. I should never just say “her”, because she is rarely alone.  Except this week she has been again – alone. After just about a month of being with those three little terrors – corralling them, herding them, preparing them, talking to them, swimming with them, reading them their books, answering their questions, feeding their hungry mouths, being their audience – she had some time to herself. In her car.  Some fancy small little car, far different than the big trucks I used to drive.  18 wheel or 4 wheels, her car is a different machine than either of them.  And at work. I guess she’s not necessarily “alone” at work – there are people there.  And there are moments and even hours of interaction. I sat today and watched her talk about swim toys, goggle, backpacks, and shoes for two hours. I can’t say it was that interesting to me – but I can’t say that listening to her read Olivia the Princess and Olivia and the Puppy Wedding is that interesting in itself either. But I still like floating around and taking it all in.  Anyway, my point.  She was alone in her office sometimes.

It’s different following her around here, in Los Angeles.  Not just the car thing – that hasn’t been as different as I would have thought. I cozy up in there (I prefer the new one, it is a hell of a lot cleaner than that one she drove across the country, which still hasn’t been cleaned out), listen to her music and her thoughts and have some solitude I didn’t have when I’d join her on the subway.  But this isn’t about me, it’s her solitude.  And this time in her car, it doesn’t seem to bother her.  She flips around the music stations, and tends to rest on those damn love songs.  I was getting bored of the ‘easy listening’ station and right when I was about to cause a circuit break in that radio, she started listening to Ryan Seacrest in the morning.  He reminds me of Dick Clarke, but I’m not sure what she is thinking. I know she was excited for her Sirius radio and to hear some long haired funny Howard guy during the drives, but she complained to her husband that the Sirius didn’t include his channel.  What Sirius is or who the guy is beyond even me, as I don’t really care.  But I swear to god I think she wanted to compare this Ryan Seacrest guy to the Sirius guy, which without knowing anything, seems ridiculous.  It kind of reminded me when she was in high school and someone told her if you freeze raisins, they almost taste like peanut M&Ms.  So she tired it, and it tasted nothing like a peanut M&M.  She wanted to hear the Sirius guy, so she was trying to tell herself the Seacrest guy actually kind of sounded like Howard. Interviewed like him.  Was blunt like him. But she sat there with this thought in her own car, not voicing it to anyone but settling in with it, and I know she appreciated this time in the car to have these ridiculous thoughts.  Then she also found a country station.  If I know one thing, it’s that every country song is really a love song.  Most are love songs about love, some are love songs about beer and whiskey.  I could appreciate both in my life, and I’ll be damned if she doesn’t listen to that station more often than not.  I get a kick out of it – watching my granddaughter who described herself as an “urbanite” move from Brooklyn, drive around Los Angeles and listen to some station that announces “That was the Zac Brown Band singing Goodbye In Her Eyes.”  She’s listened to the song about 100 times now, and I’m tired enough of it that I almost wish station 100 on Sirius was working or she’d flip the radio over to the Seacrest guy, but she likes the song.  So she doesn’t.

Anyway, I am supposed to have a point to this story.  The car isn’t so bad, for me or for her. She’s working again, although if you ask me, her job seems a little too easy.  She’s talking with people.  Talking some more.  Typing some things, who knows what.  She takes breaks and laughs with some people.  She’s not lifting anything, she’s not driving anything. She’s not moving anything around.  She’s not selling anything.  But I supposed I always knew she’d be using her mind to work even though she’s more than capable of manual labor.  She doesn’t want anyone to think she’s not physically strong, even though she doesn’t have to be to do what she does. But I think I heard her talking about doing some long bike ride in a few weeks – did I really hear her say 100 miles? – so I guess she’s finding other ways to prove she’s physically strong.  I’ll tell you this, she hasn’t gotten on a bike in months.  Months.  Damn near a year, without that much exaggeration.  That 100 miles on a bike should be a good story. I’ll let you know.

Anyway, and then I see her swim in the middle of the day.  She’s working, then stops, and swims, and then works again.  Her standing by the pool, chatting with some colleagues, cap on her head and goggle tucked into the hip of her suit – I felt like it could have been 2013 (or, I suppose, it is).  It could have been 1990. It could have been 1981.  She was the same person out there, more natural in her ways around the water than I see her anywhere.  Confident in a way that her son is confident when he is at the dance studio in New York.  Confident in a way her husband is when he is training those Type A bankers and getting their butts in shape.  Confident in a way one of those girls is when she is drawing or around animals.  Confident in a way that her other girl is still figuring out how to be.  I can’t say I really felt that doing much, except being a grandpa. That was one of the few things I knew I was good at.  I knew I was a natural at.  Even at my worst, I was a good grandpa and I knew that. Which is why I stick around now watching them all.  Her cousins in Colorado.  Her sister and brother in Colorado.  Her brother in San Diego.  Her cousin in New York.  Watching over them, still, gives me that confidence that I see in her when she’s on a pool deck. She laughs, puts those goggles that look so damn uncomfortable on her eyes, and she dives in, swims, swims, and swims some more.  I know it isn’t a competition, but I’ll tell you this, there aren’t too many guys in that water faster than her.  You would think she swam more than she does.  But if I know her, this just makes her want to swim more. Remember, she hates the thought that not everyone – everyone – knows how athletic and strong she is.  She could do the heavy lifting sort of job if she needed to, not just the thinking woman’s job.  She swims, and then she climbs out of the pool, as gracefully as she did when she was 16 (have you ever thought about how hard it is to get out of a swim pool? That is what you really need practice at every day, more than the swimming part.  I watch a lot of people, and most people look foolish doing this.)  She takes the goggles off, tucks them under the hip of her suit so they are dangling by her leg.  She talks and laughs, and I forget she’s not 15 again, finding out who she is on the pool deck.  I think she is even, very briefly, forgets she’s not 15 again.  I wish I could have seen her more then.

But she’s not 15.  So she goes back to work, talks, gets back in her car.  Alone for a while, then picks up the kids.  Takes those three kids to the park so her little guy can play football and her girls pretend that they are putting some doll in jail (the jail being a gated up restroom).  One night they even find a little boy to play with and he goes along with their idea to put him in jail.  Which tells you how much he wanted to play with those girls.  They ignored him, and ignored him, and ignored him. Most kids would go find someone else to play with, but not him. He kept trying.  He tried again. He even asked her “How can I play with them?” and she just said, “They can be funny, but they’ll play with you.” And soon enough they did.  They put him by the gated up restroom, made him stick his arm through the gates, said they locked the key and he had to stay.  And he said, loud as could be, “Oh man, this is the best day of my life.”  Playing with two little girls who put him in jail.  What a riot, but hearing that sure did make Nikki smile.  It made her so happy – to see another kid be patient with her girls, not give up on them, have fun with them – that I wanted that kid to be my own grandson too so I could start following him around.  So anyway, this has been the scene many evenings. It ain’t a bad scene.  Especially the other night, when the Blue Moon was out, nice and big in between two palm trees and sitting low to the skyline.  The air just chilled enough to need a sweatshirt.  Kids of all ages playing team sports, parents sitting on lawn chairs laughing and forming their own bonds.  And for a guy who raised a family in the 1950s and 60s in Denver, playing catch on the front lawn with my oldest daughter and later, maybe not as often but still doing it, with my sons, it’s one that I can get used to a little better than the chaos of Brooklyn.  Trust me, there’s still plenty here that I could do without, but she’s headed in the right direction, if you ask me.  Although, knowing her – all the things I could do without are the reasons she’s happy right now.

And she’s happy – she is.  There is a weightlessness to how she’s carrying herself, I can tell.  But don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen her cry these past few days.  She’s cried when her daughters started school.  She’s cried listening to that damn Zac Brown Band song (which also makes me feel, this could be 2013, or 1990, or even 1985 for Christ’s sake).  There haven’t been the kind of tears people might have seen during that incident where her little girl went ballistic in the car on the way to the airport, but there hasn’t been that kind of incident. But the tears are nothing to be concerned about.  She’s cried easily since she was 3.  Her sister used to torment her once she figured out Nikki would cry.  She’d tease tease tease, singing some song about fatty fatty, and Nikki would just cry.  And if she had to say goodbye to one of those puppies my dog Queenie had, she would cry.  I remember when the woman who lived across the street from her died in 1986, she cried. I don’t think she even knew the woman.  She cried at her high school graduation.  Point is, she cries.  It’s usually not the kind of crying to be concerned about.  It’s not usually the kind of crying when she came into my bedroom that summer of 1994, knowing how sick I was, knowing she wouldn’t see me again, and kissed me good bye. I told her I was proud of her, and she cried and cried and cried. She cried the entire plane ride home.  None of it was like that this week.

She’s also laughed a lot.  At the beach, at work, and her son’s school.  Her son’s big into this football thing and he wanted to play football with her before school, and another little boy joined.  They wanted her to be the center, Kai was the quarterback, and the other boy the wide receiver.  She has a short dress on, so she didn’t really want to hike through her legs.  But those two little boys didn’t get the idea of the fake side hike she was trying to do.  Every time she politlely knelt down to the side and tried to toss them the ball, they moved right behind her and bend down to try to force the ball back through her legs.  Every single time.  They both did it when they switched position.  So there she is – at an elementary school – playing football in a short skirt and having to be the center. It was hard for me not to laugh, and she sure did (she also found a way to convert her skirt into shorts, don’t worry).  Some babysitters came over to meet them, and her girls dressed one up like a “fairy princess” and the poor sitter tried to indulge them and have a regular conversation with Nikki, and Nikki couldn’t help but laugh.  She’s even laughed with her husband, which is saying a lot after the month of stress they had moving cross country.  After just about buying him a plane ticket back to New York when they stopped in Vegas.  But rest assured, they have laughed together and that’s a good thing.

There are no more boxes in her home, but she still looks like she’s moving in.  She slows down every time she gets to the cartons and bins that have old photos, old journals, books she loves.  She won’t throw those books away – History of Love, Story of Forgetting, Half of a Yellow Sun.  I Know This Much is True (even thought it is bigger than 5 bibles combined).  Too many others, some I think she barely remembered reading or why she saved but as soon as she flipped it open, it seemed to come back to her. By just glancing at 5 words, 2 sentences, 1 paragraph.  She flipped through every one, read some pages she liked. Smiled.  That too could have been 1983, her sitting in my living room, reading a book.  She’d do it then, and not much has changed.

The photos slow her down, yes, she loves to look at them.  I think of the photo albums her mom put together while she was growing up, and her eagerness to look at those photos even when they weren’t such distant history.  I get the impression that she sees stories in each picture – her own, the one that really happened, the one that could have been, different versions, different endings.  Maybe we all do that, without knowing it.  Pictures capture a moment, but they tell so much more than that moment. And what followed the picture, sometimes it’s hard to separate what actually followed from what we wanted to follow.  I never would have talked about this much back in the day, but I see some snapshots of my life, and I certainly like to blend together what was going on with what I wish was going on.  What followed with what I would have follow if I could do it over.  I tell you, there’d be a few more love songs in my life about love and not about beer if I did it over.  But that’s not to say there wasn’t lots of love in it.  There still is – it’s why I can’t quite leave.

Then there are those journals. She spent hours reading what she wrote.  She dove in, that is for sure.  She’s struggled each time she went to write something this week. I wondered why – I would have thought those journals inspired her.  And life has been filled with enough big events to inspire her too – seeing old friends, meeting new friends, starting a “new” job, getting the kids over the threshold of monumental school days, interviewing babysitters to be part of the family, worrying about her dog, who is a little skinnier than when they left New York, meeting sitters for her girls and trying to figure who would fit into the family best.  The combo seemed ripe for some good writing – but she kept pausing, stopping. I took the liberty of looking back at those journals, to see what she wrote.  She didn’t put them in storage, she kept them in that great big giant closet that is in her bedroom, easily accessible, so it wasn’t hard.  Man, she wrote a lot! All different ways of telling a story.  And I tell you this – I think I figured out why she couldn’t write much.  She saw, as did I, what she could do when she was writing things that she intended no one to read.  Stories in which she could be brutally honest, tell all the small details, give context that was layered.  When her story could blend over into someone else’s story, and it was okay, because she wasn’t making them vulnerable and exposed as well. She wasn’t exposing herself to anyone but herself.  No one was going to read, so she could lay it all out there. It’s got to be different now, when she is thinking maybe someone, somewhere, is reading.  Maybe even the people that might be part of the story.  She’s got to filter, to hold back.  Naturally, she’s likely holding back the bad stuff. The hard stuff.  The complicated things and the dark sides.  But then when she goes to tell the good stuff, the fun stuff, the other stuff, it might not feel as genuine or true.  Of course it all is, but without that other side, it is just not the whole picture.  I really don’t know for sure, but I think this is making her pause.  She knows what she is capable of, but she has to find a way to do it now that others might be reading.  She’ll do it, I know.  She’ll walk the line and tell a good story.  She just needs to keep practicing.

I’ll keep checking in on her.  Sit with her, listen to those songs, make sure she is practicing.  Pull out the journals and maybe try to lead her to a good one to share. Or recreate.  Or be inspired to lay an LA story out there, holding nothing back.  But for now, I’m just looking forward to next Tuesday, when I get to see her on that pool deck again.