Alone

SW, Boy and Girl are gone to Grandmother's House, over the burning sands (or whatever) of the central valley, leaving me on my own for a week and a half. Time to pack, read, catch up on my sleep, try to finish a few projects before law school drives everything permanently out of my mind. Or else just waste a lot of time surfing the Internet, there's always that. Oh, and watch Martin Scorsese's series on The Blues, which I got from the library the other day.

Yesterday was a birthday party for Boy's Best Friend, J... whom he will not soon see again. By the time Boy gets back, J will be summering in Montana; by the time he and his family return, we'll have moved. We're going up to Idaho for a couple of weeks this summer, and have invited them to fly over and visit - yes, they have their own plane - but for some reason they won't commit to it. Maybe they'll come, though. And SW and the kids have to come down to LA every couple of months, so the contact won't be completely broken, but... I think Boy is going to have some hard times ahead. We're leaving the only home he's known, most of the people, virtually all of the friends. He and J have so colonized each other's lives that it's strange to think of them apart... Not only that, but J's family has a swimming pool, and we only have a wading pool. I'm going to miss that, too.

Wednesday was Boy's last day at his school, too. (If it weren't such a violently countercultural sort of a school, I guess they might have said he was in pre-kindergarten, but they call it "house group" instead.) And it's interesting, since he was there for three years, and he liked it, and we liked it... but I'm pretty sure he won't miss it. At all. The next year may prove me a liar - though will that really be so bad, if I'm to be a lawyer? (Sorry, residual knee-jerk anti-lawyer sentiment, soon to be purged, I'm sure.) - but he really doesn't seem much of a one for school. Doesn't like groups, doesn't care for authority, at least the sort of countercultural passive consensus-style authority practiced at his school. And I misdoubt he'll be any fonder of traditional rule-based, do-what-I-say-because-I-say-so, time-to-do-this-now authority. We'll see what happens in the fall.

Boy's turning points are our turning points. (Girl is too young to have a tribe outside our own little family, so she's not losing hers; her transitions are not so clear.) We've begun saying goodbye to friends, because so many of those friendships have been formed around Boy's school and Boy's friends, and even though we'll see them over the summer, things have begun breaking up. SW and I are leaving our home behind for student housing - which doesn't even sound like home - and something completely different. I've lived in LA for twenty years now, she's been here seventeen, and even though neither of us has ever been too keen on the city itself... we are, more or less, Angelenos. Two decades, that's a long time to bake in the relentless sun. Can we even take the rain and cold anymore? Time to find out... soon.