Cell Phocus

“The dog was created specifically for children.  He is the god of frolic.”                     -Henry Ward Beecher

My son and his dog have been inseparable since the day we adopted the lovable, loyal, and very mellow basset/lab mix pictured above, our dear Tiki.  I remember vividly the day we met him, a rainy Saint Patrick’s Day afternoon just over one year ago.  I knew Tiki was a good match for our family after I witnessed him nervously shiver his way through and pass “The Cat Test,” a test basically involving nothing more than exposing him to a dog-friendly cat in a roomful of caged cats in order to gauge his level of feline aggression.  This was the final hurdle in the process of our decision to adopt him.  I remember how he panted and trembled at my feet as I filled out the papers to bring him home.  My son, then only 3, comforted his clearly very anxious new pup with a hug that day, a moment I’ve always been so thankful to have captured on film.

Tiki quickly fell into his groove in our family.  He instantly became an integral part of my son’s bedtime routine.  To this day, a ritual that began during his very first week with us, as soon as he spots any sign we might be headed toward the bathroom to brush my son’s teeth, the final phase of the bedtime drill, Tiki trots into his bedroom with a dog’s posture of duty and purpose and plops himself down on the floor at the foot of the bed.  There he stays, silent and patient, until my son falls asleep and my husband or I retrieve him for his final walk of the evening.  As is evident in the main photo of this post, probably among my favorite pictures of the two of them together so far, my son and Tiki’s bond continues just as strongly in their waking hours together.  Pictures like this one capture my feeling of appreciation for what a special match for our son and our family we have found in Tiki.  A home in need of a dog found a dog in need of a home and nobody in our house has been the same since the day we welcomed him home.

iPhone App Used:  Camera+

“Silence is as deep as eternity; Speech, shallow as time.” -Thomas Carlyle

My family and I recently took a detour on our hike in The Armstrong Redwoods and along the way encountered this beautiful outdoor theater space.  It was sort of surreal to stand here, enveloped by quiet and the shade of the towering trees, and see this vast spread of empty benches.  At first the spot felt almost haunted with the weight of all the memories I could imagine had been made there.  I found myself picturing all of the events that might have taken place within the small radius of this gathering spot (the weddings, the parties, the plays).  My mind seemed to rush to fill the vacuum of silence with my imaginings of all the sounds that have echoed around in this small pocket of a clearing in the redwood grove.  Determining this the perfect place for a picnic, my family and I situated ourselves on the very last bench furthest from the stage and unpacked our lunches.  There we sat, savoring our ham sandwiches, trail mix, apple slices, and our time together there before packing it all back up again and continuing on our hike.

iPhone App Used:  Camera Awesome

“If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.” -Toni Morrison

My father and his fiancé live in Santa Clarita and we always stop for a visit with them on our drives down south.  I spent almost a decade and a half of my childhood in Southern California and I sort of enjoy how different my dad’s new town is from the Southern California I knew in my youth.  The spaces are so much more vast and open than where I grew up in Orange County.  We only happened to stumble upon this scene while walking our dog behind the public high school the day I took this photo.  This dusty golden panorama of rolling hills, sporadically splashed with earthy green and rust-colored tufts of grass, enveloped us as we stepped over a cliff and onto the pathway descending it.  Maybe Toni Morrison’s quote above can give a sense of how the air felt this day, crisp and cleansed by a recent rain as though it’d been washed and left damp to line-dry, in a way the photo alone cannot.

iPhone Apps Used: Camera+ and Camera Awesome

“Where does the white go when the snow melts?” -Hugh Kieffer

Noticing the distant white mountains as we approached The Grapevine, I wished we could stop to let our boys play for a bit in the snow.  A few miles later I realized our path from Northern to Southern California would soon grant my wish, leading us directly into the wintery playground I’d been admiring for miles.  ”It’s just like pretend snow!” my son exclaimed when he first crunched into the white sheet of it just outside the car, I’m sure remembering the fake stuff he’s seen in holiday displays much more often than he’s experienced the real thing.  Luckily, my friend and I had both inadvertently brought our boys’ rain boots, the perfect footwear for a spontaneous scamper in the snow.  We did not, however, bring gloves.  Unfazed by my words of caution (“Don’t get your hands wet because your fingers will freeze without gloves!”), my son dipped his hands into the icy white fluff repeatedly, tossing loose puffs of it into the sky.  He didn’t seem to mind when it behaved more like bread flour than proper snow balls in the air around him.  After only a few minutes, his fingers froze enough to turn them red with the kind of cold that burns.  When he screamed out in pain, I quickly dried his hands, squeezed them tightly in my own, and warmed them with the hottest breath I could muster from the depths of my lungs.  I warned him not to get them wet like that again, only to watch him scurry off and repeat the scene…twice!  Soon the sun began to set behind the mountains, muting the bright white landscape to deepening shades of gray.  After no more than probably 15 minutes total of this playful detour, we loaded our shivering boys back into the car and turned the heater up so high it muffled their little voices in the backseat.  Then we drove on and blended back into the crowd of cars of Highway 5, adding ourselves to the stream of glowing taillights flowing South.

iPhone App Used: Camera Awesome

“Magic lives in curves, not angles.”  -Mason Cooley

I will never forget when my son asked, noticing the sliver of glowing gold above Disneyland that night, “Hey, Mama, how is there a moon at Disneyland, too?”  Noticing the Cheshire Cat smile of a crescent moon myself before he asked this, I remember thinking how fitting it seemed that it resembled the smile of a classic Disney character.  I remember saying, jokingly to myself, that I wouldn’t put it past the Disney folks to fashion a moon in keeping with the theme of the park.  As I’ve noticed every time we’ve visited the place, Disneyland pays an impressive amount of attention to detail.  Though along similar lines, my son’s and my observations of the moon that night came from very different places inside of us.  I obviously knew it was only coincidently a cat’s smile-shaped moon above us in that moment.  He, however, privileged with the kind of vision only youth ever grants us, was capable of entertaining the absurd and wondering that kind of thing.  His lack of experience and naive perspective allowed for his worlds of fantasy and reality to entangle themselves briefly enough for him to even ask that question.  I didn’t take the photo above that day, but on our most recent visit to Disneyland.  It seems to capture visually the sentiment behind my son’s earlier wondering about the moon.  When I noticed his mouse-eared shadow stretched across the pavement as we waited in line for It’s a Small World, I tried to savor the brief glimpse it seemed to offer of how it must feel to be 4 years old again at The Happiest Place on Earth.

iPhone App Used: Camera Awesome and Camera+

“Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.”  -Robert Frost

Seeing my son with a fistful of flowers always reminds me of the very end of this song.  He loves them, as do I even more so now that he’s usually my companion on our walks and so draws my attention to them it a way that doesn’t come as naturally to me.  Often he returns from our time tromping on trails together with tiny, colorful bouquets to display at home.  Here is a picture of some flowers we passed recently on a walk in our neighborhood.  This tree was such a shocking sight at first, like some sort of leafy sponge had been saturated with sunlight.  We walked home with a sprig of this yellow stuff and decided to call the tree it came from “The Banana Tree.”  My son hurried to fill a vase to hold the bright flower tufts, keeping them on display for days in our kitchen.  Since then, I’ve been tempted to look up the proper name of this sunshiny plant, but I fear doing so might lesson my whole memory of the moment I’ve just described.  I sort of like only knowing this tree by the silly name my son and I gave it together that day.

iPhone App Used:  picfx

“We live in a rainbow of chaos.”  -Paul Cézanne

Here is the gist of the conversation that hatched my friend’s and my spontaneous, wonderful, and (admittedly) somewhat crazy idea:

ME:  Our trip to Disneyland was so great!  I am sad that our passes expire in 3 weeks.  Part of me wishes I could just hop in the car right now and go one last time.

FRIEND:  Seriously?  I’d totally do that with you!

ME:  I was only kidding.

FRIEND:  I’m not kidding.

ME:  Well, then maybe I’m not kidding either!

Less than 3 weeks after this conversation my friend and I were in the car, our two boys strapped securely in their carseats behind us for the 8-hour drive to my dad and his fiancé’s house in Southern California.  Pictured above is a rainbow we saw on the first leg of the journey, the second such rainbow I’ve spotted in the vast open space along a very desolate and lonely stretch of Highway 5.  We were only gone 3 days, 2 of which we spent driving there and back.  Our day at Disneyland happened to fall on my friend’s son’s 4th birthday, a major factor in or justification for even going on such a whim of an adventure in the first place.  It was an honor to celebrate such a special day with them this way.  Both of our boys had an absolute blast.  My aunt, who just happened to also be in Southern California for business that week, was even able to join us.  In the end, this final day at Disneyland really must be the end of such adventures for awhile because our annual passes expired the day we were there.  So there can be no more impromptu squeezing in of one last day of Disney fun.  That day we spent with our friends and my aunt was the perfect cap on what has been such an amazing year of trips to one of my family’s favorite spots on the planet.  Thanks to our passes, we spent last year making some incredible memories, memories I know each of us will treasure always.

“Seize from every moment its unique novelty, and do not prepare your joys.”          -André Gide

Unlike on most of our hikes, my son sat comfortably reclined in his stroller so that I could walk our usual route at a pace of my choosing this time.  This hike was less about exploration and adventure for him, and more about a workout for me, though I did bring his scooter along for him to ride on the paved trails.  Mere feet into our 2-mile loop, I noticed a grassy patch scattered with what seemed like at least 20 ladybugs, like maybe we’d stumbled onto a spot where an egg had recently hatched.  I stopped and picked up one of the round, red beetles to show my son.  Little did I know we’d spend the next 20 minutes making up jokes about the little critter and giving him names.  My son talked to the ladybug, giggling as it crawled up his long shirt sleeve.  He’d belly-laugh each time the bug reached the ticklish skin of his neck, then he’d gently pick him up and put him back in the palm of his hand to begin the whole game again.  He kissed the ladybug, and concluded that it loved him.  He also decided it wanted to come live with us at our home.  By the end of the hike we had collected 4 ladybugs for my son’s bug cage, keeping them all captive along with some sticks and sprigs of grass in the damp, cool shade of an empty sippy cup.  When we came home I found a way to keep the little guys alive in a sunny spot on the windowsill in my son’s bedroom.

iPhone App Used:  ColorSplash

“Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.” -Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

My son and I spent an afternoon and evening in a local county park with two of our friends the other day.  Both boys climbed trees and flew their paper airplanes from the highest branches they could reach.  Later they raced each other down hills, proudly bestowing nature finds on my friend and myself each time they’d trudge their way back up the grassy slope.  I remember appreciating how it stayed light out almost an hour longer that night than it did what seems like only a few weeks ago.  Even with the extra daylight, though, the sun eventually did dip toward the horizon, tucking itself first behind this tree and then beneath the entire landscape for the night.  By then the wind had picked up, chilling the air, as the croaking chorus of frogs encompassing us grew louder and louder and signaled it was finally time for us to pack up and head home.

iPhone App Used:  picfx

“Truth is not a crystal that you can stash away in your pocket, it is an infinite liquid into which you fall.” -Robert von Musil

My son and husband decided to break out the Stomp Rocket from our sand toy bag on a recent family day at the beach.  Something about these rockets launching anywhere in his immediate radius sends our usually docile basset/lab mix into a loud, panicked, leash-yanking tizzy.  The barking and frantic lunging isn’t really conducive to the relaxation and tranquility you expect on a day at the beach, so I always try to remove him around this toy.  Tiki seemed to enjoy sniffing clumps of seaweed and sea creature remains on our meandering walk along the water that day.  Periodically he’d stop to roll in sandy wet patches or mark his territory on a log of driftwood.  Usually eager to take pictures of my son’s joyful strides and grins as he tromps through the waves at this beach, it was interesting to pause at the edge of the tide and appreciate the ocean on its own terms, minus the playful boy I have countless pictures of in this setting.  My dog and I paced the shore for almost an hour that evening.  He enjoyed the sights, sounds, smells, and textures from his dog perspective as I savored the serene landscape, the solitude, and the quiet space to think.

iPhone App Used: Camera+