Umbrella thoughts: This and that from inside my head.

Umbrellas are wonderful because they show up in unexpected places. This is what I thought to myself the other night as Chinua and I were driving home from a date that didn’t go badly but didn’t go well. Poor Chinua had a migraine and needed to head home right away—also, he couldn’t eat much, so I ate all the sushi, no regrets!—and my headlights lit up an umbrella that was hanging upside down from a bourgainvillea bush as though it was simply an offering for a wet passerby.

I thought the same thing when I spotted a man in full army fatigues walking in the rain with a pink satin umbrella. Or when I saw two umbrellas sitting side by side at a resort, both the brilliant saffron of monk’s robes. Umbrellas are wonderful. Some kind of strange addition to any day, something that covers and maybe has polka dots. Or ruffles. Or shiny satin.

Umbrella thoughts.

***

Goodness, what a slog of self-doubt I have to wade through just to wake up. It’s boring, honestly. My doomsayer doubts that I can do even very normal things, like walk downstairs. It tries to convince me that all is hopeless, that “going downstairs” is something for the very attractive among us, those with excellent teeth and long eyelashes.

“Don’t try it,” my early morning doomsayer warns me. “You’ll never make it to the kitchen.”

And I lie there and think, “this voice is probably right. She has never ever lied to me before, never ever.” This is for two reasons. First is that my early morning self tends to be gullible. She’s a bit malleable, a bit soggy from sleep and strange dreams. The second is that my kitchen really is rather far away. It’s not in the same building as my house, actually, and if it’s raining, the doomsayer has even more chance of convincing early morning Rae that the best solution to the problem of not being able to get out of bed is not getting out of bed.

The truth is that the solution to not being able to get out of bed is getting out of bed, which is unfair, illogical, and demands muscular ability that even caffeinated Rae finds hard to access.

Just saying. Great forces are against me, and it only gets worse as I get older. This is not an exaggeration. (It might be an exaggeration.)

***

Teenagers are the most exquisite creatures in the history of creatures. (Along with those other most exquisite creatures like newborns and toddlers.) They are also hard to write about because of these incredible, life-altering things going on with them. But maybe I can say just a little.

One, they stretch, and it is like something out of Science Fiction. At least, in our household, it is. Solo grew so fast that we could see it happening in real-time. I’ve never seen anything like it. It doesn’t seem humanly possible. The growth is so explosive in my family that some of my kids end up with stretch marks from literally being dragged up high into the sky.

Speaking of Solo, the poor kid has been dogged by venomous caterpillars for his entire life. When he was two or three years old and we were visiting our friends in Varanasi, India, he kept running out into the courtyard in the mornings and stepping on the stinging caterpillars that had dropped from the mango tree the night before. I couldn’t stop it. Every day they were swept away, every night they dropped, every morning Solo ran out and ended up with terrible stinging feet.

So when I got a call that he’d had another encounter (there have been many in between) with stinging caterpillars in his shirt, I was not surprised. But I was not prepared for what I found when I picked him up—this kid’s whole (stretched over six feet) body was covered with painful hives.

I was actually really concerned for him. I think it’s time to buy an epi-pen. But he took some medication and put some hydrocortisone cream on and he’s fine now. Stinging caterpillars are like his nemesis. What a strange nemesis—but then, Solomon has always been unique. He also just turned fourteen, if you want your mind to be blown, long-time readers.

***

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