Seattle, WA

Feb 17, 2007

Current mood:crazy

Seattle........Finally!! :)

The Emerald City.  After passing the Boeing Field on the west, the interstate bends  around a hill and the vision before you is now the backdrop of a city that looks like it belongs in a fairy tale tucked away in the clouds. The night sky is creeping up on the eastern horizon and the city is illuminated against the deep blue of Puget Sound.

I picked up Jake, Hannah and her friend Lara, turned the driving over to the man of the group and we headed over to see the campus of Seattle University where Jake will call home for the next four years of his life. If you didn't know it was there you would miss it. It sits up on top of the hill off of 15^th and James (I think), the only hint of its existence from the main road is a few bookstores and a chapel with the Seattle U insignia mounted stoically above their front doors. It's dorm buildings humbly tower among a 1940's neighborhood. As we ride the elevator up to his floor, the door opens on each level to let another person in or out. I never stayed in dorms when I went to college, I stayed with mom and dad because I liked my bed and my dog, so this was a new experience for me. We got out of the elevator on the blue floor and suddenly I felt like I was in 'American Pie'. All the doors were heavily decorated with the names of the people who lived in them along with pictures, magazine cut outs, and drawings each giving life to a 12x12 concrete room.


My oldest son, Jake

Jake has the best room, it's the only door at the very end of the hall. How they design dorm rooms to squish a bunch of raging teenagers in them is beyond me, but they did pretty well. The bunk beds are tall and spacious, the only thing lacking was a bathroom which his roommates informed me that there was only one per floor for each sex. Fun. I'd like to see how long the hot water lasts on a Monday morning before class starts.

The four of us headed into downtown for some P.F Chang's. Yummmmmmmmm!! We were famished and ordered everything we could fit on our table. Lara, who is about 4'11" and 90 lbs, is aspiring to be a fashion designer. She may be small and unintimidating in stature , but, boy this girl can put the food away!! J We talked of college life, classes and goals and life as a freshman. Afterwards, dropping the girls back at the dorm, Jake and I wanted to spend some long deserving mother and son time. We haven't done this in years!!! So, we decided to first hang out and then catch the new James Bond movie that started at 11pm.  We played on the internet biding time watching Napoleon Dynamite. Napoleon Dynamite always reminds me of three people. My youngest son Roman, and my two roommates in Aspen, Tyler(Tiggidy on myspace) and Cory.

Heaven

Tyler and I worked the summer of 2004 at a private golf club in Couer d'Alene, Idaho. It was a small, intimate club that made me feel like I was living in a fairy tale, we opened it with only 54 members and catered to the likes of John Elway, Jake Plummer, Mark Rypin, Maury Povich, Peter Forsberg, Jeremy Roenick, Adam Deadmarsh and an unbelievable foray of world renowned golfers and celebrities. Tyler was the Men's Locker Room Bartender, I was the Lead Dining Room Bartender. We worked everyday, all day, from April to October and we had a BLAST!! Of course, if you weren't able to locate me in the dining room, you could find me, yes, in the Men's Locker Room or on their balcony with some lame excuse or another on why I was there. J


Our flatmates in Snowmass.....Tyler is on the far right below Heather.

Tyler was like my little brother and he and I decided on continuing our golf circuit experience to the opportunity that was offered to us at another private club in Snowmass. So, both of us convinced our best friends(his was Cory, mine was Heather) to commit to our idea of adventure for six months and we headed south for the winter. It became evident 170 miles outside of Coeur d'Alene that Cory and Ty had committed every line of Napoleon Dynamite to memory, and that they would soon become our soul source of entertainment in our four bedroom condo. Back in the dorm room, I recounted all of this to Jake and told him that hopefully, someday, he would have the opportunity to meet Ty.




Jake and I

Jake is nothing less than a  gentleman. He opens my car door for me and then proceeds to be my experienced chauffeur navigating Seattle's tangled web of one way streets, stopping briefly on the hunt for clove cigarettes. Yes, he has been read the riot act on smoking, and I only pray that someday soon he'll realize that all it will bring is bad breath and bad health. There are only a small handful of people on a Sunday night in the movie theatre so we take advantage of the middle row of top seats, dead center. A young couple is on the same wave length and they sit directly behind us. As we are eating our popcorn and gummy bears, we overhear that they are from Colorado Springs and we turn around to engage in some Colorado snowstorm conversation. Turns out that the guy is in his fourth  year of engineering, Jake is in his first and even though they do not attend the same schools, they know some of the same people. His girlfriend needed a valid excuse to escape Denver's weather so she came to visit him for the weekend. By 1:30, the movie had ended and we headed down the stairs and over to the elevators at the top of the deserted mall.  There are two other people that enter the elevator and at the last minute, two young guys with baseball hats and snowboarding jackets get on. I had no intention of breaking the no eye contact elevator code that most people live by so I had my head titled up to watch the numbers descend downward. When out of nowhere, a male voice says,"Figures I'd see you randomly in the middle of nowhere." One of the guys in the baseball hat and snowboarding jacket said to me, it was Tyler The other one was his cousin from Spokane, who is also attending his freshman year of college in Seattle. I hadn't seen Ty since the day we left Aspen in the spring of 2005 after the lifts had shut down for the season. He found me on Myspace a year later and said almost the same words as he had now. I felt like I was in a dream. And as much as I've told the kids that weird stuff like this happens all the time to me, this was the first time Jake had seen it.

If you know me well, you know that I do not believe in coincidences and that I believe we are all connected universally bringing into our life serendipitous moments that have big picture meanings, showing us if we choose to see, that we are on the right path of our destinies.


Roman, Jordan and Jake on Mother's Day 2010 in Frisco, CO

My older three children were always blessed with living in their dad's world, they usually had to experience my world through the stories I told them from Alaska, to the people I meet, to the adventures I've experienced. Sarah and Casey had the opportunity to scratch the surface of the life that I've been compelled to, so far away in the middle of the continental United States. They have tasted the passion in the places that drew me in here. Jake hasn't yet and I was grateful that for twenty minutes as we stood in the middle of this enormous glass encased super mall in the middle of downtown Seattle at two in the morning on the dawn of Martin Luther King Day, he had a glimpse of something tangible that I could share. Tyler and I caught up quickly as no time had passed and as we parted, we ended up again in the same elevator and out of the six levels of parking we had nonetheless parked our cars across from each other.  Tell me that is not destiny and I'll wake you up to the miracles of a lifetime.

Jake decided that I was not driving over the Snoqualmie Pass in the middle of the night during an ice storm even though I told him that it was nothing and I'd be fine. This oldest son is the soft wind in a storm. The gentleness of his soul resonates to every one who he comes into contact with. There is a subtle wisdom within him and his compassion and empathy for all things is apparent in all that he does and the way that he lives. He has been singing acapella since junior high and actually met Hannah while doing a musical in high school and is self taught on the guitar. He sang and played at his sister's wedding the newlywed's first song. He is the only one of the five who I have never spanked, he is the one that if he tried to argue and say no one time, I'd say yes and he would concede. He is the diplomat, the balance between all of us. His faith is unwavering and his smile is easy.


Jake playing on top of Castle Rock in Colorado for Mothers Day 2008

We went back over to Hannah's studio apartment and turned down her futon couch into a bed. Looking out the window, I don't know how this reminded me of when Jake, Casey and I went camping out along the river at the Columbia River Gorge, but it did. It must have been that comfy, cozy, bonding feeling that you get when you are confined into a small space and the entertainment is old fashioned talking into the night not knowing who was the first to fall asleep and who was the last one telling the story. J

I woke up to yet another incoming wind and ice storm that they said would again paralyze Seattle for much of the week so I hastily through my stuff together, wrapped my hair up in a clip and Jake walked me down to the parking lot. As much as you let go and let your children be who they need to become, the emotion in that last hug, the last goodbye never eases. I wanted to put him in the car and take him with me on this road trip, to be by my side, laughing, sharing and eating sunflower seeds along I-90. Instead my vision is blurred and I need to pull over at the gas station in Snoqualmie and let it all out. And in this pain of mixed sentiment comes the gratefulness I have for everything.