Some thoughts on a niece

I recently moved to the Bay Area largely because my brother and sister, and my brother's family, live here now. We were born and raised in Austin, Texas.

Anyhow, my brother has two children, 5 and 2, girl and boy.

I've been staying in their Oakland Hills house for a few months (which has a whole separate level), and it's been great to form a casual relationship with the little ones.

Jolie is a thin, sparky, quirky, imaginative girl. We got to know each other pretty well when Mom and Dad went out of town for a NYC long weekend and I watched her and her brother. Even with a nanny, a very demanding enterprise (lame?). By Sunday, my meter was running down; sleep, focus slowly dissipating. I just wanted to watch TV and eat bon bons after they finally went down. Married With Children.

Anyhow, Jolie and I don't get to see each other that much during the week. I come and go through a separate entrance and live and be on a separate level of the house. So, via Mom and Dad, Jolie and I started setting dates. She inexplicably started talking about fishing and how cool it would be to catch and eat fish we caught, so for her 5th birthday I bought her a fishing pole.

We went to the glory that is Wal-Mart, a mind-boggling event for a kid at any age; I don't think she'd experienced it before. After a brief foray into the Barbies, which majestically draw her by a fairy, mermaid magnetism, we made it to the fishing poles. She was immediately drawn to the pink, flowery, good-for-nothing two-foot-long poles that eventually end, scatter-like, in a sad front yard the same day it comes home, wallowing until some ambitious adult decides to throw it away, finally.

I tried hard to explain that they are worthless poles, that we actually want to catch, clean and eat some fish, not be pretty. She refused a practical one. It was too "ugly." We compromised, ironically, on a red one with "Ugly Stick" declared in large, full letters down the package's side and on the pole itself. I didn't say anything.

We eventually made it to San Pablo Reservoir, a large stocked lake just inland from the East Bay ridge that separates Oakland and Berkeley from the inland valley countryside - cows, farms, open roads.

We pulled up and bought a fishing pass and picked a spot near some Hmong, who were fishing up a storm. Hmong, a people of the mountainous regions in southeast Asia, were the only ethnicity out there that I could see, 50 or so. Their presence reminded me immediately of one of my journalism professor's favorite books and required reading in one of the classes I had with him: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. A story of extreme cultural disconnect with a young Hmong girl and her family in its center, told indefatigably by Anne Fadiman, daughter of former New Yorker book critic Clifton Fadiman.

My professor, Berkley Hudson, was impressed by Fadiman's tireless work on the book. When The New Yorker inexplicably hired 38-year-old Tina Brown as editor, Fadiman had been working on the piece. She turned it in, or it was already there, and Brown rejected it. For the amount of work she put in, it was crushing (this is all according to Berkley). She published it as a book and, as related by Berkley, said something like: "A woman goes through delays, gives birth. It's different for a woman."

Anyhow, the Hmong were catching these huge 4/5-pound channel catfish - grey, momentous fish. We inspected one of the catch and Jolie said, "No way I'm touching one of those." I said, "Then how will we catch, clean and eat them?" We fished off a dock into the stocked reservoir grey water with nightcrawlers, but nothing bit. The Hmong were fishing with thawed frozen shrimp and were cleaning up, which was surprising. And they were fishing off the lake's bottom, using tear-drop shaped large weights. They would heave-cast, with large, long poles, the bait 60 to 70 yards out and the weight would sink the baited hook to the bottom. To know when a fish was on, they placed a bobber between the rod's first and second eyelet; when it jiggled, they jumped to yank the rod and hook the fish.

We didn't catch a fish, not even a bite ... even though a Hmong guy gave us two frozen shrimp and we adopted their technique.

...

Jolie started looking forward to "special time."

So that's how we started the dates. And for the last one we went to the Berkeley Botanical Garden, which is a great 34 acres. The gardens sprawl out into Strawberry Canyon, the canyon that carves uphill above UC Berkeley; the gardens ared divided into sections by region of the world - an amazing layout, and one maybe only California and a handful of other places could hope to put on: everything grows here.

Her little heart/being effusively brightens at random times, particularly related to conscious flights of imagination.

I transcribe a redwood poem of hers at the base of one the garden's most prominent redwood trees with the Golden Gate Bridge anchoring the wide bay in the distance.

The Redwood Tree

We are at the redwood tree.

The branches look like spider legs

and they're trying to take us.

The top looks like a crown.


It's really pretty,

tall and nice.

I'm scared of the spider legs

It's older than us

It's like [effusive, heart-brighten moment] so big

I've also been introducing her to some music. She agrees that Big Poppa's the best rapper:

Biggie Biggie Biggie can't you see?

sometimes your words just hypnotize me

And I just love your flashy ways

I guess that's why they broke, and you're so paid

Ok. Not so many thoughts on a niece, but there it is ...