Christina as Little Mermaid, age 7 -- born beautiful. Photos c 2011 Barbara Newhall

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

My daughter is beautiful. She was born beautiful. But I sometimes wonder if she really wants to be.

If she liked being beautiful, then why the heck would she dress up as a skeleton for Halloween when she was 6 years old? As a warlock at age 8? As a heap of trash at 11?

And this year, at age 28 – as a perfectly presentable, but not particularly pretty, eleventh incarnation of the Doctor on BBC-TV’s “Doctor Who?”

I got an email from Christina late in September asking me to locate her clunky old black boots from high school. She’d need them for her Doctor Who costume. She’d get the tweed jacket on eBay and the bow tie from Aunt Reena’s costume shop in Valencia.

Christina at 11 goes for icky -- a trash heap with a garbage can for a crown

Once again Christina was gearing up to cast herself against type for Halloween. Why?

Christina was just minutes old when she was pronounced beautiful for the first time.

“She’s gorgeous,” said the nurse anesthetist as she suctioned out our new baby’s throat.

“You probably say that about every newborn,” my husband said.

“No. This is for real.”

Christina had the usual puffy newborn eyes and neckless body. She also had a wide, generous mouth.

Jon thought she looked like a frog. I thought she looked like a duck.

But it wasn’t long before the puffy eyes opened and it became apparent that, indeed, little Christina was in danger of growing up beautiful.

That worried me. Mightn’t Christina turn into one of those vain females who depend on their looks to get ahead? What if she decided she didn’t want to be a smart professional woman like her mother and grandmother before her? What if she decided to go with arm candy and be done with it?

An astronaut at 5 -- space fantasies

In my family and in Jon’s, smart is everything. We go to college. We read the New York Times. We play chess. We love a good debate. We edit newspapers, do science and write things.

What if our daughter turned out to be none of the above? What if she decided to just sit there, looking beautiful for the rest of her life?

And that is why, when Christina was little, I made sure I did all the recommended mom things to build up her self-esteem. I told her she was good at math. I complimented her cooking. I went to all her soccer games and cheered when she blocked a pass with her long legs and gangly body.

But I was careful not to mention beautiful in the same sentence with “you are.”

Nonetheless, despite my careful mothering, Christina figured it out. She had a face to launch a thousand ships, and she knew it.

I learned this to my dismay one evening over a Chinese restaurant dinner when Dolly, an old family friend, put down her chopsticks, looked at my daughter and declared, “You’re a beautiful girl, Christina.”

Skeleton -- scary at age 6

Christina was unperturbed. Clearly she’d come to terms with this state of affairs on her own, possibly while looking in a mirror.

Instead of blushing and thanking Dolly for the compliment, Christina was matter-of-fact. “I know,” she said demurely.

Christina went through the usual girlish pink phase when she was four or five. For a while, everything she owned from jammies to lunch pail to ballet leotard was pink.

When Halloween rolled around, however, Christina wanted nothing to do with pink – or pretty.

At the toy store, the two of us checked out the Halloween possibilities. We strolled the girly costume aisle sparkling with princess robes, angel wings, magic fairy wands and bride get-ups.

But Christina wasn’t interested. She wanted to be a witch. An astronaut. A skeleton. One year – in a departure necessitated by her love of the Disney movie – Christina opted for a Little Mermaid costume. But in no time she was back on track – as a mud monster.

At 15, a vampire

As the Black Mage from Final Fantasy.

As a clown.

As an off-duty medieval knight, inspired by the Tamora Pierce novels.

As a vampire.

And so, all these years later, I have to wonder, did I overdo it? Does my daughter think she’s not allowed to be pretty? Does she think she must always choose interesting, creative, ambitious or shocking over pretty on Halloween?

Even more worrisome, does she believe she has to play the off-putting pile of trash or the in-your-face vampire – in real life?

When I was about sixteen, my father noticed that I was enjoying a lively social life with lots of dates with lots of boys. I was into clothes, make-up, haircuts. An experiment with peroxide had turned my bangs orange.

My father’s mother and grandmother had been starchy church women, schoolteachers both, and my father had decided it was time to set me straight.

Christina at GeekGirlCon as "Doctor Who" hero; bow tie from A Chorus Line in Valencia, CA

“Barb, you need to develop your mind as well as your beauty,” he told me one day. “Your beauty won’t last your whole life, but your education and your mind will.”

I took that as a double-edged compliment: My father thought I had beauty and that I was potentially smart.

At age 28, Christina is now safely out of the woods. I think I can relax. She is beautiful, sexy and graceful – but nobody’s arm candy.

And she’s smart, smart, smart. She doesn’t play chess, and she doesn’t read the New York Times. She’d rather bake you a birthday cake than suck you into a debate.

But she did make it through college nicely, and – like her mother and father before her – Christina is a devoted editor and writer. If she’s going to dazzle the world, she’d rather do it with a good story than a gorgeous face.

And Christina knows a good story when she sees one. A pretty girl in an angel costume does not make a story; she’ll tell you that. There’s no tension there. Pretty is just pretty, and that story is going nowhere.

A pretty girl dressed up as a pile of trash, on the other hand – now that’s a story.

Next Halloween: My son the boy

© 2011 Barbara Newhall

Twenty-two years after the deadly crack-down at China’s Tiananmen Square, Chai Ling, a young leader of the student protests there, finally tells her story.

Why did it take so long?

Because Chai’s story is not simply one of political activism in China followed by escape to a new life in the United States. It is also the story of a woman who has had four abortions.

Tiananmen Square and the shame of four abortions

In the two decades since she left China, Chai has sat down to write her story several times. But each time she has been paralyzed by the shame of the multiple abortions – three in China and a fourth after escaping her homeland and its one-child policy – and the sexual carelessness they imply.

Compounding her personal shame is the guilt Chai continued to feel over surviving the violence at Tiananmen Square when so many others perished.

The details of Chai Ling’s life will fascinate readers with even the slimmest interest in the politics and culture of contemporary China. And I admire Chai’s courage in revealing the details of the abortions she endured.

But Chai is a true believer. And as a result, the story of her personal growth from obedient daughter in an oppressive China to marriage, children and career in America ultimately disappoints.

As a girl, Chai gives her heart to pleasing her autocratic father; she studies hard in school and brings home excellent grades – and honor – to her family.

As a student at Peking University, she becomes enamored of the study of psychology, long a forbidden subject in China. Next she embraces the idea freedom for China and for herself, leading to her involvement at Tiananmen Square.

On the run from the government after the student protests, Chai tries out Buddhism. In America she continues her education, founds the software services provider Zenzabar, and gives herself over to ardent, highly profitable entrepreneurship.

And finally, at book’s end Chai Ling gives her heart to Jesus.

No doubt Chai’s tendency to leap from true belief to true belief has something to do with the autocratic Chinese culture that shaped her. That makes Chai an interesting case study. But it does not make her the author of a book with a profound point to make.

Indeed, her political and emotional naiveté is unsettling: “I now believe that transforming China into a Jesus-following nation is the key to open democracy in that country,” she writes.

What, I wonder, does Chai think a democracy is? A place where everyone worships Jesus?

As her story draws to an end, Chai has founded an organization called All Girls Allowed and she has focused her energies on ending China’s one-child policy and its coerced abortions.

Chai closes the book with an invitation to the reader to become a follower of Jesus – and send her an email with the news.

In other words, a book that begins as a deeply felt memoir of a bright young Chinese woman growing up to reject her government’s party line – ends with a party line.

© 2011 BF Newhall

A Heart for Freedom: The Remarkable Journey of a Young Dissident, Her Daring Escape, and her Quest to Free China’s Daughters, by Chai Ling, Tyndale House, $22.99, hardcover.

Grandma Falconer makes sand castles with Peter and his sister on Lake Michigan. c 1987 B.F. Newhall

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

The Oakland Tribune

Sunday, September 27, 1987

“Move,” said Peter. “I want to get by.”

My mother looked up from her book and gave my 6 1/2-year-old a hard look.

She was sitting on her sofa, in her house, feet up on her coffee table.

Reluctantly, she moved her feet to let Peter by. He squeezed wordlessly past.

Something was wrong, very wrong, with that exchange, said my gut.

But what? The chilly glare my mother threw at my son? The pleases and thank yous he left unsaid?

It isn’t easy to think clearly after a few days under the same roof with one’s mother and father. When I was a young career woman living in New York City, I discovered the three-nights-and-four-days-at-home rule.

That was all I could take of living eyeball to eyeball with my mother. I could be her kid again for four days, max. After that, it was flight – or fight.

I broke my own rule last summer and inflicted myself and my children upon my parents for an unprecedented stay of eight nights and nine days.

It was not until I was safely home under my own roof in the Eastbay, my feet tucked up on my own coffee table, that I could see what had gone wrong during that exchange between my mother and her grandson.

Peter had no respect.

It was more than a mere forgetting of his pleases and thank yous. It was downright presumptuous of him to think his grandmother should interrupt her reading to accommodate him at all. He should have walked quietly, respectfully, around the table the other way.

Had it been another child, a peer, in Peter’s path, squeezing past with a quick “excuse me” would be okay.

But around grandparents, children should show some respect.

Respect. The very word sticks in my craw. Question authority was the motto of my young adulthood. Challenge it.

There was no place for blind respect for one’s elders during the ’60s. We were equals under God and the U.S. Constitution. Every creature – adult, child, rhinoceros or whooping crane – was to be treated with respect.

Children, the clean slates of the future, were held in especially high regard in those days. As innocents, they possessed a unique wisdom lost to their time-sullied elders.

And today, the young child, the person of the future – not his parents and grandparents, the person of the past – continues to command unusual respect, even awe.

This small bundle of nerve endings is a miracle of creation, the child-rearing books coo. It has needs and feelings that deserve our utmost attention.

Little Samantha, but a fetus, can hear in utero. We should play her Beethoven.

She has feelings in utero. We should think nice thoughts about her as we experience morning sickness.

Unless, of course, we are planning to abort this particular fetus, in which case it is better not to think.

Through all of this, a stubborn something deep inside me has persisted, insisting that it is the grandparents, if anyone, who deserve the extra measure of unconditional respect.

Not because our elders have earned it. And not because our elders are in any way better, smarter or kinder than their descendents.

But because they are the elders.

Peter dotes on his grandmother these days -- and she on him. This is Christmas 2007, twenty years later, and I'm pretty sure he excused himself as he squeezed between the coffee table and my mother's knees. c 2007 B.F. Newhall

My mother deserves Peter’s esteem because of the life she has led as a mother and wife. Because of the potatoes peeled, the casseroles baked, the dustballs chased and the corporate VIPs entertained.

Because she holds the office of grandmother. Because she has done her do.

Peter won’t even clean up his room and he thinks he is on a par with my mother, who has cleaned up his bottom?

My friend Claudia sends her two small children to Chinese school every Saturday morning. “I want them to learn about their culture. I want them to learn that respect,” she explained.

“Your parents live in Michigan,” she went on. “So far away. I would never want to be that far away from my mother.”

The Chinese culture, thousands of years old, venerates the people of the past. It is not unique in this.

The elderly are held in high esteem in her native Belize, according to my friend Miriam.

“Old people are the root,” she explains. “If grandparents come to your house, they don’t sleep on the floor. You give them your bed or your hammock.”

Today’s Western culture, with its silicon chips, videocameras and interplanetary probes, venerates what it still to come.

It stands in awe of the future and its citizens – our children – as though our children possessed a hot line to the truth or, as the Chinese ancestors of yore, to Heaven.

The fact is, we and our forebears created the world into which our children are being launched.

We have done our best, sorry as it may be. We have done our do. And for that we deserve some respect.

By gosh.

© 1987 The Oakland Tribune

Well, I missed my Friday night 11:59 p.m. deadline last week. The reason: My 92-year-old mom is still in a skilled nursing facility recovering from a broken hip. My brothers and I are stressing ourselves out trying to figure out what her next residence will be. Assisted living, great though it has been for the past couple of years, no longer suffices. She needs a memory support unit.

Peter and Emily put together a vegetarian meal for the family. But that was before my mother broke her hip. Photo c 2010 B.F. Newhall

Driving home the other day from just one of  countless visits to my mother at the hospital, I had to ask myself, why aren’t I writing about her? Naturally, I prefer to think about happier things – the elegant dinner Peter and his girlfriend Emily put together when they visited here in January.

But why, really, do I resist the topic of my mom and me? I’ve got plenty of time for self-examination on those drives back and forth to the hospital.

I’ll see if I can persuade myself to give the subject some thought and get back to you. 

Maybe.

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

September 13, 1987, The Oakland Tribune

Little Max is off to kindergarten for his first taste of the real world. What will he learn?

Dr. Seuss? Two plus two? Maybe.

“Jingle bells, Batman smells,

Robin laid an egg . . .”

Probably.

“I was born in the U.S.S.R.

To blow up Mr. Reagan’s car.”

Yes. But if not that, then certainly:

“Robin’s in the kitchen.

Batman’s in the hall.

Joker’s in the bathroom.

Peeing on the wall.

Grossed out yet?

Max won’t be.

Peter, ready for his first day of kindergarten at Bentley School, September, 1986. Photo c 1986 B.F. Newhall

Out on the schoolyard, young Max will finally get to indulge his taste for raunchy – and there isn’t much his parents can do about it.

Maybe they shouldn’t.

It was 7-year-old Derek who picked up those three ditties – during lunch hour at a public school comfortably nestled on a hillside of split-level redwood houses starting at $300,000.

When Derek started school he found his mentor in things gross in Randy, who is 9.

Randy’s parents also are college educated and spent their own pretty penny buying into this exclusive hideaway in the hills.

Let’s face it. Kids, some kids, naturally love raunchy jokes and songs.

If we want to hang tough, we can keep them from bringing the Mad Balls into the house. We can insist they not spend their allowances on Garbage Pail Kids cards. We can refuse to buy the slime pits, the gummy worms, the plastic barf and the plastic poop.

We can decline to send the birthday party guests home with miniature trash cans stuffed with – edible – dead fish, hot dogs and zap guns.

We can lay down the law at the tiny toy washing machine full of – edible again – dirty sox and Jockey shorts.

Those items are simply the commercial expression – some would say the commercial exploitation – of the juvenile mind’s affinity for the naughty.

What we can’t control is what gets discussed on the playground.

Geoff Dettlinger used to steal the pencils off my desk and break them with a single irreverent crash of the hand. That was in seventh grade back in Birmingham, Mich., at a time when $30,000 for a split level was considered a pretty penny.

Geoff, who now lives in Alamo and sells tractors at Western Traction Co. in Union City, used to read Mad Magazine during recess.

He adored the Mad spoofs of contemporary society. I thought Geoff and his raunchy magazine were sick.

Geoff, who wouldn’t be caught dead using a term like contemporary society, laughed at the ’50s era cartoon Cadillac wearing a Maidenform bra over its big, pointy bumpers.

He was amused by things like the championship diver landing with a flourish in the empty swimming pool, or Pronto burning the Lone Stranger at the stake.

“Yes, I still have a sick sense of humor,” Geoff assured me over the telephone, in a voice that no longer cracked when he laughed.

We talked of his futile efforts to turn me into a Mad comics reader. “You thought it was wrong to laugh at that sort of thing,” he noted.

It’s true. I did then and still do deadpan at raunchy humor. I fail to see the humor in passed gas, noisy belches and flying lemon cream pies.

Andrew Sarris, film critic of the Village Voice, sheds some light on my knee-jerk distaste for slapstick humor. He offered it during a course in screenwriting I once took from him.

Women, he suggested, find little humor in the pie-in-your-face joke because, when all the yuks are yukked, it is they – the females of the race – who are expected to clean up the mess.

He’s right. What’s so funny, I ask you, about spending the next 20 minutes of your life on your knees with a washbucket?

Same thing with the passed gas, the noisy burp and the spoofs of such social niceties as eating one’s salad with a fork.

As mothers, it is up to us to civilize the adorable barbarians who are born to us.

They come out looking like frogs. As newborns, they behave more like banana slugs than members of species claiming to reflect God’s image. They eat, sleep, excrete and that’s it.

We do this, we women. We inflict polite ways and sanitary habits upon our beloved frogs and banana slugs because, without them, our children will not survive in society. Nor would society last long without a few key conventions.

Still, it’s tough being a banana slug in the process of becoming human. A little playground comic relief is to be expected.

So, when a certain kindergartener of my acquaintance – he requested anonymity – recited the following, I did not disapprove.

“Batman and Robin are flying in the air.

“Batman lost his underwear.”

Followed by:

“Mommy’s in the kitchen, burning the rice.

Papa’s on the corner, turning the dice . . . “

I managed a laugh.

“Welcome to the real world,” said Geoff.

© 1987 The Oakland Tribune

Andrew Sarris left the Village Voice long ago; the $300,000 split levels in Silicon Valley are going for more like $1.3 million these days ($3 million?), and the Garbage Patch Kids have surely given way to another clever, bestselling toy.

But some things never change. Mad Magzine lives on; I’m pretty sure I could still get my hands on some plastic poop or plastic barf if necessary, and Geoff Dettlinger is still a comedian – he emails me jokes from the Internet these days, some of them actually funny.

By the time I got my camera out, the fit young runners had pretty much disappered.

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

I was all of three or four years old, pumping away on the pedals of my tricycle, near tears because the big kids were leaving me behind.

“Wait for me!” I cried.

Nobody listened.

My six-year-old brother Davey and his friends had decided to ride their bikes – actual two-wheelers – all the way around the block. Davey had persuaded his friends to let me tag along, but I couldn’t keep up, and nobody would slow down for me, so little and so slow on my tricycle, not even my big brother.

When we reached the other side of the block – far from home – the big kids sped up. In tears, I watched them grow smaller and smaller down the sidewalk, then disappear around the corner.

Today, this morning – same thing. I watched in dismay as my daughter and a handful of other fit twenty- and thirty-somethings took off running, leaving me behind.

I decided to record my humiliation with a photo of their trim figures receding in the distance, but by the time I got my camera out, they had all but disappeared down College Avenue.

Christina had talked me into this. She’d gotten me out of bed at the crack of dawn – 8 a.m. – to meet the Berkeley Lululemon running club at College and Ashby for a six-mile, Saturday morning run to Lake Temescal and back.

At first, I trotted along behind the much-younger runners. But after half a block, I had to face up to reality; I’d never keep up with all those fit young things. But I could do a brisk three-mile walk down College to Broadway in Oakland and back. And that’s what I did.

A sweaty Christina was waiting for me outside the Lululemon store at the corner of Ashby and College.

I don’t know how my four-year-old self found her way home.  Maybe I sucked it up and managed on my own. More likely Davey eventually came back around the block to get me.

Today I sucked it up. I gave myself a terrific hour-plus walking workout. But by the time I got back to Lululemon, the rest of the running club had finished up and left for home. Except for Christina. Still sweaty from her six-mile run, my daughter was standing outside the store, waiting for me.

Photos c 2010 B.F. Newhall

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

I don’t like daffodils. I feel about daffodils the way I feel about some of my writing – too damned cheerful. Too nicey-nice. Too tidy. Too certain that in the end everything’s going to come out just fine, that all shall be well.

I prefer irises. I especially like the bearded irises that are volunteering up and down the hills of our neighborhood right now.  Their swooping, swooning petals are downright lascivious. So are the fuzzy, yellow-brown genitalia cascading from their centers. These are not nice flowers.

Daffodils, by comparison, are starchy, unequivocal. They are trumpets of optimism playing to the sun. Last month, there were daffodils blooming all over the neighborhood, as if there had not just been a winter. And if by chance there had been a winter, as if there would never be another.

The trouble with daffodils is they have no subtext. They are all cheer and sparkle and optimism. They are avatars of perky. They get on my nerves, no doubt, because of that daffodil place in my psyche, which from time to time locates itself in my writing.

In my daffodil brain, everything happens for the good. Problems can be solved. Human beings are redeemable. God is in God’s sweet heaven. And my 92-year-old mother, who’s been lying in a hospital bed with a broken hip for the past five weeks, is not going to die. Ever. In just a few weeks, my mother and I will head over to Nordstrom again for lunch. As usual, she’ll order the chicken salad with berries. I’ll get the one with artichokes. After lunch we’ll hijack Nordstrom’s loaner wheelchair and scoot over to Macy’s where things are more affordable. She’ll sit in the wheelchair with her purse in her lap, credit card at the ready, and I’ll roll her around the petites department. She’ll ask me to back up to take a second look at the crisp brown and white linen jacket. She’ll offer to buy it for me, I’ll decline.

My mother will come through this hip thing just fine. She always has. She always will.

My daffodil brain does not write about my mother’s spine, which is as curved and uncertain as question mark. It averts its eyes from the sun-damaged splotches darkening and growing across her cheeks. It makes excuses for the strings of nonsensical sentences coming from her mouth. (It’s the painkillers talking.) My daffodil brain is too polite to type words like constipation, commode, diaper, droopy buttocks, crepey skin, thinning hair, boney knuckles.

Photos c 2010 B.F. Newhall

No, my mother’s days are not numbered and, therefore, neither are mine. My mother will not spend her last days in pain and uncertainty, wondering how God, or death for that matter, could possibly be real. And neither will I.

© 2010 Barbara Falconer Newhall

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

The Oakland Tribune, September 1987

“What does Christina have on today?” M.J. wanted to know.

M.J. and Christina are friends. They ran into each other while shopping for tutus.

M.J., who is 4, was wearing a dress.

She looked pretty.

Christina, newly 4, was wearing dungarees.

She looked OK.

Christina in her brand-new dungarees, ready for preschool.

My sister-in-law Alice had warned me about this. I bought a raft of back-to-school overalls for Christina in August and showed them to her. “Are you sure Christina is going to wear them?” she cautioned as I snipped off the price tags.

Her daughter Julie, who is 5, won’t wear anything but dresses. And neither will most of Julie’s friends. It happens when the girls turn 4, said Alice.

Pink dresses, powder blue dresses. Dresses with nosegays, kitty cats and sunbursts. Dresses that show the calf, the knee and the shoulder.

Little girls, it seems, are the last stronghold of prettiness in today’s society.

Their mothers and grandmothers go off to work dressed for success in man-tailored suits in shades of ecru and khaki.

Their only concession to femininity is a wisp of lace at the wrist or throat.

Those moms who don’t hold outside jobs schlep about in denim skirts and loafers. If they are pretty, it is because their cheeks are still flushed from the morning workout.

If you want to see something pretty these days, you have to be quick. For, by the time a girl reaches the third or fourth grade, she has changed her look to tough.

She wears her Levis or jeans skirt tight, suggesting that, yes, she does own standard equipment thighs and knees.

But anything else that might be construed as pretty is hidden by high-top sneakers and an oversized sweatshirt.

A hank of hair, brutally chopped, falls forward to conceal what was, when last seen, a pretty face.

Pretty has become an embarrassment for women and older girls.

Like the Arab woman anonymous in her chador, a girl must cover her beauty, lest it tempt and torment the male of the species, causing him to banish her – or try to – from the workplace back to the boudoir.

But the littlest girls are still blessedly ignorant of the politics of gender.

Truly sensual, they paint their fingernails purple with marking pens. They dot their cheeks with rainbow stickers.

They gather up the leftover stick-on bows at the birthday party and press them to their bodices.

Out shopping, Peter wants to buy yet another Battle Beast to wage war on his bedroom floor. Christina is satisfied with a roll of that gold ribbon with the red hearts on it, please, Mommy.

She cuts a piece off and winds it around her neck. Thus adorned, she looks into the mirror and beams, enormously pleased. She is a fairy, a ballerina, a queen, a gloriously beautiful lady.

Christina is pretty. No, let’s be precise, Christina is a knock-out.

Jon and I are careful not to mention this in our daughter’s presence, however.

What if she grows up to be a fluff ball, a beautiful nothing? Christina is pretty enough and demure enough to get away with it.

Instead, we tell her at every turn how clever she is, how strong, how witty, all of which is true – but not as true as how beautiful she is.

Miriam de Uriarte, director of the Berkeley Child Art Studio, shares our bias.

She notices a difference between boys’ art and girls.’ Boys’ drawings are spare and functional, full of action, spaceships, combat and competition. Girls tend to draw houses, flowers, people.

“I used to think it was purely social,” says Miriam. Girls’ drawings, baroque with sunbursts and daisies and often nice to a fault, were strictly the result of conditioning, she thought.

But after 22 years of teaching children art, Miriam has changed her mind. “Now I think girls are naturally more process-oriented, more experimental, more in touch with fluids and textures. They tolerate more decoration in their work.”

Trouble is, Miriam adds, girls are “praised for drawing the house and flowers, for being a nice girl. They become stuck in this groove.”

Miriam encourages girls in her art classes to make ugly pictures, to express anger and fear. “I get some really power drawings.” She also gets, “Oh, yucky. I’m not going to draw a monster.”

Christina (second from right) and her ballet class. Photos c 1987 B.F. Newhall

Christina needed a leotard and ballet slippers for her ballet class. M.J. and Annie would be showing up at class with tutus over their leotards. Christina, I resolved, would also have a tutu.

She tried on the peach leotard.

Too sallow.

Then the lavender leotard and black slippers.

The colors didn’t pull together.

Next, the pink leotard with a great white cloud of a tutu.

Christina was delectable. All in pink and white, my daughter looked like a dish of ice cream, a swan lady, a fairy princess.

She was pretty as only a 4-year-old girl knows how to be pretty. I told her so.

© 1987 The Oakland Tribune

Christina hadn’t called. We had dropped her at the airport hours ago. The flight to Burbank takes only seventy minutes. She should be home by now.

But Jon and I still hadn’t gotten the, “I’m home. The plane didn’t crash. My roommate remembered to pick me up, and we didn’t get mugged in the garage,” phone call.

Christina at home with us -- where we know she's safe.

It’s a phone call that we have come to need from our twenty-six-year-old, totally grown up, perfectly competent daughter.

Days can go by — a full week can go by — without a peep from Christina. Not a problem. We live in the San Francisco Bay Area. She lives hundreds of miles away, in Southern California. She is off our radar.

Jon and I go about our lives like normal adults, working, shopping, cooking and kicking back after dinner to watch TV, Jon in the den with the latest episode of 24, and me in the living room with House reruns.

But when Christina visits, or Peter, they are back in our lives in all their lovableness. My not-quite-extinguished mothering hormones – my overmothering hormones  — kick in. So when Christina, or Peter, departs and I can’t be absolutely sure that my kid is totally safe, happy, and equipped with a sturdy umbrella and 60-watt sunscreen – I start to wonder.

The next thing you know, I’m dialing Christina’s cell phone.

No answer. I finish clearing off the dinner table and go to the living room to see if I can find a House episode I haven’t seen.

Half an hour later, Jon calls from the den. “Have we heard from Christina?”

I wasn’t worried up till now. But if Jon is worried, I’m worried. I dial Christina again.

Still no answer.

It’s 10 p.m. Late, but not too late to phone Christina’s roommate. She won’t be in bed yet. I picture her sitting around the apartment playing with the cats, or eating popcorn and watching Ugly Betty, or flossing her teeth.

There’s no land line at Christina’s apartment, of course, so I look up her roommate’s cell number. I just happen to have it written down next to every phone in the house. Just in case.

I dial.

Christina’s roommate picks up. “Hello,” she whispers.

“Hi. It’s Barbara, Christina’s mom. Is Christina home yet?”

“I can’t talk now.” Roommate’s voice is muffled. Strained. Annoyed maybe. I hear voices in the background. “I’ll call you back,” she says. She hangs up.

Later that night, a phone call from Christina. “I’m home. I’m trying to sleep. My cell phone battery ran out. Talk to you tomorrow.”

The next day: “Mom. Please don’t call my roommate like that. She was in a meeting when you called.”

“You mean she wasn’t home, getting ready for bed?”

“No. She was in a meeting. A business meeting.”

“Hmmm. How about if I get myself an iPhone — so next time I can just text her if I have to?”

“Mom. You’ve got a life. I’m pretty sure you do. Why don’t you go downstairs to your writing room and look for it. I’m sure it’s down there somewhere.”

I go downstairs.

I found it. Photos c 2010 B.F. Newhall

I sit at my desk. I am surrounded by two walls of bookcases and a serious bank of file cabinets, both overflowing with important stuff. My desk and parts of the floor are covered with papers, three-by-five cards, unopened mail, thumb drives, half-read books, empty tea cups and coffee mugs cover – important stuff all.

And right in front of me, juicy story ideas jotted on sticky notes make a halo around my computer monitor. Whaddya know. Here it is. My life.

I almost forgot.

© 2010 Barbara Falconer Newhall

My friend Jake is a man in his prime. He does triathlons, reads good books, knows all the best hiking trails, drinks nice wines, and likes nothing more than a good, scrappy conversation.

In other words, Jake has never been anybody’s rickety old grandpa. 

Until recently.

A few months ago, Jake’s daughter gave birth to a baby girl. Jake couldn’t be happier about this delightful new creature in his life.

He wasn’t so sure about his new status as a grandfather, however. It would require him to make a decision, a big one.

What would this child call him?

Jake? Jakey? Jay-Jay?

Anything but Grandpa.

Grandpa – that’s what they call the old guys. And Jake was not an old guy.

I feel his pain. My own father went by Grandpa. My grandfathers were Grandpa Falconer and Grandpa Dick. My mother is Grandma. Old people all.

What’s more, where I come from, Grandpa is not pronounced Grand Pa. It’s Grampa – folksy and countrified, with a short, nasal, deeply midwestern “a.”

GRAMP-uh.

Likewise, at our house Grandma was never Grand Ma, but Gramma – also with a shot of that nasalized “a.”

My Grandma Falconer at age 97 with pearls, up-do and 19th-century pince-nez. c 1973 Ludington studio.

Grampa. Gramma. For me, those names have the ring of my father’s small town, Methodist – Mason County, Michigan – antecedents. No dancing, no drinking, no swearing. Reader’s Digest rather than Portnoy’s Complaint. Pie and percolated coffee rather than cruditees and cabernet – or even a Stroh’s.

In my husband’s cosmopolitan, coastal – San Francisco – family, on the other hand, the Newhall elders were known as Scott and Ruth. Jon’s father didn’t care much for small children. At dinnertime, they were always seated as far as possible from the head of the table. Preferably in the next room.

But once those small children became lovely, supple young women and bright, headstrong young men, they were allowed to approach the table for adult-to-adult conversation with their peers, Scott and Ruth.

My family frowned upon that kind of familiarity. At our house, parents and grandparents were addressed like royalty. Words like Mother, Father, Dad and Mom were honorifics, terms of respect. We’d no more call my parents Dave or Tinka than we’d call the Queen of England Betsy.

Which takes me back to my friend Jake. His first thought was to have the baby simply call him Jake. Or Jakey. Or Jay-Jay. Something cozy, but age-neutral.

After all, no way was he old enough or fusty enough to be anybody’s Gramps or Grandaddy. And if he really were old and rickety, he wouldn’t want it pointed out every time somebody called out his name.

On the Daily Show the other night, Julie Andrews confessed to seven grandchildren. What’s more, she said, she lets her grandchildren call her that most ageifying of endearments – Granny.

Granny Jules, to be exact.

My sophisticated friends Nancy and Steve – she’s a well known artist, he’s a professor at UC-Berkeley – sent us an invitation to their grandson’s second birthday party recently. They signed it, to my astonishment, Nana Nan and Papa Seeda.

Nana Nan? Papa Seeda?

Granny Jules?

How do these people do it? They must own buckets of self-esteem. How else could sophisticated, in-the-mix people like Julie Andrews or Nancy and Steve risk being thought of as - old?

Peter and Christina with their Grandpa and Grandma Falconer. c 1988 B.F. Newhall.

My friend Jake is a thoughtful guy. As I mentioned earlier, he reads good books, urges his friends toward good conversation, and likes to meet his life challenges head-on – with the aid of a nice cabernet if need be.

But maybe Jake, like Nancy and Steve and Granny Jules, was blessed with an abundance of self-esteem after all. (Or was a glass of cabernet involved?) Because somehow my friend Jake finally faced up to the facts.

He may or may not be old, he told himself, but he is a grandfather.

He isn’t this baby’s dad. He’s not her uncle or her big brother. Yes, he loves bicycling, swimming, hiking and scrappy conversation. But he is also this tiny girl’s grandparent.

And grandparents have responsibilities. They are the elders of the family. They provide continuity, stability, security, dignity and maybe even some enlightening dinner table conversation.

It was time, Jake decided, to accept his new responsibilities. And his new title. He’d be what this brand-new little person most needed. He’d be Grampa, with a twang.

© 2010 Barbara Falconer Newhall

The Oakland Tribune, August 9, 1987

Up in Siskiyou mountain country, in the northwest corner of California, there is a spot known to the Karuk tribe as Kota-Mein.

In the Karuk language, Kota Mein means “center of the world.”

Like their ancestors before them, the Karuk people hike up to sacred spots like Kota-Mein, Chimney Rock and Doctor Rock to talk to the Great Spirit and to receive power.

I have never been to Kota-Mein, but I have been to Bass Lake, Mich.

If I were drawing a map of the world, its center would be at Bass Lake, just where its outlet flows into the great, blue Lake Michigan.

I have lived in California for nearly two decades, but like my forebears – my mother, her mother Toto, her mother Nana, and her mother, Grandma Harlow – I return to Bass Lake every chance I get.

I am drawn there as surely as a Michigan mosquito is drawn to the juicy ankles of anyone foolish enough to venture outdoors after dark in a Michigan summer.

Chimney Rock and Doctor Rock have been compared by their devotees to black holes in space, vortexes, whirlwinds of energy. Those spots on Earth have, it is said, the power to give the worthy pilgrim a vision of transcendence.

Last month, I left my husband behind in the Eastbay with a freezer full of spaghetti sauce and meatloaf.

The children and I boarded a Boeing 767 for a pilgrimage to Michigan. I wanted to show them my secret spots. Peter, 6, and Christina, 3, were enthusiastic.

They donned hats and mosquito netting to pick raspberries in the woods with their grandfather.

They watched the cherries being harvested. They caught a toad and inspected a patch of poison ivy.

Peter and Christina aboard a classic inner tube.

They learned to soothe their mosquito bites by wiping them with spit.

They met their great-aunt Ruth and made friends with a half-dozen second cousins, some of whom were drawn here, as we were, all the way from the West Coast.

They chased minnows in the warm, brown water of the Bass Lake outlet.

They took wet fistfuls of the creamy, miraculously clean Lake Michigan sand and let it drip off the ends of their fingers to make dainty drip castles.

They heard the story of the drip castle party their Uncle David and Aunt Alice once threw on the shores of the Pacific.

My brother and his wife, also a Midwesterner, once invited some California friends to a beach party, promising to initiate them in the intricacies of drip castle building.

They discovered, to their chagrin, that Northern California sand does not drip. The project was a flop.

Christina and Peter drift toward Lake Michigan.

When they grew sweaty, my children waded down the outlet into the Big Lake. They threw their bellies onto the breaking waves and dove for the smooth rocks buried in the sand.

Again and again, they climbed aboard a much-patched inner tube and drifted down the outlet into the Big Lake.

The hours passed.

My mother sat on a beach towel spread on the sand, watching her daughter and grandchildren. “This is life,” she sighed.

Behind her, Lake Michigan’s waves crashed noisily on the beach, just as they had crashed when I was a girl and when she was a girl and when our great-grandmothers were girls.

When I was a seventh-grader, I painted a picture of this beach in art class. Sand, grass and lake blended together in a misty – and I thought – very successful portrait of my beach.

My art teacher was displeased. “It doesn’t look real,” she said. “Too sweet.”

Before we left, I showed Peter and Christina one last secret spot – the view of the Big Lake and outlet from a high sand bluff to the north.

From this bluff, there is nothing to see but beauty. Even the human bathers, many of them grown fat on too much cherry pie and sweet corn, take on a certain grace when seen from up here.

Photos c 1987 B.F. Newhall

I had my Nikkormat along and, as always, I took a picture of the outlet.

The Siskiyou Indians forbid photographs of their “power sites.” When my pictures returned, I saw that, sure enough, it had happened again.

My magical spot was gone. What I held in my hands was a 3 ½ by 5-inch glossy of – just another beautiful beach.

I’ll have to go back and try it again.

© 1987  The Oakland Tribune

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

Most of my grandmother’s children – there were seven of them – lived out their lives within walking distance of their mother’s white frame house in Scottville, Michigan.

Not my father. He moved away.

Which is why, when I think of my Grandma Falconer I see the pince-nez, the soft pink skin and the silvery-white hair swept into an up-do — but I also see my grandmother’s figure standing motionless at the foot of her driveway, watching as my family drives out of town.

My grandmother as I remember her, her hair in a silvery up-do, her pince-nez in place.

My grandmother waves at first, then she just stands there for long moments, gazing after us as our Ford two-door disappears down State Street and out of sight.

My grandmother lived ninety-six of her ninety-nine years in Scottville, a farm town not far from Lake Michigan. She saw most of her children weekly, if not daily – at the Scottville bank where my Aunt Ruth worked, at the creamery across the street, owned by my Uncle Polly.

But my father, mother, brothers and I lived in faraway Detroit, which in those pre-AC, pre-freeway days was a sweltering six-hour drive through muggy countryside and town after trafficky town congested with stoplights, double parked cars and people trying to make left turns. It wasn’t a trip we made lightly, especially in winter when instead of muggy it could be cold and dangerously snowy or slushy.

Unlike most of his siblings, my father left home after high school. He went off to college at Michigan State College (now Michigan State University) and never really came back.

He worked for the same dairy most of his career, at first as a plant supervisor in Flint, and later as a corporate executive in downtown Detroit. He bought a house in the suburbs, joined Oakland Hills Country Club, and bowled Tuesday nights with other Detroit executives at the Detroit Athletic Club. He outgrew Scottville, his rural beginnings, his family’s small town ways, his mother.

That’s the way it often is in our oversized, mobile country. We pack up and move across the country with impunity, putting hundreds, even thousands, of miles between ourselves, our origins and our families.

The impulse runs strong in my family:

• My grandmother and her widowed mother left upper New York State for Scottville in the 1880′s.

• Her husband-to-be, my Grandfather Falconer, and his parents left Glasgow for Scottville in the 1870′s.

• My father left Scottville for Detroit in the 1930′s.

• My brothers and I left Detroit for the West Coast in the 1960′s.

Grandmother, grandfather, father, siblings – we never gave it a second thought. We were all seeking a better life. It’s what we were supposed to do. It was part of being American.

My father was a dutiful son from afar. He visited his mother when he could, and he telephoned her long-distance on Thanksgiving and Christmas. He made sure that we kids visited her often during the summers we spent on a lake near Scottville.

At the end of each summer we made a good-bye visit to Grandma Falconer. Our T-shirts and bathing suits, toothbrushes and combs packed in cardboard boxes and squeezed into the trunk of the Ford, we stopped by my grandmother’s on the way out of town.

We wouldn’t be seeing Grandma again until next summer. She wouldn’t be seeing us again until next summer. Many miles and many months would separate her from her son, and all my grandmother could do about that was stand in her driveway and wave at us as we drove away.

I never knew for sure why my grandmother lingered so long in her driveway, shaded by the tall spreading trees that canopied State Street, where she had lived as a girl, and later – after she and my grandfather lost their farm at the edge of town – as a married woman and a widow. But there she stood, in a flowered cotton housedress that buttoned down the front, the chain of her pince-nez anchored with a gold pin in the waves of her silvery hair.

Did she stand there because she wanted to reassure us that her love was truly steadfast? Or did she so pine for her beloved son, who lived and worked so far away, that she wanted to drink up those last moments of him as he drove away from her? If the latter, she never mentioned it in my hearing. She was not one to complain.

My grandmother and her seven children, my father at the upper left. Photos c 1960 Ludington Photo Studio.

It’s possible that Grandma was just being polite, seeing us off like that. Small town woman though she was, my grandmother cared about the niceties. “The blade of the knife faces in, toward the plate,” she informed me one summer day as I set the table for her.

But it seemed to me that, driving off like that, we were rejecting her and her small town, nineteenth-century ways. We were leaving her in the dust. And so, out of pity, I made it my job to see to it that, for as long as my grandmother waved and followed us with her eyes, at least one of us – me – would return the look and the wave.

Pressing my two sweaty brothers aside, I’d turn and kneel on the back seat of the Ford and gaze out the back window as my uncomplaining grandmother shrank and disappeared into the distance.

Here in California, when my children were growing up and carpooling to school in the morning, I followed my grandmother’s example. I walked them out of the garage to the driveway to meet their ride. I helped them into their seatbelts, then I stood in the driveway waving good-bye and blowing reassuring kisses until the neighbor’s car disappeared down the hill and around the corner.

When Peter was a baby, same thing. When all the bedtime rituals had been completed, teeth brushed, storybook read, kisses and massages applied and lights turned off, it was I, not Peter, who drew out the final good-night. Heading for the door, I blew kisses across the room. And closing the door behind me, I popped my hand through the crack to throw one last kiss at my little son.

Peter is twenty-nine now. Months ago, he left California to live in Minnesota with his girlfriend. Like his family before him he’s left home. He’s gone away. He’s taken himself off to a distant place, and has no plans to return any time soon.

The other morning, their holiday visit over, Peter and his girlfriend piled their luggage into Jon’s little silver Toyota for the trip to the airport. Jon started the engine and backed the car onto the driveway. I stood in the garage in my bathrobe waving good-bye.

I don’t know how long my son watched me and waved. But as the garage door dropped between us I felt myself disappear from sight, piece by piece. My face. My hands, mid-wave. The hem of my robe. My slippered feet. Until finally, like my grandmother, I was gone.

© 2010 Barbara Falconer Newhall