His Mama’s youth music theater company’s Once Upon a Mattress might have closed this past Sunday, but not in the boychild’s mind.  Every day brings a fresh opportunity to dress up and sing along to pretty much every part, from Princess Winifred the Woebegone to Prince Dauntless the Drab and the whole royal retinue in between.

Oh, he skips some lyrics and provides his own original interpretation of others.  Artistic license.  In “Opening for a Princess,” he sings that “nobody’s getting any yogurt” (the rest of us thought it was “younger”), and “you can recognize a princess by her elegant hair” (and here I thought it was “air” all along).

Here’s his pace car, Carol Burnett, in a 1964 television version (she opened it on Broadway in 1959).

Pops, indicating the height of the trees when his dad planted them 70 years ago.

In my recent, breezy, Twitter-length series of As to some Qs about lesbian fatherhood, I wrote: “My dad is one of the beacons of love in my life.”  True story.  One of his most oft-repeated definitions of family is this line from the sympathetic speaker Mary in Robert Frost’s poem, “The Death of the Hired Man”:

Home is the place where, when you have to go there,  They have to take you in.

One of the clearest and warmest youthful memories I have of my dad, besides standing next to him singing as he played Broadway show tunes on the piano, or playing frisbee with him in the back yard, or walking the streets of San Francisco en route to an “old timey movie,”  is how he tucked my sister and me in at night.  I can’t vouch for what he might have said with my sister in her room, but I suspect it was fairly similar to what he said to me.  We would wax philosophic — mostly at first, he would, and I gradually joined in as the years wore on — pondering life’s big imponderables.  Then as he’d turn out the light and linger in the doorway, he’d say, “It’s a good world.”

He said it enough times that I pretty much came to believe him.

He’s not always kept a firm grip on this belief.  In the first years following his first grandson’s cancer death — five years ago, now, later this month — he framed it as a question rather than a statement.  At times he simply admitted that he felt it couldn’t be true. I’d try and reflect as much truth back that I could.  ”It’s a heck of a world, Pops. It’s a big one, a stupefying one, with capriciousness side by side next to grace.  No more good than bad, maybe even.  Surely beyond my ken.”

Still, we agreed that capricious or no, we ought to love as many as possible, as well as possible, as frequently as possible.  I like the “possible” part there, since it cuts a hard working person a little break.  We may not always be successful, but the point is to try.

In the photograph above, taken last fall, my dad is posing in front of some conifers his father planted in the early 1940s. It was on a patch of land overlooking the Monterey Bay, a place to build a home, the first and last my grandparents had owned.  There were few trees on that meadow at the time, and my grandfather thought that, on general principle, there ought to be some. Since these trees were saplings, our family has seen marriages, divorces, births, and deaths.  Triumph and tragedy and every mundane thing in between.  The stuff of life.  Meanwhile the trees kept growing, paying our comings and goings and squabbles no mind.  One eventually caught a disease that denuded it.  Still, it stands tall, awaiting storm winds strong enough to topple it.

The land and what’s on it are now another family’s.  They, like our family has three times now, are fighting cancer.  We all hope they have better luck than we’ve had.  Whether or no, it gave us a good deal of comfort that this place — its home, its trees — would now shelter a family  drawn there by, among other things, a sense that it might make a good place to heal.

My punkin lamb peeping the world through a pair of “100″ glasses.

The girlie’s Kindergarten class celebrated their hundredth school day earlier this week. So, so long ago was her first. An excited, nervous, pre-K little girl ago.

Who’s in her place now? If only I could can catch hold of the happy, self-posessed blur in front of me, I’d tell you.

Waiting for the steam train, Berkeley, CA.

Valentine’s Day train ride, Berkeley, CA.

Way back when the beloved and I had our commitment ceremony, circa 1997, we made a point to celebrate all kinds of love. Familial, platonic, romantic; all of it.  We did that partly because we were uncomfortable about having drawn people from far and wide to pay attention only to us-us-us. But we also wanted to thank those we gathered around us for equipping us with the capacity to love one another so well.  Any celebration of a union is implicitly a celebration of all that makes it possible. Every time we love and are loved well, we learn more about it, and are empowered to do it better with others.

So Valentine’s Day mit kids ropes us all in. A hike in the hills, a picnic, a spell-binding train ride. Yummy Chinese food for dinner.  Okay, so only some of us had champagne with our dinner.  And only some of us had the salted chocolate caramels in front of a movie after the kids were in bed.  But hey. Any good train needs a caboose for the staff to chillax in.

[Here are the O'Jays, on whose "Love Train" no wee photo caption could ever improve.]

At Mama’s Royal Cafe, Oakland, CA.

We went to Oakland’s legendary Mama’s Royal Café the other day as a foursome, for the first time in forever. Or rather, for the first time since the little guy was in a baby seat, which feels like forever. It’s a long period of diminished engagement with the world, these early years. The dark side of the moon.

“Can the little one last the duration of ___ (X, Y, or Z public sphere experience; you pick it) without a physical/emotional collapse of excruciating proportions? Can we?”

This has limited our luxury dining out experience to a coupla taquerias. It could be worse: a good taqueria was always my other culinary pilgrimage (aside from Mama’s) when I returned home to the Bay Area during my half-dozen years’ expatriation in the Great Upper Midwest.

But with the youngest youngin at three, we’re beginning to see the light.  We made it through the whole meal at Mama’s with nothing more than a little pre- and post-food loopiness.  On the little guy’s part. Though the beloved and I got a bit dizzy, too.

“Here we are! In an actual restaurant! And nobody’s spilled anything yet, or burst out crying!”

We’re gonna drink it all in, all of this. There’ll be a time (won’t there be?) when we’ll be lucky to get the two of them to sit with us in public for the duration of a meal without texting their chums under the table.

“ZOMG Baba just said I <3 U!!! Again!!! LOL!!! BTD!! CUL8R!”

Shoe, Berkeley, CA.

I asked his big sister to help get us out the door faster by putting his shoes and socks on. This was what she considered “done.”

Belly swingers, Berkeley, CA.

Archival image from about a half a year (and one significant boy haircut) ago. Swinging predilections and techniques remain as depicted.

Face painting self-administered, for the occasion of her Gramma’s birthday. She wanted to write “Happy Birthday” on her face, but we convinced her that writing backwards into the mirror with grease pencils onto a fairly small surface area was a doomed, if imaginative, undertaking.

For the fun of it, here’s the self-administered face paint job circa two-and-a-half years ago. Bit of a shift in technique. Same joie de vivre.

Boy with pinkie, Berkeley, CA.