Sunday afternoon, post Forty-Niners’ football, Molly dragged Mike and her out with the excuse that she had an assignment to do a family portrait for a photography project in school.
Indian summer burned through most of California in early October, days where the temperature in the city was still seventy-five degrees at four in the afternoon and the later sunsets would turn the western skies red and purple. It was that warm when Molly insisted they travel across town to the hillside where March and Mike were married, and she took a couple rolls of film of them all over that hillside.
There were moments that afternoon, sitting on a rock or leaning against a twisted cypress tree when March looked up and caught a certain look in Mike’s eye.
He squeezed her shoulder. “I think this was where we were standing when May dumped that Singapore Sling on Rob.”
March began to laugh and ruined their pose.
“Mother! I can’t get a good shot with you bent over.”
“Sorry. Your father’s making trouble.”
“Daddy…please.”
“Okay, shortcake.” Mike leaned in and said, “I can still see your mother swatting bees with that huge straw hat.”
March tried not to laugh again but failed at the image of her mother hitting Mike’s dad in the back of his bald head. “Your father looked pretty dumbfounded when he turned around and saw it was her. I felt sorry for her, standing there embarrassed. She was just so scared of bees.”
“After your mother smacked him a good one, my first thought was to find some way to paint honey all over his head. Figured your mother could get even for the crap he’d put me through.”
March looked at him and patted his hand. “I know. I don’t think he knew how to be any other way.”
“Hel-lo. Earth to parents.” Molly stood in front of them, clearly annoyed. “Would you two please pay attention to me? I need you to look at the camera before I lose the perfect light.”
Mike looked at her. “You need to stop making jokes, sunshine. You heard your daughter. We need to look in the camera before she loses the perfect light.”
March jabbed him in the ribs.
Molly walked back, muttering, “You two are such a problem.”
Mike looked at her. “We’re a problem.”
“Good,” March whispered.
So they spent a Sunday on a hillside, smiling into a camera lens, Mike goosing her or poking her, and annoying their daughter when they laughed too hard. Later, whenever March asked to see the shots, Molly was always too busy. She showed them one or two shots that were not as good as March knew Molly could produce. When March said as much, Molly told her she had turned her only good prints in to her teacher and she would make more copies when she had time.
They spent Christmas that year at their house in Lake Tahoe. On Christmas morning under the tree was the best gift March could ever remember. The photo Molly took of Mike and her was amazing. Their daughter had caught all the love and humor between them as they looked at each—best they each could be because they had each other—captured forever in celluloid.
March had started her official life as a Cantrell on a San Francisco hillside, and four kids and almost thirty-four years later she was still on a San Francisco hillside. Though her generation had once sung about the sounds of silence, the sounds of the city were what she loved: those white mornings when the plaintive notes of foghorns floated above the bay, the deep water and moisture-thick air magnifying every sound so that whispering wasn’t really secretive at all.
At noon, there was the chatter of people at the corner deli on short lunch hours ordering salami and Jack cheese on fresh sourdough (Dijon mustard and pepperocini, no pickles). Muni trams rattled regularly on tracks over the Avenues, and freeway traffic during rush hours hummed like distant swarms of bees. Horns honking, voices, and air brakes, close to home the distant clanging of a cable car bell at Leavenworth & Hyde and the soft rumble of an automobile changing into low gear to power up the hill were merely single moments in a day where the constant din of life was going on around her.
For her, there was something incredibly grounding about a place where she’d taught her children to ride a bike to the ringing of a cable car bell and the applause of tourists, and where the call of gulls was as much a part of the air she breathed as oxygen.
The noise of the city was most noticeable in the old brick courtyard at the center of their home. Mike called it March Country—an oasis where on temperate mornings she drank her coffee surrounded by raised planters and huge stone pots spilling over with flowers the color of a fall sunset. Some of the wind chimes from their wedding hung from courtyard posts, ringing out occasionally in the October wind.
March looked up from the kitchen sink when she heard her grandson cry. Sixteen-month-old Tyler was out in the courtyard trying to scale the seven-foot brick wall and not one bit happy that he was failing. She dropped the pasta strainer and, wiping her hands on her shirttail, she was through the French doors in a heartbeat. “Hey there, sweetie. What are you doing out here alone? Escaping?” She scooped him up and headed inside. A minute later she stood in the door of the media room, Tyler hooked on her hip while a good minute and a half of Sunday afternoon, Forty-Niner’s football passed without a single male in the room noticing them. “I think you lost something, Scott.”
Her oldest son looked her, then quickly glanced at the corner where a five-foot square rainbow of bright Fisher Price toys lay abandoned.
“Daddy!” Tyler shouted. Her grandson had great timing.
Scott was up and made a beeline for her. “Damn, Mom. Sorry.” He took his son. “You okay, buddy?”
“Daddy!” Tyler rubbed his hands on Scott’s cheeks.
Scott groaned. “What’s all over his mouth and hands?”
“Dirt. He was trying to climb the courtyard wall.” She held out an open container of baby wipes.
“One play,” Scott muttered. “I only looked away to watch one play.” He cleaned up his son and wiped his own face. “He fell off the back of the toilet last week when I was watching him. Renee will kill me.”
“Then you’re lucky she’s out with Molly and Keely,” she told him.
Her eldest son looked at her over his son’s head, thickly-covered in his same black curly hair, and Scott grinned at her, knowing she wouldn’t say anything to his wife.
For just one second, one small heartbeat of memory, there stood Mike in another time and place holding Scott and giving her that same grin. Those moments were why she wouldn’t want to be twenty-five again. The future was always a blank, out of control; it lay out there as unclear as morning fog on the horizon. But the past was familiar and kept coming around and around in tender, special moments that gave her some measure of contentment about her choices in life.
Looking back was the best way to understand destiny—something
