Scenes from a mall parking lot

Life does it sometimes. Paths cross when they're simply not supposed to. So it happened that just as Mr. DMFP and I with family were planning, suddenly, last minute, to be in San Francisco, Jordan's family was also going to be there. For a few hours. One specific afternoon that we would be there, too.

That's weird, isn't it? They're in Chicago, we're in Austin, we both moved away from SF two years ago and...there we were, triangulating in time and space, unexpectedly.

The next thing we knew, we had a plan. Sort of. Mr. DMFP was defending his thesis, I was editing an enormous book, we were swamped and didn't have very much free time.

You may know how a thesis defense goes. It's supposed to be over at 2 so it's over at 3:30. We're sitting in the parking lot at Stonestown Mall next to the university, waiting for him to be done. We've been to the zoo after dropping Mr. DMFP off, and we've bought a celebratory balloon and cupcakes. The baby is asleep. Jordan and I have been talking by cell phone, trying to figure out how in the hell to make this last-minute meet-up work. They're coming in from the south to turn in a rental car. We're hanging out at the mall...parking lot. Actually, our family has spent a lot of time in this parking lot, hanging out, waiting for Mr. DMFP to finish class or a meeting or a visit to the library. But we expected this to be our last such wait.

So, The Wonderwheel family comes to us, last minute. In the parking lot. They pull up and I see Baxter's big smile and then the whole family's spilled out of the car and I open the side doors of the van to let the boys all meet again when all I see is two pairs of feet flying throught the air as my own children, Dubya and TH, dive headfirst into the back cargo area.

Undeterred, Baxter and Lyle follow, getting at them over the seat, through the windows, and finally, through the open cargo door. You can run from Baxter and Lyle, but you can't hide.

And we hung out in that parking lot one last time. Mr. DMFP finally finished (successfully) about 30 minutes in and we all took a quick trip to the bookstore where the kids wanted to buy everything they could see and TH and Baxter renewed their bestestfriendever preschool friendship over Star Wars esoterica.

Realizing that a bookstore is perhaps not the best place for a reunion of two families with four adults and five children under age 8 and deciding that a mall parking lot just isn't...what's the word? ... well, anything but a parking lot, we brainstormed somewhere else to go.

A playground a few blocks away where Baxter had had a birthday party. A good playground of the SF variety, up-to-date equipment, bouncy surface, lots of kids. TH confused Baxter at one point by wandering off and not being reciprocal, leading Baxter to ask his parent, "I don't understand what TH is doing." It's a big and growing club, that.

And in spite of the allure of bright red and yellow, geometrically attractive playground equipment, what did we all end up doing?

Standing around outside the fence in a field, tossing sticks and old tennis balls and anything else we could get our hands on at an old balsa-wood boomerang stuck in one of the enormous coastal cedars. I mean, we did this for what seemed like hours. All of us (except Jordan, who has her dignity). For this, our paths crossed from Austin and Chicago to San Francisco, for a few delightful moments talking, catching up, and throwing crap at an old dried up boomerang hanging in a tree.

And that damned thing is probably still hanging up there.

It was brief, but it was fun, and out of all the people we know in the Bay Area, the only ones we got to visit on that whirlwind business-school-some pleasure trip were people who don't even live there.