Category: parents

In Situ

“What does in situ mean?” my fiancé asked me.

“In place, at the site, I think?”

At In Situ, the restaurant at the SFMOMA, the menu offered two explanations. One, what I had guessed; the other, “Relating and collaborating synergistically.” My dad passed the menu to me, saying, “I have no idea what this definition means.”

“It’s an adverb.” I tried to remember what those are. “So I guess it would be something like, you and I are in situ right now as we’re working on this project. Man, we’re so in situ on this issue!”

My dad looked skeptical. I was used to that. He had skeptically gazed at the menu a few minutes earlier, saying, “I started thinking that salmon thing could be good. But then I read the rest of the description and I was like, mm.”

The salmon was served with flying fish eggs and, I think, pickled ginger. It looked delicious.

My dad lamented the lack of steak on the menu. My mom complained she was having stomach issues the past few days. They deliberated as if nothing looked good, whereas to me, literally everything did. I was nervous. When I’d sent my parents the menu a week ahead of their visit to San Francisco, aware that they would be treating us, I couched my suggestion in concerns about the pricey-ness and adventurous-ness of the food. “Sounds great! Let’s do it!” my mom wrote back enthusiastically over Facebook messenger. I don’t think she consulted my dad.

Adding to my nerves, the situ was somewhat lacking. We were at a communal table although I’d requested on OpenTable not to be put at one, if at all possible, citing my out of town parents’ noise concerns. I knew it was a lame request, not likely to be honored, but still, it would have been nice. (Our table only had room for two other communers, who luckily never appeared.) My dad waffled over which side of the table had comfier seating — low couch or low chair? — and finally picked the chair. Across the restaurant, we could see the non-communal tables, warmly lit and secluded by walls dotted with modern art. On our relatively deserted side, the ambience was more museum-cafe, with big unshuttered windows bringing in the 7pm summer daylight and street traffic. The waitstaff was slow to check on us and casual, until halfway through our meal, a charismatic man in a suit appeared to take our wine and dessert orders, as if someone had alerted him to the parents.

The Cut-Glass Bath by René Magritte
The Cut-Glass Bath by René Magritte

After a few drinks at our home in the south of the city and incredibly bad rush hour traffic, we arrived early for our restaurant reservation, but without enough time to justify spending $100 on MOMA tickets — which is open until 9 on Thursdays, the day we dined, though it usually closes at 5. Instead, we made our way through the gift shop (my dad bought a packet of colorful chip clips, I bought a paintbrush — two of the best-value items, it seemed to us). The limited-time souvenirs from the Magritte exhibit reminded us of our failure to view said exhibit. My mom loves art, and I felt bad. We headed into the restaurant and ordered the limited-time Magritte cocktails, which were speckled on top to look like giraffes in a glass; pretty, but a bit bland for my taste. My dad got something with rum that turned out, upon closer inspection, to only have three ingredients: rum, lime, and pineapple. It was surprisingly delicious.

Picking starters was easiest: my parents went for the tapioca fritters and the asparagus. My mom and I ordered the carrot soup (a single serving was $7). I silently mourned that we would not be trying the cuttlefish or the salmon. We ordered bread for $4, and the brown butter it came with was definitely worth it.

As soon as the starters arrived, exquisitely presented, my nerves began to settle. My dad and I dove into the asparagus, while my mom and my fiancé at the other side of the table split the fritters, each end informing the others that what they were tasting was really really good. Our soups came in double-walled glass espresso cups, with a bit of foam on top, and the flavors of the carrot and curry spice were comforting, familiar, yet unusual. The asparagus dish had a number of thrilling accoutrements — fried maitake mushrooms, homemade tofu, and a sesame dipping sauce. The tofu’s rich flavors had me feeling like I was experiencing soy for the first time. My dad couldn’t get enough of the mushrooms (although unfortunately he had to, there were just a few bites each). When we got to try the tapioca fritters, my mom and my fiancé weren’t wrong — crunchy on the outside, delightfully sticky and chewy on the inside, dipped into a kind of complex sweet and sour sauce, they were perfect.

I was beginning to feel confident. My parents sang the appetizers’ praises, reminiscing about a very expensive dinner on vacation in Peru, similarly inventive, “a cut above.” We explained about Michelin stars, feeling it prudent to note that this restaurant had just received one.

My parents had opted to split the egg-yolk stuffed halibut entree — when it came my dad noted that it was cooked “the way chefs like,” as in, a bit soft, not necessarily the way he likes. I tried a bite and thought it was cooked perfectly — flaky, not slimy. Egg yolk seeped and mixed with the fresh peas, forming a delicious sauce that my fiancé scooped into his mouth after the parents were done with the dish. He and I were splitting the mysterious “Lamb Carrot”: the lamb buns, a kind of Chinese-style sweet bun stuffed with lamb, were delicious, as was the large carrot on the plate, also stuffed somehow with lamb. We split the farro risotto too, a zesty dish with cheese, pesto, and maybe something pickled — instantly satisfying, indeed a bit too satisfying for me to finish my portion.

We expected modern touches throughout, and MOMA didn’t disappoint. The napkin that my parents marveled over, a cross between paper and cloth. Glasses of wine inventively paired with the dishes in a hard-to-read alphabetical code going up the spine of the menu. The utensil, not a spork but a kind of spife, that was perhaps used for slicing as well as spooning, as our non-suited waiter explained half-heartedly, although that didn’t explain the notch in its side.

Everyone was very full — though my parents, ultimately, seemed to have eaten little — when dessert arrived, a cheesecake that we’d ordered because we had to order it ahead, which made it seem very special. I’d missed this, and the description of the dish, because I’d been in the bathroom (Are all bathrooms in SF going to become unisex now?, my mom wondered at the stalls. They were individual rooms, I explained). My fiancé was expecting something savory, but my parents were somewhat shocked at the cheesecake’s appearance: a round of Brie on the plate, surrounded by butter cookie “crackers.” They were more shocked by the flavor: indeed, soft and pungent Brie itself, with an outer layer of sugary caramel. My fiancé and I loved it, but the cheesecake proved too adventurous for my parents to finish their portions. Still, they insisted they were glad they’d tried it instead of something ordinary like the brownie, which they might have liked better, but…

I’d been worried that my fiancé and I were getting free dinner at a place that only we enjoyed, but in the end, my parents seemed truly impressed with their meal. We left feeling proud that we had given them a unique, San Francisco experience. I was proud of them for keeping an open mind, too. The food was worthy of its Michelin star, and everyone had seen that. We had overcome. We were in situ.

A few days later, we had my parents over for homemade brunch, which my dad applauded as the best meal he’d had in a while. Better than In Situ. My mom gave him a look.

“I loved that meal,” she insisted, and told a story about how their Airbnb host (presumably, a Californian herself) had sniffed over the expensive and fanciful “California” cuisine.

“It was definitely interesting,” my dad said, and left it at that.

Verbs and Nouns

When I was a kid, I was always saying I wanted to be a writer, and my dad was always telling me, “A writer is someone who writes.” I did the thing that kids everywhere do with the well-meaning advice of parents: I misinterpreted it completely. You see, the advice often came when I was down on writing — I didn’t feel like working on my essay, I didn’t want to finish my short story for summer writing camp (yes, I went to writing camp). My journal was gathering dust in my closet but I told visiting relatives I planned to write a novel — well, a writer is someone who writes. My dad was encouraging me, showing me how to follow through. But what I heard was, “A writer is someone who wants to write.” (And that ain’t you.)

Wants to — such a small but important phrase, and it slipped into my understanding, unquestioned.

Maybe I was thinking of another one of my dad’s sayings: “Find a job you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” What did it mean to have a job you love? I had no idea; maybe you woke up each morning to birdsong and leaped out of bed with a grin, wanting to do stuff. What stuff? Well, the things I loved were writing, reading, drawing, swimming, playing outside, watching T.V., and playing video games. I wouldn’t have wanted to do a single one of them all day long. A combination, maybe, but that didn’t sound like a job.

I thought being a writer was a potential job. But writing was a lot of work — work when I struggled to get the words right, work when I handed a piece to my dad and we went through his red-penned suggestions. My dad, a laywer, studied English lit, and possesses a keen eye for extraneous words, passive tense, and non-sequiturs. I worked to check my sensitive ego enough to appreciate his critiques, because the writing was actually more important. I didn’t care about anything the way I cared about writing, because I knew that with a great deal of effort I could eventually express myself truly and permanently (at least, as long as the house didn’t burn down), and that was the best. While I wrote, I could delight myself with an idea or a turn of phrase, and the way one of those gave way to the other, and that was also the best.

But writing was still work, and as it seemed my dad was always pointing out, I didn’t want to write all the time. In fact, I wrote less and less as I got older and spent more hours on homework, friends, part-time jobs, and sports. Nevertheless, I collected books on writing like I was studying for an MFA, and those books insisted that people who wanted to write would make time for it in their lives — the pen was a calling, a love that a true writer couldn’t resist (unless they had writer’s block, of course, which only happened to writers once they were already writing). The books confirmed my doubts: I probably didn’t have a passion for writing; I was only compelled in that way by AOL instant messenger and sitcoms.

When I went to college and declared a major in English, still clearly my favorite subject, I wasn’t sure what I planned to do with the degree. Actually, I had a wish, but it seemed pretty uncertain at this point. When my dad said, simply, “A writer is someone who writes,” I knew he supported my choice of study, but it felt like he was getting a little tired of repeating himself.

I’d taken a computer science class in high school because a few guy friends recommended it; one of them became my boyfriend, and gave me encouragement and help debugging as I took more classes in college. I liked the logical thinking and the creativity — stepping through a fascinating proof that underlies cryptography, or finally getting my machine learning code to compile and play PacMan. Everyone seemed very impressed that I was one of the only girls in my classes, that I was doing something so ostensibly challenging and cutting-edge. I tried not to admit, even to myself, how much the material drained me.

Meanwhile, I loved English, which I continued to major in almost as a guilty pleasure. I left my lectures feeling like I’d been moved by a sermon; I left my exams exhilarated from responding to a prompt with some unique and interesting perspective I hadn’t even known I’d possessed. I couldn’t wait to give feedback to my peers in creative writing classes; my hand always shot up in discussion sections. Writing papers took a lot of time and energy, but I often reread mine with gleeful pride.

“I might want to be a writer,” I told my parents still. Had I written any stories lately? No, unless you counted the two I had to write for my short story class; I’d been a little busy. “Remember what I always say,” my dad told me.

I kind of dropped the writer thing, somewhere in the middle of college. I was done insisting I wanted to do something that I clearly didn’t want to do (maybe, hopefully, I’d catch the fever when I got older). I declared a second major. And while I don’t remember any career fair for English students, there were festivals for computer science, trumpeting jobs upon jobs that people seemed to love.

“Paige needs to find her passion for computer science,” my manager wrote in my review after a summer internship at Microsoft. I’d been working with a young woman whose eyes lit up as she defended her database design, and I knew my manager was right. But I dug in my heels, thinking, the fact that computer science is so much less fun and more frustrating than English is normal. Everyone says so, that’s what makes it a challenge worth overcoming. I figured I just hadn’t found the right job.

I tried a few more jobs in tech, but my passion still eluded me. I left my job to figure out what I wanted to do instead, and I thought I’d give creative writing a real shot. The day I decided to start, I sat down in front of my word processor and almost immediately stood up to get some water. I sat down again; I opened Facebook and the New York Times. Returning to the word processor hours later, I felt foolish. I was an adult who had made a decision, so I would keep going for a while to see it through, but this couldn’t possibly be the passion I’d set out to find. A writer is someone who writes!

My dad would have pointed out my flawed logic with a stroke of his red pen. And soon, I saw for myself that he was right, and I’d heard him wrong all those years. Wanting to write didn’t have anything to do with it. I started writing, forcing myself to do it every weekday, at first holding myself to a word count, then to a span of hours. I dragged myself through fall and questioned everything in winter, but by spring, I only needed to shake off some morning hesitation to write all day long. It still felt like work, but it also felt like love, as it always had. And just like that, I became a writer.

I’ve been thinking about where I got confused. As a kid, I was trying to say that I wanted to be a writer as my job, in the future, a job I needed to love so I wouldn’t have to work a day in my life. Thankfully, my dad never told me that I’d better pick something more practical; he certainly improved upon the typical parental advice of previous generations. But since he’s always said that I should improve upon him, I hope he won’t mind that I have a few ideas. I’d like to try to clear up all the mess around work and love, jobs and being, verbs and nouns. To a mini-me, I might say something like this:

You mean you want to be a writer as a job when you grow up, right? Great. Right now, your job is to be a student, which is a weird job you don’t get paid for, and it’s probably hard for you to picture ever having any other job. But it’s awesome that you know writing is something you like to do. (Here, my kid will roll their eyes because I still say “awesome.”)

Writing is a verb, and every job is a noun, a whole situation composed of many, many verbs. You already know that being a student isn’t only about studying; you’re also expected to take tests and speak in public and get along with your classmates. Like with most jobs, you get decent credit for just showing up every day and sticking to your schedule. Like with most jobs, the people who actually care about studying are only sometimes successful and happy with the varied, mysterious, and shifting requirements of “student.” (But they’ve got a good shot, I think.)

No one is going to just tell you what all the jobs are where you can do writing, which may have “writer” in the title and may not. No one is going to just tell you what else is involved in those jobs (maybe verbs you like, maybe verbs you don’t). So ask; start with your teachers at writing camp. Follow the words you see all around you, inspect the jobs at their source.

Because you care so much, I think you’ve got a good shot, but let’s say you get a job where writing is a big part — maybe you’re even called a writer — and you don’t succeed, or you’re not happy. Or let’s say you can’t find someone to pay you for the kind of writing you care about, so you have to get a job doing something else, and write on the side. It’s ok; keep going, and know that your job will never define you. What matters is your work, and the decision on that is all yours.

Work is the effort of your self behind a verb, and as you’ve seen with writing, when you care about something, you want to work your hardest at it. There’s a kind of paradox, because you never want to do hard work, nobody does, and you might wonder, do I really care after all? Trust that you do, because when you don’t care with all your heart, the work won’t feel good, not even close. When you find work that fills you up even as it empties you out, hold onto it, because it’s rare. Actually, it’s the best — but you already knew that, didn’t you?

For now, focus on doing the work of growing up. You want to grow up and become something? Plan instead to grow up and do something, because the work you choose to do is how you become. Sorry, but there’s no way around it. Sorry not sorry, because you’re incredibly lucky to get to choose in the first place.

My dad had a great way of putting it: A writer is someone who writes.

He also used to say, with an affectionate laugh: “Listen to me now; believe me later.” Yeah, I think I’m going to have to steal that one too.