Marin T. rex

This is my Love Bunny.  Yes, that is its name.  Don't judge. My guy gave it to me 28 years ago, when he first told me he loved me.   He wanted me to remember that moment, that sweet moment, that first hint that this rather stoic academic I was falling in love with was actually super sentimental.   Those early years  … Oh gosh, we were clueless.   We were in love, sure, but pretty much always trying to impress each other, which is maybe just committed infatuation?   Once actual Real Life started happening, everything changed; it was raw and messy and no one was impressed with anyone ever and it was mostly about survival:   3 babies; 5 more in heaven; moves; financial stress and disagreement; family far away;  me: lonely and alone with the kids while he constantly traveled for work; him: lonely and missing us and missing out while he was on the road; the sudden deaths of our fathers; medical scares; scary diagnos...

The stage lit up in a way I found overwhelming.  The crowd cheered and I listened to the music and was moved but didn’t know why.  Kids sang along, angrily, ecstatically, and I stood in their midst, tears streaming down my middle-aged face.  I found myself once again in the sacred role of witness and testifier. Four years prior, the first concert not-of-my-choosing that I chose to attend with my daughter was some metal band. I don’t remember who but I remember the night vividly.  It was a classic-to-the-point-of-cliché mother-daughter battle:  she was 14 and NEEDED to see this band, would simply die if she did not.  Her Catholic-school friends were supremely uninterested in seeing this band, so her reasonable, modest proposal was that she, at 14, attend a gritty concert in a gritty part of San Francisco, solo.  I was not 14, and I would simply die if she went alone (I might actually have used the words “over my dead body”).  Impasse. We were i...