Yesterday was such a long and eventful day, so stimulating from basically start to finish, I slept like a log last night—even though I had chai with Valerie in the afternoon. I suppose it also made a difference that the chai was consumed between noon and 1:00, quite a bit earlier than usual. That was probably key. Still, I would say about three hours of it was dedicated to Birth Week; the rest—or rather, the next six hours or so—was really dedicated to Gabriel and Lea's wedding rehearsal. I'll get back to that. Actually, you know what? I'll get back to that in a separate post. I was going to combine them, but for tagging purposes, I think separating them is best.

Yesterday was the third of three days in a row Shobhit had off of work, so luckily he neither needed the car nor had to take the bus to work. My Birth Week island was Mercer Island, apparently the most-populated island in a lake in America—it's the 13-squre-mile island in the southern half of Lake Washington. From the air it kind of looks like a giant footprint. It's also where I-90 crosses the lake from Seattle to Bellevue, and as far as I can remember, this is the first thing I've ever done there besides just drive over it on the freeway.

Karen had said Luther Burbank Park was really nice, and given its location on the northeast corner of the island, I figured there must be a good view of Bellevue from there—in fact, there are fun, partially-obstructed-by-treeline views of both Bellevue and downtown Seattle, and even, from this angle, Madison Park and the U District beyond. It actually is a very, very cool park, from its shorelines to its views to its boardwalks through wetland.

Valerie, my dad's cousin and Auntie Rose's daughter, met up with me there. This makes four Birth Weeks with Valerie since Auntie Rose died in 2020 (five total, as Valerie joined Auntie Rose and me in 2018, when we went to the Bellevue Botanical Garden). Valerie his taken up the mantle of Auntie Rose's Birth Week tradition since she died, which she really seems to appreciate—as do I.

Side note: in the shot above with the cake (a mini red velvet cake she brought which was delicious), Valerie looks remarkably like Auntie Rose. I didn't mention this to her yesterday, but I have multiple times in the past, and she always remarks on how a person doesn't particularly want to look like her mother. For me, there's something comforting about it. To be clear, Valerie is a totally different and distinct person from Auntie Rose—she's far more liberal, for one—but that doesnt change the fact that there's a part of Auntie Rose in her, and it makes me feel like she's still with me, in some admittedly nebulous form.

When I hang out with Valerie, discussion inevitably turns to grief, and the loss of loved ones. With both lost our mothers in the same year, in 2020. Actually, this year might have otherwise been the year when that finally didn't happen, except that her dad, Uncle Imre, just also passed away two months ago, at the age of 91. He was a man born in the Great Depression, lived through World War II and Communism, moved to the U.S. and built a whole different live with Auntie Rose. His life spanned just nine years shy of a century. It's pretty extraordinary, and Valerie told me last night that "As horrible as Mom's death was, Dad's was equally . . . amazing."

I didn't quite understand that at first, and then she clarified: Uncle Imre declined for only a few days before he died, and was lucid until only about a day before, allowing enough time to allow family to come and say goodbye without it being a traumatic experience for them. It was still sad, of course, but also beautiful. Even Dad and Sherri went up to visit in the last days before he died—I didn't, because I had too much going on in my calendar. I will freely admit that it was largely social, and I dropped all other plans for things like Auntie Rose's memorial. But, I just never had the same relationship with Uncle Imre, so I did not prioritize either seeing him before he died, or going to his memorial, in the same way. Besides, Shobhit and I went to his house next door when we stayed at Valerie and Scott's second house in Port Townsend for our anniversary last year, and it was quite lovely, a perfectly wonderful final memory to have of him.

Mind you, as much as conversation pivoting to grief was inevitable, it was hardly all we talked about—we discussed the loss of loved ones for maybe, I don't know, half an hour? I did talk about how my experience with losing Mom was different from most, because I had such a complicated relationship with her, and I know that when Dad goes it's going to hit me a lot harder. It'll probably even hit me harder when Sherri goes, come to think of it.

Anyway, Valerie openly admitted she hoped I would bring chai, like I did last year. I brought my favorite cashew cookies for dipping in it, which she was also suitably impressed with. She brought a sub sandwich she bought somewhere, and I made a sandwich at home to bring. We got to the park within minutes of each other, and we found a bench to sit on in a wide green field with a partial view of the lake water from where we were sitting. I'd say it was after about an hour, around 1:00, I said: "I have a suggestion. How about we take our stuff back to our cars and then walk around the park a bit?"

There are probably other nice places to explore on Mercer Island, but Luther Burbank Park really was beautiful, a perfectly suitable spot for an afternoon on the island. We were both kind of struck by the number of Mercer Island Police cars parked by the old brick building near our picnic spot in the park, which turned out to be Mercer Island Youth & Family Services, but, according to a sign hung on the door window, something to do with Mercer Island PD records as well.

We both went to use the nearby bathrooms, then walked around that building, then to the footpath that wraps around the perimeter of the park along the shore to the north end of the park, where the aforementioned city views could be seen. We both took several pictures there. When we headed back down on the path to the west side of the park, that was where we encountered the boardwalk over wetland, and where we found a beautiful crane standing in it. I even managed to get a great shot through the binoculars I brought—something Valerie tried to do using her wide angle lens camera but couldn't quite get right. I got a couple of fun photos of her making the attempt, though.

We walked to the south end of the park from there, past a very cool "earthen sculpture," to a set of piers on the water, and then back to a grassy area where we found another bench to kill the last few minutes I had there. In the end I got a healthy 44 shots of our visit there.

I'd have loved to hang out with Valerie longer, but I needed to head out by 3:00, as I didn't want to cut it too close to the meeting time of 4:00 in Snoqualmie. We said our goodbyes, hugged, and I went back to my car, where I attempted to post my Birth Week posts for this island on my socials. The signal there was too weak, though, so I had to get going by 3:07. I might have gotten to Snoqualmie by 3:30 but now the ETA said 3:40. I did my posting on the phone in the dashboard mount while I drove. Don't tell anyone. I'm still alive! I won't do it again.

[posted 8:34 am]