One Woman Revival

It’s just past 5 pm, I am resisting the urge to sink into the little blue couch in my living room. I want to just close my eyes and allow the day to get dark around me. But I fear I may be solar powered because my brain tends to get slower in the evening so I will aim to get these words down before my battery runs out. 

As a corollary, I tend to have more energy on sunny days and last weekend the sun was unabashedly beaming. I had been meaning to go to the Aquarium of the Bay near Fisherman’s Wharf so that seemed as good a reason as any for my partner and I to walk from my apartment in SOMA to Pier 39. We took about a half hour stroll down the Embarcadero, weaving through the tourists. One family I noticed were South Asian parents with two girls dressed in identical pink leggings and sweatshirt. I knew instinctively that they were not twins but instead that their mother just dressed them the same out of convenience, as my mother had done for my younger sister and me. My sister’s insistence to copy me only reaffirmed this mode of operation. 

I had always imagined I would start a family similar to the one ahead of me. As they skipped along oblivious to the parallels I was drawing in my mind, I was also reminded of how more and more of my friends were having children while others were making the conscious decision to stay childfree. Two camps of thirty-somethings were forming and few people seemed to easily traverse both groups. San Francisco itself seemed divided into territories along these lines. 

And almost immediately when we entered the aquarium, a crush of strollers closed in around us. This was clearly in the land of families. Youthful shouts emanated down the long halls and we dodged preteens who seemed to be running for no reason. My main motivation for the visit was the jellyfish room and we got a quiet moment there. Serene jellyfish of different shapes and sizes danced around us while one species we learned lives upside down with its tentacles towards the sun because of plankton which it farms in its tissues.

In the underwater tunnel we had to navigate to reach the outside world, I overheard a mother help her son identify a sturgeon. Her older daughter then pointed to a leopard shark and proclaimed it also sturgeon. The mother appeared vexed. 

We ended up hurrying through the interactive exhibit section, it felt in poor taste to push a 5 year old aside so I could also pet the manta rays. But just as we were almost leaving the aquarium, we passed the otter enclosure where one of the furry residents was swimming in circuits like her paycheck depended on it. There were no other otters in the enclosure so clearly she was having to put in overtime. I pressed my hand on the glass and the otter swam to meet it. A toddler waddled up next to me and the otter swam up to him too. He squealed with uncontained excitement and looked up at me as if it say “Did you see that??” Yep I nodded in agreement, pretty cool.