Home again (having said a sad goodbye to Audrey, who flew back East to New Hampshire), we spent Christmas eve working in a soup kitchen in San Francisco where our good friends from this discussion forum, Gilda and Ed, regularly volunteer. While I was serving dinner, I met a man there who seemed so low and hopeless I had to ask him what, in all the world, might help him. "All I want is a job," he said. "But I'll never get one so long as I'm living in a cardboard box." But when he went on to tell me he could be a bicycle messenger and make really good money that way -- if only he had a bike -- it was impossible not to think of my son Willy's 21-speed mountain bike, that had been sitting idle in our yard for a couple of months. Cautiously, I asked my son what he thought of lending this man his bike, just long enough for him to get started in the bike messenger trade.

Three days later, I was handing over the bicycle to a man whose last name I never did get. He bicycled off down the road, last words being "Don't worry. You'll get this bike back." We are still waiting, and the obvious conclusion is that I was an unusually big sucker this time. Shortly after I handed over my son's bike to the homeless man, I said to a friend, "Oh, I sure hope he returns it. I want so badly to confirm my belief that you really can trust a person to do the right thing, and that the world is full of more goodness than deceit."

As of today, there is no sign of Willy's bike, and all indications are strong we won't be seeing it again. But I've made my peace with that. I'd rather be someone who looks to people to do the right thing than one who expects they'll screw you every time. And oddly enough, Willy hasn't given me a minute's grief about his lost bicycle either.

[ Photo above: Christmas in Jamaica ]

New Year's Eve, my son Charlie suffered another setback -- the loss of a backpack containing a journal filled with drawings, writings and poetry he'd kept, almost every night, for three and a half years. Even as I frantically placed calls to police stations and put Lost Item ads in newspapers, my son taught me a lesson: "I look at it this way, Mom," he told me. "There are monks who spend years making these beautiful mandalas out of sand, and then blow them away. Everything I put in that journal is still with me."

So my son lost his license. Evidently he needed that lesson, and with luck, his brother may learn it without suffering quite such a severe consequence. So I will be spending more time driving my sons to school. Soon enough, they'll be off to college, and I won't be driving them anywhere. Truth be told, there are worse places a person could be than riding along a beautiful stretch of highway in Northern California with two healthy loving sons (great guys, if not great drivers) whom she adores, and who appear to be quite fond of her too.

My daughter called today to report that she's left New Hampshire to move in with a group of new friends in Cambridge, Mass. She's got a couple of jobs she likes, waitressing at a jazz club and at a health food store, and she's looking forward to coming west again to return to college in the fall. Meanwhile, she's doing lots of African dance, as her mother works on Western Swing. My most recently mastered move: the Texas Tommy.

We have gone through some rough times over the last year or two, my daughter and me, and I won't be surprised if there are more ahead. In life, as in writing, I'd choose occasionally painful honesty and hard times over comfortable pleasantries. Give me a picture that's a little messy and dark, over the kind of perpetually idyllic scene that looks as if it could have been painted by Thomas Kinkade. Our hard times notwithstanding, there is never a day my daughter could doubt my love for her, or that I doubt hers for me. And never a day I don't feel we're learning something from our struggles.