Not a soccer mom

Yesterday, a smidgen of rain opened up our Saturday to possibilities.

Soccer dad was disappointed and — understandably — baffled. After a slightly damp start at dawn, the day turned gloriously sunny with a refreshing breeze off the Bay. Not only was Ben’s match cancelled, however, over concerns about the state of the field, dad had been due to referee a game in pristine Piedmont.

[An aside on Piedmont: this is a neighbourhood close to ours. Its hilly, leafy streets are full of immaculately maintained houses of the type some of my “Desperate Housewives”-watching London friends imagine I might be living in: they all have million-dollar price tags and manicured gardens; no pool (although this is something some people assume I have too) — that’s more Southern California. The area has great public schools and good amenities. That said, true Berkeleyians are sniffy about Piedmont. The soccer moms there are said to wear pearls and twinsets on the school run. Crucially, however, it is its lack of diversity that concerns us liberal folk. It is homogeneously white and upper middle class, so not somewhere one chooses to live, even if you could afford it.]

Anyway, our Saturday was not entirely soccer-free. No sirree. I was up with the larks to take Sam to his 8am (yes, you read right, 8am) match in the not so salubrious industrial wastelands of Oakland. Mortifyingly, I was also on snack duty (these leagues are super organised with, among other things, online schedules and snack coordinators).

Having agonised about the task for some time — this being the ultimate initiation test into soccer-mom land in my opinion — I decided on Entermann’s doughnuts, fruit juice and sliced oranges. So there I was slicing oranges at 7am and packing a cooler box in the still dark hours of a Saturday morning.

The match turned out to be great fun. The boys — all sweet 7 and 8 year olds who make up for what they may lack in soccer skills with engaging enthusiasm — seem to play their best in the early hours. Their team, the Relampagos, are undefeated this season and stormed to victory once more. And camaraderie among parents runs high when you have all made such a supreme effort on a weekend morning. Someone brought a steaming box of Peet’s coffee and we alternated between chatting and shouting encouragement to the players on the sidelines as we drank it.

But, given that it was all over by 9am, a full, free day ahead of us beckoned. We opted to go to the new De Young in San Francisco. This is the Herzog De Meuron designed art museum which was built to replace the collection’s previous home that was not earthquake-safe. I was intrigued to see it, not least because I think the same architects did such a great job with London’s Tate Modern.

Like Tate Modern, the De Young has a wonderful setting — in this case the beautifully landscaped Golden Gate Park on the west side of the city near the ocean. The lush greenery and palm trees set off the stark, angular building well. We liked the quirky vistas the building offers visitors from both inside and out, the collection of native American art and the stunning, 360-degree views offered by an observation deck in the structure’s forbidding-looking tower. A success, we decided.

Our day ended with a Margaritas at Dana and Scott’s home up in the Berkeley hills. This was a spontaneously thrown party to celebrate the indictment of Lewis “Scooter” Libby — not sadly Bush’s sidekick Karl Rove as had been rumoured, although we can still hope — and, as Dana saw it, the first piece of good news US Democrats have had for some time.