It is 10:04 AM on Friday, May 29. Saturday at 2 PM is the graduation party. The eleven-item Thursday Drive-By list — the porch light, the wreath, the hose, the cobweb decoration above the garage — is roughly 60% executed. The lawn smells like fresh mulch from a quarter-mile away. And inside roughly 340 Lamorinda households, the real event of the day is just beginning: arrivals.
This is the Friday. The Friday the Relatives Land.
The Spreadsheet on the Fridge
There is a piece of paper on the fridge. It is held up by a magnet shaped like a redwood from a 2019 trip to Russian River. On it, in someone’s neatest handwriting — usually a parent, occasionally a teenager who got drafted because their handwriting is “better, Mom” — is the master list:
- 12:47 PM — Karen + Dave — OAK — SW 2284 — rental car, won’t need pickup
- 1:33 PM — Mom — SFO — UA 491 — Andrew picking up
- 4:11 PM — Mark + Lisa + the twins — SJC — AA 1822 — Uber to house
- 7:55 PM — Cousin Pete — OAK — JetBlue 627 — might be late, has key code
There is no household in Lamorinda that does not have some version of this list. The format varies — some are spreadsheets shared in iCloud, some are group texts with five “📍” emojis, some are the actual paper-on-the-fridge — but the content is the same: people, planes, times, and an ongoing real-time renegotiation of who is in charge of getting whom from where.
If you look at this list closely, you’ll notice something. Three different airports. Three. Because Lamorinda is one of the rare American places that is roughly equidistantly inconvenient to three major airports, and every relative coming in has chosen differently, and all of them think their choice was right.
The Three-Airport Tax
Karen and Dave flew into Oakland because “Oakland is closer.” Karen and Dave are correct. Oakland is closer, and Southwest fares out of MDW were $40 cheaper, and OAK to Lafayette is a roughly 25-minute drive at noon on a Friday. Karen will text at 12:51 PM: “landed, easy!” and she will mean it.
Mom flew into SFO because “United had the direct flight from O’Hare.” Mom is also correct, in her own way. SFO is farther but the United nonstop saved her three hours and a connection in Denver. SFO to Lafayette is 50 minutes if traffic is decent and 90 minutes if traffic is not decent and you don’t know which one you’re going to get until you commit to the Bay Bridge.
Mark and Lisa flew into San Jose because Mark has “a guy” at SJC — a colleague who lets him park free — and the flight was $28 less. Mark is also correct, but barely, because SJC to Lafayette is the longest drive of the three, and Mark and Lisa have two seven-year-olds, and somewhere around mile 22 on 880-North the twins are going to need a bathroom. Mark will arrive at 5:47 PM, not 4:54 PM as planned, slightly chastened.
The math on three airports is: no one was wrong, exactly, but you, the host, now have an arrivals schedule that spans seven hours and forty-eight minutes.
The Tunnel
Here is the variable nobody from out of state understands. Three of the four arrivals — Karen and Dave from OAK, Mom from SFO, Cousin Pete from OAK — are coming through the Caldecott Tunnel. The Caldecott Tunnel is a four-bore tunnel on Highway 24, and it is the gate between the East Bay and Lamorinda. It is also, on a Friday afternoon between 3 and 7 PM, the single biggest variable in the entire arrivals plan.
Friday eastbound through the Caldecott, on Memorial Day weekend, in late spring, with a Giants home game at Oracle Park letting out at roughly the same time, with graduation parties prepping in five Acalanes-district neighborhoods — it is, technically, a stretch of freeway. Functionally, it is a probability cloud.
If you’re a Lamorinda local, you have opinions about the Caldecott. You know that the third bore — westbound only on weekdays — flips eastbound at noon on weekends and at certain off-peak hours. You know that the fourth bore opened in 2013 and basically saved Friday-night life. You know that an accident in the second bore at 4:47 PM on a Friday means Mom’s 50-minute drive from SFO is now 95 minutes and she is going to call you, panicked, from somewhere near the Berkeley exit, and you are going to have to be cheerful about it.
Mom is, of course, going to ask whether she should “get off and take surface streets.” The answer is no. The answer is always no. The answer is “you’re already in it, just stay on 24, you’ll be through it in fifteen minutes.” The answer is delivered in the tone of a flight controller talking down a small plane.
The 1:33 PM Pickup
At 12:48 PM, the host leaves for SFO. They have padded the drive by twenty-two minutes because they have done this before. They will arrive at Cell Phone Lot at 1:14 PM with seventeen minutes to spare. They will sit in the Cell Phone Lot listening to a podcast and refreshing United’s app, watching the little plane icon scoot up the Pacific coast.
Mom’s flight will land six minutes early. Mom will text “landed.” Twenty-two minutes will pass. Mom will text “bag is taking forever.” Eleven more minutes will pass. Mom will text “ok finally.” The host will pull around at 1:51 PM. Mom will be wearing the United-issued blue blanket scarf-style around her neck because the plane was “freezing.” Mom will have one rolling suitcase, one large quilted tote that contains, somehow, four wrapped graduation gifts and a Tupperware of homemade banana bread. The banana bread will be in a gallon Ziploc inside the Tupperware “just in case.” Of what, exactly, is unclear.
The drive back will be 53 minutes. There will be a 12-minute stall at the Bay Bridge approach because of an Oracle Park spillover. Mom will say “oh my, the traffic” three times. The host will say “yep, it’s Friday” three times. Mom will ask whether the kid is nervous about graduation. The host will say “no, she’s good.” This will be repeated, in some form, in every car coming through the Caldecott this afternoon.
The Side-Door Strategy
By 4:30 PM, the host’s spouse — back at the house — is implementing the Side-Door Strategy. The Side-Door Strategy is a Lamorinda graduation-week classic. It works like this: the front of the house is now staged. The lawn is mulched. The porch light is fixed. The wreath has been replaced with the new one from the Lafayette Trader Joe’s run yesterday. Nobody, nobody, gets to walk in the front door before the relatives roll in tomorrow at 2 PM.
So the side door — the one that goes into the laundry room past the recycling — is now the active entrance. Karen and Dave will be told to come in the side. Mark and Lisa will be told to come in the side. The dog walker, the rental delivery guy at 11 AM tomorrow, the caterer’s prep team — all side. The front door is for the moment. The front door is reserved.
There is something deeply Lamorinda about the Side-Door Strategy. It is the residential equivalent of a stage door. The actors enter from the back. The audience sees only what is meant to be seen.
The Group Text Drift
By 6:00 PM, the family group text has reached a steady state of low-frequency status updates. “Through Berkeley.” “Just past Lafayette exit.” “Anyone want In-N-Out, we’re passing the Pinole one.” (Nobody wants In-N-Out. The group text knows this. The In-N-Out question was a thinking-out-loud from cousin Pete who is bored on his Lyft from OAK and is going to arrive at 8:20 PM regardless.)
By 7:00 PM, the relatives are landing in waves. Karen and Dave have been at the house since 1:48 PM and are deep into a second glass of wine on the back patio. Mom is on her third cup of tea and has asked twice where the bathroom is, even though she’s been here forty times. Mark and Lisa are unpacking the twins in the guest room, which has been re-staged with two air mattresses and a small basket of Trader Joe’s snacks. The dog has lost its mind seven separate times. The kid — the graduate — is in the kitchen, on a stool, fielding questions about college.
The host is at the stove. The host is making spaghetti, because spaghetti is what you make when nine people have landed in the last six hours and nobody has the energy for anything else. There is garlic bread in the oven. There is a Caesar from the Lafayette Whole Foods because you do not make a salad on Friday-the-relatives-land. Aunt Karen brought two bottles of Russian River pinot from a winery the host has never heard of, which Karen will, helpfully, describe at length.
The Sunset
At 8:30 PM, sunset hits. The sky over the ridge does the gold thing, and then the pink thing, and then the long blue thing. The relatives — all of them now landed, accounted for, and dispersed across the property like deployed troops — are doing the universal sunset thing. Karen is on the patio. Mom is on the front porch with a sweater. The twins are inside watching Bluey. Cousin Pete has not yet landed; his text at 7:58 says “lyft says 22 min.” Pete is going to walk in the side door at 8:24 PM with a duffel bag and a six-pack of an IPA from a brewery in Brooklyn, and the host will say “Pete!” in the voice you reserve for the cousin you actually like.
The graduation party is tomorrow. The caterer rolls up at noon. The first guests arrive at 2 PM. The rental tables are landing at 11. The kid is going to walk across the stage Sunday morning. But Friday — Friday is the arrivals day, and the Caldecott Tunnel has done its job, and three airports have delivered one family, and the spaghetti is on the table.
The Friday Confession
You will not remember the spaghetti. You will not remember the Caesar from Whole Foods. You will not remember which bore of the Caldecott had the slowdown at 4:47 PM.
What you will remember is this: at 7:43 PM, Mom and the graduate sat at the kitchen counter, and Mom said “I cannot believe you’re already going to college,” and the graduate rolled her eyes, exactly the way she did when she was seven, and Mom laughed, and that was the moment. That was the moment the entire week — the lawn manicure, the Thursday drive-by, the SFO pickup, the side-door strategy, the eleven-item list — had been building toward.
The relatives have landed. The house is full. Tomorrow at 2 PM, the rest of it begins. But Friday at 7:43 PM, in a kitchen in Lafayette or Moraga or Orinda, with the light doing its gold-pink thing over the ridge and a dog asleep against the dishwasher and a Tupperware of banana bread on the counter — Friday is its own thing. Friday is the before. Friday is when everyone is finally, actually, here.
Related: The Thursday Drive-By · The Wednesday Lawn Manicure · The Tuesday After Memorial Day · Caldecott Tunnel Guide · Tunnel Psychology · Lafayette Restaurants · Getting Around Lamorinda
