On Your Birthday, Dad

My father would have turned 72 today. While going through his and my mother's papers a few weeks ago, I found this birthday card given to him by his father. Fifteen dollars sat inside with the words "Love, Dad" below the rhyming sentiment. He would have received the card on some year between 1969 (the series year for both bills) and 1985 (the last birthday my dad would have celebrated with grandpa).

Wendy and I found a similar birthday card, years ago, from her great-grandmother to her grandfather with cash sitting inside. Both discoveries have bewildered me.

I wonder why they didn't spend the money to buy themselves a gift. Maybe they didn't want to put the money in their wallet for fear of using it accidentally to buy some necessity. I imagine they planned to go out someday and get something nice for themselves. Someday exists after the work day is over, and after the commute; after the family time, after the yardwork, after the errands and after the nap.

Eventually, this valuable little gift is shuffled among other papers and forgotten until it is discovered, years later, after all the somedays are all used up.

I'm going to spend this money today, dad, and think of you. Happy birthday, wherever you are.

Happy Valentine's Day, Mom and Dad

Strangers in the Night

My parents met each other on St. Valentine's day, 1962. They met at a bar in the San Fernando Valley. My mom was there to meet a date. She was then a 34-year-old divorced mother of four who lived with her kids at her parents' house.

Parents don't like to talk to their kids about the people they dated before they met their final mate. It's as though they would rather not show their work in solving an algebra problem. My mom was a little more forthcoming about her pre-marriage experiences than my father was. I know she dated Johnny Grant, the recently deceased "mayor of Hollywood," who she described as "all hands." Hearing that ended my line of questioning for the day.

Still, I was the kind of kid who wanted to get to the very root of my origins, the point at which chance comes into play: that night, a bar, the San Fernando valley.

My dad was 26 at the time -- eight years younger than she. He was working for the L.A. school district as a custodian (janitor) and going to night school to get a degree in geography. He was living with his parents at the time -- he had moved to the area eight years previously from North Dakota -- and he was soon to buy a house on the same street, just a few houses down.

I picture them both, in this bar, in a semi-rural suburb of Los Angeles, orange trees and tract houses, chatting with each other while she waits for her date to arrive. My father, probably post-break-up and my mother, post-divorce. They're drinking martinis or scotch-and-sodas. The guy my mother is waiting for, whoever he is, calls and asks for her. He's running late, he says. He wants to meet somewhere else.

No, she says. No. She's not going somewhere else. She's waited for him this long, and she's talking to another guy at the bar anyway and, well, he can just take a long walk off a short pier.

And that's it. The future starts. My father gets her phone number, one that strangely starts with a word, like TOrrington 7-5309. That night starts a chain reaction of step-children, marriage, my sister, myself, looking after ailing and dying parents, a move, retirement, another move to a new state, and death -- all of it over 40 years.

A flat tire, a newspaper article, even a head cold could have made it all happen differently. They're both gone now, which is the trouble of being born to older parents. The advantage of being born to older parents, though, is that they're wiser and less likely to fly off the handle. My life has been made easy by older siblings who smoothed out the rough edges new parents always start with.

I miss them both very much. Whether they're together in the afterlife or together in oblivion, I know they are together.

photo credit: Cocktails 4 Two by gwENvision

I've Fallen Into the Cellar

Today, this week, I've been in the grips of a monstrous depression that I can't shake, no matter how hard I try. The weather has been, for the most part, fantastic, but that's not enough to pull me out of this nose dive. I've tried everything I can think of. Just now, I was engaging in some online retail therapy, looking for an American DVD release of Zabriskie Point (no such luck), when I thought maybe what I need to do--maybe what's been wrong with me--is that I haven't been blogging.

I've tried to write again, but it just hasn't gone through. What's left to say after mom's death? Part of me thought that this blog started as a reaction to my father's death, so maybe it should end.

I miss my mom and my dad. Most of all, though, I miss my wife. We announced the first winner of the Wendy Jackson Hall Memorial Scholarship this week. I thought it would make me happy and give me a sense of completion. It doesn't. It's just one more rung on the ladder. I'm holding on to the ladder.

A Cubic Foot of Memory Suspended in the Air

Castaic Lake, CA

I took Cinder to Battle Point Park last week. It was a rare sunny winter day. We walked around the park, I occasionally throwing the ball for her, but mostly just walking along. We saw high school kids playing lacrosse, joggers, and lazy geese who didn't fly any farther south. We wandered around the far edge of the park, up against its southern boundary fence, and cutting back across a field to where we had left the car, I walked into a smell identical to that of fishing at dawn with my father at Castaic Lake.

I walked out of the smell before I recognized what it was and paused, trying to figure out how a field in Washington during afternoon hours could smell so much like a distant time and space. It smelled like the location, but not the event. I didn't smell my father's cigarette, the oily Coppertone lotion, or the garlic cheese paste we used as bait. I retraced my steps, leading with my nose, trying to find that smell again. I walked back and forth; I walked in circles. I couldn't find it.

My stumbling search was interrupted by a child's voice. She was in a stroller pushed along the path by her mother. The girl was shouting something, testing out words. As they passed by, the little girl leaned out of the stroller, pointed at me, and said "Papa dead!"

I waited in the middle of the field for a few minutes in case there was a message coming from beyond, but nothing happened. Maybe what the girl really said was "Papa dog."

When Dad Told Me He Had Cancer

He tried to be composed, but he could hear me start to panic and his voiced cracked a bit over the phone. I tried to stay composed, too. I told my boss that I had to leave for a family emergency, then I went back to my desk and called Wendy to drive over and pick me up from work. We lived three blocks away. I held it together through the ride home, but once my body hit the bed, it was as though I were vomiting tears. My body spasmed and I wailed. And I couldn't stop.

Feeling Punk

Went to a Washington Lawyers for the Arts brown bag session yesterday. The theme of the session was clearing rights for movies, music, and other arts. I really appreciated what they did, but lawyers are a hard group to trust. The first guy's presentation was basically a sales pitch for Corbis' rights-clearing services and it was directed more toward ad agency types--none of whom, I think, were in the room. The event had a lot of specifics in it, but it confused a lot of people into thinking you had to have clearance for every single unoriginal thing you've put into your work. A law professor who sat near me explained afterward that the standard they were applying is meant for advertisements, not works of art. You still have to get some clearance for works of art, but not for each and every building that appears in a street scene in your movie.

Wendy is down with the flu. I came home yesterday and she had a fever of 102 that quickly went as high as 103. She took some Tylenol and the fever started to come down. This morning it was normal, but she's still feeling punk.

"Feeling punk" was a phrase my dad used to say instead of "feeling ill." I suppose that the current understanding of the word punk will leave that phrase to the wind.

Opening Day 2004

We got tickets from our friends Maki and Rich. I was so happy to go that I got here an hour early. I sat there with the day's paper, reading up on the season while the ground crew sprayed down the infield. And then, over the PA, they played "It's a Beautiful Day for a Ballgame" and it made me miss all the times I went to day games with dad. I would spend a fortune just to go again to a game with him. That's kind of a problem--I fixate on impossibilities like that. We went so many times that it practically became routine. Now, to be cut off from that routine, seems endlessly cruel.

But that is not living in the moment. If I could learn to better savor the moment, maybe I wouldn't suffer such nostalgia.

4/19: I just went looking for this song on the Internet. Hearing it at Safeco was the first time I've heard it all the way through...I think it was originally written as a salute to the Cubs. I grew up hearing it at the start of Dodger radio broadcasts. It was originally recorded by the Harry Simeone Songsters and recently appeared on a Rhino Records collection called "Baseball's Greatest Hits - Lets Play II," which is unfortunately out of print and seems to be pretty rare (used listings start at $90!).

Why I Write This

I finally got my home computer set-up corrected enough to be back online regularly with updates to this thing. While I was uploading a lot of old entries, I noticed that I've been doing this blog for more than two years now. Congratulations to me. I flake out on my writing most of the time, but I'm proud to say I've kept this up.

It hasn't been easy, though. I never really understood through most of it why I was writing it. I sometimes think that I shouldn't make it personal...who am I to be writing so public a memoir? But just now, I realize that this all started with the death of my father. I wanted a way to speak to my family--even if they never heard it, even if 'family' meant someone related to me reading it next week, next month, next year, or next lifetime. I think it's becoming a node of my personal digital library.

Bob and Michelle were here this weekend...got to see them both without the filter of other family. Very interesting what turns out.

Sad Anniversary

Dad died a year ago today. I hope that in the future I will be able to let this day passed unmarked, but for now I can't. It just makes me sad that I've already got a years distance on him. At least the twelve months of "firsts" (birthdays, holidays, things that he loved to do) are gone, and maybe I'll stop being so morbid in my thoughts.

My Father's Unexplained Return

Dreamt of my dad last night. I guess it was the first real dream with me interacting with him. He just suddenly showed up again, and there was no explaination for his 10-month absence. Just showed up at the doorstep, looking cold and confused. Everyone in the family was too happy to see him alive again to ask a lot of questions. They were beaming at him and when I would ask my sister or my mom questions like, "Well where has he been?" or "What about the funeral...we saw him in the casket?", they would just wave the question off, marveling at him, never taking their eyes off him, and answer by saying, "Doesn't he look good?" And he did, I suppose. He was spry again; no shuffled cancer walk, no wince of pain. But he was really quiet and didn't seem to really remember us well. I finally got the courage to talk to him, and though he looked and sounded like my dad, he seemed like a different man. I asked him some pointed questions about what happened, but he was casual in his answers to the point of being aloof. My dad was formerly a very engaging, direct man, who never failed to look me in the eye when he spoke to me or listened to me.

"Where have you been?" I asked.
"Oh, you know, around."
"No, I don't know. Where have you been?"
"Different places. Walking, mostly."
"Didn't you die?"
"No."
"What about the funeral?"
"That wasn't me."
"But I saw you in the casket!"
"It must have been someone else who looked like me."
"But then how did you leave the hospital?"
"I walked out."
"But what about your liver and all the pain you were having?"
"It went away. I got better."

I eventually just gave up on the unsatisfying interrogation and stood back away from him with my family and watched him.

This isn't the dream I was hoping for. It was likely influenced by a novel I've been reading (Bruce Wagner's I'll Let You Go) about a boy in search of the schizophrenic father who abandoned his mother before he was born. I wanted the Obi Wan Kenobi dream, where the voice of my father would come to me and tell me things I would need to know.

Okay, now for something a little lighter. Before the above mentioned dream, I had another dream last night that I was a film producer of a certain pornographic niche--lit porn. Basically, we would take sex scenes from literary classics--D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Henry Miller, etc.--and we would film these very explicit sex scenes that were faithful to the source text and were edited with a voiceover of an actor reading the text. The dream, however, was without nudity and coitus, and instead consisted of a lot of research and phone calls. Still, not such a bad business idea. I could imagine the ad in the back of The New Yorker, or perhaps facing the short story in Playboy (do they still publish fiction at Playboy?).

You Can't Tell a Parent What to Do

Mom's been staying with us since last Monday, and by Saturday, Pam, Brian, and David will join us for a week. We've had a good time with Mom, and I think she's pretty comfortable at our house (she gets awful cold in the morning, though). I'm saddened by how frail she's gotten. She can really just manage to walk around the house. Steps are a big problem for her, so she hasn't yet gone downstairs. Her skin is really fragile, too, like Dad's was before he died. Gus dragged a paw across her arm this morning and rather than scratching, her skin tore--a 45 degree flap from the point of Gus' claw, about 3/4 of an inch wide. I keep giving her pep talks about how she's got to take care of herself, eat right, and do her excercises, but she smiles and nods as though I was lecturing, which I suppose I am. You can't tell a parent what to do. I could have told Dad every day to take better care of himself, to not eat so much, and I did to an extent--but it never did any good; couldn't have. We have no power to change others and very limited power to change ourselves. We're just a bunch of little yo-yos, carried by momentum.

So, I have to remember not to try to do too much on this trip with Mom. All the time I spent nagging Dad was wasted. The time that really means something to me now is the time we spent together just talking. I'm trying to maximize that with Mom.

My Fatherless Father's Day

It's difficult not to let the summer slip away from me. I'm putting in a lot of hours at work again, and when I'm not there it seems like I'm doing some project around the house. Right now we're working on a fence for the side yard that will keep Cinder from chasing the neighbor's car and getting dashed beneath their tires again. We're taking photos of the work and I'm keeping a little log (well, okay, it's still inside my head). I'm planning to make a webpage for the site.

Last Sunday was Father's Day, and it was pretty difficult for me. I wondered beforehand how I would react. I was in the driveway cutting wood for the fence posts when a story came on the radio promoting a new book of essays by famous people on the subject "What Baseball Means to Me." Of course, the day before the holiday, they kept talking about the bonds between father and son forged during baseball games, and how this would make a perfect present. I tried to keep working, but I just stood there with the saw in my hand, weeping into my safety goggles. Wendy told me to sit down and let it all out and I did…for about twenty minutes. I guess the odd thing about grieving is that there is no straight path to acceptance. A couple days before, I felt like I was adjusted to him being dead, but then again on Saturday it felt like the most unbelievable injustice. I had tried to pre-accept his death. When he was sick but still alive, I tried to keep consciously remind myself of the fact that he was still alive and that I was fortunate that he was since two friends had already lost their fathers.

Night-Night, Sleep Tight

It's been a busy couple of weeks since last I wrote. Lynnea and Walter were here for a few days, and we had a great time with them. Lynnea showed me how to kill and cook crab, and Walter and I got to play a lot of video games. It was just right. They weren't here for too long (got here on a Friday before departing Sunday on an Alaska cruise), so we didn't really plan anything. Rather than cram together a lot of activities, we just sort of hung out together. I think that when people come to visit, we always want to show them everything within a forty mile radius, and we try to get them to validate our decision to move up here...See, isn't this really a great place? The truth is that we're a little lonely up here, and we wish someone would move a bit closer. Instead, we would do better just to concentrate on the experience of having them with us.

Pam came up last week, and we had even less time with her. She got into town about 8 on Saturday night and, after dinner and the ferry crossing, it was pretty late when we got back to the house. We left early the next morning to catch up with Lynnea and Walter and have lunch with them. It was less than ideal--I would have enjoyed spending more time around the house with Pam on Sunday--but it was worth it because I knew that Lynnea and Pam both wanted the opportunity to see each other. Lynnea and Walter left after lunch and we walked around downtown a bit before going to see Spider-Man. Afterward, Pam took us to The Melting Pot for a fondue dinner which was really amazing. I thought fondue was just cheese and dessert, but we also had a meat and vegetables course where we boiled small pieces in vegetable broth. Everything tasted great, and their presentation was really fun.

At one point during dinner, Pam called David on her cell phone to say good-night. She said the same kind of sing-songy nursery rhyme that our dad used to say to us almost into our adulthood. It made me cry a little bit, but only because I was so happy she was passing that on. It goes like this:

Night-night, sleep tight
Good Lord keep and bless you
All through the night
Safe and sound, all the days of your life
See you in the morning light
And don't let the bedbugs bite!

to which he would always append: "I love you." It reminds me of another one that he would always sing to us in the morning when waking us up to go on a vacation:

We're all in our places
With sun-shiney faces
And this is the way
We start each new day

Wendy and I are going on vacation starting next Saturday...I'll have to remember to wake her up with that song.

Atmospheric Memory

It's been a pretty tough week at work. My boss has left my department for another, and she's basically been replaced by two people--both of whom don't really know anything about video games. Plus I've just been feeling emotionally exhausted by all of the family turmoil of the year. Wendy says we really need a vacation--our last one was a four-day weekend about a year and a half ago. Unfortunately, there's so many other commitments on our time that we won't really be able to take a non-family-visit vacation until early 2003.

We did spend a lot of evening time this week in the city. On Tuesday night, we went to see a retrospective of Evan Mather's work, which was pretty good. On Thursday night, we went to Olympic Hills Elementary for the premiere of Wendy's Animated Authors project. That was really nice. Wendy spent two months working with each class in the school to write and animate a fable. Some of the stories were really cute, with titles like "The Stealing Aliens" and "The Evil, Stupid Joker". The kids and the teachers were all very happy to see Wendy and they thanked her for all of her great work. I like that I was really able to see her specific sensibilities in the animation (she did some animating of the project between groups of students in the class). Last night we went to ResFest, which was actually very good. We went to the Altered States program and saw one very funny, well-produced short called It's A Shame About Ray about a guy who is forced to review his life after he prematurely dies, and another called Copy Shop, a dialog-free German film about a guy who runs a copy shop who is himself being duplicated by one haunted machine.

But the main thing I want to remember is yesterday morning. I am fortunate to get to walk through part of the city on my way to and from work. Yesterday I had what I would call an "atmospheric memory". It was overcast but rather warm, and that combination, plus the fact that it was morning and spring, reminded me of the June gloom we used to get when I was growing up in the San Fernando valley. Because that always happened at the end of a school year, I've often felt a sort of bittersweet exhilaration during those conditions. As I walked, I listened to an NPR story about how volunteers had planted one million bulbs right after the September 11th attack, and the city was now awash in yellow flowers. I felt happy and thankful to be alive. I could recall specific scenes from my youth and feel no anger or bitterness that they were long gone--they felt just as much a part of me as when they happened. Then I thought of my dad and I started to cry a bit, but he felt a part of me too.

The Difference Between What We Do and What We Would Choose to Do

I'm spending too much extra energy on work stuff. I don't know why. I've put in a lot of hours in the last couple of weeks and I devote too much time to thinking about things outside of the office. It's hard for me not to let my work persona take over my identity. Sometimes I feel like I have to disengage from it when I'm coming off the boat and getting back onto the island. That's weird because I know that I would always rather be at home. If I won the lottery, I think I would leave my job immediately. Or maybe I wouldn't. It's hard to say, really. It all boils down to the difference between what we have to do and what we would choose to do. I really enjoy my job and get a great deal of satisfaction from it, but I ended up there as a result of decisions that I made to fulfill requirements like pay the rent and put food in the refrigerator. And yet, the whole notion of doing what you would choose to do seems to be a dead end for all but a few people. My dad, for example, really went into a depression soon after he retired and he hated his job. I think that if he was still working today, he'd probably be alive (though maybe a little grumpy). If I got to do something I think I really want to do: open a business on the island and not have to worry about whether or not it ever made money, what would I dream about? I don't think life is necessarily good when its easy.

So, what...I'm talking myself out of winning the lottery? This is stupid.

Okay, so here's what I really wanted to write about today. I read in the newspaper that the National Geographic photographer who took a very famous cover shot of an anonymous Afghan refugee in 1985 was able to find her again all these years later. The article showed two images of her, and it printed her age between 29 and 32. The latter image was evidently staged to make it look as much like the original photo as possible, but the difference between them is very clear. Her life has been very hard in the time since she was 15, and that hardship has exagerated in her physical features the wisdom that time brings to everyone.Call it knowledge from the other side of thirty. As a young woman, she looks ready to take on the world. As an older woman, she seems vaguely embarassed. Check it out: National Geographic.

the best couple of days

This was the best couple of days I've had since my dad died (January 29). I think about him a lot, but now more with control. When I do think about him, I feel like I have a little bit more perspective on things. Wendy and I were in the hot tub the other day, and I was telling her how bad I felt that I couldn't just call him. I've never gone a whole month without hearing his voice. Today I called to talk to my mom and found his voice is still on their answering machine. It was nice to hear his cadence again, the way he said "Bye" on the phone in a slight southern drawl, probably fabricated to be cute decades ago before becoming a forgotten part of his repertoire (he was originally from the least southern state in the union: North Dakota). It didn't feel odd to hear it, either, but I did think of how preserving someone's voice--a much more intimate part of one's identity, even more so than their physical appearance--was a luxury that our grandparents never had. I don't know what to do with that answering machine greeting; part of me feels like I should capture it and encase it in crystal, another part of me feels like I should let it slip away randomly, perhaps in the next power outage.