“Still here” meaning both the author of this blog (quieter of late), and my pops (even more quiet of late). The photo above was taken a year ago today. My pops has aged a lot over this past year, more so in the past six months. Still more so, it seems, in the past six weeks. During this, his 92nd year here, time is speeding up all around him, and taking its toll.

But today, I am grateful to be able to say, we can still thank him directly for his loving presence, his affection for people, his inherent generosity, his sincere desire to make those around him smile. So after breakfast and home-made kid gifts in bed, we’re off to see him, whether or not he sees much of us.

He and I (and those others who love him and care for him) are entering that now-familiar zone in which we begin to communicate more nonverbally than verbally. My firey baptism into this zone was my mother’s pre-death coma, a ten-day period marked at is beginning by our discovery, only then, that it was a metastasis of her breast cancer and she had very little time left. I returned to it again about a dozen years later with the boy who was her first grandchild (as each of them, unmet by her). I begin to convince myself now that in spite of the fact that I can’t tell whether my pops can’t hear me or that he can’t understand me, we have forged sufficient mutual comprehension over a half-century of loving to carry our relationship forward into the inexorable, ineffable next place.

Last night, looking through my many photographs of him, my Apple iPhoto face-recognition feature gave me the option of identifying his visage in my ginormous, 5,000+ store of images, and over and over again it thought I was him. Fitting, I thought, because I do think he has often seen himself in me, we each of us at about the same distance from that middle point of the gender spectrum, him in his gentlemanly male body on one side of the midpoint, and I in my gentlemanly female body on the other. When we have been together (never as frequently as I’d like, the miles and care-dependent kids and work hours a mighty barrier), I think we each have been fed in a similar way.  We both hit a milestone when, years ago, I said to him: “Pops, I’m the son you never had,” and he replied, “Doll, you’re the son I did have.” I have shared that before here, and I’m certain I will again. It is worth the repetition so that a random new pair of eyeballs can see: this degree of human growth is possible within one lifetime. Parental love can drive it.

I’ve missed him more and more lately, because there has been more and more of him to miss. Even as, paradoxically, some wisp of truth, however unlikely, persists. The other day, when I left his place, he said to the kind attendant who would be there with him for the night, “There he goes.”

Past Baba’s Day posts at LD

• Who’s the daddy?, 2006
• A Baba’s Day Proclamation, 2007
• Baba’s Day, ought seven, 2007
• The trouble with Mother’s Day (or, Why I’m glad to be a Lesbian Dad), 2008
• All aboard!, 2008
• A Baba’s Day pictorial, 2009
• Weekend bonus shot, 2010
• Baba’s Day: Quickie Dispatch, 2011
• GREAT GIFT FOR DAD, 2012

“Ravens give me the creeps,” Suzanne said. She was among the trio of angelic preschool teachers who ushered our kids into their first understanding of community outside our home. Each one radiated warmth and calm. Quite naturally whenever I dropped off or picked up the kids, I lingered and chatted, sponging up what I could.

“I saw a bunch of them as I was walking to work this morning, like a gang,” she said. “I just don’t like ‘em.”

I hadn’t given ravens a good deal of thought before that, but once she said it, I had to agree with her. Who’s going to like a carrion bird?  Even if they serve a vital purpose in any ecosystem, even more so in an urban one like ours.

“They do seem like bullies,” I said. I recalled to her a disturbing scene I witnessed not long after we moved to our Berkeley home a few years earlier. I’d heard a cacophony of birdsong from out in front, and saw small birds moving restlessly from branch to branch in the trees and bushes there. Eventually I figured out the object of their attention. A raven perched on a power line above our small sidewalk acacia tree, transferring its weight impatiently from one bony-leather claw to the other. This was the same tree in which I had just a few days earlier identified a sparrow, incubating eggs in a nest.

A single sparrow sat at a distance from the nest on which its mate remained, fluttering its wings and calling out in the direction of the raven. Finches, juncos, black-capped chickadees, California towhees, even a robin or two had joined the chorus, though in my ornithological ignorance, I couldn’t say whether they were attempting to aggregate their might and drive away the threat, or were simply calling out, like schoolyard kids, “It’s a fight! It’s a fight!” with equal parts voyeurism and warning.

For the short time I could spare (I had a wee one to tend indoors), I did my part to drive away the ravens. I yelled, I waved my arms impotently from the upstairs porch. I contemplated but did not actually throw a rock at them (a street, many car windows, and occasional pedestrians were the certain landing spots for any projectile). Anyone who knows ravens knows that all my efforts were ineffectual.

I had to return indoors to tend to my toddler daughter, and before I turned away, I saw a second raven alight on an adjacent telephone line. I remember wincing internally as I heard the rising and falling of the smaller bird voices, punctuated by the clicking and crying of the ravens. It was yet another moment of concession in a lifetime of them, each one heaped upon the last, few going unnoticed.  Like that dog that time, trotting headlong down the sidewalk, bearing the dazed determination and glossed-over eye of the lost. Or the brush rabbit I remember watching pull its way across the road as I sat as a passenger in my mother’s station wagon. I had to be in high school at the time, maybe younger. It had been hit, presumably by a car not too far in front of us, but was still able to wobble its way to the bushes on the side of the road.  The image has never left my mind.

Bystander effect, conflicted, bleeding-heart Saint Francis of Asisi subcategory.

~~~

Apparently ravens (and rooks, and crows) collect in a storytelling. Mallards group in a sord; larks in an exaltation; emus gather in a mob.¹  This particular raven story–the one where Suzanne shared her discomfort with them, and the one where I watched a small storytelling of them begin to form around their prey–is one of so very many untold, until now.  Why do these stories go untold? The answer is as familiar as the stories we’ve told and retold ourselves, since we first developed the urge to tell them and the language with which to do so.  Sometimes I lack time; other times I lack spirit, or sufficient comfort in exposing myself, or enough sense of license to expose others.

Working in social media has sharpened my appreciation for who’s watching, and also at what cost.  This has not always been to my own benefit, of course. In most cases, it’s best to dance as if no one is watching (that’s precisely how I finally netted the mother of my children, or so she says: dancing with myself at the end of the night at a party, unawares).

In the case of my own kids’ slowly receding and morphing as subject in my storytelling, their growing selfhood has played a large part. When they were younger and less verbal, less recognizably who they are, it was easier to fill the breach with my own words. With each expansion of their ambit, I’ve felt compelled to pull my narrative ambit further in. Other parents at the preschool could be reading (numbering up to 20 to 30 total); then others at the elementary school (up to 200 and 300).

Not that I fancy everyone reads my blog. But some might, and could inadvertently let slip how far back the curtain is pulled.  So most of the time, I write what I can imagine saying to another directly in front of my children. Or what I can imagine them (or their friends, or their adversaries) reading five or more years from now. The more I have come to know my children, the more I understand their privacy.  And the more I have come to know the internet, the more I have come to prize my own.

And yet. Stories sustain us, as well we all know. Emotionally true stories most, whether fiction or nonfiction.  Stories of others’ imperfections especially, because they give us courage to see and accept our own, and (one hopes) begin to learn something. This was the chief, if demanding rationale I fed myself when I began writing personal narrative publicly. Not to be an example of things done perfectly, but instead the opposite.

~~~

Nine months ago this week I lost my job and, off and on since then, my way. The day my job disappeared, as I wrote at the time, a branch some 20 inches in diameter at the trunk broke off the sidewalk gum tree and fell toward the house. It grazed the porch pillar, just missing the beloved accordion-playing gnome figurine that keeps watch on our porch railing, and very nearly rang the doorbell before it came to rest, filling the porch with a massive bouquet of branches and leaves. The following day was my son’s  first day of Kindergarten, and the day after that he fell from the monkey bars there and fractured the radius and ulna bones in his forearm.

Most days I leave my house, I look up at the gum tree’s healing branch collar, and mark the time since that eventful week. Nine months is an auspicious length of time.  My son’s cast was off him in about nine weeks, and these days, he is not just rid of any monkey bar fear, he lunges for them at every recess. Yesterday he mastered skipping a bar, to his unbridled elation.

As for the tree?  The collar shows clear signs both of the injury its branch sustained–a tear with damage, not a premeditated cut–and the growth since then.  The city’s arborists came out the very same day to remove the branch, which was blocking the sidewalk. But it was the day before my 50th birthday that they came back to trim up the rest of tree. We worried that they’d have to fell the whole tree, but upon closer examination, they decided they’d subject it to a good thinning, remove some other suspect branches, and give it a chance to show us it can thrive. Jubilee!

And what of my progress? It will be a story half-told and half-not.  For better and for worse, I am slow and deep, and with only fitful success manage to pull off the opposite.  This is less a sign of my half-century here and more a sign of how I’ve been since long before the collective Western pace began to pick up, when the Industrial Age gave way to the Information one, and fell under Moore’s Law.²  I notice that when I slow down, I often say less. But, I hope, I gain more. I noticed a whole lot in the weeks and months when time reopened for me, after the sudden shift in my working life last fall. I noticed my community, my neighborhood, my kids. I came to know again who it was that was nesting nearby, or was no longer. I watch them all and try to give thanks, branch by branch and bird by bird.

Notes

1. Feast your eyes on this beautiful list of collective nouns for birds.
2. It’s not just me thinking everything’s going faster and faster. Talk to Gordon E. Moore. Or perhaps skim the Ehrenreich review of James Gleick on the topic, if you’re short on time but just long enough on curiosity (!).

Waiting for Mama, Berkeley, CA

Mama went on a phenomenally unusual (for her) week-long meditation retreat last week.  Since she gave birth to the first of these kids, she had never taken that much time for just her, and she returned a remade woman.

We all made it through the week intact (a feat made nearly inevitable by my current status as work-at-home, self-employed Baba), but lordy did we miss her, and lordy were we happy for her to return. After a long drive from the Santa Cruz mountains, she texted us to say that she was at the local market picking up provisions. From that point onward, I couldn’t pry the kids off the porch.  And when mama finally arrived, I couldn’t pry them off of her.

This time I convinced him to get outside the vehicle as I washed it (last time: he stayed inside and listened to a Sondheim musical).  He had that huge spray nozzle thingie in his hands for a mere moment, and he instantly understood why Baba has so dadgum much fun washing the vehicles. And he was danged good at it, too.

I tried to convince him that going on a dump run was about as much fun, maybe more. “Huge piles of garbage, taller than that building there!” I said. “Ginormous tractors just pushing the garbage in a huge pile! So much flying dust they have to spray a mist of water down on the pile every so often! Can you think of anything more fun than that?”

As it happens, he could. Spraying the nozzle thingie with soap and water all over the side of the truck. I’m going to keep working on him about the dump run.

Courtesy his sister, who knows whereof she colors all over someone’s face, based on personal experimentation.  I can’t say what in the Sam Hill they were aiming for here. One version was a dog, I remember that. But it kind of took off from “dog” and headed in more of a “Dali” direction.

Feeling a bit less verbal here, a bit more photographic. For perhaps evident reasons. World’s a bit spinny lately.

Whenever I hear the sound of an ambulance, I pause and do a little tonglen. It’s a Buddhist meditation practice, intended to take in pain and send out compassion and relief. Wherever there is an ambulance or fire engine siren, I know someone, somewhere, is in distress. So I try to do what I can to relieve it. Not much, but something.

From the other side of the country, I’m not sure what I can do. But I can say that doing tonglen, as a distance healing of sorts, also heals the healer. A bit. Here is a pithy instruction in how to do it from my main teacher, Pema Chödrön. Mostly it’s breathing in and breathing out, but slowly, and with very focussed intention. If you are in distress, or feeling very heavy hearted about others in distress, it may help.

And may love and a sense support from near and far flow in abundance to all who need it in Boston right now.

View from below, Memorial Stadium, Berkeley, CA.

I was heading to an event up there, on the balcony of the top floor of Cal’s remodeled Memorial Stadium, overlooking the San Francisco Bay. Having managed not to read the directions explaining how to enter the building, *cough*, I had a little time to spend outside it, watching my chums schmooze.