In Memory: A Letter to my Children

Meg and I flew the flag today. Every week we watch the end of the PBS News Hour, when they silently share the names and photographs of those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan that day. Most of them look like my children. It's hard to know how to pay tribute to those men and women and to all the soldiers who came before them. War is an inevitable and sometimes necessary burden, but lately, beginning with Vietnam, it has not seemed that the wars we have fought have been  either inevitable or necessary.

After 9/11, I was as pumped up and ready to strike back as any testosterone-raging male. Looking back, I guess taking a swipe at the Taliban in Afghanistan was defensible, but I would say that we have little hope of nation-building there now. Iraq was at best a mistake, at worst a crime. I believed it when Colin Powell told us that Saddam was about to gas or nuke us. He (and perhaps even I) should have known better. Meg was skeptical. She would not have invaded Iraq, and she turned out to be right. Considering President Bush's other policies, it's not surprising that we were betrayed by him. Presidents have agendas and egos that can lead them (and us) astray.

Still, I am frustrated by frustration. What good does it do to sit in a corner and grumble? For my part, I have decided to be more active in supporting policies that I think will reduce the risk of pointless wars. I believe this is the greatest tribute I can offer in memory of those who have died for our country: a hope that none will die again for a cause that is unwise or unnecessary.

In fighting terror, I think we need more intelligence assets and fewer carriers and fighters. So I will support, by petitions, letters, etc., steering our defense spending in that direction. To reduce our dependence on Middle Eastern oil (which many think is the real reason we are fighting over there), I will similarly support investments in alternative energy.

As the Egyptians who filled Tahir square have reminded us, we are not powerless. And our voice can be heard more often than once a year at the ballot box. Many in the House and Senate are public-opinion windsocks. We can be part of the freshening breeze.

If you too are moved to be more active (in whatever way, and for whatever cause you think best), remember this: with every petition you sign, every letter to the editor or to Congress you write, I will be there with you.

Love to you all on this difficult day.

Dad

The Hunt for Lost October

The Internet is a family killer, right? Kids won’t come out of their bedrooms, locked in World of Warcraft. Dinner, when the family is together at all, is a sulky time of furtive peeks at text messages.

If you have a home like that, populated with e-buzzed teens, take heart. Today’s enemy will soon be your friend. When hell freezes over? you say. No, when they go off to college.

run silent, run deep

Our youngest took off last fall. The break is dramatic. You really start to feel it in October, as you go from heavy daily contact (at least visual sightings) to nothing. Nada. Zilch. It turns out they’ve been waiting for this for a long time. A bird flown from the cage. It’s impossible to get them back in, even if you wanted to (and after years of changing the cuttlebone and the newspaper at the bottom of the cage, let’s face it, there is some relief on both sides).

You hate to call them all the time, but waiting for the phone to ring can be pretty unrewarding. Despite what they suspect, you don’t want to know everything they are doing, at least I don’t. Just the opposite, in fact. I don’t think my heart could take the full details. Ignorance is bliss.

For a while anyway: eventually, too much ignorance spawns worry. And then the delirious projections of your own youthful transgressions begin: He hasn’t called because he hasn’t been to class in three weeks. He hasn’t called because he has gone off with friends on a trip he knows he shouldn't take. He hasn’t called because he fell and hit his head while running and didn’t have an ID and the hospital doesn’t know who he is.

You get the idea. As a dad, I just want to know that my sons in college are engaged with their schoolwork and are making friends. That they are happy. The rest will follow. They are on their own now. Which means that although I no longer get to nag I still have the joy of worrying, indeed the heightened ecstasy that comes from fretting about something you care about but are powerless to affect. After a while, we let go of pointless worry---it’s that or go crazy---but in transition, you need some way to stay in touch.

The telephone is great, of course, but in our family a phone call is a big event. At first, while they are breaking free, it’s tough to get them to call at all. And even when they take pity and call once in a while, the loss of a child’s daily presence is palpable. This is why Al Gore invented the Internet, so parents would have email and instant messaging.

Email and IM restore a sense of amiable, unobtrusive presence. Hitting a few keys on the computer is almost like calling up to my sons’ bedroom that dinner is ready, even (or especially) when it elicits the same silence, the one that means I know they have heard me and they know I know and all is right with the world.

One of our sons is an emailer, the other an IMer. For whatever reason, neither one seems to respond to the other medium. As far as I know, emails to the IMer go into a black hole. And I never see the emailer online in a way I could IM him; I think the IM program calls it “hiding.”

I stay in touch with the emailer in the current-events chatty kind of way we enjoy. We send each other notes about politics and economics and share links to stories and opinion pieces we think are thoughtful or outrageous. Not only is this entertaining, but it gives me a window into his state of mind: as long as he and I can share a joke about Donald Trump, I know his emotional reserves are intact.

Instant messaging is a terser medium, so with that son I have to be more of a cryptographer. I’ll see the little green light in a chat program that means he’s there somewhere and I’ll send him a “Hey, how are you?” I usually get a word or two in response within a few minutes. “Great,” means what it says. “Good house” (for a Men’s Glee Club performance) or “Only one more final,” is code for “perfect.”

This is all I need. Just the ability, or the illusion of the ability, to reach out and touch them. Years of Tom Clancy novels have caused me to think of my college boys as great nuclear submarines gliding gracefully through murky depths. Rigged for silent running, but detectable by a ping from the heart.

Ungodly

What if Thag had looked out from his Stone-Age cave at the volcano erupting in the distance and thought, “Wow, that’s cool,” instead of, “Son of a gun, I’d better appease that sucker?”

Nature's fire and brimstone.

Neuroscientists tell us that belief in god is a default setting for humans. Why that is is an interesting question. Maybe it’s because there is a god who programmed us to believe in him or her or it. Or maybe we grow up looking for replacements for our parents. Perhaps having shared religious beliefs helped us form the cohesive, supportive groups that behavioral evolutionists say had the best chance of survival. The debate is ongoing, passionate and, at least as far as proving the existence or not of a deity is concerned, an intellectual dead end.

But thinking about why we believe in god got me wondering this: What if we didn’t? What if no one had ever believed in any god of any kind? What would our species be like? What would our morals be, if any? Would we have evolved in anarchic chaos, or are our customs for treating one another well what led to our survival, and our civilization?

Recent psychological experiments have revealed that many basic norms of behavior, what we call morals, live deep in our base brains, alongside sex drive and fight-or-flight. Actions triggered there happen before we think about them. The explanation for why we have reacted instinctively as we have is the result of the cognitive lobe’s subsequent musings. In other words, good behavior gave rise to morals, not the other way around.

In this line of thinking, Jesus and Mohamed merely picked up where our reptilian brains left off, articulating and encouraging our more altruistic instincts. Which raises this question: Have their religions, or any others, been worthy custodians of our moral beliefs?

A weakness all religions share is that their earthly leaders are men, not gods. Like CEOs of businesses or rulers of nations, religious leaders seek to expand the influence of their sect, to spread the word, as it were. Religious missions are a form of spiritual colonization.

Expanding market share takes money, and so, from Aztec priests demanding gold and virgins to appease the gods to modern church leaders, religions have sought sacrifices and tithes from the faithful. And more than occasionally, the weakness of men has resulted in corruption in dealing with all that wealth. One of the Medici Popes was even a pirate, literally, not metaphorically.

Expanding market share also requires…well, expansion. With no religion, we would still have fought over land and women, but not for the right to hasten the heathen's descent into hell. If the morals that bubbled up from our evolutionary development had served only mankind and no “higher” purpose, there would be one less reason to detest one another.

But have a little graft and a few crusades and inquisitions been worth it? Have our religions made us more likely to be good people? Put in the most basic terms, is fear of eternal damnation a more powerful motivator than fear of social ostracism?

Now that we are living longer than in the Middle Ages (when you might have met your maker any day), the notion of going to hell (or wherever damnation takes you) is comfortably abstract. Eternal damnation is like global warming: In our daily lives, most of us just aren’t that worried about it. It’s not going to happen to us, that’s those other guys. And anyway, it’s a long way off.

On the other hand, if Facebook is any indication, our level of caring what others think of us is on the rise. In a purely humanist moral system, the approval of others would be what would guide and constrain us.  Maybe if that were all we had, we would be better behaved, not worse. If our sense of our own goodness were measured by how others judged us, we could not put off the day of reckoning.

If every day, not just on some distant Judgment Day, we had to account to others for who we are, perhaps we would work harder to mute the clamor of striving for self to better hear the ancient voice of our altruism.

Racing the Train

Am I the only one who does this? I’ll be walking along a sidewalk and a bicyclist will come down the street toward me and there will be a tree between us and, because of our relative speeds and distances from the tree, the bicyclist will seem to disappear behind the tree and I’ll try to time my pace to keep him hidden as long as possible, as if he had gone through a magic portal that took him somewhere else entirely. Sometimes I even imagine his wonder at being whisked into another dimension.

Local variation in Oxford, England: "Beat the Boat."

Or, when I was a boy and a train would be passing close by, I would make a game of trying to run to a fence post or a stop sign before the train got to the trestle. I did that all the time. I had a couple of close friends in grade school and we played a lot of games together. When they weren’t around, I would still play the games with them, but I would take their parts. I’d toss a ball up on the roof and stand where I couldn’t see it rolling back down, to make it harder to catch, and I’d take turns for each of us, and keep score. I tried as hard as I could each time. It wouldn’t have been fair otherwise.

Are these signs of some mental illness? Should I be worried?

Part of it is just the normal, healthy desire to compete, I suppose. Darwin would approve. And if there’s no one around for the contest, make someone up, or race a train. The practice keeps you sharp.

But what’s up with that bicyclist behind the tree trick? Do you think it means I have a subconscious desire to imprison people, or to send them off to other universes?

I don’t fantasize about sex much. I can call up an erotic memory with the best of them, but mainly they’re memories. I talk about sexual fantasy, little jokes all men share, more than I engage in it. But this business of racing something, or competing with an imaginary or even inanimate opponent, grabs me like a pretty woman and pulls me under.

It doesn’t happen all the time. I bike alongside a Cal Train most days, and the longing rarely stirs. It pops up randomly, unexpectedly, unconsciously. Suddenly I’ll be walking or pedaling faster, then sprinting. I always feel a little rush of elation if I win.

Sometimes I adjust the marker I’m racing to if I have no chance in the original contest, but a win in that case is not satisfying. It’s more like a training run. Practice for next time, whenever that might me. Whenever the little boy in me whispers "Go."

Gypsy Writer

I've written so many novels in Starbucks that, as my stack of unpublished work has grown, I’ve moved from including them in the acknowledgements in a sophisticated, light-hearted way (Gracias Baristas) to dedicating my work to them with the kind of passionate gratitude usually reserved for lovers. Lately, I’ve been looking for poems about coffee that I might use for an epigraph.

Picasso au lait

Hemingway had the cafes of Paris. I have Starbucks. Maybe that’s the problem. There is a regular at one of my Starbucks who is a pretty good artist (he paints watercolor portraits with coffee). And we have our share of intense revolutionaries, although it is the social network, rather than the social order, they plot to overturn. The Google campus is our Gertrude Stein salon.

Going to Starbucks is like going to work. It gets me up and out the door. I commute by bike, so it’s a bit of exercise as well. Mainly, it’s a place with a lot of people coming and going. Home should be a perfect place to write---quiet, spacious, my own coffee maker---but it’s not for me. When Meg is working, she can’t be my playmate, so I spend a lot of time with my nose pressed up against the window glass.

There can be annoying distractions in a public place, true, someone talking too loudly on a cell phone, that sort of thing. And sometimes it’s hard to get a table, since as near as I can tell everyone at the coffee shop is doing the same thing I am: using the place as their office. Starbucks is a laptop farm. Sometimes I worry that we are being unfair to our benevolent host. I have a friend in the restaurant business who used to tell me about the importance of table turn. I don’t think the table turnover rate is very good at Starbucks.

When I settle into just the right table, maybe in a corner, where I can see the people passing in the coffee line and hear the coffee orders called out, I can feel something change in me, almost as if I had been transported to a place where I am completely unknown, a visitor from another time. The white noise is a river down which my imagination drifts. I watch the people come and go without watching. I listen to conversations without hearing (except for tuning in the occasional bit of salacious gossip or tech insider talk). My mind wanders free as scenes and characters float by, inviting me to visit.

So I’m dedicating my book to Starbucks. At this point, they can have their choice of several. Maybe I’ll even give them a sliver of the royalties to make up for only buying small coffees and not venti frappuccinos. My acknowledgments will mention Maria and Jose and DJ, who were friendly and gave me stories to go with the coffee. Some of them asked me what I was doing, pounding away on the keyboard. I would tell them a little about what I was writing, but it’s awkward talking about your own work, and it's fiction after all, whereas their stories were their lives.

Over the years, I’ve seen complete staff turnovers in several Starbucks. Sometimes I wonder where those people are now. Did Sophie make it into nursing? Did Carla find a good school for her son? Did Juan get his car back? One thing I learned from them is that your story doesn’t have to be published to be real. It can be moving and uplifting even if you are the only one who knows it.

Still, I want my story to be like the Good Samaritan, the quiet man who no one knows until he performs some act of extraordinary kindness or heroism that is an inspiration to all the world. Finding the way to tell that story is the tricky part. I told a little of it to Maria. A little to Jose. We shared our stories. That’s how it begins.

Dress Code

Barry Sanders taught me what a Full Cleveland was. He was the toastmaster at my old law firm’s annual self-congratulatory dinners in the 1970s, back when all the lawyers and spouses fit into one banquet room. A Full Cleveland was a burgundy leisure suit (remember those?) worn with white shoes and a white patent-leather belt. A Full Dayton was the same thing, but in blue.

Getting in step with the crowd
(photo courtesy of Daniel Hartwig)

We all chuckled smugly as Barry, a bit of a dandy himself, worked the crowd with sartorial slights that implicitly linked self worth to conventional good taste. The unspoken truth behind the joke, the whiff of xenophobia, was that the firm was growing so fast in those days that it was losing its clubby homogeneity. Next year there might even be someone in the audience from Cleveland or Dayton.

Humans are not the only species that is self aware, but I’m pretty sure we’re way ahead of dolphins in narcissism and neuroticism. When we're not gazing at our reflections in the pool, what is it we are obsessed with? What others think of us. Am I as wonderful as I think? Really? You too.

Pulled by cultural gravity, we are attracted to like bodies of behavior and thought. Once wrapped in a cocoon of comfortable uniformity, there can be little need to think outside the dress code.

And what then? Are we individuals, or building blocks for some edifice or another: a business, a religion, the minutemen of Arizona, an eco-terror cell?

Aware of the power of peer influence, we warn our children to be careful who they hang with. Perhaps that is a warning we should give ourselves as well. It can be pretty cozy in our self-selected tribes, among all those coordinated suits and ties or matching t-shirts and hoodies. Sometimes it’s worth wearing something that isn’t part of the uniform, just to see how others react. Or to see how their reaction makes us feel about who we are.

Bums of Santa Barbara

Chris was about nine and we were on our way to dinner on State Street on one of our first visits to Santa Barbara. At the outside patio at Borders Bookstore a group of homeless men had commandeered four or five tables. Some had big backpacks and sleeping bags rolled up nearby. They were mostly white, mostly the age of veterans of some decades-ago war. They looked like a group of old warriors planning a mission against the society that had abandoned them.

Two were playing chess. One was a gaunt middle-aged white man with tattoos as weathered as his face, and the other was the only black man in the group. He didn’t look like the others, and not just because he was black. He was bigger and sleeker and better dressed, wearing a black shirt and a black leather cowboy hat with silver medallions around the brim. He was both beautiful and slightly terrifying. He was carrying on a running patter with his opponent and flirting with two young women who seemed to know him and who slowed as they passed by to give him ample time to embellish his flattery.

Chris stopped to watch the game. He stood very near the table. Meg and Nick and I hung back a bit, and while Chris watched the game I watched him and the man in the hat and the hard scruffy men gathered around the tables like gulls at the beach.

At the beach in Santa Barbara.

The evening air held the soft coolness of that morning, when I had taken Chris out to try rollerblading on the beach bikeway. He had wanted a bathroom break and we had gone to a public restroom that was almost on the sand. It was early, and men were still lying in their sleeping bags under the palms. As Chris was going into the restroom, a couple of men with pale, wind-burned faces who looked like permanent beach residents were coming out, swearing like sailors, talking so vulgarly and with such an edge of anger and hostility that it made me feel protective of Chris, even though they weren’t talking to him, even though he probably wasn’t paying any attention to them. As if I had just been appointed beach-decorum police, I told them to knock it off. Not the brightest thing to do. One of them came over and asked what my problem was. I said something imprudent, again, and he said “Seriously?” in a way any man would understand to mean “Do you really want me to slice out your liver right here?” My heart was racing with the need to run or kick him in the balls, and my mind was racing with the image of Chris coming out of the bathroom and finding me bleeding on the concrete. While I was considering how to manage a dignified retreat, the other guy tapped his friend on the shoulder and said “Come on, let’s leave the tourists alone.”

That was my introduction to the bums of Santa Barbara. This was their little piece of paradise, not mine. Even the charming patio area outside the bookstore had now been turned into their private lounge.

When the game was over, the skinny white guy scooted his chair back from the table and put his hands on his knees and sat shaking his head. The big man in the hat began setting up the black pieces in front of him. The knights looked like they had ridden in from another set entirely. One of the pawns was headless. When he had finished, he looked up at Chris and asked if he would like to play. I wasn’t so keen on Chris settling into a homeless encampment, but the man had a surprisingly kind face. His voice was deep and gentle. He didn’t seem to want to know what my problem was.

For his part, Chris didn’t hesitate. He sat down and started setting up the white pieces; the loser of the prior game chuckled to himself and pulled up another chair to watch. The big man extended his hand and said his name was Mason. Chris’s hand was small and pale in Mason’s rough mitt. Chris said his name and moved his king’s pawn two spaces. Mason responded with his king’s pawn and they each made their first three or four moves with quick precision, as if they had been choreographed, which in a way they had, both players trying to gain control of the center of the board, moving their troops into position for the coming battle.

Meg and Nick and I stood around watching for a while. I felt a little self-conscious just standing there gawking, but I also felt proud that my very young son was playing chess against a grown man and, although I hate to admit it, proud that he was playing chess with a homeless man, among other homeless men: Some of you may not want us in your paradise, but we are bigger than that. We are not consumed by your rage and bitterness. We don’t think ourselves too good to sit down with you. We are not afraid of you. Which, of course, I had been that very morning.

Watching them play, listening to Mason’s gentle banter, watching the attentive way his last opponent followed the game, I began to see the chess board and not the homeless men. It was getting to be past time for our dinner reservation, and yet I hated to take Chris away from the game, so I suggested that the rest of us go check in at the restaurant, which was directly across the street. I thought we might get an outside table where we could keep an eye on Chris while giving him some space to do his thing---he doesn’t like to be hovered over while he’s playing, at least not by me. I pointed at the restaurant and said he should join us there when he was through playing. Mason looked up at me and smiled and said, “Don’t worry, this will be quick.”

We got a table and our drinks and ordered dinner and Chris and Mason were still playing. Long game, I thought. I went back across the street to check on him, with the excuse that I wanted to make sure what we had ordered for all of us to sample and share was all right with him. It turns out they were already on their third game. Mason had lost the first two and had asked for re-matches. Chris had been beating me for a year by then, so I felt Mason’s pain, especially when it became obvious from the positions on the board that he was about to lose again. I stayed and watched the end of the game and told Chris it was time to go. He would have stayed, and Mason would have kept playing.

That was the beginning of something like a friendship between Mason B. Mason, an ambiguously housed man, and our family. Mason had dreams of doing children’s television programing, but he made his living as a street musician. He was a pretty good blues singer, and a showman. Every time we came to town, usually a few times a year, we would look for Mason where he would be playing his guitar and singing at the farmers’ market.

One year we bought Mason a new chess set. The boys wrote a note on the back of the board and signed it. When we couldn’t find him to give it to him, a friend told us he was in jail on an old assault-and-battery charge. I called the local prosecutor to see what the deal was. He said Mason was unstable and had a history of violence.

The next summer Mason was back at the farmers’ market. We gave him the chess set and he handled it like it was gold. We listened to him sing and in between songs he told us a little about his problems with the local gendarmes. The Santa Barbara police were fascists, he said, who persecuted the homeless to keep Santa Barbara looking like Disneyland.

A few years later, we lost track of Mason again. Afraid he was back in jail, I asked around. It was worse than jail. He was dead. He had gotten cancer and died quickly. It was shocking, really, for all of us, to come back and find him just gone like that. I realized then that I had known so little about him. The one thing I had known, though, the thing that was most important to me, was how he would treat my sons.

After we moved to Palo Alto, I took Chris up to San Francisco to try his hand at playing chess on Market Street. He was sixteen by then and had a closet full of chess trophies. I had seen a story in the San Francisco newspaper about a man who set up a dozen chess boards every day at Fifth and Market. The crowd that came to play and watch was an unlikely mix of Zen masters and street punks. Anyone could play. By custom, the looser paid the table fee, a dollar a game.

Street chess in San Francisco.

Some of the old men looked like they had been playing on that broad brick sidewalk all their lives. Others, younger and tougher, might have been taking a break from knocking over a convenience store. We stood around watching the games, and when a place at a board opened up, Chris sat down. The young black man he was going to play stayed slouched in his chair, his long legs splayed out under the table, as he picked up one black and one white pawn and wrapped them in his hands and held out his fists for Chris to tap: black or white. I watched the start of the game and then, still practicing not hovering, walked around and checked out a few other games and finally bought a soda from a market nearby and stood leaning against a wall near the old man who rented the tables, twenty yards or so from Chris, close enough to see but not to watch.

Men came and went, players, kibitzers, friends, accomplices. Either they didn’t notice me or I didn’t look like The Man, or maybe they just didn’t give a damn, because some of what they said to each other if repeated to a jury would have been good for five to ten. The distinctive aroma of weed wafted by once or twice. I didn’t get the impression that any of them were homeless, but they were all definitely at home on the street.

Chris and the young man were playing speed chess, using a timer that gave each of them a very short time to make each move. Turbo chess. You have to think fast, more react than think; it’s easy to make a fatal mistake. They were playing intently, the young man not slouching now as they both leaned aggressively toward the board, smiling, talking a bit of trash, making their moves like thrusting spears. Every once in a while one of them would laugh out loud. After about an hour, Chris got up and they shook hands and he came over to where I was. From the big smile on his face, I was expecting him to tell me he’d had another Mason B. Mason-like triumph. But not this time. The guy had cleaned his clock. Chris said he’d been close in one game, not so much in the others.

So, what is it about chess and people on the street? It’s a funny game for a homeless man with violence issues or a tough city kid, don’ t you think? The game of kings, it used to be called. Whatever you think about who you’d expect to be playing, it’s a great leveler. Your chess game is only as good as your mind; and your mind is as good as your chess game.

I can’t tell you how many bums I’ve ignored over my lifetime, how many more I’ve wished I just didn’t see. I don’t know whether to give them money or look the other way. Or hand out cards saying I give regularly to the local food bank. Some Thanksgivings Meg and I take sandwich bags of turkey and dressing and twenty dollar bills to homeless people in the park. Other times I’ve called the cops on some scary lunatic who’s raving at passersby. And yet, when I see a policeman hassling someone with a suitcase and bad hair who has taken up residence on a sidewalk bench, I am apt to go all civil libertarian: Wait a minute, he has a right to be here, this is America. I’m a mass of contradictions.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been uncomfortable just walking down the wrong street at the wrong time. How many times late at night I’ve crossed to the other sidewalk to avoid a group of young men in hoodies.

But I can tell you this: Mason B. Mason and the chess players on Market Street made me ashamed of my reflexive stereotyping and the cynicism and fear it fathers.

There are crazy people out there. Drunks and addicts sleeping in the parks. Tough kids gathering on tough street corners. Dangerous people. Desperate people. But some of them are chess players. Some of them wanted to play chess with my son, and he with them.

BelittleNet

I don’t know how to write about this, or even if I should, but I’m annoyed and a little sad and don’t know what else to do. What I want to say is this: “Kids, don’t listen to us when we mock you. Don’t listen to anyone who does that. We’re the idiots. Not you.”

Would you wear this hat?

I read a political essay on KQED, the local NPR affiliate, the other day, so naturally as soon as it aired I started reading the comments. They were all fine, except for one snarky one, to which I posted a snappy rejoinder. Bring it on, baby.

So that I wouldn’t feel completely egocentric, I read some of the other essays. They were all thoughtful. The one after mine was by a sophomore in high school who said that in the results-oriented world he inhabits the quest for knowledge for its own sake takes a back seat to careers that make concrete contributions. He's working hard to try to be a doctor or engineer, someone who could see the fruits of his labor in real time. He said he wouldn’t mind making big money too, something he thinks is not possible in pure science.

From many of the comments on his essay, you’d have thought he had revealed a fool-proof way to cheat on the SAT. He was accused of being greedy and of “gaming the system.” He was told by one commenter, in what almost seemed like a threat, that the commenter had friends on the admissions committees of all the Ivy League schools and the boy would never get in.

What the hell! This is a sixteen year old kid who is working hard to get good grades and hoping to go to a good college and succeed in the all-American way, and who, by the way, has taken time out to write an essay for NPR, to join the public discourse on education and its goals. And he's attacked by adult males. I just don’t understand it. Why the vitriol? It makes you wonder whether life has disappointed them to the point that they just can’t see past their cynicism.

Then I leave that website and see a news item about two fourteen year old girls in Minnesota who committed suicide together, apparently because they could see no other escape from the bullying they were subjected to by some of their classmates. OMG, as they might have said.

Bullying by schoolmates is not new. It’s cruel and we need to do the best we can to stop it and to give kids a safe place to go when it happens to them. But bullying of kids by adults is right up there with sociopathic serial killing, as far as I am concerned. And that’s what those comments on that poor boy's NPR essay amounted to: bullying.

Kids think in extremes. That’s why they come up with all the good ideas. And plenty of bad ones too. Trying to corral them into our cultural and intellectual framework like they were domestic pack animals running wild is wrong. Let them run, for God’s sake. Most of them will end up in the pen with the rest of us soon enough. If we’re lucky, a few will discover greener pastures for us all.

A Visit From Dad

My father came to visit me this afternoon. I was sitting in a coffee shop, staring off into space, thinking about what to write, half-listening to the two girls behind me talking about their boyfriends, when he came walking in the door. The sun was glaring off the windshield of a car in the parking lot and at first I thought it was a trick of the light, but it was him. He looked just the same, a little older but not much, and maybe even that was more a failure of my imagination than an actual change in him. He pulled up a chair and sat down like he thought I would be expecting him.

What do you say to a man you haven’t seen in so long? A man you worshiped as a boy, but who turned out to be someone different than the father who raised you. Not different to you, but to others. Different in a way that was not so much hard to understand as hard to accept.

“Hey,” I said. I thought I might look a little flustered. “You should have whistled.”

We had this family whistle, passed on from grandfather to father to son, three notes---up, down, up---like you might hear from a songbird. When one of us whistled from across the golf course, other golfers would think it was a mockingbird or a dove. Only we knew what it was. A love song.

“How are you hitting them?” he said.

“I don’t get out much anymore. I miss playing with you.”

“I’m thinking of getting new sticks. Something lighter. What do you think?

“Maybe.”

“How’s your mom?”

“Dead.”

I thought he might look away at my bluntness, but he didn’t. I don’t know why I thought he might. He never had.

“She made it another thirty-five years,” I said.

He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Camels. Unfiltered. Coffin nails.

“You can’t smoke in here.”

He shook a cigarette out of the pack and thumped one end on the table to pack down the tobacco. I wondered if he still had the silver zippo lighter I’d given him. He held the cigarette between his fingers but made no move to light it.

“You were pretty tough on her,” I said.

He just looked at me. He had this way of looking at you with just his eyes. His head would be almost bowed and he would look up, as if from reading, and all you could see would be his eyes. They were blue and cold. He wasn’t cold, at least I didn’t think so, but his eyes were, or not his eyes, exactly, but the unrelenting way he looked at you.

“She wouldn’t even come to the hospital at the end,” I said.

He worried his unlit cigarette, touched the end of it to his lips and then lowered it.

“Do you know why?” I said.

“She was in a pretty bad way then.”

“Susan. That’s why. Susan.”

“Susan was a good doctor.”

“That had nothing to do with it.”

“What happened to Presenting Italy?”

“I told the importer we couldn’t take shipment. I told her you were dead.”

“Did you go back to Florence?"

“I took Meg to Harry’s bar to meet you. We had those little cheese sandwiches. We toasted you with Campari tonics.”

“Would I like her?”

“We’ll never know, thank God.”

He laughed that way he did, a series of quick little sneezes. I always thought it was a cool way to laugh, even emulated it myself when I was a boy. It sounded like a pig routing around in garbage.

“You probably don’t remember this, but when you couldn’t talk anymore, you had me hold up a board of letters and you pointed to them to spell out what you wanted to say.”

He watched me steadily. I remember watching my own children that way when I thought I might know what was coming and wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it.

“The last thing you spelled was ‘Jesus.’”

He cocked his head slightly. I thought I saw a flicker of a smile, but he was sucking air through the little gap in his front teeth the way he used to, and maybe it was just the way he set his mouth to do that. His lips were pale.

I waited, but he didn’t speak. He never went to church. I never did either. I wanted to be just like him. I wanted to ask him now if he had found religion in those last hours. If he had seen Jesus. If he had asked him for forgiveness. Of course, Jesus had nothing to do with it. It was my mother he should have asked for forgiveness. Not just for Susan. Not even for all the other women I found out about gradually over the years after he was gone, the ones who came around looking lost, looking like they needed someone to whom to confess. I don’t know if they saw my father in me. I don’t look like him.

He said he had to go to the bathroom. I pointed to the corner where it was and he got up and went there. He was wearing a grey Harris Tweed sport coat, even though it was very warm outside.

I wondered what he would say about my mother when he returned. He had always made me feel something was wrong with her, that that was why she got so emotional, why she had to go off to that hospital for a few months the summer I was fourteen.

She lived the last thirty-five years of her life alone, growing stronger each year. By the time she died, she was the mother I remembered, the one who drove me to Florida where my dad would be stationed in the Navy. We rode in an old Dodge and the windows were all open, the radio playing loud, and she was singing. I was five. I kept holding my little blue woolen cap out the window, watching it flap in the wind. It blew out of my hand and she stopped and went back for it and brushed off the dirt and gave it back to me. We got going again and I held it out the window. She laughed and told me she wouldn't stop again. It blew out of my hand, or maybe I let it go, to test her, to test myself. She didn’t stop. She didn't scold me. She smiled at me and patted my bare head, as if to reassure me that she understood my need and respected it, even if she could not indulge it.

When Dad didn’t come back after a while, I went to the restroom and knocked on the door. No answer. I knocked again, harder. I was wondering if he was all right. I called out to him, tested the door. It was unlocked. No one was in there. The bathroom smelled like cigarette smoke, I thought, but that could have just been my imagination.