I Looked for My Father

I looked for my father in the cold nights when the shadows scared me and the moon was of no mind to provide any comfort.  I looked for him in the crowds of Dads scooping up their boys, giving their girls rides on their broad, powerful shoulders.  I looked for my father coming down the avenue, coming home to me and my brother and my mother because that was the only place in the world he really wanted to be.  I looked for my father.  They told me that he wasn’t lost…but I couldn’t find him.

I looked for my father in the fragile hearts of my uncles, in the hopeful eyes of my mother’s lovers and would-be lovers, in the smiles of other fathers who stood by their boys and kept safe their girls, I looked for my father in the glances of strangers and the attentions of wise men who sometimes became mentors.  I looked for my father.  They told me wasn’t really lost…but I really couldn’t find him.

I looked for my father…in the guise of being the husband he wouldn’t be, in the love of being father to children I didn’t create, in the bittersweet joy of holding the children of the children I didn’t create.  I even looked for my father in the eyes of my father…but I didn’t find him.

Outside

Outside…in the morning moonlight…in the warm winter sunlight…in the flow of humanity making their way in the workaday world that surrounds…standing outside, looking in, wondering how to bridge the gap.  Wondering, in fact, if he wants to bridge the gap (of course he does…everybody wants to be inside the shelter…he tells himself he doesn’t as proof against the feeling that he never really will.)

As a child he knew that he wasn’t the center of the universe…but that didn’t stop him from imagining he was…didn’t stop him from puzzling over what exactly other people had to do when he wasn’t there to see them. 

As a man he knew that he wasn’t the center of the universe…hasn’t ever been the center of anyone’s universe; but that didn’t stop him from longing, however foolishly, that he could be…even if only for a brief season.  It’s a gentler, egocentric madness.

Outside…standing outside the fire…standing outside the world…shielding himself with words and music and an abundance of self-pity and unvoiced doubt…standing outside, looking in, wondering if he really wants to bridge the gap.  It’s a foolish, wholly unoriginal madness.

Thanksgiving

I don’t want to think about her today…I don’t want to think about her sitting in her kitchen, her face stoic but her eyes bright and mischievous, teaching me how to clean the green beans from her garden while she told me stories from her colorful past.  I don’t want to think about her laughing quietly and winking every now and again to seal the pact of love and affection and secrecy between us…I don’t want to think about her vaguely smoky voice calling me by the name no one but she was allowed to use.  I don’t want to think about her at all.

And I don’t want to think about him today…my greatest champion and my most pernicious foe…I don’t want to think about the times we laughed and the times we cried and the times we shared secrets and the time we fought like…well, like Cain and Abel…I don’t want to think about his theft of pieces of my youth…I don’t want to think about his unrealized potential seeping away on a cold, lonely street in Los Angeles.  No, I don’t want to think about him at all.

I don’t want to think about my boyhood friends…one lost to time, forever wearing his silly grin and his almost gaudy blue suit as we left Louis Pasteur Junior High School and spent one last perfect afternoon together before parting, unbeknownst to us, forever; one lost after Alexander Hamilton High School turned us loose on the unsuspecting world and found…fleetingly…smiling with his family in a photo sent from a distant shore…before being lost forever to the arms of the blessed Universe.  I don’t want to think about them at all.

And Lord knows I don’t want to think about my baby girl…tiny and inquisitive and quick to smile whenever she saw me…my sweet girl who grew into a troubled woman, a lost and angry soul who I felt, foolishly, that I’d abandoned when life took me from my hometown to another town down the coast (her 5 year old self had said, quite seriously, that when she grew up she was going to marry me and take care of me.)  I don’t want to think about how her heart failed her and took her back to the light from whence we all came.  I don’t want to think about her at all.

I certainly don’t want to think about my best friend and most stalwart companion, in my life for too brief a season and in my life forever and a day…I don’t want to think about the sad, brilliant soul who lost himself in bottles because life was sometimes much too hard to face…I don’t want to think about the girl who gave her strength and comfort to us even though she was losing a battle with an invader in her own body…I don’t want to think about any of them. 

I don’t want to think about them at all.

And yet I do.  I do think about them.  I do want to think about them.  I want to think about them and all of the others who’ve come into my life and left, lingering indelibly even in their passing.  I want to think about them.  I do think about them.  And I give love and blessings and gratitude and humble acceptance of their grace.

I think about them…and give bittersweet thanks.   I miss them…now and always…and I give love and blessings and humble acceptance…and heartfelt thanks.

Four Crushes (The Songs Remember When)

When I was a boy I was shy, aloof, fat, anxious, and impatient with my peer group…not the best combination for social success in the emotional cesspool that high school could be. I was also cursed and blessed with a vivid imagination, a facility for written expression, and a yearning poet’s heart that, in ways both naively expansive and painfully insular, wanted to love and be loved.

Not surprisingly I had crushes that both elevated and devastated my foolish romantic’s heart and soul. Each one had its own soundtrack...songs forever identified with specific people.

Back in those days…the halcyon days padding the halls of Louis Pasteur Junior High and Alexander Hamilton High School (Los Angeles liked to dedicate their schools to dead white men…a function of the times they were built rather than any overt racism…to the point where a tongue-in-cheek suggestion to change the name of another school to honor Marilyn Monroe rather than James Monroe, a seemingly reasonable notion to me given where we lived, was shot down with vehement disdain by the powers that be)…back in those childhood days I carried torches that warmed and seared me to the core.

From the perspective of age I look back and see that some of my crushes from that time…four of them in particular…added more color to the tapestry of my life than I had previously consciously acknowledged.

Those four…two older, two among my peers…linger with me in ways I would never be arrogant enough as to believe that I linger with them.

They all seemed to like me. They all saw me as harmless. They all loomed in my head with more vividness than the reality of our acquaintance should have allowed for. They still do.

One died suddenly while I was still in the process of becoming a man.

One I willingly surrendered my virginity to in an act that meant much more to me than it did to them.

One shared what turned out to be final goodbyes with me on the last day of our High School life in the parking lot of Hamilton early one morning after having spent the previous hours indulging a last gasp of childhood at Disneyland, the place where childhood never ends.

One never saw my crush because I was too scared to really let it show…it was, of course, a time when I imagined that rejection would literally kill me… and because they had a crush of their own that was not me.

Those four…one gone, two hopefully living well out in our sweet old world somewhere, one in the circle of my acquaintance once and again…none of them knowing what an indelible impact they made on my journey from then to now…linger in my soul, memory making the music of their souls ever sweeter in the golden realm of affectionate nostalgia.

It was and is a gentler, sweeter madness...the songs, like my heart, remember when...and I thank them all for that.

...one small step...

40 years ago the 13-year-old me sat in the living room of my aunt and uncle's house in Carson, California (they had a big color television and we...my mother, my brother, and I... made the half-hour trek from our house near Culver City because of that)...I was cross-legged on the floor watching, with wide-eyed wonder, grainy pictures that had been sent from beyond our world.

Answering the challenge of a President who did not live to see the deed, two men from our planet were setting foot on Luna...our planet's faithful satellite...its bright and storied Moon.

It was amazing...and all these years later I am still amazed. Watching Neil Armstrong and "Buzz" Aldrin on the surface of the moon made it seem, to imaginative boys like I was and to just about everyone else experiencing it, like anything...ANYTHING...was possible.

I imagined then that we would be spreading out into the solar system and beyond...boldly going where...well, you know...

We don't have colonies on the moon or people walking on Mars or flying cars or anything of those kind of things we might have imagined on that summer's day in 1969...though, as I write this on a computer more powerful than some of the ones used to plot the course to and from the moon, there are 13 brave souls working on a space station in Earth orbit so we're not too badly...but it is still utterly delightful to remember that thrilling day when brave Mr. Armstrong took one small step...

Making April Smile (a Valentine's Day remembrance)

When I was 11 I gave a Valentine to April Brown. I wrote a little note in the card but I didn’t sign it…at the time I was much too shy for that…but I imagined that she would know that it was from me. If she did she never showed it…I’m not sure she knew that I was alive (my empathy for Charlie Brown and his unrequited passion for the Little Red Haired Girl was never so powerful)…but the pleased and puzzled little smile the blossomed unbidden on her face when she looked at the little card and read its inscription was reward enough for me.

It was, in fact, an electric moment…a moment made more powerful, perhaps, by the clandestine nature of the situation…and in my shy silence I was happy that I had made her smile.

April got a fair number of valentines…she was a pretty girl with an easy smile and the novelty of still being a new student in our school…but she kept putting mine on top. I saw her glancing around the room doubtlessly trying to decide who she wanted her secret admirer to be.

At the end of the school day, she carefully put her little valentines…mine on top…into her notebook and went off happily with the clique of popular girls she had effortlessly become a part of since her arrival. I walked home humming…some wonderful old Motown song…and feeling both happy (for having made April smile) and disappointed (with myself…for not having had the courage to sign the card.)

Still…on balance… it was a lovely Valentine’s Day.

Mary

Mary wanted to be a superwoman. Well, we were just children when we knew each other so I guess she wanted to be a supergirl. My friend Mary was a beautiful tomboy…with long dark hair and dark sparkling eyes (their light as often guarded and pensive as it was bright and smiling) and smooth tan skin that paid proud testimony to her Mexican heritage…just one of the guys who didn’t seem to realize that she was well into the process of blossoming into a breathtaking woman.

I, of course, had an unspoken crush on her. Nothing, I convinced myself, would come of it…I was a year younger than her, not to mention shy and chubby, and she…she was a coltish goddess…but I luxuriated in the intoxication of “loving” her with the silent passion of the young would-be poet that I was.

My family…my mother, my brother, and I…and Mary’s family…her mother, her stepfather (though, to be honest, I’m not sure they were actually married), her older sisters, and her little brother…lived in a duplex in South-Central Los Angeles (back then a great neighborhood, we were within walking distance of USC, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, some amazing museums, and a big library.) My family was upstairs, hers was downstairs.

Mary often hung out with us guys…joining us on our “adventures” and actively sharing in our boyish dares. I still vividly remember that day that she took the dare to leap off the roof of the duplex down to the lawn; the roof slanted down and the distance wasn’t that far but it still seemed like a bad idea to me. I shared my misgivings with Mary but she just gave me a jaunty wink and told me not to fret so much.

I remember Mary up on the edge of the roof, hesitating while looking down while the other guys egged her on. And then she jumped and for a painfully long moment time stopped as I watched her plummet to the lawn with gangly grace. Mary hit the ground with a dull thump and then she was still. The guys went still and quiet. I raced to her side as her sister came out of the house to see what was going on. She wasn’t really hurt… she just had the wind knocked out of her. I helped Mary to her feet while her sister screamed at her for doing something so stupid and screamed at us for encouraging her to do it.

Mary, for her part, winked at me and whispered…”told you I could do it”. I just nodded, loving her all the more while, at the same time, wanting to protect her from her impulse to take dares in an effort to be one of the “guys”. Mary’s sister sent her into the house and sent us guys away.

Mary’s family moved out of the duplex and my family moved across town into our own house (a house my mother still lives in all these years later.) Eventually the two families lost touch.

I know, without a doubt, that Mary turned into a beautiful woman. I hope, with all my heart, that Mary found someone who appreciated her…that she had the beautiful babies that, in her rare reflective moments, she admitted to wanting to have and raise and love with all of her expansive heart.

I’m not sure why Mary has come to mind of late…it’s been a long while since I thought of her so vividly…but I hope that she is indeed happy and well and fulfilled wherever life has taken her.

Mrs. Zimmerman

I was not a very good student in High School. I am neither proud nor ashamed of this, it is simply a fact. I made good grades (I graduated “with honors”) but I really didn’t push myself as hard as I could have. Mostly, however arrogant it might sound, I was bored. Mostly, however foolish it might sound now, I was itching to be done with school and childhood and get to the promised land of adulthood. Being a grownup, I found, was okay but not nearly as magical as it seemed when I wasn’t one…but that’s the way of things when we are young and running too fast to not be young.

My High School (dear old Alexander Hamilton High in a western corner of Los Angeles) was culturally diverse…blacks and whites in abundance with a good number of children of Latin and Asian descent making the school a racial stewpot; a good percentage of the white kids were Jewish as we were reminded anytime a Jewish holiday coincided with a school day (lots of filmstrips and independent reading time on those days because so many of our classmates were away and teachers didn’t want to go over the same material twice)…but full of the same schoolyard politics (cliques and gossip and the like) as any other school.

I found all of that political stuff tedious beyond words and I ignored it as much as I could. I sought out isolated corners of the sprawling campus to read and be to myself but I rarely had them to myself as a stalwart circle of friends…social outcasts, by choice or by happenstance, like myself…gathered and we created an inclusive clique all our own.

Our principal…a diminutive silver haired, eagle eyed woman named Mrs. Jimenez…ruled Hamilton with an iron fist in a velvet glove, easily alternating between nurturing grandmother and unrelenting tyrant as required.

I did the homework for one class while half-listening to teachers talking in another class so that I didn’t have to lug books on the half-hour walk from the school to my house any more than I had to.

I had a small circle of loyal friends (a state of being that continues to this day) and secret crushes that are part and parcel of the existence of a teenaged boy (I think Gina knew that I was smitten with her but I don’t think she ever took me seriously.)

And I had Mrs. Zimmerman. I was blessed to be taught by several motivated and motivating teachers in my school days…Mrs. Levy in the 3^rd grade, Mr. Daniels in the 5^th grade, Mr. McIntosh in the 6^th grade, Mr. Edwards and Mrs. Allen in Junior High, and Mrs. Zimmerman. Mrs. Zimmerman was an English teacher and she kind of took me under her wing and taught much about the one thing that did really engage me back then…that being writing, of course.

I ended up taking 5 or 6 classes with Mrs. Zimmerman over the course of my 3 years at Hamilton and she always challenged me to dig deeper, strive harder, to put my reality into the things I wrote. More than any other teacher I ever had I gave my all to reach for the bar that she kept raising higher…and I loved her for that.

I never told her that, of course…teenaged boys don’t have the words to tell teachers how much they appreciate making them reach for the fullest potential they can…but I hope that she knew it somehow just the same.