Memory Lane

Metaphor became reality for yours truly the last two days as I returned to a place where I spent high school through young adulthood. (Okay, I'm asking you, dear readers, to accept without close examination the premise that I've actually become an adult. Please, just walk with me.)

I flew to San Jose to attend a family funeral, and spent the evening before with a wonderful friend of forty years and her daughter and her daughter's  best buddies. The into-the-wee-hours talk about where we were, where we are now and how we each got here was a blizzard of old remembrances, dawning understanding and nodding gap-filling. This meeting became a soul-fulfilling, thrilling adventure at the confluence of "where did you go" and "you've always been right here." It was truly remarkable and life affirming.

The next day found me attending the funeral of a family member whose affect on my life was sometimes positive, sometimes less so, but always profound. Leaving my GPS forgotten on the kitchen counter at home made me a last-minute arrival and allowed me to sit in the very last row and I unintentionally but thankfully assumed the role of observer. It was revealing and frequently wrenching to listen to the accounts of folks who knew a person much different from the one I knew. In the end, a life is defined by an amalgam of partially obscured views and the best path is simply to allow each their own legend according to the memories they hold.

Neither of these meetings is the raison d'etre for this blog entry, although without the framing perspective provided by loving reconnection on the one hand and ambivalent goodbye on the other, there would have been little reason to write today.

It was on the drive from Soquel to Morgan Hill that I found myself assailed by a flood of disparate memories. Bouyed by the unabashed joy at a friendship confirmed and the dread anticipation of a relationship that could now never truly be resolved, my mind was opened to the past in a way that was quite unexpected. I found my psyche flooding with acknowledgements of formative events that until now I hadn't realized were so.

I wouldn't have thought a 20-odd mile drive along a long-familiar, twisting mountain highway would be so cathartic. But as I drove along, the road became the thread linking old memories to the me I've become. I've travelled these curves with girlfriends and buddies, on the way to work and relaxation. I have driven this route possibly hundreds but at least many scores of times.

There's Cat's where I spent so many hours watching Lindy sing and across from which Dave's mom died one careless night. And Mountain Charlie's where my buddy Dan won the World's Belly Bucking Championship and where I was spotted by my friend Joe and called to the stage to sing Lazy Bones with him and then sang Lush Life for reasons I didn't understand at the time and then walked out through a silent crowd who somehow sensed that this would be the last time I'd ever sing Vala's anthem. Or the Wine Cellar where Bill and I pretended to be lounge singers (ahem!).

The esses remind me of the eternal argument over which is THE Dead Man's Curve. And driving to Pat's wedding where I would share the best man slot with a six foot blow up Gumby and a moth eaten, stuffed lion named Kippy. And to lots of places but nowhere in particular on Steve's last night before going off to join the Air Force. And to Summit to watch the show Sherree and Tom directed with the kids of Loma Prieta.

I rode shotgun with the careful Anne and the terror-inducing Bill. And then again with Bill the day before his wedding when what he needed most was a friend who would shut up and drive. This road took me to the camp the Ee-girls had set up at Sunset and the overnight solitude and white noise of Red, White and Blue.

The Alameda overpass that I can't pass under without wondering what was the last disappointment that led the guy to pull himself out of his wheelchair to topple to momentary but anonymous fame as the suicide of the day. And the perc ponds where people would raced radio controlled model boats. And Lake Vasona, where Dave and I went unintentionally sailing in the Volvo.

The tilt-up industrial park where I worked after the Navy is still there, as is the brooding Lexington and the turnoff to Roaring Camp. And of course the way to Highway 9, where I went with Sherree for an ill-advised hike without supplies on a hot day that led to heat exhaustion and a mad dash to find something, anything to drink and all the time frantic in the knowledge that I had broken Tom Young's younger daughter but more immediately, had failed in my boyfriend duty to protect the last person in the world I'd want to hurt.

I remember the drive back to my Mare Island base when I bet Steve five bucks I could open the bottle of soda without a church key before we reached the 101 overpass and at the last moment tossing it over the side and proclaiming, "Well, it's open now!" And seeing the Lost World dinosaurs and wondering but never bothering to go look, becoming one of thousands who thus consigned it to financial ruin.

Santa's Village is still there - sort of and as something else. As are the memories of innumerable friendships. Sort of and now, perhaps something else. And there was the awful, solitary drive the night that I realized she was with someone else now and that it was time to think about moving on. I did that drive twice, years apart and in response to rejection from two different women. It hurt both times and it helped both times. The highway was my confidante and mentor in ways I guess I never understood until just now. And maybe not now.

And the time my agent decided it would be a hoot to tell me she'd wangled a dinner invitation at my favorite sci-fi writer's home in Bonny Doon and driving there wondering what to say and finally practicing opening remarks until I was confident and the confidence flooding out through my toes when the woman of the house made clear there was no dinner party planned for that evening and "What did you say your name was?" and then the bewildered acceptance that I'd been had and the desire to turn and flee until the smirking woman asked "Did Elizabeth put you up to this?" and I knew and wondered which way to turn until this God-sent woman said well, I was there and I might as well come in for a bite  and later that night, getting home and realizing I could not recall so much as a word of a two-hour conversation or a yard of my drive back along 17.

17. It was a road and a destination and the freedom to have no destination in mind.

This highway connected me to so much and the memories of it to much more. Memories distorted by time and hopes, triumphs and disappointments. Memories that may or may not be factual but are nonetheless perfectly true. I wonder who that boy-man was who drove those twenty-odd miles all those times.

I may never really know.

The Christmas Lady

My folks are long gone from this life and I think of each of them under certain conditions or at particular times of year. I think of my Dad at work a lot, because the work ethic is something I think I inherited from him. I also think of him when I'm fixing something around the house. He had the home repair skills of an aardvark, but he tried. He would have been proud to see me hanging drywall, sweating copper or rewiring circuits.

I also inherited from him a curiosity about the things around me. When we'd be driving the highways and byways on our annual road trips, Dad always needed to understand the story behind the things we'd drive past. You couldn't get him to stop to pee until your eyes were actually yellow, but he couldn't pass the World's Largest Open Pit Mine without stopping to take the tour. He loved touring work sites and learning things and what he'd learned on trips would become part of his patter later on. He was also sort of the keeper of the McDermott family legend, alongside his sister, my Aunt Mary. I think of him a lot during my family or business travels. To the extent that I'm able to spin a yarn, I owe that skill to my Dad.

At Christmas, thoughts invariably turn to Mom. She was indeed the Christmas Lady. When we were small, I remember the assembly and decorating of the tree as a multi-day event. Before a single ornament found its way aboard, every branch was tied up to the trunk with green string, lest they droop once loaded. Then, she'd apply the strings of lights, patiently winding around and around to achieve a homogenous look throughout. That consumed the first evening.

The next evening, we'd put on the ornaments. Each child had one ball with their name spelled out in glitter and only that child was allowed to hang that particular ball. Mom was a hard taskmaster when it came to the overall look of the tree. Hanging too many balls on the lower branches unsettled her sense of balance, bringing timely and specific correction. Too many to one side or the other was also dealt with lovingly but firmly.

After we'd gone to bed - and only after we'd gone safely to bed - Mom would go back over the tree, moving, adjusting, trimming and tying as necessary to yield the overall look she found presentable. Only then would she consider the tree ready for the piece de resistance - tinseling.

Tinsel was the crowning glory of Mom's tree decorating approach. Doing it well was considered a sign of intelligence and a deeply caring soul. Doing it poorly was tantamount to a high crime. Woe betide the child or Dad who put too much on one branch ("You're clumping it!") or draped it in any orientation but straight up and down ("Have you ever seen an icicle grow sideways?").

This probably sounds very compulsive and even overbearing but it wasn't. Not really. We all went along because we knew that when we were done, we'd be looking at a thing of beauty. And year after year, that's precisely what came to pass.

  Mom's compulsion about Christmas perfection also extended to wrapping technique. When decorating  a gift, the paper had to lay perfectly flat with better-than-hospital corners and tape perfectly applied, exactly parallel to the edge of the paper. Bows were largely homemade from the ribbon we bought in econo spools. By the time we were ten, each of us could wrap a present to military specifications, including curling the ends of the ribbon using the thumb-against-scissor-edge method.

Gifts were something else. The best Christmases were those that involved handmade gifts from "Santa." Like the Matchbox scale whole city my brother and I played with for several years until Godzilla (our cat who likely wasn't aware of the role in which she'd been cast) chewed off the ends of all the telephone poles and batted the fake bushes to smithereens. Or the clothing she sewed for my sisters' dolls, the best-dressed little pseudo humans in Lake Hills.

Santa did misstep once or twice. Like the time "he" brought me a complete football outfit. My parents were confused when they found out I'd given away the whole uniform to a friend who actually liked football except for the helmet, which my brother and I used as a stand-in for an astronaut's headgear. But it was easy to forgive these occasional fauxs pas when you'd show up with an unexpected friend for dinner and magically, a perfectly appropriate gift - wrapped and labeled - would be presented to the unannounced guest as though it was nothing out of the ordinary. I never quite figured out how she pulled that off but she did, again and again.

My mom died years ago. But before she passed away, she passed on a certain reverence for approaching Christmas as a crusade. We don't follow all her edicts - our tree is "fake," in a nod to my allergy to spider mites. And the Bellevue McDermotts have established our own tradition of hanging and filling Chirstmas stockings, which was never part of Mom's game plan.

Even so, she's right here with us at least once each year. In the perfectly wrapped gifts and the big late-afternoon feast. In many of the decorations that have found their way onto our shelves and tables. In the tradition of buying gifts for a needy family from one of the "sharing trees" at the local mall, we respect Mom's determination that come hell or high water, every kid gets a gift at Christmas.

I suppose much of this seems fairly passe. Many families share most of these traditions and I'd guess lots of you look on your own mothers as a Christmas original. And of course, we're all right.

For me, Christmas came each year in the person of my Mom. So, you'll excuse me if for this one day, she's the most important person in my world.

Happy Holidays to each and all of you from Marion's baby boy!

Christmas list

Things your daughters give you when everyone knows this might be the last "family Christmas" for awhile:

·         A truly wonderful picture collage

·         A secret note describing what you mean to them

·         Really special ornaments that only you and they know how special

·         Software to convert all the years of VHS to DVD (score!!!)

·         Unabashed smiles

Things your wife gives you after (going on) twenty-five years of wedded bliss:

·         A pill sorter

·         A soap caddy

·         A pot clip to hold the mixing spoon

·         A box of Bandaids (seriously, Bandaids!)

·         A knowing smirk

Trust me, I could not have made this up.

Happiness list

Happiness is…

1.       …walking through a mall behind your adult daughters and they’re holding hands.

2.       …dogs worn out from the cold weather so they spend most of their time inside sleeping.

3.       …the salespeople who were canvassing our neighborhood as we drove up turned out to have already stopped at our house and they didn’t come back.

4.       …Christmas lights!!!!!

5.       …two weeks of leave.

6.       …when your doctor demands you lose some weight and the number she prescribes is WA-A-A-A-A-AY less than you’d already figured you needed to lose.

7.       …new neighbor has been there several weeks and does not appear to have any annoying neighbor characteristics (cross fingers).

8.       …between business travel and daughters coming home, I’ve managed to see zero sports or political news for over a week.

9.       …Daughter One introducing me to Big Bang Theory; I think I have a new show!

10.   …KAYAKING!!!!

11.   …hangin’ wit’ me baby!

Cycle of life

Okay, so my last post (phrases including Eugene) was a bit of an inside joke with Daughter Two. I'd apologize to the rest of you if it hadn't been so much darn fun to torture the daughter. Which brings us to the topic de jour.

There are definite phases in the life cycle of a Dad. Somewhere between clueless first time parent and clueless, frumpy old geezer, we go through stages in our development. And they all revolve around either the parent or the child being made to appear or feel like a dufus.

When the children first arrive, they have but to lay there to convert otherwise witty, urbane adults into doting parents (read: dufae or would the plural be dufum?). I know that I thought spit bubbles were cute when extruded from the innocent lips of baby mine. I saw a wino producing precisely the same bubbles and in far more interesting colors this afternoon and 'cute' was nowhere to be seen in my thought balloon.

Mary and I thrilled to each new achievement by our babies, even those that are embarrassing to admit today. I can't imagine what led us to believe a blown out diaper was an object of amusement. Also can't imagine what synapses were misfiring in the old noggin to make me find mirth in strained pea garp.

But time goes by and the parents recover some modicum of dignity only to shift the mantle of dufusness to the kids long about kindergarten time. Kids at that age will wear the dufusest , most outlandish colors or pattern of colors. I have proof, I have photos. They'll even do it to themselves, concocting hairdos - frequently with the aid of a licking dog - that make our parental guts explode trying to hold back the guffaws.

There's a pause during the middle school years when the kids struggle to be cool and the parents struggle just to keep them from imploding. Most middle school kids are pretty sure they're the biggest dufuses in history and tragically, many of them are at least in serious contention for the title . It's a brutal in-between time.  But you know life will get better eventually and mostly, you concentrate on convincing them of that life fact.

Just when you think the whole family might walk off a cliff together, along comes high school! Parents no longer care about being cool to their own PTA friends. No-o-o-o! For some reason known but to Yoda, parents of high-schoolers struggle to be cool to their children's friends!!! It would be tragic if it wasn't so damn comical. The duficity meter goes off the scale as parents pretend to understand sagging jeans and coal miner eyeliner. We totally ignore the fact that the minivan that made us the cool parent who always chaperoned field trips in grade school, that very conveyance now marks us as irretrievably, insufferably, painfully, stupefyingly uncool. Prisoners in dufusdom.

The college / first real job years represent a truce as both sides hold their collective breaths. Then...wait for it...

Yes, the former kids become first time parents and the cycle begins anew. Which is really bad news for the now-grandparents, who can only make room in the dufe-cycle for their newborn grandkids by themselves vacating the playing field, sliding off the merry-go-round into the dreaded zone of geezerdom.

I am still in the slide zone. Okay, I'm hanging on with bleeding nails, but still there. Neither Daughter One nor Daughter Two has produced offspring so I hang on to my position on the field of honor. The Daughters and I battle over who's the current holder of the Dufus Cup. My absolute lack of ego when it comes to doing things embarrassing in public give me a slight edge.

Anyway, I don't blow bubbles yet.

I think.

A list for all you Eugene-lovers out there

or, Eleven More Ways to Torture Daughter Two

Words found using "Eugene" in a Google search:

1) ..., OR

2) ... software

3) ... Mirman

4) ... Pilcher

5) ... Register-Guard

6) ... Cernan

7) ... Schmeigel of the MIT Schmeigels

8) ... O'Neill

9) ...Swim and Tennis Club

10) Actors' Cabaret of...

11) ...Folklore Society

A totally unbiased theatrical review

Mary and I went to Daughter One’s last Red Curtain Revue at college last night and I saw a completely new person in many ways.  She was a dancing, singing, emoting entertainment machine and I loved watching her. But I always love watching her. She’s my kid and she’s very talented.

But aside from her on-stage performance, there was this new persona, something I’d suspected was there but hadn’t actually seen: Daughter One as director. She staged several of the numbers and they were the numbers that showed the most inventiveness in the show. She chose the right people and played to their strengths, providing the sold out audience with truly a peak experience.

The Whipped Into Shape number was just something to behold and when she had the whole cast to work with, her production number of Freak Flag was tour-ready.  I didn’t know Be My Friend from “Edges” before last night and Daughter One’s rendition has made it a new favorite number.

Perhaps you’ll see my daughter perform some day. If you’d seen her work product last night, you’d hope for that day to come soon.  When she says “Let me entertain you,” she delivers on that promise.  

I know, proud Dad crowing about his daughter. And you’ve no reason not to suspect that I’m being a bit more hyperbolic than the performance deserved. And you’d be wrong.

I’ve always been honest with my daughter about her performing because it’s a tough road she’s chosen, not one that you want your beloved daughter to walk down unprepared for reality. I’ve told her when I was less than blown away, when she needed to tweak this or that or choose a better number. She’s come to expect honesty from me and my reviews have not always been easy to provide or to receive. So she knows that when I say the following, I mean it:

Angela, you’re so ready. So, go give the world what you have to offer.

Apologia

On an average day, I am accosted by three or four beggars who apparently believe that some portion of any monies I might have about my person can reasonably be classified as “extra.” As in, do I have extra change? Yeah, that’s why I work every day – to keep a surfeit of “extra” money, in case I’m asked.

Yesterday, I faced a new wrinkle. One of the “Occupy Seattle” denizens actually asked me if I had “funds for the cause.”  I declined making a donation and hurried past, not being entirely certain I could make the 5:06 and not wanting to stand in the rain waiting for the next limo – er, bus! I mean, bus!

The Saviour of Society who’d requested a grant apparently found my response too abrupt and decided I needed to be brought down a peg in front of all my fellow just-got-off-work-and-in-a-hurry-to-get-home-out-of-the-weather-ites. In a voice loud enough to carry from Pike to Pine and back again, she asked, “Don’t you care about humanity? Human rights? We’re the 99!”

I didn’t turn around but I continued to hear her exhortations as I crossed Pine and turned West toward the bus stop. Several of the folks who witnessed the exchange broke out in chortles and one lady said, “Ooh, I think you might have upset her!”

I went on my way and hadn’t thought about the encounter until I saw an article about one of the Occupy X groups today. And I thought, perhaps I really should have been more receptive to her plea. Perhaps I owe her an apology. And everyone knows the best apology is a public apology, so here goes.

Dear young 99 percent lady:

I apologize for being too abrupt in my refusal to contribute to your cause last week. I must have been distracted by the freezing rain and the fact that I’d just put in nine hours working as an advocate for persons living with disabilities and I failed to take the time to give you money to support your more important pursuits. I don’t know how I could have been so unfeeling.

I truly am sorry that you felt ignored. For the fact that you and your compatriots have not been able to make any headway in changing the world, I am also sorry.

I regret that most of us have to make a living and thus have utterly failed to pay you the attention you so obviously feel you deserve.  For being less than receptive to your yelling and drum-beating, I apologize.

I am sorry that the world is not fair and I accept my share of the responsibility for having failed thus far to right all of society’s wrongs.

For the imbalance of trade, I am penitent. I take the blame for plague, crop failure and fat people in stretch pants.

Sad-eyed doggies are almost entirely my fault, as are drought in Africa, tsunamis and the duck-billed lips that have of late befallen so many aging celebrities.

For lying politicians and the decline of serious journalism, I ask your forgiveness. Also for tornadoes, floods and teenagers wearing pants that don’t cover their butts.

I am burdened by the knowledge that I’ve utterly failed to eradicate cellulite, crabgrass or computer dialers. And I lie awake nights tortured by guilt over the proliferation of ’reality’ television programming focused on pawn shops, bounty hunters or brain-stunted idiots named Snookie.

Had I only paused to think, I might have offered my abject apologies for global warming, corporate greed and the fact that sometimes, crooks get away with, well, being crooks.

For these and so many, many other failures of civilization, let me offer my official mea maxima culpa. Truly, would that I could right the world’s wrongs. I can’t do that and really, I. Am. So. Sorry.

But there is this one thing…

After much soul searching, I do have to admit that I really don’t feel inclined to accept blame for the fact that you’re a shrill, self-important, unrepentant leech whose view of the world is limited to platitudes that will fit on your cardboard sign and whose approach to effecting change involves camping out in designer camping gear, pausing for hourly lattes, and screaming at people who are sincerely trying to make a difference in ways that have a chance of actually working.

That one’s on you.