Reunion Tour

My dad had two sisters, my aunts. They were both older than he was. He was, by their account, the baby. All three are gone now, but as the summer winds down, I got to thinking about the reunions we had at our mountain cabin over the years. I am certain that my perspective is skewed, but I was always a little surprised at how relaxed and normal my father was able to raise his own family in spite of the strained relations he maintained with his sisters. My aunt Peggy lived in town, and we were regularly treated to whatever new confection or concoction came into the grocery store where she worked. It was Peggy's daughters that became my parents' first line of defense when it came time to round up a sitter for the evening. All these associations were essentially benign, and they only caused the usual kind of trouble. Peggy's husband, Duane, was another matter. "Uncle Waywee," as we were encouraged to call him, was a Navy man who never seemed to have both oars in the water. In my memory, he consisted on a diet of pipe smoke and longhorn cheese. And bitterness.
Sunday afternoons on the front porch of our cabin with my dad's family stood in stark contrast to the enormous gatherings that descended upon our little spot in the meadow when my mom's family showed up for their annual get-together. Nobody seemed to look forward to these, including my father. He seemed hard pressed to show his relations the same kind of good time that he always had with his in-laws. When his other sister, Leora, made a trip out west from her adopted home of Boston, that strain only increased.
There was drinking involved. Not the happy, tipsy version that my mom's family generally provided, but the surly, slurred kind that turned bitter as the day progressed. The benefit of fifty years or so has given me some insight into what that may have been like for all involved. My dad was the success in the family. He had his house in the suburbs, a company car, and three boys who helped him build their mountain hideaway. His sisters didn't have that. Auntie Leora was divorced and was doing her best to hold on to her kids as they drifted away. Aunt Peggy was the bread-winner in her home and was just as happy to leave her husband in front of the TV on any given evening.
But this was a family reunion. A family that was watched over by Grandma Esther, "The Great Stoneface of Kansas." Esther had moved her family out of Kansas, leaving behind a Peter Pan of a husband and set up a boarding house in Boulder, Colorado where she raised her brood while looking after a host of tenants, mostly college boys. I have no memory of my Grandmother smiling, and I am sure that bringing her children back together didn't offer her the occasion.
My father tried to smile. He was a good host. Right up to the point where Uncle Waywee started into a beer-infused rant about equitable distribution of wealth. Which is giving him a lot of vocabulary credit, since most of it consisted of a refrain of "high and mighty" and related sneers at my dad's lofty position as printing salesman at a local publishing company. The job for which he had been aiming since he had a paper route as a teenager. My father let it go, but I know it wore on him. Which is why we sometimes missed those connections with his clan. And always looked forward to when we could all get together with my mom's family for a volleyball game or some horseshoes in the shadow of those big Blue Spruce trees.
And we would wait, just a little pained, for the next obligation.

Reasoning

I knew I was taking a chance of disrupting our yearly neighborhood gathering. It's always so nice to block off the street and get everyone to show up with some salad or a desert and stand around the grill talking about the way we all get along on our little strip of Oakland. I decided that, if I was ever going to ask a Trump supporter about his views, I would make it the guy on the corner who happens to be the only other Bronco fan I know in this city. Maybe he's got a thing for orange, who knows? I decided to find out.
"So who do you like in November?" was my opening volley.
He grinned a little, and replied, "You're not gonna like it."
I gave him credit for knowing his audience, but I assured him that I was not looking for a debate, just curious.
"I'm a Trump guy," he confirmed.
"Do you mind if I ask why?"
"Well, Hillary Clinton is a politician. And all these other guys who have messed everything up over the past however long are politicians."
I could not argue with that assertion, necessarily.
"Donald Trump is not a politician."
And that was his line of reasoning. Politicians had messed everything up, and it would take someone who was not a politician to straighten them out. It made as much sense as anything that had come out of the Trump campaign for its entirety. I chose not to ask him what particular portion of the Trump plan was going to put things right. I promised him that I wasn't looking for a debate.
Not twenty-four hours later, I found myself back at my school site doing some early prep work for the coming year and ran into a fellow teacher who was busily putting things back into order in her room. We made a little chit-chat before she volunteered that she was still not quite over losing her chance to vote for Bernie. "I don't know what I'm going to do," she complained.
I suggested that she could vote for Hillary Clinton. That suggestion was met with a polite death stare that was followed by her assurance that she could "never trust her." She said she would never vote for Trump, but in her mind, there was no lesser of two evils. In this particular corner of the universe, there was no distinction between what Hillary was and did and what Donald J Framp and said.
I remembered standing in the glow of the streetlight the night before and my promise not to debate. I looked for what might have become common ground. Without pointing to events or utterances that I found personally objectionable, I looked for a way to resolve this vision of the world. I suppose I might have had more success arguing the existence of God, or at least the Flying Spaghetti Monster. And we have three more months to wait this one out. In the meantime, how about those Mets?

No Crying In Baseball

I have opined about this here before, but this one will definitely leave a mark. The Oakland Athletics traded away one of their stars just before the trade deadline. Okay, they traded a pair of their stars, but only one will really matter to me. I might miss Rich Hill, a thirty-five year old left-handed pitcher with some experience and some promise if he ends up throwing a no-hitter int he World Series for his new team, the Los Angeles Dodgers. Like the way it hurt to watch Josh Donaldson hit home runs for the Toronto Blue Jays in last year's American League Championship Series. And every time the Blue Jays roll into Oakland, I am reminded of that green and gold T-shirt I have with his name on it. The shirt I bought because I am Donald's son, and I have a son named Donald. The shirt I bought because there was this really good third baseman who played for a really good team here in Oakland.
Just not good enough.
It's been a long time since the World Series was played here in Oakland. Fans of the Athletics have their history and their heroes, but most of it happened before I came here and adopted them. I was here for the Streak, when a mediocre team turned things around enough to win twenty games in a row. That one was special enough to get Brad Pitt to be in it, eventually. Brad hasn't made it out to the Coliseum recently. Not that there hasn't been some success in our ballpark over the past few years, but the most notable stories coming from down there have been about the rotten plumbing and sewage backing up in their dugout. Why would anyone want to stick around if they didn't have to?
That's why I will miss Josh Reddick. He was a right fielder who seemed to enjoy the mess. He could knock the ball around the yard, and his fielding abilities got him the nickname Spider Man and endeared him to my son forever.
And there were the pies. Josh may not have made the ritual of throwing a pie in the face of the player who hit the walk-off run for his team, but he made an institution out of it. Josh Reddick knew he was playing a game, which is why he switched his walk-up music to George Michael's Careless Whisper a few years back just to keep things from getting stale. Like the back of their dugout. It was fun having Josh around the clubhouse for the past few seasons. Now, my son has a green and gold T shirt that can be worn with nostalgic pride, and a "remember when?" smile.
Bye, Josh. Thanks for the memories. And the pies.

Grateful

Watching me watching the world around me. This is how I experienced Yosemite. This was after missing out on the grandeur of all that nature for all these years. This national park was my Grateful Dead album. People who look at my music collection have always been able to find the hole, that missing piece. For the longest time, that was the Grateful Dead album. "Wow," they would say, "You've got a lot of music here." Plenty of admiration. "But you don't have any Grateful Dead?" 

I never did. As much as I respected and admired the work of Jerry and Mickey and the rest, I never got around to buying that record. Or tape. Or CD. Or mp3. This is probably as a result of having spent a good deal of time in my youth surrounded by Deadheads who felt that I should share their commitment to the Dead. I appreciated what I heard, on cassettes and vinyl on endless recordings of live versions of all those songs. Dark Star. Truckin'. Ripple. On and on. Sugar Magnolia. Friend of the Devil. The sounds and words that made up all those tunes became part of my world. Vicariously. Somehow, I felt as if I were to buy into that whole scene that I would be surrendering to this thing that I didn't fully understand. I was stubborn. I didn't want to surrender to something so big, so vast. It felt like peer pressure, and so I avoided it. 

Until the day that I went ahead and bought that greatest hits CD. And now I can hear those songs and enjoy them for what they are. It was a silly principle onto which I held for no particular reason other than showing just how stubborn I could be. That would be pretty. Stubborn, that is.

Which is kind of how I felt when I got out of the car and set foot in Yosemite Valley. There I was, surrounded by all that rock and trees and waterfalls, and that's when I felt the eyes of my friends, and my wife, and my son on me. I knew they were waiting for me to light up with the joy that all that natural wonderment could give me. I looked up at those massive slabs of granite and felt awe. And gratitude for the patience extended by all those around me in the time it took for me to find my way here. Among the trees and rocks and waterfalls. In my head, I heard a song. 

You, who choose to lead, must follow
But if you fall you fall alone.
If you should stand then who's to guide you?
If I knew the way I would take you home.

It was beautiful. And I was happy to be there. 

Performance

The parties are all over. The balloon industry has met its quota for the next four years, and now we get down to the nitty gritty. The presidential election can now take place. Those previous two years in which people from both sides of the aisle were dong exploratory research and test marketing their brand are behind us. We are now faced with the awesome choice of Hillary or Donald, candidates so familiar to us that we are on a first name basis with them.
I'm not sure I want to be that familiar. I am reasonably certain that, if given the opportunity to meet one or both of them face to face, I would refer to them as "Mrs. Clinton" and "Mr. Trump." A  lot of this has to do with the inherent dignity of the office, not necessarily because of the inherent dignity of the candidates themselves. On the contrary: When my son, who will be voting in his first election this  November, looks to me for wisdom I have little to offer. Currently I am stuck on the parental echo of "because I said so." Do you really want Donald Trump to be president? Then you had better cast your vote for Hillary Clinton. But what about all that stuff about -
And I have to cut him off. Not because I don't want him to question the dominant paradigm, or to seek out the answer that will work for him. I am terrified. Each day that passes without Jim Henson popping out from behind that floppy orange mass of hair, explaining that it was all some massive prank and that he wasn't really dead but he has been zipped up inside the most awful Muppet of all, I become a little more afraid. Are all those people who have access to keyboards and typing those racist, misogynist, and otherwise hateful messages, comments  and tweets really going to crawl out of their dark holes and find their way to polling places across this great land of ours to generate the biggest mistake of our lives? I think of those dull British folks who woke up after their pub crawl to realize they had somehow managed to put their beloved country in a blender and sent it into an economic tailspin. Odds bodkins, that was a bit barmy, weren't it?
Scary, how that one little moment of throwing a tantrum in a voting booth can come back to haunt you for the next four to eight years. It still doesn't give me a good answer for my son, who continues to look for "the right person" for whom to cast his vote, but it does give me hope that this will all turn out to be one really bad piece of performance art.
Yeah. I'd vote for that.

Back Again

Close Encounters of the Third Kind was on my cable TV a few mornings back. Thirty-nine years ago, when I saw it the first time, I was caught up in the mystery and the science and the fiction and all those space ships. It capped off a year that had already taken me to a galaxy far, far away, and now I was being shown a spot just up the interstate from me where aliens were going to land. Roy Neary's story gave me hope that in spite of my lack of potential as an astronaut, there was a chance for me to head out into the stars.
That was when I was fifteen. I saw it as a great adventure. It was an amazing ride. Even way back then, I understood that beings from another planet had selected Roy, played by Richard Dreyfuss, was an everyman. He was a bit of a schlub. He was no Han Solo. He wasn't even a Luke Skywalker. But somehow, he was the one that the schwas picked. Not Francois Truffaut or Bob Balaban or any of those science types. Even that sweaty kid who played the keyboards for the mothership, he stayed home. Roy got to go for a ride.
It reminded me of Billy Pilgrim and the Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse Five. It was that same swirl of time and space that I found myself reveling in decades later. Only now I was sitting on the edge of my bed, I was married and I have a kid and a house of my own and Devil's Tower isn't just six hours away anymore. It would take me about as long to drive there now as it took Roy Neary way back then. And now I understand why it was so hard for him to make that choice. He wasn't a kid. He wasn't going off on some idealistic crusade. He was being called. Even though everything in his life, his job and his wife and his kids and his house, created a vortex to keep him here on earth. That's why he's crying at the dinner table. He's a mess.His marriage is falling apart. His neighbors think he's crazy. He has lost his job.Roy has come untethered from his spot at home.
Now I understand just how hard it was for Roy, and how much greater the adventure he was on really was. It's lasted for nearly forty years. And thousands of miles. Here to there. And back again.

What We Made

Every day
I am presented
with this blank page
You help me
fill it up
With a wink
or a smile
or a laugh
or a thought
Every year
I write a book
with your name
on the cover
Our name
on the cover
We share that
we agreed to
long ago
In a meadow
among the trees
and the flowers
and our friends
We made a family
of just two
to start
Thank you
for taking that walk
with me