Autumn Years

Autumn, for me, is a swirl of memories about  loss. When my grandmother died, my father drove my friend Darren and I around  while he picked up his mother's  ashes. Afterward, not knowing exactly how to  cap off an errand like that, stopped and bought us a case of beer. Which we put in the back of the car with that box of cremains. That was one fall.  A couple of  years later, as the leaves began to  turn, it was Darren who died. He was taken much too soon, before he graduated from college. It was my father who went to the hospital to pick up  my friend Joe, who lived through the car crash. He told  Joe that this was the time that he believed that dads should be able to tell kids  that everyone and everything would be okay. They both knew it wasn't. It wasn't okay. My parents bought us pizza that we may have eaten. We weren't hungry. It was a few more years before it was my father's turn. I was hungry on the day of my father's funeral.  It wasn't a car but a plane that got him. By this time, I had stopped drinking, but I went for a cheeseburger and sat in a booth where we had sat with my father so many times. It was almost twenty years before the undertoad reached up and grabbed our beloved family dog. I suppose she did us a favor by choosing the anniversary of Darren's death to go to sleep and not wake up. We buried her in our back yard. There was a chill in the air.
And all of these images come to mind when the days start to get shorter, and the shadows grow longer. I have been able to fill in the gaps with seasonal memories that don't come with graveside visions or ironic connections to those who have passed. Trick or treating with my son. Thanksgiving preparations and back to school sales. Most of those years have not included funerals. Still, at some point when summer is over, my mind starts to wander down those dark lanes. At some point I will sit and ponder my own existence and how I came to live here. To be alive here. I figure I owe that to those who went ahead of me. I am making autumn mean something more than loss. Yet, I can't help but be a little anxious at this time of year.
Because I remember.

The Jeff Sessions

Jeff Sessions is a climate change denier. "Carbon pollution is CO2, and that’s really not a pollutant; that’s a plant food, and it doesn’t harm anybody except that it might include temperature increases," he said during a 2015 Senate hearing for EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy.
He called the Voting Rights Act a “piece of intrusive legislation,” a quote that he stood by during his failed 1986 federal judicial confirmation hearing.
One of Mister Sessions' staffers, Thomas Figures, testified that his boss derogatorily called him "boy" and joked about the KKK in front of him. Sessions' former co-workers also testified that he joked that he thought the hate group was “OK," until he learned that they "smoked marijuana.”
Figures also testified that Sessions called the NAACP “un-American” and “communist-inspired.” 
Sessions was the first senator to endorse Donald Trump. “People don’t have to endorse all of his rhetoric, but he’s correct on the issues, substantively, and he’s where the American people want to be, and we as a party should celebrate this and join this movement.” 
Yes, there was a time when Jeff Sessions was appointed by the man who he felt was"where the American people wan to be." He became Attorney General of the United States. And when that didn't turn out to be a slam dunk for his boss to be immune from prosecution, his boss had to let him go. Or in this peculiar version of reality, he was "asked to resign." Now he's gone. In his place is an opening that will no doubt offer the "President" a chance to fill it with something more subservient and dedicated to the movement he inspired. Something more divisive and more supportive of the untouchable nature that this administration demands. Jeff Sessions, once considered to racist to become a federal judge, apparently wouldn't go fare enough.
Scary? Imagining there might be a future when we look back at Jeff Sessions' stint as Attorney as "the good old days?" Very scary indeed. 

Paradise Lost

I decided to bring the fifth graders in from the playground early. In the middle of their recess, it became apparent that some of them were feeling the effects. Not from the nominal rigors of exercise, but the challenge of breathing in air that was increasingly laden with smoke. One hundred seventy miles north, a fire was burning, and in Oakland, we were feeling the effects. We went inside and played Heads-up/Seven-up. Much to the dismay of many of the fifth graders who felt there was no imminent threat to their health.
On this Thursday afternoon, air quality in the Bay Area was measured at 199, some thirty points worse than that of Beijing at the same time. Those with breathing challenges and other concerns were advised to remain indoors. Meanwhile, one hundred seventy miles north, things were much worse. In Paradise, California the air was on fire.
Thirty thousand people were evacuated in advance of the wind-driven blaze, and the quixotically named town burned to the ground. Homes, businesses, restaurants, a retirement home, all destroyed. Paradise was gone, but not forgotten.
These kind of wildfires are now becoming more prevalent, especially in high density areas that were once farmland and open space. Providing fuel for fires makes them burn longer, faster. They also occur more often in a world where the climate has shifted enough to make conditions tinder dry at a time when rain used to dominate the forecast for months at a time.
The year before I moved to Oakland, there was a similar firestorm in the hills above the city. Neighborhoods were wiped out. Hillsides were left barren. But it didn't take long before lots of people and their insurance money returned to the area and built new homes. Because of some twisted pioneer spirit. And that will probably happen in Paradise too. And these folks will live there as a constant reminder of what can happen, and whenever the wind blows in that certain direction...
I don't think this is the last time we will be having PE inside.

Stop Making Sense

Well, after all that heady business of midterm elections, it's nice to know that we can get back to basics: A mass shooting. If it seems like just minutes since the last one, you would be right. Instead of screaming at each other about red and white and policy, we go back to screaming into the night about the blood on the floor.
Wednesday night, a lone gunman walked into the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, California and did what lone gunmen do: He opened fire. When it was all over, thirteen people were dead, including the shooter. Among the dead was Sergeant Ron Helus of the Ventura County Sheriff's Office. Sergeant Helus was one of the first on the scene, and was hit multiple times by the initial spray of bullets.
Sorry. That's a bit of hyperbole brought on by trying to describe another senseless murder. "Spray of bullets?" I embarrass myself, and I beg your forgiveness. There is no polite way to describe guns going off in close proximity to human beings or other animals. "Hail?" I think I used that one a week or so ago as I discussed the shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue. The synagogue whose name will now always have an ironic ring: Tree of Life.
Sorry. There I go again. I am trying to make some point by connecting the facts of the case with the tragedy itself. It's something humans do: Try and make sense. Which is why there will be yet another search for a motive. Why did this twenty-something walk into a bar and kill a dozen people? It matters most to those who lost a friend or loved one, but we all lean in to try and understand how such awfulness could erupt at a college-friendly watering hole in southern California.
The killer was a Marine who had previously been contacted by authorities earlier this year during a domestic dispute. He was evaluated by mental health professionals and deemed "not a threat." The handgun he used was purchased legally. And finally I apologize for writing any of this down, except it is the only way I know to try and make it fit into my world.
It should make sense.
But it doesn't.

The Path

Ten years ago I strutted around feeling like I changed the world. My vote for Barack Obama was the stuff of legend. I had actively participated in the election of the first African American President of the United States. I truly felt that I had been a part of the hope and change our country and this planet needed. Since then, I have endured my share of disappointments. I have lived through what appears now as the inevitable backlash of all that hope and change.
I am old enough to remember casting votes for Al Gore and John Kerry. I can also remember the tearful days of consoling my wife who feels these things even more deeply than I do. We had voted for Bill Clinton, twice, and we assumed that the United States was coming around. When Bill's wife lost her chance to become the first woman President of the United States to a blustering, questionably coiffed real estate developer, it became clear that the path to hope and change was a winding one. It was not an escalator.
Seeing how I was in this for the long haul, I signed up to vote by mail. I did this primarily to ensure that I would be an active piece of the democratic machinery ongoing. In case my tires were flat on Election Day, I had already passed my ballot on to the proper authorities and my voice would be heard. And, after the debacles of 2000 and 2016, it seems like a lot of others decided to join my in my compulsion. Thirty-six million of us in the 2018 midterm election. 
We voted for a Democrats to take control of the House of Representatives. We voted for the youngest woman, at twenty-nine, to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a dreamer, a Dreamer, and a Bernie Sanders-style progressive. In Colorado, the first openly gay man, was elected Governor of the Centennial State. Jared Polis  vowed to fight for Medicare-for-all. He also backed stronger gun laws, investments in renewable energy, repeal of the death penalty, and for universal full-day preschool and kindergarten as an extension of Colorado’s public schools. And what did I do, here in California? Well, I kept my little corner of it blue. Deep blue. As I talked about the returns to my mother back in Colorado, she sounded disappointed. "I guess I wanted more," she said. And I understood. The fear and hate is still out there, and all this hope and change will be hard pressed to extinguish it.
But it's a start. 

Life Matters

When the man who shot and killed eleven at a Pittsburgh area synagogue was brought to the Allegheny general hospital to have his wounds treated, it was nurse Ari Mahler who cared for him. Ari Mahler is Jewish. The man who shot and killed eleven at the Tree of Life temple had screamed "Death to all Jews!" just an hour before was kept alive by the very people he wished to exterminate. Nurse Mahler wrote this last Saturday: “I’ve watched them talk about me on CNN, Fox News, Anderson Cooper, PBS and the local news stations. I’ve read articles mentioning me in the Times and the Washington Post. The fact that I did my job, a job which requires compassion and empathy over everything, is newsworthy to people because I’m Jewish. Even more so because my dad’s a rabbi.” 
Compassion and empathy over everything.
Which brought me back to a time some twenty years ago, when my school's staff was given an opportunity to visit the Museum Of Tolerance in Los Angeles. While there, we were afforded an audience with a survivor of the Nazi death camps. He told us about how he escaped from a train car that was taking him and his family to extermination. His family was not as fortunate as he. After he told his story, someone asked what he would do if he encountered Hitler today. "I wouldn't kill him," he said. "I would build him a house in Israel. With glass walls and windows and doors, so every morning when he woke up, he would see us. That he could not kill us all." 
And so there it was. Given a chance to exact revenge, he chose to enforce empathy. The number of times Jewish gunmen have broken into alt-right meeting groups and screamed "Death to all Nazis" sits squarely at zero. That is not how this is supposed to work. Life will go on. Every day we learn something new. 
I learned something from nurse Ari Mahler. Here it is: “If my actions mean anything, love means everything.”

You Are What You Reap

It's about time to close up shop on the front yard garden. This summer we had great success with cucumbers and cherry tomatoes. We were giving the stuff away, we had so many vegetables. The same cannot be said for the sunflower we planted in the corner of one of the raised boxes we maintained with mild vigilance. Somehow the regular watering that seemed to make everything else grow so very impressively didn't seem to matter to the wilting stalk that started with so much yellowy promise.
We also tried to coax more than a single fruit from our green pepper plant. There was an initial burst that seemed to suggest that we might have salads to be proud of which resulted in that aforementioned lone pepper. And it had been gnawed upon by creatures who seemed only vaguely interested since they left the back half of the pepper, the part we could see initially, but the back half was a toothy mass of discarded rodent snack.
In the back forty (yard), we planted parsley and four strawberry plants. The first was for garnish and breath freshening. The second was for shortcake. Or a reason to bake shortcake, but you know what I mean. The parsley flourished, while the disregard ladled on the green pepper by furry pests was not felt by the strawberries. After surrendering a month and a half's yield to the trash pandas, I rigged up a hanging pot that took them out of the path of the dessert vermin.
Now it's November, and the harvest is just about complete. Since the tomato plant was a leftover from last year that seemed to awaken in spring, we might still have a few of those to drop into our store bought salads. The cucumber vines are spent and tired, and there are two butternut squashes that seem about ready to be rescued from their spot on the ground.
And the biggest green leafy surprise was the chard my wife rescued from the Ace Hardware dumpster. For a month, we ignored it. Then we decided that as long as we were planting a garden we might as well try to resurrect it. Lo and behold, it came charging back, leaving us with great leafy goodness that was chopped up and fried down into a brown paste that my wife seemed to enjoy quite a lot. And that rogue tomato plant? I'm thinking I might go ahead and string some Christmas lights on it.