Now the agency has announced that, due to revelations of alleged cases of post-Katrina fraud, it is cutting the benefits for future disaster victims from $2,000 to $500.
Wow.
What a society we live in. It must be ever so convenient for the conservative Republicans running FEMA for the Bush administration to have had that recent GAO report about people who used their relief money to go to football games, purchase "adult erotica products," and alcohol. We should remember, too, that the GAO is the investigative arm of Congress, controlled by conservative Republicans.
None of whom, of course, would have ever gone to a football game, watched porn, or had a drink...
The judgements implicit in the current government witchhunt against storm survivors are rich with racism and classism. I'll say it here, because I fear no one in the major press outlets is going to get involved with this issue. I hope I'm wrong about that, and some prominant columnists take this on, but if not, you can count on this blogspace to monitor FEMA's crimes against the good people of the Gulf Coast.
I had the privilege of meeting many East Biloxi residents last winter. Their average annual income was around $10,000. They'd lost everything they owned in the storm. The government aid they received helped them buy clothes for their kids, food to eat, tents and air mattresses to sleep on.
Was anyone drinking? You better believe it. The traumatic aftermath of this storm appears to have helped an entire generation of locals discover the benefits of self-medication, or maybe they were already indulging before Katrina, I'm not sure.
If FEMA's current initiatives to (1) hunt down people occcupying trailers "illegitimately" and throw them out; (2) cut benefits for future storm victims by 75%; and (3) play politics by blaming the victims for their poverty and lack of options all succeed, it will represent a major historical stain on this nation's record.
This is not an America I could ever feel any loyalty to; it is instead a cruel, selfish and uncompassionate society. Consider this: If the way we treat the neediest and most vulnerable among us is an indication of our collective moral character, given what is happening right now to the people of the Gulf Coast, we have none.
Saturday, June 17, 2006
Friday, June 16, 2006
Love in the ruins
Twice last winter, I flew across the country from San Francisco to the Mississippi coast, to visit my girlfriend in Biloxi. She was working with people whose lives were pretty much ruined by Hurricane Katrina. And, she stayed there a long time, three-plus months. Thanks largely to her efforts, some of the poorest residents in East Biloxi were able to move out of the ruins of crushed houses or leaky tents into trailers she somehow wheedled out of one of our worst national bureaucracies, FEMA.
Now, she is back down there. FEMA, meanwhile, has formed a special investigative force to discover whether some people may be occupying trailers without the proper "documentation," i.e., they are unable to prove they meet FEMA's criteria for living in a trailer. The agency's goal is to boot these people back out into the streets.
That this is outrageous is obvious. My friend, as regular readers know, has since broken up with me, partly so she can be free to stay down there on a long-term basis and help her clients. It appears that the victories she won for some of them were short-term, now that Orwellian agencies like FEMA (a division of "Homeland Security") is actively on the hunt to blame the victims of Katrina for their fate.
What am I, a writer, supposed to do at this juncture? My former girlfriend and I are trying to find an outlet for a piece we have co-authored about this situation, but the editors I know tell me that no one much cares anymore about the Gulf Coast's predicament any longer. Can that be true?
If anyone has any ideas, please contact me. I will probably post a version of our article here in the next few days, once I see whether any of my contacts in larger outlets are interested in publishing what we have written.
This is a perfect example of the dilemma of progressive journalists in America throughout my lifetime. Does our voice really matter?
The answer is no longer blowing in the wind. The answer is splattered lifeless in the dead trees all along the ruined coast of Mississippi.
Now, she is back down there. FEMA, meanwhile, has formed a special investigative force to discover whether some people may be occupying trailers without the proper "documentation," i.e., they are unable to prove they meet FEMA's criteria for living in a trailer. The agency's goal is to boot these people back out into the streets.
That this is outrageous is obvious. My friend, as regular readers know, has since broken up with me, partly so she can be free to stay down there on a long-term basis and help her clients. It appears that the victories she won for some of them were short-term, now that Orwellian agencies like FEMA (a division of "Homeland Security") is actively on the hunt to blame the victims of Katrina for their fate.
What am I, a writer, supposed to do at this juncture? My former girlfriend and I are trying to find an outlet for a piece we have co-authored about this situation, but the editors I know tell me that no one much cares anymore about the Gulf Coast's predicament any longer. Can that be true?
If anyone has any ideas, please contact me. I will probably post a version of our article here in the next few days, once I see whether any of my contacts in larger outlets are interested in publishing what we have written.
This is a perfect example of the dilemma of progressive journalists in America throughout my lifetime. Does our voice really matter?
The answer is no longer blowing in the wind. The answer is splattered lifeless in the dead trees all along the ruined coast of Mississippi.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Transitions
A reader glancing through my earlier post, "Careers," could be forgiven for assuming that I've become an expert at making transitions, at least in my work life. (My ability to navigate personal transitions is, quite clearly, from all the other posts here, weak, at best.) But over the past 19 years, I have had at least 15 separate positions inside 10 companies or institutions, not counting all my second jobs, projects, freelance writing gigs, and night teaching work.
Over these two decades, there have been few constants. The only pattern is everything has kept changing, and like most people I have to struggle to keep up. It's not that changes in business, technology, or the profession of journalism frighten me -- in general, I like the changes sweeping through our era, but they bring with them certain costs, including serious disruption in many of our personal lives. Including mine.
At the core of everything I have done, in all of my various careers, is writing and story-telling. I spent many years also doing research and reporting, and sometimes I still do. But the second half of my career has been much more about editing and managing content than creating it. Even in these latter roles, writing still forms the core of my approach, and is the main element in all of this that interests me.
At dinner the other night, a friend who produces television documentaries was telling me about the writing that forms the central element in producing her pieces. The editor I had dinner with last night has as her true passion writing, not editing. These and many other friends in the business understand it all comes back to the story.
And the story-teller.
Over the years, as I've moved from job to job, sometimes by my own initiative, sometimes not, I've been struck by the uniqueness of each corporate culture I encounter. Companies often exist in silos, especially in the Valley, where guarding technology and business secrets is paramount.
Almost by definition, I've spent more time as an outsider, or newcomer, than insider, and I often gravitate to others who may feel on the margins of whatever organization I happen to be in at the time. It just seems like it is those with less power and influence who often have the best insights into why a place functions the way it does.
Of course, I've often been one of top executives, too, and therein lies a contradiction. I've never appointed myself to a top job, however; I've mainly been picked out of the middle of organizations and placed there by higher-ups. This distinction is important in the sense that I rarely find myself interested in, or motivated by, personal power. To me, harnessing the collective power of the group is much more my goal than individual milestones or credits that might accrue to me.
I think the reason this is how it is for me is that I am at heart a writer and story teller, not an organization man. I'm by nature an outsider, not an insider. In fact, I'm usually more interested in the story of what I am doing than the actual work itself -- or at least my brain seems to be wired in such a way that I am as likely to be constructing a narrative in my head at any one moment as exclusively focusing on the task at hand.
I don't know what all of this has to do with the title of this post -- transitions -- other than this whole effort by me is an attempt to make yet one more unwanted change in my life. This time, it is about letting somone I love go. I don't want to, but apparently I have to. The only resources I have in this battle are my history and my story telling.
Therefore, night after night, I write.
Over these two decades, there have been few constants. The only pattern is everything has kept changing, and like most people I have to struggle to keep up. It's not that changes in business, technology, or the profession of journalism frighten me -- in general, I like the changes sweeping through our era, but they bring with them certain costs, including serious disruption in many of our personal lives. Including mine.
At the core of everything I have done, in all of my various careers, is writing and story-telling. I spent many years also doing research and reporting, and sometimes I still do. But the second half of my career has been much more about editing and managing content than creating it. Even in these latter roles, writing still forms the core of my approach, and is the main element in all of this that interests me.
At dinner the other night, a friend who produces television documentaries was telling me about the writing that forms the central element in producing her pieces. The editor I had dinner with last night has as her true passion writing, not editing. These and many other friends in the business understand it all comes back to the story.
And the story-teller.
Over the years, as I've moved from job to job, sometimes by my own initiative, sometimes not, I've been struck by the uniqueness of each corporate culture I encounter. Companies often exist in silos, especially in the Valley, where guarding technology and business secrets is paramount.
Almost by definition, I've spent more time as an outsider, or newcomer, than insider, and I often gravitate to others who may feel on the margins of whatever organization I happen to be in at the time. It just seems like it is those with less power and influence who often have the best insights into why a place functions the way it does.
Of course, I've often been one of top executives, too, and therein lies a contradiction. I've never appointed myself to a top job, however; I've mainly been picked out of the middle of organizations and placed there by higher-ups. This distinction is important in the sense that I rarely find myself interested in, or motivated by, personal power. To me, harnessing the collective power of the group is much more my goal than individual milestones or credits that might accrue to me.
I think the reason this is how it is for me is that I am at heart a writer and story teller, not an organization man. I'm by nature an outsider, not an insider. In fact, I'm usually more interested in the story of what I am doing than the actual work itself -- or at least my brain seems to be wired in such a way that I am as likely to be constructing a narrative in my head at any one moment as exclusively focusing on the task at hand.
I don't know what all of this has to do with the title of this post -- transitions -- other than this whole effort by me is an attempt to make yet one more unwanted change in my life. This time, it is about letting somone I love go. I don't want to, but apparently I have to. The only resources I have in this battle are my history and my story telling.
Therefore, night after night, I write.
Monday, June 12, 2006
Careers
One October some years ago, I drove an old Chevy van up Fell Street to the Fillmore in San Francisco, and resumed my journalism career after a two year hiatus in the Peace Corps. A small group of us started a magazine called SunDance at 1913 Fillmore Street. It was a large-format magazine, with big graphics and long articles on the intersection of post-Sixties politics and culture.
Actually, it was pure-Sixties in its sensibility; we just didn't know yet that that era was finished. SunDance had an impressive list of writers and artists, none more famous than John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who also gave us some money. When they came to visit the office and share stimulants with us, we knew we'd been blessed by the gods.
Alas, none of us knew what a business plan was, and SunDance lasted all of three issues, though glorious issues they were. A few years later, I landed across town at Rolling Stone, at 625 Third Street, where celebrities of every stripe poured through the office, and the stimulation never ended. Not being a music writer, I rarely hung out with musicians, but a small group of us formed an ad-hoc investigative unit on staff there, and we did some good work until the founder, Jann Wenner, decided to move the operation to New York.
Some of us left behind then started a non-profit, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and our first real office was in the Broadway Building in downtown Oakland. Financing ourselves by a combination of foundation grants and contracts with media outlets, we produced newspaper series, magazine articles, books, television and radio documentaries (and eventually, long after I left, articles on the web).
I resumed my magazine career, now as an editor, 12 years later, becoming bureau chief for California magazine. We did some big stories there, too, but our Australian owner shut us down without warning one day; and two days later I was named Investigative Editor at Mother Jones. We did a lot of good stories over the next two years there, but it came time for me to leave, even though I wasn't sure where I would go next.
My dear friend Raul Ramirez came to the rescue. He was leaving his post at KQED-FM for six months to go to Harvard as a Nieman Fellow, and asked me if I would fill in for him. This was my first taste of public radio news, one of the best venues a journalist could ever find, and I truly loved it there.
When Raul came back, I was ready to jump to the newspaper business, but the president of KQED made me an offer I couldn't refuse, so I moved "upstairs," bought some suits, and became an instant executive. Another half-year and I was named Executive Vice President for KQED Inc. It was a bit gnarly upstairs, but I enjoyed this new work, including an extremely long, slow negotiation with the union representing the station's technical workforce. It was both the details and the big picture of helping run a company important in our community that attracted me at that point in my life.
This job came to a sudden end, however -- another transition I didn't see coming.
Meanwhile, a group of journalists headed by a friend, David Talbot, had quit the Examiner to try and start a web-based magazine, to be called Salon Magazine. David asked me to join them, mainly as a business consultant, so I did for three months that fall until we had managed to raise enough money and conclude a big marketing deal with Borders Books to be able to launch.
Then, I got a call from HotWired, the online offshoot of Wired magazine, founded by Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalf. Would I like to become a producer for a new daily political website called The Netizen?
You bet. I was getting a little tired of the business side, which, though fascinating in its own right, can't compete with the thrill of creating content. We launched The Netizen in a few weeks, and for the next six months I presided over a chaotic product that really was the brainchild of Louis Rossetto, though he spent his days editing his magazine, not producing content on the web.
Louis and I clashed over the politics of the site. He's a brilliant iconoclast, a libertarian, a former college Republican. (When I was in college, I was a radical anti-war and civil rights activist, and arrested on one occasion.) But somehow we enjoyed the intellectual fight we found ourselves conducting, at least most of the time.
But I didn't know what to think when he called me to his office one day; maybe I'd crossed a line and was going to be fired. Nope. He asked me to become the head of content for HotWired, which meant overseeing multiple websites, and many people on the front edge of what Louis called a digital revolution. This was not hyperboly.
But his vision for his company was seriously inflated. We tried to go public twice and failed. Not long after that, the investors took over the company, and booted most of us, including Louis, out.
This transition turned out to be a bit more difficult. I did some consulting, but nothing really seemed to jell. Then, Talbot called and asked me to come back to Salon, now a daily news website that was finding its voice covering the scandals engulfing the Clinton Presidency. He asked me to do several jobs -- news editor, investigative editor, senior executive.
Whatever. Being me, I said yes, though doing so meant I had to turn down two big consulting gigs that had taken months to land. Being at Salon the second time was a lot more fun, at least initially, because I got back to my investigative journalism roots, now as an editor, and was able to hire the best factchecker around, Daryl Lindsay, to join me there.
Our biggest hit was the Henry Hyde story, written by Talbot, edited by a bunch of us, and promoted by all. (Before that story was published, I checked with the deans of prominant journalism programs about the ethics of our decision, and was assured we were on solid ground. This helped later when we were subjected to a barrage of media criticism, as well as death threats, bomb threats, etc.)
Salon aimed to go public, too, and eventually did, thanks to its principal financial backer, Mr. Hambrecht. But, as part of becoming a publicly-traded company (briefly, as it turns out, since the company would be delisted during the dot.bust), my own role there changed. Daryl and I ended up opening a Washington, D.C., office for Salon in summer 1999.
By a year later, I was back in the Bay Area, at Excite@Home, where I was managing a large staff of producers, writers, designers, and editors.
Talk about the dot.bust! Excite@Home was doomed, though it took some months before I could allow myself to recognize that sad truth.
After that disaster, a Midwestern couple much after my own taste, Tom and Heather Hartle, moved here from Michigan and asked me to help them launch 7X7, a new city magazine for San Francisco. We launched -- to some fanfare -- a week before the 9/11 attacks. New York's economy was injured; San Francisco's tourist-based economy essentially collapsed. That also ended the minor economic recovery from dot.bust around here, and sent me out in search of a new job, yet again.
But not before we had created some great issues of 7X7. In the spring of 2002, I accepted a one-to-three-year visiting professor position at Stanford, where (until 2005)I kept a close eye on how the collision between journalism and digital technology was unfolding. Nine months ago, I rejoined the private-sector fray, at a start-up, where we are exploring the new lexicon of content surfacing, categorization, and interactivity with user-created content.
Along the way, over the years, there have been too many other projects to list, but recent ones include teaching memoir-writing to boomers; acting as the interim managing editor for the Stanford Social Innovation Review; guest-editing at Business 2.0; working as an investigator for the victim families of 9/11; serving as interim editorial director at CIR; editing some investigative articles post 9/11 for The Nation; guest editing a special issue of BIG magazine on SF (a very special launch party for which I will describe later ); and helping various journalists on special projects, as well as a number of entrepreneurs on start-ups.
In the more distant past was a decade of screenwriting and consulting in Hollywood, plus 14 years of teaching at U-C, Berkeley's journalism school. For many years, I also traveled internationally and spoke at conferences, mostly about global environmental problems. During all this time, I tried to balance the journalistic requirement to remain aloof from direct activism with my penchant to be involved in my communities in every way possible. Not an easy act to master, and I don't think I did it well most of the time.
This long, unpredictable voyage has as much been a private search for my writing voice as a "career," i.e., finding ways to support my family, and therefore, to be a productive member of our society, as opposed to what else I might otherwise have turned into.
That same quest continues in this space, unabated...At this point, all I really wish to do is write
Actually, it was pure-Sixties in its sensibility; we just didn't know yet that that era was finished. SunDance had an impressive list of writers and artists, none more famous than John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who also gave us some money. When they came to visit the office and share stimulants with us, we knew we'd been blessed by the gods.
Alas, none of us knew what a business plan was, and SunDance lasted all of three issues, though glorious issues they were. A few years later, I landed across town at Rolling Stone, at 625 Third Street, where celebrities of every stripe poured through the office, and the stimulation never ended. Not being a music writer, I rarely hung out with musicians, but a small group of us formed an ad-hoc investigative unit on staff there, and we did some good work until the founder, Jann Wenner, decided to move the operation to New York.
Some of us left behind then started a non-profit, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and our first real office was in the Broadway Building in downtown Oakland. Financing ourselves by a combination of foundation grants and contracts with media outlets, we produced newspaper series, magazine articles, books, television and radio documentaries (and eventually, long after I left, articles on the web).
I resumed my magazine career, now as an editor, 12 years later, becoming bureau chief for California magazine. We did some big stories there, too, but our Australian owner shut us down without warning one day; and two days later I was named Investigative Editor at Mother Jones. We did a lot of good stories over the next two years there, but it came time for me to leave, even though I wasn't sure where I would go next.
My dear friend Raul Ramirez came to the rescue. He was leaving his post at KQED-FM for six months to go to Harvard as a Nieman Fellow, and asked me if I would fill in for him. This was my first taste of public radio news, one of the best venues a journalist could ever find, and I truly loved it there.
When Raul came back, I was ready to jump to the newspaper business, but the president of KQED made me an offer I couldn't refuse, so I moved "upstairs," bought some suits, and became an instant executive. Another half-year and I was named Executive Vice President for KQED Inc. It was a bit gnarly upstairs, but I enjoyed this new work, including an extremely long, slow negotiation with the union representing the station's technical workforce. It was both the details and the big picture of helping run a company important in our community that attracted me at that point in my life.
This job came to a sudden end, however -- another transition I didn't see coming.
Meanwhile, a group of journalists headed by a friend, David Talbot, had quit the Examiner to try and start a web-based magazine, to be called Salon Magazine. David asked me to join them, mainly as a business consultant, so I did for three months that fall until we had managed to raise enough money and conclude a big marketing deal with Borders Books to be able to launch.
Then, I got a call from HotWired, the online offshoot of Wired magazine, founded by Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalf. Would I like to become a producer for a new daily political website called The Netizen?
You bet. I was getting a little tired of the business side, which, though fascinating in its own right, can't compete with the thrill of creating content. We launched The Netizen in a few weeks, and for the next six months I presided over a chaotic product that really was the brainchild of Louis Rossetto, though he spent his days editing his magazine, not producing content on the web.
Louis and I clashed over the politics of the site. He's a brilliant iconoclast, a libertarian, a former college Republican. (When I was in college, I was a radical anti-war and civil rights activist, and arrested on one occasion.) But somehow we enjoyed the intellectual fight we found ourselves conducting, at least most of the time.
But I didn't know what to think when he called me to his office one day; maybe I'd crossed a line and was going to be fired. Nope. He asked me to become the head of content for HotWired, which meant overseeing multiple websites, and many people on the front edge of what Louis called a digital revolution. This was not hyperboly.
But his vision for his company was seriously inflated. We tried to go public twice and failed. Not long after that, the investors took over the company, and booted most of us, including Louis, out.
This transition turned out to be a bit more difficult. I did some consulting, but nothing really seemed to jell. Then, Talbot called and asked me to come back to Salon, now a daily news website that was finding its voice covering the scandals engulfing the Clinton Presidency. He asked me to do several jobs -- news editor, investigative editor, senior executive.
Whatever. Being me, I said yes, though doing so meant I had to turn down two big consulting gigs that had taken months to land. Being at Salon the second time was a lot more fun, at least initially, because I got back to my investigative journalism roots, now as an editor, and was able to hire the best factchecker around, Daryl Lindsay, to join me there.
Our biggest hit was the Henry Hyde story, written by Talbot, edited by a bunch of us, and promoted by all. (Before that story was published, I checked with the deans of prominant journalism programs about the ethics of our decision, and was assured we were on solid ground. This helped later when we were subjected to a barrage of media criticism, as well as death threats, bomb threats, etc.)
Salon aimed to go public, too, and eventually did, thanks to its principal financial backer, Mr. Hambrecht. But, as part of becoming a publicly-traded company (briefly, as it turns out, since the company would be delisted during the dot.bust), my own role there changed. Daryl and I ended up opening a Washington, D.C., office for Salon in summer 1999.
By a year later, I was back in the Bay Area, at Excite@Home, where I was managing a large staff of producers, writers, designers, and editors.
Talk about the dot.bust! Excite@Home was doomed, though it took some months before I could allow myself to recognize that sad truth.
After that disaster, a Midwestern couple much after my own taste, Tom and Heather Hartle, moved here from Michigan and asked me to help them launch 7X7, a new city magazine for San Francisco. We launched -- to some fanfare -- a week before the 9/11 attacks. New York's economy was injured; San Francisco's tourist-based economy essentially collapsed. That also ended the minor economic recovery from dot.bust around here, and sent me out in search of a new job, yet again.
But not before we had created some great issues of 7X7. In the spring of 2002, I accepted a one-to-three-year visiting professor position at Stanford, where (until 2005)I kept a close eye on how the collision between journalism and digital technology was unfolding. Nine months ago, I rejoined the private-sector fray, at a start-up, where we are exploring the new lexicon of content surfacing, categorization, and interactivity with user-created content.
Along the way, over the years, there have been too many other projects to list, but recent ones include teaching memoir-writing to boomers; acting as the interim managing editor for the Stanford Social Innovation Review; guest-editing at Business 2.0; working as an investigator for the victim families of 9/11; serving as interim editorial director at CIR; editing some investigative articles post 9/11 for The Nation; guest editing a special issue of BIG magazine on SF (a very special launch party for which I will describe later ); and helping various journalists on special projects, as well as a number of entrepreneurs on start-ups.
In the more distant past was a decade of screenwriting and consulting in Hollywood, plus 14 years of teaching at U-C, Berkeley's journalism school. For many years, I also traveled internationally and spoke at conferences, mostly about global environmental problems. During all this time, I tried to balance the journalistic requirement to remain aloof from direct activism with my penchant to be involved in my communities in every way possible. Not an easy act to master, and I don't think I did it well most of the time.
This long, unpredictable voyage has as much been a private search for my writing voice as a "career," i.e., finding ways to support my family, and therefore, to be a productive member of our society, as opposed to what else I might otherwise have turned into.
That same quest continues in this space, unabated...At this point, all I really wish to do is write
Sunday, June 11, 2006
Patterns
A couple years ago, I did a little photography project. Walking around my neighborhood, the Mission, I shot whatever caught my eye on the sidewalks and walls, mainly just trash or graffiti. I didn't shoot buildings, cars, trees, or people. Just urban detritis.
I showed the photos to my kids, and they had a funny response: "I know where that is!" They didn't necessarily view any of these images as pretty or ugly, appropriate or inappropriate. They just recognized them as parts of our neighborhood that they, too, had noticed on our frequent walks around the area.
As a single Dad, 50% of the time, I often see life through my kids' eyes. I also rely on them about people. When friends drop by, or new people enter my life, I always ask them later what they think about them. As with my images of the streets, the kids rarely make judgements. Instead, they make observations.
My kids like all of my friends. And they are inclined to like anyone new I introduce to them. Over the past three years that I have lived here, one person above all others captured their hearts, as she did mine.
She was the most unlikely of all our visitors in that she has always claimed she doesn't like kids, particularly, and certainly never wanted to have any, or be responsible for them. Oddly, however, with my three little ones, she revealed a side of herself that perhaps never before had been seen.
I won't go into detail now, but her sweetness toward them changed our entire family dynamic. Today, after she is long gone from our lives, her influence lingers throughout our flat. The kids often mention her, when we play certain games or do things she introduced into our family life.
When people ask me why this loss has been so difficult, I always try to explain that it isn't only me who has lost his lover, best friend, and confidant, but my kids who have lost a good friend, an adult they came to trust and love very deeply.
It's hard, in a single parent household, to make things work. There is a ton of work, never enough time, constant pressures of various kinds, conflicts, worries, difficulties, noise, chaos. There also is music, art, beauty and love of a rich kind.
My kids and I were alone before she came and we have been since she left. They are fine with it; partly because there may be some backsliding going on around here about some standards that she introduced. And though the kids never considered her a parent, only a friend, she was our most special one, the only one we all embraced as part of our family.
A problem for me, the sentimentalist, is that her traces are everywhere here, so the kids innocently mention her all the time. This is fine in one sense, because I remain in love with her myself. Yet she is totally and irrevocably gone from me. She broke up with me, partly because I am a parent.
Our lives go on. Today I played vigorous games of basketball and soccer with my kids; we hung out with friends; ate lunch on Valencia Street; ordered Chinese food at night (Indian from Spicy Bite next time); and rented movies tonight. In the video store, an attractive woman with dark hair and dark eyes complimented me on how sweet and cute they all are.
I'm not sure whether it takes a village to raise kids, but I do know it is very hard to be a parent, whether alone or in a couple. Every now and again, however, if we are lucky, an Angel shows up, and that can make all the difference...I am grateful to mine, even as I mourn her loss. Maybe some day another will show up to take her place. Or maybe not. Either way, her time enriched us, changed us, left us all wanting more.
The heart may indeed be a lonely hunter. But I don't think any of us should turn away from love, in its many forms, unless we are willing to pay the price, many times over. Breaking any heart, but especially a child's, will reverberate far into our collective future.
All any child of divorce has to do is to look in the mirror.
I showed the photos to my kids, and they had a funny response: "I know where that is!" They didn't necessarily view any of these images as pretty or ugly, appropriate or inappropriate. They just recognized them as parts of our neighborhood that they, too, had noticed on our frequent walks around the area.
As a single Dad, 50% of the time, I often see life through my kids' eyes. I also rely on them about people. When friends drop by, or new people enter my life, I always ask them later what they think about them. As with my images of the streets, the kids rarely make judgements. Instead, they make observations.
My kids like all of my friends. And they are inclined to like anyone new I introduce to them. Over the past three years that I have lived here, one person above all others captured their hearts, as she did mine.
She was the most unlikely of all our visitors in that she has always claimed she doesn't like kids, particularly, and certainly never wanted to have any, or be responsible for them. Oddly, however, with my three little ones, she revealed a side of herself that perhaps never before had been seen.
I won't go into detail now, but her sweetness toward them changed our entire family dynamic. Today, after she is long gone from our lives, her influence lingers throughout our flat. The kids often mention her, when we play certain games or do things she introduced into our family life.
When people ask me why this loss has been so difficult, I always try to explain that it isn't only me who has lost his lover, best friend, and confidant, but my kids who have lost a good friend, an adult they came to trust and love very deeply.
It's hard, in a single parent household, to make things work. There is a ton of work, never enough time, constant pressures of various kinds, conflicts, worries, difficulties, noise, chaos. There also is music, art, beauty and love of a rich kind.
My kids and I were alone before she came and we have been since she left. They are fine with it; partly because there may be some backsliding going on around here about some standards that she introduced. And though the kids never considered her a parent, only a friend, she was our most special one, the only one we all embraced as part of our family.
A problem for me, the sentimentalist, is that her traces are everywhere here, so the kids innocently mention her all the time. This is fine in one sense, because I remain in love with her myself. Yet she is totally and irrevocably gone from me. She broke up with me, partly because I am a parent.
Our lives go on. Today I played vigorous games of basketball and soccer with my kids; we hung out with friends; ate lunch on Valencia Street; ordered Chinese food at night (Indian from Spicy Bite next time); and rented movies tonight. In the video store, an attractive woman with dark hair and dark eyes complimented me on how sweet and cute they all are.
I'm not sure whether it takes a village to raise kids, but I do know it is very hard to be a parent, whether alone or in a couple. Every now and again, however, if we are lucky, an Angel shows up, and that can make all the difference...I am grateful to mine, even as I mourn her loss. Maybe some day another will show up to take her place. Or maybe not. Either way, her time enriched us, changed us, left us all wanting more.
The heart may indeed be a lonely hunter. But I don't think any of us should turn away from love, in its many forms, unless we are willing to pay the price, many times over. Breaking any heart, but especially a child's, will reverberate far into our collective future.
All any child of divorce has to do is to look in the mirror.
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