What is love? 1.1

This is a photo of me holding my daughter, Sarah Daisy, when she was a baby. She transformed it into a birthday card for me this past April. When she was born, I had black hair, I was 32, and I'd never before encountered a creature such as her. She was so gentle and sweet, right from birth, that we called her the "Buddha."

One time, when she was still very young, I sat her on a bed and snapped her picture. As the flash went off, she fell backwards onto the bed, her legs up in the air. Her gentleness was such that something as ordinary as a camera flash could knock her over.

***

Tonight I spent with another gentle soul, a special friend, whom I will call J-2, since her first name starts with the same letter as my ex-girlfriend's. For the first time since J broke up with me, I am truly attracted to someone new. But as fate would have it, she's not ready for a new relationship at this point.

In fact, all I accomplished by expressing how I feel about her was to make her cry.

My question is this: why is it so difficult for men and women in our time?

I suppose, as the cliché goes, "timing is everything." J-1 would appreciate this. When she left me she explicitly said she wanted me to be free to meet someone new, and she predicted that that would happen sooner than I might think it could.

I don't know that four long months after she left me qualifies as "sooner than I might think," given how painful this all still is, but it is true I am attracted to someone new now, even if she is not ready to return my affection.

So, where does that leave me? Back here, alone, wondering if anything can ever work out for me. It's not like I fall in love easily, or that I pick women who will automatically respond to me. For reasons I do not understand, something deeply chemical and definitely irrational is involved in all of my choices. I guess I like things to be complicated.




The most I ever do, however, is make the first move. Once rejected, I inevitably retreat. From then on, it is up to her to make anything else happen.

What does any of this have to do with love, you ask. Stay tuned...

Last Night

El ayer por la noche alrededor de 50 amigos vino al partido en nuestro patio trasero celebrar el contrato de mi Laila de la hija a Loic. Las costillas especiales del cerdo de Larry eran un golpe grande.

House of Hope

Last week, at a company barbecue, my buddy Kyle and I were contemplating how tempting it would be to bring our shotguns to work one day and take out a few of those huge Canadian Geese that frequent the lagoon behind our office. Before someone sics the anti-NRA lobby on me, let me assure you this was strictly a fantasy. I don't even have any ammo for my classic 16-gauge shotgun that resides under my (or rather, J's) bed, and it hasn't been shot for over 40 years. (Kyle, however, is an active hunter, so he's got something that could do the job, I'm sure.) More importantly, I'm not sure whether Canadian Geese even taste any good and, as a predator, I certainly would never kill anything I didn't intend to eat.

It's probably not one of my better parts, but I don't have much sympathy for the animal rights movement. I wonder how much time any of those activists have actually spent in nature. It's not a nice world, but one where predators are constantly stalking their prey, ready to pounce and eliminate the young, the old, the weak, the careless.

Rather like our class-based society's collective approach to the poor, the homeless, the addicted, and the lost souls who inhabit our streets. In other words, I am suggesting, it might be better to examine our cruelty to other animals through the prism of how we treat our own kind. If we do that, we have to admit we are a violent herd of predators, feeding on the misery of those who fall over the edges of our comfort zone, as we acquire the resources we feel we need to feel safe and keep our families protected.

Not much different than a covey of Canadian Geese might feel if they saw me and Kyle approaching one morning, our guns raised at the right angles so that they were in our line of sight.

***

The photo I am publishing tonight (below) is one of the classics in my family collection. That is my father, around the age of 69, demonstrating to my kids the art of cleaning a fresh-caught fish, probably a bass he hooked in Mud Lake not long before this photo was taken. The kids are watching much as I watched, a generation earlier, as Dad (now Grandpa Tom) patiently fillets a small, freshwater morsel.

Soon after this shot, they ate chunks of this fish. I remember the look on their faces and the excitement in their voices: "This is good!" None of them had ever before liked fish, but never before had they tasted it fresh out of the lake and into the frying pan. That taste is just about as good as it ever gets. No restaurant, no matter how good nor how expensive, can compete with this cuisine, that of the outdoors, freshly gathered and killed and cooked and eaten before any of nature's degenerative processes have time to get underway.

That food eaten in the wild resonates deeply within us, transporting us back to our ancient origins as upright predators with big brains and big sexual organs, is obvious. We're a smart kind of animal, and an extremely sexual species as well. Thus we have taken over planet earth, and are rapidly overpopulating it, without regard to what the outcome will be.

***

I am grateful to my father on so many levels for how he shared his own private knowledge about life with me, both when I was a boy and then much later on, when he was an old man. In between, we had many problems, but despite that, he never lost me entirely. (By contrast, my sweet J's mother very clearly lost her,though I hope some day they will reconcile.) I always loved him and I was devastated the night he died, just hours before he would have met his newest grandchild, my daughter Julia. I felt so mad at him for exiting at that point, until I let in the true meaning of my mother's memory of his last words, as he lay writhing on the floor, "I've got to go, I've got to go..."

He and another Canadian friend told me on a golf course one day about how even after 70 years since they were in school, they still could recite poems from memory. Then they proceeded to do so, two old men in checkered pants and goofy hats, reciting poem after poem and never missing a word, never missing a line.

As I listened, I noticed something else. Both Dad and Roger were reciting these poems with a noticeable English accent -- not American, not Canadian. I asked whether their teachers had been English, and they said some were, some weren't.

But all were, clearly, at heart, as these two students confirmed almost three quarters of a century after the lessons first were learned. Repetition has its virtue when training young children.

***

A lot is going on out here. I just found out that at the giant engagement party we are throwing tomorrow night for my oldest daughter (pictured in the middle of her little sister and brother in the photo below), one of my new special friends will attend. She is bringing a friend. I have arranged my painted sand dollars along the railing of the back porch, my rather sad little attempt at using watercolors to express a small portion of love for my daughter as she embarks on this next stage of her life. My very nice new neighbor has given us use of her grill, so we can cook the 40-50 pounds of meat our guests will consume. Some of those flowers J planted last summer have been coaxed back to life during this heat wave and my daily waterings.

So, a lot is happening around here, most of it good. Still, late at night, my mind wanders down to Biloxi, and the image of a certain redheaded Angel sleeping on her air mattress on the balcony of a Methodist church. Someone who during her days probably is fighting the relentless bureaucratic morass that the local community encounters whenever they try to rebuild their lives.

It's enough to drive a perfectly sane person crazy.

So my hope is that she is taking care of herself, because I always will love her and want her to find happiness, if possible, or at least meaning. She, more than anyone I know, deserves that.

She once told me my words can be "magic." I hope so. Not only for J, but also for everyone I know and love, if I can add magic to your world I will do so for as long as I am breathing. Tonight, as I tried to add some magic for a new friend, she started crying. I immediately recognized the symptom -- those in her past, including her parents, had not done their work well enough. Otherwise she would already know how special she is. Same with J.

I'll say this. Whatever happened in my childhood to send me hurtling into an obsessive, compulsive, depressive future, my parents did a wonderful job of making me feel as if I were special. My own chemistry may have doomed me to challenge their assessment, but every time I hit bottom, their words, whispered in my boyish ears, return to me. "You are smart and you are special."

Thanks, Mom and Dad. Whatever I have to offer others, I owe, ultimately, to you.

Beware of Darkness*

Like most kids, I was afraid of the dark. I’d check under my bed for all kinds of monsters; sometimes, I’d also check the closet. But I also remembering debating with myself whether it was worth the risk to get out of bed and cross the room to look into my closet, given that if something was under my bed, it certainly would get me in the process.

This dilemma tended to freeze me in place, pondering unsavory alternatives.

Growing up required giving up all kinds of fantasies, including these fears, since as it turned out, no monsters ever showed up – at least not the ones I’d imagined. The demons were figments of my imagination.

Eventually, however, I grew to realize that a lot of the things and people around me were figments of my imagination. There was an entire set of sports leagues I invented, each team with a distinct roster. I kept stats for everyone, and “published” news reports analyzing each day’s results. Some of my “leagues” persisted for years, so that I’d compiled 50 “seasons” of records or more.

It’s a bit embarrassing to admit I only recognized how compulsive this behavior was in my 40’s. Even as an adult, I continued to play these imaginary games, almost any time I got bored. When I finally let them go, it was a relief, actually. It was about the same time I recognized how shy I had been all of my life.

My strategies for fighting shyness included pushing myself into socially uncomfortable situations, like going to parties where I knew no one; or giving public speeches before ever larger crowds. By the time I was 50, I no longer considered myself shy. And I wasn’t.

I like to tell my little kids these stories, whenever they tell me they feel shy or that they have fears about monsters and other evildoers. Ten-year-old Dylan has recently developed a compulsion to double-check that all of the doors in the house are locked before he goes to bed.

He can’t really explain why, but it seems related to another of his decisions – to stop watching any scary movies or read scary books. It’s that problem of having too active an imagination, I believe. He may be a bit like me in that way.

Still, we all know that bad things can and will happen in life. Pretty much everything ends badly. Relationships break up, jobs get lost, friends disappear, favorite things break or get lost, ultimately we all lose our lives. So almost everything ends badly.

The question is not how it’s going to turn out – we’re all toast in the end – but what the next step will be. You meet somebody, you like her or him, a relationship forms, it escalates to intimacy, and all of a sudden you’ve got a brand new entity in this world, as captured by the equation (1+1=3), i.e., you, me, and our relationship.

So when you break up, you not only lose your partner, and you also lose that third entity, your intimate relationship. Right away, you’ve lost two-thirds of what you’ve had.

The real problem comes when you realize this isn’t the end of a process, it’s the beginning. Because, all too often, the next stage is you start to lose the one thing you have left -- yourself. For me, that is when I start to question whether the “us” ever really existed at all. Maybe our relationship had only been a figment of my still over-active imagination.

So watch out. For just like in baseball, three strikes and you’re out. Then, it’s time for you to take yourself out of the game altogether.

*George Harrison

El piso bajo*

When I was a young teenager, before my first real job, I was a paperboy. I rode my bike around our neighborhood, enduring the hazards of vicious dogs (one bit me in the butt), workers driving their pickups home drunk a couple hours after the afternoon shift ended (one ended up in the ditch), not to mention the much more relevant distractions of any cute girl walking by in shorts, lonely housewives who wanted to talk, or my main obsession -- getting back out to the massive corn field behind our subdivision.

After all, I had an entire world in formation out there, with the documentation to prove it. It was a world based on running. After I had smashed down a narrow swath of corn stalks for 50 yards or so, I would intersect with other paths I had created. At each of these intersections, I added a circle, much like those that confound visitors to Washington, D.C., or Paris.

This was my private world, and only I knew what transpired there. I can only guess what the poor farmer who discovered this maze thought when he directed his harvester through my world, but being as I was young and irresponsible at the time, I didn't really care. I ran through my world, rebuilding a skinny young body from the ravages of rheumatic fever. I pushed myself relentlessly, as I raced around this cornfield, repeating my mantra, "I am not lazy, I am not lazy, I am not lazy."

Unfortunately my various maps and stories about that era are lost due to my decision a few years later to vaporize any evidence I had ever been so immature to do this in the first place. Tonight is the first time I've ever written about this.

I suppose that farmer is long since dead, and if any crimes were inadvertently committed by ruining a small portion of his crop, certainly the statute of limitations has expired by now...

***

One day, when collecting payments from my customers of the Bay City Times, one elderly (to me) lady asked me to come inside. Reluctantly, I did. She offered me tea and started talking about how she had recently lost her mother. This horrified me, especially when she started crying. "I'm so lonely!"

At this point, I knew I had to go. I climbed back on my bicycle and rode away from there, and tried my best to never talk to her again. I found it appalling that a woman of her age was so lonely for her dead mother; it was not like she was a child like me.

Why would an old woman ever act so forlorn?

***

If you have not guessed this, tonight's post is an ode to a special friend, though not the one I usually mention. This is someone different, the one who took the time to teach me basic html, and not to condescend to me in the process. Luckily, I took a digital photo of this lesson, so I have preserved it for a future that we will no longer be able to have together.

There is another reason I am loyal to this friend. At the depths of my loneliness last winter, when my dearest J was away, the weather was cruel, and I did not have any desire to reach out to other potential female companions, this person sensed my pain, and invited me to a very nice, home-cooked dinner. The warmth of their home, plus the sight of a couple very much in love, helped sustain me through that period.

***

For all of my posts, there is an optimal soundtrack. Tonight's would be "Thank you, Jack White." The CD is Flight Test, the artists Flaming Lips.

Virtually everything I write about here concerns a sense of loss. Yet, I hope it is clear I am not mournful. Each loss we suffer creates a new opportunity in this life. No matter how painful, or how shockingly we experience it, a new feeling will arise to address our pain. Sometimes, that is a sense of relief -- that a source of great consternation, ambivalence, or guilt (to cite a fraction of the spectrum of emotions actually involved) now has decisively been removed from our daily reality. In the wake of this removal, we may be free to seek a truer future for ourselves, i.e., a partner more ready to traverse life's challenges with us, an employer more appreciative of our vision, a community that sustains, rather than depletes us.

As the title of this post suggests, (*)the ground floor is a place I am familiar with, as I've often retreated there when life's shocks have brought me more than I (temporarily) thought I could bear. But, as I've mentioned before, it's not how you fall but how you bounce.

I'm confident my friend will bounce just fine, and I look forward to meeting again, once we are both on the upper floors of life.



Caption: Just another lovely photo of a whiteboard somewhere in Silicon Valley. (Author unknown).

You see me, I don't see you 1.1

Late tonight, in my neighborhood Safeway, a friendly guy in front of me had only one item, a large bottle of beer. I only had a half dozen items myself, principally a new spotlight for my back porch that will hopefully light up the backyard for my daughter's engagement party this coming Friday night.

We were behind several slow-moving groups of people, which is a pretty good indicator that they were poor. (Middle-class people like him and me want to move through these lines as fast as we can, because we're quite sure we have somewhere better to be, and we might well be right. It's quite possible that standing in line at Safeway in an inner-city neighborhood is as good as it gets, (sorry Jack Nicholson, and sorry, therapy waiting rooms); but it's equally likely that it is not.

Anyway, my impatient stranger, a line inhabitant like me, no doubt somebody I'll never meet again, was a younger, handsome, African-American man with an appealing smile and a habit of talking out loud, sort of to himself and (since I was responsive) also to me. He said he was just off work, after another long day on what must be an afternoon shift somewhere, and he couldn't wait to buy his beer, get home, and "chill."

The problem was that he started expressing his frustration that the Asian man running the cash register, who is also one of the store managers, was moving too slowly for his taste. I noticed the Asian man look sharply in our direction, taking the two of us in -- a black man and a white man, both apparently successful in their ways, both impatient to get through his line and out of that place to wherever we were going with the things we were buying there.

When the black man in front of me reached his turn at the front of the line, the Asian man let him have it. "You think it is easy to be here at the end of eight hours, never having even a break? Of course I move slower now." His eyes flashed with anger; he was twice as old and probably half the size of the black customer he was confronting.

I noted to myself, "This is not a very good way for a store manager to treat a customer." But I dropped my eyes in embarrassment -- for all concerned.

To his credit, the black guy kept his cool, said nothing, paid for his beer, and left.

As he rang up my order, the Asian man asked, "How are you, Mister Wei?" (Many Chinese people drop the "r" from my last name and pronounce it in the form of a common Chinese name, Wei.

"I'm fine," I assured him. "But I hope you get a good rest." As I exited, I heard him explaining his earlier outburst to the next customer in line: "That guy, he comes in here every night and he only buys beer!"

***

Earlier this evening, I had a lovely dinner with a new friend who is a visiting journalist. I asked her to explain her interviewing style. She said, "I am very shy. So I try to ask general questions and keep them very short. And then I listen carefully to the answers."

So, I asked her to interview me. Her questions were indeed short and direct. And they triggered responses from me that were long, rambling and revealing.

I felt like she could see me.

The best journalists are often shy, curious, and persistent.

***

The familiar chill returned to San Francisco tonight, as the fog settled softly over our beautiful city at sunset. But the wind was gentle; my companion after dark simply tucked her hands up into the arms of her sweater to stay warm (see earlier posts about women's extremities), and didn't need my arm around her this time to ward off the cold.

But, back home in the Mission, I've reopened the windows, started the fans, put ice in my glass, and pondered what it may mean that I now seem to live in a place with a strangely hot summer climate. It ain't the tropics, but I'll take it just the same.

Self Portrait

Up the down elevator at work...

It was bound to happen...

Last night, I started a post called "Why do we fall in love?" But after a few sentences, I stopped writing and started thinking. The more I thought the more I realized that I don't know why we fall in love. I'm familiar with all the theories; I've read the books. The Jungian explanation works for me. But in modern global societies, the power balances between men and women have changed so radically that both seem perplexed at how we should relate to one another, going forward. Around me, I see a lot more pain and confusion than happiness and satisfaction. Many couples seem out of synch; many are breaking up. Many of us are alone, without a partner.

All of this, we know. Last night, for almost the first time since I started this blog, I felt I had nothing to say. I was blocked.

Another factor was that I remained so angry about FEMA that I wanted to leave that rant up top for as long as I could.

Every writer's fear is writer's block. It happens. When it does, I've learned, it means I'm just not ready yet. So, last night, I aborted my partial post and closed my laptop. Today, I have nothing additional to say about falling in love other than for whatever mysterious reasons, I've been wired to do so my entire life. It's one thing I know how to do, although it invariably gets me into serious trouble, time after time.

If I'm not falling in love, there's a good reason, the same one for writer's block.

I'm just not quite ready yet...


P.S. I finally "transplanted" my pumpkin plant to the back garden, but Julia had the idea that rather than removing it from its pot, where it looked so comfortable, we should bury the entire pot up to the surface level and encourage the plant to grow out of the pot if it chooses to. So that's what we did.

The Shame of FEMA

The Bush administration has made it official NYT Story. The next massive disaster like Katrina will be handled with new rules. Most notably, families will receive far less cash assistance than they did last year, when FEMA provided $2,000 per family. The new limit is $500 per family.

The announcement comes in the wake of criticism that FEMA's cash assistance program was victimized by "breathtaking" fraud earlier NYT story summary, according to the GAO, which is the investigative arm of Congress. Headlines indicated that as much as $1.4 billion in assistance "may have been given based on fraudulent, inaccurate, or improper claims," or 25% of the total.

A closer look at that report, however, reveals that the Congressional auditors estimated that the range of likely fraud was between $600 million to $1.4 billion. Headline writers grabbed the upper estimate and ran with it, a nice example of how the news got sensationalized.

If you use the lower figure, only about 11% of the cash assistance went to victims on questionable grounds.

The release of the GAO was accompanied by lurid details. FEMA cash had been spent on liquor! Gambling! Porn!

My question is simple: Have any of these auditors ever visited South Mississippi? What the hell else do you think people would have spent their money on? Food rations were freely available, as were clothes (until the weather turned) and shelters to stay in.

There appears to be a moral battle going on, where conservative Republicans are at war with their own contradictory impulses. Mississippi is as GOP as the GOP can get -- a Red state all the way. It is the Republican leadership that has purposely developed the casino culture along that coast to goose the economy. That this was controversial is an understatement, because this is also the heart of the Bible Belt.

Therefore the casinos were never allowed to establish themselves on land, but were instead anchored on giant barges anchored offshore. Katrina picked these heavy monstrosities up and tossed them like bathtub toys inland. The problem is they weren't bathtub toys, they were agents of death and destruction that is visible to this day in the naked landscape they plowed through before coming to rest, on top of crushed houses and bodies, far inland.

Those same state officials as their first act after Katrina decided the casinos could rebuild their operations on land now. So, as soon as three months after the worst hurricane in Gulf Coast history, residents could once again gamble away whatever cash they could lay their hands on.

The contradictions and hypocrisies go on and on, back and forth between Capitol Hill, the White House, and the Gulf Coast. One thing for sure: the victims have been officially blamed for FEMA's incompetence, so next time their assistance will be reduced by 75%.

Five hundred dollars per family. In the richest land on earth. The shame coats all of us, because we are witnessing class and race discrimination in the twenty-first century. That bridge from the old century to the new one that Clinton used to talk about may have a fast lane, but you can be sure the poor down yonder won't be having access to it.

Today, tonight and tomorrow

Our heat wave continues, but this evening a brisk breeze swept in from the ocean, so that couples returning home from dinner had an extra incentive to wrap their arms around one another, and keep warm in their light clothes, the short-sleeved shirts, tank tops, shorts, cotton skirts, and other summer clothing we've adopted here en masse lately. Driving across town to meet my dinner partner, I saw more half-naked people than anytime since Carnival.

Tonight, I am fixated on three issues: art, language, and how people keep each other warm. I'll work backwards.

Warmth

When I spent my first night with my ex-girlfriend, it was a wet, cold October night and there was no heater in her bedroom. Her bed was very cold. While she was in the bathroom, I laid on her side of the bed to warm it up for her; then I moved over when she came in. My kids sometimes call me "the furnace," because like most males I generate lots of body heat, regardless of the weather. Women, on the other hand, get cold at their extremities -- their ears, feet, hands, bottoms -- though once they warm up in bed, they stay warmer, somehow, than a tall man like me ever can be confident of being as the night goes on and the temperature keeps dropping.

I love having somebody next to me in bed, cradling her head on my shoulder, keeping her warm. Hours later, I turn to her smaller body to reclaim some of that heat, when I am needing it most.

That's what love and partnerships are all about. Giving and taking in proportion to who needs what when and who can give what when. It's all a lovely balance. I have always loved the way a woman feels in my arms, especially when I know I am holding and warming her against the cold. It's all about nature, and our blood temperature (98.6 degrees), size, fat tissue, muscle, bone, and how we fit together.

We are meant to join, like pieces of a puzzle.

Language

I love languages. Having visited 20-25 countries, mostly for work, and often for weeks at a time, I've had the opportunity to move among people speaking Spanish, French, Portugese, German, Italian, Russian, Malay, Indonesian, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Finnish, Hindi, Urdu, Farsi, Dari, Hebrew, Arabic, Uzbeki, Hazari, Pushtu, Hawaiian, and many other, lesser known languages, including several Native American languages. Sometimes I have spent an entire night "talking" to someone in the languages I know (English, Spanish, Dari) while they spoke back to me in theirs (French, Japanese, Mandarin.)

At times like this, I have often felt that a perfect exchange of meaning occurs. It is not necessary to be able to perfectly comprehend the words someone speaks to you if you can read her eyes, lips, and other facial clues, not to mention how she moves her fingers, hands, arms and, when possible, the rest of her body.

I should say I love the way women "talk" non-verbally. Every gesture is like a window into their essential soul. I recall how J. used to move her left arm and hand when expressing certain ideas or emotions. She presented herself as a kind of tomboy-type, almost masculine, but her gestures on the left side gave away her deeply feminine nature. No man I've met, not even the best imitators, could have duplicated how she made the air move around her slender left arm, hand, and fingers as she expressed certain kinds of emotion-based thoughts, the ones I was most curious about.

One of my favorite languages is Japanese. I know only a few perfunctory phrases, but it is apparent that the Japanese language divides up reality into significantly different chunks than does English. Another favorite is Mandarin, but its tonal aspects make it almost impossible to master at my age.

Art

When I am getting to know someone, the moment I can identify his or her artistic side is when our connection begins to deepen. Make no mistake: I love people of all kinds and temperments. But, when I sense the artist inside another person, I tell them. This is my best instinct, knowing where the art resides inside those I meet.

Tonight, I found an old book (The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse) I had not read in many years. I must have been very young when I marked certain passages, but without second-guessing my younger self, I will reproduce my first choice here, and credit its author:

I would conceal it, yet
In my looks it is shown --
My love, so plain
That men ask of me
'Do you not brood on things?'

-- Taira Kanemori