Babs, eh?

The oddest thing was when The Babbling Syndrome spread north of the border to Canada, where it was also known as Le syndrome de babillage, because Canadians, as we all know, don't talk much in the best of times, and this certainly was proving to other that the best of times, at least south of the border.

Sent to investigate how our northerly neighbors were coping, or not, I found that in fact TBS had apparently mutated into a rather more benign form, as Canadians were becoming so fond of their loquaciousness that they nicknamed the condition Babs. It started as soon as I got to Customs, and rather severe-looking officer asked me suspiciously, "Why have you come?"

I fumbled for a suitable answer to this question, but couldn't locate one.

He looked up from my passport, with photo of me in goofy glasses, mustache and Groucho Marx nose. He squinted to find the resemblance and I instantly realized what a drag it must be to work for Homeland Security, which up north is called The Department of Just Checking, eh?

"And why do you have so many pencils?"

"I am a writer, and we always say, "The pencil is mightier than the light saber; or Der Bleistift ist mächtiger als der helle Säbel." (Maybe he will be impressed by my erudition, I was possibly thinking.)

Anyway, the Customs fellow tried again: "Business or Pleasure?"

"Neither, actually," replied, suddenly finding my own inner voice, briefly. "Curiosity."

"Ah," the man's expression softened. "Babs, eh?"

So, that's how I got into the country. I didn't know the name of the hotel where I was to be staying or answers to any other question, but being curious was a good enough reason to clear the border, at least in my case.

We Canadians are so relaxed -- "laid back," I think is what you gringos called it -- that we're quite happy with our babbling state. We just wander around our charming streets these warm nights, smiling at each other and saying "Eh?" There is a large Asian community in the town I chose for my Babs query, so I determined it might be interesting to see how these hyphenated Canadians were coping with Babs.

I got as far as the large Japanese community, where the condition is known as さざめくシンドローム, or "The syndrome which clatters."

I've got to go now, sorry, but amidst all this clattering, there is a report about a little man who has somehow become stuck inside a woman. It's tough being a lone investigator in times like these. But, given my expertise from the case of the man who wanted a little woman, I'm now considered something of an authority on the fate of the little people, who dart in and out of view constantly among us, occasionally even apparently becoming lodged within us.

What an odd lot has been dealt us. I'll report back when I can hear myself above the clattering, find the little inner man, and perhaps introduce him to his own little inner woman.

Boyhood Scrapbook ( Libro de recuerdos de la adolescencia)

After my first marriage broke up, I moved my stuff in my car to a house across town. Everything was jumbled together in boxes, so for a while I couldn't find anything. Then, I moved again a month later, this time into the house where I would spend most of the next year.

Slowly, as I unpacked my boxes, I sorted through old letters and books, some reaching back to my childhood. My son Peter, then about 8, had just become a big baseball fan, rooting for the Giants, playing little league, and collecting baseball cards. I told him about my big collection back in the Fifties, when I was a kid.

He came over to spend the night one Saturday and I dug through my boxes, just to see whether any baseball-related stuff had survived the many moves I'd made since childhood. Out tumbled this old scrapbook, circa 1958, with prime baseball cards of Willy Mays, Jackie Robinson, Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams, among others, glued inside.


This turned out to be pretty much all that was left of my boyhood collections (I once had collections of virtually everything -- stamps, bottle caps, stones, shells, seaglass, driftwood, bullet shells, bones, you name it). One battered scrapbook with boyish scribbles and notes throughout.

For some reason I had carefully retyped the 1958 baseball season stats; an indication of how much I was into baseball at that time.

Baseball and numbers, real and imagined, these were the elements dominating my fantasy life when I was little. Only one thing has changed over the decades, and that is the addition of one additional passion -- the opposite sex. Add it all up and --presto! -- you get the outlines of one man's simple life story.




-30-

Off to Burning Man (or Women & Cats)...A hombre ardiente (o mujeres y gatos) ... 非常に熱い人にを離れて(または女性及び猫)

Not me, I'm not off to anywhere yet, but my car is. Peter and I switched, so I drove his older model down 101 South today. You never know what you'll encounter on this commute; today it was a runaway box of empty styrofoam food containers that was rapidly transformed into a cloud of snowy pollution that drifted far southward from where the box lay wounded on its side in South city.

It is an odd car that I am driving today; it moans, emitting a kind of long, sorrowful groan, otherwise unintelligible. Naturally, I tried talking to it, asking about its history, but it did not answer.

Oliver doesn't talk much either; he's come back now and then to enjoy the sun in my back yard. He sits next to me when I grill and sniffs the steaks, or whatever, with vague interest. I wonder what will happen when I grill fish, however. That may get him jumping.

He's a lethargic fellow, but slender and healthy, just a peaceable sort, uninterested in fights or challenges. When we first locked eyes, he rolled over on his belly to indicate he prefers to make love not war.

Lots of history with cats and me. My older kids had a cat named Choicey who lived maybe 19 years; she was very sweet when young and crotchety when old. Most of her life she was in extraordinary shape, very healthy and quite aggressive as a hunter. She used to wait near the fruit trees in our yard after harvest when the only plums, apples, apricots, left on the branches were rotting.

Birds would come by and peck at this fermented fruit and then fly away erratically, drunk. Choicey specialized in vertical leaps timed perfectly to allow her to pluck these careless alcoholics out of mid-air, very impressive. She reminds me, in memory, of Omar Vizquel snatching a line drive out headed for left field of the air...

Choicey was equally good at catching small snakes, injuring them slightly, and bringing them to the front door triumphantly (never inside). Peter always carefully addressed the snake's injury and nursed it back to health in an aquarium, filled not with water but a little soil and lots of grasses (and bugs to eat). When the snake was healthy, he released it back to the yard.

Unlike the snakes, few of the birds brought down by Choicey survived. Darwinian drama in a front yard.

***

Aidan found an abandoned nest of kittens in Golden Gate Park during a school picnic about five years ago. That is when we got Ghoastie, one of our two current cats (the other being Pumpkin, both females.) Ghoastie is slim, active, outdoorsy and submissive; Pumpkin rules the house and loves to sleep on the couch or on Julia's bed.

When the kids' Mom and I split up, in 2003, there was a period of time that both cats stayed with me in my flat, until the previous owner could vacate the new house we bought. One night, Ghoastie escaped out back and disappeared. The children were back east (as they are now) visiting their grandparents, so I didn't tell them at first, hoping she would turn up before they came home.

She didn't. She remained missing for weeks. The kids and I created a poster, which we circulated to every neighbor along both sides of four streets. Hundreds of posters like the ones you see all the time, tacked to telephone calls, or slipped under your front door.

Then, one night, my girlfriend and I were out back when we heard a distant "Meow." She had just been explaining to me how cats talk in Mandarin, which appeared to quite different from our American felines. At the sound of this faint cat cry, we both rushed to the back fence. I called Ghoastie in English, she called out in Chinese. (We reasoned that you can never know too many languages when it comes to attracting a runaway cat.)

Slowly, for more than an hour, the cat's cries became progressively closer. She was far away at first, probably five or six backyards away in the darkness. But finally, she sounded as if she were next door. We kept calling and waiting. Suddenly, up and over the fence came Ghoastie. She nuzzled into my girlfriend's arms, which settled our linguistic debate once and for all.

***

Earlier, my younger kids had a cat named Jazz. He had been rescued by a friend who found him huddled inside a bulldozer that was parked near a wetlands reclamation project in Marin. My wife took Jazz in, fed him from a bottle, and nursed him back from a fragile state. The vet said it would be touch and go whether he survived, but he did.

When we moved cross-country in the middle of 1999, we left Jazz with a neighbor. He had always been an outside cat, very friendly, pretty territorial, but nice with the kids. The neighbor loved him and tried to make sure he was safe, but one day in her back yard he got into a fight with another male cat, who bit him.

After that, he refused to go outside. He retreated into a front room, and sat in a window looking out toward where we used to live. She could not coax him out, so she moved his food, water and litter box into the room and let him be.

A few weeks later, when I returned to the west coast to retrieve a few possessions, including Jazz, he perked up immediately when I approached the neighbor’s house, and once I was inside, he rushed out of the room, and very happily entered the airline carrying case I had brought for him. (This in and of itself was odd, because he had always before fought going inside the case.)

Back in Takoma Park, outside D.C., he settled into our big house, and explored the yards. But soon, he stopped going outside, which was puzzling. Over the months, he gained weight and became less and less active. We only realized something was terribly wrong when he started spending all day and all night on one corner of baby Julia's changing table, the corner nearest a window that looked out over our vast back yard.

The vet said he was dying from feline leukemia, which is rampant in San Francisco. He probably got it from the bite in the fight. He never cried or complained; he just gazed at a place way out in the garden where he once had roamed.

After he died, I buried Jazz in the exact spot way back in the yard he'd spent his final days gazing at.

***

I love Google's translation service; when I asked it to translate Burning Man into Japanese it came out as above (in the title field); and when I retranslated that back to English, it came out as: "In from the very hot person separated."

The same English to Spanish to English process yielded "Ardent Man."

The rebel call

I'll admit up front that I am badly over my head in this business of blogging about my emotions and my personal life. After all, I am a journalist by profession, not a novelist. It is only since January this year that I learned that it is entirely natural for my emotions to bounce all over the place.

Maybe the women in my life have been protecting me from these facts of life for a long time. If so, why? Did they think I was not capable of handling the truth? If so, this makes me wonder why women and men are ever able to make fundamental connections. If we don't help each other understand how different the genders truly are, are we truly generous in spirit? Or, as I suspect, are we all motivated by the capitalist myth of scarcity?

I'm aware that many options remain open to me, as a man of a certain age. There are those of my same age, who understand perfectly what our generation has been through. Our experiences may be so similar that explaining things becomes almost unnecessary. Then, there are women a bit younger, let's say 16 years or so, who due to the disparity between how men and women age emotionally, are roughly my age emotionally and therefore my equal.

Then, there are women much younger than me. Or women older than me. All of these groups represent potential partners, but only, of course, if the feelings are mutual.

For me, being in a relationship is so much about the opportunity of giving and care taking that I feel awkward whenever anyone asks me what I want in return. I know only this much: it is such a wonderful surprise when a woman starts taking care of me. For whatever reasons from my past, this is not what I expect. When she comes into my house, cooks for me, runs her hands through my hair, pats me as I fall asleep, and is attracted to my children -- that will be exciting to me.

But, of course, so far, in my history as a single dad, that is only an imaginary experience, not something I have actually known. The closest thing to it ended in sadness. I don't really think it has been fair for me to write about how she affected my kids, and me because she was always honest about her ambivalence. Truthfully, I feel like taking down any posts that might unfairly expose her, because she does not deserve that. She was always open and honest in all ways; if any reader has a different impression, I have failed as a writer in profiling her, and I realize now I really should stop.

You know, I stopped doing serious journalism years ago when I grew tired of writing about other people. It started to feel that I was stealing their stories. Now, in the name of telling my own story, I worry that I may have been distorting someone else's. A conversation earlier tonight with a writer friend helped crystallize this insight.

I just hope J knows I would never use any words to hurt her or misrepresent her; words are way too precious to me, and also the only tools I have left. My challenge going forward is to be honest about my feelings without compromising anyone else's privacy. Who knows whether I am even capable of that; after all, I am not a novelist.

One Year Later 1.1

A year ago tonight was our last night of innocence. A hurricane called Katrina was bearing down on the Gulf Coast, but there had been so many close calls in recent years that your average TV viewer could be forgiven for growing cynical about reporters poised by water's edge, their stylish clothes blowing in the wind. So much of our world now is mediated. We "know" what we know about most things through the filter of media, and none has shaped our national consciousness more than TV.

But this was a monster storm that was swirling through the shallow warm waters of the Gulf, and veteran hurricane watchers developed a very bad feeling about Katrina. By a year ago tonight, even the shallowest of the on-air correspondents realized that this one was the real deal, so they fled inward alongside the local population. Anyone who could get away did.

Those who were left were about to experience a nightmare beyond description, which has not stopped many writers (including me) from trying. The next morning, Katrina did things no one could have imagined. Offshore the storm pushed an entire island toward the coast. Next, it smashed headlong into the massive barges serving as casinos anchored offshore.

Now, as it twisted ashore, the power of the surge reached its terrible peak. It lifted these huge barges and carried them like balsa wood models forward toward East Biloxi. The jagged center of the storm, ripping through whatever it encountered like a buzz saw, leveled the coastal village of Waveland. It also took out everything all along the coast for many miles on either side. Down went Pass Christian, down went a chunk of Gulfport, as well as Bay St. Louis, and other towns here and there.

At Biloxi, the giant barges now were hurtling toward town on the shoulders of a 30-foot wave. The people too poor or old or sick or otherwise compromised to get out of the way huddled in their attics or on their roofs, helpless in the face of God's certain fury.

When I spoke with both survivors and the volunteers who had tried to help them three months later, the sense of trauma, among the victims and the volunteers, was palpable. People tended to repeat their stories over and over, sometimes glancing anxiously over their shoulder at the Gulf nearby as if nervous they might reignite its anger.

No one in the path of the barges survived. I met people who suspected their friends were still flattened underneath these twisted hulks where they came to rest a half mile inland. Given the smell of death that surrounded them, I suppose they were right.

But even early this year, there were reports that at least 200 unidentified bodies were still being held in refrigerator trucks in Mississippi. The truth is that nobody knows how many died and how many disappeared, because like anywhere in the U.S., the poor, the illegal, the undocumented, the messed-up are not counted well.

Some people swam to their survival. Some had tied themselves to trees, cars, houses, anything that might hold, and were able to avoid drowning as the giant wave washed over them. But for many, the killing blow came from the other direction -- Back Bay -- where the storm viciously had them surrounded. Here, another 30-foot wave rushed in from the opposite direction of the Gulf surge. The two killer waves met over East Biloxi, exploding every structure at their epicenter.

Nothing I could write could adequately describe the aftermath of this explosive event. By the time I got there, everything was dead and everything was flattened. Everything was splattered and everything was quiet. Everything was muddied and everything was moldy. Everything smelled of death. No birds flew there and no children laughed there anymore.

A community had been turned inside out, rendered naked, everybody's possessions strewn about like trash. Shreds of paper, wood, steel, plastic, tile, brick, cement, cloth, flesh and bone stuck out of the mud like tombstones. Scavengers turned up. We met a man excited to have found gold and other jewelry along the beachfront, a dirty, shameless man, with furtive eyes and a guilty manner. I couldn't help thinking about Les Miserables and the scene under Paris when the bodies are picked over. My companion told the man his lucky find might well be the life treasure of a lonely old woman living in a tent nearby. He moved away quickly, glancing over his shoulder as if she might call the cops on him. She would do no such thing; tragedies are tragedies, and there is always somebody ready to benefit.

She knows only too well how badly people act in these awful moments. Although she would never describe herself as an idealist, she keeps hoping that saying something matters.

Tomorrow morning, she and others will be marching in Biloxi, apparently without a permit. They may well be arrested, a bunch of poor people, mainly black, and a few volunteers, mainly white, as they protest the plans to rebuild the coast with casinos and resorts. Those left behind under this plan will be the same people who felt the direct hit of Katrina a year ago tomorrow.

All they can do is march. All we can do is listen, and recognize that a new civil rights movement may be emerging post-Katrina. If so, we have to hold our politicians accountable.

After all, this is an election year...

As readers of this blog know, Katrina did more than rip a hole in the southeastern corner of this country; it also tore many lives apart, including, indirectly, mine. I lost my lover to Katrina. And a long time later, she lost me as well. I've moved on, something I often felt I couldn't do. I have accepted that she is gone from me, and that she is devoted instead to those trying to regain their lives on the Gulf Coast.

Tomorrow, she will be among those marching; maybe she'll be arrested. She has my support. I honor her and all the brave volunteers. They should be all of our heroes.

***

Life goes on. I used to want to go south. Now I have decided to head north. I have some important work to do north of the border, in Canada, the home of my father as well as many of my mother's relatives. This will be my first visit to Vancouver and it's not strictly business.

Here, in San Francisco, my son and many others prepare for their own religious pilgrimage, to Burning Man.

May God, whichever one serves you, bless us all -- in Nevada, Biloxi, Vancouver, and all over this globally warming planet...

Vintage

Today, I finally made it out to my first softball game of '06 -- in the very last game of the regular season. I can't say I played real well, going 0 for 2 at the plate, but it felt good to be out there with my old friends wearing the colors once again for the Michigan Mafia.

Best of all, we won the game in a come-from-behind, one-run victory in the last half of the last inning, just as the fog coating the outer Sunset reminded me why I never want to live out there. Fortunately, as I drove home to the Mission, the fog gave way to bright sunshine.

Peter and I grilled steaks, onions, tomatoes, and garlic, boiled red potatoes, and had a couple sweet ears of corn on the cob for dinner.

Summer is fading here. Next weekend is Burning Man, the certain end to the season.

I had to play softball today to keep my streak alive -- all 29 years our team has been around I've played with it. Since I didn't get to play any organized baseball as a kid, courtesy of rheumatic fever, the Mafia experience has been my second childhood.

You know I like numbers, and that's a big part of baseball. Here are my "career stats,"FWIW:


(Y)29 (G)328 (AB)1176 (R)393 (H)675 (D)62 (T)25 (HR)24 (RBI)364 (BA).574 (TB)859 (SP).730

I admit that I was proud to win four batting championships , though the most recent time was in 1996. Next season will be the Mafia's 30th; our coach has hair the color of snow now; when we started it wsa black, like mine. That silly baseball "card" above is from somewhere in the past, around 1990, I think. The ridiculous mustache is long gone.

Hundreds of people have played on the Mafia over the past 29 years. But we only made the championship game one time, in 1994 (I think). We lost badly but I remember that I hit 3 for 3, so my "World Series" batting average is perfect.

We play hard but with a certain self-knowledge, as captured by our team motto: "Only the mediocre are always at their best."

***

My friend Erica and I met today, partly to talk about family memoirs. She has convinced her grandmother -- one of two surviving siblings from a family of 14 African Americans -- to tell her granddaughter her story. I lent Erica a tape recorder and tonight was to be their first conversation. I can't wait to hear how it went. Like so many black people in America, Erica knows very little so far about her family's origins, when they got here, and from where, though of course she knows her grandmother's grandmother was certainly a slave.

She knows they lived in Louisiana, and that her grandparents migrated here during World War Two, when her grandfather got a job at the shipyards in Hunter's Point. Besides her memoir project, Erica is talking to a friend about researching her geneology, including the option of using DNA to find out information about her African origins.

It is stories like hers that inspire me about the potential of technology in our time to help us discover things that previously seemed unknowable.

***

I'll be teaching memoir writing to boomers and seniors again this fall. This type of teaching is stimulating if emotionally exhausting. I do it at night, in downtown San Francisco. As I emerge from class at 8:30 or so on Monday nights, I am tired, hungry, and anxious to get home. I'm also grateful to people for their honest story-telling and their willingness to explore things about their lives that they may have never before discussed, let alone in a public forum.

This work has coincided with my own chaotic life these past few years. For instance, I still have a message on my cellphone from two autumns ago...I played it as I walked out the building housing our classes into the chilly night air. I'd assumed I would be spending that night alone. But the message was from my new friend. "Um. I'm changing my mind..." She explained she had ordered food and if I wanted to come over, I should.

You know what I did, and I've never regretted it...