Homecomings

It's a Sunday evening, and ever since I can remember this is the day for a roast. So, today, as my little kids returned from a week on a horse ranch in Montana, I served a pork roast, garlic mashed potatoes, gravy, corn on the cob, Persian cucumbers, baby carrots, plus a leftover mix of hot sausage, white potato, stir-dry peppers, spices and tomato sauce.

Dessert is fresh raspberries, vanilla ice cream, and chocolate chip cookies.



I disclose these mundane facts in an attempt to set the scene. I am my parents' son. Much of what I do dates from what they did for me.



Since I became a single Dad four years ago, I've felt a new urgency to share my cultural background with my children. It's important to me that I share some of the experiences I remember from my childhood many decades ago in Michigan.



Sundays were special, as family days, but also scary, as the end of the weekend, which felt safe, and the kickoff of a new week out in the world, which promised uncertainty, including unpleasantness.



In those days, quite distant now, I had to know how to fight in order to defend myself from bullies. My Dad warned me that I would need a variety of tools, including enough wrestling ability to get on top of a bigger, stronger boy and let my (inevitable) nosebleed (presumably from his punches) coat him in my bright red life fluid, thereby ending the fight.

Or, how to throw a wicked right punch, which became a weapon that broke more than one nose.

What he didn't really teach me but what I learned on my own was to avoid fighting altogether, since I found it distasteful, by bonding with bigger, tougher allies. Thus, in my teens, I went around with some guys who would soon drop out of school, engage in criminal activities, and end up in prison.



Under their protection, I survived until such time as I could locate other oddballs like myself, outsiders so strangely wired that none of us fit into any known category in that ingrown, cruel backwater known as (ugh) Bay City, Michigan.



God, how I hated the place.



But, here in the Mission District of San Francisco, surrounded by a diversity of cultures, languages, sensibilities and orientations unimaginable in gross old Bay City, I'm much more comfortable.



Here, all is right in my world. My children are back. My special friend has redesigned the space in a way that excites us all.



Our home seems brighter now, fresher, and more open. The sweet odor of a moist roast hangs in the air; thus my own personal family traditions live on here on a distant coast.

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