Candle Night

Tonight I am thinking about romance in my 50s, as opposed to my 40s, 30s, 20s, and teen years. Going back further gets into childhood, of course. Something very confusing to me as a boy was how I got erections thinking about or looking at girls. I'm not sure how common this is, but it most definitely was the case with me.

When you are uninformed and naive about sex, as I was, getting an erection is extremely confusing. You feel as if you are not in control of your own body, never a good feeling (until it is).

Not to mention the embarrassment of trying to keep it from showing in your tight pants. Throughout my boyhood, I was anxious about this problem. I never talked to anyone about it; somehow I knew it was among the unmentionables.

As a young teen, I had my first crushes. One of the girls who was the object of my yearning was a couple years younger. In fact, most of the girls I adored throughout my teen years were younger. This pattern continued throughout my adulthood. (Note to angry commenters -- I am just being honest here.)

I married my first girlfriend at roughly the halfway point between our birthdays. Thus, I was freshly 22, and she was a mature 21. We stayed married a long time -- 20 years, before our relationship broke into pieces. It took three more years to finish our divorce; three months later, I married for the second time.

That marriage ended in early 2003, so we were together 11 years. But the last year and a half was a sexless marriage, and by the time we broke up, we were both ready to move on.

So, this is the starting point of my story. Whatever I did or did not do until the age of 55, my life was defined by the central fact that I was married.

These past four years have been my first real experience as a single man, and you know what? It's not so bad. I was thinking about the relationships I've had over this time, and they have been marvelous, each in its own way. Some of the best parts of dating involve that period where you sense something is possible but you don't yet know what will happen.

There have been around 7 or 8 women who I've hung out with in my 50s in this state of potentially sexualization. This has been my learning period, what most people do when they are teenagers or in their 20s.

I never had that opportunity, and much of my older life has been defined as much by that gap in my education as anything else. Now, when I contemplate getting married ever again, I wonder: Why?

It is fun to be entirely free to meet new people, and allow mutual attractions to work themselves out, as they may. I am again reminded of that song, "The Inside of Love," by Nada Surf.

Making out with someone you don't really know -- it happens. Yearning for a deeper connection -- it is the perpetual state of being alone and single.

Meeting new people -- that can happen, guilt-free.

Without exception, the women I like who appear to also find me attractive have been about 15+ years younger than me. Is it possible that our emotional ages -- men and women -- are roughly calibrated at that kind of gap?

Since time waits on none of us, I wonder what my peers, women in their late 50s, know about this that I have not yet discovered. Need I reach the age of 70 before I am their equal, emotionally?

***

Today had some special moments. My 25-year-old son came by for lunch. He is in town visiting his girlfriend, and so is not staying with me. But he looks great, and is thriving, I think, at Cal Tech.

My good friend who runs the lifelong learning program where I teach memoir, and I took a long walk. She had a serious health scare this fall. It looks now that she is in the clear.

I'm rearranging furniture in my house, making things more comfortable, I hope, and more functional. Today was partly a day of repairing things. Spring is in the air (the temperature hit the high 60s), so of course I am into spring-cleaning.

Believe me, this place could use a large dose of that!

I am waiting to talk with a girl I like a lot. That may happen tonight as well.

My first dinner was brown mushrooms cooked in olive oil, with fresh basil, garlic, and onion slices. Then I ate a small piece of steak. Later I will have some warm shrimp and a salad of fresh greens, cherry tomatoes, and red pepper.

Out back, my little candle house glows with the light from a red candle. This is not exactly a red light house I am running here, but you get the general idea...

I am happy to be a man who loves women.

-30-

So you want to be a freelance writer...

The year 1975 was going to be, to my way of thinking, a make-it or break-it kind of year. I was determined to try and succeed as a freelance journalist by selling my research, reporting, writing or photographs.

I was living communally in a purple Victorian in the Haight, six adults and my neice, then around seven years old. So living costs were very low, and our old white van had been replaced by a 1966 red Volvo 122-S sedan with a B-18 engine, and supposedly the easiest car to repair then on the road.

Sadly, as I have recounted before, my skills at repairing cars were limited to changing the windshield blades, and even then, I tended to buy the wrong size, or install them backwards, etc.

This was still no small matter of low self-esteem for me, only a few years out of Michigan where everyone knew how to repair cars. Not only that, they knew how to build houses, raise crops, fly airplanes, and shoot game.

By contrast, in the mirror of my own soul, I was a faux-male. I couldn't do any of those things reliably; rather, it seemed to me there must be a type of magic that if you only could tap into it, would help you make mechanical things get right again.

It would be decades before I learned that logical thinking and patience were all that were required.

Sadly, I possessed neither.

Not to digress further, the year 1975 dawned with me determined to make something of myself. As I look at photos from that era, I see a striking young man, tall, slender but athletic, with dark hair to his shoulders, intense blue eyes, and an easy smile. No wonder most people considered me one of the most "normal" people they knew.

After all, this was post-Sixties San Francisco. I would have been embarrassed to admit that unlike virtually everyone I knew, I had never tried LSD, cocaine, or mushrooms. I had smoked dope, of course -- everyone did that -- it was like drinking a latte today.

But, in retrospect, even good old marijuana yielded bad trips for me. The first time I smoked it, in college, a girl convinced me to go to a party and do it. I was game, but I quickly became so paranoid I felt certain she, and everybody else there, was trying to get me. (For what, I wasn't sure.)

I remember stumbling home that night in Ann Arbor, seeing this girl and others behind every tree.

Now, I wonder: What was that all about? I came to be able to smoke it casually, as everyone did, soon after. But neither drugs nor alcohol held much appeal; I could easily alter my state, if I wanted to, just by revisiting my childhood battle with rheumatic fever, or my much more recent week of delirium under the cloud of typhoid/salmonella in India in early 1971.

In fact, my unpublished novel from that era contains weird scenes about elephants trampling me and faces peering down at me in the night, under mosquito nets, seeing whether I was regaining consciousness or not.

Most of time, in reality, I was not. But the weird thing was, even when I was unconscious, I think I could hear some of what was going on around me, like the snatches of conversation that sweep back to you from the people ahead, walking into the wind out on the Berkeley Pier in the Bay.

***

Whenever you move a piece of furniture in this place, you encounter some forgotten bag or box of stuff. Lots of it belongs to my kids, big and small. Some of it is leftover from girlfriends or wives. This week, my ten-year-old recovered a file I had long since misplaced. It was hiding behind the couch, nestled among what I gather is a major cache of his favorite, long-missing "Star Wars Miniatures."

So, he got his and I got mine.

Here is what mine says:

I was a spectacularly unsuccessful freelancer through August of that year. My total gross earnings were $945.50 from nine sales. I earned $145.50 for four articles for Pacific News Service, all of which were syndicated widely to newspapers around the country. New Times magazine in New York paid me $275 for three different types of work -- a research job, one article, and one photo.

(My notes indicate that my wife actually took the photo but that I was given the credit, and I don't want to even speculate why that was the case. Also, I recorded that the payment was three months late. In 1975, the $75 photo fee represented substantial income and was badly needed.)

I got two other checks during this eight-month period. Rolling Stone paid me $75 for a photo, and then (jackpot!) $450 for an article.

The topics behind all this effort?

* Chemical threats.
* Search for Patty Hearst.
* The Klamath Indians in Oregon.
* The LA skid row Slasher.
* Timothy Leary as a snitch.

***

Why, dear reader, would I bother you with this odd set of detail? Because, as it turned out, this was the last stretch of time before I became what Americans consider to be a "success."

The very next month, after these records stopped telling their story, I and my partner, Howard Kohn, broke the biggest story of that year, and the biggest story in Rolling Stone's then-still young history.

Our boss, Jann Wenner, was immensely generous. I remember a job offer (which I accepted) and a huge bonus ($20,000, I believe). He bought me my first suit, at Wilkes Bashford.

The rest of 1975 is unwritten in this old, yellowed, hand-written spreadsheet. But the rest of that year is well documented for history, in the form of thousands of newspaper articles and tapes of all three major US network TV broadcasts. We scored what in media terms was a major homerun.

So this old, yellowed paper is from the precious months before "success." I never had an inkling about what it would feel like to suddenly be thrust into the public eye. To have reporters following your every move; to have prosecutors issuing subpoenas to try and force you to reveal confidential sources; to have radicals issuing you death threats; to have groupies begging you to meet them after work.

I was so naive and so unprepared for all of this, back in 1975.

I did my best, which is to say I muddled through. But I also managed to escape the limelight and melt back into a different corridor, one that felt like the right fit. Still within Jann's organization there on Third Street, I coordinated an investigative unit that did stories about all sorts of important issues. A brief golden age of original investigative reporting on political and economic and environmental issues ensued at the magazine.

The results over the rest of 1975, 1976 and early 1977 are a legacy I am proud of. I introduced Lowell Bergman to Jann, and Lowell was hired. Together, we did some great stories.

When it all came crashing down, half a year after my first daughter was born, just before Christmas 1976, the dye had been cast. Lowell and I and a very special gentleman named Dan Noyes would go on to create the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Jann would go on to become a billionaire. Many of his other writers as well as Annie Leibowitz would become legends.

Tonight, as I look at those hand-written entries from so long ago, I am reminded that not only is the darkest hour just before dawn, but for any young freelance writers out there, your success awaits you just around the next corner, so persist.

You never can tell what may happen next. Just keep writing.

-30-

Molly Ivins (Part Two)

I was struck tonight, as I watched a fuzzy video of the Center for Investigative Reporting's 25th anniversary celebration back in 2002, by Molly Ivins's deep personal identification with what we at CIR had always tried to do.

I scribbled down a few of her comments as Master of Ceremonies that evening:

"Progressives are thought of as terminally earnest...(but) if we couldn't laugh, we'd go insane." Molly jokes her way through the event that night, some of them delivered so fast in her droll Texas drawl that the audience has trouble keeping up with her.

But laughter erupts again and again. She is skewering the mainstream press, politicians, and anyone else within range, with an unerring sense of deadly precision.

But, she also is cognizant that young journalists are present, presumably idealistic and fresh-faced. To them, she is momentarily earnest: "Yes, you can make a difference." But, then, she adds, "The best way you can learn [to become a good reporter] is to listen to older journalists sitting around in bars..."

Finally, she turns on herself: "You know, I've spent my whole life being obnoxiously cheerful." An unabashed optimist. That's who Molly Ivins really was.

We need more like her. Let's hope some of the journalists from the next generation were listening as well.

-30-

Molly Ivins

First, it's time to say goodbye to another journalist colleague, gone too soon. Today, it was Molly Ivins, dead of breast cancer at 62. She will get many well-deserved eulogies. I can only add my few personal experiences with her. She was in town on the speaking circuit one night in the early '90s when a mutual friend invited us to hang out at Stars for a late-night drinking session. We were both at our best, which is to say our worst, so the jokes were flying back and forth as waiters shuttled bottles of her favorite spirits. Night turned into the next day.

Later on, I had to admit I had finally met a woman who could (easily) drink me under the table.

Listening to Robert Stone the other day, I had to agree with him that alcohol is the scourge for writers. It's too perfect as a drug -- that reliable friend as they struggle with their demons and setting just enough of what's inside out to make people laugh, cry, or identify...

Molly's caustic humor not only was contagious, she could be over-the-top inspirational to progressive audiences. Her story telling was legendary. She gave no ground to those politicians who asserted claim over her Texas. If Bush thought he represented the true Texan, Molly begged to disagree.

Perhaps no journalist was more influential in ripping the false mask off of the "compassionate conservative" to reveal the axis of evil(Cheney-Rove-Rumsfeld) within. Thanks to Molly, Junior will always also be known as "Shrub."

Molly was the keynote speaker at the 25th anniversary of the Center for Investigative Reporting, in 2002, just a short time after my mother died. She personally introduced the three of us who co-founded CIR. Her speech was an old-time, shit-kicking, raucously profane political screed.

Later on, when the kids are asleep, I'll try to hook up my inactive VCR and view the tape. Maybe I can add a direct quote.

Until then, I remember one other time.

Molly was promoting another of her books in 1998 and was once again on a lonely book tour. By now, she was extremely well known, as her newspaper column was getting wide circulation and audiences everywhere looked forward to her visits.

But on this particular day, she was sitting in the waiting room of a web-based magazine, waiting for an editor to get out of a meeting and see her. The receptionist was young and didn't know who she was. The staff milling around also was clueless. As I saw her across the lobby, Molly somehow seemed ineffably alone, awkwardly thumbing through a magazine, probably wondering why she was even there that day.

I went over and renewed our acquaintance. She seemed grateful for the connection.

I know I was.

Good-bye, Molly. The next world just became a much funnier, and much more irreverent place. Even as ours became one giant heartbeat less so.

-30-

Anniversaries.1

Tonight, I stopped by the 30th anniversary party for Mother Jones magazine, one of San Francisco's premier contributions to the world of magazine journalism. I started writing investigative articles for the magazine soon after it launched. I also worked there as an editor in the early '90s. Tonight, I saw many faces in the crowd from my past, and spoke to a few of them. I realized that I and my peers are becoming a distinct minority of those at parties such as this one. We are the grey-hairs in a youthful world -- the world of magazines.

Next year, Rolling Stone magazine will celebrate its 40th anniversary. I wrote and edited articles there from 1974-77. Like MoJo, it started here in San Francisco; in fact the two magazines have some shared history. When Jann Wenner took his music magazine east to New York in 1977, The MoJo staff inherited the old RS office at 625 Third Street.

They also got some leftover furniture, including the famous table around which we all used to gather for story meetings in the '70's Rolling Stone. People like Hunter S. Thompson, Lester Bangs, Chet Flippo, Joe Klein, Tim Cahill, Tom Hayden, David Harris, Cameron Crowe, Joe Eszterhas, David Felton, Tim Ferris, Ben Fong-Torres, Howard Kohn, Jon Landau, Dave Marsh, Annie Leibovitz, Greil Marcus, Grover Lewis, Abe Peck, John Morthland, Paul Scanlon, Marianne Partridge, John Burks, Timothy White, Sarah Lazin, Charley Perry, Michael Rogers, Roger Black, Ed Ward, Charles Young, Christine Doudna, Harriet Fier, among many, many others, used to gather there, as did I.

Sadly, when they made one of their later office moves, MoJo had to cut the long table in two in order to get it into the new space.

It probably would have been smarter to offer the table to Jann, whose Wenner Media holdings now are worth approximately a billion dollars, for several reasons. First, he would probably have bought it for a nice sum. Second, it wouldn't have been cut in half.

That decision (the cutting) has never set well with me. I prefer my history preserved over that which has been drawn and quartered. Besides, the table already had plenty of gonzo knife marks courtesy of Hunter. Why use a saw? It's vaguely sacrilegious.

Nevertheless, congratulations to my old colleagues at MoJo for persevering. And, next year, congratulations to Jann, for never really growing old. Many people seem to hate Jann, but I don't. He's an American original, one of our true entrepreneurs. And he's still at it, even as he has passed the age of 60.

***

The Peace Corps is now 45 years old. All told, there have been 187,000 volunteers. (I was one of them, from 1969-71 in Afghanistan.) You don't hear much about the Peace Corps anymore; clearly it is not a priority of the Bush administration. But it continues to send people to poor countries all over the world for what inevitably prove to be life-changing experiences.

The gap between an average lifestyle in this country and that of most people in the underdeveloped economies is several orders of magnitude, which is to say vast. You have to be there, and live it, for an extended period, to begin to appreciate it. The gulf is so wide.

I can see the terrible misunderstanding that has developed between devout Moslems and the West in cultural terms. It was clear 37 years ago in the small town where I lived in Sunni Afghanistan that the main problem Afghans had with American culture was its apparent "godlessness."

I remember telling people that they shouldn't draw conclusions about Americans from watching Hollywood movies.

But, alas, I was wrong. That was before it became obvious that most people here live their lives as if they were in a movie! (Thanks, Neal Gabler, author of Life, the Movie.)

I was especially offended by the oft-stated assumption by Moslems that American women were more or less (cover your ears) whores. I felt that we as a society had no idea how people in radically different contexts were interpreting these movies. This is what helped trigger the virulent anti-Americanism among Islamicists: Hollywood. And the reason is obvious: They feared too many Afghans, Iranians, Saudis would be swayed by this powerful of all media and adopt the secular values (read: immorality) celebrated in American film.

Like many others, I was appalled by the oppression of women in conservative Islamic culture, although in that time and place I also was aware of how much respect Afghan women were accorded and how much practical power inside the compound walls and beyond they often exercised.

In the years since, our historic feminist overhaul of American society has changed the terms of just about everything between the sexes here. Now, with American women, you have to seriously watch your step, lest you somehow seem condescending, arrogant, overly aggressive, or whatever, just by acting like a red-blooded male.

It is all too exhausting much of the time. Not to diss my American female friends, because I feel every much as close to them as any of my male friends. But we truly have messed up our ability to relate to each other, I'm afraid.

***

Another old friend: Dinner tonight with one of the first people to urge me to get involved in the web. He is a major advocate of sustainable, green, organic lifestyles, and he practices what he preaches. He's an author, activist, philanthropist, father and husband, and a great colleague in any capacity.

He bought me dinner at Cafe Gratitude, which he believes is the future of all food consumption. I know he is probably right, and his idealism is always infectious, but I have to admit that I have a hearty lamb soup boiling on my stove here at midnight, because I am still hungry after our raw-food dinner.

Maybe it's because of my Scottish genes? I remain a committed omnivore, even as I am willing to experiment with more sustainable models. After all, if we are to survive as a species, the way we live in the U.S. circa 2007 needs some serious attitude adjustment.

-30-

Only the Lonely*

Sometimes, the hardest part is where to start. I'm still feeling the shock of the news of cousin Gordon's death. Two of my sisters and a neice posted comments to last night's posting. They reminded me of more things about Gordie. That, in the late Sixties, as he came of age, Gordie grew a beard and let his hair grow to his shoulders.

Many of us did these things, including me. But Gordie took on an other-worldly look, very much like the idealized portraits of Jesus familiar to all of us through Western art. It's not a stretch to say he was the spitting image.

Maybe the reason for his resemblance to a spiritual and inspirational leader was his inner quality of organic peacefulness. Plus I don't think there was a mean bone in his body.

But he was an old soul, and the old souls among us sometimes depart this earth prematurely, before the rest of us resolve our own mortal battles.

***

My own heart is heavy tonight, not just because of my cousin's death, but lots of things, many ineffable.

I expected the thrill of watching my son's basketball to be a positive distraction from what otherwise was a day of depression, and it was. In the first half, he and his teammates were out of synch, and by halftime they were way behind, 15-4. He missed all four shots he took, had one turnover and one personal foul. He had no steals, blocks, or rebounds.

But all that changed in the second half as he and his teammates mounted a ferocious comeback. At the end they fell just short, 19-22 but they made it extremely exciting. A long shot at the buzzer missed, barely. When I tried to total up his stats, I believe Aidan scored four points, had five steals, 2 blocks and five rebounds in that wild second half.

Again and again, he and his mates aggressively took the ball away from the other team, and engineered fast breaks -- always the most exciting plays in basketball. They didn't win, but their opponent went away sighing a big sigh of relief.

Because had there been another minute or so on the clock, the outcome might well have been different.

***

I truly hate being reminded of the hole in my own soul, but these days it is inevitable. Bad feelings are afoot; difficult days lie ahead.

This too shall pass (I hope).

***

BTW, this my 400th post in nine months! Thank you for reading some of them, my dear readers. It matters to me to have an audience. I appreciate your visits.



* Roy Orbison

Remembering my cousin

Gordon Anderson died today of lung cancer in Michigan. I think he was in his mid-50s.

Gordie was the youngest of my three Anderson boy cousins -- George, Jr., and Dan were his big brothers. George was a few years older than me, Dan was my age, Gordie a few years younger.

An oddity in my extended family when we were all growing up in the '50s was a severe gender imbalance. On my Dad's side, his two brothers and three sisters produced seven boys, but no girls.

On my Mom's side, her two sisters and one brother (Uncle George) produced six boys and two girls. So, of the 15 cousins we got to know, 13 were boys.

By contrast, in our nuclear family, there were three girls and me.

A statistician would have fun with this. Whereas overall boys constituted about three-quarters of the offspring, in my own family, boys accounted for 25% (me).

Outside of my family, 86.7% of all 15 births in my generation were male. The odds of this can be computed, according to various formulas, but for me the salient facts are these:

*My father's birth family produced three boys and three girls. So did I.

*My mother's birth family consisted of three girls and one boy, which is exactly the household I grew up in.

Which brings me back to the one boy in my mother's birth family, Uncle George. I know he is hurting tonight, back home in Michigan, having lost his youngest son. He is in very poor health himself, and he is the last surviving member of my parents' generation in either of their families.

He is also the only one who was born in America. The other nine (6 females and 3 males) were born in foreign lands. Uncle George is the lone native son, but when he was a little boy, he used to talk about what it was like "back in Scotland," a place he'd never visited but which hung over the household like a dark storm cloud of unresolved memories, particularly for his parents, my grandparents.

The Scots are a strange people, endearing and imposing at the same time. My grandfather, Uncle George's father, was an especially intimidating man (to me). He was a master tool-and-dyesman, exactly the type Henry Ford was looking for when he sent his earliest sound trucks around Scottish cities in the 1920's.

My grandfather answered the call, and moved his young family over here, to the place where (they were told) the streets were painted with gold.

Immigrant experiences have been richly chronicled by many writers more skilled than I. Let me simply say that I felt my grandparents' sense of sadness at a culture lost. Whenever I glimpsed them with their other old friends from Scotland, I was amazed by their strange accents and their animated discussions.

I acquired a lifelong love of Scottish meat pies at this stage; a thirst that remains unquenched to this day.

***

There’s so much more I could write, or try to write, but tonight my heart is heavy with sadness. I miss Gordie even though I haven't seen him in, what, 30 years? I had heard he was ill, but I had no idea how very ill he in fact was. His big brother George took him in and cared for him until the end.

Of all of my male cousins, many of whom tended to gross me out, Gordie was one of the sweetest and the strangest of all. He was such a picky eater! If I remember correctly, Aunt Reta could only convince him to eat peanut butter.

Of course, memories are suspect, and perhaps there was another type of food he would eat, but I don't think so.

Also, in the '50s and early '60s, when most of my other cousins were cultivating their machismo, Gordie just stayed himself, not particularly athletic or aggressive or ambitious for glory.

His brothers and I used to sit around and talk about how we would wish to die, if it turned out to be up to us. The rest of us agreed we'd rather die as heroes for our country than in any other way. But again, unless, my memory is faulty, Gordie didn't express much enthusiasm for warfare.

When Uncle George moved his family to the Tampa area to be closer to his parents in their declining years, he opened a soft ice cream shop, which, when we visited, was one of the true highlights of my youth. We worked there, alongside our cousins, and we were paid in ice cream -- all we wanted!

That's about as close to nirvana as I have ever been.

The Anderson boys also introduced me to Mad Magazine somewhere during this period, and that had more influence on my evolving sensibilities than anything going on back home in school.

On another occasion, Uncle George and the boys got a pet monkey. I think this is when they were living in Ohio, and I think the monkey's name was Tommy. Of course, today, having monkeys as pets is illegal, I'm quite sure, but Tommy (if that indeed was his name) had quite an exciting life with the Anderson boys.

Some of my most special memories date back to the years when Uncle George and family lived in Wisconsin, just across the magnificently vast Lake Michigan. They would take the ferry in summer and meet our family at Ludington State Park, nestled next to Lake Hamlin and the sand dunes of the northwestern coast of the Lower Peninsula.

At Ludington, we had many adventures. Gordie, Dan, George and I roamed the woods and the riverbanks, the lakeshore and the swamps where delicious Michigan blueberries grew.

It is all so long ago now. My mind becomes hazy as I try to bring up the memories. Tears fill my eyes as I remember my younger cousin Gordie, a gentle soul if ever there was one in my generation of males.

He never married, and he suffered ill health for some years as he aged. I wish I could have seen him one more time. In the end, he was where he always wanted to be, with his family.

I mourn for him tonight. And I am so very sad for my uncle and my aunt, a woman who always had a plate of cookies waiting whenever we came to visit. Uncle George is the guy, who, when carrying my Dad's ashes down to Mud Lake at Rolling Hills for my mother and I to spread in the lake where he loved to fish, joked: "I came down this hill many times with Tom (my Dad) but this is the first time I could say whatever I wanted to him, without him talking back."

Maybe it's time for me to say this to my sole surviving Uncle and his family: "I love you. May Gordon rest in peace. I am proud to say I was his cousin."

-30-

Blurry Giants 2.0

For the third time in a year, I was able to attend a pro basketball game Saturday night and sit in seats at courtside. From this vantage point, the blinding speed, the deft agility, and the pure athleticism of elite performers was on display to the point of over-stimulation.

The lights and the noise are intense. The master choreographer seems to believe that even one moment of relative silence is not to be tolerated. The spectacle overwhelms the actual game, unless you are a few feet away from the floor, which is where my companion and I sat.

Here, you get familiar with each player's expressions, his voice, and the way he motions his teammates as sophisticated plays unfold. The action is so swift that my camera could never even begin to capture the actual scene. Instead, I inadvertently documented a sort of abstract expressionist interpretation of NBA basketball.

Only during timeouts, when the lights came up, and the cheerleaders came out, did the scene come back into momentary focus. The cheerleaders' diversity was inspiring -- blond girls, Asian girls, Latinas, black girls, tall and short, skinny and curvy. They all love to dance.

They were constantly in motion, and their smiles aren't painted on. Dancing around like this in sexy clothes is great fun. Regardless of whether they know (or care) very much about the actual game of basketball.
These girls and the fans were not to be disappointed tonight. The Warriors won, in a blowout, 131-105.

The Warriors are coached by a legend, Don Nelson, nicknamed Nellie. He is a big man, with a shock of white hair, and he knows the game of basketball from a strategic perspective as few others do. He seems to be building a team that can be a winner -- a rarity in Oakland the past 14 years or so. His teams play an aggressive run and gun type of offense; his ideal player steals the ball from opponents and initiates an exciting race to the other end of the court, where a lay-up, dunk, or violent collision with a defender (yielding foul shots) is in order.

The crowd gets worked up by these incidents, and in this game, the Warriors scored 29 points off of turnovers, a nice total.

***

After midnight, my phone started ringing. It was my twelve-year-old, at his sleepover, 20 miles from my house. He sounded sleepy and sad. Everyone else was asleep, he said. I suggested he get some milk or something to eat, and then call me back.

He did, a few minutes later. Then again, and then again. He said he was also trying to reach his mom. But he couldn't, so it made him feel good that he could talk to me.

By the 5th or 6th call, I could tell he was getting very tired. He knew it too, and said he thought he might try to sleep now. I said that I would stay awake for a long time just in case. At 11 minutes to 1 am, according to cellphone, we rang off.

Thus enlivened, rather than drifting off happily to sleep, with a soft rain falling outside my bedroom window, I got up and had a large plate of shrimp cocktail. This was good, and it almost unleashed an additional hunger that luckily did not come to pass. Because I am well stocked with all sorts of things one shouldn't be eating past midnight.

Somewhere later on, in the darkness and the silence, I remembered being my son's age, alone at night, in my case usually with a slightly older teenager in the next room as our babysitter. But the noises outside and inside the house seemed amplified. It was windy in those parts, and the wind chilled my thoughts and fantasies of awful dangers beyond the sheetrock and the yellow bricks and the double pane windows.

On the positive side of family intimacy is the element of feeling safe.

Yet there are forces always at work, some external, some internal, that easily undermine any person's sense of safety. It's a world of dangers, certain in every case to end badly, unless you consider departure a relief from these demons, which for many it ultimately is.

So much anxiety and so much angst. So much loneliness and so much fear. Only connect. Find (or rediscover) that special person who you know you can always count on long past midnight, when the ghosts come out to play.

It's a nice time to have a friend, and not only at age 12.

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