Day Endings, Night Beginnings

That time every month when a full moon rises over San Francisco Bay is a time for an evening ride, particularly if you have a shut-in with cabin fever.

I've had a house full of the ill and injured lately, with sicknesses and hurts aplenty. Tonight, driving two of them back to Bernal, I spotted the moonrise; later two more of us drove to the side of the Bay to check it out.



That's when I snapped these photos. (They enlarge upon clicking, and these ones may be worth that.)

As I watched, the night deepened. The air was both warm and cool, springlike but vulnerable to breezes sweeping in from the west.



As night fell, it got cooler. The whisper of today's tsunami in the Pacific drifted over the land. Far to the south, of course, the earth had moved -- dramatically.

Nothing quite like a disaster of this scope, whether an earthquake or a volcano or a hurricane, reminds us of how inter-connected we all are.

Plates move off the coast of Chili and a giant wave approaches Japan. A mountain blows its top in Indonesia and the air fouls over Germany. A hurricane smashes into Central America and Kansas City floods.

If only we all remembered how much we are all in this together!

If only we didn't divide across racial, religious, color, gender, political and social lines. All of these divisions are, in fact, trivial.

The hateful rhetoric in American politics, for example, is utterly baseless. The attacks are the product of fantasy and fear.

Those who fear change fight it with hate. This has always been so. It continues.

I, for one, am no longer listening. Those who spit such filth from their lips froth with weakness. May they eat their rhetoric. After a giant storm to come, their words may be all they have, after all.

Then, with the awful grace of God, may they be forced to turn to a person of another color, or race or religion or -- heaven forbid!, a liberal -- to eat their next warm meal.

Have no illusion. Even this experience would not hold back the tide of rightist hate that is sweeping across this land. America is in trouble; a storm builds.

Still, above it all, the moon rises, the moon sets. I'm powerless about the political tsunami; rather than fight it I turn away and wait for it, too, to pass.

The moon shows it no respect; neither shall I.

-30-

Picking Your Battles

Somewhere along the way, when I wasn't paying attention, the styles changed, and it became cool to wear mis-matching socks.

Or, maybe I did notice, but have since forgotten.

Whichever way it may be, today I focused on this issue, while picking up my daughter from school. I noticed, certainly not for the first time, that her socks were of two colors -- one blue and one green.

She's always fashionable, and I instantly knew this had become a fashion, somewhere, sometime, when I was absent.

When my attention was elsewhere.

A storm had gathered hours earlier -- a fierce wind swept from the southwest over the City. I'd watched the rain driven sideways from one of our hills.

I should explain, for those who do not know San Francisco, that ours is a town built on seven hills.

Our parks are on hilltops, not in every case one of the fabled seven, but sometimes just on a rise that elsewhere would be considered a significant bump in the road, but here is just another topological blip.

She had to walk the dogs before we went home. As we rounded a corner, and the storm clouds parted, Holly Park beckoned from one of those blips -- green these days, thanks to the rain.

As we trudged onward I started wondering whether I should start wearing mis-matched socks as well, then I realized that that is one of those increasing numbers of trains that has most certainly left the station without me.

And there won't be time enough left to be playing catchup.

-30-

The Responsiblity of Memory

Preface: Visits to the doctor are always stressful and only more so with age. There are so many test results to wade through and so many concerns to parse. The bottom line in my case is, as my physician puts it, is that I have "good genes!" So I guess, God willing, I'll be around for a while, maybe a very long while indeed.

What I think about, when I think about aging and what you might call the "third act" of a life, is the responsibilities that come with a long life.

When you span eras you begin to assume a custodian role in your family and community and perhaps for society at large over the shared history that fewer and fewer of your colleagues are still around to discuss.

Your memory becomes critical, but so does your character.

It becomes ever more essential to be honest. You may be the last one standing to tell the story of someone else. That person may no longer be here to tell their own tale.

This is the constant responsibility of a journalist, of course, or any writer. If you hold the reputation of another in your hands, how do you manage that responsibility?

I've struggled with these questions for years, and for the most part turned away from the kind of journalism that required me to play God years back. I much prefer the memoir function, which I continue to experiment with here at Hotweir, trying to perfect the craft before publishing similar work offline.

But this work too will only be as good as the quality of my character, as an honest writer. That truly is humbling.

-30-

Downtown in the Rain

Something about being downtown in a big city in the rain takes me back to my childhood, although I'm not sure I ever was actually in a big city in the rain during my childhood.

I grew up in Royal Oak, which in the post-World War Two era, when I arrived, was a fast-growing suburb of Detroit.

My memories of Detroit are pretty much limited to taking the streetcar downtown to Hudson's and my grandparents' house, which I probably did only three or four times; and visiting my uncle's hat shop on Saturday nights, which I probably only did a few times as well.

Oh yes, one visit to a Red Wings' hockey game at the old Olympia Stadium, and a couple baseball games at the recently demolished Tiger Stadium.

I doubt it was raining on any of those visits, but whatever, today I took one of our local buses downtown, sitting wedged between a toothless old woman comparing her youthful experiences in jail with a middle-aged man still dealing with his own legal troubles.

They were contrasting their own lives of crime with today's youth, and agreeing that kids today just don't understand what they are getting themselves into when they break the law.

"They talk tough, but who they impressing? The cops ain't impressed. They know they just gonna be laying down for a long, long time. Like ten, twenty years..."

Sometimes it's hard to envision an inner city where the majority of people would not be hurting in some terribly visible manner -- addicted, disabled, seriously ill, desperately poor, homeless, mentally ill.

The happiest people I saw today were a small group of Down's Syndrome folks out for their own trip downtown.

Ducking into a mall cafeteria to escape the rain, I happened upon a raggedy bearded fellow who had more holes in his clothes and shoes than the donut display he was gazing at.

Since I was early for an appointment, I decided to sit and watch the shoppers -- another class altogether. mainly smartly dressed young women, some with kids along, these folks seemed focused and relatively content by contrast.

Many already clutched shopping bags that were full, but more consumption apparently would soon occur.

Considering that we are in the middle of what appears to be a permanent transformation of our economy as this, the richest society in history, adapts to a new global reality, I couldn't help wonder how much longer such shoppers will blithely continue to flow into places like this one.

How long will there be enough cash -- or plastic -- in these people's pockets to sustain a lifestyle whose time has passed?

This musing led me to consider how I might continue to adjust my own living standard southward. (All such musings are personal in the end.)

The days of middle class people being able to live in cities and pursue creative careers have crashed and splintered into a thousand pieces. Being a writer, an artist, a community organizer -- living in any sort of manner outside of capitalism's main corridors -- in a place like San Francisco has become unsustainable.

For today, however, I have the hood on my jacket to protect me against the rain, and friends who care about my fate...

-30-

Obama's Lonely Road

--JJ

Everybody seems to be either in the process of headed on the way up or on the way down, as if we are all on a giant teeter-totter with only the occasional guy standing on the fulcrum standing steady.

Or maybe that's just my perception.

It can be a struggle to maintain perspective on a world that is filled with swirling images, shifting feelings, and confusing signals.

One can perhaps be forgiven for becoming disoriented.

***

Since perception has long since eclipsed reality in American public life, it is increasingly obvious that President Barack Obama's major problem is not what he is trying to do, or even how he is going about it, but how he has lost control of how his story is being told.

That would seem to be a media problem, but media only provides the pipe for the story-tellers and it is they who are the problem -- from all sides, from all political positions.

It's been said by some that America doesn't deserve Obama; he's too good for us. A brilliant Japanese blogger, Akihiko Reizei, noted recently that Obama is trying to be reasonable in an unreasonable political climate; a centrist where there is no center.

The rightists, for their part, are not even trying to appear reasonable. They are running against a left that barely exists outside their imagination, but nobody much cares about reality in the U.S., so the mere fantasy of a left is all that is needed to sustain these tea-party activists.

Obama's only path to success in this kind of environment, according to the blogger, would be to embrace the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which of course has been only lukewarm to his initiatives -- precisely because he is a centrist, not a leftist.

The blogger pointed out that if he at least builds the support from his party's liberal base, he will have some political perch from which to operate. As it is, he is increasingly isolated and unable to maneuver.

It seems unlikely that Obama will migrate left, at least this early in his first term, but once the Democrats suffer serious losses in the midterm elections, which I expect to happen this fall, he will face little choice.

The reason is that moderate Republicans, like John McCain, are coming under withering attacks by their party's radical fringe. These conservative extremists will gain many seats in Congress, if current trends continue, further polarizing the country's already toxic public discourse.

Obama may choose to maintain his centrist posture, as the only adult in the political fray, but if so his will be one of the loneliest Presidencies in history, and he will accomplish little when it comes to policy reforms.

As a matter of pragmatism, he will need to move left to avoid the reality noted by Reizei: "the middle road is a lonely road."

That simply is a road too few modern Americans are willing to share with him.

-30-

Searching For Something That's Lost

If everything happens for a reason, this must be a weekend of reasons.

Today, in a light rain, I could smell the eucalyptus buttons at Glen Park, where my 15-year-old was about to play an indoor soccer game, and I hoped it would help take my mind off a range of worries that have been following me around like multiple shadows knitted to my frame.

Later in the game itself, he scored a late goal to pull his team within one in a comeback attempt. Since he is a defender, it was a long shot, from mid-court, that he knifed into the right corner of the net, eluding the keeper.

I'm not sure I've yelled that loud in a year.

It was good therapy, as I've intimated, because of some new curve balls life has thrown me.

Maybe that is what sports is good for -- taking our mind off of our troubles. If so, the highlight of this day was his goal.

***

His little brother is in Mexico on a school trip, hopefully having a wonderful time. (We have no way to communicate from here.) Friday night, about 24 hours before getting on the plane, he was pacing around my apartment in such an excited manner, it seemed as if he could barely contain himself.

At 13, with bushy red curls, he is growing taller almost before our eyes and nearly rivals his athletic brother in height now.

He packed lots of books for his journey, including a recent addition from my bookshelf, William Shirer's riveting Berlin Diary.


***

Meanwhile, their little sister had a sleepover Friday night here with her best friend; plus my own friend fell and twisted her ankle badly that day, so I had her bedridden, with the ankle elevated and iced.

That made six of us in this place Friday night.

***

All of this was the good or at least acceptable stuff, the routine developments in busy lives. Yesterday's outdoor soccer game (photo above) was good too, another useful distraction.

Last night, I attended a friend's 50th birthday party across town, in a rare example of me socializing at night.

Still, the shadows are following me, as I go about these attempts to continue living my life as if I am somehow in charge of how it all turns out.

Admitting my powerlessness is a constant struggle. Practicing my faith is another one. Finding that indispensable source of my lifelong optimism, against whatever odds, that I'll overcome the major obstacles now confronting me is essential, I know that.

But how can I find it again?

That was the question echoing back to me today as I walked through the rain.

Where did it go? I must have lost it somewhere along my way...

-30-