All Alone at the Worst Times

Getting into the car to drive my son and myself to a funeral today, I discovered my battery had died. We walked in the heat, and I told him, "I'm glad you're going with me, because the only thing worse than going to a funeral is going alone."

The mother of a former fellow soccer teammate had died recently and we wanted to pay our respects.

We got on a bus, and got out a few blocks later to transfer, and were halfway to the church, when another parent showed up to pick us up. I waved for him to go on, while I returned home.

After all, my daughter was home alone, and not having a working vehicle while living alone is not an option for me. I had to call for help. If it came soon enough I could get to the service a bit late.

Road service never comes quickly. But the man who came remembered having come once before to help me for the same problem. Afterwards, I looked back through receipts and he was right. It was a year and a half ago.

How different my life was then. How many people have died since then; others disappeared from my life. In some ways, it's as if there was an unspoken evacuation, but of course that is not how life works.

Later in the afternoon, as I was trying to find out if the funeral was still going on, the front gate squeaked open, and my son walked in the front door. He looked inconsolably sad.

"I just couldn't stay," he said, looking down. "I was alone, at the back, standing."

I hugged him, and said I understood. After all, I had let him go to a funeral alone. That that is a cardinal sin for a parent, I readily admit. He did have friends there, even his mother, but none of them were within reach, at the particular moment he needed them.

That's how it works. We all may end up being alone at the times we most need someone to be with us. A related tragedy is many people feel much more alone than they are because they can't find a way to ask for help.

As it turns out, in our extended community, there is another funeral tomorrow. "It seems like too many people have died lately," my son said. As he spoke these words, I glanced at the memorial at the telephone pole in front of my house.

Last night, as I went out to after my plants, I saw my dead neighbor's mother, alone, arranging the flowers and lighting the candles. I greeted her and she smiled sadly at me.

"Bless you," is all I could think to say.

-30-

One Boat in the Sea

The other day, waiting for the race to start, I wandered in the rain down along a path I haven't traveled in a while, when I spotted this boat cutting through the surf. Chrissy Field, as this area is known, is a stretch of bay-front wetlands along the north edge of the old Presidio army base.

Nowadays, it is a national park.

The boat, a nice-looking specimen, was small in that setting, though through my zoom lens, it appears here as more prominent than it was in fact. Everything and everyone is small when you get far enough away from them. When scientists discovered that the universe is expanding at ever greater rates some years ago, they confounded some of our assumptions about the nature of life.

How could everything be getting further away from everything else?

Unless you work very hard and patiently at it, human society can often seem to be following the same law of the universe. People can seem to be getting further and further away from one another.

Small things lead to cracks in relationships, cracks deepen into huge gaps, and silence eventually is all that remains.

The real calamitous events that eviscerate our social connectedness are often breakups and job losses. For people who invest a lot in their primary relationships, this can be especially true.

I count myself in this category. As I stood alone, shivering in the rain, looking at the boat, I started thinking about my partners, one after the other, and how every time I tried not only to have a person to live with, but a best friend, and a keeper.

By keeper I mean becoming the keeper of each other's stories. To me, this is a vital part of life, and this is what long-term partners can do for one another.

There are, of course, options. Good friends can serve as documentarians for you, as you can for them. Family plays an important role, but if your siblings are far away, as is the case with me, you too rarely can get together or even talk to penetrate far below the surface of life's constantly shifting surface.

Your children are your children. Although you share everything you can with them, it's not their role, especially at young ages, to be your best friend. They need you to be their parent, which itself is extraordinarily complex work, one I have written about many times here.

In recent years, I have devoted myself to being the best parent I can be, even to the exclusion of other needs. I don't regret it, and I hope I won't regret it, even if it turns out that I end up living alone from here on out.

Because I've slowly come to comprehend that meeting anyone actually able and willing to fit into my particular family ecosystem, with its stresses and boundaries, is probably impossible now.

***

I don't moan about any lost partner; I don't pass my days thinking about this person or that, wondering about how life might have turned out differently had we stayed together.

The heart, the mind, the spirit work in much different ways than that. My record is even -- I left some loves; others left me. Someones the reasons were clear; sometimes murky. Sometimes other people were involved; sometimes not.

None of those details are salient about how I feel tonight. For it is at night that the images start to creep into my world, unbidden and largely unwelcome. They cut through the surf in my mind much as that boat cut through the Bay, with their own purpose.

All I am is an observer.

What I miss about people are very specific things, little things like the way they ran their fingers through their hair, the way they crossed a room, the way they sang along with a song they loved.

How they became excited, how it felt to comfort them when they were sad.

I also have a strange sort of muscle memory of them, about how we felt when we were in a certain place and time. Having mostly lived in the same city for decades, there is barely any neighborhood, and precious few intersections, even, where a memory doesn't exist for me.

A memory of being with someone else.

I think of these as ghost stories now, for better and worse, and maybe ghosts are on my mind for a lot of reasons.

***

Steve Jobs died today. I never met him, and didn't know him at all. Given my line of work, I know people who knew him, but that is different. I have little to add to the memorials of those who did know him that will emerge in the coming days and weeks. So I won't write one myself.

But his death, at 56, was sadly premature, according to our expectations for ourselves, though given his repeated health setbacks in recent years, not at all unexpected. His Wikipedia page has been updated accordingly.

***

The storm season has begun along the north coast, so we are now being visited by a series of rains swept in off the mighty Pacific. Just the other day, dropping off something for one of her brothers, I was surprised to find my daughter washing her mother's car, out in front of their house.

"I just like to do it," she explained. Then, perhaps sensing my mood, she walked over and gave me the best hug I have had in a long time. I referred obliquely to this moment in my post the other night, "...Why Hugging Matters."

On that particular day, the things that most bother me these days were getting the best of me. Lack of connection, isolation, loss of intimacies, the unrelenting visits by memory ghosts at night -- these were approaching feverish pitch.

It is easy for any of us to think no one remembers or is still thinking about us until it turns out that they, in fact, are.

The problem, of course, is one of how to express such complex emotions. How to tell someone that even though you don't still want to be in love with them that you actually still love them?

The much bigger problem than that is that we will all perish, sooner or later, and if you don't find a way around this conundrum, you will experience regret. I know what I am talking about based on very painful experience.

***

Work friends are another matter, although the relationships we establish at work really dominate most adult Americans' time. When we have jobs, we are mere visitors in our families -- a conflict that bothered me for decades.

It is considered "unprofessional" to talk too much about what is going on at home, even my wives counseled me about this, and yet, for me, the very essence of life is what is going on at home. It's a huge factor in why I work, earn money, and occupy my time with tasks that can be, at times, boring or even onerous.

It's all worth it because you are taking care of your loved ones and their needs.

But work, for me, as also been an outlet for my passion for words and story-telling and sharing ideas. I've loved being part of teams, working collaboratively to build companies and products, including magazines, newspapers, books, radio programs, TV shows, movies, websites, and much more.

I've been, in every single case, a loyal team member, yet also due to the nature of my particular talents, one to whom the task inevitably fell to "tell the truth" at crucial moments in an organization's history to the person in charge.

This has proved to be a fatal role, every single time, because no powerful person ever wants to hear what they don't ant to hear especially at the very moment they most need to hear it.

This "truth" is not my truth, but the collective truth based on what these days is considered "crowd wisdom." I may or may not have had a personal opinion about the matter at hand, but my peculiar role in groups seems to be to sense when a turning point has arrived and be the one to voice that uncomfortable fact in ways that -- if the leader is willing to accept it -- could save the company.

If not, well, we all know how that story turns out. And most of the places where I worked have indeed disappeared from existence. This experience is eerie and has left me shaken.

Again, my nights entail visits by more ghosts, now from the workplaces where I have have devoted so much of my time, and whatever intellectual capital I've had to expend.

None of this would really matter, of course, if my fate had turned out to be one of those who ended up with enough resources to support himself and his children as long as they all needed his support. (And, though improbably, that may still turn out to be the case -- there is always reason for hope.)

But even when a person does great things, as opposed to only good things, and acquires great wealth, as opposed to modest wealth, death will choose its time to end his story.

This Steve Jobs is gone. All all of us, me the writer and you the sharer of these words, are still here...for now.

The skies are darkening on the west coast now. A homeless person is banging my gate out front, trying to figure out if I have a bottle or can to recycle. The candles in memory of my fallen neighbor have gone unlighted in recent nights. Maybe his family no longer has the heart to come out a few yards from their front door to light them.

Or maybe the rain snuffed them out.

Me? I keep seeing that boat in the Bay and wondering what this all means, if anything at all, and when -- or if -- I ever will find out.



I'll see you in my dreams!

-30-

Rainy Monday; Why Hugging Matters

No happy story this time around. My daughter competed but did not do well in the rain in this race in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Still, I'm proud of her. She competes. She cares about her teammates. She doesn't always do well in these races, and today she felt pretty bad about her performance. And I did too, but only because she did.

On a tough field, in the rain, she didn't meet her own objectives, but does that matter?

Not to me, her Dad. because this 12-year-old girl gives the best hugs any father has ever received.

And that matters a hell of lot more than where she finishes in a mere race. But still, I know, this was a very tough day for her. So tomorrow I will give her a very big hug back.

-30-