Midnight Reflections

Sometimes it feels like the only time I really relax is late on a Friday night like this one, when the teens are home safely with me, and the four of us are under one roof. Rarely is that the case. One or two of them might be here with me but usually not all three.

Tonight they all were out until late, my daughter at a dance and my sons with friends.

Last night my daughter and I went to a "root beer social" at a charter school, which is one of her options as she enters high school next fall. It is located in the Western Addition, not far from Fillmore Street, which was the area I first got to know when I migrated to San Francisco late in 1971.

The neighborhood, though always somewhat sketchy, still resonates with me as one of my "homes" these many years later.

It's west of the civic center and east of the Haight, where I lived with my older three children when they were young.

The school was impressive, especially because it features small classes (low student to teacher ratios), attentive counseling and tutoring, and an academic curriculum above that required to get into the U-C land grant universities that are the pride of this state.

It says that 95% of its students go to college, twice the state average, although I suspect that is actually 95% of all seniors, since most schools do not count anyone who drops out somewhere along the way to their senior year. (A math trick schools have perfected around here.)

But it also features a staff skilled in recognizing the different learning styles of kids. As the parent of a son diagnosed way too late to be helpful with a severe form of ADHD, I've become sensitive to how poorly our schools handle those with learning styles outside the norm.

Although in this era we call these as "disorders" or "deficits," and treat them with drugs, I suspect a generation from now our educators will simply be better at employing multiple teaching methods to accommodate the radically different way our kids learn.

My son, for example, is brilliant -- he has always managed to do well in school by developing alternative methods of learning than by reading, which tires him enormously and actually forces him in extreme cases to fall asleep.

This is just one example of how primitive our understanding remains of human brain development. Neuroscientists! That's what we need.

P.S. I've got one of those among my kids as well.

Paths Forward and Back

Note: This is a re-post from almost three years ago.

In my thirties, having already attained wise man* status, I used to advise people around the age of, say, 27, that if they were feeling confused about where they were headed in life, "just wait a few years."

"By your mid-30s, it will all be clear. It may seem like you are wandering along a path headed nowhere, but you'll actually reach a rise in the road, and when you look back, it will all suddenly make sense. You'll see every twist and turn in your path and understand why you took them."

This was immensely satisfying to me, not only because I sounded wise, but it actually reflected my own experience up until that time.

On paper, my life may have looked like a straight line, but inside my head, all was confusion. I reached the point in my early 30s when I simply couldn't figure out what I was doing or why.

Not that there were any outer manifestations of my confusion. I kept working, hard, at three jobs, being a responsible husband and father, paying my rent and driving my 1966 Volvo around town in a careful manner.

But none of that solved the existential riddles that consumed my inner clarity, leaving only a fog as impenetrable as that coating the western hills in its place.

This state yielded to a period when I thought I had it all figured out. My roles were clear, my success assured, my path ahead illuminated, with little clue that huge obstacles lay hidden in the dark.

None of it was to be -- none of my assumptions about my future held. All gave way to a new crisis, at the age of 40, when I proceeded to blow my settled life to smithereens.

If I could do one thing over, I probably would back up time and try to do that part of my life over.

But time affords us no such luxury.

Onward I plunged, headfirst into middle age as if I had never known an irresponsible time as a youth. Come to think of it, that was part of the problem. I had never known an irresponsible time as a youth.

Of course. That was it! I'd always been the big brother, the responsible one, the reliable part of any equation, while most others found a way to party and mess things up as only youths properly know how to do.

It's not nearly as forgivable to do this in middle age, yet millions of men (and women) continue to make the same mistakes I made, leaving trails of bitterness and dead-ends in their wake.

By the time I had reached the next rise in the road, there was no point in looking back. My inner fog had escaped during my mid-life crisis, erasing all traces of who I had been or where I had come from.

Now I was on my own, creating my own destiny, freed from whatever vestiges of my upbringing had accompanied me into middle age, a free man at last.

Whenever I consider writing a memoir, first I must confront this foggy past, and try to find my way back through all of the confusion and broken memories to a place when I was much more pure, when the choices I made didn't carry such slicing consequences, break such innocent hearts, and doom my future course to a path where any joy would have to intermingle with the rain of bitter tears.

It turned out to be pretty much a rerun of my first movie, not a sequel. Until it came to one big part -- the role of father to three new young children.

Through my second painful divorce, with any hope of a stable financial future torn and shredded like so many old unwritten poems, discarded along my way, I finally grew up, I suppose, and recognized what responsibility really entails.

I don't pretend to have any wisdom now. Look elsewhere for that, dear reader. And if you are still young, go ahead and act like it.

Otherwise, you may steal that chance from another young man or woman, waiting to play whatever role is left for them, once you finally move out of their way.

-30-


* self-appointed, naturally