Freedom in Sight

Driving northeast from Noe Valley early tonight, the sun broke through behind me and lit up the world so that every detail seemed crisp and palpable. The hills ahead revealed each of their houses in a colorful rainbow of boxy beauty.

A girl walking by was looking at her phone. Every strand of her light brown hair shone with a radiance that was breath-taking.

The faces of the drivers of oncoming cars were illuminated. I could see the color of their eyes. One merry chap with blue eyes had a white beard and a ruddy face. He looked like a miniature St. Nick.

The trees with their blossoms stood out like Impressionist paintings suddenly brought into focus.

The eastern sky was purple, as a small rainstorm that had moistened us earlier continued on its inland journey.

Rains wash the pollution out of our coastal air; thus the exceptional clarity.

As I drove I thought about this type of seeing, this wonderful moment of seeing more than we usually see. On my mind was a conversation I'd had earlier with a blind woman, a writer who has spent her entire life sightless.

I'm profiling her for an ebook site I blog for, and I found her perspective on life and writing so invigorating. Most of us are sighted. We take this for granted. We can see; we've always been able to see.

Some of us need glasses, and many of us, as we age, have difficulty seeing as well as we once did.

But, in other ways, as we age, we notice details that passed us by when we were younger. To me, it is now the simplest moments that carry the most meaning. Not the complicated ones.

I'll try to supply an example.

Yesterday, as we emerged from the darkness of the garage, my grandson and I stepped out into the light of the yard. Suddenly we both noticed a single Monarch butterfly, fluttering over a plant nearby.

"I have a butterfly net somewhere," he said. "I could catch that butterfly, but I don't know where my net is."

"Maybe it's just as well, sweetie," I answered. "This way she can go free."

-30-

Two Gardeners

We dug into the compacted soil and broke up the clumps. We pulled out weeds. We dug and chopped and finally forced out some long roots from unwanted plants. Finally, my 3-year-old grandson and I had expanded a small piece of his new backyard into something resembling a space for vegetables and flowers to grow. His Mom and he will take care of that.

We also worked our way up the hill in his new backyard to an old pole with a water faucet, noticed the ancient hose that disappeared below layers and layers of ivy vines. We turned on the faucet and heard the water but could not see or reach it. So we started hacking away at the vines with clippers. He with the long ones, I with the short, sharp ones.

An hour later, we had freed the hose! It still worked, so we watered our little garden patch far below.

Next, we discovered some wire screen, tied to the earth by more intertwined vines. I didn't think we could free that but Luca did. So we started in. By now I was sunburned and tired, feeling old. But my young companion was sure we could succeed and in the end he was right.

I told some friends later this was a "mental health day." What I meant by that was that instead of stressing out about the crap that besets me daily now, the audits, the financial worries, the search for paying work, I spent the day in the sun with a little boy whose imagination and focus know no limits. That's the best therapy for someone like me that I can imagine.

-30-

Tuesday Bluesday

You know, this new blogging interface really sucks, so I hope Blogger fixes it soon. I apologize to anyone who stops by for all of the run-on sentences. I take great pride in choosing where my paragraphs begin and end, but Google clearly does not. Whatever, this was a good day, all things considered. As I watered the plants in our garden, I noticed all of the bumblebees caressing the herbs. And, so sadly, several immature green plums dropped before their time by yesterday's high winds. Like on all Tuesdays, I spent around five hours driving my kids around the city or helping them with homework, rides or dinner. We have our rituals, also. My youngest son is getting rather good at cooking pasta. We all like it just barely coated with red sauce. You could call it orange, then laced with shredded Parmesan. This was not really a Blue Tuesday. This was an Okay Tuesday.

-30-

Goodbye Kisses

Life is not an even road, cut straight through a field, with trees standing tall on either side, but an uncertain path, switching sometimes violently back and forth, up and down, the way forward disappearing at times. When your next step is uncertain, that's a good time to listen to the signals the earth will deliver to you forthwith. At least that's my philosophy. Today, picking some flowers in my daughter's new backyard to put in a vase for her, I startled a doe from her afternoon nap. She jumped out from the shadows, contemplating me as I contemplated her. We came to a mutual agreement that neither an old, white-haired man nor a young female deer were much of a threat worth worrying about, so she went back to her tasks and I went back to mine. Taking care of grandchildren is a privilege, historically speaking. Only in very modern human history has anyone like me lived long enough to enjoy this privilege. Then again, you have to earn your privilege. These days, I am trying to earn the trust of my granddaughter, Sophia. She is 1. I am 65. Very slowly, she is getting used to me being around. She notices her Mom hugging me and her big brother. This past weekend, she learned how to kiss. Her first kiss was to her brother. She has also learned how to wave goodbye. Today, when she woke up from her nap in the car outside Target, with me by her side, she smiled and then broke into tears. "Where is Mommy?" Tonight, hours later, when it was time for me to leave, she waved goodbye and then she kissed me. That's one I shall treasure. -30-

Not Lost in the Weeds

It's a warm night here in San Francisco, and I'm back home after a day when the teens and I helped my oldest daughter and her family move into their new home in the East Bay hills. The day started with math homework, the bane of my youngest daughter's existence. We think we finally figured it out, but who knows. My 17-year-old vomited all morning, having come down with a stomach bug last night, perhaps having eaten something crummy. My 16-year-old has little energy and should probably be checked soon for mono. I myself felt horrible all day. Lately, my body has just seemed to hurt, head to toe, around the clock. I suppose it is stress. Trying to shoulder two IRS audits is slowly but surely wearing me down. I wonder if anyone in the US government has any idea how debilitating an audit is to an honest, hardworking taxpayer. You're presumed guilty and have to prove your innocence. But doing so involves reconstructing life three years ago, long after many of the paper records of what happened have faded, been destroyed, lost, or recycled. We do not all have the luxury of unlimited storage space. The experience of being audited by the IRS has led me to truly hate my own government. I know these very young people, hired straight out of college, and compensated on whatever they can squeeze out of people like me, are grateful to have jobs and sincere in their conviction that they are simply catching tax cheaters. But in fact they are persecuting honest people, normal people, people who do not have the means to defend themselves. In fact, they are destroying the American Dream. And since they are doing this on Obama's watch, I hereby declare I will not vote for Obama this fall. He is the ultimate hypocrite, pretending to care about people like me and my family, but obviously does not. Any President who encourages audits of those unable to defend themselves, while bailing out the banks that have put many of us in the unfortunate financial situations we find ourselves, is truly an enemy of the middle class. *** I love my family. I love little else about the world or life any longer but I love my family. Today, I snapped this photo of my granddaughter, her Mom, and her youngest Auntie.

One way or another we will make it through. If my body holds up, I will survive these assaults on our family. Maybe I'll even start to feel better, and enjoy the sun and the songs of birds again. I would like to buy some seeds for my daughter's family and help them plant a garden in their large back yard. Tomatoes, lettuce, carrots, radishes, spices and fruit trees should flourish there, I think. I imagine an old man with white hair helping them work the earth and raising these crops. What that will require is energy and stamina. It is confusing and sad that I seem to have so little energy and stamina now I am on my own. Almost all of my adult life I have had a partner. I was not always the perfect partner back but I always loved the woman I was with, best that I could. It has been a crisis the past two years as I have tried to learn how to cope with being alone and the presumption now that I will always henceforth be alone. The crisis begins when the sun rises (at the latest -- many nights it begins earlier). It starts out with the silence of being alone in this place. I turn on the radio, and NPR helps me feel not quite so much alone. I can never eat breakfast, when alone, but I do drink coffee. Sometimes, if the weather is right, I open my back door. The right kinds of weather include rain or sunshine, but never fog. In the sun I hear the birds. In the rain I hear the raindrops. Either way, I feel less alone. As I sip my coffee, I think about the people I love. Of course, these start with my children, my grandchildren, my ex-partners, my friends, and lots of random people who have come and gone in my life. *** My fantasy baseball team, the Mud Lake Mafia, is off to its best start ever. Even after a terrible week, we are in fourth place in our 14-team league tonight, but for most of the past two weeks we were in first. I have no illusion that we will regain first but I feel we can finish in the top half of the league, which would be a major accomplishment. *** The Giants finished April with a record of 12-10. *** My son's team won Friday night, 3-1. My daughter's team tied 2-2 yesterday in an inspirational comeback. *** In many ways this was a good weekend. But as I shaved yesterday, looking in the mirror, the only thought I had was that one of these days will prove to be the last time you shave your face, David. -30-

Winners One And All

This spring is the final season for the Palominos, as the girls are reaching the age where recreational soccer ends and club soccer begins. So for this close-knit team, which has never had a winning season, this is their last and only chance for that experience. By the fall, most of the players will have graduated from Middle School and gone on to various high schools. Before he became head coach last fall, Aidan inherited a team with an overall record of 8-37-2 over six seasons.

They had their best season to date last fall, when they finished 4-5, so the kids are hoping that this spring might be even better. So far, so good. They won their first two games before facing a tough opponent today in the late afternoon heat at Crocker-Amazon. The first photo above was from last night's practice, as their young coach was getting them prepared for today's game. The second photo was just before today's game started. Four girls did not show up, with conflicts of one sort or another, but those who did played short-handed the entire game with great spirit. As Aidan told them at halftime, they were outplaying the other team, even though they were behind, 0-1. In the second half, he reminded them, they would be playing into the wind, and he adjusted the lineup and their strategy as a result. It all seemed to amount to nada when a bad bounce caused one of the Palominos' defenders to score an unintentional goal for the other team. Now it was 0-2 and it stayed that way until late in the game. Somehow, however, these players didn't give up; they rallied. The fought for ball after ball and won more of those battles than they lost. They moved the ball up the pitch against the wind and in the last five minutes or so, scored a goal. Now it was 1-2. Their intensity only increased after that and with perhaps three minutes left, they tied the game on a PK. In the final minute they almost scored the winner, but when it was over, the 2-2 tie felt very much like a victory. They are now 2-0-1 this season with three games left and an excellent chance at a winning season. And, in the "Aidan Era," they are now 6-5-1. -30-

Hide 'n Seek

Increasingly, I'm realizing that a day spent with grandchildren can compensate as a counterweight against a lot of the other BS in life, as we age. They know nothing of financial or job pressures, taxes, audits, climate change, or politics and they could care less. They notice hummingbirds, raccoon tracks, edible plants in the garden, and cloud formations.

They're constantly learning new things and are wired to do so. Unlike all too many of us adults, they do not shrink from challenges; they embrace them. They are always trying out something new, pushing themselves to exceed the limits, and they get bruised up in the process. I want to be more like my grandchildren, going forward. I'd also forgotten what a thrill it is to play hide 'n seek, the ultimate game of chase and discovery. Just waiting to be found creates a state of anxiety and anticipation that has few parallels in our comparatively boring adult lives. -30-