The Silence That Looms

It sounds as if Obama is going to step up in the wake of last Friday's slaughter and use his position as leader of the nation to promote new preventative measures, though I admit to skepticism about what he, or anyone, can do about reducing gun violence here in America.

If there were one group with the power to effect positive change it would be the NRA, the powerful pro-gun lobby.

As I've noted in the past, I'm pro-gun myself, in the sense I hunted as a boy and still own an ancient 16-gauge shotgun, though I don't possess any shells for it.

My three sons have always loved guns, especially BB guns.

I get it.

But weapons that are meant for no other purpose than mass killings of other human beings are beyond my comprehension. I do not understand why anyone, except a delusional paranoid preparing for the apocalypse, could possibly wish to own those types of guns.

That said, I agree with the pro-gun people who say more government regulation of guns isn't going to prevent tragedies like what happened in Connecticut, sadly.

At least it would be a start, however.

Beyond that we have the paucity of resources available for mental health diagnosis and treatment, a critical failure in this society.

Do you know that in order for someone to remain the care of a professional for mental health problems, and for that professional to get reimbursed by most insurance companies, that person has to be declared to be in a critical state?

Anyone who has ever dealt first hand with mental health recovery knows it is a gradual process, that when the patient proceeds from critical to relatively stable, he remains at risk of relapse if not properly attended.

Yet our private insurance companies force providers to jump through so many hoops at this stage of recovery that many are lost from the system, revert to their former ways, and once again are on the streets posing potential risks to themselves and the rest of us.

We do not have a civilized mental health system in this country.

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of this problem overall is the great social disease of dislocation, alienation, and loneliness. Although no one much wants to admit it, we live in world where many of us are speeding away from each other like stars in the universe, ever more distant, silent, and disconnected.

This is our greatest problem of all.

And unless we can find a solution to that, not only will the slaughter of innocents continue, the tragic alienation of many of the rest of us will be an inevitability as well.

Searching for Leadership

What happened today in Connecticut is unspeakably horrible and tragic. Inevitably, it also will become a political question, a matter that demands public debate and new policy initiatives.

These kinds of preventable slaughters have become too frequent -- even one of them would have been too many, and the U.S. is a country now desperately waiting for some leader to emerge with the courage and will to take this problem on.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was a lone voice on the issue of gun control recently; where is another person of courage?

When a sports commentator added his voice to the conversation, he was widely ridiculed, which says more about the state of denial many sports fans live in than it does about him.

If you are a parent or grandparent or aunt or uncle or even a friend of children, or even if you are none of the above but have a heart, you know how horrifying today was for all of us, and you felt the horror yourself.

I'm not sure that gun control is the entire answer here, but I do know that restricting access to weapons that have no other purpose but to slaughter other humans is the right thing to do.

We also need much better mental health intervention services. We need better community awareness of the signals that someone is in trouble in the types of ways that could lead them to do what was so tragically done today.

Rarely is an individual so isolated that literally no one is aware of his struggles, emotionally and mentally.

Remember that even the Unibomber was eventually identified by his brother, thanks to media circulation of his mad writings.

As I said, gun control is only one piece of what needs to be done, but for that we need a political leader willing to take on the NRA.

For that, it is time to look to our President. I'm sure his emotion today was sincere, that he was acting more as father than as Commander in Chief, as he wiped away tears.

But as President at this moment he is also Father in Chief. Step up, Mr. President, and take on the gun lobby. Now is the right moment. We need you.

p.s. If you agree with these sentiments, please forward them or your own to the White House.

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The Last Time Like This For a Century

Today, as we rounded the hill atop Bernal Heights at 8 a.m., the kids in the carpool and I noticed it had started raining, even though we were bathed in sunlight. "There must be a rainbow," I said out loud, though the kids were, as usual, plugged into their headsets, listening to music, even as I listened to NPR on the car radio, so nobody heard me.

"Wow!" was the collective response, theirs and mine, and we cleared the ridge and a gorgeous full rainbow framed our entire view westward.

It turns out they were paying attention, if not to me, to the environment around us.

Later, I mumbled something about today being 12/12/12. Once again, I doubt anyone was listening, but the point I tried to make was that this is the last time such a numerical date will occur in this century, since there is no 13th month, at least on the Western calendar.

In 89 years, we will again start a twelve year period when we experience another 1/1/1 to 12/12/12 sequence, but that's a long time away.

Alas, nobody was listening.

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Our Immigrant Stories

My 16-year-old has to make a movie consisting of individual photos on the theme of immigration. I couldn't resist relocating some old photos posted to this blog a long time ago and forwarding them to him.

This is the ship my Scottish grandfather, Alexander Anderson, traveled to America on back in 1923.

Here is the manifest from that ship, with his name on it.

It a terrific class assignment for a high school student to research and express himself on the immigration issue. Dylan has plenty of perspective -- he knows about the Irish, the Chinese, the Jewish and the Latino immigrations.

He'll create a soundtrack for his movie. I suggested this song, which he didn't know:


Arlo, the son of the songwriter Woodie Guthrie sings it with Emmy Lou Harris.

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Art is Dangerous

(Hiding her face.)

If one thing alone is certain, it will never be easy to be a writer or any other kind of artist.

Since we live in the age of data, let me describe what in the tech community is known as the 1-9-90 rule.

It states that one percent of the population will post to the Internet, nine percent will comment on that post, and 90 percent will just read it.

Not much different from the old days, eh? Still a broadcast model of communication.

As a writer who has struggled financially at some points in my life, I've always kind of hoped my kids would choose more practical careers, like engineering, medicine, or business administration.

Inevitably, however, most of them have migrated over to the creative pursuits in one form or another. With none of them is this more clearly the case than with my youngest. At 14, she has been pursuing her passion as a visual artist for years now, and today marked a milestone in her journey.

Tomorrow is the deadline for applications at San Francisco's School of the Arts (SoTA). That meant, in her case, she had to submit some forms and recommendations from her art teachers, but also a portfolio of ten original drawings, including still lifes, self portraits, and landscapes.

Despite being told that the odds are stacked against her being admitted (because so many kids want to go to SoTA), Julia has been working hard for weeks to finish her pictures by this deadline.

Last night, she might have been able to finish her landscape, but the fog rolled in over this city and she could no longer see Twin Peaks.

This morning, the sun replaced that fog, and she stayed home to finish the piece.

By mid-afternoon, when I picked her up from school, her portfolio, tucked into a large blue case, was ready to be judged.

But who will judge her work and what do they know about my daughter and her talent?

At the age of 14, what can we really say about anybody?

I can tell you this. She is determined and committed and she works as hard as anyone I have ever known to get things right. She is a perfectionist.

She sees the world through her own eyes, and has little use for perspectives at odds with her own. Although kind and generous by nature, she does not suffer fools gladly.

The way she views things has always struck me as visual as opposed to verbal. She is also a very good writer, BTW, but we writers often fall in love with our own words, and the verbal narratives they imply.

Julia, I believe, falls more in love with a visual kind of story telling.

I don't know what will happen when the school officials evaluate my daughter's application. I don't know that she will be granted the next step in the process -- an audition, where she will have to quickly execute similar drawings to those she's submitted.

But I do know this much. She is an artist in her father's eyes.

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Busy, Not Busy; Not Alone, Alone

As my vegetarian, 14-year-old artist finalizes her portfolio in preparation for applying to the School of the Arts, up on Twin Peaks, all I can say is thank god for hummus and edemame.

These are among the constants in my refrigerator, especially at a time she is growing so fast that everyone who sees her after a week or two gap, repeats the same mantra: "Julia, have you grown taller again?"

Today, in the driving rain, I started off driving her 16-year-old brother's carpool to Lowell HS out near the Ocean. He loves the rain and the fog, so he is always happy when we have this type of weather.

Soon after, it was back out into the rain to pick Julia up from shadowing at Mission HS across the street from Dolores Park. The day is close when she has to choose among the six schools on her list and to rank them.

The city's lottery demands that approach.

As I settled in to try and work, a new call came -- my 18-year-old had a dental emergency, so soon it was out in the (now) mist once again, to rush him to the dentist, all the way over near North Beach in the far end of Polk Gulch, at the western edge of Russian Hill.

After that it was back and forth from here to the gym and to Bernal as night time settled over the City by the Bay. All told, I'd driven nearly 49 miles, an appropriate number for this City that measures 7 miles by 7.

***

I have not been blogging here much lately, and for that I apologize to the handful of loyal readers who keep an eye on this space. I'm going to try and amend for that. Plus, there are reasons good and bad for my silence.

The good is that I have been busy with work projects that are helping me limp to the finish line of the worst financial year, for me, of the past quarter century. I may be limping but at least I am still standing.

The bad is I have felt ill from some time now, both physically and mentally. I don't usually write about depression, but it is no secret that among writers this is a common problem.

I'm fine with it, normally. Like other emotional states it can be episodic. It's only when it settles in like an unwanted house guest that I become concerned.

I have worked hard enough on depression to know the proper therapy, which is to connect with others. Luckily, it is not a challenge to find people I know and also to meet new people.

I meet new people every week, literally. Most of them are young, smart, pleasant, interesting. We have wonderful conversations. A substantial number of them are also lovely young women -- an added bonus for a man who has always loved women.

But these relationships, for the most part, are fleeting -- bits of conversations traded as if on the wind, a fragment may blow first this way and then that. I am reminded at those times of cherry blossom leaves in Japan as the trees disengage themselves from their fragments of beauty, exchanging them for greenery and the richness of fruit, only later still to soon stand empty and bare as the winter arrives.

It is winter, in the city and in my life.

As a Michigan boy, I wish it would start snowing outside, sort of. But if it did, and I had no one to share it with, I probably would be more drawn to Robert Frost's "Stopping by the woods on a snowy evening."

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Happy Endings

Driving up to Sacramento on Thanksgiving, we could see the snow-capped Sierra far to the east. The air was that clear and crisp our whole visit.

I've grown to love the neighborhood where my daughter and her family live. There are so many trees that remind me of my youth in Michigan.

A place with actual seasons.

The trees in the park near her house are gorgeous this time of year -- leaves red, yellow, orange and green.

My youngest and I made five pies -- two pecan, two pumpkin and one apple. Others in the family made the turkey, dressing, gravy, three green salads, sauteed brussel sprouts, Waldorf Salad, broccoli, other veggies, other side dishes and other desserts.

It was a magnificent feast -- as it is for many people, Thanksgiving is my favorite meal of the year. As a boy, I loved dark meat; later on I grew to like white meat; as I've grown older, I now once again strongly prefer dark meat.

The kids baked this turkey to perfection, as far as the dark meat was concerned. So juicy, perfect.

The rest of the five day weekend involved a lot of driving, homework, more college application stuff, football games on TV, and writing.

It's impossible at my age to not turn to memories during the holiday periods. I can easily summon the moment as a young child, with my nose pressed to the window of our house in Royal Oak, that I first grasped the enormity of the fact that every snowflake hitting the outside of that same window had a unique shape.

This was math at its best -- capturing the concept of infinity.

An infinite number of anything implies unrestrained uniqueness. The concept of unique appeals to the inner mathematical core of a writer.

Writers fancy ourselves as unique voices. We are arrogant in this way -- that we believe our ability to string together words in a visual narrative is as distinct as our fingerprint.

It's our verbal fingerprint.

Storytellers need to believe that stories matter and that the way we choose to tell ours matters as a result.

We may not ever discover why we write; or whether it is a gift, a psychological disorder, an urge to connect, a desire to be heard, or a malady not yet diagnosed by medicine.

But we write. We write and write. I've written millions of words. They've been read by hundreds of thousands of people.

The other day, in the park, shooting the photo at the top of this post, I felt I could look through those beautiful orange leaves to heaven.

I don't know what I mean by heaven.

My 18-year-old son was here the other day when some Christians showed up at the front door wanting to talk to us about Christ. He politely explained to them that he is an atheist and they politely moved on to ring the next doorbell in their missionary outreach.

Maybe by heaven I mean what I felt I was glimpsing was the end of my own particular story. If so, it was a lovely shade of orange, like sundown in the tropics.

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