A Lonely Engagement

There are patterns everywhere.

The trick is to locate and identify the patterns in our own lives, especially the destructive ones.

Last night, after hours of work, I discovered that this is what the novel I'm writing is about, apparently.

Each time I go back in and open up the file, I rewrite it slightly from the top.

(This has long been my habit as a writer. I write very quickly, but then, edit, edit, edit until the draft feels right.

(Not so much here, of course. A blog is meant to stay informal, looser...)

But the novel, which is still in its early stages, is about a journey through time and space, but much more critically, through the maze of events and relationships that either reveal or conceal the necessary degree of self-knowledge to say, write a book.

It's an addictive activity, once you start, but it occasionally turns brutal. The only way this book ever can succeed, in my eyes, (forget financial success), is if I can attain a degree of emotional honesty that normally proves too intense to sustain.

At some point, we all want to retreat back to the states of denial and articles of faith that normally permit us to live out our routines without thinking too hard about it all. The problem is no one ever writes a good book of the sort I am attempting now without setting these regular routines aside, and pushing further into places most of us, especially me, rarely wishes to go.

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Morning Dew, Afternoon Light

My 8th grader and I went to the big public school enrollment fair the other day. He cracks me up.

"Let's just go in there, grab the applications, and get out of there, okay?"

Once inside a massive hall, the noise was overpowering. Parents and kids pushed toward tables manned by volunteers. The first person I saw was the principal of his brother's high school, a man with a perpetual smile -- an optimist.

I don't recall any of the principals of my schools ever being optimists. They seemed more like prison guards.

My kid hung back while I exchanged pleasantries with the smiling principal; he hung back again when I greeted a bunch of kids wearing beanies from the school that is his top choice.

It's the school with the reputation (and record) of being the top academic high school in these parts.

He sat in the back row of a short question-and-answer session offered by that school. I asked if he had any questions; he said no. So I asked one, about the nature of the "personal essay" that is part of the application process.

I think it is odd that a B+, a B-, or a B all count as a 3.0 grade. When I was a professor at Stanford a few years ago, I used a pretty complicated mathematical scale to award different numbers for those letter grades.

But, to get into a high school, you could earn all A-'s and have a 4.0 GPA.

While we were driving home, he was studying the applications carefully, reading parts of them out-loud. This is an attention to detail that bodes well for him getting into the school of his choice.

That, plus the fact that he very rarely gets a "-" behind his A's.

***

Life in my house goes quickly from a noisy hub of chaos to a venue so quiet you could hear a pin drop. The strokes of the keys on this laptop compete with the ticking of a wall clock to remind me that I live alone, it is chilly outside, and we are in the midst of enduring the shortest days of our year.

The bottom of time.

The holidays now approach, a time of dread some years; occasionally also still of joy. I think that, for me at least, I must have been better at living in denial in order to enjoy the holidays in the past.

Given the recession, and the state of my own disarray, not to mention that of my profession, maybe this year I'll focus on celebrating small triumphs, like being able to push out this blog post.

Yay!

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What You Saw At The Beach

These shots are from today, on San Francisco's western shore. If you click on them, the images become bigger. These images like that (to be clicked)...











Self Image, Ocean Beach

Garden Soup on an Autumn Day

My friend noticed this as we arrived at the Polo Fields -- a shaft of sunlight in the woods near the soccer fields.



The field also looked surreal in the early morning light. The game didn't go well, for the girls. They lost, 0-3. But the playoffs are not over yet and they'll play again next week.



Back home, my 11-year player had an idea. "Let's cook something."

"Something" turned into an organic vegetable soup. We picked a few tomatoes, green onions, sweet basil leaves, and other plants, cooked them in a cream base with potatoes, carrots, garlic, and other ingredients into such a delicious comfort food that even my big, tall meat-eating boys snapped up their portions happily.

What is endlessly wonderful about parenting, as long as you're open to it, is all the things your kids teach you and introduce you to. I could write volumes about this topic. (I suppose, given all of my posts, I already have done that, actually.)

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Back to Origins

Over three and a half years ago, I started this blog with a simple post:

Date: Tuesday, April 04, 2006
Headline: Heavy rains

Post: Here in the Bay Area, just back from New York, I miss the sunshine, as it has been raining ever since my return. The whole world around me seems to have turned dark. The light is gone.


***

For apparently the first time since I wrote those simple three sentences, I went back to reread them tonight, because I find myself, emotionally, at what feels like the exact same place in life as I was then, with all that old familiar pain.

But before getting to that, I was shocked to discover that in such a short post I could have failed to capitalize the first letter of the first word in the middle sentence!

I've corrected it above, as well as in the original, but it certainly shows that I got off on an inauspicious note, eh?

Of course, hardly anyone ever read that beginning entry, I'm sure.

And I was not at all explicit as to what was happening to me back then. It took awhile before I stopped relying on metaphors like rain and darkness and admitted that I was going through an extremely painful breakup with someone I loved and who loved me.

If I have grown at all since then, I have learned that breakups always involve people who love each other. Even in the white heat of seeming hate, revenge, anger, bitterness, there is the residual love that once ignited softer passions.

This week, the skies have again turned dark, the rains are falling (softly so far) and the same metaphors apply in my personal life. I have returned over the past few months, but explicitly and with finality only this week to the status of a single man, with no partner, mourning an extremely special relationship that just did not work out.

The reasons it didn't work, and the proximate behaviors involved, on her part and mine, will remain private. I've developed a new sensitivity toward all of our collective and individual privacy online over my years of writing here.

On the one hand, I want to be entirely honest, emotionally. And, as a writer, the more of any truth I can voice helps me heal the fastest. But, "truth" is a funny concept, as I've gradually come to appreciate over a lifetime of seeking it.

When a couple splits, there is (at least) her truth and his truth. And since mine is the only voice here, the least fair thing I could possibly do is reflect only my perspective.

I will not do that, not to someone I will always, on many levels, love so deeply, regardless of what the future holds.

Letting someone go is hard work. You have to do it when you lose a relationship; even more profoundly when someone you love dies.

Letting go of anyone seems to be especially hard for me. I still mourn work friendships that date back decades. I miss old friends who have somehow dropped away over the years.

I miss moments that can never return.

Most of all, I miss intimacy, probably the hardest state to achieve. Relationships involve a balance of power. It is almost impossible to get that part right. They also involve stages of life; the two have to have some way to balance their relative stages in a mutually satisfying way if they are to happily stay together.

Of course, I should define my idea of relationship. I don't mean "staying together for the kids;" or "one takes care of the other," or "it would be too scary to end up alone."

I fully accept and even expect that I will end up alone in my life. I've had my share of wonderful relationships, and I can honestly say I wish no one who has been an intimate partner harm. I wish each of them happiness and resolution before we pass on, as each and every one of us will do.

One of my ex's has a great boyfriend. I am very happy for her, she deserves that.

I have a lot of work to do. I wish it wasn't this dreariest of all times of year in which to do it. Every joyful face, with the exception of own children's, at the American holiday time sears my broken heart.

There's more. Deep within any person going through the loss of a relationship that once seemed so special and so hopeful is an awful gaping hole -- a place filled with so much agony that no other human being could possibly be expected to go there and witness it.

Perhaps, with people who write to survive, that place is even uglier and more frightening. Perhaps. I do not know for sure, but what empirical evidence lies before me, in the broken shards of my attempts to form new couplings, suggests that the bright red blood flowing (metaphorically) from my body flows for a reason, and these words must be its purpose.

So, if any of my long-time readers thought they would be rid of me in this space anytime soon, fear not.

A new wound has opened. I am alone, hurting, and needing to communicate. Because that is my only tool for healing and moving on. Those who become too sad at reading about another's pain may wish to vacate these premises for a while.

Take heart. Another season beckons. Spring time, the season of renewal.

But not for now.

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Stopping by the Roadside on a Cloudy Afternoon

Weather like this always feels portentious. The air is fairly still, but the sky is filling with angry clouds. An hour north of the city, way up at the summit traversed by Lucas Valley Road, you come to Big Rock.



This stretch of Northern California has an other-worldly feel, which is not surprising given that the Star Wars movies draw heavily from this environment for their depictions.

In fact, just a hop, skip and a jump at far less than hyperspeed from Big Rock is Lucas's headquarters.

Though I think of myself, primarily, as a writer, a major way I process information of all types is through visual stimulation. Colors, angles, shadows, visual patterns of all sorts unleash my words. My continuous goal is to try and provoke visual images inside the heads of others with these words.

On the visual side of my career, I've published photos offline, as well as here and on my companion blogs, especially Sidewalk Images.

But I think if I could be reborn as another type of time traveler, it would be as a painter.



Since that seems not likely to happen, let me tell you about the tours of not only Big Rock Ranch, but of Skywalker Ranch, which is a bit further down the road, that I was so kindly given today.

The 1890s Victorian mansion Lucas has had constructed as his home and office is one of the most impressive private buildings in California today. It is massive, but elegantly constructed with astounding portions of stained glass, in-laid wood, and curving walls. Every window looks out onto a separate vista: Only of the natural world; none of the other buildings on the Ranch can be so much as glimpsed.

Much of the artwork knocks you out, because he has originals, but in order to truly appreciate it, I'm afraid you have to be a big fan of Norman Rockwell. There is a heavy air of nostalgia for bygone eras in this place, which is very, very quiet.

You almost need to whisper.

I was reminded of another enormously influential figure: William Randolph Hearst. We Californians deliver such people to the world at large, even as we claim them as our own, identify with them on all sorts of levels, and expect them to be just like us.

Which of course, once they reach this level, they cannot possibly be.

There were many other impressive parts of the tour, including his world-class sound studio, his vineyard, the Inn, the organic gardens, and the herd of cattle. Most of the food in the cafes appears to be harvested onsite.

Let's return to the vineyard. Did you know that the grapes harvested here are bottled by Frances Ford Coppolla into his wildly popular line of wines? I didn't.

It makes sense, given that Lucas and Coppolla, as members of the small club of true non-Hollywood success stories in American film, have long been good friends.

(I've met both men over my life here, just in passing, but that is another story.)

My favorite part of the Lucas mansion is its two-story library, with a winding staircase in the center of the room, a fireplace, and a very large collection of books about mythology (Joseph Campbell, etc.)

The Star Wars stories are deeply ensconced in myths, of course, occasionally painfully so. But it is hard to fault an artist like Lucas who, in an age when fewer people study the classics -- or even read books! -- has devoted his life's work to updating and re-interpreting Oedipus particularly, but many other mythic characters so successfully, using modern technology and communication channels.

I'm a fan for that reason. George Lucas, in my eyes, is one of our great educators in the modern age. He's done what great teachers have tried to do for generations, by bringing our collective intellectual past into the classroom, making it all newly accessible, trying to seduce each successive generation of kids to locate the context for their pains, their trials, their successes, their failures, their dreams and aspirations.

We all go through all of this; none of us escapes any of it. That is a universal lesson. Today's visit, just at a particularly vulnerable time in my own life, was reminder of these essential truths.

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Everything *Does* End

As the sun set over San Francisco this late autumn night, I walked alone to my car, got in and turned on the radio. It was set to my kids' favorite station ("Live 105") and the song playing was by Death Cab for Cutie, "Meet Me on the Equinox."

It's quite a beautiful, haunting song on the alt-rock circuit these days. The chorus for that song is "Everything Ends. Everything Ends."

All of which feels quite appropriate today, a day when quite a few important things in my life came to an end. My calendar, however, which I have been roundly criticized for, anticipated only one event -- my son's playoff soccer game, the first his high school has had in anyone's memory.

This season has been more like a fairy tale than any of his other sports successes over the years, if only because the odds seemed so long against them.

At the first "home" game, I was the only spectator as the game started who was not booing their own team! Mainly, the others in the stands were kids, calling out insults to their classmates on the field.

Later, I started learning that these observers were the kids who wished they could play on the team, but they "didn't have the grades." So they showed up to yell insults instead.

This is not a very promising start to my son's high school soccer "career," is all I could think to myself. But, on the pitch, he was doing fine. Even though a freshman in this inner-city high school, he became a starter and -- except for about ten minutes in the first game -- started and played every minute of every game until he injured his ankle, and had to miss last Thursday's season finale.

Game by game, this particular group of kids were visibly coming together as a team. A real team. They won games, lots of games.

Gradually, I began recognizing that there were other parents attending the games, and a small group of us, the regulars, bunched together, where by shouting loudly, we could imitate a real crowd.

The new principal of the school started showing up, plus a few teachers, counselors, and a small but more loyal group of students.

The cheerleaders started coming to certain games. More kids started coming.

The team kept winning, crafting an unlikely 8-game streak where they won seven, tied one, scored 31 goals and allowed 3.

During all of this, I started looking beyond my own kid and his story to empathize with the parents of seniors on this team. They had been the long-suffering attendees of games oozing with low morale for over three years.

The school's record over those three years was 12-30-4, and they never came close to making the playoffs, which in the San Francisco Public School System is dominated by huge schools like Mission and Lowell.

Balboa, by contrast is a third the size.

Nevertheless, today, as the team with the fourth-best record in the league, they finally got their chance. Their opponent was the team with the top record.



This game was to be a very different experience. Not only were us regulars out in force, we brought family members. Not only did the principal attend, he arranged for teachers to change their meeting schedule and attend.

The cheerleaders were all there. And many, many students were there. The girls' soccer team was there. (Note to self: Attend at least one girls' soccer team game next spring.)



As the team prepared for their showdown, the loudspeaker kicked in. We were in the City's professional soccer stadium, the nicest venue any of these kids have ever played in.

Those of us in the crowd sat in stands so large we assumed they could never be filled for a mere afternoon (2:30 pm start!) public high school battle. But the kids kept pouring in, and by the time the action started, we had a loud, boisterous contingent on hand for both schools.



This is my favorite photograph from this season. This how a team looks. You rarely see people of so many races, cultures and classes together in this way, except in some of our proudest national institutions: The military, first and foremost, but also in our sports teams.

We are a rainbow nation, and this school happens to be the most diverse in San Francisco, which in turn is one of the most diverse in all of America.

In our common future, this is the face of America.



My son did not start. It was not about his ankle, which we had successfully healed. It's because he is a freshman, and this, potentially, was the last game the seniors on the team would ever get to play wearing their high school's colors.

Plus this season, with its tremendous and unexpected successes, really belonged to them -- and their families.

I was very nervous all day today getting prepared to watch this contest. As all of the other regulars, one by one arrived, they confided the same feelings. As a parent, while you watch your kid play a violent sport like soccer, you are always on edge.

First, you pray (s)he will not get hurt. Second, you hope they do well. Third, you hope don't feel bad afterward, no matter what happens.

Somewhere, down the list, you hope they win, too, because winning is and always will be by far more fun.



Although he didn't start, before the end of the first half, one of our seniors got injured, the first of many sad injuries today, so my son ran onto the field to a raucous cheer (he says that is only because he is friends with all the cheerleaders.)

He quite obviously had not gotten the team memo (cut your hair to a Mohawk) because his floppy red mop stood out, as always, in sharp contrast to everyone else out there on the pitch.

But he played very well. The first injury was to a midfielder, so he played midfield. When he was on the field, his team scored the game's first goal. It was very near the end of the first half, and our giant and very rowdy crowd went utterly crazy as result. We were besides ourselves.

I hope I didn't hurt anyone's hand as I jumped and screamed and slapped high fives in the stands. But even as this was happening, I knew, way deep inside, that this is as good as it ever gets, in this very brief life of ours.

It doesn't really matter what happened after that, although I will of course tell you. That moment was the kind of peak moment we all live for, I suspect.

Think about it. To succeed in any field in this world you have to work, unless of course you are born to privilege, in which case nothing I can write here will make any sort of sense at all.

There is no kid on the Balboa High School soccer team who was born to privilege. These are not a bunch of boys likely to be headed for Harvard Law School, either by class or by grades, with a few possible exceptions.

These are athletes, and many of them also have good grades, but they are not considered elite material by those who continue to dominate (and profit from) our economy and the political order that remains in place in this country.

(This, despite the efforts of our idealistic young President, himself a victim of hanging around too long, IMHO, with the elites.)

Nope, these are regular guys. And at halftime today they were on top of their world. They had the top team in their league on the ropes.

But we all knew that a second half had to be played. More injuries ensued, and my kid was rushed back in, now at center forward. Are you kidding me? He's never played offense, so how will he know what to do?

But his coach, who clearly cares a lot for these kids, was off the field helping his latest senior recover from a vicious blow that, for unknown reasons, was not called a foul. For a while, the injury looked quite serious, but I think he eventually was able to walk on his own again.

Meanwhile, the tall freshman was back to where he belonged, on defense, and he continued to play well until the final whistle.

What else can I say? They lost 2-1. Perhaps with better referees, they would have won. Perhaps, if the other team hadn't flopped and fouled less obviously, they would have won. Perhaps, with a few better bounces and a few other breaks, they would have won. Maybe the best team didn't win.

But that's the way life goes.

You know what I like best? After the game, walking with him to his mother's car, my son told me that he was happy about this game. "I didn't expect to play. It was the seniors' last chance. I only got in there when they got hurt. That's how it should be. We did very well. I played well."

And that is the lesson of sports. Someone has to lose and someone has to win. Afterward, you shake hands and move on.

Too bad the rest of life doesn't always work like that. Although I am very proud of my son, as I returned to my flat alone, I wondered what it is I have to be that proud of...

Have you ever felt that way?

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