A Tree on a Hill

This is meant to resemble a tree in Alamo Square, where I've spent time with a few friends and my kids during the past three months. You can live in a city for decades, as I have in this one, and never get to know certain neighborhoods, but for a number of reasons, my chance to get to know the Alamo Square area finally arrived.

It is a heavily residential neighborhood, with high-rise apartment buildings among picture-perfect rows of Victorians -- so perfect they are the ones that grace many a postcard sent from San Francisco.



Thus, busloads of tourists stop here, competing with the locals walking their dogs, playing frisbee, or reading on the benches.

I'd visited this park a few times over the years, but never had gotten to know it. During the holidays, while recuperating nearby, I spotted the tree, a Monterey Pine I believe, its branches permanently bent (but not broken) by the westward wind.

It stands on the southwest side of Alamo Square, and for whatever reason, I identify closely with it, especially when I view myself through the eyes of my children, who visited me often while I was staying there.

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Family Origins Matter at Times Like These

Most of us come from modest backgrounds. In the midst of the worst recession of my lifetime, I think back to the lives of my grandparents, on both sides, and how difficult they were.

Above is a photograph of my Grandma Weir's wedding ring. The few people I've ever showed it to just shake their heads at how inexpensive and simple it is.

She was the wife of a farmer and they lived in a tiny house on the small plot of Canadian land they farmed.

They had six kids; her husband (whose name I bear) died young. Nothing about her life, start to finish, was easy.

She died in a rest home in her 90s. I don't know why or how I got her ring; perhaps after her death my Dad (her youngest child) was given it, and maybe he then gave it to me.

It's odd that I don't remember these details. It bothers me.



I have only a few other items from my father's life, including a packet of old black-and-white photos and some hand-written pages of a novel he had wanted to write. Plus a few of the golf balls he initialed on the last night of his life.

The second photo tonight is of a Day of the Dead poster his youngest grandchild made honoring my father recently. The two of them never met; she was a tiny infant when he died the night before I had hoped to introduce them.

But I'm quite sure they would have been fast friends had their times on this planet overlapped. They share a sunny disposition, an optimism, and an easy love of other people.

My father's life, from a material standpoint, was easier than his father's. He also lived much longer, into his 80s.

Almost all of us in the so-called middle classes in America are trying to come to grips with reduced expectations about our lifestyles going forward, and despite any personal stress this is causing me personally, I recognize that this is a good thing for us as a whole.

For too long, we've been the world's voracious consumers, swallowing every good sent our way. Our rate of savings has been too low, and our credit card/mortgage/personal debt way too high.

As I confront a set of rather difficult choices in my time, I think back on my ancestors, and then I don't feel so bad. Every generation faces its challenge. The answers for me may lie way back there, when they coped with scarcity and hardship we can barely imagine.

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The Insanity of Hope

Oblivious to us, the trees are bursting with insane hopefulness. Here below, things can be more complicated. How hopeful any of us feels can prove to be a minute-to-minute thing.

Life in the richest country in the world, in the richest society in history, is filled with uncertainties for many of us. That there is a middle class here, increasingly, is a myth, at least depending on the zip code where you live.

For some time now, I've been aware that the choices I've made, especially to raise two families in one of the most expensive cities on the planet, were directly at odds at the career I chose, the writing life I've attempted to pursue.

Back at the beginning, I could not have imagined my successes. Looking back over my annual statement from the Social Security Administration (the one that calculates your future payments, once "retired") I see palpable evidence that there were some very good years there.

I can remember moments when all seemed secure, or at least secure enough that my worries were about more abstract subjects than they have been lately.

Today, however, I'm incapable of abstraction; it is impossible to achieve when needs that are more concrete scream out daily for my attention.

Is telling a story abstract or concrete? Is it necessary? Can we live without it?

What about the story-teller?

Among my friends are those who have told one story extremely well during their career, and benefited handsomely. Others have told many stories quite well, but never gotten a break.

I guess I'm somewhere in-between, and now, at this stage of life, facing dilemmas about how or even whether to proceed with the work of recounting a life filled with stories.

Just the people who would need to be mentioned represent a very long list. Today, during a long phone call, I discussed one such friend's work from a quarter-century ago, work now virtually forgotten, plus the friend is no longer with us.

But the caller had discovered the work and would like to recreate how this terrific effort was accomplished. I am, apparently, one of the few people alive who knows some significant details about this particular episode.

Though this indeed is a remarkable story (sorry that I must be discreet here, for now), there are dozens of such tales that live only in my memory. So few have been put down on paper, or on the screen here at this blog space.

When I am focusing on these kinds of things, I feel a responsibility, if only to posterity, to get it down and get it right.

But that will take work, and work takes energy, as well as time. And, in order for me to accomplish any of this, the current chaos that is squashing me simply must calm.

There must be some calm. Some of the awful uncertainty hanging over me needs to be eased. I must know what and whom I can depend on.

Then the financial resources have to be there, so I can breathe long enough and feel safe enough to re-enter the room of abstraction, that room where all stories start...Nothing is more concrete than that.

Otherwise, all will remain silent, and the stories will eventually pass with me.

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Do Not Pass "Go"

First, I fell in love with this photo. Mainly I publish these kinds of shots over at Sidewalk Images, but this one belongs here.

Maybe if they're lucky, I'll let the SI folks have it later.

In racing, there are lanes, of course, all the same length even though racers start at different points on the track.

It can be disorienting to watch because it seems as if some racers have an advantage -- and, according to people who run in these events, there are advantages to where you start, though not because any one route is shorter than any other.

In life we all start at different points also, but there are distinct advantages -- not all people get off to an equal start.

In fact, we individually get off to radically different jumps and follow radically different routes. All that is certain is we all end up at the same finish line sooner or later.

Lately I've been reading a couple different histories, one by the late Howard Zinn; the other a lesser known work called "Wherever There's a Fight" by Elaine Elinson and Stan Yogi.

This latter book shows how California was built on the backs of exploited minorities. San Francisco, the proud liberal City, once had the largest vigilante force in American history.

Here, and throughout the state, minorities were beaten, raped and lynched for no other reason than their race or ethnicity.

Natives, Latinos, African-Americans and Asians in particular were singled out for unspeakable acts of repression.

It is only by understanding this racist history that any of us can move forward today -- that is my premise.

This perspective represents a point of contention, however, between people like me and conservatives who believe the past is past and no longer relevant.

Though I realize I am utterly incapable of convincing even one conservative that I am right about this I know that I am.

But they are in no mood to listen. The evidence? The opening speech at the recent "Tea Party" convention contained overtly racist appeals to prevent today's immigrants from being able to vote.

Those who fail to understand the past are condemned to repeat it. In this case, that does not mean that white conservatives will be able to return to their racist activities of the past -- they will not be able to clear the country of minorities no matter how badly (albeit secretly) they may wish to.

But by revisiting the racism that is our common legacy, by unleashing dangerous forces like those now toyed with by ignorants on the right, the future of the U.S. as a viable democracy hangs in the balance.

This country either will be a free country for all, welcoming all, or it will collapse in a pile of dust, swept into the dustbin of history that awaits all racist societies.

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The Desperation of Loveliness

Time does what it will with us.

Tonight I write out of a deep need just to be heard. I'm not sure that I even have anything all that worthwhile to say. I'm quite sure it is not profound. Nor will it be provocative.

Sometimes, I'm visited by a certain silence. The ticking of the clock echoes like bombshells across the room.

Forty years ago today, in India, I nearly died. Given the condition I was in at the time, wasted by salmonella, typhoid fever or both, having lost about 30 percent of my body weight via dehydration, probably I should have died.

But I didn't.

My mother was profoundly grateful when the news arrived that I was alive -- not that anyone had told her how ill I was but because somehow, out of a mother's instinct, she just knew.

We were far, far out of touch at the time. There was no Internet, no cell phone, not even any land line or long-distance service. Somewhere there must have been a telegraph office, but nowhere close to the routes we were taking.

I was unlucky, getting sick, then I got lucky, getting well.

After you are very sick, of course, you become very tired, sometimes for a long time. But I was young then.

As you age, then, recovering from illness becomes much more difficult. This tiredness in your later years can swallow you, if you give into it.

My mother finally passed away herself, more than 32 years after my near-death escape. She was very, very tired at the end, and then she shut her eyes, fell asleep, and never awoke again.

I am here tonight, for better or worse, forty years later. Sometimes when I am discouraged, weak, lonely, sad; and sometimes when I feel so profoundly tired, I think back on that time and remember how powerfully the urge to live welled up in my then-still-young body.

The instinct to live is so powerful within us; yet in times of despair, as the years pass and circumstances become challenging, what Robert Frost heard in the silent woods one snowy evening beckons some among us, if only for an instant.

However, many more words wait to be written, and many lovely faces deserve smiles not new frowns, and we know this to be true. Thus that moment might have more power than it in fact does, as long as we remain sane, of course.

And we endure, to breathe in a new day's air to see what it brings us, and to consider anew how we might participate.

Today, as I ventured into a new place and a new challenge in my life, I paused for a moment. My eye had caught something in the distance. As it came into view, albeit only as a blur and just for an instant, I saw a tiny, very lovely bird.

My mind had been elsewhere; I was both tired from the accumulation of stresses too mundane yet relentless to articulate; and excited that I was about to have a new way to apply myself, and what talent I possess, to a worthwhile cause.

But in that precise moment, my only thought was this: What a desperately lovely creature.



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The Passing of a Moment

El Nino brought us yet more rain today; no complaints. Earlier, my close friend and I walked past these plum trees, bursting with their advertisements that spring is indeed on the way.

One of my most difficult struggles has been to achieve what I imagine to others must seem so simple -- just to live in each moment, to appreciate being alive, to feel as blessed as I truly am.

It's often been easier to think about deficiencies and disappointments, to remain dissatisfied, to demand (of myself and others) perfection.

Perfection never comes, so expecting it is a recipe for sadness.

I'm tired with all patterns that have proved unsatisfying; my new restlessness is based in a drive to achieve simplicity in my life.

My life is not simple, but the way I choose to live it can be.

I'm working on a set of simple principles, some of which I can articulate from time to time here; others that shall remain more private.

My new rituals, some of which would surprise even close friends, include daily prayers. These, too are very simple in nature.

Much like the petals that hang from the trees above, a reminder that all things shall pass.

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One Option: To Be Forgotten

J. D. Salinger once told an interviewer about his many years out of the public eye: "I love to write, and I assure you I write regularly. But I write for myself and I want to be left absolutely alone to do it."

For writers, the option always exists to keep what we write to ourselves. We all do this to a certain extent. Not to the lengths that the great Salinger went, perhaps, but all writers share a common river of words: We just branch off in streams both discovered and hidden.

I'm aware of contradicting myself, here and elsewhere, about why I -- or anybody -- writes. Sometimes I say we have to do it. Sometimes I think it is to connect with others. Sometimes it seems as if no audience is necessary or even desirable.

After all, these are only words, and in the most powerful, militaristic, visual culture in all of history, how could mere words possibly matter to anyone?

Heirs will determine whether the public gets much more than a glimpse into Salinger's private writings, or those that survived his death and instructions, that is. From the point of view of the writer himself, that probably never mattered. He'd had his public moments, the fame and remuneration, etc.

There are those who write for these material purposes, and they are to be commended for it. I've often worked for pay; I continue to do so. This spring I have at least two magazine articles coming out -- two that I recall at this moment.

The editors were courteous. The process was professional. The result will be that my voice finds expression in two new titles from the hundreds in my past.

Long ago I stopped keeping track of where my published work resides, not because I don't care, but because I have no idea how to efficiently do so. For the past four years, almost everything has been in blog form, here or elsewhere, so it presumably will live on until the host (in this case, Google) chooses to remove it from the servers.

I don't have copies.

If, as a writer, you choose not to write, or not to publish, that is the option of providing an answer to the local museum promotion in the form of a question that I saw earlier this morning, whilst driving my soccer-playing son to a practice way across town.

I may not get this precisely right but it was something like this: "Is it better to be loved or hated rather than forgotten?"

Only the writer knows.

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