The above image of my Pops is from a coupla five years back, which would have made him a spry, debonair 86.

Yesterday he turned 91. In our morning chat, which usually takes place on cell phone as I walk, he is having a harder and harder time making out various words. This morning it was “thrifty.”

Me (concluding a reference to something): “I felt really thrifty.”
Him: “You felt really chesty?!”
Me: “No, thrifty!”
Him: “Risky?!”
Me: “Thrifty! I felt thrifty!”
Him: “Ruskie?!”

In recent years we both seem to have enjoyed the frequently preposterous variations he puts on mis-heard words. Or rather, the variations provided to him by his beleaguered, four-score-and-way more than seven years-old cochlea(s), which have been slowly and certainly  giving up the ghost and throwing him just any old homonym that strolls along.  He’s been taking a running jump at this swap a mis-heard word for most hilarious and unlikely homonym for years now. Nowadays, the mis-heard words number into larger and larger percentages of the conversation.

I would have begun to spell it out for him, which I usually do when we don’t make it out by the third variation. That usually works, though there’s no guarantee we won’t wend our way down another rabbit trail, since I have to come up with words for the letters. Never having trainied in the international radio telephony alphabet, I take it as another opportunity for mirth-making and derailment, which of course he’s all in on (“R” as in Rasputin! “U” as in urchin! “S” as in sesquipedalian! and so on).

This morning, alas, there was no time to spell.  I had arrived at my place of employ.

Me: “Pops, I’m at work now, I gotta go. We’re going to just have to leave it at Ruskie.”
Him: “Anything you say, doll.”
Me: “Main thing for you to hear is, I love you and have a great Thursday, Pops.” (followed by “mwah” kissing sound)
Him: “Mwah to you too, sweetie.”

Loud and clear.

I watch him go through these doors to his apartment in the retirement community so long and hard now. Used to be he’d turn and wave and shamble off, only looking back once to wave me away (‘gwan now, doll; go home).

Now, stooped by his ninety-one years (this Wednesday), he turns and looks over and over again.  And so do I.

We all went around my brother-in-law’s Thanksgiving table–my own brood, my dad, my mother in law, her old friend, her partner, my partner’s dad, my partner’s brother’s family and his wife’s mother–and said what we were thankful for. Many of us said we were thankful for the Occupy Movement (as ironic as that might have been, from around a well-stocked table in a comfortable, warm home).  All of us who were not retired and of working age were hugely thankful for our full, rewarding, gainful employment. Most of the kids under 12 demurred, though I know their gratitude is big, if fairly tightly woven into need and dependence and hope and expectation.

My dad was grateful simply to be alive and here for another Thanksgiving, and I immediately seconded that thankfulness. I went on to say specifically: each morning when I walk from the bus stop to work, I call Pops, and we talk for the 12 or 13 minutes it takes me to get to my building’s elevator, where the signal begins to fail us. It’s always too short, but he’s a lot more alert during this morning call than he used to be when we talked after I got the kids to bed. The calls during when I’m interruptable by the kids are usually just too hard to sustain.

But in these morning calls, each time we each hear each other’s voice, we are both so heart-warmed. I can hear it in his voice, and he can hear it in mine.  He always wants to know where I am in the walk, since by now I have described each landmark: the intersection crossing some 10 or more lanes in total, the canal I pass over, the wild fennel I walk by, the sound and the traffic of the freeway just a surface road and a chain-link fence away.  The fog as it lingers over the peninsula foothills a short distance to the west. He was for decades a geography professor; he is curious about these things.

He asks about my work; I tell him about his grandkids’ leaps and bounds; I ask him how he is, and he always answers, “Oh, I’m fiiiiiine.” I have  to believe him. It doesn’t really matter what we talk about. It just matters that we coexist there, in that space of connectedness we both know is rarer and rarer by the day.

I walk in the door to work having just said, yet again, “I love you, Pops.”  Smile on my face, grateful he’s still alive.

“It’s okay to hav a Baba,” (sic) from the girlchild, Kindergarten year (2010).

The sun still hasn’t set on Baba’s Day this year, and I can’t pause long, but do want to leave a little something here for the occasion, in solidarity with any other comrade who happens by. The only way it’ll happen is with bullet points and incomplete sentences, so! Herewith:

• •  Talked at length to my Pops this morning about fatherhood, lesbian and otherwise. His loving support and openness to my whole self has a value beyond words.  It is anointing, validating, liberating, inspirational. He essentially gets it, which is about as much as you want from anyone, especially a family member, particularly a parent.




• •  There’s much to say about our conversation, but not on the fly on the day itself. In short, we concur: when you disengage the clutch and allow your gears to coast unhindered by the space stamped out for them (allotted movement, only here and only in this way), all sorts of stuff that might otherwise bamboozle begins to make sense: masculine femininity, feminine masculinity, the fact that each of us who fights for more space for ourselves, who elbows more elbow room for a fuller, truer self, makes more space for others.




• •  We have more allies in this process than we know. Specifically, women trying to make space for parenthoods like mine have allies in gay men fathers and straight men fathers who themselves want company as they, too, expand the notions of what’s possible.  I think my father appreciates my parental/gender journey because he’s just such a man. Either one (gay man father or straight). He’s 90 already, so if I don’t know now, I’ll probably never know which. His favorite answer to questions he can’t quite hear: “Probably.”




• • Before I return to my day, here are some ditties from years past of topical interest:




• • Things I have in common with dads, from 2006,
  • A Baba’s Day Proclamation, from 2007, and
  • A Baba’s Day pictorial, from 2009

Happy day, to one and all.

Today my Pops turns 90. He has outlived more family members than he ever expected to, including younger sister, wife, first grandson. For as long as I can remember, he’d say, regarding his projected longevity: “Live ’til ninety, then start counting.”

We’re hoping the counting will go on for quite some time.

I remember taking the picture above some 38 years ago with my first camera, a Kodak Instamatic. I was roving around taking portraits of every family member, bipedal and quadrupedal, that would hold still long enough to let me.  Most pictures were of my dog, and then later, landscapes on family trips. I remember that of all the family portrait subjects he was the most accomodating, but he had to get up and procure himself something to hold, so’s he was — I don’t know — more occupied. Kind of more official-seeming. I think he’s holding a baseball hat of mine. Hard to tell against the shouting-out-loud polyester cover we had on that couch.

Now he’s got a pugnacious Dupuytren’s contracture, a condition that bends the pinky and ring fingers in toward the palm. He would be able to hold that baseball cap now, but with a little more difficulty. Can’t play the piano anymore. When he remembers to put in his hearing aid, he is still never 100%. Whenever he knows he’s been asked a question, but didn’t quite hear its particulars, he answers, “Probably.” Which works pretty well in most circumstances. At a table with more than a few chatting people, he can make out that people are having a lively conversation, but often is challenged to identify exactly about what.

There are milestones yet that he might like to witness. But he’s seen a lot already.  Triumph, loss, precious things broken. Now all he cares about is love. When he’s at his most lucid, when I’m talking to the Pops I’ve known all my life, that is what’s vivid to him. Events in the recent and middle distance-past often shimmer for him in a warbly blur, like pebbles underwater at the bottom of a creekbed. For a while now it’s been easy for him to slip my sister or me out of our generation, and until we catch and gently correct him, for a moment he can think he might be talking to his younger sister, or his wife. A Geographer by profession and a world traveller, he has longsince lost his ability to know his way outside of the town he spends most of his time in. Nowadays, when he’s visiting me in my town — the place he met and came to love my mother; the town I began in as a zygote — it is as if block after block is appearing to him out of the fog of a dream. “Ah, yes,” he’ll say, as we drive along, but it’s hard to tell if it’s not still dream-like. “Probably,” might be his answer.

What is vividly clear is that it’s the love of the people around him — mostly, when it comes down to it, the love of my sister and me and our families — that he is sticking around for.  He has said as much for years. After you’ve done what you’ve wanted to, been where you’ve wanted to go — if you’ve been so phenomenally fortunate, which he essentially has been — it is the love that is left. It’s a nice thing to know.  At the end of our nightly phone chats, I always remind him how wonderful it is to hear the sound of his voice, how much talking to him is the highlight of my day. I love saying that to him. Then, before we hang up, I say, “Hey, how ’bout we talk again tomorrow?” And he says, “Hey, how ’bout it?”  Not knowing for certain whether I’m going to get that privilege makes it all the sweeter every time I do.

Pops at 87, City Hall, San Francisco, CA. (Photo: AZ)

…shouldn’t– shouldn’t– what?!

The boychild and Pops and I went to a cafe long a favorite in my home town — so long a favorite that it’s entirely likely that the inimitable Dr. Maddow supped there.  Okay no one sups there.  But maybe had a stack of pancakes there, or an omelette.  Over which she’s sure to have debated Middle East politics, unlike some of us, who were more likely to have been debating which band was greater, The Who or Led Zeppelin. Let me hastily head off at the pass any of you rapscallions about to note that she could probably debate that point with equal alacrity. I don’t need to dwell on these things.

(For those of you just tuning in, Dr. M hails from the same home town as me, thereby both putting it on the map and casting me more squarely in her long, tall shadow.)

The point here, is: CAUTION CHILDREN SHOULDN’T what?! This was the question Pops and I asked each other, between bites of our own omelettes. Pops thought maybe children shouldn’t stick their finger in soup? I thought maybe they shouldn’t stick their white gloved finger in soup?  There was nothing resembling a small, menacing body of water anywhere in view of the sign, though one might suppose such a menace may once have existed. Whatever it is that the disembodied white gloved hand is sticking its finger into, it is making the hovering happy face above it sad.

We didn’t ask the lil’ peanut, since he would be hard pressed to identify anything — animal, vegetable, mineral, or perhaps most especially his big sister’s back, just when she’s on the verge of becoming really irritated  – that a child should not put a finger into.

No, we didn’t ask the waitron.  That would have spoiled all the fun.

Out for brunch with DadDad at a local diner frequented by me mum, many years ago.  Therefore it’s a sentimental favorite.  Pops reaches for something to sweeten up his coffee, and contemplates the various colored packets containing faux sugar.

“Let’s see: blue, pink, or yellow?”  he asks no one in particular.  I see the sugar jar next to him and ask the obvious question.

“Why not go for the real thing, Pops? Heck, you’re 89.  I think you’re entitled to pull out all the stops now.”

He happily obliges, as the waitress approaches the table.  I repeat our exchange to her.

“Eighty-nine? What’s your secret?” she asks.

He considers the question for just a moment as he stirs.

“Get up in the morning.”

[Ed note #2: Infinite thanks to AnnZ for the open-hearted, practically open-ended loaner of the spiffy camera whose eye caught all these moments.]

Pops, indicating the height of the trees when his dad planted them 70 years ago.

In my recent, breezy, Twitter-length series of As to some Qs about lesbian fatherhood, I wrote: “My dad is one of the beacons of love in my life.”  True story.  One of his most oft-repeated definitions of family is this line from the sympathetic speaker Mary in Robert Frost’s poem, “The Death of the Hired Man”:

Home is the place where, when you have to go there,  They have to take you in.

One of the clearest and warmest youthful memories I have of my dad, besides standing next to him singing as he played Broadway show tunes on the piano, or playing frisbee with him in the back yard, or walking the streets of San Francisco en route to an “old timey movie,”  is how he tucked my sister and me in at night.  I can’t vouch for what he might have said with my sister in her room, but I suspect it was fairly similar to what he said to me.  We would wax philosophic — mostly at first, he would, and I gradually joined in as the years wore on — pondering life’s big imponderables.  Then as he’d turn out the light and linger in the doorway, he’d say, “It’s a good world.”

He said it enough times that I pretty much came to believe him.

He’s not always kept a firm grip on this belief.  In the first years following his first grandson’s cancer death — five years ago, now, later this month — he framed it as a question rather than a statement.  At times he simply admitted that he felt it couldn’t be true. I’d try and reflect as much truth back that I could.  ”It’s a heck of a world, Pops. It’s a big one, a stupefying one, with capriciousness side by side next to grace.  No more good than bad, maybe even.  Surely beyond my ken.”

Still, we agreed that capricious or no, we ought to love as many as possible, as well as possible, as frequently as possible.  I like the “possible” part there, since it cuts a hard working person a little break.  We may not always be successful, but the point is to try.

In the photograph above, taken last fall, my dad is posing in front of some conifers his father planted in the early 1940s. It was on a patch of land overlooking the Monterey Bay, a place to build a home, the first and last my grandparents had owned.  There were few trees on that meadow at the time, and my grandfather thought that, on general principle, there ought to be some. Since these trees were saplings, our family has seen marriages, divorces, births, and deaths.  Triumph and tragedy and every mundane thing in between.  The stuff of life.  Meanwhile the trees kept growing, paying our comings and goings and squabbles no mind.  One eventually caught a disease that denuded it.  Still, it stands tall, awaiting storm winds strong enough to topple it.

The land and what’s on it are now another family’s.  They, like our family has three times now, are fighting cancer.  We all hope they have better luck than we’ve had.  Whether or no, it gave us a good deal of comfort that this place — its home, its trees — would now shelter a family  drawn there by, among other things, a sense that it might make a good place to heal.

Pops with his LST.

My dad enlisted in the service as a college student at San José State University in the then-orchard-ridden South (San Francisco) Bay Area. He was what he called a “90-day Wonder,” prepared for leadership in war by three months at an officer’s training school at Columbia University.

He still retains a number of stories from WWII, none of which entail him receiving anything more than a glancing wound. (His glancing wound was one, once, and it was his own durn fault: during a ship-board drill, he banged his head on a pipe. When he appeared topside with his helmet on, a wee trickle of blood ran down his temple.  He gets a special impish twinkle in his eye as he tells about the fervor with which his men saluted him after that drill.)

The story that sticks with me the most is so descriptive of his life.  Off Normandy Beach hours after “zero hour,” he was on deck surveying the scene. Movement in the water below him caught his eye, and he watched as a torpedo drilled its way toward his ship, then under it, then into the deeper-hulled transport ship right next to him.

He tells of this with the same “no big deal” understatement that he tries to apply to the various traumatizing events that have buffeted him throughout his life. The cancer death of his younger sister. A few years later, the cancer death of his wife of 30-some-odd years. A dozen years after that, the cancer death of his first grandson, at ten.

He told me that that last death in particular was immeasurably harder than the war was for him.  That may say as much about what he saw during the war as it does about the impact of the death of a child.  It also just hints at what it might feel like, the death of a child due to war.

My Pops knows he’s a lucky man, is the main thing. Watching that torpedo go under his ship just focussed and dramatized something that seems to have happened throughout his long life.  The mixed blessing of seeing hardship narrowly miss him, yet still exact its painful toll, right there in front of him.  The peculiar weight borne by the compassionate witness-bearer. The luck of his long life has a bittersweet taste to it. The bitter: the longer he lives, the more people he outlives.  The sweet: the longer he lives, the more he loves who he still has, for as long as he still has.