…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.

My grandfather’s garden tools, Santa Cruz, CA.

My grandparents’ house is finally leaving the family tomorrow, some seven decades after they built it on what was at the time a quiet meadow overlooking Monterey Bay, just past a gentleman farmer’s small horse ranch. My dad and I recently took one last constitutional around the place, during which he regarded, recollected, and put into place his youthful memories of home. Quite a job, at 88.

Madonna and kids, exiting the Castro Theater, San Francisco, CA.

Okay not that Madonna.

This week, in a valiant effort to continue to post fresh content here when I am feeling a lot more like the cat pictured on the most recent LD Weekend bonus shot, I have decided to tinker with and post an assortment of more abstract-ish photos from the LD photographic archives.

Beyond the prevailing reasons outlined in the Weekend bonus shot of late (stress! and also, burnout!), I also happen to believe a number of things which these various blurry images will do a reasonable job of conveying. Namely:

1. Life, in its infinite complexity, eludes representation in any form, literary or pictorial. Therrefore, blurry may well be more honest. And,
2. Photographic images can only convey a fraction of what they might be (might be!) attempting to convey, in the way of fleeting moments. Therefore, why bother trying to render those moments “accurately”? And,
3. If, for the past three-plus years, I’ve made some sort of compact with the world around me (i.e., You, gentle reader) to take a stab at consistently representing my (mannish lesbian) parental experience, and stress and burnout is part of it (insofar as such things are unavoidable elements of life, even currently-in-reasonable health middle class life), then mightn’t a spate of blurry images of marginally determinant subjects be in keeping with that compact? I hope so, ’cause that will be this week’s theme.

Since banned books week at the end of September, I’ve had some pieces on LGBT family kids’ books in the buff-n’-polish queue, and since Nat’l Coming Out Day I’ve had something brewing on the winner of the LD swag give-away and the results of this year’s Reader Survey (really, really helpful, heartening, and very much appreciated). Those items are still forthcoming, along with a fix of the various mishaps my recent DIY WordPress upgrade made hap’.

But then the Langbehn-Pond family lost their court case, and Mitrice Richardson was released by authorities, likely mid-bipolar delerium, into the dark of night, not to be heard from since. To which one must add all the hate  and paranoia raining down on us from the extreme, anti-gay, anti-miscegenationist, anti-Obama right wing. Kept in check by — wait! there is no principled entity on the right keeping its ugly ugly id in check! That, and the usual private sphere developments, which in the long term aid my gratitude and insight, but in the short term can just plain bum my high. (”High?!” you say?)

All this makes the start of Kindergarten look ever so sweet, doesn’t it? Also probably makes you glad I’m sticking to blurry photos this week.

The blurry photo for today was taken this past Baba’s Day, as we were leaving the Castro Theater in San Francisco. (We’d seen Free To Be… You and Me, the most apropos Baba’s Day film this side of Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood.) What I like about the moment is not just the everyday-ness of my beloved’s motherhood — the umbillically attached kids, casual appendages — but the fact that my sister and I, decades ago, espied the same doorway and its wash of daylit bright following the old timey matineés our Pops took us to, so often.

Now at 88 fast going on 89, there are no more matineés with Pops, at the Castro or pretty much anywhere else. But he still tucks me in at night (or is it me tucking him in?), with a 9:30pm phone call. The kids are asleep, the place is picked up (enough), and we both spend a little time painting pictures of the events of the day, in all their blurry accuracy.

I wanted to caption this picture “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him well,” but the beloved thought that would be too strange and obscure.  Also, if I used the actual Shakespearean line, “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio” and so on, it wouldn’t hook the same way, since we’re all too accustomed to the mis-quote.

At any rate, she’s not holding the swanky PB & J sandwich in her hand like Hamlet held Yorick’s skull, so the whole notion is even farther off the mark.  Plus I don’t think she’s contemplating the capricious transience of life.  It’s not so much “memento mori” here as it is “memento peanut butter is still really gross, and just because I told Baba that I would think about trying it doesn’t mean I have any intention of actually doing so.”

Observant locals may recognize the location as the memorable Garden Court at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel; those familiar with the joint might also recognize that the crown dealie is part of the “Prince and Princess Tea” they offer youngins. The beloved initially thought we were humoring Baba when we went there to celebrate the girlie’s first week of Kindergarten. After all, by the end of the week we both realized that getting through this first Kindergarten week milestone easily took as much out of us — if not more — than it did out of her.

Before we even got onto the subway to head into the city, though, it became quite clear that the upcoming fancy tea was way more huge for the child than for the parent.  For a gal currently fascinated by fairy tales and those who populate them, visiting the closest thing to a palace we could find and then pretending to royalty was as near as she could get to a dream come true. Between first hearing of our plans to whisk her off to this tea, and her finally discovering from Helmuth, the Garden Court maitre d’, that she could, she asked ”Do I get to keep the tiara?” at least five times.

For a scepter, she was given an 18-inch long, pencil-width dowel bearing on it an elaborate, twisty, multi-colored lollypop. After she’d eaten her fill of chocolate-dipped strawberries and fancy cakes and slurped down her cup of hot chocolate (peppermint tea was an option, but it’s not like she heard that once the words “hot chocolate” had passed the waitron’s lips), she picked up the scepter and traipsed gentle laps around our table swaying it to and fro.  ”Sweets to you, sweets to you!” she repeated in her high falsetto as she wiggled the scepter in our general direction like a divining rod.  On one or two laps she came dangerously close to clipping the gal at the neighboring table. It’s all fun and games until you knock a patron unconscious with your lollypop scepter.

Meanwhile her ma and I ate more slowly. Little salmon sandwiches. Egg salad ones. Cucumber ones. It took a while  before I got to spreading the rose petal jam on the fresh scone, but when I did, the flower scent (more pungent than you’d expect, coming from the jam) was like Proust’s madeleine.

“My mother loved roses, the scent of them. In flowers and in perfume.” Long pause.  ”She would have loved to have been here.” I say this to the beloved as if any of the above information would have been news to her.

She looks at me sympathetically. In the background, the pianist renders a lilting, graceful version of “Bennie and the Jets.”

“She was the Anglophile’s Anglophile. Never travelled to England but always wanted to. Insisted I have strawberries and clotted cream when I was in London that time.”

The beloved smiles sweetly, and continues to say nothing. She’s heard all this so many times before. We courted, after all, amidst my year-old mother-loss grief.

“This granddaughter. God would she have loved to have known this granddaughter.”

We both take in and exhale our biggest breaths.

The beloved says to me, “I’ll bet she is here, right now.”

The girlie makes another tip-toey lap, pausing to knight me, then moving on, barely missing the sandwich tray on her way out.

“Yep,” I say, “but I’ll bet she wouldn’t have expected to find me here in this outfit.” Back home the girlie had insisted I get as fancy as possible, which to her always means the light blue tie with the polka dot flowers on it. Dark grey Italian wool suit, BR off the rack. The middle class gal’s Saville Row bespoke.  She is thrilled when I am got up this way. I on the other hand, when I am got up this way and not heading directly for a queer event, feel like ROTC officers probably do on the Berkeley campus on dress uniform days. Or a version thereof. I am proud, I am comfortable in my skin, and I am well aware that I appear unusual at the least, perhaps even surprising.  At the most I might inspire  what I hope will be only isolated pockets of well-restrained, inward derision. I quietly hope I don’t get bopped upside the head, especially in front of my daughter. Old fears die slowly, maybe even never die completely.

The girlie pauses in her circumnavigations. “Why, Baba? Why wouldn’t she have expected to see you in this outfit?”

She asks it in the way kids ask questions like these: their tone tells you that they already half-know the answer, and they’re asking as much to discover how you’ll answer as what. By now the pianist is on to the Beatles’ “Blackbird.”

“Well honey.  Every new child invites their parent into a dance. Sometimes it’s a dance the parent knows already and loves, sometimes — most of the time — there’s something new about it.” I check to see she’s still with me, and she is. “My mom was a girlish girl, and she expected me to be that way. But I wasn’t. So she learned how to dance with me as a boyish girl.”

I don’t tell her yet how complicated that dance was. Pain here, grace there. The long, arduous walks through the aisles in Capwell’s, the now-defunct department store where our mother would get my sister and me our fall school clothes. Me, longing for the stuff hanging on the racks over in the boys’ section, and rarely being able to even identify that longing powerfully enough to advocate for myself, much less succeed in scoring the full-on Leave It to Beaver regalia I wanted. And yet the Tonka trucks, the HotWheels, the baseball gloves I did get for my birthdays. My mother’s lingering disbelief that my lesbianism wasn’t rooted in some negative experience with a boy, somewhere, somehow. And yet her tireless, passionate advocacy of my full self — as much of it as she was able to see.

We never got to the end of that dance together. Did not. Death came first, and I will never forget the St. Paul bar I was sitting in, a month and a half after she died, when that realization grabbed me by the lungs. I held my face in my hands and wept without ability to stop weeping, minutes on end, and the three or four people with me could only look on sympathetically and occasionally pat my shoulder.

I have gotten there with my dad, I thank the heavens. One afternoon a few years back, when I was thanking him for the hand-me down shirts he had just given me, an old habit between us by then, I said to him: “Pops, I’m the son you never had.” And right back he said, “Doll, you’re the son I did have.”

I look at my daughter, tiara akimbo, lollypop scepter at half-mast in her limp wrist, this evidently girlish girl. She fixes a level, unblinking gaze back at me, the only Baba she’s ever known. Then she raises her scepter again, and continues her dance.

]]> http://www.lesbiandad.net/2009/09/royal-treatment/feed/ 21 http://www.lesbiandad.net/2009/02/something-old-2/ http://www.lesbiandad.net/2009/02/something-old-2/#comments Tue, 10 Feb 2009 20:32:36 +0000 Lesbian Dad http://www.lesbiandad.net/?p=835 [First in a series for Robin Reagler's Freedom to Marry Week blog carnival, Some/thing oops! What About Love]

You want old? Old was what my dad was when, over a dozen years after we’d held a weepy-exuberant commitment ceremony in a botanical garden across the bay, my beloved and I were legally married in City Hall in San Francisco. Like, he was four score and seven years old, that’s how old.  (I can’t tell you how disappointed he was to turn 88, simply because he could no longer quote Abraham Lincoln when he answered a question about his age.) 

My dad wasn’t the only old timer in City Hall that summer.  When we went to get our license back in May, the first week same-sex marriages were legal, most every same-sex couple there was way older than the average marrying age. Sure, there were young pups in relatively fresh love, lining up to get some. But most of us were old dogs, to one degree or another.  Many of us had kids along for the ride: babes in baby carriers,  toddlers tumbling underfoot,  ’tweens, holding rings and beaming with pride.  Some kids were probably so grown I didn’t even realize they were the kids of the newlyweds.  But based on what I saw, both the day we went in to get our license and the day we bum-rushed the rotunda steps to get hitched, the average age of us same-sex “Party As” and “Party Bs” had to be at least a dozen years more than those before — and after — the same-sex nuptials summer of love.

There we were, crow’s feet framing our eyes, salt all in the pepper of our hair. Some with a lot more salt than pepper.  Our partners’ hands, their voices, their foibles, even their capacities for redemption were all very well known to us.  Especially their capacities for redemption.  Else we wouldn’t be there.  The love stories that summer were not so much ones of love in its first tender, brilliant bloom, but love bloomed, and spent, and budded out again, now with deeper roots and thicker branches. 

We married eyes wide open.  So open as to be agog at it all.  Agog  walking into City Hall and finding smiling faces absolutely everywhere.  City employees, hell, random citizens of the city all had elbowed each other out of the way for the opportunity to be part of history — the part where love rose up, if only for a summer.  We were agog at the youngster hetero couples, traipsing up to the counter with such a relaxed sense of — what’s the word? What’s that thing that seemed so unimaginable, so exotic, so utterly unfamiliar?  Ah: Entitlement.

That’s the one thing — the only thing — that was new to us. 

[Here are the other Somethings old at Robin's carnival.]

  

[next in this marraige equality series: Some/thing new]

Tonight, Pops told me about his experience on the street corner earlier today with my sister, her son, and a spirited group of No on 8 people.

“I wore navy blue trousers,” he volunteered.   “And snappy white shoes.  And a necktie, so as to indicate that I was serious.”  A brief pause.  ”I think I was the only one wearing a necktie.”

“That was a great idea, though, Pops.  Lends you moral authority.”

“I thought so,” he replied.    ”It was a wonderful experience, you know.  People would honk and wave.  It was really quite something.”

At eighty-seven, I think it’s possible my father has never stood on a street corner and proclaimed  anything.  Not like this.  I mean, he went to war, landed on Normandy beach.  But he’s never stood in public, in his community, bearing witness to a harshly contested, deeply held belief like this.

“One fellow had to leave for a moment, and I held his sign.  It read– now how did it go?  Let’s see… Yes.  It read, ‘Everyone should have the freedom to marry.’  I like that.”  Another pause.   “I mean, it has a different impact.   ‘Right to marry’ is forceful, but  ’freedom to marry,’ that’s…  That’s inspiring.”

[next in this marraige equality series: Prop 8 update the gazillionth: the day before]