As I was cooking spaghetti last Sunday, Brian, setting the table, asked, Have we been married twenty-nine or thirty years? and I realized that somewhere along the line we had become the kind of parents who remember all four of the dogs birthdays but are vague about our own anniversary. As I lined up all the spaghetti strands, though, my OCD kicked in, and I said, Weve been legally married for six years, domestically partnered for twenty-three years, illegally married for twenty-seven years and shacking up for twenty-nine years. Add them together and this is our eighty-fifth year. This is also Talk-like-a-Pirate Day, so you could say that me and me wench been herrrrre togetherrrrr for a thirrrrrrrrrrrd of a centurrrrrrrrrrry, Arrrrrrrrrrrrgh, Matey We are spending our anniversary as we have spent our eighty-five years: he is performing in Fort Mason tonight. I am taking the boys to a movie fundraiser at the school. The secret of our happy marriage is in the scheduling.. When the triplets moved more than a decade ago, Brian and I were so overwhelmed with the feeding and diapering and colostomy bag changes that somewhere along the line we got out of the habit of answering the telephone. About once a month, after achieving a critical mass of aunts and uncles asking us how the babies were, and how the dogs were, we got into the habit of sending out an e-mail telling everyone that the triplets were thriving, the pekingeses were wagging their tails, and that the two of us were exhausted, but delighted at the journey called parenthood. Brian and I felt terribly new age sending out those e-mails, thinking that we were on the cutting edge of the 21st century, and that we were instantly communicating the joys (and desperations) of parenting in the modern age. In the new modern age of facebook and instagram, this must all seem terribly quaint. One of you held onto those e-mails. And when the time was right you told me to write a book. And I did. (unabashed plug: Barnes & Nobles started carrying the book this week so if you have a friend who has not read the book yet, ask them nicely to ask for it at Barnes & Noble. We want them to think that everyone is talking about the book....) And then came Zane. And then came Aidan. And for a year or three we continued to send out e-mails about life in the blue bungalow, and how somehow impossibly the four of us thrived on this improbably Island of Lost Boys. And someday one of you is gonna hand me that pile of e-mails and tell me to write the sequel, of what it is like to raise two very spirited boys and four very indignant pekingeses. But in the meantime, as John Lennon would say, Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans. So somehow in between Brian teaching with three different companies, and performing with two different companies, and the book coming out (Wait! Is this a chance to plug the book? Come to LitQuake in the Castro on October 12th at 1 pm at 4122 18th Street),, and the work as a Captain, and raising did-we-emphasize-spirited boys and soccer games and cross country and basketball, we just got out of the habit of the e-pistles. So the first thing up is Aidans Second Holy Communion. Second? In all of the drama last spring, Aidan was attending classes for first holy communion. For the non-Catholics in the group, its kind of like a pre-bar mitzvah, the moment in the childs journey when he starts breaking bread with his faith community. My own first communion goes all the way back to May of 1965, back in South Ozone Park. SIster Mary Magdalene and all the other nuns at Saint Anthony of Padua had kept us busy that entire spring. In my memory, they made our class memorize the entire mass in Latin, then, after getting the memo from Vatican 2, we had to re-learn the whole thing in English, and the songs as well. Who knew Gregorian chant was so difficult to transpose. This event was significant for me in that it was the first time that I ever got a brand new pair of dress pants. For the first seven years of my life, I had made do with hand-me-downs from Brother X and Brother Not X and, frankly, they were both hard on a pair of pants, so most of what I wore had patches. But no, this was my first pair of my very own blue polyester dress pants, and Nurse Vivian made sure to tell me how careful I needed to be, and as the very non-athletic, nerdy son, I walked gingerly from the house on Sutter Avenue to Saint Anthonys, only to trip on the church stairs, and rip the right knee right out of the pants. I of course cried, and so Nurse Vivian, quite wisely, chose not to take any pictures of the first communicant with the skinned knees on his pants. They did, however, give me another gift, my first watch, a Timex watch with glow-in-the-dark numerals. Oddly enough, I still have it to this day. My wrists grew too fat for it long ago, but it is probably the oldest possession I still have. With my own boys, I wonder what they will keep and what they will toss. Its like wisdom. You never know what parts the son will latch on to. Back to Aidan: as many of you know, Nana took ill in the spring, and so the weekend that Aidan was scheduled for his first communion, we got word that here passing was imminent, and so we packed Papa off and sent him to Maine. In the meantim, I bought Aidan a new suit, and a new pair of shoes and I took Aidan to meet his class for the school first communion, but, really, this was not at Most Holy Redeemer, our home church, and, really, Papa was not there, so had to consider it a practice run, a warm up for the real thing. And Aidan got to have quality time with Uncle Jon and Uncle David and Uncle Edgar and Aunt JJ. I kept the suit pressed and tucked away, knowing that we would have the real event when Papa got home, and I kept the shoes in the box they came in. I did not at the time calculate the combined powers of Zane and Aidan. Somehow, sometime during the summer in one of my attempts to get the school books organized, and the autumn athletics organized, and the porch organized, I came across the shoes. When you have two boys, you are always throwing out shoes. Old soccer shoes that no one wears. Old baseball cleats that no one cares about. And in one of those supposed organizations, I held up a pair of black shiny oxfords, and both of the boys said, Not mine and I tossed them in the garbage. Which gets me to second holy communion. On that particular morning, I woke up, and got Zane into his school uniform, and got Brian into a pair of dress pants (long story short: I dropped his one suit off at the dry cleaners the day after the funeral. In May. Havent been back to the dry cleaners yet.) And I wore my all purpose blue suit. And I looked for Aidans shoes. And looked. And looked. This gets us to the second picture: sneakers for his first holy communion only for Aidan this somehow seems right. I could not have done it, but Aidan can pull off a three piece suit and sneakers. Have I mentioned Zane? In the first ten years of e-mails, I talked about Zane and his “spiritedness”, with Aidan playing a supporting role, and Brian off dancing somewhere. But Zane gets the award for :Grown Up Most in the Past Year. The teachers tell me he has grown up. The parishioners tell me that he has grown up. The nuns tell me that he has grown up. I still worry. Rite of passage or Right of passage, on the very same afternoon as Aidan’s Second Holy Communion, the boys asked me if they could go for a bicycle ride. Aidan, however, had long outgrown his teeny bicycle and his knees kept bumping his chin whenever he peddled, so I made an executive decision: Aidan would now inherit Zane’s blue sport bike, and in return, Zane would get my 7 speed bike, and I would get an excuse for giving up one more form of exercise. Brother X, Brother Not X and I had done the same with a brick red bicycle named Hopalong Cassidy way back in Yaphank in the sixties, so I figured that all would be right with the world. Uncle Paolo came over, and gave a fine tuning to both bicycles, and both of us gave them the long lecture about how now that Daddy did not have a bicyle to go along with them, they both needed to be extra careful and look both ways at every intersection and wear their helmets and…. The next morning was Labor Day, and, given Brian’s Nutcrackers, my Community Programs works, Brian’s tours with Fresh Meat, my CPSA conference, his teaching at four different venues, and me trying to promote the book (Wait! Is this a chance to plug the book? Come to LitQuake in the Castro on October 12th at 1 pm at 4122 18th Street), Labor Day was the one morning that Brian and I both had a morning to sleep in. I had told the boys that they could do as they please as long as they didn’t wake us up. Famous last words. 7:42 am Zane came bursting into the room, “The police are on their way!” I threw on a pair of jeans and sneakers and walked outside. There at the intersection of Winding and Naylor, was an old model Honda, with a huge dent in its right quarter panel. Lying next to it was my once beloved 7 speed superman blue bicycle. The driver got out of his car, and said, “I called the cops. I wanted to make sure that your son was okay.” Brian, a step behind me looked at Zane and said, “Okay, before my morning coffee, what happened?” Zane looked down, hunched his shoulders, and said in an almost inaudible whisper, “Me and the car ran into each other.” But Brian, the true detective in the family, said, “Zane, that car would not have gotten that huge dent if he had run into you. The only way that dent could happen was if you ran into him.” And so Zane had. Full Speed. Without a helmet. Sigh. True fact in case any of you ever have spirited children: even if both parents have auto insurance, neither insurance pays for damage to another car performed by an eleven year old racing hell bent down the Naylor Street Hill. Before I could get really mad, Brian went back into the house, and started a pot of coffee, saying, “Well, now I know he takes after you. Wrecking cars before he even gets a license.” But I said that Zane was the mature one this year, so it is only fair to point out that Zane has not once been to the principal’s office this year, whereas Aidan has already been there three times. And once for a felony but this is best left unwritten in case any of you get called as witnesses. And Zane has turned into the sweet one. Small example. Zane started 6th grade this year, which is considered junior high school. For Saint John’s there are two big changes for 6th grade: 1. The boys are required to wear neckties (the girls have an equivalent fashion accessory, hair clip or somesuch. But I alas having no daughters paid no attention when they talked about it.). 2. All of the 6th graders get to use a locker. For the latter, they issued combination locks to all the boys and girls, and most of them got the hang of it right away, but this was one skill set beyond Zane’s level. He could never figure out how many times left or right, so he just left his locker open ever day. When I found out, I walked over to the drug store and found one of those simpler locks, the kind that just go up down left or right, in red, and I presented it to him, and he ran up to me and hugged me saying, “You are the best daddy in the whole world.” I may have just plunked down six bucks for a lock, but it was sure as heck worth it. And Aidan and Zane are both playing soccer this fall, and both teams won last weekend, and in the short memory of grade school, last week’s victory is all that counts. That’s one of my lessons learned. Last week, I drove down to Pacific Grove to give a lecture about writing memoir. This is the advantage of being a published author. I get to pretend that I really know something about writing, that somewhere between all those classes at Notre Dame and Iowa and Dorothy Allison that I did pick up a useful fact. (Wait! Is this a chance to plug the book? Come to LitQuake in the Castro on October 12th at 1 pm at 4122 18th Street), Now, A Song for Lost Angels has not exactly turned out to be a best seller, but it has allowed me this tiny little bit of notoriety that I previously have not possessed. Whereas a year ago, the best I could say was, “I’m the dancer’s husband.” Nowadays I find myself in this odd position of being recognized once in a long while. I was at a Cop Conference in Ventura, California last week, and I was talking about peer support when this woman walked up to me and said, “Gosh, you sound awfully familiar. Aren’t you the guy from National Public Radio?” Not exactly a household name, but if you can recognize my face from the radio then I guess that I am doing okay. This Sunday, a Tokyo-based television station will be filming us for a show about the real housewives of Japan. I haven’t figured out yet which of us they think is the housewife. So I am at this lecture in Pacific Grove, and I launch into the nine excellent steps to writing your own memoir, and one of the women in the audience announces that she has driven 138 miles to hear this lecture, and now I am really sweating because I am thinking, “They bought me dinner. They paid for my gas. And someone has driven two hours just to hear this!” and it was then that I had my great epiphany about why I write memoir. For years I have been sending out e-mail after e-mail, and for years I have been telling and then re-telling and then re-re-telling the same stories, to all of you and to the Writer’s Clubs and the bookstores, and next week to the housewives in Japan, that the stories about how my eight-five years together with Brian are not really all that much different than Pop’s fifty-four and a half years with Nurse Vivian, and that the stories of my raising two spirited children and four wanton pekingeses in a blue bungalow in San Francisco are not really all that much different than Nurse Vivian’s stories about raising three spirited children in a row house in South Ozone Park. Maybe then, writing memoir is the process of looking around at the soccer games and the first communions and the bicycles and patching them together to make them into meaning. So here is the meaning that I see today, that life is like that 7 speed Superman blue bicycle. I never did understand the laws of centrifugal and centripetal force, the whys and wherefores of momentum and gyroscopes and gravity. I understand only this, that my eighty-five years with Brian has been one long bicycle ride, and if we stop to figure out what is holding the bicycle up, then we fall over, or hit a Honda, but if we just pick up the bicycle and keep pedaling, we get to enjoy the wind and the road and the moment. Happy Talk-like-a-Pirate Day! May Brian and I celebrate eighty-five more! And may all of you be witnesses.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 21:21:59 +0000
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