I have an adult child whose path was not anticipated. I have spent years of my life with eyes wide open in the dark; my mind filled with questions and self recrimination, my heart in a cold steel box that pinched.
Archive for the ‘Essay’ Category
A Path Less Travelled
Sunday, May 17th, 2009Silent no more
Friday, April 17th, 2009Today I read a piece in my local paper about community reactions to the “Day of Silence” event in schools. For those of you who missed hearing about it, it’s an event where students are silent for a day (except when called on by a teacher), in support of gay students who keep silent and hide who they are for fear of harassment. It’s an expression of support, and is intended neither to proselytize nor to disrupt. Once again, those who are against fair and equal treatment for gays used the argument that gay people are demanding special consideration for a lifestyle choice, and they should just get over it. They should stop being wrong and start being some other way, like good normal people.
There’s just one thing, though: my daughter is gay.
Our Home Birth
Monday, April 13th, 2009When Debbie and I discovered she was pregnant with our third child, we had already successfully brought two children into our family, so we were confident we knew what was coming. We’d done this already, and though it wasn’t all singing and flowers, we were confident it would be routine, and in a few months we’d have special child number three. (more…)
An Instance of Repeating
Sunday, March 22nd, 2009to continue with the sex theme, this one’s alternately titled Who I Did on my Summer Vacation (joking. sorta.).
An instance of repeating
when the world is only beginning
Strong coffee in the evening and a walk through the bookshelf of a stranger. He is too young for his grey hair, and he has been to Prague, and this Kundera, he’s Czech, isn’t he? We have already dreamed aloud together, and every step taken on common ground must surely bring us closer. I take the book home with me: heavy, even in its unbearable, unbeatable lightness.
Take a number
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009I’ve decided it’s Russia’s turn to be a stable country. Every country has had its ups and downs, of course, but Russia, I believe, has paid her dues. If countries were people, then England and the U.S. would be sitting at home watching the ball game, France would be absorbed in clipping her toe nails and ordering items off the Home Shopping Network, while Russia would be stuck in line at the DMV wondering if she was going to get her car registration renewed sometime this century.
The United States fought its way to the front of that line and paid the fee some time ago, with England moseying along behind. France tried to cut ahead by slipping some money to one of the clerks, but Russia somehow is still waiting.
She would be willing, at this point, to slip the clerk some money just to be able to go home and maybe catch the last 30 seconds of the ball game, but that requires actually having some cash to slip. Russia had some green, at one point, but her cheating, no-good husbands abandoned her and the kids, who need school clothes, and schools. Russia has had time, standing in line all these years, to think about the sweet-talking fellows who charmed her, wooed her, married her, then stripped her clean, leaving her with no money and who knows how many mouths to feed. She scowls with regret and anger, tapping her foot with increasing impatience as she gets jostled by Chechnya from behind, and jostles back.
Incarnation
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009Incarnation
I. Rabbit
The first memory: yellow carpet of my bedroom in the duplex where we lived when I was five. I am sitting on the floor; I am wearing a short dress. There is something involving a dresser drawer and the wrapping paper (from a years-ago baby shower) lining the bottom of it, and there are carpet lines on my bare legs, and there is this necklace – the flatly glinting rabbit and the cheap, indelicate silver chain.
When Electrons Overachieve
Sunday, March 15th, 2009An extraordinary thing happened to me twelve years ago, and it changed my life. I don’t mean this in any sort of fundamental way. My path took no particular twist to the left that would have otherwise been to the right if the event had not occurred, and I don’t feel like I’ve missed out on anything in particular. But my life did change that day. By “changed” I think I mean that it became more complicated.
At the time, I was working a new job at a restaurant. I didn’t particularly like this job, for a few reasons. The main reason was the fact that I was not the only “Pondificator” there. It wasn’t that I disliked working with my relatives. It had more to do with the fact that I was constantly being compared and contrasted with said relatives. And since I was the new kid (being a youngest and all), and had never done restaurant work before, I felt deeply criticized and looked down upon by the person in charge (who, thankfully, was no relation of mine—in fact, I’m convinced she was from Omicron Persei 8, and was married to a certain ruler there named Lur…). There were some other events that transpired to make said person dislike me to an even greater degree, but those events were neither life changing, nor pertinent to this story, so I will leave them out.
Good dogs, bad cops
Sunday, March 15th, 2009The sun shows brightly outside the L.A. Convention Center, cooking the pavement so that one can feel the dry heat radiating off the concrete surfaces of downtown. The benches and steps are littered with loose papers; the waste left behind from convention attendees who are bustling to and fro, their ID badges hanging around their necks like cowbells. The crowd is an odd mix of cliché computer geeks with short sleeve button down shirts tucked into pants pulled up above their belly buttons, wire frame glasses, un-kept balding hair, and a penchant for sneezing. Amidst the army of geeks are the “new geeks”: Jeans, sneakers, piercings, tattoos, and black t-shirts that let you know in plain white letters how much smarter they are than you.
South across 9th St, a four lane road cluttered in heavy California traffic, a family of seven Mexican immigrants are working a hot grill; catering to an insanely long line. Curious, and more than a little hungry, I position myself at the crosswalk and wait for my light to turn.
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Divergent Roads
Sunday, March 15th, 2009I keep thinking about those roads diverging in that poem. The poet says one road taken made the difference, and some say he wrote it with a secret wink for the wise. But roads are always taken with the step of the traveler, and the ones who choose the narrow roads do so repeatedly. And so I think perhaps the road chosen made no difference in the man; it’s the differences between men that make diverging roads.
It’s like that shy girl at the school dance. She’s pretty, and you notice most of the boys glance at her a lot, but nobody asks her to dance. She doesn’t wear the world the way most of us do. She is looking for someone who knows her, to take the slow road of conversation and long walks. People secretly feel sorry for her. Then someone comes up and just talks, and smiles a lot. He walks her home.
I heard the President talk about “the American way of life.” He spoke as if it’s something we need to protect, and I found myself nodding. But that night I dreamed of all the places I’d been, and people I’d met. There was that waitress in Atlanta who served me fried catfish and called me “Hon” from under hair like a yellow thunderhead. There was that black man in the Chick-fillet who stared at his food and softly sang the first line of “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” over and over. There was that homeless man with the sign that said “will work for food” who when I gave him an apple, threw it at me in a rage, and that other homeless man who picked up the thrown apple and started eating it. I dreamed of that 19-year-old “elder” ringing my doorbell, that biker who stopped and helped me change a tire when my arm was in a cast, the lounge singer in that little club in Chico who played an old strat-copy accompanied by a drum machine. And now I don’t know what “the American way of life” is, even if the President does.
I want to drive across America. I don’t want to take any main route. Instead, I’ll drive around in every state, stopping at little diners, and asking the local folks where the best swimming holes are. I’ll spend time poring over maps, looking for the smallest roads, the windiest routes. I don’t think taking those little roads will change me much, but I think they were built by people like me, for people, just like me.
Copyright (c) 2006 – thepontificators.com
This is how I see history.
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009It is a firm rock, an immovable mountain, that grows over time, that has a face that is visible to any who might wish to turn their heads and look, and it is marked with crevices and caves and shadowy areas that will never be seen or known, despite the amount of gazing one might do. Historians actually climb the mountain, and they see some shadowy things, and might shout down to the rest of us the discovery of a cave or two, or even three, but they will never see all of them, nor completely explore even one. But they point certain nooks out to the gazers or other historians, mark the location of particular caves, and have favorite places where they visit again and again. I am a gazer. I scavenge occasionally near the bottom of the mountain, and some day I might even begin to climb. The Russian History cave has been pointed out to me, and I would like to visit it someday.
But moralities and isms don’t apply to the mountain. They are on it, to be sure. There is a moralities cave: it is very winding and dark and damp and twists around many corners and has more paths inside than one can count. It looks much like the isms cave. But the morality is restricted to its cave, it does not come out at night to torture or tempt other caves or crannies. It does not lay itself down on top of ancient Greek History and declare that it is wrong that mostly it is only the men that are visible to the gazers, and not the women. The women are still there, they are just in shadow. Everything that has ever been is there, somewhere, on the mountain. Whether or not these things are visible to those who watch from below or who climb and explore does not change the fact of their existence.
