Diary Entry from December 17, 2021

Memoir/Diary

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~

An American boy wielding a stick is a dangerous thing. I saw the kid—he might have been ten, maybe eleven—walking along the sidewalk down below, in my suburban neighborhood. My view came from my 400-square-foot balcony. The kid wore a white hoodie and moved with his back to me so I could not see his face, his expression, his eyes, anything. I watched him slash the stick—comically, brutally—at every single innocent tree he passed along the quiet, lazy road.

I smiled at this, standing with my elbow perched on my balcony railing, a clear glass full of hot Irish Breakfast tea on the wide rail. Coils of heat billowed from the tea like the vapors of a volcano. It was about 3:30 in the afternoon. A perfect Santa Barbara Friday in mid-December.

Fresh, opulent blue sky. No clouds. About 55 degrees out. Low humidity. In the background I heard the noises of whistling, singing birds around the trees everywhere near me; the sound of cars rushing north and south along Foothill Road—Highway 192—which was about fifty yards away; heard the whirring of a monotonous lawnmower at a house a few down from mine; felt the cold, wet surface of the balcony floor against my soft bare feet. I breathed in deep, eyeing the mountains to the east, feeling the sunshine against my eyes.

My father is dying. He has stage four Melanoma, and now, due to the two chemo treatments he did, he has a rare neurological condition called Myesthenia Gravis. The symptoms are that he cannot swallow (and hasn’t for over two months now); he can barely see; and his voice is garbled, his speech barely decipherable most of the time. The man is 76 years old. Thirty-seven years older than me, his wayward, strange writer only-son.

I’d grown up in Southern California—an hour southeast of Santa Barbara—but had then lived in the Bay Area for a decade, followed by New York City. The sparkling emerald jewel of narcissism and chaos: Manhattan. I’d moved there exactly one year before the Covid lockdowns started. A year of normal Manhattan, and a year of Pandemic. Such was the nature of life.

And then, in the summer, everything changed. I came for my first visit to California, to see family, in June, 2021. It was my first visit in eighteen months. I was so excited to flee the Big Apple and it’s rising crime and vast emptiness, it’s rotten values, it’s sex-offender-like aggression, that I could hardly contain myself. In the Golden State I drove for the first time in two years. (Who needed a car in New York City?)

I saw my sister and brother-in-law and niece and nephew. I went on lonely, gorgeous hikes in the mountains around Westlake Village and Santa Barbara. I saw my parents. I drove up to the Bay Area and got an Air BnB for a month in West Berkeley. I felt good and juiced and alive and romantic, 38 years old and free. Single; unmarried; no kids.

I’d always been a bit eccentric, a pseudo-drifter, a Chris McCandless (from Into the Wild) type of guy, especially in my twenties. Now, here I was, a year-and-a-half shy of The Big 4-0, and I was still chasing my ill-advised dreams, still listening to nothing but my inner voice, still meditating and running and chasing that elusive “thing” I’d always craved. Self love? Societal acceptance? Freedom? Understanding? Clarity? All the above? I could never know for sure, could never precisely name what that “thing” was. I still can’t.

I suddenly saw the white-hoodie-wearing kid again, cutting ruthlessly with the stick at a bulbous lemon tree a ways down the block. I shook my head, grinning, and took a hot sip of tea. I felt it percolate down my throat, softly wander and spread into my stomach. My father, I thought, as I did often now, cannot swallow. Can you imagine, I asked myself, what that must be like? No, came an immediate answer within myself, like several boulders crashing down a mountainside. No.

Once, I had been that stick-carrying-kid. Hell, in some ways I still was. Sensitive; angry; confused; unable to hold my intelligence; warped about masculinity; fecund in my emotional neediness; violent. Before I got sober in 2010 these feelings manifested in physical acts of rage. (Mostly against myself, but others were harmed along the way, too, unfortunately.) But, for the past eleven-plus years now—since I put the “plug in the jug” at age 27—my journey has been much more internal. I always question my sanity, still, though; that remains a common thread.

My thirst for knowing for certain if I am a “good guy” seems unquenchable. Of course no one can actually answer that question. I don’t think even I can, frankly. This is a subjective moral quagmire which only “God”—whatever that is—can know. From the closest, tiniest matter—the atoms in/of our bodies—to the biggest, farthest matter (the planet Pluto, say, or more galaxies we can’t yet discern) there is one sharp similarity: They unite everything in one deep, vast, open mystery.

Sipping another gulp of tea, listening to those cars again on Highway 192, I thought about my father. Standing next to him in that photograph from around 1993, when I was ten, one of the first times I ever backpacked—in the mountains east of Ventura. Holding his hand in front of a silver, red-and-blue-striped Amtrak train before a voyage to southern coastal Oregon, where my paternal grandmother once lived.

Fishing with him at a lake in winter at that cabin we stayed at once in Montana, in the middle of January. Cutting down endless Christmas trees and lugging them, one of us on each end, to his beige Dodge Ram truck. (I can still recall the clanging sound of that truck’s tailgate crashing down, held by thick gray cables.) Even playing The Sock Game, when I was maybe five, six, wherein he’d lay flat on his back on the rug and hurl balled-up socks high into the air, me on his chest trying desperately—and with delight!—to snatch the socks.

I think of his almost transparent blue eyes. His thick prescription glasses. His shining bald head. (Like mine now.) His gray mustache. I remember that one time—rare!—he flipped off a guy in a tiny red Porsche on Highway 33, when I was a kid being driven to grade school, after the guy cut us off. I remember Dad telling me once that I was “no better than anyone else.”

And I remember, clear as polished glass, when he and I severed our emotional cord, when I started drinking heavily in high school.

Perhaps you could say I was returning the favor, the favor being his having been my father, having raised me with my mother, having been the primary man in my boyhood. I did not understand my father, then nor now. The handful of times I met my paternal grandfather the picture didn’t become any clearer. Grandpa had died when I was seventeen. He’d had those same educated, stern blue eyes, the same elite animal magnetism, the same disregard for anything non-academic.

Grandpa had been a CEO of several major corporations in the seventies, eighties, nineties. He’d worked in Manhattan for a while, living in Jersey. My father had been born in Jersey, but they moved across the country to Malibu when Dad was young. He grew up privileged, intelligent, and with the expectation that he and his brother would both attain PhDs, would be highly conventionally successful, and would marry and have kids. That plan mostly panned out.

Of course there were a few hard bumps. A suicide attempt at 27 was one of them. The birth of an only son who could not grasp his father’s worldview was another.

The kid was far away now, rounding a bend in the road, still slashing away at trees with that two-foot-long brown stick. I wondered who his parents were. Where did he live? Was he happy? Did he understand his father? Did he want to please his dad the way I’d always wanted to? Everything I’d done in my life had, to this moment right now, eluded my father. At least that’s what I feared and suspected.

Chasing my writing dreams. My wild, anarchic teens. Being single at my age. Moving to New York City. Being terrible at math and chemistry. (He’d once taught both.) Being a deep, sensual, emotional, sensitive man, in touch with his feminine side yet internally struggling, all his life, to feel more free around sexual identity: A man both traditionally masculine and less conventionally in touch with his feminine side.  A man who’d carved his own path, who’d thrown caution to the dogs, who’d rejected everything his parents and their safe middleclass life seemed to symbolize to him.

And yet. Here I was. Caretaking my father. Letting New York go like sand sifting slowly through my fingers. Living again in the suburbs. Still single, unmarried, with no kids, alone as I’d always been (even when I was with someone). How much had I truly changed over all these decades? A great deal, I told myself. Not at all, another voice pronounced. Probably it was some admixture of both, and much more. The one thing I knew for certain: I loved my father. Maybe I couldn’t even rationally explain how or why. Maybe it didn’t make sense on some level. Maybe I was driven by guilt, shame, fear, sadness, the desire for no regret. Maybe I just loved him.

I saw the kid slash one more tree, as he finally slowly turned around the corner and he disappeared from my frame of view. A wind rolled through, unexpectedly, shaking the sparse orange and red leaves still desperately clinging to the tall tree across a little gully from my balcony. I loved that sound, the rustling of leaves in fall and winter.