Chapter 40. Father. Yes Son. You Want to What?

Chapter 40

Father.

Yes Son.

You want to what?

The following weekend was not worth remembering and I don’t recall much of it. These meditations about my father had thrown my mood into a deep funk that only added to my frustrations with lack of a job market and the continuing bad news about the economy.   And did I mention the economy?  The economy was looking very perilous in early 2009, every day the stock market continued to sink to new lows. The newscasters announced each new fall dutifully and morbidly. Just like looking at a fatal car wreck, we the American public, couldn’t turn away.  We could not stop watching this dark dance of numbers as our collective mood passed from anxiety into fear and the pace of American economic decline increased with frightening speed.

It seemed like recovery and spring would never come.  What better time to work on personal issues and really crawl down into a hole, see how it feels to muck about in your own deep emotional recesses?  Hell, I was there already, might as well push it.

Good times indeed.

Determined to make “the best” out of this unexpected situation (read this as middle-aged, a temporal shock in and of itself, unemployed, spending  endless days at home and watching the savings you had invested for times like these disappear), I resolved to finish the dad meditations once and for all.  At least I would feel better about having completed a task and better yet, maybe I would learn something.

What I eventually came to understand about my relationship with my father took several days to work through.  These meditations were not fun.  They were hard and long.

I revisited some really difficult moments of fear that I had not thought about in years.  I went back to my room as a child, I heard the sound of his snoring, an indescribably loud arcing guttural noise that would wake me at 2 and keep me awake for hours.  Worse than that, I felt the physical smallness of our home, the lack of places to hide or escape.

The next day my thoughts returned to the palpable sense of fear that my father would fly across the narrow hallway and burst through the door at any moment and hit me.  Or those wonderful moments when he would embarrass me in front of friends by insulting and deriding me as he often did, laughing with them all the way while I sat and took it all.

With these fears there was sadness. Sadness over how he took pleasure in hurting us, how he laughed loudest when we felt the most pain.  The manner in which he struck me, my mom, or my grandma. The shocking vision of his coiled arm and upraised fist, his screeching voice, the wild eyes and the unkempt hair. And then silence in the house when he left afterwards.  It was as if a bomb had gone off, the air was sucked out of the room, the atmosphere bristling with emotional electricity.

This psychological goulash was topped off with a big helping of shame.  Shame about how I laughed along with him when he went on attack seeking to humiliate my mom.  Shame about how I did not stand up to him.  Shame about how embarrassed I was to be around him.

Eventually after I took these thoughts as far as I could, I began to gain some perspective, but not until the end of a week of intense concentration.  I made sure that I didn’t drink anything during those evenings and kept she that wasn’t really all that curious about these meditations for reasons I wasn’t sure of appraised of what I was working on at least in a very summary sense.  I walked big foot Kelly a lot in the cold and thought and thought plenty about dad just what he had done to us and to me.

As one’s understanding of a person who has fucked with their life grows, pain eventually ebbs and fades and mine did.  And as my newly rediscovered sense of shock faded into the background I realized that I would never understand my father.  Why he carried the bitterness of his youth to his grave.  His resentment of the success of others and his anger at life.  His constant abuse of his family, those who should have been the closest to him.  While he could not forgive those that had hurt him, I had to find a way to forgive him for how he had hurt us.

The first step to forgiving him was to understand his pain.  Only then could there be a sense of movement.  As I thought about his past it was easy to do.  With the time he spent in a true hell from Siberia to post war Eastern Europe, that part was simple.

The next step was acceptance.  What he did is long past.  That sounded nice but I was not able let go quite so easy.  I brought this up with she who has been meditating a long time more than I have that evening at dinner.  Over bites of thinly pounded chicken breasts with a lemon/butter/caper sauce she gave me some advice.  “In our meditation group,” she explained, “when we have negative thoughts from the past we focus on them and then put them in a rose.  Then we fill the rose with light and positive energy and cast the rose away watching the petals fly.”

I had to work hard not to laugh at this thought and finally couldn’t hold it back anymore and I did.  Not good. That put me on the defensive at the dinner table.  Laughing at your wife’s suggestions is always a risky move as she rarely will appreciate your reasoning.  But the very idea of putting my father’s ‘negative energy’ in a luminous pink flower and turning him into a bright light was way beyond ludicrous.  Maybe we could tuck his spirit into a rib-eye steak or an onion, grill them well done and then douse them in gasoline, burning it all to charred embers.  Now that was a visualization exercise that I could understand and the next morning I did just that.  While I can’t say I understood why, watching those imaginary ashes float away in my vision gave me a weird sense of closure.

Friday’s meditations took an unexpected turn when I opened up to the behaviors of my father that I could see inside of myself.  This wasn’t a planned moment, but my mind went right there like a hound that had spotted vermin.

At first it wasn’t pleasant. I let the old man’s ghost walk the room for a few minutes and saw how it familiar it looked my personal mirror.  I didn’t kid myself, there were plenty of his behaviors are there inside of me.  This is not surprising, all men carry their fathers in them, good bad or otherwise.

It was easy to spot the really bad stuff.   A powerful temper that took years of discipline to wear down (and patience from she who would not tolerate it).  The sense that world was imbued in darkness and people were basically out to screw you, to be constantly on your guard because everyone was tying to take advantage of some angle and get your better.

What was really surprising was how quickly I moved through those negative thoughts and realized how many positive things that he had given to me, character traits that were dear parts of my happiness and my success.

He taught me how to be funny. The flip side of darkness is the humor it brings.  Dad gave me a 5 star dark sense of humor that has never failed to shed light on sometimes horrible situations and bring joy to normal ones.

He showed me what a work ethic is.  He lived his life working hard and made me believe there is no other way to do it.  There isn’t.

He taught me not to take shit from anyone, another double-edged sword that wins a lot of battles and puts you into ones that are completely unavoidable.

All of his brought a smile to my face.  I began to close the meditation with a sequence of thoughts about those boys who grew up with no dad at all.  I wondered whether this was better or worse.  I came to no conclusions.  Then I began to think about the men who filled in for the failing fathers out there.  In the world this could be a teacher or grandparent. In my case there was an uncle who often took up the slack for the dad who wasn’t there.    But I wasn’t ready to delve into his yin and yang yet.  It was time to pull out.

As the meditation ended I had another unexpected food vision, something so out-of-place that I never really understood why it showed up that early winter afternoon. It was a peach.  Not just any peach, it was the first peach of summer.

There was no whipped cream or chocolate syrup in this vision, instead I looked out at a perfect piece of fruit of my choice.  Where does the fruit of dreams lie?  It is something simple like a crisp apple or maybe a slice of cantaloupe, right out of the fridge, cold and crisp never mushy and perfectly sweet.  For me it was a peach. And it hovered there slowly spinning like a top.

A short parable about summer fruit.  I live in a region known for fog and cold summers not for stone fruit and certainly not the sort of fruit that is found at the road-side stands that populate side roads throughout our country.  Yet doggedly and as my philosopher gardener points out, stupidly, I planted several fruit trees anyway.  A pink lady apple, straight from an upscale well reviewed and precious farm in Philo to the north, a peach and a nectarine, the latter two from a hardware store.  No pedigree on them.

Five years later this apple tree has never produced more than 4 or 5 apples, The peach which did OK last year didn’t produce a thing, got hit with a blight that turned its leaves to crinkled black whispers.

The nectarine is now producing, this damaged plant that suffered through a few brutal transplants is suddenly happy.  We think so often of the peach, but there is the nectarine in the background, never mushy and never with that horrible skin/flesh contrast.  It is steady eddy underdog fruit that doesn’t get the love it deserves.

Cooking stayed very simple that week.  Dinners were not memorable or inspired.  I was withdrawn and not talking much during meals.  This was a week of mourning for a life that never was, a father I never understood and the damage that he caused.   These were winter days of a personal mental Shiva (the traditional Jewish period of mourning) where I buried my dark feelings about him forever.  At least I hoped so.

Sweet and Sour Cabbage for pops.

One cabbage

One onion

Oil.

Garlic.

Sugar (pinch)

Salt (pinch)

Vinegar

Take onion, slice thin.  Heat pan add oil.  Slice onions and garlic, sauté to transparency.  Meanwhile slice cabbage discarding core.  Add to pan.  Sauté on  medium heat until soft adding vinegar, salt and sugar to taste.

Very good with sausages, preferably grilled and a peasant red.

Music for thought.

John Coltrane.  India.

Moon River, Bill Frissel with Dave Holland and Elvin Jones.

Chick Corea, Sometime Ago/La Fiesta

Radhe Krishna, DJ Cheb I Sabah

Dr. John.  Dr John plays Mac Rabennack.  The legendary sessions.  All of it.

Chapter 29: Christmas Grilled

Chapter 29

Christmas Grilled

Authors note:

MHO is a work of fiction.  While some of the incidents that occur in the story and many the characters in it are based in part upon my life, the vast majority of MHO resides in my ever-active imagination.  I (and those around me especially the dog) are thankful for that.

With your bad self.  The author is overwhelmed by the power of Xmas.

Chanukah wasn’t the only thing that lasted eight days that year.  During the holiday celebration, if you could call it that, in a moment of weakness I fed big foot white dog Kelly quite a bit of our brisket and onions and fatty bits at that.  I won’t deny it, I wanted to see someone happy in the house that night and for the split second of pleasure that dogs do get as they inhale food from their bowls (no I didn’t break down and feed her from the table) she was very very excited. Then she went back the living room and immediately fell soundly sleep, spread out completely across her cushion in a state of complete and utter relaxation.

Faithful neurotic companion white dog Kelly (an English Pointer, medium-sized 45 pound white hunting dog with brown ears) was found starving and then rescued from near death by a local animal rights group and we adopted her nervous self many years ago.  While we know she is a bit, well, off, it is always disconcerting to know that all of your friends agree with you.  You keep hoping that maybe the dog is saner than she seems but uniform reactions reinforce the reality, she ain’t quite right.  Now that is not to say that she has ever bit anyone and that she isn’t a saint around us.  Like most rescues she knows where the meal is coming from and pays close attention to protecting those that feed her.  And that is the problem, she is very territorial, making sure that anyone that comes in the door, friend or foe, is greeted with a growl that implies trouble until you notice that she is wagging her tail hoping for affection at the same time.  Consistently confusing behavior.

The rescue foundation spent two years bringing Kelly back to society and to life.  Along the way she developed a number of strange bit endearing habits. She chases shadows, leaves and butterflies and hunts like a cat, skulking low and arching her back when she strikes.  Genetically a hunting dog, she points at nothing.  Most importantly, she makes us laugh.

The next morning when oui cherie was heading to work and I was at the breakfast table scanning the continuing descent of the GS Warriors into injury ridden hell, I heard her utter an expletive that she normally is not known to do.  “Merdre”, I heard the shout, and as it turned out she meant just that.  Kelly, used to eating dry kibble and oak leaves (her constant ‘chew’ of choice in the back yard), had been overwhelmed by the fat content in the brisket and had left a trail of dumps in ever increasing liquidity across the living room carpet and Sweets had stepped square in one of them.  After helping her clean her shoes and getting her out the door, I worked on the mess, cleaning the carpet while white dog seemed to burrow deeper and deeper into her sleeping pillow knowing that something was wrong.  Her digestive issues would continue for some time. In fact, these morning surprises would last a week before her system reestablished itself and they became quite an issue until she simply got better.  As the 8^th day of Chanukah ended so did her upset stomach.

Chanukah came very late that year and didn’t start until December 22.  By the time the little holiday that can showed up the Christmas tree was up and decorated and presents were showing up en masse.  All of this made me even sadder than usual as Christmas came roaring into our lives once again.

It has always been hard for my family to understand my feelings about Christmas.  It starts with a simple fact.  I am a non-believer.  As a result, for me the tree is always too big, the presents too many.  They think that I hate Christmas but they are wrong.  It wasn’t hatred that I was feeling; it was jealousy.

These feelings began years ago when I was a child.  Christmas was the most depressing day of the year.  All around me kids were reaping the benefits of weeks of begging and whining as the opened their gifts with their incomprehensibly large families.  And where were we? Driving through a strangely empty West Los Angeles searching for an open Chinese restaurant that my father could tolerate while the rest of the nation basked in their living rooms fires roaring children laughing and people, yes, singing.

Not at our house.

This year the coincidence in calendars brought this reality home even more.  Christmas consumed Chanukah.  If these two holidays were basketball teams, Chanukah would feature an assortment of D-Leaguers and Israelis while Christmas started the NBA All Star Team with Kobe, LeBron, Chris Paul, Dwight Howard and Melo leading the way to a 200 to 2 victory.   It just wasn’t right.

If this confusing set of emotions and facts weren’t enough, Christmas was also my daughter’s birthday.  An additional complication that made sure that if there was any lack of pressure in a given Christmas day we had the double responsibility of making sure she had a decent celebration that evening, always tough when everyone was busy.

The holidays were a traditional time of major excess and I was destined to pay the price.  For most of December I was too busy, or so it seemed, to remember to meditate and to do yoga on a regular basis. I lost track of my calendar.  Instead, it seemed that spent most days running around gathering presents like a squirrel on crank and shopping for dinners, stuck in traffic a lot and spending more money than I felt comfortable about.

My famously grumpy Christmas mornings also typically featured a hang over courtesy of the annual traditional Christmas Eve dinner the night before.  The dinner, generously and graciously hosted by family friends in San Francisco always featured a variety of excellent champagne, vintage red wines (California Cabs or 1^st growth Bordeaux) and aged ports that I would happily bury myself in.  We had a wonderful time each and every year that lasted right until I woke up the next day to the sounds of Christmas songs.

In earlier times when the children were small their overwhelmingly positive energy would eclipse my ambivalent feelings about the holiday.  Who in their right mind could resist your kids at Christmas? But now that they were young kidults I had little to distract me from the bitterness I felt on Christmas morning.

I woke up early that day, letting sweets have the present that she loved best, sleeping in, and went out to get the paper. Groggy but focused, I planned to resurrect another old tradition that morning, pancakes for breakfast.  As I sleepwalked across the living room the odor hit me, white dog has dumped again dammit I thought.  I was right.   I knew because my right slipper was planted in the middle of it.  This one was a liquid beauty spread out across the carpet from one end to the other.  It created an ugly brown stain and it stank. Almost simultaneously my foot skidded across the slick wet carpet as the slipper came off and my toes touched down into the brown nasty goo.

Merry Merry Merry.

So what did I do? I yelled at Kelly.  A long brutal exclamation that was loud, angry and full of expletives.  And then, obviously without thinking, I picked up the slipper that was covered with loose brown shit and threw it at the poor dog who sat there stunned for a bare moment and then took off at full speed for safety.  I missed.

Standing there in the empty living room, Christmas tree twinkling in the background, looking at the now shit stained wall, I couldn’t move.  I just stood there. At first I was just pissed that I now had spread the shit to the wall and the dog’s bed.  I also surmised that every step I took spread it further. But as the flush of adrenaline and anger passed I just felt plain sad.  That and stupid.  And cold.  And alone.  So I picked up the shitty shoe and hopped to the downstairs bathtub where I rinsed off my foot.  Then I went to the kitchen where I placed the slipper into a plastic bad and filled it with water to let is soak.  I called the dog.  No reply.

After a 10-minute bout of ½ a roll of paper towels, carpet cleaner and simple green things were more or less normal except for me.  I was shaken.

When I had stood in the bathroom a few minutes earlier washing my hands and then rinsing my face I looked up into the mirror.  Now I know that morning light is always harsh but nothing would have prepared me for the face that I saw there.  Was it the hair, a bit long this time of year and wildly uncombed, the dark circles below my eyes, the weight I had gained?  Or maybe my age or the effect of the torrent of rage that had pulsed through me earlier or was I just imagining the man that I saw in that mirror.  Because that man was my father. The vision shook me.

And so another merry happy merry happy Christmas began with me cleaning dog shit off of the wall after losing my temper in the time honored fashion of my Polish father who last greeted my memory about a month ago eating a whole onion and drinking vodka straight from the bottle. He was back except this time as a part of my behavior not just an image from my youth. This was not a great start to an already difficult day and an ominous sign of what was to come later that morning.

Eventually, I settled down at the dining room table with a cup of coffee and the NY Times and tried to calm down.  My mind had other plans.  I couldn’t help it, my outburst had taken me aback. I wandered deep and long back to my youth in Los Angeles and the pain that I knew growing up.   Which malignant behavior pattern that he had left me with would bubble up today?  The powerful and unpredictable temper that I had worked on eradicating for years but still showed up like sour grass growing in the spring lawn?  Distrust of everyone around me springing from a lack of confidence in myself, something he did his best to beat out of me?  Resentment of success in others that he carried all of his life?  What a fucking panoply of mental crap he left me with that I had to work so hard to overcome. And yes, I had done so, but what years had been wasted along the way unable to enjoy life without excessive stimulation on the one hand or wild mood swings on the other.

There was nothing normal about him.  It made me wonder, how often do you hear someone described as larger than life as a compliment?

This inner jousting was interrupted about half an hour later the family showed up.  Of course the kidults first question were “damn, what smells” and then “where is Kelly?”.  The answers were simple, dog shit and I don’t know, both of which I spat off.
Kelly was upstairs on her blanket sleeping, beneficiary of a dog’s short memory span, and came downstairs on daughter’s first whistle already forgiving and looking to have her belly scratched as soon as possible.  A cure for all what ails, a good belly rub.

I wish it would work as well for me, if it did I would scratch so hard I would bleed.

The rest of the morning seemed to straighten out nicely around a menu of pancakes, hot coffee and thoughtful gifts, books, sweaters and shirts, music and cookware.  Then I opened a gift from la cherie, noticing that I was going to Yoga in sweats and an old t-shirt she had purchased a slick black pair of pants and a shiny yoga shirt from the local hip Yoga store.  Instead of thanking her I got stupid and pissed.  Yes, the first words out of my mouth were “How much did these things cost?”.

Not a good move. My behavior slid from there moving rapidly downhill from price to need to slickness to how I was just fine working out in my sweats.  That shut the joy down and somewhere Dad was up in the heavens giving me an attaboy.

It was only the next day as we were putting away our gifts that I realized what I had done.  I could see in the ice cold glare that I got from elle when I asked for the receipt that I had blown it and when I asked her what was wrong she told me.

She was right.  Not only was my response not gracious or thankful, it put a damper on the rest of the day that only receded as we celebrated daughter’s birthday that evening and forgot.  Simply put, I acted selfish, immature and angry, none of which were called for.  I told her that she was right and talked a bit about my earlier incident with the dogshit.  She looked at me with a look that only your life partner can give you, the look said this:  You still have a lot of work to do.  Words not necessary.

I kept the yoga pants but took the shirt back.  Poor behavior aside, it was ugly.

A Christmas song selection from a non-believer.

Merry Christmas Baby, Charles Brown.  You sure look GOOD this year.

Jingle Bell Rock.  Frankie Ford.

I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus. Definitely the Ronettes version.

Anything on the BB King Christmas collection.

Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.  The Jackson 5.

Run Run Rudolph.  Chuck Berry.  And don’t look back, the man is crazy.