Back in California

I was at Voltage HQ this week for a sales meeting. Even though we took Katie to Anaheim (Disneyland!) at least as often as to San Francisco, being out there made me think of her even more than usual, because she so loved the Bay Area.

And that’s also where I first encountered homosexuality, which also makes me think of Katie, with her staunchly libertarian (in the “a person who believes in the doctrine of free will” sense, not the political party) passion for individual rights.

The progress toward universal acceptance of homosexuality (modulo the Russians!) is something she would have been thrilled about. This week we’re hearing about a college football player, Michael Sam, who’s openly gay and will almost certainly be drafted by the NFL, breaching one of the last homophobic strongholds. I caught a radio discussion the other day in which someone pointed out that his college team has known he was gay for months, kept it a secret, and were fiercely protective of him and his privacy—and that this should basically shut down any BS about how a team [deep, serious voice] “cannot possibly survive” with a gay player.

This change in public attitudes seems to me to be as dramatic as the race rights advances were in the 1960s. I mostly grew up in a small town in Ontario, where there “were no homosexuals”—of course there were, but they were deeply closeted. You had to go to a much larger town to find people who were open about their sexuality; “fag” was a common epithet, probably worthy of a fistfight (unless the other guy was much bigger). And I expect this was pretty typical for the era.

In 1976, when I was in high school, my dad was on sabbatical at Stanford. At some point during that year, my parents were invited to a party in San Francisco, and my sister and I went with them. A bunch of us spent time at that party playing a computer trivia game (connected via dialup to a computer all the way across the Bay, in Berkeley—hot stuff!), and I wound up driving the keyboard, because I could touch-type.

On the way home that evening, I commented to my sister that some of those folks really knew their trivia. “Yeah”, she responded, “especially that one gay guy”. My reaction was, “Gay guy?!”—and then I realized which fellow she was referring to, and had an epiphany: it didn’t matter. All the biased negative BS I’d heard couldn’t matter, if I’d spent an hour or two with this fellow poking me in the arm as he shouted out answers. I mean, he was touching me! and nothing bad happened!!!

This epiphany has obviously stuck with me for over 35 years, and I honestly believe that the war is over. Less than fifty years after Stonewall, that’s decent progress, though of course not fast enough for those who have suffered in the meantime. One can only hope that in far less than three decades, this all seems like crazy, ancient, outmoded thinking. And Katie’s generation seems determined to make that happen.

Speaking of the Russians, check this out—Canada’s response to the anti-gay stance at the Olympics!

Living in Fear

One of the things that nobody tells you when you become a parent is how goddamned scary it is. How when your child is sick—and I don’t mean the obviously bad situations, like a life-threatening injury or illness, but even just a cold—you’re seized by terror the entire time.

Lately I’ve been thinking back to 2010, much of which is a blur for me, overshadowed as it was by fear for Katie’s well-being. I was afraid for her and I was angry at the world, at the situation, because I couldn’t control it and just wanted it to stop, for her to feel better.

I recently finished reading And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini, who also wrote The Kite Runner. It’s an interesting book; not my usual style, but I enjoyed it. The passage below took me by surprise with its rare clarity about the emotions involved in being a parent.

Setup: the protagonist has a young daughter, and is away from home for work. Her husband has called her at 2:30AM to tell her that the child is sick.

She wants him to stop. She wants to tell him to shut up, that she cannot bear to hear it, but she’s too late. She hears the words childhood leukemia, or maybe he says lymphoma, and what’s the difference anyway? [She] sits on the edge of the bed, sits there like a stone, head throbbing, skin drenched with sweat. She is furious with Eric for planting a thing as horrible as this in her mind in the middle of the night when she’s seven hundred kilometers away and helpless. She is furious with herself for her own stupidity. Opening herself up like this, voluntarily, to a lifetime of worry and anguish. It was madness. Sheer lunacy. A spectacularly foolish and baseless faith, against enormous odds, that a world you do not control will not take from you the one thing you cannot bear to lose. Faith that the world will not destroy you. I don’t have the heart for this. She actually says this under her breath. I don’t have the heart for this. At that moment, she cannot think of a more reckless, irrational thing than choosing to be a parent.

Of course the last line is hyperbolic, but it’s an all too realistic reaction.

This is the game you play when you become a parent, whether you realize it or not going in. And it’s not a win-lose game, though obviously some outcomes are better than others; it’s the journey, not the destination. You “win” by even having had the chance to play, by having been able to have a child and do your best, however crappy that was at times.

I of course know people who have never had kids, some by choice, some by luck of the draw. And while I would never think less of someone for having made that choice, I wasn’t wired that way. As the song says, “Regrets, I’ve had a few”, but only for certain tactical moves, not for the strategy of having played.

Happy 22 to My Little Girl

Well, after a nasty, rainy day yesterday, today was a stunningly beautiful fall day, on what would have been Katie’s 22^nd birthday.

She would have been in her last year of undergrad, presumably with a good idea of what she wanted to do with herself. Careers, mentors, dreams, friends, lovers, kids…who can guess? Sure would be nice to know…

Thought of her today while in a store that first played a horrible, treacly version of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”—a song I never really liked, even when this season wasn’t my least favorite. Then they redeemed themselves by following it up with “Love Song” by The Cure. Katie would have loved it! Not that she was a huge Cure fan—I think Robert Smith was too much of an Emo cliché for her taste—but they have created a lot of good music, and she was always a believer in good music of any sort. And the juxtaposition would have had her retelling the story for months.

Three Years In

If you've ever had a deep bone bruise, you know that it stops hurting constantly after a while. But it's always there, and when you bump it, and it explodes again.

Today is a bump. Well, every day has a few bumps: today is just a bump the whole damned day.

This seemed appropriate today: Warren Zevon cover of Bob Dylan's Knocking on Heaven's Door.

As Kt would say, "Peace out".

Out of the Darkness Walk last month

It's been a while, and I've been delinquent in not posting about the AFSP Out of the Darkness Community Walk back on September 8.

It was two years ago that several friends participated in that year's event. I wasn't up to walking then, but went and observed. And this year I was happy to be able to walk.

I put off soliciting donations until rather late, and then finally got my act together and sent a note to the folks I felt comfortable asking. And boy, was it heartening to see the response! Our team was the top fundraiser for this Walk, and that's a tribute to Kt and how she affected people.

Team Kt raised $8,916, somewhat exceeding the goal of $1,000.

Thanks to Rita for organizing this once again!

Global Warming, feh...

August in Virginia, and it's in the mid-70s! I wonder how many people who visit this month will move here, and then spend the next n years wondering why summer is so much grimmer than what they remember...

I spent part of this week in Boston, at SHARE. I haven't spent time in BOS since we were there with Katie in 2008. That was a nice trip: we went up to Maine first and "did" the coast, then spent several days in Boston itself.

Every previous time I'd been in Boston, it was either winter and cold, or summer and 90+. And so other than some fond memories of that family trip, I've always had a somewhat negative impression of the city: sweltering or freezing outside, then racing inside to comfort.

The whole Northeast is experiencing this unseasonably pleasant weather, and as people had repeatedly told me, Boston turns out to be a lovely city. I had a nice time, other than hating being away from Anita (as ever). And other than seeing an ad for Blue Man Group, which we'd seen there with Katie. Weird how random things like that strike with almost physical force.

Meanwhile, The Verge covers an unlikely topic,Cracking suicide: hackers try to engineer a cure for depression. Not a particularly accurate headline, but an interesting, if sad, article. With a (largely) lively, cogent, and civil set of comments following.

Saga—Live!

Saturday before last, I flew to Detroit, then drove up to London, Ontario, and finally saw Saga. I last caught them live in 1984: they don’t tour much in North America, despite being from Ontario, because although they sell out arenas in Europe, they’ve never caught on here for some reason.

I was supposed to see them November 20, 2010, but of course that didn’t work out. Then I had a ticket for a show at B.B. King’s club in Manhattan last September, and the band cancelled (something about a visa problem for one of the band members). I have a watch on their tour page, and thus sometime in May learned that they had been added to the bill for Rock the Park 10, so I booked my trip.

It was a grey, rainy day, but that failed to dampen (!) my spirits, or those of the other concertgoers. With the doors opening at 3PM, I got in line about 2:30 and chatted with my line-mates—most of whom were my age or older. I’ve never seen that many guys with long, grey hair outside of Grateful Dead photos!

And it was a good show. Not as long as I would have liked—that’s the price you pay for having multiple bands on the bill—but Saga were as tight as I remember. After 35 years of playing together, they still seem to be enjoying themselves. And they must be able to read each other’s minds: during the opening track, the keyboardist was trying to adjust one of his (six!) keyboards. The display either wasn’t backlit or wasn’t bright enough, so he was trying to shade the display and adjust it with one hand, while still playing with the other. The lead vocalist noticed this (although it was behind him), and came over and shaded the display himself—all without missing a beat. Pretty impressive.

The impact of just hearing live music again took me by surprise. Katie of course lived for music, and loved concerts (I think she agreed with me that any music sounds good live, no matter the genre). I wound up about 25 feet from the stage, and when the otherwise-mediocre opening act started playing, I found myself missing her more intensely than I have in a very long time. She was my “concert buddy”: I took her (and friends) to her first concert, Green Day, in Pittsburgh. Later we saw Rush a couple of times, the Doobie Brothers once, David Wilcox at the Birchmere, and more. And she had desperately wanted to see Saga: I’d tried to make an expedition work once when they were playing in Ontario, but the logistics proved too difficult.

I left after Saga, to enjoy the other treat of the weekend: my sister had come down from Toronto just to visit her little brother! We had a nice dinner, then spent most of Sunday just talking and walking, what I call “found time”. With nothing in particular that we needed to or even really could do, we just relaxed and visited. I think those are often some of the best times. Then I dropped her at the train station to return east, and headed west on the 401, back to Detroit.

On the drive I was listening to the radio, and heard an ad on WCSX, a Detroit classic rock station, that starts with Boston playing in the background, and a question: “How do you teach your kids to like classic rock?”, with a baby gurgling happily. Then we hear a woman: “Honey, can you turn that up? The baby’s trying to sleep!” (I haven’t been able to find the ad on the Web, but I’ll keep looking.)

I could see Katie’s smile…