Category Archives: personal

My Wish for You

If I had the power to change one thing in the people I meet, it would be to calm the reflex to make an angry reply, or to retreat into the easy fortress of silence.

My parents, both of them very bright, nonetheless fought their whole lives.  My mother was more given to crying in frustration, but she was also good with the cutting remark when she felt it was called for.  My father, also a very sensitive person, used most of his great intelligence to keep the world around him off balance, he was prepared for combat even in his sleep.

After they died I had a realization.  Although I had not fought with either one in the years before their deaths I realized I do not want to fight with anyone any more.  I don’t want to be quick with a tough, barbed comeback.  I don’t want to argue, or win.

I want not to fight any more.  I am trying to practice mildness every day.  It is not always easy to see progress, but it is always there anyway.

That is also my wish for you, whatever version of peace feels right to you.

Howie Gravy’s Dream

Howie told me to make sure to check out the beautiful tile work in the WPA public bathroom built on the beach a block from his new house by the Pacific Ocean.  The bathroom building stood just across The Great Highway, which you could take out of town and through the eucalyptus trees and the fog, over an orange bridge to beautiful Marin County.  I don’t recall if I ever saw that tile work, but I clearly remember Howie’s enthusiasm, which was characteristic.  The man loved life.

When my mother was dying her long, slow death I had a lot of time to think about what would happen to her children after she was gone.  Her children, my sister and I, were in their fifties, but it would still be a first for them, living in the world without mother or father.  There was some terrible drama a month before my mother died, a Florida hospice trying to cover its ass hospitalized her against her will, sent her home eventually on a gurney, with her ass hanging out of her backless gown and soon covered in her own feces.   So much for death with dignity.  

It was on the first day of this unfolding treachery by Vitas Hospice in Florida, during a series of increasingly aggravating phone calls to Florida, that I had a call, not from the director of Vitas, but from an old friend I hadn’t heard from in a while.

Howie, who seemed to be in great shape and excellent spirits, and loving his new house in the Sunset, had stopped for a red light in Berkeley, driving one of his employees home after a convention.   The light changed, the passenger said “Howie, it’s green,” but Howie was gone.  Like a candle blown out by a whisper.

A month later my mother died, as peacefully as possible at Hospice by the Sea, attended by angels, with both of her children by her bed.   After her memorial service my plans began coming into focus.  I would do what I’d long dreamed of doing, find a way to get back to working with doomed– “at-risk”– kids, helping bring out their creativity and ingenuity.  

On a friend’s recommendation I saw a movie called “Saint Misbehavin'” about a hipster named Wavy Gravy, a Flower Geezer, who prays each day, to every deity and noble soul he knows of, to help him be the best Wavy Gravy he can be.  And this former Hugh Romney has done a lot of good for a lot of people.  I left the theatre inspired to be the best Eliot Widaen I can be, to become the change I want to see in the world.  There was a lot of work to be done and nobody but me to do it.

Seven or eight months later I had the workings of my plan fleshed out.  A simplified system for improvising and animating short films for the web that children would be able to do themselves.  The children would learn, problem-solve, teach each other, with a few adults on hand to listen and lend support.  The program, set in a world where people don’t, as a rule, listen, particularly to children (unless they are the doting parents, and even then, it’s no sure bet) would create a place where children would be encouraged to speak, be heard and replied to.  Feedback is crucial to any kind of human growth.

It’s like having a catch.  You throw the ball, the other person catches it, throws it back.  Few things, it seems, could be simpler, but it’s not simple enough to happen regularly.  I think that’s one of the reasons there is this mania for e-mail, instant messaging, tweeting, blogging, texting, pinging– to get the feeling of this connectedness, a primary thing missing from so many lives.  

I know an agoraphobic, bulimic with ten thousand on-line Facebook friends.  He apparently has regular contact with many of them, but when I run into him, on the rare occasions he ventures out, he clings to my company in a way that tells me his ten thousand virtual friends may not be enough.

If you go to wehearyou.net, now a 501(c)(3) charitable organization ready to do business in the world, you will see a brief sketch of the intended program.  A link from there will take you to the youTube channel, wehearyoudotnet, where you can see examples of what the kids will do, and you will notice the name Howie Gravy as the proprietor of that site.

Howie, because he listened, never spoke badly of anyone, had a madcap curiosity about everything, because he was my friend and ready for adventure, and because he died years before his time.  Gravy because of another good-hearted soul, a man who, among other things, helps bring medical services to save the eyesight of thousands in impoverished parts of Asia and other places.  Howie Gravy, as good a name as any I could think of that night, my eyes tearing up, to think that, in spite of it all, I might actually succeed in setting up and running this program that would make my mother proud.

Howie’s wife, understandably inconsolable, felt largely abandoned by their large circle of friends in the weeks and months after Howie’s death.  First life had cruelly snatched Howie away just as they were beginning to enjoy their lovely new home by the ocean, then their many friends seemed to recede, make excuses instead of visiting, listening, helping with her loss.   It was no doubt painful for the friends, as it was for all of us, most especially Howie’s wife and kids, but still.

I listened with concern on long, late-night cross-country calls to the latest details of the group of friends taking her for granted, putting her off with platitudes.  Her hurt was palpable and all I could offer was my concern, my agreement that her friends were a pretty sad bunch.  And to observe how differently Howie would have acted in any of their places.  That her friends also had a difficult and painful job, trying to console this inconsolable woman, did not make them any less sad a bunch to my mind.  Friends do what is difficult, cry with us as well as laugh, that’s why they’re friends, why real friends are so rare.

My thoughts flitter and alight on my current board of directors.  Four old friends of mine who agreed to help out, one of whom is doing all the legal work to get the organization up and running.  He emailed me the other day with the great news that the IRS had given us expedited tax exempt status.  This means we can now begin applying for grants and tax deductible contributions, it is a big step forward.  I shared the good news with the Board in an email 48 hours ago.  

What I heard from the Board reminded me of why the change I have already undergone has been so important to me, why wehearyou.net may have such a crucial role to play in troubled young lives.  I heard nothing from any of them.  

Howie teaches not to judge these busy, preoccupied people, that there’s no reason to condemn them in any way in my disappointment.  Better to move on, following the dream Howie is no longer around to help me dream, except when I dream.

“What happened to them?”

My sister, who does not have an easy life, was roughed up by our parents during the long battle that was our childhood.

“You had it much worse,” she told me once, “because you stood up to them, you always fought back.”

Whether I had it much worse, I’m not sure, but it was bad enough.  And it’s true I fought with them, all through my childhood and beyond.  My sister and I grew up in a war and it was everyone for themselves.  Violence and anger begat more of the same, as well as distrust, intense dislikes and other toxic biproducts.  

Eternal vigilance against bullies and exploiters was a theme in personal and professional life, and a detriment in both.   I never learned how to be direct and get what I need, the overarching moral component always cast a menacing cloud over those practical considerations, confrontation with the inevitable enraged, petty assholes life places everywhere was unavoidable to me.

Now I am committed to nonviolence, in word and deed.  It is  a hard, bumpy road in a rugged winners vs. losers society where sucker-punches are considered good sport.  You will notice quickly, if you announce your commitment to nonviolence, that people you meet, including those closest to you, will challenge you continually.  As soon as you slip, they’ll be ready to point and smirk.  You will not, like Gandhi, have a community of like-minded fellows to support and applaud your resolve, but an army of hooters, ready to restrain themselves or bust loose when your fist clenches in spite of itself.

I recently found a video of my parents as a young couple.  There was one amazing sequence where my father, an angry, quick-witted, supremely defended individual who believed, not without evidence, that the world is full of betrayal, turned in the sunshine and smiled at the camera as he walked.  Not a bad looking man in photographs, the man in the movie radiated optimism, intelligence, humor, warmth, and that nonchalant sense of his own power that the world calls ‘charisma’.  I watched it again, ran it back, watched the handsome, poised young man turn again to smile directly into the camera’s eye.  I described the sequence to my sister over the phone.

“What happened to them?” she asked, half laughing, half full of horror.

I didn’t know, but I described again how this good-looking young man radiated confidence and seemed ready to take a big bite out of a delicious looking world.  My sister and I never met this man, or even his reflection or shadow.

“I think it was us,” my sister said, “I think our being born did it to them, changed them for the worse.”

I didn’t think so, don’t think so.  But I recognized it was the scars in my sister’s brain that let her come so easily to that conclusion.  Our parents had seemed happy, were both good-looking, life was ahead of them, glittering.  Then, by the time we knew them they were both pretty unhappy campers.  She puts the evidence together, in the light most damning to herself, et, voila, a conclusion that can only lead to more pain.

My father’s soul was broken early, and I know some of the  terrible details of how it was done.  My mother, likewise, a child entering a lifetime of uneven combat with a cunning adult caregiver swinging a club.  It was waiting for them from the beginning, the fear, denial, anger, over-eating, lashing out in blame, the neuroses that came later. 

“I think it was us,” says my sister again.  It’s Occam’s Razor to her, the shortest explanation, everything else being equal, tending to be the right one.  They were happy, we were born, they were miserable.  Therefore, it must have been us.

I told her I didn’t think so, that it was waiting there all the time, the inevitable defeat they were set up for from the start.  But she remained convinced that it was our parents having my sister and me that destroyed their chances for happiness.

And I think of the scars that were inflicted during all those battles around the dinner table.  A parent who was not scarred that way would never think of inflicting it on their child, no matter how much of a trial or disappointment the kid was.  It takes a lifetime of conscious work to get some actual healing done, sometimes more.  And while you’re doing it, it’s best to deal mildly with the hecklers.

Digging Myself Out

The same force that used to drive me away from digging myself out is now slowly coming together to help me dig myself out.  Supervising the reversal of this force is slow, patient work.

It is either remove some of this heavy dirt that is closing in or be buried in it before I’m dead, it seems to me now.   And the force that kept me from digging had the easy appeal of fun.   It offered the stark choice: “would you rather tackle this hopelessly complex mountain of stuff, or invent some nice things against the tasty vamp behind the curtain?”   It wasn’t much of a choice, actually, the tasty vamp won every time, even as the mountain became higher, deeper, more difficult to think about taking apart.

But I take my courage where I find it now, shredding all but the courtliest examples of my former craft when I take the folders apart.  The hundreds of pages not in folders usually make me wonder why they weren’t tossed a year earlier, in some cases five years earlier.  I don’t wonder long, on a mission, now, first to clear the table and desktops.  If the mission lasted twenty minutes today, well, that’s twenty minutes to the good.

It took many years for the mountain to get this dark and dense, it will not be scaled and resized  in the blink of an eye.  It will take many, many, many blinks of an eye.  And then some.