On Fathers

It's been eerily quiet around our neighborhood today - no din from grumbling lawnmowers or whining gas powered trimmers, no screeching from the tree chipper two doors down.  Not even the repetitive thump whump from the teenaged basketball boys behind us. It's Father's Day, and I think all the men in the neighborhood are taking advantage of having a day to loaf. 

Our neighborhood is rather old fashioned in that most of the families are "intact" - mother and father living in the same home with children.  That's probably more than a little unusual here in the Detroit area. In his column today for the Detroit Free Press,  Mitch Albom quotes a statistic that one in three children lives in a home without a father in it, a number that doubles in African American families.  It shouldn't come as any surprise that in those homes children are more likely to do poorly in school, in health, and in life in general.

I think men underestimate the power they have on their family, not just in terms of their personal relationship with their children, but also in terms of their relationship with their children's mother.   Having a father at home is important, but so is having a stable home environment with a man and woman who love and respect one another.   Kids need to see that in order to know how to love and respect their parents, their siblings, and themselves.   Men sometimes have the notion that it's enough to show up at soccer games and birthday parties, to put in an appearance every weekend and holiday, especially if Mom is the main caretaker or custodial parent.  "My kids know I love them," they'll say, passing Junior a $50 bill or new video game before driving away. 

But do they?  

One of my co-workers is a single mom with a five year old son.  Her divorce was bitter and acrimonious, and the ex-husband seems to use their child as leverage to "punish" her.   When her son comes home from the obligatory "visitations" with his dad, he's either angry toward her or clinging to her every move.  "It takes about two days for him to get back to normal," she sighs.  "Sometimes he'll hit me or tell me I'm stupid.  Other times he'll cry and want to crawl into bed with me."  

Having kids is a lifetime proposition, and men who don't know that need to learn it.  The term "baby daddy" turns my stomach.  It means nothing more than the word "stud" in the world of animal breeding, and totally denigrates the importance and accountability of a father's role. 

"It is time to stop this," Albom continues in today's column. " And while I would like to appeal to the men, it's pretty clear that isn't working. So it may be time to appeal to the women. Do not accept this burden. Do not accept this as "the way it is." Refuse to get involved. Refuse you-know-what.  But refuse. Because we as a society need to refuse this pattern. We are destroying our future."

 I'd like to think that the silence in my neighborhood today means there are lots of dads enjoying "quality" time with their kids - watching a ball game on tv, out playing golf or at the beach, riding bikes or picnicking in the park. 

Those are the fathers who who deserve a day to call their own.

Stormy Night

Newscasters kept interrupting Friday Night Lights last night, filling the 47 inch tv screen with an angry splash of orange and red,warning us there were massive storms on the way. About 9:30 we hurried the dogs into the yard to take care of their nightly duties before the rain hit.   In the yard behind us, heard but not seen, the teenage boy who lived there was still bouncing his basketball in the darkness.  The orchard sparkled with the lights of a million frantic fireflies. We hadn't been inside for ten minutes when I heard the rushing of wind.  Our mountainous pine trees swayed menacingly, and the roof was pelted with small limbs and sticks flying through the air.  I gathered all the candles in one place,  put a  flashlight at the ready.  Electricity flickered, but never died.

Soon the rain came, blowing in sheets across the driveway and down the street, huge droplets being chased by the wind.  Only 1/2 inch fell, I heard later - a small amount compared to the two inches we got in one hour a weekend ago.

I love storms, and can hardly resist standing in front of the big picture window watching the show outside.  Even as a child, I pouted when my mother and grandmother would herd us all into the basement at the first dark cloud.  There's a magical feeling about being safe inside while the familiar world around you becomes wild and furious.

This morning, all is calm and clear.  The sun beams down, the yard is something of a sauna, the flowers stand stalwart and strong.  It's not unlike life, is it?  Storms rage in our hearts and souls, and yet somehow we continue to pick ourselves up and carry on.  Resilience, I suppose you'd call it.  We come by it naturally, a means of survival in this windswept world.

How about you?  Do you like stormy weather? Or does the first thunderbolt send you right under the covers?

Write On Wednesday: Turning Point (an excerpt from a story in progress...)

This week at Write On Wednesday:

A good place to begin writing fiction is out of your own experience.  Look at your life and try to make sense of certain moments - perhaps small moments that represent some larger truth. ~from The Portable MFA in Creative Writing, The New York Writers Workshop

“I’m just not a bit surprised, are you?” Nita’s mother asked for the third time since she’d hung up the phone.  “We all knew that child would come to no good.”

Nita ran the knife down the center of a celery rib, a surgical incision which spliced it neatly into two slender sections.  Pinching them together, she began dicing rapidly, her wrist rotating across the stalks as she’d noticed celebrity chefs doing on the cooking channel which her mother loved to watch.

“It’s a shame, that’s for sure,” she replied, as she had on the previous two occasions. 

“Poor little Vera,” Fran continued, shaking her head.  “She took care of her mama all those years, and then that girl showed up on her doorstep, and now this.”

Nita thought of her cousin Vera, whom she considered her a favorite relative amongst the vast pack of cousins generated by her mother’s seven sisters.  It was Vera who first gave Nita books for birthdays and holidays, recognizing her love for reading and stories long before her own parents acknowledged their only daughter’s bookishness.  Nita remembers the excited anticipation that accompanied Vera’s visits, for she always brought an aura of the outside world into their small suburban house.  Vera, with her college education and her hospital job, was so radically different from the other women in Nita’s life.

She cupped her palm around the mound of diced celery and picked up a handful, dropping it into a bright blue ceramic bowl half filled with chunks of chicken breast.   Chicken salad sandwiches had become a staple lunch since her mother moved in with Vera six months earlier.  Fran’s appetite was once robust, as befit a farmer’s daughter who loved to cook, but it became strangely meager after her bout with colon cancer last year.

“Just half a sandwich for me, honey,” she said, watching Vera flick a dollop of mayonnaise into the bowl.  “I’m not too hungry today.  I think that sad news put me off my food.”

Nita sighed, wishing again that she had been the one to answer this morning’s telephone call.  Her Aunt Helen’s voice had been clearly audible from where she sat on the sofa, drinking her first cup of coffee and trying to finish the book up for discussion at her book club meeting that evening. 

“Fran, honey, I’ve got terrible news,” she'd heard  Helen say, without even the pretense of any other greeting.  “Larissa’s dead.”

“My land!” Fran gasped, her hand flying to her heart as if to prevent it from escaping her chest. “What in the world happened to her?”

Helen’s voice had modulated into a lower pitch, and Nita could no longer make out the words.  She stared at her mother, whose head was shaking sadly as she listened, her blue eyes glittery with tears.   

“Oh, that is awful!” she interjected after a few moments.  “Where in the world was  Vera when all this happened?  She wasn’t home?  Then where…”

Nita tried to refocus on her book, knowing she would hear the entire story whenever the call ended.  Her mother was notoriously efficient at re-telling tales, although Nita had noticed that one repetition had become insufficient of late, and she would often hear three of four versions of the same story before Fran moved on to another subject.

Should she be worried about that? Nita wondered, allowing the various exclamations from her mother’s voice to recede into the background.  Could this habit of repeating stories be a sign of Alzheimer’s or dementia, a red flag Nita should be picking up on?

She  should call Vera and ask, she thought.  Vera was a geriatric nurse – or had been before she retired last year from her position as director of a nursing home. 

Then Nita remembered that a tragedy had apparently struck Vera’s family.   If Fran’s first exclamation was to be believed, Vera’s oldest daughter had just died.

Return to the Writer's Roundtable

Summertime, and the livin' is easy....At least it seems easier here, with daylight hours stretching into night, after dinner strolls, and early morning porch sitting.  There is a general sense of ease during my Michigan summers.  So I'm thinking about using some of that extra time for writing, and reading about writing, and practicing writing.  So come join me on Wednesday's as we gather 'round the writer's roundtable and  explore all things writerly...the craft, the mechanics, the planning, the process.

To begin, I opened a book that's lain untouched on my shelf for more than a year~ The Portable MFA in Creative Writing, by The New York Writer's Workshop ~ a compendium of the "core essentials" which are taught to MFA students in programs all over the country.  Chapter One focuses on fiction.  Where to begin writing fiction?  You've heard it a million times - "out of your own experience." 

Tim Tomlinson, author of this first "lesson," advises the writer to "look at your own life and try to make sense of certain moments - perhaps small moments that represent some larger truth.  At which point might I enter the morass of my life and write a story?  At a point when something significant changed."

So tell us, what are some turning points in your life that might lend themselves to a good story?

Write about them.

Obscenely Beautiful

Forgive the flower pornography(and how many google searches will that generate, I wonder?) but don't these Asiatic lilies make an incredible splash?  There are enough of these in my little backyard garden to create quite a show, and I'm even more excited because cuddled up right next to these golden beauties are a batch of blood red wonders ready to explode into bloom. 

You need sunglasses to water these plants.

Yellow seems to be "my" color this spring.  I bought two yellow jackets (the kind you wear, and not the kind that sting you), a yellow purse, and have yellow popping up all over the garden (there are tons of Stella Doro day lilies sharing space with these, and in the front yard borders as well.)

The color of light, of warmth, a joyous color.

I'll take that.

How about you?  What's your color these days?