Midlife Meditation

These two pictures are of the same people. The older one is me; the younger (by 23 months ten days) is Ocean, who throughout childhood and adolescence was my closest friend, favorite playmate, co-producer (we did radio parodies), and partner in bickering. He was given the name Stephen at birth, and kept it until, at 36, he renamed himself. The decision has not been well-received by our parents, and fourteen years later, the jury is still out among our other brothers. For my part, I've always respected the right of individuals to choose their own names. I just haven't ever felt the need to change my own--except during me first marriage, when I hyphenated my last name.   I have four younger brothers. Each is unique. We're all artists in one way or another, and several of us write. Three of us have also been involved in education. Two have been ordained, though neither remained in ministry. All have been married, though only two remain married to their first and (we all ...

    I don't have a lot of pictures of myself with my father. There's a simple reason for that: throughout my childhood, my father was the family photographer. The pictures I of him I took myself, starting with my twelfth birthday (when I got my first camera), do not, of course, include me, for the same reason. So a picture with both of us in it is a rarity. You could reach the conclusion from this dearth of father-son shots that, like many mid-century fathers, mine was absent from my childhood; and you would be partially right. Dad was 34 when I was born. He was almost a decade into his career, an American Baptist minister about to move to his third job. He was actually out of town, interviewing for that position, when my mother went into labor. I spent my first five weeks in San Jose, and then we moved up the coast to Fort Bragg.   In fact, though, Dad was about as involved a parent as a man of his generation could be. From all accounts, he doted on ...