Midlife Meditation

August, 1975: the day I was baptized, and the distance began to grow. This one's going to be rough. It's been nine days since I last wrote something in this space. I put it down to a great confluence of events: school starting up again, my kids arriving for the memorial service, and the service itself. With all these things going on, I've had few private moments to express my grief in the way I do it best: my fingers on a keyboard. (I use that word in both senses: piano and computer.) Dad's service was four days ago, and it was a great celebration for those who attended. It went on for two hours, with music, memories, video, images, and much more. Those who missed it missed out. Sadly, there were many who missed it: the church was, at best, half full, mostly family, plus the Lake Oswego United Methodist choir. This despite emails, Facebook posts, an obituary in the local paper, death notices from the conference, and possibly a few other means of announcing t...

This is a story about becoming. Many little boys want to grow up to be their fathers. When my son, Sean, was four, he went through a period of saying, "I want to be you, Daddy!" This was charming, moving, and affirming, all things that were important to me because I was in the midst of reforming my own identity: recovering from a failed marriage; embarking on a second, also unsuccessful, marriage; and coming to realize that the career I had chosen for myself, the career that was my own last attempt at being just like Daddy, was the wrong place for me to be. There was almost nothing in my world that made me feel good about myself, except for this little boy's admiration. The second marriage and the career ended within six months of each other, but the love of the child goes on. A couple of years ago, I began listening to a podcast by Marc Maron, a comedian two years younger than me who posts semiweekly long-from interviews with other performers that almost always d...

There are a very few books I remember from my pre-reading days, books I'm sure my parents read to me repeatedly. The Bunny Book (written by Patricia Scarry, illustrated by Richard Scarry) was my favorite. It's a simple story with a surprise ending. There's some kind of bunny family reunion going on. It begins with a baby bunny being tossed in the air by his father, who speculates with his mother about what the baby bunny will be when he grows up. So do the baby's siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and maybe a few other friends and relations. They come up with the answers one would expect: a farmer bunny, a police bunny, a firefighter bunny. I can't remember all of those guesses because, in the end, they're wrong. The baby bunny knows exactly what he will be when he grows up: a daddy bunny. And that, I knew from my first memory of that book, is what I wanted to be. No, not a bunny; a daddy. I would love and nurture my children, playing with them, takin...