Sometimes

Our son, David, said that yesterday was his happiest day ever because he went to two different schools. In the morning at preschool he mashed potatoes for his preschool’s Thanksgiving feast that happens today, and in the afternoon he went for his screening at the Cathedral school.

Those screenings haven’t historically gone well for our family. Our oldest has a deep spidey sense that he was being examined and when he left he was quiet for most of the morning. As for mine, I cried when Mark Gamble slammed my fingers and, as legend has it, never recovered. During the screenings the parents wait the same way that fathers did years ago for childbirths and make whatever nervous conversations they can about happier places like summer camps and spas. Meanwhile their kids are being asked to stand on one leg, which I am convinced is a better measure of sobriety than whether a boy will be able to handle 8th grade algebra. It is a long hour and a half.

But David, much like San Francisco weather, has only two states - happy or tired. He thought his time at Cathedral was fantastic and loved the legos and the carpet time. After we took the bus home he wanted to play Cathedral in the living room. In particular he wanted to play what he called “Mr. Burns and Mr. Wilkes” where Mr. Burns was in charge of everything and then would have to battle Mr. Wilkes. Perhaps departing from his experience, Mr. Burns had fire power and Mr. Wilkes had earth power and I wished I asked him what Mrs. Jeurgens could do. Whatever David’s version of the school lacked in accuracy, I do believe it had a keen Irish social satire sense of the red team vs. the gold.

This morning he woke up and wanted to go back to Cathedral since it has the best legos in the world. We tried to explain that he has a Thanksgiving feast to go to with all his friends. That he has much to be thankful for and the mash potatoes were going to be delicious.

He still insisted about going to Cathedral.

Finally his brother stepped in to soothe him. He told David, “Cathedral isn’t always great. Sometimes you have to learn things."

Darkness

The name David means beloved, and what I learned over the past few weeks is how twisted this love can be. I was a juror on a trial whose story involves a mother who took her son back in after he hit her in the head, a father who was so afraid of his son that he slept with a gun under his pillow yet still drove his son back to the house instead of the cops because he loves his wife, and a son, David, who believed that all meat is human meat and might have tried to bite his mother only to go on to darker things.

David is also my son’s name, and during the month I was vaulted between the two worlds of fatherhood and jurist. My David dances to Whitney Houston while the defendant David early one morning took out a pocket knife, locked the door and chased his father to the bedroom. His father managed to shut the glass door on David's arm and was able to pry the knife out David’s hand which enraged David so much that he began kneeing the door. The door shattered to the floor, and the father and son were left facing each other. David went to grab his father’s head with one hand landing on the ear and the other near the eye. The one on the ear managed to tear the top enough that it required three deep stitches, and the one on the eye started to put pressure on it. The father, thinking that his son was surely trying to kill him, stabbed his son in the abdomen a couple of times. The son backed off and went outside to be found by a postman. The father wiped the blade and put his gun on top of a shelf. The postman and the father called 911, and multiple units arrived. Some officers had body cameras, and we were able to see one set of footage that showed a frightened dad and an unapologetic son.

The trial seemed hyper real. We had photos of knifes, kitchens, and shattered glass. We had the recording of calls and witnesses being interviewed. We had testimony from doctors, cops, and the postman. It was a narrative that pushed me towards insomnia, and then shock when I realized that I knew the dad from when I worked in his building. What distance I had wanted from the two worlds of one of safety of my family and one of the craziness of the city was gone. I spent the weeks of the trial dropping my oldest off at the top of Nob Hill in a beautiful cathedral and then walking to the court house by descending through the Tenderloin with its vile smells of humans gone unattended. The trip felt less like a route than a metaphor of how our noblest intentions and darkest impulses all share addresses on the same street. It is a small city.

Eventually both sides gave their final arguments, and the bailiff took us back to the jury room for the twelve of us to parse what we had learned. It didn’t go as I expected.

* * *

On the ride to the hospital after the incident, David talked to an officer. He told her much of the above, that he attacked and chased his father with a knife and that he wanted to kill him. The officer took notes on index cards, and when she reached the end of her shift seven hours later wrote a report. It was her second day out of the academy, and she said she remembered it vividly.

Several of my fellow jurists doubted her. They complained that it had been seven full hours. They wish they had an actual recording instead of notes so they could know exactly what David had said. They doubted police in general. One at the start of the trial looked at David with his thick glasses and slouched shoulders and thought David could be guilty of no crime and that it was all self defense since his father had a knife at one point.

The father was also recorded telling his version that mostly matched David's while he was in the hospital. Some jurists doubted him since he gave his account after he had stabbed his own son.

Reasonable doubt wasn’t just being applied to the question of guilt, but also to the evidence. We see so much on the web these days that it has been the guardrails of what we believe is true. The standard of what used to be reporting, when people used to take notes and then write it up later no longer works when you can tweet or post immediately. The past used to be 50 years ago, now it is measured in days if not hours.

The idea of Trial by Jury came from the Age of Reason. Central to philosophy of the time was the belief that educated citizens could weigh information without the need of kings. The people can decide, and while there were certainly moments when this was a bad idea (see the guillotine or Jim Crow) there were times in its better moments that it worked well.

That age is over, and what I learned is that it hasn’t been replaced the Age of Information as much as the Age of Doubt. With so much information now flowing to us, we are forced to become experts at filtering. We need doubt just to get through an inbox.

* * *

The better arguments from jurors came from that David is crazy. He is likely schizophrenic and certainly delusional. He talked about aliens and the grays. He said with no evidence that his Dad was trying to rape him and was holding him against his will. His defense was that the world was even darker still. One jurist commented on how the homeless in San Francisco say all kinds of crazy things and are harmless. I didn’t do a good job of explaining to him that there are different kinds of crazy that I learned from my own family when I was a child and watched my cousin go up and down on his own street of sanity.

David isn’t homeless just as my cousin wasn’t. But my cousin when left unmedicated is a violent schizophrenic. My cousin threw rocks at us as kids, killed birds in our backyard, and stabbed another cousin's dolls on one particular Christmas. He could also be just fine. When I last saw my him he was heavily medicated and in a home. He isn’t David and David isn’t him, but I am left with three beliefs that you can get medical help for schizophrenia, that just because you have schizophrenia doesn’t mean you can’t be violent, and that it is brutal on families.

I did my best to try to bring logic if not process into the room. We had multicolor post-it notes, portable white boards, and voting stickers. We built timelines and matrices. We had the court report read back the transcript of David’s confession. We found faults with the judges instructions and asked questions about self defense. We listened to each other and talked in turn. But I know that these tools and methods used for design discussions can go wrong and have the empty stock options to show for it.

The only guilting charge was for brandishing a weapon. Everyone felt that the knife was real even if the police accidentally threw it out before the trial. Every other charge was either thought to be less extreme or was spilt with only a handful joining me on the guilty side. It is likely that there won’t be a retrial.

The weekend after the trial brought back blackouts to the Bay Area and smoke to our lungs. The north is burning with 5% containment and our electric company is so unsure of their work that they have cut the power to thousands. We are a region that prides ourselves in being enlightened. Where we seemed to be headed is only towards uncertainty and darkness.

Fireball

It was the summer of Fireball, a Pitbull song that Edward wanted to listen to over and over again. The camp counselors played it as they drove their vans across the city until it became stuck inside of all of us like the fog.

It was the summer when my father tried to grill on our trip to Cape Cod that he didn’t realize that over the winter the squirrels had chewed through the propane gas line. The whole structure erupted in flames. He tried to smother it with a towel, but that only trapped the gas underneath. When he lifted the towel, the flames bursted out. I quickly got a hose which doused the flames. Only the grill and the grass were singed. My father didn’t grill again.

It was the trip to the cape when David jumped to the fire pole at the Falmouth playground. This summer he has pushed his limits whether it be traversing rocks or climbing into forts. He was not undefeated - there was a stumble down a hill and a splinter in a foot - but the only way to climb is to learn to reach.

It was the time that Edward and my mom first played tennis and Crazy Eights. Edward once gave her a two minute monologue on why cooked carrots are better raw. They tossed seaweed that had washed up on the shore back into the sea and laughed on the porch afterwards while still hearing the sounds from the harbor.

It was the battle of the upstairs television. My sons wanted to watch PBS cartoons; my father wanted CNN. Ultimately we got a small set in the garage for the boys.

But the news couldn’t help but seep in.

There is no good way to explain El Paso to a five year old. There is no way to explain the rage. No way to tell a kid it won’t happen again. No way to talk about death at that scale.

It was the summer I saw the plaque remembering my cousin Claxton behind the altar at St Dominic’s church. He was a born a few months before me, and for the first years of our childhood was always more advanced than me - both brighter and more athletic. It was no wonder that he started elementary school at Cathedral.

It was just over twenty years ago he lost his life to heroin.

We have this notion of the innocence of summer, that the only dangers are sunburns and stings, that there might be a place where things are safe.

When Edward tried the Cathedral uniform on for the first time, it reminded me when I saw it on Claxton. There is the formalness to it - a tie makes anyone look older and responsible. It projects a possible future. But in the end, how things wear down is unknown.

It is the last little bit of summer before Edward heads into kinder camp on Monday, and he will learn how to make s’mores, how to play on a roof, and how tor raise his hand. In a few weeks he starts the actual school and gets a team to help as he tries to learn by reaching. The hope is that he can grasp and climb. That he stays protected from the fire.

Upon a Hill

We will do our best to earn this.

An acceptance from a school is less of an achievement than a promise. What is going to matter is not the ink on the diploma, but the sweat it takes to get it.

I know that we are rather fortunate. That even though we had a great group of friends pulling as hard as they could, that we had to catch a couple of breaks to get in. Sometimes, but not very often, you get lucky. We will not take for granted that we made it, because there will be times ahead when the luck breaks the other way.

There are going to be challenges with our boys since, like all, if they arrived at a school fully formed they would not need to go to it. We will dig deep.

Elementary school was a challenge for me.

It is strange to look back at your youth, and see it not through the eyes of a child but the ones of a father. I realize now that because elementary school was such a challenge for me that how much my father had to try to help my school. He gave his all into my education at a time when other dads were more interested in the sidelines. An education is a journey shared, and we will do our best to do the heavy lifting.

There is a book that talks about the languages of love. It is about couples, but what I have learned through this process is about the language of love from fathers to sons. This language has fewer words than some, but comes with broader shoulders and higher hopes. I thought the best way to honor my father was to name our first born son after him, but what I realize now is that the best way is to teach my own son that language.

We will do our best to earn this.

After I graduated from elementary school, I had to repeat a grade and was sent to a boarding school in Western Massachusetts. The school was an athletic one (which is really not the direction I needed to go), and it even had its own ski slope. The fall term was about soccer season, and everyone was sorted. The varsity got to practice at the top of the hill near the dorms, the jv was at the middle, and the intermediate team was at the bottom. I was once again placed on the intermediate team, which came as no surprise.

The thing is I really love hot water, and the only way that I was going to get a hot shower was to run up the hill and try to beat the much better athletes, the jv and the varsity, to the dorms. Sometimes when you are sent to the bottom of the hill it means that you are just going to have to run twice as strong. For me it was not just the start of learning how to run, but the beginning of learning how to strive. And while it took a high school for me finally to get my act together, during that brisk New England autumn I still showered rather well.

We have been given a great gift of a school upon a hill. It is a beautiful place with the great resources of wonderful teachers, phenomenal music, a stem lab, a garden, and so much more. I know that we need to hustle to take advantage of the wonders of Cathedral. My sons will have what is for them their own warm water, and they will learn to run hills to get it.

So begins our journey.

Wheels Keep on Turning

Our youngest rode a bike on Sunday. His first journey went straight into a fence. The next was into a bench. Eventually he learned to turn and brake if for no other reason than the lack of bandaids. The bike still has training wheels, and in a few days he will go back to occupational therapy to work on jumps and landings, balance and coordination. He moves ever so cautiously through the world and tells me each day, as I leave for work, about the dangers of the outside. Around the pool during holidays he clung to the side and made sure never to wander in even though the water came up to his chest. For him to get on a bike and to start to pedal without consequences is to visit a foreign planet. It might have been his older brother's excellence with a bike that got him to ride. Perhaps it was his grandmother's kind words, or that the bike was new and blue, or maybe just simply that it was a sunny day and he finally felt old enough to move. We all pedal in life at different rates, reach milestones at different times. Getting there usually takes a few crashes along the way. I learned to write after college from the sports pages of the San Francisco Chronicle. They had the style of conveying the facts with the slightest of winks, that you had to tell the truth, but always make sure that you leave in the parts that amuse you. It was a style I could mimic, a structure I could use. I reached writing late and perhaps not well, but like my son on the bike I am glad I reached it at all. A couple of nights ago, I sat across from a father whose son has dysgraphia which is what kept me from writing, and when I heard his tales of frustration, of being able to know far more than you can say, of salvation with computers and caring teachers, and of the hurt when trying to get out the words; it brought back such memories of a youth struggled. I could also relate to the father since I am now one too. And this means giving the push on your son's back to get him started on a bike with the knowledge that there is a pretty good chance he will hit a fence. But there are no bandaids for fathers. There are just occasional sunny days that you need to cherish when your kid starts turning the wheel.

Folklore

 

 

We arrived a little early for the Discovery Museum's Class, and as my son and I have done this wet winter, we waited in the rain. At five, he is at the point where our adventures together are more interesting whether they are trips to Oakland’s Fairyland or to the Cow Palace for the Reptile Expo. Going to the Discovery Museum to take a class in building Leprechaun traps was a bit like both.

There was a bin of trap supplies - tape, straws, nets, cardboard, and popsicle sticks - from which he grabbed a fistful of parts. The other parents, mostly dads, were eagerly arranging things for their kids, but I very much wanted the trap to be my son's, and so in the end we were left was a pile of scraps hung together by tape. The only way it was going to trap a leprechaun was to confuse it.  The trap looked sad, in a Charlie Brown design kind of way, and we took it over to the testing table to see if it would work on small, wind-up robots.

The robots, lacking higher intellect and an Irish disposition, completely ignored the trap and scurried of to another kid's trap that at least was sticky. My son didn’t mind and his project now waits on top of our mantle fully ready to be deployed in a couple of weeks.

Of course, the other thing we are trying to catch in a couple of weeks is a spot in a kindergarten, which at this time seems almost more mythical than an Irish Fairy. The hunt is one of recommendations and reviews, interviews and information sessions, and tours and teachers to the point where it seems less of a trial of intellect but a journey of endurance.

To complete it, we used words as our tape and popsicle sticks.

Anyone trying to get into these schools uses what they can, and if your child is wonderfully presentable you go with that. But if perhaps your child is a bit normal then you have a great deal of explaining to do.

My wife and I became an editor/writer team, and we searched for adjectives like “cerebral" while trying to figure out how to say “does not like talking to strangers” without using terms like “aloof.”

We wrote to friends a lifetime ago, and met nice people everywhere we visited.

We said “wonderful" a great deal and sprinkled “thank you” like the winter rain.

Our son also started to write. While his classmates wrote about peanut butter and unicorns, he finished his first book on Kryptonite that was dedicated to his younger brother and whose back cover had a bar code he drew. He is starting to formulate his own epic journey, and I hope which ever galaxy he visits, super hero he thwarts, or Sith Lord he trains that he, too, sprinkles in the “thank you” along the way.

For even if you manage to catch a leprechaun, you still need to charm it. Words are your best bet unless you have a unicorn or perhaps a peanut butter sandwich.

Sometime soon the rain must go away and so will our little adventures of preschool. The larger beasts of kindergarten are yet to come. I hope we have tales of dragons.

 

 

Kindergarten Tornado

My eldest son wanted to make pancakes.

 Later that morning was yet another elementary school tour for him, and his emotions tend to come from his stomach as opposed to his heart. Your child has but a brief moment to show brilliance at these places, that somehow during the time between when he and his fellow candidates march in a Choo Choo Train line to meet with a team of experts and afterwards when he rushes back to you that his letters will be straighter, ears will hear better, and smile will stretch wider than the normal boy he usually is. It is the moment when he goes behind the curtain to see the wizard who checks on his brains, heart, and courage while you wait with a bunch of other parents who are also pretending not to be stressed while wishing that they were home.

 Getting into kindergarten is a long, yellow brick road. There was no way he was going to do it on an empty stomach.

He almost climbed completely into the fridge to get the milk and butter, and had to get a chair to reach the shelf that had the bisquick. The one parenting concession he agreed to was that my wife was in charge of the stove, but we were a little distressed about how easily he turned it on. He went slowly with the pouring, the mixing, and the flipping.

 We rushed the rest of the morning. When we put him in a booster seat for the drive he complained about having food all over his pants. A quick change later, it was clear that he was more thoughtful than I was who can barely cook and badly dresses.

So many years ago I toured that same school and had left it crying. A boy had slammed my fingers, and that was it. I didn’t get into the place; nine years gone with a set of tears. Life is a series of auditions, but only occasionally call backs.

 My son was the caboose of the interview train and one of the first to rush back. We went to a park, and he never said a word about what happened behind the curtain.

The next few weeks we will wait in a fog of uncertainty. There are the moments when my kid can be truly insightful and the others when he can be painful (especially to his younger brother). Which version of my son was there I don’t know. What is certain is that he is learning how to the handle the world. We have no idea where he will wind up, but he will be cracking eggs and sweetening his life with just a touch of syrup.

On Ice

Perpetually on the preschool birthday circuit with its symphonies of screams and sugar our family went together to the ice rink to celebrate a girl turning five. The family was generous to let David come since these things are run off head counts and wrist bands. He was happier to be at the ice rink than his older brother who only wanted to run around with a purple balloon sword.

David wanted to go on the ice and waited patiently while I went to get our boots.

We had chided him in the past for being, what we thought, was lazy and stubborn. He didn’t want to go up and down stairs as much as his brother, insisted that we carry stuff for him, and refused to ride at bike camp to the point that his counselor admired his determination. But to focus on the symptoms was to miss the cause. It wasn’t that he was lazy as much as doing these activities are harder for him than his brother. We recently learned that his gross motor skills are more like mine and aren’t as developed as much as his peers. Granted like everyone he will have to be able to motivate for his needs (like cleaning up), as much as for his wants, like drawing super heroes, in which he possesses an unmatched determination.

David wanted to go on the ice, and I didn’t want to show how excited I was to join him.

* * *

We are at the twilight of our eldest going to preschool, and our minds are focused on what happens next. 

We have visited six different elementary schools, each of which feels like a different asteroid about to hit our world and permanently change it. There have been moments of beauty like when we saw kids singing in a church, moments of worry like when our tour leader wasn’t really sure where the fifth grade was going to be the following year, but mostly moments of anxious parents trying to smile and be as positive as they can while they, too, were trying to figure out their own incoming asteroid. 

The elementary school admission process had made me a bad conversationalist; I grew only to have one topic to talk about. It is hard to not just become completely focused on the size of the craters are coming, but also to feel that you have to share your own crazy hypothesis with everyone else.

I wonder what the dinosaurs did when they saw the streaks in the sky.

And to be caught up in all of this is to miss the wonders of the now. A week ago Edward drew me a picture with the word “Daddy” on it.  He tells jokes. He loves adventure camp, building symmetric towers, and making up stories with his mom on the couch. He has the beginnings of his own narrative. No need to rush the next chapter.

He can also have a major meltdown if he needs food at 5:40 and can antagonize his brother out of boredom, but these are smaller moments of the day than the rest which is good.

* * *

David wanted to go on the ice, and I gave my wife our camera in case I might stumble and fall. I have spent the autumn being an assistant teacher for the first time and it has been uneven. The teaching part has been fine with times that I did make things clearer and only a few when I didn’t. But the classroom has its own desperation that in some ways is the opposite of my fellow preschool parents.

These kids are teetering. They are the ones who didn’t get into the good public schools and are stuck with the teachers who didn’t either. Our main teacher is French, and while I do love the culture, in that country either you are someone who passes things, or you are discarded. It is a county that brought public shaming in the form of a guillotine. She shames kids more than I would, listing out on the board the ones who need help, getting angry at the ones who didn’t answer the questions correctly, and refusing to accept that a kid not having a computer at home is a good enough excuse to do his programming assignment.

For these are the children that don’t have computers at home. One of them had his glasses broken and had to spend a month squinting since he couldn’t afford another pair. One wears the same track sweat shirt every day, which I initially thought was great and am now worried that might be the only one he has.

Half the class dropped after the first month.

The school wasn’t my first choice either, but it was one of the few left with not enough volunteers and no one wanted to claim me.

I feel a bit bonded with these kids even though I don’t just have one computer at home, but three.

Still there are the differences. For instance, there isn’t any gunfire in my world.

On my second day teaching a kid fired a gun at school. He was a freshman, two years away from even able to drive, and launched a bullet into the place perhaps because he only wanted to show off. The cops came, the reporters came, and the social workers came. And then after a week they all left.

What I learned is that all shots are heard around the world. It is hard to think about functions and variables when you are wondering what is in a kid’s back pack. One of the other TA quit, and my wife suggested I do the same. With two small kids I understood the calculus, and if it happens again, I won’t come back.

But until then I made a promise that I would do my best for these kids, that someone needs to help them debug things, someone has to make sure that they can stand upright when things get slippery.

* * *

David and I made on to the ice. Unlike other parents I gripped his hand. I didn’t want his first time circling the rink to be a failure. I want him to think it is okay to go and try something even if you aren’t really skilled at it.
At school he is learning how to have friends however fleeting. The newness of friendship makes it okay if it is only for a few moments playing with blocks or being a fireman. At three there is little sense of permanence, but much more sense of play. 

He can be such a happy kid and is learning how to be silly with others.

He, too, grasped my hand tightly as we did our two loops around the rink. Each of his steps was made with quiet concentration. I have no idea if he enjoyed the skating as much as the proximity. I did my best to hold him aloft, to prevent him from crashing too soon, and to take in a small moment in a noisy birthday.

Soon things will change, and I will have to learn to be okay at letting go.