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.

Force the Net

The saddest I ever was after a birthday was when I got a tennis racket. My mom and I went to the tennis shop and since I wasn’t that great of a player my mom and I decided on the middle of the line racket, another sensible choice in a childhood of practicality. It was one of the first of the larger head rackets with an extra wide sweet spot for my troublesome aim. I thought it was great until the next day my cousin’s mom went to the same store and bought an even better racket.

I was devastated to the point my mom got my aunt to apologize to me. Over the years my family talks about that racket as a code for not getting what others have, of being slighted with someone with more money.

I thought about the racket over the years as well, but what I realized is what I should have thought about was my aunt. Her son, tall and agile, was a great athlete and she was just trying to get him the best for him to reach his potential. He once again would crush me in tennis matches; my lifetime winning percentage in that sport is about the same as a chair.

Still my mom would cheer me after points with phrases like “great effort” when my shots became close to coming in. For her tennis was the great social opportunity, and she was determined that I have a good backhand despite how many lessons it would take. Ultimately through no fault of the racket, she let me go on to a sport like running and my younger brother would be the one with the wonderful game and brilliant social life.

I thought about the racket again this week, when another dad sent me a picture of his son in a brand new Star Wars costume. The son is my eldest boy's best friend, and the two of them had been discussing the force, and Darth Vader for weeks on end. Mine has a sticker book with a legend and he determined to know every nook and cranny of the world as if he was a 40 year old on the internet. He asks me about who built the Death Star and is disappointed that most of the engineers don’t have names.

And so there it was a photo of his best friend in a Kylo Ren mask shown to my son. It was his personal tennis racket. My son now had a true want.

With my years of tennis training, I did something then that I was so unsuccessful as I was in the sport. I rallied. I decided that instead of buying a bigger Darth Vader costume, that my son I would work to build with what we have. My wife quickly came up with the idea of using a paper bag for the mask, I did my best to draw the outline of the helmet, and my son colored it in. He was so proud of the mask that he tried to scare his brother the new two days.

What I realized what I sometimes have to teach is the importance of working with a need. That my sons needs to know if you want to have something you need to go out and get it. My years of being bad at tennis filled me with a need to be good at some sport, which gave me the drive to run. The best private schools aren’t great at teaching hunger if they are working so hard to be nut free.

The masks we give our children shape them, protect them, and ultimately change them. 

I thought about sending the photo of my son in his paper bag mask back to the other Dad. And then I realized that is something my aunt would have done. No need to cause a racket.

Alt Delete

I hit my reset button, the ctrl alt delete of where I was going.  To me “alt delete” means that through dieting I am deleting the alt parts of myself preferably around the waist. The control part is hard.

I switched out the carbs of my diet, lowered the sugar, and gave up on alcohol and caffeine.

My body has spent the better part of a week telling me this is a horrible, horrible idea.

I don’t have as much hunger as the complete lack of energy save for trying to twist off the top of an Advil bottle to deal with the headaches.

I didn’t realize how much I had become carbs and quick energy. To be a new parent is to be in a world of burst speed - dashes around dropped bottles and chases around bath time. It is jolts in the morning when you didn’t sleep because the little thing next to you was trashing, and drinks at night to ignore the crying from upstairs.

I had been on a march of ever expansion since the birth of my eldest. I got in habit of taking him to coffee shops and ordering croissants when he was a new born. That is one of the many things that needs to change.

He lost his first tooth this week, a sort of one time weight loss of his own. But when he got the dollar the next day he held it up as if it were an olympic medal. A trip to the dentist determined that more dollars where headed to him soon.

We live our lives like our teeth - they start as baby, eventually the wisdom comes, and then we spend the rest of the time making sure that they don’t drop out. Maintenance becomes the new goal.

Turning 50 soon means that I am on the health clock. Overweight creates all kinds of health issues and I think the next phase isn’t as much about burst energy as it is making sure that all is healthy and well.

I want to be the best for my sons and so I had to reset myself. The agony of headaches is nothing compared to the despair of heartaches of not being with them.

So I will do my best in a world of salads and water, push on as I can against a rebelling body, and watch things change even if it is one tooth at a time.

Airborne Migrations

The trip was meant for my mother in law. It went beyond being her 70th birthday to something that motivated her for nearly a year. It was a chance for her to return home, back to the county she came from, to acknowledge those that shared her journey, and for a brief time to get all of her brothers and sisters back together again for a laugh and a pint. It was referred to as “the wedding” since it would be that kind of a gathering with the purpose of celebrating life’s transitions.
But like most weddings, you hardly get to spend time with the bride. My only long conversation with her was when we traveled from the hotel to the airbnb and she refused to believe that google maps had a better understanding of directions than she did. In the end it turns out that she wasn’t Luke Skywalker with the Death Star and perhaps could use a guidance system. She was equally unafraid to give me other guidance about all things Irish as we walked, and such is the relationship between sons and mother in-laws.
I did my best to listen.
For me the trip was more about seeing if we could take two small kids abroad. In particular, it was about David who had never gone out of the country. He was named for his Irish grandfather, and has the same thick hair and curved eyebrows as my mother in law. It was just under forty years since there was a David from the family in Ireland, half of my mother in law’s life.
David lives in a world of super heroes that I am allowed to occasionally visit. What is labeled as five minute super hero stories from a book that is well worn often become 20 minute discussions about who is on each page. He wears as much batman clothes as he can, though I do my best to limit him to only 2-3 pieces at a time. When he got upset, I started to draw super heroes for him to calm him.
The drop-offs at school became David surrounded by five of his friends watching me make sure that Aquaman had an orange shirt and green pants. Accuracy is a very important part of his world of heroes and villains, and so we spent a year making sure that I drew Superman just so (always with a cape) or Batman with a utility belt. It was a pattern of convenience since a drop-off is like defusing a bomb attached not with with a red or green wire, but with an umbilical chord. It worked and we kept going even in Ireland.
We pretended that the Dublin Castle is where Bruce Wayne lived - even though as David’s brother, Edward, pointed out it wasn’t a real castle anymore just a museum. We learned about Brian Boru and Bram Stoker, of the heroes and monsters real and imaginary. We fled the leprechaun museum shortly after the multimedia presentation on Newgrange became too spooky. We built lego ninjas and robots in the hotel. We wandered through a country rich in legends and storytellers, a kingdom of faeries and selkies where the taste of salmon could bring the knowledge of the world, and the entire time David wore his Batman raincoat complete with two pointy ears on the top of the hood worn ever upwards even indoors.
Mythologies can flow both directions across an ocean.
I thought about migrations when we went to Herbert Park, a gem of a park only a few blocks from where David’s grandfather grew up.
On one side of the park is a modern playground with the same safe slides, scoopers, and child screams as in America. On the other is a duck pond surrounded by blooming trees that looks like something Monet would draw, elegant in its silence except for the occasional quack.
I wondered if these birds were descended from the same ones that were here when David’s grandfather was a young boy. Or do these birds migrate from all over only briefly stopping in Dublin. Are some brought over and released? Where do the birds fly?
Ireland, itself, is experiencing its own immigration. None of the workers in the hotel nor the baby sitters for the nights out with the cousins were born in Ireland. The cab drivers complained about the influx of foreign nationals. The aunt who sat next to me during dinner, seemed to have in interest in Donald Trump. Things flow both ways across the ocean.
My mother in law’s father had a stroke much too young. It meant that for each child there was less money, and the distance they traveled from their home in Navan to where they settled, correlates to birth order. The first went to the states, the next London, and so on. The birthday party was a reverse migration; the youngest traveled the least to make it to Trim, but when they all arrived back with the same bushy brown hair, that David also shares, it was quite clear that though they lived in different ponds that they were all of the same feather.
There is no such geography on my father in law side. The pattern is more of doctors and writers; red heads and brunettes.
The writers came in handy for all of the toasts.
The doctors came in handy since the other thing airborne we brought with us was sickness. Everyone except me had ear issues. My wife in particular was off balance enough where I had to go to the pharmacy to pick up medicine only to find that half the store was spray on tans and pregnancy tests. I assume that one leads to another. Our eldest, Edward, was the one who needed the most help since when we arrived at Trim his temperature shot up to 104.5. His fever caused him to scream desperately at night. It was the banshee voice of true horror, and my wife did her best to make him drink ice water to cool him down.
I am still frighten of whatever shook him in the middle of the night and was glad that the fever changed as quickly as the Irish weather.
The week before we left, David changed our drop off routine. He drew a villain for me. It was the Riddler complete with green pants and purple question marks. The face had the eyes in the right place, and there was the slightest of smiles.
My wife told me he had been drawing people all day long and that he was well beyond what was age appropriate. Representational Drawing is supposed to come in much later. There was one article that said that at 3 some kids will be able to draw for 15 minutes at a time, and I wondered about David’s ability to be at the art table for a hour or two.
There is a danger of over extrapolating your child’s abilities. A kick of a soccer ball, doesn’t mean a world cup invitation.
But at the same time, I felt something that I couldn’t help - pride.
When I dropped him off at school the day after our long flight home, he asked me to draw him an Irish Ninja.
I don’t know what he will remember from the trip, but I would like to think that he remembers it as a place of legends and family myths. That he dreams of things that fly whether they are birds, aer lingus airplanes, or Superman. That he looks at all of his great aunts as part of his own tribe. That he felt this was a country worthy of Bruce Wayne.
I asked his brother what was his favorite part of the trip.
He said without hesitation “Burger King”
Sometimes you don’t migrate that far away from home.

Circular Journey

Our first parent teacher conference was a surprise to me. The teacher had mark our eldest son’s report card with such a  consistent score of “average” that it almost felt that the entire thing could have been done over Netflix’s and chardonnay, and when we went to see her the news was much the same. I learned that if you wanted someone to say that your child is brilliant in every way take them to a grandmother; schools are often there to say what isn’t going well.

“He has no real interest in music or art,” she said, which stung a bit. Our youngest loves music especially if it is off the sound track from Zootopia, but our eldest hadn’t sung at home any of the songs he was being shown at school. 

Until one day, he started singing Moonshadow by Cat Stevens. It was only the slightest semblance of a melody, but it was music. I put the song on our home stereo, and slowly we learned the lyrics together. Our youngest also chimed in, and of the handful of words he has two of them are “moon” and “shadow”.

And so we entered into our autumn singing a song about decapitation.

Sometimes it takes a while to get somewhere.

Next week I am returning to the place that I started - 2### Clay Street, San Francisco CA 94115. It is where I came home from the hospital 48 years ago. My parents moved out of the place when I was just a little bit older than David is now. I have no memory of living there, and I know that our memories of Steiner Street will fade from our boys. The stickers of monkeys and elephants that we put up for them will be pealed before the new tenant arrives.  The carpet where they first crawled and later walked isn’t coming with us to clay street. We are leaving the swaddles and swings that soothed them.

The new place has a tiny back yard, and there will be tricycle races and easter egg hunts there. The boys’ room is going to have balloon wallpaper, and the carpets in the new place will get stained just as much as the carpets in the old.

The distance between the two houses is four blocks so the places we eat and shop will be the same. The distance I will have traveled in my life is five feet from the infant’s room to the master bedroom, which I know isn’t very far.

But it has been a circular journey.

One night at the Clay Street house 47 years ago, my parents woke me to watch Neil Armstrong climb down a ladder. Waking an infant is something you are never supposed to do - far better that they can sleep so you can get yours.

It was time to see a man who had travelled farther than any man ever has, a time to watch humanity’s desire to explore the world, a time for parents and a child to share a moment of wonder. My parents still remember the large cardboard box I played with afterwards which I pretended was a rocket. Some houses aren’t forgotten.

And so I am going to return to the place from my distant past, a place where I watched someone walk amongst the shadows of the moon. I am still learning the melody of being a father and a husband, but the lyrics of life sometimes has a familiar refrain.

E & E

It is my son, Edward’s, birthday tomorrow and no longer will my wife and I be able to tell to the random playground parents that we have two under two. The speed of our family creation was a badge given for bravery (and a touch of foolishness).

Instead the birthday marks the transition towards toddler. The age is not referred to as the terrific twos. His disposition is changing from one of needs, such as food and sleep, to one of wants like doors being open or iPads to be held. This past week he has developed a new great want - Elmo.

When I greet him in the morning his first word is Elmo, which has taken over his vocabulary like ‘Aloha’ in Hawaiian.  After I clean his diaper, he says ‘Elmo’. After I give him the milk he says once again ‘Elmo’

He has a small Elmo doll but prefers the world of Elmo literature. If I am to blame for his constant running around, I like to think that his mom gave him his love of books.

In one tale, there are little flaps to be lifted so you can help Elmo find his blanket. In another the flaps are for numbers, letters, shapes, and colors. My son checks each page several times.

My wife and I are a bit worried about traveling some place where we didn’t have a handy Elmo. Her idea was to buy several like the way we bought three shirts for my wedding in case I sweated too much.

I started to look at videos and audiobooks for my son, but I prefer the red headed monster silent.

I know that a year from now he will have new wants, and I think about how much he has changed in the last. A year ago to the day was the first time he started to walk in a way that resembled rugby players after a night at the Tonga Room. He doesn’t stumble as much any more.

Halfway through the year, his brother arrived whom he greeted with tears. He now hugs him every morning and brings him bottles or toys to make him happy. I asked Edward if he wanted to give David the Elmo doll, and Edward replied with his other favorite word ‘mine.’

I think that turning two means that you have so many more flaps in life to look under, so many words and letters to learn, and so many more pages to turn. There are monsters in the world, but some can turn out to be friendly. That streets can be busy, but are safe if we hold hands.

I know that there are green eyed monsters of brotherhood, and for that matter this year will have tantrums with epic choruses. And I hope we weather these well by counting to ten with numbers we have learned from the streets of Sesame.

Life Aquatic

My eldest son, Edward, said his first swear word yesterday. He was, of course, mimicking his father who in a moment of frustration over a spilt mocha on a changing table launched the explicative. In my defense, during the week I take care of the kids during the 6’s of a.m. and p.m. - the twilight between sleep and exhaustion. The mocha is my fuel, my milk drink as opposed to his.

To my son, who has so few words, perhaps the swear could have meant the same thing as “boom” or “uh-oh”. Life with two small children is a series of liquids and spills and there is the never ending clean up of wipes and towels. It has become part of our routine enough that Edward will sometimes grab a towel if he spills something. His favorite person for a while was the trash man.

We have a life aquatic with our heads out of the water barely enough. Parenting is the process of riding the tides of toddler attentions - the fast shifts of the currents of desires.

Edward for the most part has been living well. He has a collection of aunts and grandparents whom I refer to as the mutual admiration society. He has gotten used to having a younger brother in the same sort of way of getting used to eating using a spoon. It isn’t always, and when it doesn’t work out it gets a little messy. But the intention is there.

To get him out of the house away from the newly steam cleaned carpets and couches, he goes to a bevy of activities. He has soccer tots on Mondays, where he insists on stacking cones as opposed to running around them. He goes to Jameroo and Music Together, which are meant to cultivate his artistic side, but wind up being places where he runs around the peace circle screaming. Someday he will do exercise in sports classes and art in art classes, but for right now he explores things impulsively.

On Thursday mornings he goes to swim classes at the JCC. We got our first report card a couple of weeks ago - never too early to start measuring kids in San Francisco. He had top marks in enthusiasm and confidence, but did not fare so well when it came to the section of skills. It looks like it will be a career of venture capitalism.

Not all of the kids in the class are unafraid of the water. Some luckier parents have children with a better sense of danger. There was one girl, Olivia, who would cry the entire class. I would get the updates on Thursday dinners about how everyone was doing. In my mind Olivia was of Russian descent with large eyebrows, and a power set of lungs. She is, in fact, Chinese and didn’t scream as loudly as my imagination. More of a whimper.

I kept asking about swim class over dinners. Did we think the instructor named “Blaze” lived in the Haight or were the rents to high there? Was Edward kicking on his back? Did he put his head underwater? Does Blaze have good earplugs?

The updates kept coming, and one day I got the major news. Olivia had stopped crying during class. Edward had held her hand and made her feel safe in the water. I like to think that with his hand held he could not splash as much either, and that the two of them could start to learn about the aquatic life with a sense of calm.

I then learned that at the next class they had started to kiss. We spent a few weeks of Thursday dinners speculating about the two. About how he would think of his summer romance with his few words of “up” and “down”. Would he grow up to be an olympic swimmer, because he had found true love in a sea of chlorine.

And then yesterday it was broken to me softly. Olivia had spent the entire class with Sebastian who was both blonder and younger than my son. Edward was very troubled that she would not hold his hand anymore and could not understand why she would kiss Sebastian instead of him.

When he came home from class, he took a longer than usual nap. That evening he didn’t pick on his brother except for a few times of pulling his hair.

I was, of course, devastated by the news. How could she I wondered. Was my son just a stepping stone for the shallow end of the pool? You have such little time to give your children the advice they need to handle the world. You won’t be there for all of the heartbreaks. I can only hope that Edward reached down into his small list of words, and after going past things like “apple” and “blue” would come to say what his father told him. 

Shit.

Wear To Now

I was in line at the supermarket and at the counter was Marie Claire magazine with the headline 20 beauty hacks. While normally I would be upset about how badly the word hack is being used - 20 beauty hacks is something a serial killer would do - I was more amazed by how much technology has wandered into lifestyle.  The world’s runways are lit by cell phones.

It is going to get more intrusive.

Two of the biggest tech companies, Apple and Google, over the last year or so have announced their plans for wearable computing. While normally there is convergence in the tech world, this time each has their own idea about how to chain you to their ecosystem.

Google’s is to extend the computer screen to your permanent vision by making the wearable be eyeglasses. Their ideal is the movie Terminator in which given a situation a list of options can appear. The eye glass will know where you are and what you need. The price is that Google gets to know everything about you.

Apple’s is to wrap a pager around your wrist as a watch. Their ideal is Babylon 5 in which everyone communicates by tapping their hand. The watch will monitor your health and ring your friends. The price is that it is going to be expensive.

The differences mirror their approach to mobile apps. Google has built out Android to mimic the flow of webpages being downloaded from the server. Central to its navigation is the back button which is similar to the back button on a web browser. Google wants you to surf ideas. They want you to wander.

Apple wants you to live locally. There isn’t a back button or any distracting widget, there is only the app you are currently in, and they want to make those as powerful as desktop applications. They have added rich database support to locally store your information and deep libraries that take advantage of the phones sensors. Apple’s truth is the bird in the hand, not the cloud. They tend to mess up when they go to the server and the launches of Maps, MobileMe, and Ping were all problematic.

The question for wearables is what do you want to see when.

I do like Apple’s philosophy of self inspection more than Google’s world awareness since I would rather have less intrusion than more. But there those times, say a job interview, where getting the answers you need immediately would be useful. At some level using Google Glass to assist driving would be great, but there is also the danger of paying more attention to an incoming text than a pedestrian. Perhaps Google will figure out the right balance of when to update, but this will take time.

My main issue with watches in general is that I break them all the time; their faces are patchworks of scratches. I go through watches at a far faster rate than glasses. When I purchase a $30 Casio, that doesn’t matter as much, but with these things coming in at over $400 the effect will be brutal

But to be able to signal my wife it is time to leave a party or that I love her could be great. Still we already have our silent language of nods.

I am aware that I am too old for their target audience just as I was too old for text messaging, and that was a decade ago. But I do feel someday soon I will get announcement on a wearable device about a company’s upcoming hackathon. All I will be thinking is that they really meant the word overtime.

The Waves

My son went to the Pacific for the first time near Stinson Beach. He can’t really walk without support, but grasping my fingers he charged right into the sea. He has no notion of swimming or for that matter basic safety. He wanted to dart into the waves, to go into the unknown.

I am job hunting again, a process similar to speed dating but without the intimacy. There is a habit of some shops to try to stump the candidate. They ask about a technical api or some arcane part of language that can be answered, usually, in four minutes in a web search and it is as if their main hiring requirement is to make sure that their programmers will work when the internet goes down. The truth is that when the network goes away everybody goes out for coffee, so the fear is a little misguided.

You can always find something that somebody doesn’t know, and as such that isn’t the mark of a good interviewer. What is more impressive is trying to find out what it is like when someone is over their heads, when they rushed their ocean and the waves were bigger than they were - how do we handle struggle.

I flail most of the time. I want to pretend that I could be calm, that I would handle the crisis with an even demeanor, but the truth is that when things get hard, there is mostly panic. I want to pretend that there isn’t fear, but that is as silly as pretending that the ocean doesn’t exist.

I can sometimes ground myself in my memory - that I have some sense as I tumble about which way is up. I remind myself that I have survived other job hunts and other bad jobs. I remember to breathe.

This time is different. Someone else’s tiny hand holds mine. These days I don’t need a life preserver for myself as much as a raft for my family.

My son has a giggly laugh when he gets excited. He has my mouth and my wife’s eyes which crinkle with joy. He loves the ocean. He loves bananas, blueberries, yogurt and chicken. He loves his grandmothers though he has no idea what the word “grandmother” means. He loves chewing on a plastic bath toy. He loves chewing on paper.

We will go back to the ocean soon. We will take lessons on how to swim. I will try to teach him not to put sand in his mouth. He will teach me to giggle at the waves.

Seeking Stability

I played a game with Carter’s daughter where you alternated placing metal sticks that hooked together ever outwards into space. As the rounds progressed the structure grew. Any piece that fell while you were placing had to go back into your pile. Winners were determined by who got rid of their pieces first.

I think we split the games for most of my stay.

I don’t know if a 45 year old should feel proud of beating a 10 year old, but she was the kind of competitor that wanted you to play your best. She has the geometric intuition that I had at her age, the kind that senses how things tilt less by math than by feel. My insights have started to fade, but only a little.

With each move we could make the structure more or less stable depending on whether we used the sticks as cross beams or counter balances. Chloe, the daughter, loved order and symmetry. She played for aesthetics. Thinking that the mess had an equal chance on falling on either of us, I played for chaos.

I think Chloe would have always played for order - she seemed to be constantly organizing her older siblings - but I think she needed order even more now. Her father, my best friend from high school, was having problems with his treatment for stage four lung cancer.

While there are no good versions of the disease, his particular kind has a receptor that can be attacked. There are a series of drugs that are coming out that fight the disease back. But the effectiveness of any one drug seems to last for a little more than a year. He has to keep switching the drugs and hope the treatment he is on will last until the next drug becomes available for humans. He is ticking through drug number 2.

The side effects are getting to him. The cancer has metathised to his brain and, for lack of a better analogy, has started messing with the software. He has dizzy spells and cotton mouth. The day before I arrived he collapsed and during the ride to the hospital he felt paralyzed. After a few hours resting in the ER, he felt fine. No one has an idea what happened and he is being tested next week by five different doctors.

He seemed fine the first day. I worried that he was trying to hard to be with me. He asked me to come a couple of weeks earlier when things were a little darker - the word “soon” that he left on my voicemail had a certain kind of italics - but the Carter of day one was almost energetic.

He asked during the call that we not talk about cancer, and so I did my best to bring up the teetering of my own world - the instability of software startups and the challenges of taking care of a newborn. Our personal cross beams are our wives, but sometimes the pile of things to worry about in your forties can seem so much larger than what you worried at 10.

We talked about Obama Care, the Tea Party, and supply side taxation. We discussed Kobe Bryant, Barry Bonds, the Lakers, and the Niners. We traded TV show suggestions - (mine was Episodes; his was Almost Human). We chatted about parenting which segued into sending kids to public or private schools. I told bad puns. We wandered back into being the sophomores we were when we first met, the kind where philosophy on capital systems or favorite bands was meant to be an endurance test. We stayed up late for west coast time.

The next day he needed a bit more space, and I played a few games with his wife and children. His eldest son is now an atheist who plays a ton of video games. We chatted a bit about the game Civilization, but I could sense his disappointment when I went for cultural victories instead of scientific. His middle daughter was shy and spent most of the time in her room. That left Chloe and our on going battles of order versus instability.

I decided that this game needed new rules. She was a little surprised that you could just make them up. She pointed to the side of the box that had them listed with diagrams of how the yellows could go a certain way that was much different than the reds.

I told her that we could try adding a rule for one round and if that didn’t work out remove it. At first she was horrified; the only thing worse than adding rules was removing them. She then allowed it on a trial basis.

The next round she added a rule of her own.

Just before leaving Carter and his wife joined us, and Chloe explained our vast system of challenges and double rolls. That round I came in last and I was quite okay losing, because to me it meant knowing that perhaps however small we could change the rules towards something that was not going to collapse as easy if only for a February afternoon.

The Physics of Time and Gravity.

Days have become probabilistic. At any hour I could be asleep or awake. Three o’clock in the morning and four thirty in the afternoon have bled together separated only by electricity. Time has been broken into three hour chunks which starts with feeding and ends with a diaper change. These repeat again, again, again, and again.

My wife and I have our pacifiers - not just the rubbery ones we stick in our son’s mouth. I need to code and o go to Boulange for a mocha every morning. Warm milk and iOS 7 api’s sooths me. I miss work or more of the abstraction of it. I miss the concept of sticking with something for more than thirty minutes, I miss building and designing, and I miss collaborating on a white board.

My wife misses being a manager. Sometimes she would try it out on me. Then she decided to hire one of her former workers to help organize things in the back of closets and papers deep in boxes.

We both think each other is crazy. We bicker more about things small and vast. We fret over how much time a shower should take. We worried if our son is gaining weight. We try to be as supportive as we can, and it isn’t nearly enough. Our baby cries, my wife cries, and I bluster. These repeat again, again, and again.

We learn about the outside world through cracks. Everybody used to be worried about the Syrian Government now they are worried about our own. I used to think Walter White broke bad because of lung cancer, and now I wonder if it was because he had an infant on the way.

My wife and I did escape yesterday to see the movie Gravity. It stars George Clooney and Sandra Bullock as two astronauts floating above the earth. In my dreams it stars ourselves, or certainly better looking versions of ourselves. We are tethered together aloft. Every ninety minutes the world crashes and we improvise with small jokes and physic problems.

The thing about the movie is that as desperate as it gets (and we lose our breath the same way that Sandra does) around the corners it is beautiful. You watch the sun come up over the earth’s horizon. You see the storm clouds of the day and light ganglions at night. Everything floats as if it is swimming with the stars.

A few weeks in, I am not sure if parenting is meant to be enjoyed only at the edges. I love my son’s smile, his vast repertoire of breathing noises, and how happy he gets when he reaches out to hit a blue monkey doll. I loved taking him to a coffee shop to meet his grandfather. I love his farts.

There are moments of beauty in between the disasters. His crying has broken my wife and I on consecutive nights. It isn’t the size of the shriek, but the endurance of it. Our previous goto methods of swalddling and singing mostly middle period Beatles songs aren’t working as well, and we keep trying to come up with new ideas if not to distract him then at least ourselves from the fact only thing up at the hour besides us are raccoons. We share the black circles around our eyes.

Soon the infant orbit will end, and the toddler one with start, followed by the terrible twos. The rules will keep changing. We will try our best to stick together, tethered aloft above it all.

The boy in the bubble

I wanted to believe in a bubble. It wasn’t the financial or technical bubble for I have seen those both burst, but rather a personal protective bubble. I wanted to believe that you couldn’t be let go of your job four weeks before your kid arrives, that there is some bend in the universe that would protect you, and that a company that talks about being a family would understand the need when you were starting your own.

I was wrong.

Silicon Valley might be developing the newest society in the world, but is steals from one of the oldest. There is a culture of cannibalism; the place eats its old and infirmed. Innovation requires speed. Every technology will ultimately be replaced so the faster you can build a new one the more life you can give it at the start. And in order to be fast you need to cut those who can’t keep up, those who go with their wife to the doctor to discuss a c-section, those that want a few weeks off for paternity.

My kid arrives tomorrow.

I want a bubble around us to protect us from the scary world. I want our own healthy air, our own blankets for naps, our own quiet place.

The short weeks since I parted with the company have been spent power nesting. We have skateboard tape on our stairs, stickers on our walls, and cushy surfaces everywhere for changing or sleeping. We made a will and made sure the brakes of the car are up to date. We have read books and attended classes. We have slept in and exercised. We wait.

The job loss stings, but I am very lucky. My father built a bubble around me. We live in one of his houses and I get insurance through him. The c section will be paid for. I will get a chance to help my wife, to be the errand guy, to be the co changer, to feel my kid rest on me, and to spend a little moment outside the river of tech.

I keep getting asked whether I am ready to be a dad, and I don’t think there is a good answer. I know I have no concept of what it takes, and I also know that people in my position haven’t had a clue for millions of years and at least some of them came out okay. I know that I will make a ton of mistakes and that I can’t protect or provide everything. There isn’t a bubble.

What I do have is time. Perhaps not full power parenting time - I am going to need to keep slivers for my sanity and certainly nights away when I can date my wife. I want to spend time so that I get to know who my son is and will be. That I can figure out what makes him laugh, to find out what makes him passionate, and to help him as best I can. At times we will disagree, he will push my limits, or I will be harsher that I should be. It is highly likely a decade and a half from now he will think I am incredibly lame (and a good chance that he thinks that of my humor by the time he turns 4). But I hope later he will recognize the love and hope I want to pour into him.

I know I appreciate how much I received, how much I was helped. There isn’t enough I can do to honor my dad., but the best I can do is to name my son after the man who has meant the most to me.

These are the days of miracle and wonder.

And don't cry baby, don't cry.

-Arthur

Dog days of August

One turns a palindrome every 11 years, yet the distance between now and 33 feels closer than the one from 22 to 33. 33 was at is own cusp - a few weeks before the towers fell, a few months from my bank imploding in the dot com bust, and a few days after swimming from alcatraz for the first time. But I live now only 50 feet from my 30’s apartment. I traded working cramped around a trading desk in the Bank of America building to working cramped around a start up table trying to build a mobile app.

The difference is that my workspace now has dogs not phones. As part of the Hamms Building’s quest to become a tech incubator they allow dogs for their tenants. Ours is a small yapping ball that nibbles on visitors. She is taking obedience classes to try to teach to her that she is a dog even if she is the most spoken to thing in the office. Similarly my boss has a group of venture capitalist to teach him how to play fetch. Everybody has a master even if nobody has a land line.

The issue arrives when there are multiple dogs in the same elevator; I have learned to push myself towards the back while the growling escalates. Everyone believes that theirs are perfectly well behaved, but being in cramped quarters changes things. In the event of a fire the people with dogs are supposed to wait until the ones without have exited, but I have no doubt that when the flames are blaring that anyone is going to be polite.

The mobile world feels like there are too many dogs trapped in the same elevator. There is only so much territory for peoples attention and with thousands of apps on millions of phones only a few on going to survive. The earnings reports are starting to smell.

Still it is necessary to pretend that one’s own will work. At 22 I believed more than I do now, but I also thought then that no one programmed over 30. Or if they were programmers they didn’t do anything cool.

I do know that at 55 I will think I was as naive at 44 as a was at 22, but what I realize now is that there aren’t that many cool parts to programming. A good portion of it is learning how to dig out of a hole or preferably to have the communication skills so you don’t put yourself into one. But (and I do feel lucky) there are those handful of moments when an idea works, when I do feel brilliant, and that is why I take the smelly elevator everyday.

55 will be different than 44. Perhaps I will write a piece about the speed limit, only to be questioned what a car is. Perhaps I will have moved another 50 feet. I do hope for the impossible dream of getting just a bit more desk space at work, but I am glad now that the major difference between 33 and 44 is that I have someone to share the hours after work in a less smelly place we call home.

Music and Lyrics

My second solo iOS app isn’t doing very well.

I spent a grand on advertising and made 5 dollars of revenue. A trip to vegas would have been more successful though probably more hazy. With software development you can remember the exact steps you made which makes it the opposite of a hangover.

The first mistake I made is that I believe I missed the product niche. Making your own iBook is nice, but if you want to build a quality one you would use a pro tool like in design or ibook author. If you just want to send your friends photos you can do it from the camera app, or the Facebook app, or instagram, or hipstamatic, or iMessage etc. Low end sharing is pretty well solved. That doesn’t even go into companies like Flickr or Shutterfly who are desperately trying to state relevant.

The second mistake I made is that app wasn’t playful. At no point (other than flicking pages which was all apple) did the app feel fun or cute. I believe that if you can’t say something true, say something funny.

So to combine the two is to say that I made a product that people weren’t clamoring for and weren’t thrilled to use, which is a bit like saying I wrote a song whose only problems were the music and the lyrics.

The hard part is that I really like my own app. There are some great parts - like a chorus that works even if the rest of the song doesn’t. I think I will be right in that the ePub market is going to take off and there weren’t any great low end tools for it. That changed when Apple launched iBooks Author last month.

After that elephant wandering into the room, I have tried my best, solicited as many opinions about the first as I could, and push several updates to the store to try to make the app more appealing, but I have only ever received one book made with my app which was from my brother. He never used the app again.

I feel I have made the google+ of ePub apps.

And so I am left trying to figure out a new song. I think being entirely indie is too hard for me. It is a bit like trying to be Prince and play all of the instruments on a given record. I know that I good at some parts and that I should keep slugging away at the next new thing.

And I guess if that doesn’t work, I should consider vegas.