JUNETEENTHprideFATHERSDAYrecovery

There is a snapshot of me at about 2 years old, perched on my seated father's extended leg like a jockey on a horse. My hands are held loosely in his. My father’s hair reaches his collar, appropriate for a liberal academic in the early 1970s. He has full sideburns, an audacity that once made my grandmother exclaim, “Why, Charlie! You look like a hippie.” 

We are in the living room in St. Paul next to the antique Danish spinning wheel and clogs my parents took with them from continent to continent on their student missionary travels. On the wall behind us is an explorer’s map of the eastern hemisphere, framed and hung as decoration.

In the old snapshot, I’m grinning broadly as my dad bounces me up and down, singing the French country tune “A da da! Sur le cheval de bon papa”

Sometimes, in the evenings, my father would sit in the basement and listen to his record collection, which ranged from symphonies to choral music to Peter, Paul and Mary and the Beatles. 

When I was eight, my dad taught me the basics of drafting and carpentry—his own fathers’s trade—building a sturdy plywood and lumber playhouse for me in the back yard, complete with a pitched, tar shingled roof. 

My parents had traveled the globe and taught me how to have sincere conversation and share a meal as comfortably with a Hmong refugee from war-torn Laos as with a member of Congress. I was taught which fork to use, the purpose of a caviar spoon, and what to say or not say to a server during a six-course meal. I also learned to eat fried okra with my hands, and how to dig into a pot of fiery hot stewed chicken using a handful of sticky rice as a utensil. 

My father taught me the art of storytelling. My childhood friends and I would beg him again and again to tell us about the time grandaddy Johnson got four flat tires. My family’s oral history was rich. 

The night I came out to my father as gay, he wept and embraced me, not completely understanding what it all meant, but affirming me as a worthy and loved young man.

For all of this, I am grateful. 

I am grateful for my father's simple humility. He recognized his own faults and was familiar with the words "I'm sorry”. 

He taught my five elder siblings and me that emotional vulnerability could be a man's strength, not his weakness. Emotionality was ok. In our home, it was permissible for a man to cry. More than once, my father reminded me that being a pacifist doesn’t make one a passive-ist. 

He was finally felled by the ravages of a disease he passed on to me through genes and by behavior—the disease of alcoholism and addiction. But my father died sober and spent the last years of his life as an active member of Alcoholics Anonymous. I remember, during his fading days, asking my father about the AA process of making amends. 

He told me he was dying with nothing unresolved, no aching wrong unaddressed. He said that forgiveness was an essential part of loving someone, and forgiveness was greatest gift I could give anyone, including myself.

Today I honor him.

Pick an Institution

Recovery Journal 

February 17th, 2019

For me, living in a homeless shelter in a smallish American town is a hybrid between normal life and bedlam. It is akin, I am told by those here who know from personal experience, to living in military barracks, and akin in even more ways to life in prison. 

There is greater turnover here than at the federal correctional facility at the other end of Lompoc, California. And here, there are children, always crying, whining, delightful. They scurry beneath tables and around the rows of metal bunk beds, their hands and faces colored with magic marker or jam, their hair unkempt and damp from rain and vigorous jumping and whirling and twirling on the derelict playground outside the shelter’s main building. The older children go off to school each morning and reappear late in the afternoon. The younger ones are pushed around on strollers or hiked on hips or kept in cribs in the family apartments across from the shelter’s main hall. I stay in the main hall with the men who fifty years ago were known as “winos” and the women who, during the same era, were called “fallen.”

Lompoc is on the Central California coast, an hour north of glamorous Santa Barbara. It’s known as the City of Flowers and Arts. Once the flower seed capital of the world, it’s home to many small wineries. But now that it’s legal, marijuana is exploding as the region’s crop of choice. And three notable institutions, with interests in drugs and outer space, border the flat, sleepy town. 

There’s Vandenberg Air Force Special Command base, part of the United States Space force. Regular launches include a recent send-up of a new US spy satellite. 

Nearby is a low-security Federal Correctional Institution, which holds non-violent drug offenders and white collar criminals. Lompoc prison is notable for a 1980 escape by a convicted spy who sold US satellite information to the Soviets. The story was the basis for the movie Falcon and the Snowman. The prison currently holds a former Boeing engineer who sold classified US Space Shuttle and Delta IV rocket secrets to the Chinese. 

And then, here on the far end of town across the Santa Ynez river, is the Bridgehouse homeless shelter where I stay. At any given time, the shelter is home to a hundred or more men, women and children. It’s a “dry” shelter, meaning we’re given regular, random drug tests. A fair number of the residents have been through the US corrections system. There are Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings held in the shelter on various nights of the week. These meetings are well-attended. In addition, since I got here, I trudge or bicycle or catch rides with my fellow Bridgehouse residents to recovery meetings at several dingy but cozy storefront sites in town. 

Today, I rode a borrowed bike to two meetings in Lompoc, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Both were attended by grizzled, plain-dressed men (no fallen women today) with rutted, ruddied completions but good jokes to tell. The weather was dismal. The coffee was hot, sweet and lousy. And there was a palpable feeling of God in both of the rooms. I got drenched riding to the first meeting and walked in sputtering and late, my shoes squishing and noisy as I crossed the chipped tile floor and took a seat along the back wall. 

We went around the room and each spoke for a few minutes. We were addressed by name. Four weeks into small-town meetings, everybody knows my name. Most of them know my story. I don’t fit it, except yes I do. Based on my blessings and my flaws, which are equivalent to every other single person in attendance.

After my second meeting, it was twilight, and I sat a while on the porch making telephone calls and looking out at the rolling hills of Mission Valley. It was chilly and, somehow, both raining and sunny. And the moon was out. The collision of unlikely weather and celestial bodies was a metaphor, I decided, for Lompoc and my experience of it.

Then it was time for church, where soup and bread are served, and Pastor Brian gave a sermon on how we’re all just here for a short time, in God’s long view of things, and how there’s comfort to be taken in that.