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.

The Beatles had it right

A couple of nights ago, I sat at one of the long folding tables in the main room at here at the Bridgehouse Homeless Shelter in Lompoc, California and talked with Abuelita Cassandra over a cup of coffee. Her bunk is on the women’s side, directly across from mine. She’s older, thick waisted with a bulbous nose, but has fiery eyes and sits with sharp upright posture. She’s hard of hearing, some days more profoundly than others. Cassandra’s snow-white, upturned bouffant makes her look like a painting of one of the founding fathers. 

This abuela was born and raised in Santa Barbara. Her papa was a gardener. The family’s house, she told me, was in a good neighborhood. It was large, two stories tall, with smooth polished floors and green trim around the doors and windows. There were dogs and cats and chickens. Cassandra had her own pet, a loudmouth goat who followed her around like a puppy. The goat died when she was eight years old. Her mother never told her how, or why. It was Cassandra’s first experience with life’s impermanence.

Abuelita Cassandra lost her mother six months ago. Shortly thereafter, her husband had a fatal heart attack. Then, a few weeks later, her son succumbed to an aggressive cancer. Cassandra got the news while in the hospital with a brain aneurysm that seems determined to move around and remains, today, a pressing concern (no pun intended.)

 “I’m here,” she told me, gesturing with fingers fat as stuffed grape leafs, “because I need to be around people. People who give a damn.”

This was a revelation. It had never occurred to me that anyone would actually volunteer to stay at a homeless shelter. It’s always seemed to me to be the end of the line, the last fragile bit of a safety net before a plunge into oblivion.

“The people you meet here,” said a young man, sitting down beside us and running a hand through his imperfect mohawk, “they get it. They understand the value of home. The value of family, you know? Out there, we take that shit for granted until it’s gone. Until you’re on your own. Tell you one thing, jefe, nobody here takes home for granted.”

The people I meet in the shelter melt into family almost immediately, with the willingness and appetite of the starving. Because we are all hungry for love, all hungry for belonging, every person alive. But many of us grow complacent in our appreciation for what we’ve got. Complacency, at a homeless shelter, is not an option. Everything here in in vivid focus, both our surplus and our lack. And while there’s a lack of material things and assurance of consistency every single day, there’s a surplus of love. 

All you need is love.

Love is all you need.

That’s the only assurance we have in life; if we are open to love, if we put ourselves in love’s path and refuse to budge, we will receive it in abundant measure. 

I have never met human beings as willing to offer love and kindness and a sense of home as the homeless. 

At dinner last night, I sat at one of the tables with a young mother and father and their three kids. We were all bundled against the cold. Mom was crumbing crackers into the kids’ soup. Dessert that evening was an enormous, donated pan full of chocolate muffins in paper cups. There were three bowls of frosting—chocolate, strawberry and cream cheese—and plastic utensils for spreading. One of the little girls had dolloped her muffin with pink goo and was proceeding to use her little plastic knife to decorate her own face with the sugary fluff. I talked to her gently about table manners, and how big girls didn’t raise table knives to their face, and knives certainly didn’t go into their mouths; that was the job of spoons and forks.

“Thank you,” the dad said, watching. Then he added, with a laugh, “Bienvenido a nuestra casa. Welcome to our house.”

And in the end, the love you take

Is equal to the love you make.