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.

Lump Oak

My time here is finished. For now, at least. 

Lump Oak—that’s what my telephone’s speech-to-text tool wants to call this place, though I know it better as Lompoc. Or the Mission Valley. The City of Flowers and Arts. The City of broken down greenhouses and no more flowers. The city of hardscrabble people and liquor stores and dusty minivans and muffler dealers and chickens wandering though barren fields at the edge of town and wind always wind always wind, whistling, pushing-pulling-shouting at you.

I found my sobriety here in Lompoc during a month in a homeless shelter I can hardly stand, a shelter I also love. My sobriety, too, I can hardly stand and also love. Dearly. I’ve got to love it dearly or I can’t put up with it. Like a husband or wife or child. Like anything. 

This shelter makes me curse and sputter at those who curse and sputter. I put on my headphones and walk in circles around the enormous parking lot listening to public radio and 12-step podcasts. I go for miles, buffeted by wind, dampened by rain from a sky that weeps tenfifteentwenty times each day in little jags instead of in one triumphant bout. I go until my knees ache and my shoes are soaked and then I get on my borrowed bicycle and ride off whispering, seething “willingness, motherfuckers, willingness” from my sluggish, bluish lips on my way to another meeting, onetwothree a day, where there is blistering hot coffee and well-mopped linoleum and a list of promises written nearly a century ago that say that if I follow these principles in all my affairs, that before I’m even halfway through I’ll be rocketed into a new dimension.

Tomorrow I’ll be rocketed to Pasadena, California in a small truck driven by Pastor Brian, taken for an assessment at what I’m told is an idyllic sanatorium-style recovery hospital for drunks and addicts. I’ll meet a counselor there, and then a psychiatrist. With luck, they’ll take me. 

I hope to be deemed workable, not one of those who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. 

My constitution here in Lump Oak is strong. As is my will, which is not necessarily a good thing when it becomes necessary to give one’s self over to this simple program. Or this complicated program. Or anything directed not by self-will. 

Honesty with myself? I’m doing my best. (Which isn’t all that spectacular.) Most days I stop short of making others guffaw. So I suppose I’m doing okay.

This afternoon, the Air Force Base sent Bridgehouse a surplus crate of fleece-lined, all weather military dress coats. They're well made and sturdy with wide double breasts, thick sashes, and rows of buttons down the front. This was a chilly drizzly day, so we passed the coats out immediately and everyone put them on, turning the room into a ragtag squadron of WWII spies and private detectives. Men and women young and old leaned against invisible lamp posts and spouted made-up film noir dialogue. It was London, or Hollywood, and we were glamourous. And toasty.

A few hours later, on my last night here at the shelter, a group of Harley-Davidson Bikers for Jesus came to grill up hamburgers along with a sharp warning to accept Christ as Lord and Savior or we’d end up in the lake of fire with Satan. 

There were some hiccups during the preparation of the meal and the process took longer than expected. It was already half an hour past normal dinnertime when the jowly motorcycle pastor wearing baseball cap stood up in front of us. He cracked open his worn Bible, cleared his throat, and started in with pre-meal fire and brimstone. 

We sat hungry and unamused, most of us still dressed as spies and gumshoes in our fancy coats. Stomaches rumbled, expressions were sour, and one look around made it plain that ministering to the woebegone was headed south fast. 

Aware of this, a potbellied biker with a straggly beard grabbed a bag of Hershey’s Kisses and started walking through the crowd, handing chocolates to the women and children to keep them quiet. 

The pastor droned on a while. Then food was passed, first to the women, then the children and finally to us men. It took an eternity. By the time I was handed a plate, the burger was dry and shriveled. Forlorn. It seemed to have been lost in the wilderness for forty years. Perhaps with the Israelites. 

I nodded and muttered clumsy appreciation nonetheless. At this, the pastor beamed, his eyes twinkling beneath his low-slung cap. He lay a thick hand on mine. And suddenly, whatever distance had existed between us fell away. Jesus was indeed Lord and Savior. And the burger was delicious by default. 

Willingness, motherfuckers, willingness. And Jesus. And a full belly. And a fancy coat and a warm bed.

Goodnight, Lump Oak. I’ll miss you.