I run for me.

To be healthy. To feel better. To look better. To live longer. To be able to eat and drink more of what I want and still be fit. I run because both my grandfathers and my father had heart attacks before they turned 60. To paraphrase Christopher McDougall in Born To Run paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw, “You don’t stop running because you get old. You get old because you stop running.”

I run for my wife.

To have more energy. To be hotter. To be better in bed.

I run for my kids.

To play more energetically with them. To show them being active is good for you and fun. To survive long enough to see them move out and build their own lives.

I run for my grandkids.

To meet the grandkids I may one day have, and be able to play with them, too.

I run for you.

This came later. I didn’t start out running for you. No offense. I like you. But you’re not why I started to run (unless you’re listed above). But as I’ve been doing it, and sharing my experience here, and on Twitter, and on dailymile, I’ve found it feels great when people tell me I inspired them to run, or walk, or get off the couch. And that, that sense of community, that evidence that doing what’s best for me can inspire someone to do what’s best for them, that is by far the most unexpected benefit of running. So for that, thank you.

See you out there.

This is a companion piece to one the nice folks at dailymile graciously allowed me to post on the dailymile community blog, where I talk more about running barefoot and in Vibram Fivefingers, and about becoming a runner in general.

Christmas snuck up on me this year. It often does, and I know I’m not alone. The older I get, the faster time accelerates. I fully expect to wake up any day and find out it’s 2025. Which will be cool, because surely by then we’ll be able to teleport.

But Christmas snuck up on me in a new way this year. It snuck up on me in the form of Owen, almost four and 1/2, asking questions about God. Pesky Christmas carols.

Lisa and I are both singers, so when the holiday season rolls around, you’ll find us humming, whistling, and often belting out one Christmas carol or another. We even sing the occasional Hanukkah song, and I’m told I do a pretty decent Grinch. So there we were, innocently trading verses of Joy To The World, and I get to the part about “He rules the world, with truth and grace.”

Owen: “Who?”

Me: “Who what?”

Owen: “Who rules the world?”

Me: “He does.”

Owen: “He who?”

Me: “He God.”

Owen: “Hegod?”

Me: “No, God. Just God.”

Owen: “Who’s God?”

Me (inside my head): “Fuck. Really? Have we actually not covered this? Shit, I guess we haven’t. Crap, crap, crap. What do I say? I totally should have rehearsed this.”

Me (out loud, nodding head and looking thoughtful): ” … ”

Owen: “Who’s God?”

Me (still looking thoughtful): “Uh.”

Owen: “Can I watch TV?”

Me: “Totally! What do you want to watch?”

Ha! Dodged that bullet. Barely. And clearly we can’t leave this question unanswered. The kid needs to know who/what God is, but here’s the rub: I’m not sure I know who/what God is. More to the point, I don’t believe there is a God. At least, not in the Judeo-Christian, monotheistic, omnipotent, personified sense of the word.

I suppose this makes me an atheist. I have a hard time calling myself an atheist, because in modern American culture, calling yourself an atheist is a like proclaiming yourself as some kind of activist. It implies advocacy. Membership in a club. Part of the reason I’m an atheist is because I don’t really want to be in any of the clubs. I just don’t believe there’s a God. Which, by definition, means I’m an atheist. So there you are.

My wife and I are in different places about this. As I mentioned in my anniversary post, I basically excised Jesus from our wedding. Lisa didn’t fight me on this, but if it were left to her she wouldn’t have done it. We don’t go to church or actively practice religion, but if you ask her, she’ll tell you she believes in God. She was raised Christian. She went to Sunday school and attended church with her parents. I wasn’t, and didn’t. My family celebrated Christmas and Easter in our secular-humanist/consumerist way, but God didn’t much factor in.

So we come from different angles, but we’re not THAT far apart. My moral and ethical sense is basically in line with Christianity. Love thy neighbor, do unto others, have a few hundred wives, and live to be 350. All this stuff sounds OK to me. And as I said, I’m not an activist atheist. If you believe in God, that’s cool. I’m not going to try and talk you out of that belief. Unless you try and talk me in to something, in which case we may have a problem. A friend of mine who actually is Christian has a great bumper sticker on his refrigerator door (because there’s no way he’s sticking it on his Audi). It’s attributed to Gandhi and says “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.” This isn’t why I don’t believe in God, but it goes a long way toward why I don’t spend much time in church. That, and the whole don’t-believe-in-God thing. That tends to get in the way for the Christians. Apparently it’s not a requirement for the Jews, though, so there’s always that route. But I’m getting off track.

So, back to the issue at hand. What to tell my son about God? God is an important concept to understand, regardless what you believe. You can’t live in the world and not know what God is. So, like saying please and thank you, crossing the street, and the Beatles, I need to teach my son about God. And at some point he’ll need to make up his own mind about whether he thinks there is such a thing. But that’s for later. For starters, he needs to know what it means.

As you might expect, my escape from this discussion was short-lived. It wasn’t long before Owen brought it up again, likely in response to some other Christmas carol–related incident. But this time, I was slightly more prepared.

Owen: “Who is God?”

Me: “OK. You know that episode of The Backyardigans where Pablo and Tyrone go up above the clouds to see the goddess of weather to ask her to make it stop raining so they can play basketball?

Owen: “Yeah.”

Me: “And while they’re there they meet the goddess of naps and the god of laughter?”

Owen: “Yeah.”

Me: “Well, some people believe there’s just one God in charge of everything.”

Owen: “Oh. OK. Is there?”

Me (inside my head): “Fuck.”

Me (out loud): “Some people think so. Some people believe … different things.”

Owen: “Do you think so, or do you believe … different things?”

Me: “Well, I guess I believe … different things.”

And he basically let it go at that. For now. I’m sure this won’t be the last conversation we have about it, so I’m sorting out how to help him understand, so when it does come up again, I’m more prepared. I can’t fake this. I need an honest, true answer for my son about God. I think I’ll tell him I don’t believe there is such a being, but a lot of people do, and the truth is, I don’t really know.

I mentioned this to my friend Becky, who has three girls and has been my friend since junior high.

Becky: “Hm. That’s a tough one. Wait till he asks where you go when you die. I like, ‘When you die, you go back to where you were before you were born.’”

Me (channeling Owen): “In mommy’s tummy?”

Becky: “Before that.”

Me (still channeling Owen): “In daddy’s penis?”

She’s gonna need to flesh out this line of reasoning, I think. For my part, I’m open to any and all suggestions or advice.

This is my first entry in the Write-Of-Passage Writing Well Challenge. Like Mrs. Flinger, whose brainchild this challenge is, I like good writing. I read blogs to get a sense of the personalities behind them, but mostly I read them for stories. Well told stories. Yes, this includes using reasonably good English and not murdering spelling and grammar. But (and don’t believe anyone who says you aren’t allowed to start a sentence with a conjunction) it’s more about using language to engage readers and evoke an emotional response.

Anyway, I’m all about good writing and shit. So, I thought, sure, I’ll take the challenge. The first challenge was to describe your most embarrassing moment.

Some of the stories other writers in the challenge have shared are really brilliant. There are links to them at the end of this post so you can see what I mean. Reading them and wracking my brain, I honestly couldn’t come up with a single good story about an embarrassing moment. The few I did come up with paled in comparison to the gems shared by others. Try as I might to exhume a hilarious anecdote about public nudity, flatulence, or general buffoonery, I either had a very high tolerance for embarrassment or I’ve successfully blocked out those parts of my life. There’s no way I was cool enough to avoid them, but I just can’t come up with any.

So, I’m skipping right over run-of-the-mill embarrassment to abject humiliation. Why not go all the way, right? This is a post I’ve been trying to figure out how to write for a long time, and maybe this was the trigger I needed. Here goes.

Junior high sucks. This is a fact like gravity is a fact. You can fight it, but sooner or later it’ll drag you down. Some have it better than others, but for most people there are few times in life more full of awkwardness, confusion and despair than adolescence. Plenty had it worse than I did. I wasn’t one of the popular kids, but I wasn’t an outcast. I was smart, I did well in my classes, and I had friends. Good friends, I thought.

When I was nine, my parents got divorced. Their divorce was not the horror show some could describe. I never heard them fight. I never saw my mother cry or my father storm out. No doors were slammed, nobody got hit, and when it was over we could all still be in the same room together and be basically decent to each other.

My parents were fairly evolved about how they handled their split. Both veterans of the EST training, precursor of today’s Landmark Forum, they were steeped in self awareness and understanding your true motivations and being honest with yourself and all that self-actualized crap. Taken to extremes this can be crazy making, but in moderation there are plenty of worse ways to approach life.

Having done all that self exploration, when the paths of their lives diverged, my parents were pretty grown up about it, as much as my nine-year old self could tell. By the time we kids found out they were splitting up, they’d been discussing it for at least a year and had made the decision to go their separate ways. For many kids my age, this might have prompted a tortured exploration of why this happened. Did my parents not love each other anymore? Did I do something to break the family apart? Why, why, why?

But I knew why. My father told me why. My parents were getting divorced because my father was gay.

“Do you know what it means to be gay?” he asked as we stood alone in his bathroom. He’d just explained to me and my two younger brothers, six and three, that he and my mother were going to be splitting up, then asked me to stay while they went off to play.

“Yes,” I said. And I did, basically. I’m not sure exactly what I knew, or how I knew it, but I had the basic idea. It was the 80s. Reagan was president, AIDS was in the news and gay people were on TV. My parents were both singers and theater people, and had plenty of gay friends. So I knew what it meant to be gay as much as I knew what it meant to be straight in my prepubescent nine-year old way.

“I’m gay,” he went on. He said that was why they were getting divorced. They still loved each other very much, and loved us boys very much, but he was attracted to men, not women, and said he needed to be honest about that and live his life accordingly. I’m paraphrasing now. He said something like that, but after your dad says “I’m gay,” things go a little staticky for a while. He asked if I had any questions and I said I didn’t, and I asked if I could go play, and he said yes.

My memory of that conversation is clear, but the days, weeks, and months after are a blur. My life changed significantly. We moved to a new house. My mom started dating someone almost right away. And I had this new weight on me I hadn’t carried before. My parents were divorced, and my dad was gay. These things were now with me constantly like an invisible, non-fatal illness. I couldn’t change them. I couldn’t make them go away. I just had to carry them around and try to understand them.

My best friends in school at the time were Dale and Mark (not their real names). I didn’t tell them right away about my dad. They knew my parents were splitting up, but that wasn’t so unusual. Lots of kids had divorced parents. It took a while before I was ready to share more details. I don’t know how long it took, where we were, or how I brought it up, but in my very evolved and mature way I told them what, for me, made my whole family situation make sense. My parents were splitting up not because of anything mysterious or sinister, but because my father was gay. No big deal. He’d only just realized it, or come to terms with it, or whatever, and had decided he couldn’t be honest with himself and stay married to my mother.

In hindsight, I can’t say I’m surprised they didn’t take this well. Neither of them came from families that were very socially progressive. Mark lived with his mom. I never met his dad, but I know he at least had some perspective on divorce. Dale, on the other hand, lived with his still-married parents, who could fairly be described as … backward. I don’t know exactly where they were from. Maybe West Virginia. Somewhere south and east of our small Northern California town. Where ever it was, they’d brought their values and attitudes with them and imparted them to their son. Dale would not have sworn allegiance to his parents, but when faced with something as fundamental as homosexuality, he reverted to his roots.

It didn’t happen right away. It started gradually. Dale would make jokes about my dad. About him being gay. Being a fag. He’d draw semi-pornographic sketches of my father with a man. To be funny. I didn’t object at first, tried to be cool about it. It was just Dale. He’d always had a biting and sarcastic sense of humor. But it didn’t stop there. The drawings got worse, the comments more hurtful, and then things took a nasty turn. I’d confided in my two friends. I wasn’t ready to tell just anyone about my personal situation, but them, I trusted. They didn’t take that confidence as seriously as I did.

I emerged from class one day to find Dale and Mark standing with a group of guys who weren’t exactly regulars in our social circle. These were the guys who liked to push the smaller kids around. Guys who took pleasure from intimidating those smaller or less confident. I wasn’t friendly with them, but neither had I spent much time as the object of their abuse. I wasn’t a small kid. There were easier targets. But now they had ammunition. My secret wasn’t a secret anymore. Dale had told the school bullies my dad was gay, and in doing so had allied himself with them as the ringleader of his own humiliation squad. Target: me. Mark stood with them, not quite among them, but not on my side, either. He might have offered a half-hearted “Hey, knock it off, dude,” but no more. They taunted me. They said things about me, about my father, my mother, my step-father, and my brothers. Nasty things about anal sex and incest and things I still don’t like to think about in relation to my family.

I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t know what to do. I might have been able to beat the shit out of Dale on his own, but he, knowing that, had surrounded himself with guys I had no hope against physically. I’d like to say I brilliantly tore him down with my superior intellect like a character in a John Hughes movie. But I didn’t. I screamed “Fuck You!” I cried. I shoved him and was swiftly advanced on by his newly formed gang of thugs. I backed off. I walked away. And I cried some more. Like a fag, as far as they were concerned.

What I felt can’t adequately be described as embarrassment, though that was certainly an aspect of it. I was humiliated. I was hurt. I was devastated. I’d chosen to share a deep personal truth with people I considered my friends, and they had betrayed me fully and with gusto. Our friendship ended there. We still had some friends in common, but the closeness I thought we had was gone.

There’s still a part of me that has trouble trusting people with important but potentially damaging pieces of myself. I have thoughts I don’t share. Or if I do, I share them in a joking tone from which I can easily retreat if pressed. How much of that is because of what happened in seventh grade? I don’t know. But if the essence of humiliation and embarrassment is exposure of something dear and personal, I certainly felt exposed that day. I still cross paths with Dale and Mark now and then. We have friends in common on Facebook. I’ve had beers with them at parties and stood around fire pits talking about mutual friends and our lives now. But we’ve never spoken of what happened then. Part of me wants to forgive them, openly and fully. But another part of me still feels the shame I felt that day, and if it’s possible to grow up enough to move past that, I’m not there yet.

I like saying parenting is like curling. You know, that sport in the Winter Olympics where they push a big heavy polished stone across ice and then frantically sweep in front of it with brooms to try and guide its course and make it go as far and as straight as possible but they can’t actually touch it? I think parenting is like that. We can try and clear the way, but mostly kids go the way they’re gonna go.

Lately I’ve been wondering how well that analogy holds up. There have been a lot of pretty major changes at our house lately. Not counting babies being born, I’d say these are the biggest changes we’ve gone through as a family. Definitely the biggest Owen’s seen besides his brother being born and changing schools. Here are some of the highlights.

• I got laid off, which means I’m home almost all the time versus being at work 50+ hours a week.
• Lisa has a break from work until October, so she’s home, too.
• We let our nanny go. She was here five days a week for about seven months, spent more waking hours with the kids than either of us, and we all loved her. She was amazing and we miss her.
• Owen took three weeks off preschool then went back for summer school (at the same place). But some of his best friends aren’t there, and some won’t be coming back.
• Michael Jackson died.
• Nicholas turned one, and got serious about walking. He’s a walking machine now.
• Owen turned four, and has agreed to wipe his own butt for a whole month in exchange for the most coveted toy of his young life — Ahsoka’s Starfighter Lego set.

The Michael Jackson thing was mostly to see if you were paying attention, but Owen did come home from school one day and said “Who died?! Michael Jackson died!” Seriously, no idea where that came from.

But besides that pop quiz, the passing of MJ has been a blip compared to other recent milestones. It’s a lot of change for kids to absorb, right? I mean, they’re resilient and probably more durable than many of us when it comes to bouncing back from hard times, but they’re also creatures of habit and routine, and changes like this don’t go unnoticed.

Not surprisingly, Owen’s reaction is the most noticeable. He’s been much quicker to cry lately. When we ask him to do something, he ignores us about 80% of the time. He continues to refuse to try new foods, and completely loses his shit if we try to push him to do it. He’s quicker to get frustrated with his little brother.

But I have to wonder — how much of this is because of what’s going on with our family, and how much of it is just who he is at this moment in his ever evolving and developing life? The level of stress and uncertainty is unquestionably higher than usual. Most of this comes from me and being out of work. I try to keep my sharing of this mostly between Lisa and me (and my blog, of course), but sometimes I’m sure the kids get a taste of it.

Like the day we had this fun family outing to the La Brea Tar Pits (which, by the way, is totally repetitive, since translated it means The The Tar Tar Pits) which stopped being fun when we returned to our car to find it had been towed away because I didn’t pay attention to the “No Parking After 4pm” sign that apparently everyone in LA but me knows are all along Wilshire Blvd. But I’m not used to parking on Wilshire Blvd at 4pm on a weekday because I’M USUALLY AT WORK AT 4PM ON A WEEKDAY!!!! It was a stressful afternoon. I tried to keep my shit together as Owen peppered us with questions the entire way home, in traffic:

“Why’d they take your car away?”

“Why’d you park in the wrong place?”

“Why didn’t you read the sign?”

“Why couldn’t we take a taxi to get the car?”

“Why couldn’t I go with you to get the car?”

“Why was there a man in the only stall in the Koo Koo Roo bathroom when I suddenly had to poop as if my life depended on it while Mommy was off finding us a ride to the impound lot so I crapped standing up while you attempted to catch it with a paper towel while imploring me to hold it just a little longer please?”

(Ok, he didn’t ask me that, but he could have, since it did happen.)

But there haven’t been that many days like that. Mostly we’ve kept things pretty even keeled. So how much should we worry about what this is all doing to our kids? I don’t think we’re scarring them for life, but how can I be sure? The only thing I can think to do besides trying to keep my own cool is talk about what’s going on openly and honestly with them. I don’t think pretending nothing’s changed is the answer, but I also don’t want to make more of it than it is. I remember when my dad told me and my brothers he and mom were getting divorced.

It wasn’t long before I was like, “OK, that sucks, can I go play now?”

If my curling analogy is right, I’d say we’ve hit some rough ice, and the brooms might be showing a little wear and tear. Is this going to dramatically alter the course of our kids lives, or will they come through more or less unscathed? I suspect no one knows for sure, but I’d love to hear anything you care to share about how you’ve helped your kids navigate when the ice gets a little less smooth.

Hi. This post is a bit messy. I don’t want to start with an apology, but I think an explanation is warranted since this is so different from what’s usually on this blog. All this happened 14 years ago. Though I think about it nearly every day, it’s doesn’t haunt me like it used to. I don’t dwell on it. But when Heather and Mike lost their little girl Madeline this year, and so many rallied around them to try and prop them up in their darkest time, many things came back to me. What I went through is not the same as losing a child. My point of view is different. But there are enough parallels that I wanted to get all this out in writing. This also ended up being a lot more about me than I intended, but that’s just where it went. So, thanks for reading, and I’ll understand if you’d rather not.

Details are fuzzy. I’m not sure this happened the way I remember it. Probably not, considering how scattered my memories are. Time does that to memory, and it’s worse when the events themselves were surreal, as these surely were.

I was in San Francisco, on my way back to LA. My stepfather got in touch with me at SFO as I was heading to get on the plane home. I think he called my friend Nate who showed up to tell me I needed to call home. This was 1995, before cell phones were everywhere, and certainly before I had one. So somebody walked up to me and said I needed to call home. I called from a pay phone. Greg sounded serious, worried, and tired. Jeff wasn’t doing well. I should be there. I should come now. I was worried, certainly caught off guard, but he was probably overreacting. He can be a bit dire. Sure, I’ll come home. But I was sure it’d be OK.

I changed my plans and flew east instead of south. Jeff was in a hospital in Roseville. My dad picked me up and we went from the airport to Jeff’s hospital room. What Greg said on the phone was right, he wasn’t doing well. He looked like hell – puffy, pale and rough. His breathing was fast and shallow. I think he was asleep when I first got there. He was clearly having a hard time. I remember nudging him to try and get him to breathe normally. I wondered what they were doing to fix it. To fix him. He’d been having problems with his kidneys for months. Something to do with an illness he’d had several years before plus damage from lots of painkillers after surgery. He’d been on dialysis. There was some talk of a transplant, but it didn’t seem very focused. Maybe they were talking more to my parents than me. Or maybe it was confusing and vague for everyone. It started with his kidneys, but now his heart was enlarged and he had water on his lungs. Congestive heart failure, they call this. Which is weird, because heart failure sounds like you’re dead, but really it means his heart wasn’t working efficiently. Did you know when your heart doesn’t work well you start getting fluid on your lungs? Apparently they’re related. Also, it’s weird how when your heart is weak it gets bigger. You’d think a bigger heart would be all strong and shit like The Hulk but it’s more like it’s swollen and trying hard but just not doing its thing. He wasn’t doing well.

I was having a very hard time processing all this. I was in college, missing classes to be there, but clearly needed to be with my family. I spent the next few days hanging around the hospital, sitting in Jeff’s room, talking to him when he was awake. Sometimes just sitting. It was an awkward time for us. We hadn’t spent much time together recently, and didn’t have a lot to talk about. I was 21, he was 18. I’d been out of the house more than a year, off at school, thinking myself very grown up. I had all these plans. Or visions of plans. I didn’t really want to hang out in a hospital with my sick brother. I’d rather hang out with him when he got better and we could do stuff. Like have a beer or go to the river or get high or watch TV. Whatever. Not this. I didn’t understand how sick he was.

After a few days, I went back to LA. Back to school. Back to my life. It looked like he was doing better. They’d decided to transfer him to a bigger medical center in Davis. That seemed like a good sign. They were better equipped to help him, and I figured they wouldn’t move him if they didn’t think he had a good shot at recovering. Before I left I went to Jeff’s room and we talked a little. He was sleepy, not saying much. We talked about how I’d see him in a few weeks when I came home for Thanksgiving. We hugged. He held onto me a little longer than I thought was normal. Or maybe I held onto him. Maybe both. I don’t know.

I flew back to LA. There was this guy from out of town that I barely knew staying with me. Long story why, doesn’t matter. My girlfriend (now wife) was at her parents’ place in New York. So it was just me and this guy I didn’t know. As I said, my memory of the timeline and series of events is fuzzy, but I think I was home for like 12 hours. I got home, said hi to this guy, went to bed.

The phone rang. Woke me up. It was around 3am. It was my dad. Jeff had passed away. He’d died. He was dead. I should come back.

I went back to LA thinking I was going back to school for a few weeks while Jeff recovered, then going home to visit for Thanksgiving. By then we’d know more about what was going on with him and be able to talk about what was next and make plans. And hang out and have turkey.

I fucking left.

Because of school. And because bad things don’t happen to us. Bad things happened on TV and to other people, not to us. People got better. People were OK.

So I went home. Except in November 1995 things didn’t get better. They got worse. They got worse fast and they tried to save him and there was nothing they could do and he died. And I think maybe he knew when I left, somehow, that things weren’t going to get better. I think maybe that’s why he held onto me a little longer than usual. Maybe he knew even though we were saying “see you at Thanksgiving” we were really saying goodbye.

Or maybe he didn’t know. But that’s what we were saying, whether we knew it or not.

Things start spinning. This guy is in our apartment and my brother just died and I have to buy a plane ticket or maybe my friend Chris did that for me because I think he flew home with me though I’m not really sure and I had to leave pretty much right away so I threw some clothes in a bag and told this guy he probably needed to find another place to stay because I didn’t know when I’d be back and it was weird for him to stay there alone and I left and my girlfriend still wasn’t there and I remember when we came home after what seemed like years after the funeral there was leftover macaroni and cheese in a pot uncovered in the refrigerator and honestly that bothered Lisa way more than seemed logical but what the hell did logic have to do with anything at that point and he’d just left that there in the refrigerator of these people he barely knows and who the fuck does that?

When Jeff died I called Lisa’s parents in New York to tell them what happened. I called her dad at work because I wanted to talk to him before I talked to her. She was there for an audition. That day. So we decided not to tell her right away but make arrangements for her to fly to Sacramento after her audition to be with me. But let her do the audition before telling her. I still think that was the right thing to do, though she was pissed about it. She said we should have told her. She didn’t get whatever she was auditioning for so maybe it wouldn’t have mattered, but we didn’t know that then, and we’d only been dating about a year and who knew we’d get married and have two amazing kids and it didn’t seem right to disrupt the whole reason for her trip when there wasn’t anything she could do except make plans to come home which we were doing for her.

A lot happened in the next few days. A funeral. Many, many people. More than we expected. More than would show up for my funeral. Jeff was an amazing person. He touched a lot of people. He’d been seriously dating a girl for a while and we listed her in the paper as his fiance. What the hell difference does it make now? Clearly they’re not getting married. Listing her as “girlfriend” seemed strange, less than the truth. So we rounded her up. I think her parents were bugged by it but who cares. We created a custom headstone with a guitar on it that was supposed to look like his guitar which was all 90s metal. He loved Metallica. I still have that guitar. It’s almost unplayable but I won’t get rid of it.

I stayed home for a while — I’m not sure how long — before coming back to school in LA and going back to school. Most people at school knew what had happened and they were cool about it but those first few weeks back in LA were the strangest part of this whole thing. Because my world had a huge hole ripped in it but for everybody else it was the same world it had been a month ago. When we were home for the funeral everything was about Jeff and how awesome he was and how crazy and horrible it was that he was gone. And for me everything was still about that but it wasn’t about that for anyone else. Except my girlfriend who was incredible and my close friends who were amazing about all of it. And really everyone was pretty great but there’s no right way to be at that point. No right thing to say.

And it’s been almost 14 years. Jeff was 18 when he died. The way time is speeding up (it is, you know), in a few blinks he will have been gone longer than he was here. That’s crazy. I wanted this post to be not just about his death but about his life. But I guess what I needed to write about first was the end. And maybe that means there will be other posts about his life. I think there will be.

Today is his birthday. Jeffrey William Blanchard was born June 2, 1977 in our house on Hughes Road in Grass Valley, CA under a rainbow my father painted on the wall of our little eat-in kitchen. And today he’d have been 32. And I have no idea what he would have done or who he might have become, but it would have been awesome. I wish I could see it.

Happy birthday, little brother.

Dearest Lisa,

We’ve been married seven years today.

Seven years ago we stood up at West End Collegiate Church in New York City and pledged our love for each other in front of everyone. And we didn’t mention Jesus because I didn’t want to and you said that was OK. And then we walked/floated out of the church to the theme from Star Wars on the pipe organ. That ruled.

Seven years has gone so fast. People talk about the seven-year itch, but we cleared that hurdle by living together seven years before the wedding. When we got the seven year itch, we got married.

We’ve flown by the seat of our pants much of the time. We’ve trusted the Force, Luke. We weren’t sure we wanted kids. Then we decided we did. Owen was the most amazing thing that could ever be. He was incredible and we were happy and we weren’t sure we wanted to have more. Then we decided we did. And Nicholas was also the most amazing thing that could ever be. And it shouldn’t be possible for two things to be the most amazing anything, but they both are.

Now we look ahead. There will be new adventures. Uncharted territory. Not sure what, exactly, but things will change. They have, they do, and they will. And we’ll do it together.

I’m so lucky.

You are my best friend. You’re beautiful. You’re fiercely loyal. You like almost all the stuff I like (except Twitter.)

You’re a great listener. You’re an amazing lay (sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Kable). You’re an awesome mother to our kids.

We share things. We work together. I take the cans down to the street and you bring them back up. And it works.

I love you so much.

Happy anniversary, my love.

Owen is already learning you can’t go home again, even if he doesn’t understand that yet.

We’ve had pretty good child care luck. When Owen was born in 2005, Lisa took seven months off.

(Before you get all excited and start applying for her job, this was seven months without pay. Lisa’s an opera stage manager who gets contracted per show. So basically she took no contracts for seven months. So didn’t get paid. So we lived on one income, which was not the most fun thing ever, but that’s not what this is about.)

As I was saying, we’ve been lucky. Lisa stayed home longer than many can, and the single income thing didn’t kill us

(Although I’m not super excited we may be doing it again soon. And no, Lisa is not pregnant.)

When she did go back our moms each came to help for several weeks.

(Which also didn’t kill us, though in some ways came closer.)

And with Lisa’s sporadic work schedule and piecing together babysitters here and there (that sounds like we dismembered them. we didn’t) we didn’t put Owen in daycare until he was over a year old. Having seen many friends hand their kids off to infant care at 6 weeks, we were happy we could wait, and Owen thrived (and continues to, thankfully).

When the time did arrive to start him in daycare, we found a place close to where we work in Downtown LA that we were really happy with most of the time he was there. When we did have issues, they addressed them (mostly. took way too long to get me a new keycard for the security gate.). Their hours were RIDICULOUSLY convenient (6am – 6:30pm. That is not a typo.). The location worked well for us (and was right near the train station which Owen loved). The director and staff were friendly and caring, and the teachers Owen had really seemed to love the kids and what they were doing. Oh, and it was cheaper than almost everyone else I knew was paying. I still don’t really know why, but I’m not complaining.

This is the Old School.

(We’ve always called it school with Owen, even when it was really just daycare. Also, I feel strange posting the name of the place, but if you’re in LA and interested email me and I’ll share. If you still want the info by the end of this post.)

Owen LOVED the Old School. Once he got over being left somewhere besides home, and apart from the inevitable tough days now and then, he loved it. He made friends before we knew he was old enough to HAVE friends. It was a strange experience visiting friends whose daughter was in his class and seeing they had something going on which had nothing to do with us or time they’d spent together while we were around. They were tight, and that happened all on their time, not ours. He loved his teachers, and often he didn’t want to leave when one of us showed up to take him home. How could our house compete with all these toys, kids, and a playground right outside? We saw his social skills blossom, and get this – they basically potty trained our kid for us. No kidding, one day they were like, “start sending him in underwear, he’s ready.” I felt like tipping them.

Then we got pregnant with Nicholas.

(Clearly, it was my wife who actually got pregnant, but we’re a team, so I say “we got pregnant” even though I realize she is the one with the uterus and did all the actual gestating and pushing the baby out and it makes me sound like kind of a new age parenting hippie to say “we got pregnant” but there I said it so whatever. Again, this is not what this is about.)

When we started contemplating how to handle the logistics of a second child, we decided two things: We were getting a nanny, and we were moving Owen to a school closer to home. We’ll call this the New School.

The New School is four blocks from our house (Old School: 10 miles). The New School has been lauded by friends since before we had kids as the best thing that ever happened to their kids. It’s only slightly more expensive. Having Owen at the New School would allow the nanny to pickup and dropoff (Car Talk, anyone?), and meant he’d be in school with neighborhood kids, some of whom might end up his classmates for years. Also, as Kindergarten started to loom, we wanted him to have a slightly more academic atmosphere than the Old School provided. Theirs was basically structured play, with crafts and stories and circle time, which is great for little ones, but lacked the beginning reading and math we think is important to at least start introducing somewhere around age three.

(This makes it sound like we’ve spent much more time thinking about educational theory and approach than we have. We basically play this thing by ear and try and do what Owen’s ready for. Honestly, the way notes home from his teachers at the Old School were spelled, I was not sure I wanted them teaching my kid to read, sweet and well meaning as they were. Also (and this probably bothers me the classically trained musician more than most), his teachers could not sing. I don’t mean they didn’t have beautiful voices. I mean they couldn’t carry a tune in a fucking bucket. Owen still has trouble matching pitch and I blame them. We sang to the kid, but they had many more waking hours with him in those early days, and how the hell can a kid learn Twinkle Twinkle Little Star when it sounds like there are only maybe 3 1/2 notes in the song and their relationships to each other are entirely arbitrary and vary from one verse to the next? Does that song even have verses? Whatever, you get the point. And again, this is not what this is about.)

So we decided to move Owen to the New School. We thought a lot about timing this move. Knowing he liked his Old School, we didn’t want him to associate leaving there with the arrival of the baby (fucking baby you came and I had to change schools and I hate you!), so we decided to wait and move him several months after Nicholas was born, while Lisa was still off work (she couldn’t take quite as much time off with #2, further reason why we went with the nanny option). We actually made the switch while out of town on vacation, so when we got home, Owen started in the New School. If he were older I think we’d have wanted him to have a chance to say goodbye, but at 3 we just thought that wouldn’t make sense to him. He’d probably think we were saying goodbye for the day and coming back tomorrow.

The good news is I think we succeeded in making the school move not about the baby. Owen loves his brother and has never connected his arrival with changing schools, that we know of. That said, the school move was a little rough at first. The first few days were great. He was all caught up in the novelty of the new school and the differentness of it all. We naively thought we were home free. But about a week later we heard:

“When can I go back to my Old School?”

My heart sank. Because of course he couldn’t go back. We’d structured our lives around him being close to home, not to mention paid money to the New School and given up his spot at the Old School. It was time to move on, but how do you tell that to a 3-yr old? We told him the New School was his school now, and he was going to keep going there. Thing is, I wanted him to WANT his New School, and by extension to have fond memories of his Old School without actually wanting to go back there again. Which is totally unrealistic, especially since I also have my moments of pining for my past. And I’m 35 — he’s 3.5. I’m a whole power of 10 older than him.

But those moments pass, and before long, he did get past it. Mostly. Pretty soon he wasn’t asking about his Old School anymore, and was really having fun at his new school. He made friends, he likes his teachers, he’s learning all kinds of cool stuff. And the logistics are working out great and we’re really happy about the move.

But now and then, it comes up. We see someone from the Old School – at a birthday party, playdate, etc. – and he asks about going back. But the more time that’s passed, the more his Old School isn’t really the place he knew anymore. Almost all of his friends have moved on. Most of the teachers we knew and liked are no longer there. And, of course, he’s not the same kid he was, either.

And maybe that’s the hardest thing to accept.

He’s changing.

And it’s all good. It’s what’s supposed to happen. He’s growing up. And that is both the best and the hardest thing to watch. He’s the same sweet funny cuddly charming kid, but at the same time, he’s not. He’s different every day. And that is, as much as anything, why none of us can ever go home again. Because not only is home not the place it was when we left, but neither are we the people we were then. We change. And that’s what’s supposed to happen, but sometimes we think back and sigh a little about who we were, and will never be again. At least, Owen and I do.

Owen is obsessed with Star Wars.

Owen is 3 3/4 (he’ll correct you if you say he’s 3 1/2), and obsessed with Star Wars. He’s probably too young for this fairly violent (and completely awesome) series of films (and cartoons – did you know there were cartoons?!). But we love it, and thought he would love it, and he does, so yahtzee! The thing is, I couldn’t take much more Diego. Or the Wiggles, oh my god the Wiggles. If you’ve managed to avoid this particular Australian import, count yourself extremely lucky. I thought we were so clever to have kept Barney out of the house, then the Wiggles flanked us and moved in. Clever Wiggles. Anyway, Owen has now seen all six Star Wars films, the Clone Wars animated feature, and many episodes of the Clone Wars animated TV show. He owns three very realistic, battery operated lightsabers, complete with lights and sounds, and has played Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga on PlayStation3. He’s definitely too young for THAT. We’re horrible parents.

But that’s not the point. The point is, he’s most obsessed with particular aspects of Star Wars. Much to my wife’s chagrin (“I thought I had more time!”) his fixation is primarily on the female characters who aren’t wearing a lot of clothing. This includes Leia in the early scenes of Return of the Jedi, Padme Amidala after the arena scene in Attack of the Clones, and Asohka (Anakin’s padowan learner) in Clone Wars. All have bare midriffs, shoulders, legs – you get the idea. He also digs Jedi and lightsabers, but likes them best if they are defending (or wielded by) scantily clad females. We think questions about whether he might be gay are pretty much answered.

When Owen wants to watch Star Wars, he usually asks by saying something like, “I want to watch Star Wars, where Princess Leia gets captured by Jabba, and has a tummy.” Having a tummy means her tummy is bare. When he sees someone with their belly showing he asks “Why does she have a tummy?” When he isn’t wearing shoes and doesn’t want to walk on something without them, he’ll object, “But I have feet!” We were driving one day and talking about the beach, and how he wouldn’t need shoes and could run around with bare feet. From the back seat: “Silly Daddy, not bear feet, KID feet!” So it’s just feet. And tummies. So back to that.

The tummy fixation isn’t new. He will consistently notice and comment on anyone with a bare belly. He’s into observing and pointing out body parts, and tummies are special, I suspect because they’re less often spotted than say, heads. Visiting a local motorcycle shop with my stepdad, Owen spotted a poster of a woman in a bikini, leaning suggestively against a motorcycle. He took inventory: “She has legs, and she has a tummy, and she has those, and she has arms …” That was a few months ago. By now I think he knows what “those” are called (his baby brother is breastfeeding, after all). He’s nothing if not observant.

If you aren’t already, you should be reading Tanis Miller’s blog, Attack of the Redneck Mommy. She’s funny, and smart, and Canadian, and often blogs about her boobs. What more do you want? Anyway, I follow her on Twitter and had her avatar up on my screen when Owen walked by. He stopped and looked at the picture for a bit, and then in a slightly shy but impishly smiling way said, “Why isn’t she wearing a shirt?”

I think she might be, you just can’t see it in the picture.

(Impish smile) “She looks like she’s … captured.”

I told Tanis about Owen’s comment. She says this is why she’ll never change her avatar – according to her, her real photo? So not captured. I suspect we may have planted the seeds for a rich sexual fantasy life for our not-yet-four-year old once he’s a bit (read: a LOT) older. I also suspect Redneck Mommy would be proud if that’s true.

So, that brings us back to Star Wars, doesn’t it? I’m king of the segue.

As I mentioned, in addition to the mostly naked women of Star Wars, Owen likes the Jedi. He wants to be a Jedi when he grows up. He holds out his hand and screws up his face and wonders why no people or objects move around the room from his powers. It’s awesome and a little heartbreaking. I’ve given him no reason to think he can’t be a Jedi when he grows up. I hope he never stops believing he can. As Yoda said about not believing, “That is why you fail.”

Star Wars creeps into almost every conversation now. Last week Owen asked, “What kind of car does mommy have?” A Honda.

“What kind of car does daddy have?” A Toyota.

“I like daddy’s car better … because it has Yoda in it.”

My faith in humanity bolstered, I now think introducing him to Star Wars was a pretty good idea. We’re awesome parents.