In 1997 I was finishing up a significant part of my life – a chapter in every sense of the word.  I could not write about the events that transpired during the last few months of that year for many months afterward.  But eventually I did.  What follows is that effort. It was originally a piece I had submitted to the Sun , which, incredibly, still exists.   The story was rejected, but not without kind words of encouragement.  Here it is, slightly changed from the 1998 version.

Mid-October is the best time to arrive in New York. The skies are often a rich blue, the air just slightly crisp, and the foliage… well, have a look at any one of a dozen classics of the Hudson River School to see the potential. In the fall of 1997 I had returned home to rural Ulster County twice each year for the previous ten, and the second visit had always begun just after the end of the Bering Sea Pollock “B” season. After two months at sea, I would normally spend the first six days helping to steer a ship across the Gulf of Alaska, and then I was generally on an eastbound plane the day after we docked in Seattle.

That autumn visit in 1997 I saw my father before he picked me out from the crowd exiting the train at the Poughkeepsie  station. He stood with his hands at his sides, his head tilted very slightly. The afternoon sun accentuated the lines made by his jowls. Tired expression. Waiting for me. His oldest. This image of him is burned into my memory:  the countless times he stood exactly in that spot , waiting for his sons. Each time he looked a bit older, a bit more tired. His face brightened when he found mine, and his eyebrows lifted in the slight bemused expression that made him look younger. As we drove up route 9W on the poorer, West side of the Hudson,  he explained the fall foliage and clipped, excited sentences.

“Be damned if I’ve ever seen anything like it. Look at this! Half the trees peaking, what in hell is the other half doing? Green! Deep, dark green like summer. Stays like this …  we’ll go straight through November.”

Whenever he drove, even back when he was teaching me to drive when I was 15,  he gripped the wheel tightly with both hands and peered over the upper edge, focused and with great intensity. Trips more than an hour gave him neck aches, put him in a foul mood. Later, after I returned from Mexico, and  the leaves had all fallen and the woods had turned to the repellent, uniform gray color that had driven me from the place 10 years earlier,  my father had looked out through the glass doors of the cottage at the songbirds feeding on the back porch and said, “this was my last autumn and I’ll be damned if I didn’t enjoy every fucking minute of it.”

That first week we spent our days together, there were movies at Rhinebeck, long drives through the Catskill mountains, and walks around the Ashokan reservoir. Although he would tire easily, nothing diminished his appreciation of the foliage. The forest was resplendent, and we would sometimes stand before a single tree for minutes without moving or speaking. Once, he whispered, “You see why I needed to come back – why I had to finish up here?”  He never cared much for the year or so he spent living in Seattle. “Trudging up hills in the rain, past scores of homeless…” was how he described it to friends who had never been there.

I had left Seattle with the impression that it would be a good idea for me to make every effort to obtain a captain’s license for the 5,000 gross-ton fishing boat I was working on at the time.  A broad hint was delivered by our Norwegian Fishing Master over a plate of baked shrimp at the pos- season party in a fancy restaurant on the shore of Lake Union. It would be inopportune, perhaps even rude to refuse outright, so I said, “my father is ill… We’ll see.” My host shrugged, looked away.

After that first week, Dad seemed to be doing well. Very little pain. I figured I needed about 12 hours a day for 20 days to prepare myself for what would be a three-day Captain’s exam to be taken in New York City. It would be impossible to accomplish this while sharing a small house in the woods with my father. I cautiously broached the subject one afternoon. He waved a backhand at me, “Of course ! Of course!  Christ, when I studied for the first-class radio ticket I practically sequestered myself from your mother. Go to some third world country or something. You look like you need a vacation, anyway. Hah!”

We agreed on Mexico. I had always wanted to see Taxco, a small city that was designated a historical landmark. My brother had described narrow cobbled streets winding up the mountain, the tap-tap-tap  of the silversmiths’  hammers ringing through the town, mixing with the church bells. I pictured myself in some colonial garret overlooking  a verdant valley, working out the formulas for nautical astronomy. I didn’t have to return to Seattle until the first week in January, so I booked a flight that brought me back to New York around the third week of November. One of the things about terminal cancer is that you must get in the habit of saying goodbye, really saying goodbye, every time you leave for a trip, or when you go back to the other coast you live on or in that other state or city you move two years before. Eventually, you say goodbye every time you go out to get a half gallon of milk or bagels in the morning. You get pretty good at it. One of the many things cancer teaches a survivor is sincerity. A fluidity and resilience of the heart. How would you like to remember your last moments with someone important?  This is one of the gifts for those of us that are left behind.

I needed Taxco or the Taxco I imagined, for a number of reasons. My father was dying of advanced prostate cancer. He had been “dying” for over a year. On my wedding day the August before, I had to tell my younger brother about our father’s illness because he could not tell him himself, understandably repelled by the idea of so wounding his youngest and beloved son. I told my brother on that day, since it was the only day that month that I had seen him. We were lounging around on blankets near a pond in a park in British Columbia, our tiny wedding party of three, where we had finished  taking our vows by the sea. After I broke the news, he walked away from me and my new wife and stood on the other side of the water, and looked away and wept. I felt as though I had driven a stake through his heart. In the ensuing year I flew to New York twice, once to help our father through an operation. I threw myself into my job, working nearly every day. I canceled a long trip to Asia with my new wife so that I could work, and she went alone. The following season she decided to switch ships, and we worked in the Bering Sea within a mile of each other, but in separate realities, linked only by e-mail, which in those days was very difficult and unreliable. During the first 15 months of our marriage we had spent, cumulatively, one month together. While I was walking with my father in the Catskill forests that October, she was at the end of a 5 1/2 month stint off the coast of Siberia. I had a nagging feeling that things were not as well between us is they could be. I sought my own private Taxco in the same manner a ship captain searches for a harbor, any harbor, in a raging storm.

The “Pasado Javier” is a favorite with German and Japanese silver buyers, as well as Mexican tourists. It is centrally located, but not too central, and it is far enough away from the Zocalo to remain free from the noise and fumes of the endless caravans of combis that pushed through the narrow streets at a walking pace. I chose it for the magnificent stonework, the garden, and the wide wooden tables under a huge arched foyer behind the pool. It reminded me of a monastery. But it lies between two churches, and the morning, afternoon, and evening guests are graced with the enthusiastic sounds of Mexican youths ringing the massive bells – crazed homunculi who I supposed must’ve seen Disney’s version of “the hunchback…” 100 times or more. Nevertheless, each morning I would swim for 20 min., then park myself at one of the tables with a half gallon of lime water. Lunch in the marketplace was $.80. I jumped into the books with appropriate ferocity, but found it difficult to concentrate.

On the evening of October 31, I wandered around the streets of Taxco, examining the shrines created by local families for the Dead for the following Dia De La Muerte.  The shrines were beautiful, pagan influenced affairs ,  fully lit with candles and graced with dried and fresh flowers and pictures or artwork of the beloved Dead. Early the next morning, in that exhilarating netherworld between waking and sleeping , where everything is possible, I was approached by my mother, who had died four years earlier, in November of 1993. She was radiant, and stood before me with perfect clarity. I was overjoyed to see her, and my mood was buoyant, even jocular. She remained uncharacteristically silent and grave. I was laughing and bubbling over for a full minute, but I trailed off and began to go cold when I finally took in her manner. Then she said, quietly but with great intensity, “Owen, I have something to tell you!”  The tone of her voice, the way she held my eye, and the manner in which she enunciated each word, shook me terribly. I felt as if I had swallowed an enormous bowl of ice that quick-chilled me to the core. My extremities were paralyzed, and I felt an onrush of dread the likes of which I had never experienced. I screamed, “NO!” and pushed her away and spun myself out of the dream. I didn’t want to hear what she had to say – things that I knew were coming but could not begin to face.

After a week or so I called my father and received no answer. A day later I called my wife, who had just returned from her very extended fishing trip. I invited her to Mexico. She declined – numerous appointments, etc. Would she check in on my father?  She would. Was there anything wrong?  No, of course not. Everything with her was fine.

A few days later I called my wife again in Seattle.  No answer.  None for over a week.  Neither an answer from my father.  I focused on my studies.  I told myself that there was no reason to panic.  Finally, I called my wife on a day that she was home.  She explained that she had to leave town for about eight days.  And by the way, my father was in the hospital.  But no, I shouldn’t rush home.  He would be out by the following week, and I would be back in New York by then anyway.

After I hung up the phone, I thought about things.  It was likely that my father would die very soon.  But what, exactly, was happening with my marriage?  I decided to write my wife a letter.  I told her that I felt she distanced herself from me in the past few months, and that I really didn’t know where we stood anymore.  I told her some plans I had formulated myself – ways to escape the industry that had held me happily captive for 10 years.  A few things that I would like to do, and “… By the way you always have my support and with whatever you want to do with your own life, but please do let me know what is going through your mind…” Two days later I received a fax that more or less said “We both know why we are not right for this relationship, so there’s really no point in going into any detail.” And that was that. End of a brief and fleeting marriage.   As silly as a marriage it was, it was no less painful for it to end, especially at that particular moment in my life.

I returned to New York to find my father an invalid in his small cottage in the backwoods of Ulster County. For the first week I helped him bathe, cooked his meals, and kept him company. He showed great enthusiasm for my study material, and we drilled through hundreds of “rules of the road” questions regarding esoteric regulations about fog whistles and colored navigation lights. He gradually grew stronger, and one day in a moment of exasperation tossed his walker aside and began, simply, to walk.  Once that psychological barrier was broken we were able to go to the cinema again, although he would tire easily.  We had two golden weeks together after that.  A time of grace, during which we talked almost incessantly about the mysteries of life and death, and his anticipation of this new adventure.  We drove the back roads of Ulster County at the far end of the spectacular autumn.  The trees were empty of leaves, but no snow had fallen. We said all the things we needed to say to each other.

On the Monday morning of December 8, my father woke up vomiting uncontrollably. He vomited, dry heaved for ten minutes or so, but then continued for about eight more hours. I found some medicine to control the nausea, but the hospice nurse suggested that the cancer might’ve reached his stomach. He had already lost 20 pounds in three weeks. After two days of this incomprehensible agony he voiced what both of us were thinking – that this was the end. He had reached the point that he had so often anticipated in which the continuation of his life was pointless. He would be dead in a matter of weeks anyway, maybe a month or two at best, and it would be a slow, miserable death. He wanted none of it. He was going on his own terms. He asked when I had scheduled my captain’s test in the city. It was the following Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

Then my father said, “Good. I’ll be leaving Tuesday.”

We had talked about this, and he knew he had the support of both of his sons.  My brother was due to arrive next Thursday.  He would miss him.  Dad wrote him an e-mail that night and explained everything. My brother accepted the situation with the grace that I knew he would. If there was anything any of us had learned in our family it is that there is nothing but poison in clinging desperately to those that you love the most.  The e-mail that my brother sent back was a short piece of writing so exquisite that I was rendered speechless when I read it.  My father visibly relaxed after that day and thanked the both of us with the deepest of gratitude.

I woke the morning of the first day of my exam at 5 AM. Monday. The moon was bright and full and bathed the snow colored woods around the house with a harsh, almost metallic brightness. I  stepped into the doorway of my father’s room and I heard him speak, clearly and without the grogginess of morning. He had not slept. I came to sit by him, and his face was bathed in a cream-colored light that made him glow. We spoke of nothing. Of everything. I kept thinking, “Remember this. Remember these moments forever.”

After I showered I went out to start the car. It was so cold, the door locks had frozen and I had to crawl through the trunk to get inside to start and warm the car. After a few moments I returned to the house, toasted and ate a bagel, and then sat again beside my father as he lay and looked up at the moon through the window. “How do you feel?” I asked, mainly to break the silence that lay heavy in the room. He sighed. “Clear. I feel very clear.” But his voice wavered as he said it, and then I embraced him and held him as we cried together.  Again, I heard my internal voice, ” … never, ever, forget this. Never forget this moment, never forget the quality of this light, and how it feels to hug this man who gave you life, who gave you everything, who taught you how to think and feel about the world and who you will not see in this life again except in dreams and in your imagination and your memory. Never forget what is like to sit in his company and listen to his stories and laugh at his humor, his great and powerful humor that pushed through a lifetime of suffering as if it were a stick of soft butter and never, ever forget the sound of his voice or the sound of the typewriter, his ongoing oeuvre,  pounding through the house like thunder.“

My exam started at a low-slung Coast Guard building at The Battery, at the very bottom of the city.  Strangely, or perhaps due simply to my state of mind, I was startled by an old man at Battery Park who sat on a bench as I approached the test site, looking upward at the sun in the same way my own Dad did so often in the clear days of October, dressed almost exactly like him, and bearing enough resemblance that I reached out to him and almost spoke.  Even now I am not completely sure if that man was actually sitting there or was merely a figment of my own.

After the first day of testing, I walked up to the small hotel I often chose, near Washington Square Park , and stood a half block east of 6th avenue looking at the sun set behind an old church.  I called my father from a payphone, and we spoke for a few minutes. He wished me well on the exam, and told me I would pass.  The next day I found out that he was right.  Later that afternoon, I tried calling again, but there was no answer.  I felt pretty strongly that he was gone.

He was in my thoughts as I walked from the Battery uptown, winding through the neighborhoods where he and my mother had lived in the 50’s.  I had a beer at McSorley’s, where he took me and my friends back in the 70’s, when women weren’t allowed in, and you had to order two ales at a time.  Around Union Square there was a theater playing a current Woody Allen movie, and I watched it, again thinking of him.  Amazingly, the place where our family would always stop on our way down to the city — the Red Apple Rest — was featured in the movie, which was a neat trick, since the place had been abandoned years before.

When I returned from Manhattan on Wednesday night the cottage was pitch black. I felt around for the knob and found instead a card slipped in the jamb of the front door. It was the business card of a detective from the Ulster County Sheriff’s Department. A wave of complex emotions – fear, dread, horror and emptiness but also soaring pride for the courage of my father – rose and swept through me.  I stood in the doorway listening to the silence of the place and looked inward, toward the road that led to the rest of my life.

Epilogue

For many years I had unconsciously built up an edifice of belief regarding death and suffering that I used to comfort myself and others in times like these. It was rooted in a secure belief in the Universe-at-Large – that there are no mistakes, that every last little detail of life has tremendous significance ,and that the challenge is to remain sensitive enough to catch the meaning. Dreams were a big part of the process. It seemed that everyone who died when I was young would return to at least offer clues and hints about the details of the experience. I took great comfort in this and constructed a belief system around it. This construct was sort of forced upon me violently — first with the death of a very close friend, John U., then the death a few years later, of my younger brother Eric.  I think back at how young I was and am amazed at how well we all handled it. I suppose I was well prepared.  I was 15 when John died, and had already read Ram Dass, all of Castaneda’s books, a few by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, some Krishnamurti, the Tao Te Ching, and the life of the Buddha,as well as  parts of both the new and the old Testaments. Not to mention all the discussions I had had with my parents and close friends of similar bent regarding such matters. I was 20 when my younger brother Eric died, and by then I had already formed the core of my spiritual belief system. I had recently read Testimony of Light – a beautiful story written by a nun in the 1950s who had lost her sister of 40 years, who was also a nun. One day,  the surviving sister was in the middle of a letter, holding a fountain pen and idly searching for her next thought,  when her hand began to write by itself.  She soon discovered the meditative state she needed to allow it to happen, nearly at will.  As it turned out, the phenomena were letters from her sister, describing the work she was doing with  souls that had recently died.  It was an extraordinary piece of work, and I couldn’t care less whether it was an actual event, just as I cannot understand the controversy that continues to this day about Castaneda’s work.  The point is not whether the events occurred exactly as claimed, and can be “proven” by some verifiable recording, but that the concepts are  true in the sense of what you know as absolute truth with every fiber of your being.

Now I am no longer so sure of the details of death, and what happens to us when we die, but I do not find my doubt discomforting. Instead, I find my general sense of non-knowing to be more honest, and peaceful.  And I believe that this is the reason that I do not receive such detailed, informational dreams about the death experience from those who have died.  I still believe that there are no mistakes in our existence, and more than ever I see that every moment on this Earth is a gift, nearly all of which we throw away in a most ungrateful way.  And after sitting with two dying parents and been given the luxury of walking carefully and thoughtfully into the death experience with them, I no longer seem to have such an anxiety about what actually happens afterward.  Death now appears to be to be much more of an integral role part of our existence. An inevitability, a sure thing, a comfort.  I cannot imagine life without it.  And the death of my father, for whom so many of my values and ideals I received, and who was so very close to me in so many ways, has burned into me the absolute urgency of facing the deepest questions of life.  It’s as if his passing has freed me from the desire to know about the details of death so that I may now face life as an opportunity to experience our moment to moment existence. In this way his death, and the constant possibility of death that shadows us throughout this long and arduous life, is the ultimate teacher, the finest gift, so long as we know how to receive it as we should all gifts – with wide open eyes in the deepest and most sincere gratitude.

There was always this western pull.  From the time I was eleven, I think, I was dreaming of New Zealand, and later, when I fell into the silent peace of the woods, and then craved ever larger country, British Columbia occupied my imagination for years.   At one point, during the Reagan administration, the Secretary of the Interior, former oil man James Watt opened up vast arcreages of the Alaskan Wilderness to drilling — I can’t picture him up on a stage chanting “Drill, Baby Drill”, but the effect was the same.

However, as a bone, perhaps, to throw at the nature-lovers, or perhaps the erstwhile pioneers, his Department opened up some 5,000 acres of land near Lake Minchumina not far fromDenali Mtn. and a few hundred miles southwest of Fairbanks.  The deal was that if you showed up at the Fairbanks BLM office, you could pretty much pick out 5 acres for yourself, free of charge.  This was 1980, and it was just before I went off to college, and I felt that there was some time to do something a little different.  A friend, Bob F. and I, packed up his car, which was either a Vega or a Pinto with the following — 2 backpacks with gear, an axe, a shovel, and a 30-30 rifle.  We figured that should be about all we would need to pioneer 5 acres in Alaska — after all, we were wearing winter boots.

We set off on route 80 and drove like maniacs — in four days we were in Fairbanks.  That’s some 1100 miles a day.  I’m not sure what it was that drove us so quickly across the country, although Bob did confess to me about 700 miles west of Pennsylvania that his girlfriend of six months was late on her cycle, and he thought that maybe his life was about to change very soon, and so perhaps that notion placed something in his head that required that he keep moving in a forward direction until he could figure out what he meant to do.  Regardless, the trip up was quite spectacular, if a bit rushed.  We left Ulster County in April, and so the roads after Yellowknife were wide swaths of pure snow, packed hard enough that a Pinto/Vega could navigate without too much trouble, although the trucks nearly blew us off the road a few times.  I think there’s actually a reality show about trucks driving on those roads, so things must not have changed too much in the last 30 years.

In the BLM office in Fairbanks we met various aspects of reality.  One was the fact that everyone considering working that land looked far more capable than a couple of skinny kids from NY with a shovel and a 30-30.  I mean these guys literally had bear claw necklaces, full bushy beards, and more than 120 pounds on either of us.  And then there was the reality of the land itself.  5000 acres meant that there were 1000 5-acre lots, but we could see by the topo map that there was a wide, central hill on the land that was completely taken.  The rest of the land, we were told by those that seemed to know, was muskeg, and although it was April, in two or three months it would turn into 4-foot soggy soup.  The only way to work that land, the big guys told us, was heavy equipment.  Did we have any?

Naturally, it could have been all crap cooked up to dissuade the tourists, or silly kids from NY with pioneering dreams, but I had read about muskeg, and also about Alaskan mosquitos, so at the very least we decided to take a ride and look at some of this land.  We drove about 300 or so miles before we found a roadside pull-off that bordered the land in question.  Just before pulling off, an enormous moose, a cow, stepped out onto the road and regarded us, a picture of serenity and aplomb.  Elsewhere we had seen and heard the explosions of ptargmigan (grouse, as we called them back East), and even saw a sleek fox.  Lots of ravens as well.  But the land… well, it was hard to tell, but to be honest, it just wasn’t exactly the pictaresque cabin site at the foot of a towering mountain beside a lake, as we had imagined it would be back in Ulster County.  In fact, it was a kind of lonely, flat ground with a few stunted pine trees and lots of scraggly brush.  We had no reason to doubt the guys at the BLM, and I felt a kind of subtle pressure to return coming from Bob.  And so it was with some regret that we let go the dream of claiming and working those five lonely acres of muskeg.  We did, however, decide to take our time in heading back, and so we lingered a few days in Alaska before driving southward.  Since it was April, we were able to see, almost every night, specatular Northen Light displays — the strange rays so close that we felt as though we could reach up and touch them.

The trip back was just fine, with stops in Montana, Yellowstone, and Boulder, CO, as well as Route 20 in Nebraska, through the Sand Hills.  It was not my first trip across the continent, but it was the first time I set foot in Alaska, and I’m quite sure it was those few days there that injected a part of the place somewhere in me that had to be satisfied, so many years later and under such different circumstances.  That trip infected me with a love for Alaska that I brought along with me to college, and imparted to some of the friends I met there, particularly Tom P., and who tells me sometimes that it was my near-raving about Alaska that eventually drove him to take a trip up to see what it was all about — a trip that, some 30 years later, is far from over. 

I still dream of New Zealand, and I also sometimes regret that the wilds of British Columbia were never mine in a way that could have been.  This is not to say, however, that those places are so far out of reach.  The world is a smaller place than it was when I was 20, and now that I have kids to drag around, I have a new motivation to visit those places in a meaningful way, if for no other reason to show them that such a place is not accessible solely by sheer imagination, or by watching a documentary on a 50-inch flat screen suspended from the fresco walls of an Orange County suburb.

 This is quite possibly the only post I will be able to make this entire year.  This is because I am in New York City right now, working 5 days a week and attempting to commute to Southern California on the weekends. 

It's not working out so well, to be absolutely honest.

Yes, I am able to manage two projects simultaneously from my hotel in White Plains - one for the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and one for the New York Power Authority, but the toll has been pretty severe.  For instance, I spent a day in the hospital for pneumonia, which is not great for a guy who has struggled with his lungs half his life.

When I leave on Friday, I appear in my house in SoCal by Saturday morning around 11 AM. Then I leave the following day around 2 PM so I can show up in Manhattan on Monday morning. 

It's a life out of balance -- Koyaanisquatsi -- as the Hopi describe it. And it is not expected to be maintained indefinitely.  I'll give it until October of this year. 

Maybe I will be able to write something sometime after that.  

Each year as my four still-little kids slowly grow up (yes, I know they grow too quickly, but that depends on how much attention you pay, and now that I have changed my life to the point at which I can focus on them, time has thankfully slowed down a bit …), milestones are reached, and one that is perhaps the most heartbreaking is the transition from the belief of the version of Santa Claus as mysterious god-like traveler, to the 7 and 8-year old version, where parents chase the kids from the room to secretly wrap presents addressed from Him to Them, in a deception that can be mean-spirited at best.

Last night, Sully, my little six-year old genius, sick in bed with an asthma identical to the type I had at his age, lay next to me while I was working on my laptop and asked me to “look up the Gods” on Google.  He first wanted to know all about the “Very First God”, and then the “Gods that came later”, and finally, the “Plant Gods” because he loves plants so much.  We took quite a journey together, discovering the likes of Kronos, Zoroaster, a detour to look at 200 pictures of Jesus, the Hundu gods, and finally watching an obscure video about shamans in South America using hallucinogenic plants to communicate with their own version of God(s).  Needless to say, it was a series of complication questions, but he studied each bit of information with his brand of seriousness that sometimes scares me, and then the conversation shifted to Santa Claus.  Sully is the type of kid that you don’t want to lie to — he strikes me as the kind of child that will remember such a slight pretty much forever, and so it was with great relief that he asked the kinds of questions that were fairly easy to answer, such as “So, if Santa Claus is coming to our house on Friday night, then when will he be able to get to the houses in China?”  Happily, now that NORAD is tracking Santa, that was an easy one, and I have no doubt that he is visiting that site tonight to watch His progress.  When I look at the four of them, there is a clear line between the two sets, and it runs directly across the axis of Santa Claus belief.  How different is the sensibility of the 7 and 9 year-olds, who “know” the secret of Santa and the 4 and 6-year olds who maintain their innocence of that Spirit, and how tough it is to disseminate when the fateful question comes … “Well … see, Santa is very much real as a Spirit, it’s just that as an actual person who lives in the North Pole with Elves … um …. ”  Big sigh at that point, and soon another one crosses over in their first step toward the dreariness of adulthood.

How can I communicate to these kids without being negative and cynical that discovering that Santa is an invention, or that earning money means you can buy more toys than your neighbor, or that sex is a thrill perhaps greater than the best victory on  Mario Brothers Brawl, are not necessarily great advances in their evolution toward growing up?  When I have the pre-puberty conversations with my 9-year old — initiated by him, by the way, and who, amazingly, can thoughtfully listen to what condoms are for instead of shamefully backing away as I think I probably did when I was that age — I always leave them with a slight tinge that more he learns about the world the closer he is to joining the rest of us adults, who fell asleep and forgot how to have fun a long time ago.

But see, this is my problem, and illustrates the state that I am in, and which I am trying to climb out of, where I sometimes feel guilt for the simple pleasures of having old-fashioned Fun in a childlike way because I am not earning money for the Mortgage or the Car Payment, or providing Guidance to our little ones from an Adult  perspective as a Responsible Parent.  And as it is my problem, it has nothing to do with them — that is, there is no choice but to do the best I can to show them that Adults do NOT have to be completely asleep and distracted from the present moment at ALL times.  One of the best things about being in the presence of small children is that they themselves spend most of their moments in the present, and demand no less from those that they are interacting with.  They catch you … so easily.  Try it sometime — act like a typical Adult around them, and you will soon see that they shrug and walk away, bored, because you are not responding with the same sense of wonder and concentration than they are as they ask these impossible and magnificent questions.

And so, there is nothing we can do.  The kids will grow up.  They will fall asleep just like we do — how many times did my father implore me to read Krishnamurti, spend time in monasteries, meditate, and generally seek, seek, seek answers for these deep and burning questions — and to what end?  None immediate, but hey — here I am , 40 years later and still asking them, right?  So it was not a total loss.  The point is that there is nothing we can do to prevent the kids from joining us here in Plato’s Cave except to wake up NOW … and then provide them with an example for the rest of their time with us.  I think there is still time, for me, because my kids are still young enough to witness it, since they are not allowed to go off on their own for another 9 – 15 years.  So … now that I am very close to figuring out how to support the family without killing myself (more about that in another post), there’s a chance that the Innocence that I myself lost right around the time when I discovered the “truth” about Santa, might be found again.

The news I alluded to earlier was that after 16 years I finally finished something I started!  Namely … Fish.

I think it was in the summer of 1994 that I holed up in a little Studio Apartment on Capitol Hill in Seattle for a summer and a half.  It was the first place I lived that wasn’t a hostel after the beginning of 1989, when I started fishing in Alaska.  From 1989 – 1994 I just traveled around the country and world, staying in hostels and camping, returning to a storage unit in Seattle where I had a duffel bag of fishing clothes, which I would drag up to the boats for another tour.

But in the summer of 1994 I wanted to see what it would be like to live in a place for months on end, and so I found a nice little studio in a brick building with hardwood floors.  I enrolled in a couple of acting classes at the UW, a couple of private art classes from an artist in Pioneer Square, and a mystery writing class at the University of Washington extension taught by Stephen Greenleaf, a California author.

The other thing I did was write a book.  The idea of writing the book came after one morning when I read a particularly interesting article in the NY Review of Books by Jonathan Raban.  It occurred to me that he lived in Seattle, probably just around the corner from me, and so I opened the phone book and dialed his number (back then I suppose he felt sufficiently anonymous to list himself — he probably unlisted himself shortly after!).  Knowing his interest in the sea, I invited him down to Pier 91 for an insider’s tour of a factory trawler.  I figured his innate curiosity would overcome any doubts he might have about receiving an unsolicited phone call from some fan.  I was right, and he met me there the next day.

He was surprisingly tall — the image I had created in my mind from reading his books, the first one when I was about 15, about his trip down the Mississippi — was one of an enormously clever, humorous, and impish personality.  In person he was a bit more regal than I imagined he would have been.  His language was what you might expect from someone educated in the best schools of England — and his manner was that of a perfect gentleman.  I talked about the sub-culture of the factory trawlers in Alaska, particularly the relationship between the Norwegian immigrants who were brought in on visas to teach the Americans how to fish, and those Americans who were the ostensible students — something he was particularly interested in.  When I suggested that this topic might be one that he would be interested in writing about, he cocked an eyebrow and said, “It’s YOU that should write about it, not me …”

That brief conversation stuck with me, and later that summer I dove into a plot that I had been thinking about  — a mystery set on a factory trawler.  For the ensuing 25 days I wrote about ten pages a day.  My days went like this:

6:30 Wake — write until 8

8:00 — breakfast in a cafe down the street

9:00 – 1:00 PM write

1:00 – 3:00 — walk to the Post Office box that I had in the U district, and back.

3:00 – 7:00 – write

7:00 – 8:00 eat at a restaurant

8:00 – midnight — write.

So, writing about 12 hours a day. I did this every single day for about 25 days (walking to the PO Box on Sunday was replaced with walking to a bar that served good microbrews) and during one of the walks I saw a poster or ad for the mystery writing class at the UW extension.  At the end of the summer I took the class, and was able to let Stephen Greenleaf read it as part of the class.  He said it was “good enough to publish” but it needed a “frame.”  He explained how to write one, but I never got a chance to write it.  I just put it on a shelf.

14 years later, in 2008, I found the file on an old computer and started working on the book.  The reason, of course, was the kids.  I wanted SOMETHING to leave behind, even if it was a silly mystery.  I first wrote a frame for it, then I ended up rewriting large parts of it.  I changed the sidekick character from a young black man from New Orleans to a Samoan fisherman, and I added some details here and there.  But, in general, I was surprised by the way the story had held up.

It took all of two years, but I worked out the logistics of self-publishing — actually started a publishing company by buying my own ISBN numbers — and the result is a 230-page murder mystery named “Fish.”  It was hard, hard work — I think I went through four Proof stages.  I can think of fewer painful tasks than to proofread a book you have written.  After the fourth time reading it you are so sick of it that you cannot imagine anyone reading it, much less buying it.

But what a great feeling to be DONE.

How perfectly appropriate that this site was dead in the water for the months of July, August, September and most of October, since this was the time when I was finishing up the brutal seven month stint of attempting to work 3000 miles from where I lived, and commuting across the country on a weekly basis, or as much as I could, to hold the family and my life more or less together.  At that time I was about as alive as the site was, and it was only this evening when I turned my attention to it, only to find it pretty much gone.  I did manage to get it back, though, after wrestling with the WordPress version and various file permissions.

And how ephemeral our web presences are.  If I typed “Owen Scott” into a browser, this site would actually come up first, sometimes, and always on the first page. Now, of course, it’s gone completely from their various databases.  This happened with House of Pilates a couple of times, but on a much smaller scale, since that site was down for just a few days, and the listing on Google and elsewhere popped back to it’s spot within a week or so of being back, but being gone for months … probably a transgression that is unforgivable.  Which is probably just as well.

I wish I could say that I myself were back to where I would like to be, although I am still clearly in recovery mode.  I have noticed that when describing the narrative of the last eight months or so, if I substitute the word “work” with “heroin” or “crack”, the sentences make the same sense.  I am, however, a binge-worker in recovery.  I suppose I need to learn a little about addiction to try to find a healthier relationship with work.  Right now I am having a very difficult time finding the energy that drove me to work like I did — and that is not the kind of energy I should be finding, since it clearly is not healthy, no matter how productive it is.

Anyway, I do have news — though no time at the moment to write it up … will do so in the next post…