Fences and Bridges

The year I turned fourteen, I built a fence gate from Bamboosa and repurposed scraps of wood from the sound stage my father built out in the field to make movies when I was about five. He dismantled it before he left when I was ten, leaving the heap of struts and plywood in a pile behind the stand of Bamboosa. I nailed lengths of the one-inch diameter Bamboosa to the wooden frame I made, fashioned hinges out of leather and twine wrapped around the frame, and laced them through the chainlink fencing on either side. I also fashioned a latch that could take a padlock. The fence gate worked for a few years, until the sun rotted away the hinges. But by then, I'd moved out, leaving my step-dad to fix it. 

The barrier was intended to keep drug addicts from across the street from driving up into the South Forty, which is what we called the vacant lot just down from our house on the hill. Friends of that troubled neighbor thought there was a better view from our field than there was from the dirt road parking area. They were right, but once when they were stoned, they lit a small grass fire as they flung their cigarettes out the window in the dry season. It scorched the outside wall of my bedroom. I did not want that to happen again.

Older brother Mel was twenty, and not home. He was stationed in Sasebo, Japan with the US Navy. It was just mom and me for a few years, then Papa Leo moved in, and he and Mom decided to have a baby. Leo was forty-one, Mom forty-three when she gave birth to little Steven. Probably, mom inspired me to think about construction projects by modeling for me how to lay  an entire brick patio while on her hands and knees. She persevered working on the lovely herring bone pattern, her pregnant belly nearly dragging on the ground by Autumn. 

When little brother Steven was born in December, Mom and my step-dad surmised that it would be good to create an addition on the two bedroom house, so they could have some privacy at their end of the house. They hired a friend who was an architect to build on a bedroom and bathroom at the other end. His friend was a contractor. Together, Arthur Silvers and Abe Osheroff taught me how to build my second fence, not counting the psychological ones no one could see. But who can count those? Near the end of eighth grade, I had an ulcer. Doctor said it was probably stress. In hindsight, I can see that Art the architect, whose young sons I baby sat, and Abe the contractor, who fought against Franco in the Lincoln Brigade, and was full of witty sayings - like: "You know when  your kids are growing older, because their feet smell," were watching my back. They gifted me with a sense of power to manipulate my world in the form of cinderblocks, rebar and cement mortar. I got to be pretty good at mixing cement, setting iron supports, securing the blocks, and finishing the joints smoothly. That wall/fence is still standing more than fifty years later and it is still plumb.

"Good fences make good neighbors."   

~ Robert Frost

I live on another hill now, in Oakland. Strong winds often gust up to this crest and when it rains, it is usually horizontal rain - hitting the windows squarely. A few months back, an eight foot section of the six foot tall back yard fence blew down between our house and the neighbors to the North. Sixteen-year-old Leilani and her friend Danielle were outside talking when I went out to dump the compost and we noticed at the same moment that we could see one another! I asked if they were willing to fix it with me. They were. I went inside to get a ladder, nails, and a couple of hammers. We figured out the tongue and groove boards fit into the frame top and bottom, and that all we needed to do was reassemble the puzzle and nail it back together. Within twenty minutes, that eight foot section was back in place and has remained there through the wild windy rainstorms of this winter. I saw the young women out front last week, and we reminisced about how fun it was to work together to fix that fence - their long painted fingernails and perfect make-up didn’t even get mussed in the process. 

"Something there is that does not love a wall…" ~ Robert Frost.

Sunday night’s Oscars showed that some walls and fences are still in place. Yes, Viola Davis received the gold for Best Supporting Actress in Fences, but I believe it should have been for Best Actress. She made that film and family hang together. 

I'm glad Moonlight got best picture, even if there was a kerfuffle in the announcement of it. And while this year’s awards ceremony was not Oh, SO White as last year’s, we still have a lot of fences and walls to take down and bridges to build between people. 

Bridges from heart to heart can be built of kindness, curiosity, and courage.

Garbage Patch, Kids!

Dear children of the earth, 

Your ancestors, in their wisdom created a substance, in the early part of the twentieth century, that was thought to be of GREAT BENEFIT to humankind. Starting with petroleum, they baked, boiled, tweaked, and added to the oil many chemicals, and created PLASTIC, so called because it could be molded into just about any form, and into thicknesses varying from film as fine as hair, to inches or even feet thick. 

PLASTIC has been a great boon to many industries. The medical, dental, car manufacturing, toy, gizmo, gadget, and container industries have blossomed thanks to PLASTIC. What would we do without it?

Kids, it's time to experiment with doing without it. Turns out, there is a catch. A big one.

Here is an apology, kids. Your elders, including me, have left you with an unsustainable and poisonous industry. 

If one subscribes to the theory of physics that matter is neither created nor destroyed, then there would have to be intelligent life on other worlds to make up for the relentless loss of intelligent life on our own.  

Duh! Oops!

We GOOFED! We did not factor in that PLASTIC does NOT biodegrade. It never breaks down entirely, but rather breaks into smaller and smaller bits over tens of decades to become more and more insidious in its capacity to destroy life. There is no “away” to throw it, and, as far as we know, it will be here forever, leaving you with fewer building blocks of matter to construct your future.

We’ve let you down, Children of Mother Earth. We’ve turned so much of our dear Mater (matter) into PLASTIC, that before we know it, the whole world will be made of it!

Currently, there is a Garbage Patch, caught up in the North Pacific Gyre, smack dab in the middle of the ocean, between the East coast of Japan, and the West coast of California. It is 1300 miles from the nearest city. Nearby is remote Midway Island that once was a pristine paradise. It is still home to the largest population of a specific species of Albatross: half a million nests and one and a half million birds populate these atolls of Midway.

A very small population of scientists and environmentalist researchers also live on Midway. What they are uncovering is the horrific downside to the use of ubiquitous PLASTICS by our convenience-oriented first world folks. There are over five trillion pieces of plastic, not counting the microscopic, ranging in size from tiny fragments to bath-tub size pieces. Fishing nets, toys, bags, bottles, bottle caps, shoes, dash boards from cars, dishpans, ice chests, furniture, styrofoam packing materials, and containers of every size for everything you could imagine can be found here - washed up on the (formerly) white sand beaches. Out in the ocean beyond the coral reefs ringing Midway, and just below the surface floats the mass of clumped together PLASTIC garbage. Estimates of its size range from the size of the state of Texas to bigger than the entire continental United States. Difficult to measure, it is growing daily.

The health of our oceans determines the health of our planet. The Albatrosses of Midway are like canaries in the coal mine. Children, we’re in deep doo-doo. Our planet is very sick. Parent birds pick-up from the ocean what looks like food to them and feed it to their chicks. The chicks die in droves. Midway Island stinks of death as the corpses of dead Albatross chicks putrefy in the sun. When autopsied, the contents of their stomachs show death by PLASTICS that cannot be digested and which are toxic themselves, but also gather other ocean toxins to them. 

There are bits of PLASTIC in every marine animal on the planet from coral to dolphins, from eels to seals, world wide. The Garbage Patch of the North Pacific Gyre is not the only garbage patch, kids.

I’m scared for you children. 

Perhaps your wonderful minds can invent ways to take spent PLASTIC down to its  elemental constituents and return it to an inert and non-toxic state of matter. I hope your minds can do that.

It matters.

Good luck, kids.

Love,

One of your ancestors

PS: I'm concocting ways to go on a plastic diet. By using "single use plastic bags" until they are no longer useable, and then taking them to my local recycling center, where they are shipped to China to be made into plastic lumber, and by buying in bulk and using fabric bags I've made out of nylon, and going to farmer's markets where I can buy things not wrapped in plastic, and placing left-over apple, avocado, or citrus halves cut-side-down on a plate, rather than wrapping them in plastic, and by using wax-paper bags and glass containers instead of plastic bags for snacks and sandwiches, I'm experimenting with how little plastic I can come in contact with in one day. I'd love to hear from you, kids and your adults too, how you imagine supporting a plastic moratorium. Maybe we can do this together, eh? 

Hamilton and Inclusion On My Mind

Happy to have a little help from a friend. I get that.

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Listenin’ to Hamilton on the road down south

Got the rhythm and the rhyme thing comin’ out my mouth

I could listen all day to Lin Manuel Miranda rap

Could groove with the dude all day in the Miranda trap

The man hits the notes right, rhymes all day and night, right?

Me, I’m just an un-tried, un-tied neophyte

Still, ya gotta go, though, gotta take a chance

Gotta take a moment to celebrate the dance

Me and my true love drove down to LA

To The Painted Turtle’s FUNdraiser Bingo Soireé

The Roxy, on the Sunset Strip brings back memories

Being sixteen there, gettin’ pinched on the mammaries

Pun, he gave his all, man, introduced the stars, see?

Me, I won a Gucci Bag from those bingo cards. Wheee! 

Drivin’ home on Friday, we stopped to see some young folks

Whose camp days are over, but they still love old jokes

So we brought them each a laugh and a little piece of camp

And our free attention, to remind each one he’s a champ

Presence costs us nothing, but gives us back a gift

We sailed home feeling happy and grateful for the shift

Goin’ down we missed the raindrops, but we caught ‘em comin’ back

Sing a song of gratitude and Hit the Road, Jack

  *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   

I’ve been thinking a lot about inclusion, diversity, and white privilege, so looked around at options and found a class on the subject. Inviting friends in our Sub-Berkeley Bay Bubble to join me in learning to be a good ally. Bumbling about with good intention is one thing. Streamlining our actions to rid ourselves of blindness, ignorance, and the residue of cultural norm of disenfranchising all who are not white men, seems a good path forward. We’re all steeped in our culture of institutional racism. Ask a fish what water is. Ask a North American citizen what racism is. What water? What racism? (What differentism too.)

For more info in the Bay area go to BeyondSeparation.net    and    ImpactHub.net

Baby Tracking

A colleague asked this week whether I'd ever worked with children who held their breath. I responded, "Yes."

One of the families I worked with in the mid 90s had a 10 month old born by Caesarian-Section who began walking when she was eight months old. 

Bright, easy to laugh, and physically precocious, the little one had one problem that caused concern for her parents. Every time mom or dad tried to put her into the carseat, she'd stiffen her whole body, hold her breath until she turned blue, and then she'd pass out. 

The pediatrician said she'd out grow it, but the parents were frantic with worry. They were referred to me by a friend of theirs.

We did a brief telephone intake, during which I asked about the birth and days immediately following. It seemed the problem had been increasing in concern since that first day being driven home from the hospital. It was very unappealing to go out at all. Dad worked. Mom was feeling trapped at home. 

I asked the parents to bring the car-seat into the session. 

My partner Mary Lou and I sat with the parents and their active young walk-a-rounder on the floor in my treatment room.  Mary Lou focused on gathering a couple of pieces of info we hadn't been able to get on the phone. She gave the parents a mini education on birth-trauma resolution, and normalized for them that what seemed like a bizarre behavior, may be functioning as a coping mechanism, helping the nervous system rest from too much activation or dis-regulation. 

I tracked the little girl as she climbed up a small ladder, slid down the wooden slide, walked clockwise around the room, picked up a baby doll, sitting first in dad's lap for a moment, then the car seat, then mom's lap, then helping the baby doll down the slide, and sliding down again herself. 

With each repetition of her clockwise movement routine around the room, she got more animated, went faster, and began to vocalize with little chirps and squeals. She sounded delighted. I kept acknowledging aloud what she was doing... "oh, down the slide, running to dad, butt in the car-seat, hugging mom, baby doll down the slide, you down the slide..." 

Near the end of our time together the young one cuddled up in dad's lap holding the doll. We made an appointment for two weeks later, and the family left - carseat and all. Mary Lou and I listened, but didn't hear any struggle as they got into their car. 

A week later mom called to report that they didn't need to come for a second session, the problem had resolved. 

I wish I could tell you, with some scientific understanding, exactly what happened for the little one during that session. Truth is, I haven't a clue! 

But, doesn't something profound happen for all of us when we feel heard, seen and met? Perhaps that's all it takes in some cases. 

Beyond that, here are some guesses:

Ray Castellino, one of my teachers, says that sliding down a slide can represent coming into life. This little one's air-lift birth didn't allow for two main things: 1) Secreting the hormone that tells her mom's body that she's ready to be born, and to begin labor, please, and 2) Using her own legs and feet to push on down through the canal. Well, she also missed out on the massage that vaginally born folks get while moving through the longest journey of 2.5 inches we ever make. Mom and dad reported that she had some respiratory distress right after birth. This is fairly common in belly birth babies. Mammals require the full body massage of birth to activate all their systems. This is why mama cats lick their kittens from the tips of their noses to the tips of their toes and tails. Stimulation of the skin wakes up all the parts and welcomes them to life!

Perhaps the safety of the set up, the toys available for her to tell her story, and being mirrored as accurately as we could muster, worked to let her nervous system re-regulate. 

What a privilege to hold space and follow the body so it can tell its story without tipping people so deeply into the scary bits that they feel at the effect of the primary event all over again. 

My colleague said she was working with an adult who had a history from childhood of holding her breath to control her emotions. I'm eager to hear how the sessions go with my colleague and her client. 

Wouldn't it be lovely if we could have baby trackers at every birth to support little ones coming through? They could be kept abreast (so to speak) of what was happening on the outside, and what they could expect. Wouldn't it be nice to be part of the conversation - just like an airline pilot let's us know when we're heading into turbulence or in sight of a spectacular work of Nature?