me and the Church

‘Church’ is capitalized because I’m talking about the Catholic Church. It was without question the dominant social institution of my youth.

Mom and Dad were both devout Catholics. They both went to Catholic schools for their entire education. When I and my siblings went to school, it was to the local Catholic school at St Joseph’s in Cupertino. That was where we went to mass every Sunday.

At a certain age, I don’t remember exactly when maybe aged 10 or 11, I resisted going on Sunday. I remember my father telling me I should be able to dedicate an hour a week to god. I had no philosophic reason to not go. I just didn’t wanna. I don’t remember that I was ever excused.

In the early 1960s, the Church held a big conference called Vatican II. When it was over, many of the rules around going to church that I had grown up with were liberalized. Priests were allowed to say Mass in the local language. No longer did we have to fast before taking communion.

Mom and Dad bought into the liberalization completely. We started going to Mass in different places, not necessarily consecrated churches. One time we celebrated Mass at a park. Just out on the lawn with about 20 people and a priest. I found it interesting to experience the Liturgy stripped down to its essentials. Along with everything else going on in the world, it led me to a questioning of the established institution of the Church.

Around the same time, there was a lot of interest in music with guitars. We were avid watchers of the Hootenanny TV show which featured just about everyone playing guitars and singing. Then, of course, there were The Beatles.

So, somewhere in that time frame, the idea of music for a Mass using guitars was born. At St. Joseph’s, there was established a ‘guitar Mass’ led by a charismatic man who played guitar and sang.

As I recall, the songs were not liturgical, per se. ‘Blowing in the Wind’ and ‘Today’ were favorites.

My interest in the guitar was not due to the guitar Mass, or anyone on Hootenanny. It was The Beatles. Nevertheless, the guitar Mass was an acceptable outlet for my rudimentary playing at age 15. Mom and Dad had an acoustic guitar for some reason that I commandeered. I think Dad thought he was going to learn to play at one point but he never did. Come to think of it, I don’t know why we had that guitar. It was just there and I started playing it. I didn’t have to lobby for a guitar to play. Fate!

So, now I’m in high school. And by the way, I had run up against the limitations of the Catholic education in 6th grade and moved into the much more academically demanding local public schools. We were still very active in the church, though. The annual fall festival run by the Parish had always been fun and there was a youth group for high schoolers run by a Brother.

(Even now I’m not sure of the distinction between a Brother and a lay person. Brother Gary was not a priest but he had made some kind of commitment to the Brotherly order. For us, he was a fun guy who could be serious too. I learned a lot from him.)

Any American male in the 1967 -1971 time frame – my high school years – thought a lot about the draft. The Vietnam war was raging and quite aside from the prospect of coming home in a body bag, I felt strongly that there were better things to do with my life than to become a soldier and go to Vietnam. I enjoyed being in the Parish youth group but I had a lot of different ideas about faith and spirituality. I recognized the institution of the Church as just another power structure. I was planning on going to college, which included a deferment, but I was thinking longer term. I was laying the groundwork for a Conscientious Objector status with the draft board by staying active in this recognized religious organization.

In the end it didn’t matter because the draft was reconfigured to a lottery. I got a high enough number so the likelihood of my being drafted was very small.

There was never any particular moment when I ‘decided’ I wasn’t going to go to church any more. I graduated high school and went away to college. No one was bugging me to go to church every Sunday so I didn’t. I was playing guitar in a rock band! That was my new religion.

Over the years, I’ve been to Mass a few times. It all seems silly to me but I did it because I was with Mom and Dad and I respected their needs.

I have one more story. When I was in 2nd or 3rd grade, we were studying the Sacraments. One of the Sacraments is the Confession. Confession involved going down to the Church on a Saturday, waiting in the pews for a turn in the confessional, then entering the confessional and facing the priest through a screen. You could hear but not see the priest. It was all pretty intimidating plus it took a big bite out of a perfectly good Saturday afternoon. There was a formula of what to say, of course, followed by a recitation of whatever sins you had committed in the past week. You had to say something so there was some invention every Saturday.

So, one day my nun teacher handed out these little cards to the class. On them was printed something called the ‘Act of Contrition’. My teacher explained that it was for times when you couldn’t get to confession. You could just say the prayer and god would hear you and take care of it. Balance the books, as it were.

Well, even at my young age, I saw it immediately. Why go through the operator when you could direct dial? It was the beginning of the end of me and the Church.

Howard

I wrote about Bruce Johnson a while back. Bruce, who is sadly gone from this earth, was a friend in high school and a tremendous influence on me. Howard H was a guy who was one class ahead of me. He was not a science guy go we did not share any classes. I think I met him through John O, who was a neighborhood guy and a very talented artist. Howard was an artist too so that may have been the connection. This is my story about Howard and me.

Cupertino High School had kind of a multi-purpose room that featured a bench along one wall that was reserved for Seniors. I guess it was a tradition for each class to paint the bench. John, being known at school for being arty, was given the job of painting the bench in the summer before our senior year. Somehow, I got involved as did Howard.

Howard and John came up with a fantastical design that was very much rooted in the hippie style of the time. Think R Crumb, perhaps, although that is not fair to John and Howard. They were both very original thinkers. I am not aware of any photo of the completed bench. We didn’t think that way then and I suspect that the powers that be in the school were horrified by it. The yearbook had nothing about it.

As I went through my senior year, I hung out with Howard sometimes. I don’t remember having any sense of Howard being in college. None of what we did was associated with any class he was taking.

One ‘project’ he had – my modern term, not his – was to make up a rock band to play for this very straight-laced group. In my memory, it was some kind of Mormon girls group. Howard’s hook was that nobody in the band really knew how to play their instruments. I sort of knew and I recruited my friend Tom, who really did know how to play, but no one else did. We borrowed large amplifiers and a drum set and ‘played’ for these people. It was kind of theatrical. We didn’t have costumes or even a real plan. I guess we had some tunes . . .

So, it was perhaps related that Howard and I and a couple of other people ended up over the hill at UC Santa Cruz one weekend. The singer was in school at Merrill College so we went over there to ‘rehearse’. Again, my modern word, not Howard’s. I don’t remember how we got over there. I certainly didn’t have a car. We slept in a classroom that someone got us into on the QT. I don’t remember how we ate, just that we were there. I also don’t remember what I told Mom and Dad about being there but it wasn’t an issue. I had a lot of freedom. There was no sex or drugs; not even any alcohol. Howard was a very clean liver.

But I had a good time and as I was thinking about where to go to college, my weekend at UCSC seemed like a good omen so I applied there.

Even though my heart was in music, my academic strength was science and math so I applied as a Math major. The thinking was that it was hard to get into UCSC and my science cred was my best shot. Amazingly in hindsight, I did not have any academic music goals. I was going to be a rock star and you don’t need classes for that!

Later, when I left UCSC to concentrate on my band, Dad told me he thought I had identified a music community when I went over there the first time. I hadn’t, really. I was in my own little world. He was disappointed, of course, and thought I was making a mistake, but he gave me that freedom.

I reconnected with Howard on Facebook but we are not close. Like Bruce, he brought outside-the-box thinking to my life at a critical time and it has stayed with me. Thanks, Howard!

July 4th

I’m down at Mom & Dad’s on the evening of the 4th because I finally got fed up last year in Pacifica. Despite a ‘zero tolerance’ policy, Pacifica has more fireworks on July 4th than any place I’ve ever been to. Actually, last year was only the last straw. I had noticed from the first year I was in Pacifica for the 4th, that big bombs were common for days before the 4th. That’s in addition to the many ‘safe and sane’ fireworks everywhere.

This year it hadn’t been so bad but last night at around 11 pm a series of a dozen or so large explosions went off seemingly right outside my bedroom window. Thanks, assholes.

(a draft from July 2016)

numbers

Just stuff in my head this morning:

66 years old.

94 days of shelter in place if I don’t count the one day I worked, now 17 days ago.

188 lbs.

Jane arranged a Zoom call for the family yesterday and put together a trivia game. My favorite was, how many descendants do Bernard and Nancy Wood have? 24!

20. Dollars I paid for an on-line guitar lesson. What do you call it when it’s not a one on one lesson but it’s not a class either? Kind of an automated class with videos. But I’m annoyed at some of the terminology so I haven’t finished it.

One. Banana with my one (so far) cup of tea this morning. It would be great if I could make this my breakfast, but I will almost certainly go up and have a bowl of cereal as soon as I’m done with this post. I’ve been trying to keep it smaller (the bowl of cereal not the post).

things

I made some reference in my last post about my things – memorabilia, books, clothes – that we moved last week from my apartment. I’m still busy trying to finish the floor, but boxes of my things are all over the house. I’ve found that the context has changed how I look at them. Next week the floor will be done and we will crack the garage and Sepi’s things – mostly furniture – will come out and go upstairs. There will then be lots of storage room for all of my boxes.

But now I think I will be letting go of much of it. I’ve had some discussions with friends about their experiences going through their parents’ house after their deaths. Much had to be thrown away. I’ve known for a long time that the same will be true when Mom and Dad pass on. Most of these things are interesting, up to a point. Taken in total, it’s too much.

Well, that day is not yet upon us, but my day is. We have a huge dumpster in front of our house and it must be returned by the end of the month. Many of my things will be in it.

Dave

A little over a year ago, I posted this story about Dave. Noah’s Dad. This past week, Dave has been in California along with the rest of his family. A group of us met in Lake Tahoe over the weekend for a couple of days of camping and fellowship. They’ve been down in the Bay Area since Sunday and left this morning.

They culminated their visit last night by coming down to Mom and Dad’s house in Santa Clara. They were flying out of San Jose and stayed overnight there. An even dozen of us had a very nice dinner on the patio. The kids played with the toys Mom keeps there, they went over to the park and played in the sand, and they picked lemons off the tree in the backyard and made lemonade for everyone.

During all this activity, Dave was just being Dad: carrying Myles on his shoulders, playing airplanes with Myles, talking with Noah about this thing or that that we were seeing. Just like his comment from 2 1/2 years ago, Dave was always calm and engaged with his children.

I don’t want to imply that Ally was absent in childcare duties. She was not. She did plenty of carrying and playing too. She’s a stay at home Mom now and I think she appreciated having a little break. I’m sure having Zach’s family around her for most of a week had some special stresses. Whether Dave is like this all the time or if he recognized those stresses doesn’t really matter. He was a great Dad this week. I’m pretty sure he’s a great Dad back home too. Yay Dave!

Language can be weird sometimes. I think I am Noah’s grandfather despite having no legal status as such. He has two more back in Ohio. Ally is the mother of this grandson but is not, nor was she ever, my daughter-in-law. Dave is just Noah’s Dad. Whatever else we call ourselves, I am proud to call these people ‘family’.

EDIT: Ally posted this photo on Facebook and I filched it. Maybe not so special in and of itself, but to me emblematic of Dave.

And just to be fair, here’s one of Ally at our Lake Tahoe campsite:

the Fourth of July

I stayed in Pacifica last night. I had to work until 2 yesterday afternoon and got lazy after I got home. I had talked to Mom and Dad about coming down but finked out. Unlike prior years, Pacifica had been fairly quiet in the previous week.

Although it wasn’t fully dark until 9:30, the bombs and skyrockets started in earnest about 8 pm. The back of my apartment complex faces the backs of some houses which all have decks. In almost eight years of living here I’ve seen people on those decks maybe 4 or 5 times. Last night was one of them.

There were a dozen or so people including kids. I could see beer bottles and cigarettes. I was hoping their deck did not go all the way to the house because they were shooting off big fountains and skyrockets right there in the back yard. The airbursts were out of my sight from my kitchen window but I could hear them. The fountains splashed sparks on their roof and their neighbor’s roof. The neighbor’s house was dark so I assume they weren’t at home. Maybe they were on the deck.

Out the bedroom window looking towards the beach we could see several large displays. About 9 pm a police car sped down Linda Mar with its lights on but no siren. A minute or so later came another, then the fire truck from the station up the street. The fire truck put its siren on. There was smoke all over.

It’s the first time I’ve ever seen (or heard) police and fire presence on the Fourth of July in Pacifica.

I went to bed around ten. The explosions continued for at least another half hour. I believe I fell asleep about then so I don’t know how late it all went. If there were big explosions later they didn’t wake me up. I am thankful for that. I remember in years past huge bombs at one in the morning.

Also in years past there were big signs posted along Highway 1 in the run up to the Fourth saying that Pacifica had ‘zero tolerance’ for illegal fireworks. The fine was publicized as $1000. I didn’t see those signs this year, perhaps because there is work going on upgrading the highway. Maybe instead of ineffectual signs, the city has decided to actually prosecute the scofflaws.

My favorite guitar forum, TDPRI, had a discussion on fireworks with predictable comments from some about restrictions on ‘freedom’. Another common theme was how communities have banned fireworks but people get them and shoot them off anyway. Sepi says Brisbane enforces their fireworks ban more closely, perhaps because they are right up against San Bruno Mountain, which is covered in dry grass.

I suppose in the big picture of where our country is going, this is a small thing. OK, rant over. Tomorrow we are heading up to Lake Tahoe for a group camp out in honor of Zach. I think I’ll do another whole post on that happy subject.

at Mom and Dad’s

I came down here yesterday because Mom had an issue with vertigo and was going to the doctor. I had the day off and didn’t want her to drive if it could be avoided.

The doctor said basically that there was nothing to be done about the vertigo except rest. Mom had taken some expired medicine she had for sea sickness and thought it had helped but the doc said no, don’t do that.

Anyway, she’s better now. She has an appointment with her dentist this morning to put a permanent crown on so I decided to stay and drive her there as well. Her original plan was to drive up to Jane’s tonight for a Pampered Chef party which worried me. Last night, though, she decided she was not going to go so I feel better.

The weather was warm yesterday, in the 80s, and it reminded me of the air conditioning battle I had waged and lost six months ago. It’s a little after 7 now and I’ve been up for about an hour. It’s beautiful outside but it promises to be warm again today. Mom and Dad close their house up tight every night religiously so this morning the first thing I did was go around and open up some windows and doors. (I had the window wide open in my bedroom.) The temperature in the house has gone from 73 down to 71 in that time. All the fans that were running last night were shut off during the night.

When I lived in Grass Valley, we would set the fans in the wide open windows running full blast at night. The house would be almost too cool in the mornings but we would button everything up by 8 or so including keeping the drapes closed and the house would stay at a reasonable temperature most of the day. I know Mom and Dad want their house to be secure but comfort is a thing too. I am going to try to convince them that there are not burglars going through the neighborhood every night looking for open windows.

Mom did say last night that she will be proactive about going to the library or the movies (for air conditioning) if it gets really hot. I’ve been in my coastal cocoon lately so it was good to get a reminder that it’s summer time in Santa Clara. I’ll watch the weather more carefully.

Jane is finished with school as of tomorrow so she’ll be able to come down more easily for a while.

at Dad’s house

Sepi and I went down to Mom and Dad’s Wednesday. When we got there it was a little early for lunch so I asked what we could do to further the cause. Mom said there were some lemons on the tree that were pretty big and she wanted to harvest them. Perfect!

I went and got the ladder and soon filled the first bag she brought out. Then she got a second bag which was quickly filled. At this point I was having some difficulty in reaching some of the large lemons and also noticed that the tree had sprouted quite a few branches straight up. I knew that Mom and Dad wanted to keep their fruit trees below about 10 feet in height so I asked Mom to bring me some pruning shears.

This is what she brought me.

I remember those pruners from my childhood over 50 years ago! Still, they worked ok. I had to twist a few of the branches I was trying to cut but it wasn’t worth making an issue over it. What was funny was when Dad came out as I was about done. Of course he couldn’t leave the branch cuttings on the ground for the gardener who was coming the next day. He went and got the green compost can and started cutting up the branches to fit in the can.

He immediately said these cutters are no good. (I wish I could remember what he said exactly but I can’t.) I went and got some newer ones and took this picture of the old ones. When we were done it went back into the bin with the others so it will almost certainly make more appearances.

Back in the garage with the camera app in the phone open, I decided to look at his storage cabinet. It’s a microcosm of his thriftiness: reused shoe boxes and hand written labels. There’s an old wired phone that he can’t bear to throw out. In fairness, it probably still works and they do still have a land line.

Below those items are another hallmark of my childhood: reused Polaroid film boxes. At work, Dad took Polaroid images of experiments he was running to study and/or document certain things. The boxes would have been tossed – indeed many probably were – but they were sized perfectly for small items as can be seen.

I’ve had occasion to go into some of those boxes in the last few years. What an amazing melange of ancient hardware! They are the result of many years of fixing things and saving the better parts for reuse. The fact that most of them are worn in ways that would make them difficult or impossible to use now is beside the point. Thriftiness in action. How can I not love this man?

busy

I’ve been really busy lately. That’s partly why there haven’t been very many posts, but only partly. The negative reaction of the person I thought was my friend to a post I made has rocked me. Most of what she said in comments on this blog I did not allow to be published because they were raw personal attacks that did not leave room for discussion. Comments must be civil.

I thought about it, though. I take responsibility for my actions and don’t want to hide behind administrator privileges just to make me feel better. The post in question was only seen by three people that I know about (who reacted to it) before I removed it. Her reaction has been much stronger, I believe, because she has seen I have a new woman in my life.

I would like to talk about her but I am cautious after my experience writing about Rose. I will say her name is Sepi. I met her last fall and we’ve been spending a lot of time together for a couple of months now. My earlier post about charged words was inspired by our conversations. Are we ‘dating’? Are we ‘seeing’ each other? Do we ‘love’ each other or are we ‘in love’? Is she ‘mine’ or me ‘hers’? Words can be confusing, or misleading. Our conversations have been lengthy and are ongoing, I believe that is the best part of our relationship. Partly because of the upset around the blog post no subject is off limits. Early signs are encouraging that we have established a strong basis for a good relationship.

One of the most encouraging signs is being busy. Sepi has gotten me out doing new things, meeting new people. For years, my concept of busy was working a lot. Now I am able to do more things socially and it has been a revelation.

I am returning the favor the best I can. I took her to my jazz band concert and today she will be meeting Mom and Dad and other family members at Teresa’s birthday party. There is more to come on both sides.

Here’s a picture of me in my St. Patrick’s Day tie ready to head out for the jazz band concert:

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Tag Archives: Mom and Dad