Sam Keen's Blog

One of the hardest parts of writing Prodigal Father Wayward Son was figuring out how to organize all of the chapters ��� and which to keep and which to leave out.�� One of our early themes centered around epic fights we had had.�� This didn���t work out in the end, but here���s an account of one of our worst fights.�� Initially we each wrote our own version, and it wasn���t until later that we decided to interleave the narrative. ��So here it is, the battle of the Chicken Coop told from both sides.

The Chicken Coop��

GIF

At the end of my sophomore year of high school, I moved to Muir Beach to live with you and our relationship improved. But it was not the end of our conflicts, and one of the most memorable fights occurred the very next summer, when I was sixteen.

You���d just bought an idyllic forty-acre farm nestled in the eastern foothills of ��Washington���s North Cascade Mountains, and I went there with you and your new wife, Jan, for summer vacation. It wasn���t easy for me.�� I missed my friends; I was bored, and had little access to marijuana, which by that time was a serious problem for me. The house had only one bedroom, and I slept in a VW camper-van in the driveway.�� After a week, I got depressed and regressed into all the old sullen and rebellious behaviors I was just beginning to shed.

SAM

No sooner had we arrived, than you became a real pain in the ass.�� The farm was rundown; there was a lot to do. The water system was constantly breaking and between my writing and all the farm work, I was overwhelmed.�� I tried to get you involved in some of the projects.�� Not only did I think it would break you out of your depression, but I really needed the help. But you usually responded by giving me the finger without even looking up from your science fiction novel.

GIF

It was bad enough that you���d dragged me all the way out into the middle of nowhere with nothing to do. But then you started constantly bugging me. Trying to make me work. Guilt tripping me with your old Calvinist values.�� And there was nowhere I could go to escape. I was at your mercy.�� It drove me nuts.

SAM

On the far side of the front yard, nestled under a spreading cottonwood tree was an old cinderblock building with a tarpaper roof and large screened windows.�� It had been used as a chicken coop for many years, as was obvious by the foot of accreted chicken manure on the floor. The house was too small, and I badly needed to work, so I decided to convert the chicken coop into an office.�� I thought it would be a great project for you and I to do together.�� I asked you to help fix it up, but you refused.

GIF

About three weeks into our stay, you decided to convert the chicken coop to an office. The first task that needed to be accomplished was to clean the floor. And you wanted me to help.�� I couldn���t believe it. It was bad enough being stuck on some hick-ass farm with no friends and no dope but I would be damned if I was going to shovel chicken shit, the nastiest of all the many chores you had conceived for me, just so you could have an office.

I might have been slightly more willing if we���d been converting the chicken coop to be a bedroom for me, but I couldn���t see the justice of having to work so you could have an office in addition to a bedroom while I slept in the van.

So unsurprisingly, I declined to help.

You insisted.

I told you to screw off.

SAM

I snapped. The weeks of malingering and resentment were just too much. I lost my temper and started yelling.�� I said you were going to help me whether you wanted to or not.�� I���d had it with your ungrateful, sullen behavior. It was time for you to shape up, help out, and quit whining.

GIF

My memory of what happened next has always been a little hazy. But I remember walking up the driveway, through the front yard, towards the chicken coop. I was crying. I had always been small for my age, and at the time I barely weighed eighty pounds, while you were a strong, full-grown man. There was no way I could stand up to you and I felt humiliated. You were walking behind me and as we approached the coop, for no reason, without warning, you shoved me hard in the back ��with both hands and I fell to my knees.

That push, a cheap shot in the back when I was already beaten, was too much to bear. Without speaking, I shoveled out the coop until all the chicken shit was gone.�� But with each shovelful, I wrote you out of my life. I may not have been able to stand up to you, but I was old enough to know I didn���t have to put up with this any more. I was done with you.

SAM

My ���victory��� in the battle of the chicken coop was hollow and bitter for both of us. You felt humiliated, and I felt ashamed for losing my temper. Later that night, after we���d cooled off and I���d taken a long walk, I took you aside and apologized. Man to man. Which was a rare occurrence.

I decided this was the occasion to pass on to you my fathers favorite ring ��� a beautiful piece of spider-web Navajo turquoise set in silver. It was a palpable symbol of another aspect of the Keen Way: we may fight fiercely but we don���t stop loving.

GIF

That turquoise ring sits on my bedside table as I write this, and after that fight you never used your strength to break my will again. I see it now as a token of a vow long ago given, a connection to my grandfather whom I never knew well, and a link to my son who I hope will one day wear it.

But despite our limited armistice at the chicken coop, our conflicts continued. All through the Muir Beach years we often ended up screaming at the top of our lungs angry as hell, sometimes as much as once or twice a month. It came to be a natural part of our relationship ��� we could yell at each other like crazy then an hour later be friends again. In a strange way fighting was one way we became intimate with each other.�� And over time the nature of our fights began to change.�� I came to be less afraid of confronting you and stood up for myself more often and more vociferously.

Hi All (or few as the case may be),

Here���s a sarcastic letter I wrote my dad while we were working on the book together.�� We were going to include it as part of the book, but like a lot of good material we wrote, it didn’t make the final cut.

Hope you enjoy it – I sure did :–)

Wayward Son (Gifford)

Dear Father,

Just today you sent me a letter suggesting I write an essay for the book on ���How I Learned to Love Work,��� and that I should focus on picking apples, my college years and my professional, corporate career ��� the implication here being that I was lazy and shiftless before this time.

This came on the heels of you mis-remembering that I was hesitant to come work on your house because I was, ���just hanging around the Methow in the winter smoking dope and not doing much��� when in fact I���d just spent four years working eighty plus hours a week busting my ass at St. Johns and getting straight A���s. (Nor should you imagine that ���hanging around Methow in the winter��� was any picnic ��� not when it meant cutting wood to heat my house with an ax, slogging a quarter mile through two feet of snow to get home each night after work, breaking through the ice in the creek to get drinking water, and earning money to buy gas and groceries from working in the apple orchards.)

This odd slip of memory, combined with the suspiciously patronizing tone of the question, ���When Did You Learn to Love Work��� made me wonder if you aren���t, in some unconscious��way, still trying to perpetuate the narrative that as a youth I was lazy and unmanly, weak and malingering, unable to live up to the Eagle Scout creed that you so shiningly exemplified. ��And while I���ve bought into it for years, the more I thought about the question, the more I came to realize that this was never really the case.

Allow me to offer a slightly different narrative: ��So, let me think��� when did I first learn to love work?

Could it have been when I was four years old, and one night when you came home from work, I surprised you by reading ���Green Eggs and Ham��� out loud.�� It had taken me months to learn, and okay so I memorized a good bit of it, but I was reading at least half the words and this at a time when other kids my age were just learning their ABC���s.

Or perhaps it was the summer when I was six and you decided that as punishment for failing at some manly virtue, I was to be denied the dimes I used to get to buy ice cream from the truck that came by each afternoon. (My sister, by the way, was not so afflicted.) So, I scraped together a little money, rode my bike to the convenience store, bought some packets of instant koolaid, and started my own koolaid stand. I sat for hours in the front yard every day for a month with a table and a homemade sign singing out, ���Koolaid, koolaid, ice cold koolaid, five and ten cents a glass, get it while you can,��� and eventually I got enough money to buy my own damn ice cream for the rest of the summer.

Then there was the summer of 1969. While you were dropping acid and exploring the human potential movement, I collected pop bottles. Every day I made the rounds, riding miles on my bike, hitting the trash cans on the main street of town, combing the beaches, cruising the alleyways behind apartment buildings, occasionally even snooping in untended garages.�� By the end of the summer, I had enough pop bottles to fill three shopping carts and when I turned them all in, I got almost a hundred dollars ��� real money for a nine year old in those days. It may not have impressed you, but it sure opened some eyes at the grocery store.

The next year I became first chair flute in the school orchestra as well as the honor band ��� and this when I was in third grade, two or three years younger than all the other kids. You think I didn���t have to practice my ass off to get there?

A year later ��� in Prescott, I wrote over a hundred poems and one of them won a first place prize in the Arizona state poem contest.

I could go on, ad nausiam really, but I think you get the idea.

Despite the fact that you failed to recognize my achievements, I was actually a hell of a worker from a very young age. I just refused do the crappy jobs that you were trying to force me to do. I responded to your bullying, your humiliating rants, your belittling jibes by digging in and fighting you tooth and nail every single inch of the way.

In retrospect, this may have been where I really learned to love work, and in fact may have been one of my most challenging��achievements. It took tremendous effort, determination, commitment, courage, and above all, yes, work to defy you so consistently. I worked my tail off to keep from doing all the jobs you tried to make me do and it would have been a hell of lot easier to just give in and do them ��� a fact that, if memory serves, you pointed out to me on numerous occasions.

So the truth is, I learned to love work long before I stared picking apples or went to St. Johns. I learned when I was a very little boy, and you taught me the joy of it ��� just not quite in the way you had intended.

Love,

Gifford

Dear Readers,

Today is the��official launch of ��Prodigal Father Wayward Son, and it is also April Fools Day – which seems somehow appropriate. So to celebrate this confluence of events I am posting a chapter from the��from the book entitled ���The Keen Way��� which recounts a spattering of my father’s most foolish and endearing foibles.

Hope you like it,

Wayward Son (Gifford Keen)

THE KEEN WAY

Every man has his folly, but the greatest folly of all��� is not to have one.

��� Nikos Kazantzakis

Dear Father,

When I was a boy, you used to tell me, ���There���s the wrong way, the right way, and then there���s the Keen Way.��� I didn���t have to ask, not even the first time. It was obvious: the Keen Way was superior. Because we, the Keens, were doing it, whatever it was, it was even righter than the right way.

As a child and then later as a teenager, I often found your unconventional behavior mortifying. Apparently the Keen Way included changing your swimsuit in the parking lot at the beach in front of God and everybody. When chided, you would laugh and say, ���If they���ve seen one before, it���s nothing new; and if they haven���t, it���s about time they did.���

You used to rummage through the neighbors��� garbage, dig through dumpsters, and retrieve furniture, clothing, or household goods in various states of disrepair. And you didn���t even try to hide it. Far from it! In fact, you loved to boast about your finds. Standing astride a massive trash pile, holding some prize above your head, you would call across the street in a booming voice to wherever we were cowering in embarrassment that some idiot (obviously not a Keen) had thrown out a perfectly good toaster.

You were famous for rescuing ���road kill.��� This had nothing to do with dead animals (thank God), but rather with retrieving ���useful��� items from the side of the road. In the dog days of summer, you used to pack the family into the back of a green-and-white VW bus and take us on long trips to various semi-exotic locations. (If you live in the suburbs of Louisville, Kentucky, almost anywhere else seems exotic.)

At least once a trip, sometimes once a day, without warning, you would jam on the breaks and swerve precipitously to the side of the highway. Then, cackling in maniacal glee, with your head stuck out the open driver���s-side door, you would back up along the shoulder at full speed, the engine whining, oblivious to the honking horns and stiff, middle-finger salutes of other drivers. And there, in the middle of the road, would be some wondrous treasure. You would dart out into the highway and retrieve the item, perhaps a suit jacket. Upon returning to the car, you would dust it off and proudly display the booty. ���Pierre Cardin,��� you would announce, fingering the material with a show of judicious approval ��� and somehow it would be relatively new and always your size.

Your acuity for finding road kill appeared, at times, almost supernatural. Once, on a trip from Prescott, Arizona to Southern California, you announced as we pulled out of the driveway that you were going to find a Navy pea coat. Even for a man of your well-documented talents, this seemed to border on hubris. At the time I was twelve, pissed off about the divorce, and not inclined to forgive your foibles. So as the miles wore on and no pea coat appeared, I ribbed you mercilessly. But you took this in stride, insisting with good-natured assurance that the trip wasn���t over. And damned if after two days of travel, not ten miles from our destination, you didn���t let out a war cry of triumph and slew the car to a stop, half-blocking one lane of a busy highway. You popped out of the driver���s seat, went running back along the median, and when you returned ��� cocky bastard ��� you were holding��� yes, you guessed it, a brand-new, navy-blue pea coat ��� the kind with a double row of shiny silver buttons down the front. Just what you had ordered. My only consolation was that in this one rare instance, as I recall, it was slightly too tight in the shoulders.

When I was seventeen, we were riding along Interstate 80 somewhere between Berkeley and Oakland, one of the most heavily traveled roads on the West Coast, and you saw a logging chain in the median. You swerved to the shoulder; and a second later, I was watching in horror as you dodged and across five lanes of thick, fast-moving traffic to retrieve the chain. It took you twenty minutes and a dozen tries to make it back to the car; and twice I was sure that you were going to be mashed to a pulp by an oncoming semi-truck.

Okay, it was a nice length of chain ��� but really?

Once, we were in a high-class restaurant in Sausalito, and you were sitting right in front of the dessert table. All through dinner, you kept turning in your chair and eyeing the cakes. There was one particularly delicious-looking chocolate cake that had been completely consumed ��� with the exception of a single tall, triangular piece with a three-inch mound of crumbs and frosting heaped to one side of the platter. As I knew you would, after the waiter had cleared our plates and we were waiting for the check, you leaned back, pinched up a big mound of the crumbs, and ate them. ���Delicious,��� you pronounced.

I hissed at you to mind your manners, and you just laughed ��� a big, self-assured laugh ��� and said in a booming voice that carried throughout the small room, ���You think that���s bad, you should have seen my father.��� Everyone in the restaurant was watching; they���d all seen you. I was hiding my face in one hand, melting into a puddle of embarrassment under the table. And what did you do? Yep. You reached back, scooped up a fat slab of sticky chocolate frosting, popped it into your mouth, and licked your fingers.

The ���Keen Way��� was not confined, however, to the simple acquisition of questionable items by dubious means. Later in life it included activities like stowing away on a cruise ship (just to see if you could do it) and bringing a gram of hash back from Turkey (this must have been just for ���fun,��� because as far as I know you never ever smoked it).

And what boggles my mind now is that never once did it seem to occur to you that there might be anything even slightly suspect about your actions. Quite to the contrary, all of these incidents were carried out with loud, bombastic pride. But see, the thing was, you were big ��� big faults, big virtues, big voice, big personality, big smile. You had such charisma, such easygoing charm, that often while my sister and I were cringing in the wings, wishing the ground would swallow us up, other people were captivated by your offbeat behavior.

Your brash self-confidence, unsurprisingly, did lead to some truly boneheaded screw-ups. And the consequences of some of your thoughtless acts could have been disastrous ��� I mean, didn���t you see Midnight Express, for Christ���s sake? But even when some monumental mistake came crashing down around your ears, were you repentant? Hardly! ���Often wrong, but seldom in doubt,��� you���d laugh. ���It���s the Keen Way, son.���

This didn���t always make you easy to live with, but it let you live life on your own terms. You took chances; you didn���t give a good goddamn what anyone else thought, and you didn���t care who knew it. When I was little, you used to question me, sometimes harshly, and more than once I justified my actions by saying, ���Well, all the kids at school do it,��� to which you would invariably reply, ���If all the other kids jumped off a cliff, would you jump off a cliff too?���

From the moment I could think, you taught me to think for myself. You demanded I question authority ��� although you might have wished I hadn���t applied that principle to you quite as assiduously as I did. You insisted I strive for excellence and were adamant that I value my own judgment over that of the herd. In college, Socrates��� perennial question, ���Which do you value more, the opinion of one wise man or that of ten thousand fools?��� settled into my heart like an old friend.

At least some of your self-assurance and don���t-give-a-damn attitude rubbed off on me. From an early age, I had a strong sense that normal societal conventions simply didn���t apply to us Keens. What my peers perceived as hard-and-fast rules that had to be obeyed, I viewed as artificial constraints to be examined and, based on my own judgment, be accepted or rejected without regard for what other people might think.

This didn���t make me particularly popular in school. Nor has it always made life easy. But it has made it interesting. The way you lived, your example of the Keen Way, gave me a sense of freedom, the confidence to step outside the lines, the conviction to do what I thought best even when my friends (and sometimes you) thought I was nuts.

Without that, I wonder if I would have had the courage to build my cabin, go back to college as an older student, quit a high-paying corporate job, or homeschool my children. So��� even though I was embarrassed by your quirky habits when I was a kid, resentful of being so different as a teenager, and more than once just plain pissed off at you as an adult; despite the fact that when I read this to my wife, she guffawed loudly at the thought of me chiding you for a lack of manners (as she maintains I have none), looking back, I wouldn���t have it any other way.

And I suppose this is my own expression of the Keen Way.

Prodigal Father Wayward Son

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Posted by ProdigalFather:

Here’s something I wrote many years ago when one of Gif’s close friends was killed in a motorcycle accident. ��It was originally part of Prodigal Father Wayward Son, but we had to cut a lot of great stories for length constraints – this is one of them. We hope you like it.

Sam Keen.

MORTALITY

���There is not love of life without despair about life.���

��Albert Camus

Full moon in autumn, the aspens turning gold, Winter nipping at the edges of the night.

2:30 am: from fathoms deep in sleep I hear the piercing sound of the telephone and struggle to the surface of consciousness, breathless with panic. Who is calling at this ungodly hour? The faces of everyone I love flash before me. I remember the phone call that came the Autumn of l964 ��� Your father is dying, come as quickly as you can.”

“Hello.”

“Hello, Sam. This is Punky. There has been an accident. John Demetri got killed, and we are trying to locate his parents. We thought Gif might have his address. Is he there?���

“What happened?���

“He left here about an hour ago on his motorcycle and ran off the road down by Black Canyon and hit his head on a rock. I tried to get him to wear a helmet but he wouldn’t do it.���

“I heard Gif’s truck come in a while ago, so I know he is up at his cabin, but he wouldn’t have the address there. Why don’t we wait until morning, and we���ll go over to John’s house and see if we can find an old letter or something with an address on it?���

“O.K., I guess that makes sense. There’s nothing anybody can do now.���

I hang up the phone and climb back in bed. The moon disappears behind the hill and darkness deepens. I try to sleep but waves of feeling and memory smash against my unbelieving mind, undercutting my illusions of safety, sweeping the ground from beneath me. Impossible! Not true! Just this afternoon John was painting my house. At five o���clock he was standing on the porch wiping paint from his hands. The red and white cap he always wore that advertised “Reed’s Electrical Appliances” contained a visible resum�� of the odd jobs he had recently completed ��� a grease spot from the old Pontiac he was always working on, a sprinkling of sawdust from the cabinet he helped you build, brown paint from my house. His tattered Levi cut-offs matched his stringy beard and long, disheveled hair. A little like a lost dog who hadn’t been well-treated even before he left home. You always warned me, “You have to look underneath his appearance. John is a funny sort of guy. He always shows people his worst side first. He acts real stoned and stupid, but if you keep coming after him you see he is a real sensitive man who has a lot of pain he is afraid to let people see.”

While I was paying him for the painting we had talked about his dream of buying a few acres of land. I noticed that he looked pale even though he had been working all day in the sun. As I review my sparse memories of John, sadness grows within me for the death of a man, for shattered frail hope that had just begun to grow. And tears, because in the morning I must tell you that your friend is dead.

At first light I give up the effort to sleep and get up to watch the sunrise. A tangerine glow from behind the mountain heralds the day. The stage lights change rapidly bathing the valley in chrome-yellow, chartreuse, lemon, topaz, daffodil, apricot, copper. With a hush, preceded by a hint of violet, the bronze and burning sun steps over the ridge and takes command of a day that is already haunted by absence. I drink cups of steaming tea and watch the drama from the privileged seat among the living, feeling unaccountably guilty, embarrassed by beauty.

As I walk up the path through the meadow to your cabin, my mind squirms looking for the right words. How do I introduce you to death? You are twenty-two years old, still a stranger to death. You sleep hard, dream vividly, and wake slowly. You don���t like to talk before breakfast. Should I break the news gradually? Give you time to come fully awake? Fortunately, your dog Rastamon sees me coming, barks, and warns you that your territory is being invaded. When I get in the cabin you are half-awake.

“Good morning son,” I say, walking over to the bed and pausing until I can put my hand on your uncovered and vulnerable shoulder. “I have some real bad news. John was killed last night.”

You look at me in stunned silence.

“On his motorcycle?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“I was at Punky’s last night playing pool and there was lots of free beer. I knew John was going to Omak on the motorcycle to spend the night with a friend so he could see about his unemployment checks in the morning. I tried to convince him to come home and drive up with me today, but he wouldn’t do it….. Dead? He’s Dead?”

“Yes, son, It’s impossible to believe isn’t it?���

���Somehow I’m not really surprised,��� you told me. ���He always said he would die young and violently. It was almost as if he knew. When he came into the bar last night, he took out a quarter and held it up and said, ���This is all the money I got, but I guess it’s all I need since the beer is free and the loser is going to have to pay for the next game of pool.��� I grinned at him and started to leave and he said, ���What’s the matter, Gif, you afraid to play me?��� We traded friendly insults and played a game or two, and when I went out the door he flashed me a big smile and gave me a thumbs-up sign. It was always like that. We understood each other, like brothers, without having to talk about it. Ever since he came back from Vietnam he was in such pain that he stayed drunk or stoned a lot of the time.

���Once I told him, John, I can see all the pain and rage you have bottled-up inside you. And he said, ���I’m glad.��� But we didn’t have to talk about it after that. We were just friends. I think, somehow, it was his time to die. At least he is not in pain now.���

Silence, again.

Gradually the awful fact begins to sink into your heart and you start to cry softly. I also. I want to cradle you in my arms and protect you like I did when you were a baby. As I reach over and embrace you, I feel my body (calloused by frequent grief, covered with scar tissue from the death of my father and friends) form around your sinewy frame as if to shield you from tragedy. I hold you for a few minutes. But we are both too awkward to take comfort for long within each others arms. We edge apart, trying not to notice each other���s tears.

“I guess you never get use to death, do you Dad?”

“I never have.”

I sense you want to be alone, so I leave the cabin. An hour later you come down to the house and I cook thick slices of home-cured ham and eggs and strong coffee. After breakfast we go across the county road to John’s house to look for his parent���s address, which we finally find in a stack of letters in the bedroom. As we turn to leave I see that you have picked up John’s “Reed’s Electrical Appliances” cap and put it on your head.

The flood of sorrow carries us into each others arms and I hear a silent scream welling up from my depths. “Death, keep your goddamn hands off my son! You can have me, but leave my children alone.”

Scenes from three generations of my history flash before my eyes. First, I see myself standing by my father’s grave by a juniper tree in Prescott, Arizona wearing his hat and cursing death. Next, I imagine myself as an old man standing on the high ridge above this farm watching my children and grandchildren eating from the apricot and walnut trees I have planted.

You and I pat each other on the back to signal that it’s time to move apart. Our embrace loosens. Seeing John’s hat on your head, I remember that the universe does not guarantee us a timely death. For the first time, I see on your face the marks of one who has been initiated into the knowledge of mortality.

Prodigal Father Wayward Son

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Gifford Keen:

Wayward Son Posting:

Here���s a letter I wrote my dad that was originally part of the book and didn���t make the final cut. But we both liked it. Let me know what you think.

Gifford

Dearest Father,

Over the last few days, my thoughts have been drawn back to our last phone call time and again. I wonder if you have any idea how profound it was for me.

You were in a good mood when we spoke, not rushed or distracted. We talked about the book, how to move forward, what we were working on, and we spoke of our lives, the kids, our travel plans, exchanging all the small details that knit the fabric of our lives together.

Then, just when I thought we were wrapping up you said, ���I have been having one small problem with the book.���

���What���s that?���

���For the first time in my life, I realize how cruel it was of me to leave the family.���

With those words my mind went still, and without quite understanding why, I suddenly found my attention intensely focused on the silence wending its way from Sonoma, across the Pacific Ocean, onto my lani in South Kona, and into my left ear.

After a pause I asked, ���Why is that a problem?���

���Well, it makes me kind of sad,��� was your answer.

You didn���t seem to understand the significance of what you had just said, but I was stunned.

I had been waiting forty years to hear those words.

After you left the family in Prescott, you used to call on the phone (with astonishing psychic precision, invariably just as we sat down to dinner) and when you were low, you would tell me how bad you felt about breaking up the family, how lonely you were, how you were tormented by guilt. By the time I was living in Boulder, I remember during these confessions, I would hold the phone away from my ear, letting your words blur to an indistinct babble of meaningless sound, waiting only for that change in tone that would signal an opportunity to end the call.

I didn���t want to hear it.

And for years afterward, in the purgatorial period between leaving home and our watershed fight at Pasquals, when ever we talked about the Bad Years, I always found your responses incomplete, self-serving, unsatisfying. I poked and prodded, wouldn���t let the issues rest. I was always looking for something from you. I didn���t know what, some sort of closure, some recognition. But whatever it was, I felt it keenly. Like a black hole, the gravity of that singularity grew so strong that light could not escape, and it became invisible, revealing itself to us only through a dense, impenetrable absence.

More than once during these years I remember you turning to me in frustration and asking, ���What do you want from me?���

And with those two short sentences on the phone last week, the answer to that question snapped into crystalline focus. In all of those years of interminable, dissatisfying conversations, I only heard you talk about how you felt: your guilt, your sadness, your struggle to break free of your father���s taboos, your mother���s rigid fundamentalism, your need to resolve your issues with women. But now, for the first time you seemed to be filled with compassion for my suffering during those years.

You saw my pain.

Five years ago when you had your brain surgeries, I began to think about the relatively small number of times we would be together again, how few the hours we would spend in each other���s company, how I wanted to use that precious time. For all but the most heinous crimes there is a statute of limitations and I figured we had both paid our debt to society long ago. I lost the need to reopen old wounds. But that doesn���t mean I didn���t still feel them. Only that I owned them as mine and no longer looked to you for resolution.

The father/son injuries of my childhood haunted me for years, and for a long time I did not ever expect to be free of them. But then I had a son of my own, and being a father to him has changed everything. It is almost as if my closeness with Jasper has granted me some strange, magical ability to travel backwards in time and change the past. The resentment and bitterness I felt towards you for so long has slowly eroded, all the happy hours with Jasper overlaid on the memories of your disapproval, your absence, your indifference, leaving in its wake an inevitable, comfortable sadness.

If this sounds a strange juxtaposition ��� comfortable sadness ��� really it is not. This is a specific sadness that requires nothing but to be felt. It is an undemanding feeling, devoid of blame, free of resentment, asking nothing of me and needing nothing from you, a simple recognition of the past bearing no need for analysis, discussion, or reparation. And now, after fourteen years as a father, I feel this sadness far more keenly for you than for myself ��� that you and I never knew the sweetness between a father and a young son that with Jasper has been one of the peak experiences of my life. It is an accepting sadness for the lost opportunities that will not come to us again.

So now, if at eighty years of age, you feeling this sadness for the time we did not have, for the pain and the wounds we inflicted on each other when, under other circumstances, we could have offered each other friendship and support, then don���t view it as a problem. Entertain it. Welcome it. Court it like a long lost lover.

What I learned from Jasper is that sadness is the core emotion of our ancient past. But it was always hidden, repressed, unseen. So instead of being expressed for what it was, it changed, mutated, festered. For so many years, despite our best intentions and most diligent efforts, we were uneasy with each other, the potential closeness we both sensed so strongly always slipping just past the tips of our fingers. And this sadness, that I think perhaps you are feeling now, was at the heart of all of the shit we heaped on each other for so many years.

Accepting this sadness in myself was a key precondition to invoking the statute of limitations and granting you absolution ��� or at least non persecution ��� for your old sins against me. It was accepting this sadness that let me forgive myself for all the years of guerrilla atrocities I perpetrated on you. And I think now, if you let it come, let that comfortable sadness overtake you, it will wash away the final remnants of guilt, blame, frustration, and ambivalence you have felt towards me all these years, leaving us both free for the kind of father/son friendship we have always known in our hearts was our birthright.

Love,

Gif

Prodigal Father Wayward Son

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Originally posted on Prodigal Father Wayward Son:

Here���s a letter I wrote my dad that was originally part of the book and didn���t make the final cut. But we both liked it. Let me know what you think.

Dearest Father,

Over the last few days, my thoughts have been drawn back to our last phone call time and again. I wonder if you have any idea how profound it was for me.

You were in a good mood when we spoke, not rushed or distracted. We talked about the book, how to move forward, what we were working on, and we spoke of our lives, the kids, our travel plans, exchanging all the small details that knit the fabric of our lives together.

Then, just when I thought we were wrapping up you said, ���I have been having one small problem with the book.���

���What���s that?���

���For the first time in my life, I realize how cruel���

View original 1,035 more words

How can we change the past with storytelling? This is one of the underlying themes of my father���s and my book, Prodigal Father Wayward Son.

But what does this mean?

To understand how storytelling can rewire our past, we have to think about memory.

Every time we remember something, we change the past. Not just metaphorically, but chemically, physically, in our brains.

I used to think of my memories as if they were files stored on a hard drive of a computer: take one out, look at it, put it back. Read only.�� But brain scientists are discovering that the act of retrieving a memory in fact erases the chemical structures in the brain that store that memory long term, and during the act of remembrance, the only place it exists is in the brain���s equivalent of RAM. Then when the conscious review of the memory is complete, that memory is re-stored in a different place in the brain, with different chemical structure.

The act of retrieving the memory alters it, and there���s no dialogue box that pops up and says, ���You already have a file called ���5th grade lunchroom humiliation.��� Do you wish to replace it with the modified version?���

So the truth is, we change the past every time we remember something. We can���t help it. It���s chemical. And every time we tell a story about ourselves or a friend or a family member, it���s filtered through the mechanism of memory.

Humans tell stories. It���s what we do. But mostly we do it without thought or attention ��� our storytelling is routine, not ritual. So, although we rewrite out histories all the time, the tendency is to reinforce the painful aspects of our more bitter memories, particularly those that relate to our parents and childhoods.

But if we tell our stories with strict attention and a sense of the sacred, it is possible to intentionally re-write the emotional responses that are bound up with them.

Many of my stories of my father, and the memories that went with them, used to cause me pain every time I saw my father, or heard his voice, or even thought of him.�� But now, after an extended process of ritual storytelling, those emotions are much richer, more complex. Yes, there���s still deep sorrow and occasional sharp annoyance, but there���s also affection, acceptance, and most of all a profound sense of relief.

After fifty years, I can feel my love for him with out the bitter taint of resentment.

And that is huge burden off my heart.

For more on the book, go to http://facebook.com/ProdigalFatherWaywardSon

To pre-order:��http://amzn.to/1zeaKO8

Here’s a letter I wrote my dad that was originally part of the book and didn’t make the final cut. But we both liked it. Let me know what you think.

Dearest Father,

Over the last few days, my thoughts have been drawn back to our last phone call time and again. I wonder if you have any idea how profound it was for me.

You were in a good mood when we spoke, not rushed or distracted. We talked about the book, how to move forward, what we were working on, and we spoke of our lives, the kids, our travel plans, exchanging all the small details that knit the fabric of our lives together.

Then, just when I thought we were wrapping up you said, ���I have been having one small problem with the book.���

���What���s that?���

���For the first time in my life, I realize how cruel it was of me to leave the family.���

With those words my mind went still, and without quite understanding why, I suddenly found my attention intensely focused on the silence wending its way from Sonoma, across the Pacific Ocean, onto my lani in South Kona, and into my left ear.

After a pause I asked, ���Why is that a problem?���

���Well, it makes me kind of sad,��� was your answer.

You didn’t seem to understand the significance of what you had just said, but I was stunned.

I had been waiting forty years to hear those words.

After you left the family in Prescott, you used to call on the phone (with astonishing psychic precision, invariably just as we sat down to dinner) and when you were low, you would tell me how bad you felt about breaking up the family, how lonely you were, how you were tormented by guilt. By the time I was living in Boulder, I remember during these confessions, I would hold the phone away from my ear, letting your words blur to an indistinct babble of meaningless sound, waiting only for that change in tone that would signal an opportunity to end the call.

I didn’t want to hear it.

And for years afterward, in the purgatorial period between leaving home and our watershed fight at Pasquals, when ever we talked about the Bad Years, I always found your responses incomplete, self-serving, unsatisfying. I poked and prodded, wouldn���t let the issues rest. I was always looking for something from you. I didn���t know what, some sort of closure, some recognition. But whatever it was, I felt it keenly. Like a black hole, the gravity of that singularity grew so strong that light could not escape, and it became invisible, revealing itself to us only through a dense, impenetrable absence.

More than once during these years I remember you turning to me in frustration and asking, ���What do you want from me?���

And with those two short sentences on the phone last week, the answer to that question snapped into crystalline focus. In all of those years of interminable, dissatisfying conversations, I only heard you talk about how you felt: your guilt, your sadness, your struggle to break free of your father���s taboos, your mother���s rigid fundamentalism, your need to resolve your issues with women. But now, for the first time you seemed to be filled with compassion for my suffering during those years.

You saw my pain.

Five years ago when you had your brain surgeries, I began to think about the relatively small number of times we would be together again, how few the hours we would spend in each other���s company, how I wanted to use that precious time. For all but the most heinous crimes there is a statute of limitations and I figured we had both paid our debt to society long ago. I lost the need to reopen old wounds. But that doesn���t mean I didn���t still feel them. Only that I owned them as mine and no longer looked to you for resolution.

The father/son injuries of my childhood haunted me for years, and for a long time I did not ever expect to be free of them. But then I had a son of my own, and being a father to him has changed everything. It is almost as if my closeness with Jasper has granted me some strange, magical ability to travel backwards in time and change the past. The resentment and bitterness I felt towards you for so long has slowly eroded, all the happy hours with Jasper overlaid on the memories of your disapproval, your absence, your indifference, leaving in its wake an inevitable, comfortable sadness.

If this sounds a strange juxtaposition ��� comfortable sadness ��� really it is not. This is a specific sadness that requires nothing but to be felt. It is an undemanding feeling, devoid of blame, free of resentment, asking nothing of me and needing nothing from you, a simple recognition of the past bearing no need for analysis, discussion, or reparation. And now, after fourteen years as a father, I feel this sadness far more keenly for you than for myself ��� that you and I never knew the sweetness between a father and a young son that with Jasper has been one of the peak experiences of my life. It is an accepting sadness for the lost opportunities that will not come to us again.

So now, if at eighty years of age, you feeling this sadness for the time we did not have, for the pain and the wounds we inflicted on each other when, under other circumstances, we could have offered each other friendship and support, then don���t view it as a problem. Entertain it. Welcome it. Court it like a long lost lover.

What I learned from Jasper is that sadness is the core emotion of our ancient past. But it was always hidden, repressed, unseen. So instead of being expressed for what it was, it changed, mutated, festered. For so many years, despite our best intentions and most diligent efforts, we were uneasy with each other, the potential closeness we both sensed so strongly always slipping just past the tips of our fingers. And this sadness, that I think perhaps you are feeling now, was at the heart of all of the shit we heaped on each other for so many years.

Accepting this sadness in myself was a key precondition to invoking the statute of limitations and granting you absolution ��� or at least non persecution ��� for your old sins against me. It was accepting this sadness that let me forgive myself for all the years of guerrilla atrocities I perpetrated on you. And I think now, if you let it come, let that comfortable sadness overtake you, it will wash away the final remnants of guilt, blame, frustration, and ambivalence you have felt towards me all these years, leaving us both free for the kind of father/son friendship we have always known in our hearts was our birthright.

Love,

Gif

For more info on the book visit us at http://facebook.com/ProdigalFatherWaywardSon

Or order the book at��http://amzn.to/1zeaKO8

This morning I notice a small bird trapped in my screen porch. My Birds of

North America identifies it as a female Berwick’s Wren “ distinguished from

other wrens by its eye stripe, white under parts and unstreaked brown

back.”  A jewel in dawn’s early light!

She flies back and forth, back and forth, like a prisoner pacing a cell,

looking for an escape route and becomes frantic as I approach. Before I can

open the outer door for her to escape I notice that her mate, outside the

screen porch is flying back and forth in an identical pattern. For a few

minutes I watch the aerial ballet a deux to make certain that the stunning

display of compassion I am witnessing is intentional. Sure enough, the pair

continues to fly with a degree of co-ordination that would put the Blue

Angels to shame.

When I open the door she flies out and is joined by her mate and their

dance erupts into a series wild gyrations,

ascending to an apex and swooping low to the ground. Only the most

doctrinaire cynic could possibly refuse to be amazed and graced by the

appearance of such angels of joy.  In just such minor epiphanies we are

surprised  to find  evidence of benevolence at the heart of the

commonwealth of sentient beings apart from humankind.

I sit in silent meditation and try to quiet my spirit, but some nameless

anxiety eats away at my small store of contentment and my mind grows weary

from far too many ideas running in circles. In desperation, I grab a

handful of peanuts in the shell and retreat to the front steps of my

studio. The liturgy of crushing the shell between my fingers, liberating

and savoring the nut, rescues me from endless thought peanut by peanut.  No

sooner do I throw the accumulated shells onto the lawn than a Scrub Jay

appears and begins to sort through the detritus to see if I have overlooked

nuts that might be gleaned.  Wanting to reward his hope, I throw a plump

peanut in his direction but my movement is too rapid and he retreats to a

safe distance, perches on the wall and studies me. He makes several brief

forays in the direction of the prize, but each time he decides I am a

threat and flies to a low branch on the Chinese Tallow Tree and takes stock

of the situation. He emits a couple of soft shrieks that I interpret as

signs of frustration but, evidently, they signal the need for

reinforcements because several minutes later two more Scrub Jays and a pair

of Stellar Jays —dark blue crests, gray upper, blue rump and

belly—appear out of nowhere. The result is a kind of wild Dionysian dance

in which there is much jumping about as both species of Jays strut around

showing great attitude and superior self-esteem.

I throw out several more peanuts each one a foot closer to where I am

sitting. The more reticent Stellar Jays fly near to the most distant nuts

and look in all directions before darting in and seizing them. The bolder

Scrub Jays edge ever nearer to me. It occurs to me that Master Jay has

become my Zen teacher and has instructed me to remain motionless, breath

softly and wait. My mind slows, the flow of ideas ebbs and I sink into a

timeless state in which the birds and I are alone in a cocoon of silence.

The quieter I grow the closer the Jays come. I trust that, in time, if I

become more practiced in the great art of silence, they will lose their

reticence and eat from my open hand.

I am a self, a thinking, feeling, acting being enclosed in a mystery I can neither fully comprehend nor control.

My mind registers every current in the cosmic sea. That old devil moon

moves the tides in my blood. Distant vibratory events ripple through the

plasma of my mind. Just as the DNA in any cell of my body encodes all the

information necessary to reproduce my entire body, so my mind contains in

germ the wisdom of the cosmos. I am a microcosm of the macrocosm. I am a

gateway to the world, a nexus through which all lines pass. Deep within and

far beyond meet in the depth of my spirit.

My body is a living museum of a natural history. As a fetus I passed

through every stage of evolution. I had gills before lungs. I slithered on

my belly like a reptile and walked on all fours before my reptilian and

mamalarian brains were crowned by the glory of the cortex. In my

holographic mind and evolutionary body eternity and time meet. My nervous

system incarnates the story of Bethlehem.

I am always transcending myself. I am a child of my time, blessed and

bound by the values and prejudices of my family, clan and culture. And yet

I can dispel my most cherished illusions. I can be a truthful witness of my

own lies. I can sacrifice my immediate pleasure for a greater good. I can

wonder, wait and work for a future I will not live to see. I can rise above

my greed and cruelty and aspire to love.

Being both conscious and self-conscious, I will always ask that most

difficult of unanswerable questions: Who am I?  I can hold up a mirror to

myself, re-collect and remember a thousand yesterdays and craft a story, a

coat of many colors, to shield me from anonymity and

meaninglessness. This ability to reflect on my life is both my glory and

my burden. Sometimes, like Narcissus, I become hypnotized by an image of

myself as beauty or beast and I crave the simple instinctual spontaneity of

animals. I want to lose myself in passion, drugs or work. But the effort to

be rid of myself is never successful for long. I keep coming back like a

song. The mirror moves and another image comes to the surface. I am many

persons, rich in contradictions and paradoxes.

I am unique. No one like me has ever existed before. I have fingerprints,

a name and a story unlike any others. No one can play my part in the drama

of history. I am an important piece of the puzzle without which the picture

of life would be incomplete. My vocation is to become a gnarled, original,

exceptional individual.

I am common. Like all humans I have a hungry stomach and a divided heart.

I need food and love. I was born small and helpless, grew into the fullness

of my being, and must make the return voyage into decrepitude and death. I

struggle to create intimacy and muster daily courage to deal with the

anxiety of the unknown. I believe, I doubt, I celebrate and I grow weary. I

am both greedy and generous. It is not easy to be me. Often I allow myself

to be what you want me to be rather than expressing what I feel and value.

Yet, again and again, a small voice—call it conscience, spirit or

consciousness—calls me back to myself.

I am alone. You can never know exactly what I think or feel. You can’t

make my decisions, battle my fears, suffer my pain, enjoy my pleasure or do

my dying. I alone bear the joyful responsibility for the life given me. At

times I am lonely. I lock myself in solitary confinement and can’t remember

where I hid the key. I may invite you into my inner sanctuary but never

allow you to be a permanent resident. Even when I am alone I am always in

relationship. Without touch I shrivel. In the beginning I was enwombed,

inseparable from the Mother-Ground of my being and born into a caring

circle of family and community. In time I became a friend, a lover , a

spouse, a parent, an elder. The masks I wear and the roles I play are

shaped by the applause or disapproval of my audience. I exist in your eyes.

Without a thou there would be no I. Without you I could never know the

comfort of enfolding arms, the ecstasy of love.  Your self and my self are

linked, for better or worse. The greater our interaction our interbeing,

the stronger and more capacious we grow.

I am tough minded, practical and shrewd. I do what I must to survive and

thrive. I crave power and gain potency by acting.

I am a dreamer, half my life spent in unconscious darkness. In my most

creative moments and in sleep, I abandon the polite façade of my

personality and slip into wild costumes. In dreams I change forms, like

Proteus, become a bird, a snake, a hero a seducer, a murderer. I play

childish and terrifying games. I travel beyond time, create and destroy

heavens and hells, savor forbidden pleasures and construct alabaster

utopias. Nothing is impossible. I am large as anything I can hope, and

small as any fear I will not recognize and banish.

I live within abstract structures—government, nation, law, economy. I am a

single cell within a social body that both nourishes and threatens to

inundate me. My country gives me work, security and ideology but extracts a

heavy toll on my time and conscience and I struggle to balance public

demands and private needs.

In modern times I have grown accustomed to urban ways and the convenience

of machines. Computers have multiplied my calculations and media have

extended my senses. But my feet are still in the soil. I am rooted in the

humus. From dust to dust. My ecoself is a member of a commonwealth whose

citizens include whales and starlings. I flourish only so long as I respect

the communion that links me to all living beings.

The final word? There is no final word. I define myself, and yet I escape

all definitions. I am unfinished, pregnant with longing and hope. There is

always some fulfillment just beyond my reach, some adventure calling me. I

am a citizen of three kingdoms: the long ago and far away, the here and

now, and the not yet. My self a gypsy, alway on the road.