Teen fathers find a new path

This column appeared in the Tri-Valley Herald on May 29, 2007.

Two years ago, Wilmer Callejas was a 16-year-old gang member in East Oakland. He stole cars. He beat up rival gang members. He rode in cars involved in drive-by shootings.

Though he attended school, Callejas didn’t listen to adults or even his parents who warned him about the possible consequences of his behavior.

“What they said went in one ear and out the other,” he said.

In fact, with five arrests to his name, he’d spent time in juvenile detention, once serving as long as five months.

But that all changed when his 15-year-old girlfriend sat him down one day and told him she was pregnant.

"When she told me, my heart stopped,” Callejas said. “I was scared and didn’t know what to say.”

His girlfriend’s parents encouraged their daughter to have the baby, but they were skeptical about Callejas as a father.

“They thought I was a bad person,” he said, “and I was. But I decided I would do whatever it took to turn my life around.”

Callejas did what few teens in his situation ever manage to do. He found a way to leave the gang. “It was really hard to get out,” he said.

Dressed in jeans and a white In-N-Out Burger shirt, Callejas sat down with classmate Miguel Morales for an interview at Horizon High School to talk about their lives and hopes since becoming fathers.

The school, located in Pleasanton, is open to Tri-Valley school-aged parents, and provides high school curriculum, pre-natal and parenting skills training, counseling and therapy services, personal finance and budgeting, employability skills, and even an on-site childcare facility that doubles as a laboratory for soon-to-be parents.

Most of the 50 students enrolled at Horizon are mothers.

In fact, Callejas and Morales attend the school with their girlfriends—their babies’ mothers. And the couples bring their babies with them.

“We all go to school here,” said Callejas, smiling.

Unlike Callejas who is a junior, Morales, 19, will graduate this June. “I’d dropped out of school in Livermore and was starting to affiliate with gang members when my girlfriend got pregnant,” Morales said, crediting both his girlfriend with encouraging him to go back to school and the low student-to-teacher ratio at the school for helping him be successful academically.

Since enrolling at Horizon, Morales has earned all the credits needed for a diploma. He’s passed the high school exit exam, interned at the City of Pleasanton, gotten a job at Mervyns Department Store, and now supports a son—14-month-old Gabriel.

Both fathers live with their girlfriends and babies. Morales lives in Livermore at the home of his girlfriend’s parents, and Callejas lives in Oakland in his parents’ home.

“I pay rent to my parents for a room for the three of us,” said Callejas, who works at In-N-Out Burger near the Oakland Airport. Callejas said he also pays for car insurance and gas.

Both young fathers have hopes after high school. Callejas wants to become an auto mechanic or work in auto body repair and Morales plans to attend a trade school in Hayward to learn glass cutting.

As for other plans, when asked about marriage, the young men shifted in their chairs and smiled, and seemed a little embarrassed. In retrospect the question was premature.

What isn’t premature, though, is the devotion and commitment and the love in Callejas’ eyes whenever he steps into the daycare center and lifts his 18-month old daughter Analicia into his arms.

“My daughter has changed my life,” he said.














. .

Gifts from Janet

This column was published on May 15, 2007 in the Tri-Valley Herald.

Last year for Mother’s Day, I introduced readers to my mother, Janet. I shared how my mom’s enjoyment of writing poetry inspired me to become a writer.

I received many responses to the column, especially about the short, one-page stories she’s written in recent years to her grandchildren about her childhood memories in Minnesota and southern California.

Along with the stories, she’s written two books of poetry, and all of her works—given as Christmas gifts over the past few years—are contained in slim volumes simply bound with the assistance of Kinko’s.

My mom, who was born in 1933 and never went to college, has a straightforward writing style. Her poetry is never flowery, and her prose doesn’t try to be clever. While some of her stories recall tender and funny and memorable scenes, some simply depict a moment in time that captures who my mother was as a girl, moments that would otherwise be lost forever.

One example is her story about how my grandmother made clothes for my mother and uncle in the 1940s. With neither time nor money to sew pockets or zippers into pants, my grandmother instead inserted elastic into the waistbands.

But when my mom turned ten, shortly after moving to California, she got “a pair of blue denim pedal pushers with a zipper and pockets,” she writes. “I think it was Christmas. I put on the new pants and my roller skates.

"Out I went to skate up and down the sidewalk in my neighborhood. I stopped in front of the houses where my friends lived. Slowly I took something out of my pocket, looked at it, then put it back and skated on. I made several trips up and down the sidewalk that day. I was so proud of those pockets and was hoping someone would notice.”

Similar to her stories, my mom’s poetry speaks in a voice all her own. It doesn’t pretend to be Wordsworth or Dickinson. She simply writes from her heart, giving her readers a gift of herself.

And so, before this Mother’s Day fades from memory, here are a few stanzas from a poem by my mother. The verse is appropriate for Mother’s Day.

In sharing these words, I hope you’ll be inspired to pick up a pen or sit before a computer and simply start writing. Don’t worry about your style or whether the poetry or stories are dramatic. What’s important is that you capture your memories and write down what you’ve learned and know about life. Your children and grandchildren, though busy with their busy lives, are counting on you to preserve those memories.

Stanzas From “Contentment,” by Janet Ott

You cannot know before you have
one of your own how a child can burrow
into all the spaces of your heart, can fill
every vacancy.

You cannot know before you hold
your child and look into those soft eyes,
see the sweet smile and touch the softness
that you could fall so hard in love.

You can never know contentment, the long
lasting kind of contentment that fills your
soul, until a little child puts a tiny hand on one
cheek and with sweet lips, kisses the other.







, , ,

Deceased loved ones bring comfort

This column was published in the Tri-Valley Herald on May 1, 2007.

Eight years ago, my mother stepped into a room at Children’s Hospital in Oakland where she was helping to care for my three-year-old daughter who was recovering from heart surgery. She saw an elderly man sitting beside the bed with his legs crossed and his hand on my daughter’s arm.

The man was my grandfather who’d passed away in 1982.

“I clearly saw my dad comforting Kelsey,” she said. “Then he began to fade and was gone.”

Somewhat like my mother’s experience, Ron Hyde, of Pleasanton, encountered his grandmother’s presence in 1977 as he sat on a beach at sunset with friends in Tahiti.

“I want to say it was like a light, but I’m not sure,” he said. “But it was a presence, and I knew it was my grandmother and that she’d passed away.”

After returning home, Hyde said his mother started to tell him about his grandmother’s death. “I told her I already knew,” he said.

What prompted the topic of today’s column was my recent interview with psychologist Jean Shinoda Bolen, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, and author of several bestselling books, including “Close to the Bone,” subtitled “Life-Threatening Illness as a Soul Journey.” I interviewed Bolen on the set of the "In A Word," the regional television show about books and authors on Channel 30 that I co-host with Kathy Cordova.

Bolen believes we’re not so much humans on a spiritual path as spiritual beings on a human path. In her book, she recounts how her own son, Andy, contacted her in the hospital upon his death from a rare disease at the age of 29.

“I was awakened from sleep in the dark early hours of morning by hearing Andy call ‘Mom’ in his old familiar voice,” she writes. “He was waking me to let me know that he was leaving his body.”

Bolen’s son hadn’t been able to speak above a whisper in his final days, and as she went to his bedside after he woke her, he was asleep and didn’t respond to her voice.

“In the moment that it took me to turn on the lights,” she writes, “he took his last breath.”

After his death, Bolen’s son contacted his father, Jim, on several occasions to let him know that he was okay and was “very much alive.”

One touching visit from Andy occurred the day after his memorial service, when Bolen’s husband chose not to accompany his son’s body to the crematorium because he reasoned he’d already said his goodbyes. Jim was feeling sad and had second thoughts when Andy spoke to him: “It’s okay, Dad, I’m not there either,” he said.

According to Bolen, incidents such as hearing a deceased loved one’s voice or encountering a presence is not all that uncommon.

Irma Slage, author of “Phases of Life After Death,” agrees. “People appear when there’s an emotional reason for it,” she said. “They feel the emotions of their loved ones and feel sad. They feel they need to be there to help them.”

Slage, who lives in Livermore, said that although most of us aren’t aware of it, loved ones are always with us in spirit and are only able to show themselves when using a lot of energy.

“Mostly they come through as an odor, as my husband well knows,” she said. “After his brother died and visited us, my husband always smelled the distinct odor of the brand of cigarettes that he used.”

Slage, though, has the ability to see deceased individuals and hear their voices as if they were in the physical world.

In fact, they seek her out because they know she can see them.

Slage first learned she had this rare ability in her twenties when she was cleaning her upstairs bathroom one day in 1977. Her friend, Rose, was suddenly standing in front of her.

“I couldn’t understand why Rose was there,” Slage said. “Then she told me I needed to call her husband.”

Slage walked into her bedroom, picked up the phone, but then hung up.

“I wondered if I was crazy,” she said.

Slage soon learned that Rose had died from breast cancer—an illness she had oncealed—on the day of the visit.

“That day was a turning point,” she said. “I finally realized that the voices I had been speaking with all my life were spirits. Until then, I’d thought everyone could hear voices in their minds.”

Today Slage conducts psychic readings and relays communications from deceased loved ones.

For skeptical customers, she recounts specific information that could only come from the loved one.

But visitations need not always come through a psychic. Dublin resident Bill Graham encountered a presence about five years ago that appeared as sparkles—a presence he sensed was the stepmother of his life and business partner, Trena Caskey.

“I asked out loud if it was Trena’s stepmom,” said Graham, who heard her say that it was. Then, as he felt a very cold kiss appear on his cheek, he clearly heard the stepmother say, “Tell Trena I love her and I’m okay.”

For more about Jean Shinoda Bolen and Irma Slage, visit www.jeanbolen.com and www.irmaslage.blogspot.com.