This column was published in early September 2007 in the Tri-Valley Herald.
Six years ago on September 11, 2001, after the Twin Towers had been destroyed, after our nation’s skies had been cleared of all air traffic, Bob Tucknott skirted the main entrance of the Hayward airport and drove a little known route onto the airfield to get to his plane.
“I was immediately run down by a security guard,” Tucknott said. “I explained the situation and told him to call the tower.”
Authorized to use any runway, Tucknott lifted off from Hayward for a short flight to Oakland. From there, he flew with his daughter, Renee, on a special mission to San Diego.
“I’d gotten a call from the director of the Alameda/Contra Costa County blood bank,” said Tucknott, who reminisced recently about his unique experience on September 11. “The director asked me to fly blood samples to San Diego by 11 p.m. that night. The samples were from a large supply of blood waiting to be shipped on a C-5 cargo transport from Travis Air Force to 9-11 survivors in New York and Washington D.C.”
A volunteer with Angel Flight West, which arranges free air transportation on private aircraft in response to health care and other compelling human needs, Tucknott received the call at 3 p.m. and got busy trying to obtain flight clearance. It took him three hours, but he finally got through to the head of the FAA.
“I was given a discrete squawk code that was given to the air traffic controllers from Hayward to San Diego,” he said. Tucknott also called the various controlling agencies to let them know the type of plane he was flying and the nature of his cargo.
“What an eerie flight that was,” he said. “As we flew that evening, there was complete silence on the airways. We were the only ones talking to controllers, who were all still at their positions.”
Tucknott said it’s usually difficult to get a word in edgewise with controllers, but this evening some seemed a bit bored and chatted with him and his daughter about their mission.
When Tucknott asked if any other airplanes were in the air, he was told two F-14 fighter jets were high above him. “It wasn’t until two years later I found out those F-14’s were actually escorting me to make sure I was who I said I was. They had orders to take me out if I deviated off course.”
As Tucknott landed in San Diego at 10:30 p.m., a crew was waiting to take care of his plane and carry the blood samples to a Red Cross truck for testing. Given the late hour, the weary couriers spent the night, then flew home the next morning using the same secret code and procedures as they had used flying down to San Diego.
“The flight was just as quiet,” Tucknott said, “though I started to pick up some police helicopter traffic flying in the L.A. basin.”
Tucknott, who owns an electrical contracting firm in Pleasanton, earned his pilot’s license 32 years ago. He has volunteered with Angel Flight West for 15 years, and has flown 236 missions for the non-profit organization.
His missions have included transport of children, deaf patients, rescue dogs, campers, adult victims, burn victims, and, among other human tissue, corneas.
In fact, Tucknott and a co-pilot once transported two corneas in the span of three hours harvested from an accident victim in the Stanford area to a recipient who was prepped and waiting in San Luis Obispo.
“The controllers recognized the urgency of the situation and gave us priority handling,” Tucknott said. “God was good to us and gave us a strong tail wind going down, which got us there in record time.”
Tucknott said the entire flight and transport were conducted without signing one piece of paper.
“This seemed a little unusual in today’s world with liabilities and the value of the cargo we were carrying,” he said.
Tucknott smiled as he went on to say that by the time he and his co-pilot were finishing their lunch in San Luis Obispo, the cornea operation was complete and the patient had a new set of eyes. To support the missions of pilots like Bob Tucknott, and to learn more about Angel Flight West, visit www.angelflight.org.
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
Keeping up with my brother
This column was published in the Tri-Valley Herald in September 2007.
When I was kid, my older brother, Bill, knew how to do everything.
He knew the right way to throw a football, how to throw a baseball, and, in his teens, how to pole-vault.
He did his best to teach me what he could do, but at four years younger I was never able to do what he did quite as well.
I suspect many readers have older brothers or sisters just like this.
Over the years, it seemed my brother could always run faster, golf better, and dive better. And while he went on to pole-vault in college and gained a scholarship, I could barely get that pole to lift me even a few feet off the ground.
The story is similar when it comes to our careers. Although I’m proud to serve as the president of a respected regional financial institution, Bill has headed up huge divisions for Bank of America, both in the United States and Hong Kong. He was on the managing committee for BankBoston and ran their consumer lending division. He’s been second in charge of the fifth largest national bank in Australia, and he served as the interim president of Atlanta’s Federal Home Loan Bank. Currently he is president PEAC Ventures, a management consulting firm, and serves as a director of E*TRADE Bank.
I remember when it really hit home that my brother was somebody in the banking world. Many years ago, after he moved to Atlanta, but was working in Foster City for Visa USA, he was telling me he’d attended a company event and got to meet Annette Benning, Rupert Murdock, and the comedian Garry Shandling.
“Really!” I said, impressed.
“Yeah,” he replied. “In fact, here’s the program from that night.”
I looked and saw that my brother’s name was actually on the program and that he’d been introduced by Garry Shandling. Then I looked at my brother’s title.
“You’re the chief operating officer? The number two guy for Visa?” I asked, dumbfounded.
“You didn’t know that?” he said.
I suspect many readers have older brothers or sisters just like this.
Over the years, it seemed my brother could always run faster, golf better, and dive better. And while he went on to pole-vault in college and gained a scholarship, I could barely get that pole to lift me even a few feet off the ground.
The story is similar when it comes to our careers. Although I’m proud to serve as the president of a respected regional financial institution, Bill has headed up huge divisions for Bank of America, both in the United States and Hong Kong. He was on the managing committee for BankBoston and ran their consumer lending division. He’s been second in charge of the fifth largest national bank in Australia, and he served as the interim president of Atlanta’s Federal Home Loan Bank. Currently he is president PEAC Ventures, a management consulting firm, and serves as a director of E*TRADE Bank.
I remember when it really hit home that my brother was somebody in the banking world. Many years ago, after he moved to Atlanta, but was working in Foster City for Visa USA, he was telling me he’d attended a company event and got to meet Annette Benning, Rupert Murdock, and the comedian Garry Shandling.
“Really!” I said, impressed.
“Yeah,” he replied. “In fact, here’s the program from that night.”
I looked and saw that my brother’s name was actually on the program and that he’d been introduced by Garry Shandling. Then I looked at my brother’s title.
“You’re the chief operating officer? The number two guy for Visa?” I asked, dumbfounded.
“You didn’t know that?” he said.
It is a bit odd I didn’t know this, especially since my brother and I have stayed in close touch over the years. In fact, we were so close as kids that I recall a vivid childhood dream where I was playing in our front yard, and my brother could see from the screened porch of our home an older woman—with her skeleton showing through her translucent skin—walking along up next to the houses, coming my way, her head staying level as her legs lifted over steps and bushes, me oblivious to her approach. In the dream the gray-haired woman was certain to get me, and my brother tried several times to call out a warning, but no sound came out of his mouth.
What’s odd about this isn’t so much the dream, which portrays the fear of failure in protecting a younger sibling, but that I don’t know if I had the dream or if my brother did. It seems like he would have had it, but because I remember it so clearly it feels like I had it.
Of course, who had the dream doesn’t matter any more than what our titles are, who’s the highest jumper, or who can throw a perfect spiral. What matters between me and my brother is what matters to everyone who has an older brother or sister, that every once in a while we get to speak by phone or read an email or birthday card, or see in person a smile that no matter how old we get we’ll immediately recognize as one we’ve known forever.
What’s odd about this isn’t so much the dream, which portrays the fear of failure in protecting a younger sibling, but that I don’t know if I had the dream or if my brother did. It seems like he would have had it, but because I remember it so clearly it feels like I had it.
Of course, who had the dream doesn’t matter any more than what our titles are, who’s the highest jumper, or who can throw a perfect spiral. What matters between me and my brother is what matters to everyone who has an older brother or sister, that every once in a while we get to speak by phone or read an email or birthday card, or see in person a smile that no matter how old we get we’ll immediately recognize as one we’ve known forever.
Sunday, September 02, 2007
Running 30 miles
In late August, Pam successfully ran her first ultra-marathon, a 50 kilometer (30-mile) race through steep terrain through Redwood Park in Oakland. This was my 
second 30 miler. Our time was 6 hours, 33 minutes.
second 30 miler. Our time was 6 hours, 33 minutes.
Always nice to see this sign after 30 miles...
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Mysteries of running revealed
As fog slammed into the Golden Gate Bridge on a recent Sunday morning, I found myself yelling at a Livermore city official. “Doug!” I shouted to Doug Horner, Livermore’s newest city council member. He was passing within a yard of me, his glasses fogged, his S.F. Giants hat snug on his head. He was running toward Marin as I was running toward San Francisco. He looked up at the sound of his name, but, caught in the flow of more than 4,200 damp humans running the San Francisco Marathon, he didn’t see me.
This was my tenth marathon, Horner’s first, and also my wife’s first.
My wife, Pamela, who is the economic development director for the City of Pleasanton, trained many months for the race, and ended up beating her goal by running it in 4 hours and 15 minutes.
Here's a video clip of her training on a long run:
Scenes along the 26.2-mile route included a runner with hair shaped into foot-high spikes who dashed away from a sprinkler to save his hairdo; a retired Army Ranger carrying a POW / MIA flag and calling cadence; and a runner dressed like a Greek, complete with armor helmet, breastplate, a shield, and a spear.
Of course, creative outfits are part of the San Francisco running culture, mostly associated with Bay to Breakers.But while Bay to Breakers is reasonable at just over seven miles, the marathon requires many hours of running. And for non-distance runners, this can be a mystery: Why on earth would anyone run for three, four, five, and, for some people, six or seven hours straight?
Bill Radulovich, an elementary school principal in Pleasanton who has completed 60 marathons and ultra-marathons, says that running long distances “is an existentialistic thing” and allows individuals to “ create the meanings of their own lives.”
Radulovich believes that running long races can create personal transformation and growth in life: “You set demanding goals, dedicate yourself toward them, work through adversity and discomfort, and you forge a new self.”
Having achieved his personal goals in racing, these days Radulovich trains and supports his daughter and a few of her college-age friends. This year alone he has run 5 marathons, 3 of which were as a pace setter for the girls.
“Watching them as they forge new selves is the greatest gift that running has given me,” he said.
While the marathon as a race was inspired by the story of a messenger named Phiedippides who ran from Marathon to Athens in 490 B.C. with word of a Greek victory—and then died of exhaustion after delivering the news—some scholars believe that particular run never happened. While Greeks did use couriers to cover distances, this story cannot be found in records of the time, and didn’t appear until 600 years later. Plus, if a courier did run to Athens, it probably wasn’t Phiedippides since even before the battle he’d been dispatched to cover 150 miles to Sparta to seek help as the Persian enemy was gathering in Marathon. 
While dedicated runners may feel disappointed learning this, we can take heart that Phiedippides, who ran the 150 miles in two days, was actually an ultra-marathoner.Another tidbit about the race is that the distance of 26 miles, 385 yards, came about by chance. When the modern Olympics were established in Greece in 1896, the marathon was 24.8 miles, and then varied every four years depending on the venue. When London hosted the Games in 1908, the distance was planned at 26 miles, from Windsor Castle to London. But because the royal family wanted a better view of the finish, the distance was extended 385 yards to the royal box. This set the official distance forever after.
Many aficionados argue that the most prestigious of all marathons is Boston, which has been run every April since 1897. To run Boston, a runner has to qualify by completing a prior sanctioned marathon no slower than a certain time, depending on age and gender.
And speaking of gender, women were not allowed to run the Boston Marathon until 1972, nor the Olympic Marathon until 1984. While it’s often assumed race organizers in those days tended toward male chauvinism, many race officials truly believed they were protecting women from the damage of strenuous running. This mind-set became prevalent after the 1928 Olympics when three women collapsed during an 800-meter run. While the women simply hadn’t trained enough, the world saw this as evidence that women didn’t have the stamina for long distances.
Over time, and with the running boom of the 1970s, women began successfully completing marathons, and in recent years marathon attendance has increased thanks to more women seeking the personal fulfillment that comes with finishing the long race.
It’s this fulfillment that prompted council member Horner to start training. ”My wife has run three marathons, my brother and my brother-in-law have both run one, so in a way, I also wanted to be in that club,” he said. “I wanted to be able to say I’ve run one. After it was over, I was filled with a huge sense of achievement and satisfaction.”
Monday, July 23, 2007
A life etched with courage
This column was published in the Tri-Valley Herald on July 24, 2007.
She awoke to the rush of night air and a drop of water falling to her face from the wooden awning above the back door. That’s when she realized she was being carried. That’s when, at six years old, Sandra Kay looked up into a man’s face obscured by a light-colored bandana.
"He came in through the back door,” said Kay, 41, whose green eyes flickered as she told her story sitting outside a coffee shop in Pleasanton. “He walked right past my brother sleeping in the living room, past my parents’ bedroom, down the hall to my room where a friend was sleeping over, and lifted me from my bed.”
The man carried Kay’s little body out the back and into the garage. There, he told her to shut up. There, he violated her.
Later that night, after she was let go, Kay stood pounding on her parents’ bedroom door.
The Hayward police investigated, dusted for fingerprints, and identified the man. He turned out to be the nephew of either a friend or neighbor, Kay said. He was on parole, and knew the back door lock was broken because he’d helped move furniture in the house.
But before police could make an arrest, the man’s roommate--a former cellmate--accused him of stealing tools or some other personal items. The roommate drove to the man’s place of work and shot him to death.
Because of her young age and the certainty this man would never bother her again, Kay recovered emotionally from the assault. Yet some years later when Polly Klaas was kidnapped from her bedroom as a friend was sleeping over, Kay’s wounds re-opened. “So many things were similar,” Kay said. “I've always felt a spiritual connection to that beautiful girl.”
Ten years after the assault, when Kay was 16, she went to San Francisco with an older girlfriend to a dance club that welcomed minors 18 and older. Kay had a false identification, and soon found herself dancing with a charming young man named Pierre.
“As a chubby high school girl,” Kay said, “I usually danced alone or with female friends. I was so glad for the male attention.”
After a few dances, Pierre invited Kay to step outside to talk. She was surprised at how much they had in common. When he asked what books and movies she liked, he’d respond, “Me too!”
“It's painfully clear to me now, his strategy,” she said.
After more dancing and after her girlfriend called it a night, Kay accompanied Pierre to a payphone to call around to see if other nightclubs would welcome minors. Expressing frustration with the payphone, Pierre suggested they use the phone in his nearby apartment.
“I thought I’d met someone pretty special, so I went to his apartment,” Kay said. “In an instant, this man went from a dance partner and friend to an angry, mad-looking, violent and evil man. He used physical force, intimidation, and threats to take out his rage by violating my body.”
Eventually, Kay was let go. “He took me back to my car and gave me a rose, if you can stand that,” she said.
On her way home, Kay pulled over to call the friend she’d gone out with: “She told me I’d been raped and not to take a shower. She came and got me.”
Kay and her friend went to the police and identified the man from a folder of photos. He was wanted for raping two other girls. Everything he'd told her was a lie: his age, his occupation, his name.
In court, the defense questioned her clothing that evening, suggested her culpability since she was out after hours, magnified the crime of using a fake ID, and delved into whether or not she was a virgin.
“None of it worked,” Kay said. “He was sentenced to twenty years and deported to his country, which I think was Armenia.”
Fast forward a year. It's October and Sandra Kay is now 17 and she's walking to her boyfriend’s apartment. She hears someone behind her and thinks it's her boyfriend about to surprise her, so she quickly turns to surprise him first. But it's not her boyfriend.
“Some guy in a hood with a gun jams it against my head and tells me to stay quiet.”
Kay was forced into her car and ordered to drive, ending up behind San Leandro High School. The hooded man covered her head and dragged her out of the car.
“And here we go again,” she said, “the rage, the anger, the rape. Only this time, my soul popped out of my body and hovered over to the left. And somehow I knew that this man was taking out his rage on this body, but not on me.”
Then ordered back into the car, Kay drove as the man held the gun to her temple, his hand shaking as he yelled and debated over and over whether he should kill her.
Near train tracks, he had her pull over. “I thought this is it. I'm dead.” But he flipped up the rearview mirror so it pointed to the sky, opened the passenger door, and fled down the tracks into darkness, leaving her with threats that he knew where she lived, knew her boyfriend, would be back if she contacted police.
“And so my post trauma began,” Kay said, “living in a fear so paralyzing I would not move from a sitting position on the couch.”
Kay had to start over to learn how to talk, how to move, how to trust. “It’s a debilitating, chronic, and inescapable fear all the time for a long, long time,” she said. "With post trauma, because it's a neurological and spiritual injury, not a physical one, you can't see it like you can see broken bones, but the same process needs to take place, only internally. It's like being paralyzed physically from the neck down, like being dropped on cement from an airplane."
The lengthy healing process after trauma also involves calming the automatic startle response, dealing with the hypervigilance triggered by any number of stimuli. Kay remembers while working at a Togos being stricken with fear as a man's hand reached for change, a hand that slightly resembled the hand of the hooded rapist.
Today she credits her return to health with realizing that post trauma is a neurological disorder that needs to be treated medically. “Talk therapy can only go so far,” Kay said. She also makes sure to get sufficient sleep with over-the-counter medication, when needed. “Healing cannot take place without proper sleep,” she said.
The mother of two beautiful children, Kay is a courageous survivor who writes a blog at www.shesayswithasmile.blogspot.com. She’s also a published poet and a volunteer with Tri-Valley Haven where she gives her time to assist women in the immediate aftermath of sexual assault.
And just over a year ago, on her cheek, probably somewhere near the spot where that tiny drop of water awakened her when she was six, she walked into a tattoo parlor and celebrated her survival by having a small Japanese character etched onto her cheek.
The tattoo reads courage.
To honor Sandra Kay and join her in making a difference, visit www.trivalleyhaven.org.
.
She awoke to the rush of night air and a drop of water falling to her face from the wooden awning above the back door. That’s when she realized she was being carried. That’s when, at six years old, Sandra Kay looked up into a man’s face obscured by a light-colored bandana.
"He came in through the back door,” said Kay, 41, whose green eyes flickered as she told her story sitting outside a coffee shop in Pleasanton. “He walked right past my brother sleeping in the living room, past my parents’ bedroom, down the hall to my room where a friend was sleeping over, and lifted me from my bed.”
The man carried Kay’s little body out the back and into the garage. There, he told her to shut up. There, he violated her.
Later that night, after she was let go, Kay stood pounding on her parents’ bedroom door.
The Hayward police investigated, dusted for fingerprints, and identified the man. He turned out to be the nephew of either a friend or neighbor, Kay said. He was on parole, and knew the back door lock was broken because he’d helped move furniture in the house.
But before police could make an arrest, the man’s roommate--a former cellmate--accused him of stealing tools or some other personal items. The roommate drove to the man’s place of work and shot him to death.
Because of her young age and the certainty this man would never bother her again, Kay recovered emotionally from the assault. Yet some years later when Polly Klaas was kidnapped from her bedroom as a friend was sleeping over, Kay’s wounds re-opened. “So many things were similar,” Kay said. “I've always felt a spiritual connection to that beautiful girl.”
Ten years after the assault, when Kay was 16, she went to San Francisco with an older girlfriend to a dance club that welcomed minors 18 and older. Kay had a false identification, and soon found herself dancing with a charming young man named Pierre.
“As a chubby high school girl,” Kay said, “I usually danced alone or with female friends. I was so glad for the male attention.”
After a few dances, Pierre invited Kay to step outside to talk. She was surprised at how much they had in common. When he asked what books and movies she liked, he’d respond, “Me too!”
“It's painfully clear to me now, his strategy,” she said.
After more dancing and after her girlfriend called it a night, Kay accompanied Pierre to a payphone to call around to see if other nightclubs would welcome minors. Expressing frustration with the payphone, Pierre suggested they use the phone in his nearby apartment.
“I thought I’d met someone pretty special, so I went to his apartment,” Kay said. “In an instant, this man went from a dance partner and friend to an angry, mad-looking, violent and evil man. He used physical force, intimidation, and threats to take out his rage by violating my body.”
Eventually, Kay was let go. “He took me back to my car and gave me a rose, if you can stand that,” she said.
On her way home, Kay pulled over to call the friend she’d gone out with: “She told me I’d been raped and not to take a shower. She came and got me.”
Kay and her friend went to the police and identified the man from a folder of photos. He was wanted for raping two other girls. Everything he'd told her was a lie: his age, his occupation, his name.
In court, the defense questioned her clothing that evening, suggested her culpability since she was out after hours, magnified the crime of using a fake ID, and delved into whether or not she was a virgin.
“None of it worked,” Kay said. “He was sentenced to twenty years and deported to his country, which I think was Armenia.”
Fast forward a year. It's October and Sandra Kay is now 17 and she's walking to her boyfriend’s apartment. She hears someone behind her and thinks it's her boyfriend about to surprise her, so she quickly turns to surprise him first. But it's not her boyfriend.
“Some guy in a hood with a gun jams it against my head and tells me to stay quiet.”
Kay was forced into her car and ordered to drive, ending up behind San Leandro High School. The hooded man covered her head and dragged her out of the car.
“And here we go again,” she said, “the rage, the anger, the rape. Only this time, my soul popped out of my body and hovered over to the left. And somehow I knew that this man was taking out his rage on this body, but not on me.”
Then ordered back into the car, Kay drove as the man held the gun to her temple, his hand shaking as he yelled and debated over and over whether he should kill her.
Near train tracks, he had her pull over. “I thought this is it. I'm dead.” But he flipped up the rearview mirror so it pointed to the sky, opened the passenger door, and fled down the tracks into darkness, leaving her with threats that he knew where she lived, knew her boyfriend, would be back if she contacted police.
“And so my post trauma began,” Kay said, “living in a fear so paralyzing I would not move from a sitting position on the couch.”
Kay had to start over to learn how to talk, how to move, how to trust. “It’s a debilitating, chronic, and inescapable fear all the time for a long, long time,” she said. "With post trauma, because it's a neurological and spiritual injury, not a physical one, you can't see it like you can see broken bones, but the same process needs to take place, only internally. It's like being paralyzed physically from the neck down, like being dropped on cement from an airplane."
The lengthy healing process after trauma also involves calming the automatic startle response, dealing with the hypervigilance triggered by any number of stimuli. Kay remembers while working at a Togos being stricken with fear as a man's hand reached for change, a hand that slightly resembled the hand of the hooded rapist.
Today she credits her return to health with realizing that post trauma is a neurological disorder that needs to be treated medically. “Talk therapy can only go so far,” Kay said. She also makes sure to get sufficient sleep with over-the-counter medication, when needed. “Healing cannot take place without proper sleep,” she said.
The mother of two beautiful children, Kay is a courageous survivor who writes a blog at www.shesayswithasmile.blogspot.com. She’s also a published poet and a volunteer with Tri-Valley Haven where she gives her time to assist women in the immediate aftermath of sexual assault.
And just over a year ago, on her cheek, probably somewhere near the spot where that tiny drop of water awakened her when she was six, she walked into a tattoo parlor and celebrated her survival by having a small Japanese character etched onto her cheek.
The tattoo reads courage.
To honor Sandra Kay and join her in making a difference, visit www.trivalleyhaven.org.
.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Warm sand and good words
This column appeared in the Tri-Valley Herald in July 2007.
For the past 15 years, for the week of the Fourth of July, I've loaded up the car with kids and fishing poles and beach chairs and driven to Twain Harte, a small town in the Sierra north of Sonora.
These annual treks into the mountains often yield moments that find their way into this column.
Faithful readers may recall that I taught my youngest daughter how to fly fish on a trip to Twain Harte, and how, in another column, I was "pitched into a rushing river. In an instant, I was downriver from the raft, abducted by brute force from my wife and daughters, my head dunking under from time to time, my mind flooded with thoughts of drowning."
So as we drove last week through Escalon on our way to the Sierra, I asked my wife and daughters to be on the lookout for ideas for my column: "It's not necessary that one of us encounter a near-death experience," I teased, "but if one of you would like to volunteer, it would be good for the column."
Thankfully, no one had to be airlifted from the edge of a cliff, though things got pretty exciting when my eldest daughter found several great books in a used bookstore, and my youngest daughter found the perfect stroke that earned her a free game of peewee golf.
And what my wife and I found was time. Time to sit and read for many hours on the beach at Twain Harte Lake. No e-mail. No computers. No phones. Just warm sand and good words.
One of the books we read, and enjoyed, was Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, subtitled A Woman's Search for Everything across Italy, India, and Indonesia.
The book recounts Gilbert's travels as she seeks happiness from life in the aftermath of a difficult divorce. Her writing style is friendly and comfortable.
Gilbert's insights got my wife and me thinking about how great it would be to take a year off, perhaps to travel, to cook more, to write, to rediscover aspects of ourselves we've put on hold.
While we love what we do and the life we have, we know that building a good life means trading away certain freedoms. If only we could clone ourselves and live several lives.
And yet a theme of Gilbert's book is that after the pleasure of food and friendship she enjoys in Italy, and after her spiritual successes in an ashram in India, she discovers love in Indonesia, and, ultimately, the joy of simply living.
Perhaps that's the message from this year's trip to Twain Harte: that good stories need not always be about cliffhangers or near-death experiences.
Sometimes the best story is rediscovering the quiet wisdom of reading, the love of being with family, and simple joy of living the life we have.
For the past 15 years, for the week of the Fourth of July, I've loaded up the car with kids and fishing poles and beach chairs and driven to Twain Harte, a small town in the Sierra north of Sonora.
These annual treks into the mountains often yield moments that find their way into this column.
Faithful readers may recall that I taught my youngest daughter how to fly fish on a trip to Twain Harte, and how, in another column, I was "pitched into a rushing river. In an instant, I was downriver from the raft, abducted by brute force from my wife and daughters, my head dunking under from time to time, my mind flooded with thoughts of drowning."
So as we drove last week through Escalon on our way to the Sierra, I asked my wife and daughters to be on the lookout for ideas for my column: "It's not necessary that one of us encounter a near-death experience," I teased, "but if one of you would like to volunteer, it would be good for the column."
Thankfully, no one had to be airlifted from the edge of a cliff, though things got pretty exciting when my eldest daughter found several great books in a used bookstore, and my youngest daughter found the perfect stroke that earned her a free game of peewee golf.
And what my wife and I found was time. Time to sit and read for many hours on the beach at Twain Harte Lake. No e-mail. No computers. No phones. Just warm sand and good words.
One of the books we read, and enjoyed, was Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, subtitled A Woman's Search for Everything across Italy, India, and Indonesia.
The book recounts Gilbert's travels as she seeks happiness from life in the aftermath of a difficult divorce. Her writing style is friendly and comfortable.Gilbert's insights got my wife and me thinking about how great it would be to take a year off, perhaps to travel, to cook more, to write, to rediscover aspects of ourselves we've put on hold.
While we love what we do and the life we have, we know that building a good life means trading away certain freedoms. If only we could clone ourselves and live several lives.
And yet a theme of Gilbert's book is that after the pleasure of food and friendship she enjoys in Italy, and after her spiritual successes in an ashram in India, she discovers love in Indonesia, and, ultimately, the joy of simply living.
Perhaps that's the message from this year's trip to Twain Harte: that good stories need not always be about cliffhangers or near-death experiences.
Sometimes the best story is rediscovering the quiet wisdom of reading, the love of being with family, and simple joy of living the life we have.
.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Snapshots of a Georgia Bike Ride
This column was published in June 2007 in the Tri-Valley Herald
A police officer holds off traffic and waves us through a stop sign, smiling when we say thank you.
I recently took a week off and flew to Atlanta to visit my brother. I brought my bicycle, and we rode with several friends and 1,600 other cyclists in the annual Bicycle Ride Across Georgia, or BRAG.
Picture roads that run for miles alongside farms and fields, past tiny white country churches, through towns whose names are proudly painted on water towers, towns such as Americus, Cordele, and Baxley.
Picture cyclists riding these roads, quietly crossing Georgia, sleeping in tents on the grounds of high schools and colleges, or staying in hotels, each day rising to pedal east nearly 500 miles in seven days from Columbus to Savannah.
Picture these other snapshots:
A little girl in cornrows waves from her porch as her brother rides his Big Wheel in a dirt yard adjacent to a train track.
A police officer holds off traffic and waves us through a stop sign, smiling when we say thank you.
Acres of unfamiliar, leafy plants turn out to be tobacco.
We ride along rows of peanut crops and see a sign pointing the way to Plains, Jimmy Carter’s hometown. We see Billy Carter’s gas station.
A church group of black youngsters in matching aqua shirts reaches out to us to offer icy water bottles as we near another rural town.
On a downhill, a mother and her 14-year-old son—Chylon and Zac Thatcher—pass us on their tandem bicycle as “Strawberry Fields Forever” flows from a speaker above the rear tire. I tuck in behind them for few miles and sing along.
On a downhill, a mother and her 14-year-old son—Chylon and Zac Thatcher—pass us on their tandem bicycle as “Strawberry Fields Forever” flows from a speaker above the rear tire. I tuck in behind them for few miles and sing along.
We wake one morning to heavy rain. The forecast is for thunderstorms. I tell my brother I didn’t fly all the way across the United States to sit in a hotel room. So our team sets out to cover the 78 miles planned for that day, and by mid-morning the rains yield to clear skies.
A dead armadillo, the sixth we’ve seen, lies along the side of the road. We’ll see other dead animals as well: two possums, a rattlesnake, two raccoons, and two hawks.
On Wednesday, the layover day when cyclists may rest or choose to ride one of several loops, we opt to ride the longest route, and nine hours later my odometer—which I reset every morning—ticks to 105 miles.
On another day, at a rest stop with morning temperatures beginning to rise, retired school principal Allyn Bell stands with friends. At 69, Bell has ridden BRAG for the past 16 years.
“I’m not a natural athlete,” he says in a thick southern accent, “but I can easily ride a bicycle 50 or 70 miles a day. I hope to ride each year until I’m at least 80.”
After a day’s ride, Rachel Fulton, a 33-year-old tattoo artist from Columbus, tells me this is her first BRAG. She’s riding with friends and enjoys the challenge. I ask about the tattoo that spills along her shoulder and upper arm, and she tells me it’s an Irish and Celtic theme, a tribute to her heritage. “I may get a tattoo related to cycling if I finish the ride,” she adds, “maybe something like a gear.”
At another rest stop, Alabama residents Ed and Melody Scott give water to their 13-year-old pound puppy, a Corgi Sheltie mix named Sadie. The Scotts tow Sadie in a covered carrier, and when I pass them later she seems content to glide along the many hundred miles.
And then there’s Joe Ninke, whose extended bicycle includes a platform with railings for his 5-year-old yellow lab, Luckie. This is Luckie’s and Joe’s second BRAG.
After each day’s ride, we record our mileage and take afternoon naps in our hotel rooms and call home and watch the Braves and Tiger Woods and the Weather Channel.
In the evenings we play a card game called nine-hole golf with Gene Zurik, Deborah Kalish, Parks Avery, and his daughter Jessy, who just graduated from Georgia State University and will attend law school in the fall. Each day Jessy drives our luggage to the next hotel and checks us in.
Her dad, Parks, has a quick wit and a knack for telling stories. He’s funny and grew up in the south and is an expert at mimicking a Scottish accent.
My brother takes to calling him Angus, after Angus Hisloop, a Scotsman Parks met ten years ago on a business trip to London. Parks and my brother banter with Scottish accents about sporting events and the names of dogs, and as the cards are dealt for another hand, I take a sip of sweet tea and marvel at this snapshot of life deep in rural Georgia.
My brother takes to calling him Angus, after Angus Hisloop, a Scotsman Parks met ten years ago on a business trip to London. Parks and my brother banter with Scottish accents about sporting events and the names of dogs, and as the cards are dealt for another hand, I take a sip of sweet tea and marvel at this snapshot of life deep in rural Georgia.
It’s no wonder Bicycling Magazine named BRAG one of best 50 bike rides in the United States. 
Chylon and Zac Thatcher
Joe Ninke and Luckie
Sadie
With Bill, my brother, in a small town called Fitzgerald deep in southern Georgia
Monday, June 18, 2007
Watching TV with Dad
This column was published in the Tri-Valley Herald in 2007 just before Father's Day
After high school, my dad enlisted in the Air Force and then went to college. He became a high school history and English teacher, and later a guidance counselor at a community college.
When I was a teenager, one of my favorite things to do on a Saturday afternoon was to settle into a comfy chair in the living room and watch a movie on TV with my dad.
The movies were always in black and white because my parents didn’t see any compelling reason to buy a color TV. As long as Walter Cronkite and Ed Sullivan and Sunday football games found their way into our home through the antennae of our Zenith, not even the invention of the remote control could prompt my dad to buy a new TV set. 
My sister enjoys telling the story of going off to college and sitting down one evening in a dorm room with friends to watch The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, only to jump up in amazement when Dorothy landed in munchkin land and everything turned to color.
"I had no idea," she said.
Of course, these were the days before VCRs and personal computers. The only cell phone we’d ever seen was in the shoe of Maxwell Smart. So in those years—the early 1970s—my family did things such as go to the library on Thursday evenings, drive out every so often on a Sunday after church to watch planes take off and land at the airport, and gather on occasion in our living room to listen to my dad read a poem by Longfellow or Poe.
I know this sounds nostalgic, but it really was like that.
And then there were those Saturday afternoon movies.
I’m sure my brother and sister occasionally came downstairs or from outside to watch TV with us, but what I mostly remember is just me and my dad watching films where the hero was always fighting some adversary or injustice, films like the 1963 version of Jason and the Argonauts or the 1940 Henry Fonda classic, The Grapes of Wrath.
Born in 1930, my dad, whose name is Bill, spent his childhood in a rough and blue-collar neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. His mother died when he was three, and his father worked in a steel mill.
After high school, my dad enlisted in the Air Force and then went to college. He became a high school history and English teacher, and later a guidance counselor at a community college.
Not unlike the characters in those movies, my dad emerged a hero for our family, a role model whose choices in life were as instructive as his words.
As a teenager, I remember feeling fortunate that my dad liked watching those movies, as it gave me an excuse to spend time with him.
These memories came back on a recent Saturday afternoon as I sat with my 15-year-old daughter in our living room watching a movie we’d picked up at the video store: the black and white 1962 classic, To Kill a Mockingbird.
My daughter, a voracious reader, read the book on her own last year, and will read it again next year as a sophomore. But she hadn’t seen the movie, and I hadn’t seen it in many years.
As we watched Gregory Peck play the father of Scout and Jem, the hero who stands up to social injustice, I thought of my dad, the depression-era boy who finally did buy a new TV with a remote control and now, at 77, watches movies in color with my mom in the same living room in Los Gatos where we all grew up.
I thought of him as I sat with my daughter on that Saturday, our faces turned toward the television on an afternoon that has already begun to fade into a black and white past to which I hope she’ll look back, one day, and remember.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
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.
. .
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.
. .
Thursday, May 24, 2007
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.
, , ,
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.
, , ,
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
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.
Monday, April 16, 2007
100 times in a boy's childhood
This column was published in April 2007 in the Tri-Valley Herald.
His eyes are blue, his hair is short. He’s 29 years old and lives in the Tri-Valley. Along with reading and chess, he enjoys, ironically, playing basketball.
Here’s his story.
“Toward the end of my dad’s life,” he said, “my dad moved out and my mother began going to a therapist, whose name was Bill.”
The young man, then nine, also began seeing the therapist, who took an interest in the boy and began spending personal time with his young patient, as did Bill’s roommate. “I spent weekends at their house and they took me places and on vacation,” he said.
Although the two men were lovers, “they were always appropriate with me,” he said. “But they were inappropriate professionally with how they manipulated our family.”
In the absence of the father, the men disciplined the boy and his younger brother. They choose which friends the boys could spend time with. They set strict rules of behavior and took away the family’s television.
After three years, a family friend, who happened to be the boy’s basketball coach, stepped forward and persuaded the mother to stop the therapist and his partner from “brainwashing” the family.
The coach’s intervention freed the family of three, and led to a successful malpractice suit against the therapist. But the new freedom soon turned into nightmares.
First, his father died from cirrhosis of the liver. Then, after the boy turned 13, the basketball coach who had rescued the family began to spend a lot of time at the family’s home.
“My mom always had him over and even had me spend the night at his house,” the young man said. “But he began abusing me.”
It happened at night, he said. “I always pretended I was asleep.”
He told no one and wouldn’t acknowledge the sexual encounters, even to the coach.
The abuse continued, and over a period of two years the bedroom door opened and closed over 100 times. Then, just before he turned 15, the boy put an end to it.
"I was bigger and stronger and finally confident enough,” he said.
Still, he kept the nightmares a secret for another two years because he didn’t think his mother would believe him.
And, in fact, she didn’t believe him at first. “My mom and I had been fighting a lot because I had refused to stay at his house,” he said. “He was such a close family friend and I knew that my mom had a strong connection with him.”
Eventually, after being persuaded of the truth by a neighbor and another friend, she came to the boy’s room.
“She held me for about 30 minutes,” he said. “We cried in each others arms. She must have said she was sorry 100 times. Then we called the police.”
Wearing a wire, the 17-year-old met the coach in a restaurant and tried to get him to confess, telling him that his counselor was legally required to report what the coach had done.
“He asked what it was he did,” he said. When the young man told him, the man said nothing like that ever happened. “He said he couldn't understand why I was saying it.”
Because the coach didn’t confess initially, police taped subsequent phone conversations. Finally, they got what they needed, and the case went to court.
“He was charged with 21 counts,” he said. “He pleaded no contest to two counts and served 18 months.”
Though free again, the boy, still in high school, now lost his mother to rheumatory arthritis.
“It got into her lungs and she was put on a ventilator,” he said. “I believe the actual cause was heart failure.”
After her death, the young man found journals that were supposed to have been thrown away: “She wrote about how in love with the coach she was. That’s why she always had him over and had me spend the night at his house. She wanted to have a relationship with him.”
In the years that followed, and in spite of the abuses, betrayals, and the loss of his parents, the young man found an inner strength. He went to John F. Kennedy University and earned a bachelor’s degree, and he found the courage to enter therapy.
“My therapist was amazing,” he said. “I personally wouldn’t change any situation I’ve gone through. I’m very happy with who I am today.”
Today the young man with short hair and blue eyes—undeterred by his past—is pursuing a master’s degree.
And yes, he even enjoys playing basketball.
“Each experience teaches us something,” he said, “and each should be valued regardless of how difficult it was.”
.
His eyes are blue, his hair is short. He’s 29 years old and lives in the Tri-Valley. Along with reading and chess, he enjoys, ironically, playing basketball.
Here’s his story.
“Toward the end of my dad’s life,” he said, “my dad moved out and my mother began going to a therapist, whose name was Bill.”
The young man, then nine, also began seeing the therapist, who took an interest in the boy and began spending personal time with his young patient, as did Bill’s roommate. “I spent weekends at their house and they took me places and on vacation,” he said.
Although the two men were lovers, “they were always appropriate with me,” he said. “But they were inappropriate professionally with how they manipulated our family.”
In the absence of the father, the men disciplined the boy and his younger brother. They choose which friends the boys could spend time with. They set strict rules of behavior and took away the family’s television.
After three years, a family friend, who happened to be the boy’s basketball coach, stepped forward and persuaded the mother to stop the therapist and his partner from “brainwashing” the family.
The coach’s intervention freed the family of three, and led to a successful malpractice suit against the therapist. But the new freedom soon turned into nightmares.
First, his father died from cirrhosis of the liver. Then, after the boy turned 13, the basketball coach who had rescued the family began to spend a lot of time at the family’s home.
“My mom always had him over and even had me spend the night at his house,” the young man said. “But he began abusing me.”
It happened at night, he said. “I always pretended I was asleep.”
He told no one and wouldn’t acknowledge the sexual encounters, even to the coach.
The abuse continued, and over a period of two years the bedroom door opened and closed over 100 times. Then, just before he turned 15, the boy put an end to it.
"I was bigger and stronger and finally confident enough,” he said.
Still, he kept the nightmares a secret for another two years because he didn’t think his mother would believe him.
And, in fact, she didn’t believe him at first. “My mom and I had been fighting a lot because I had refused to stay at his house,” he said. “He was such a close family friend and I knew that my mom had a strong connection with him.”
Eventually, after being persuaded of the truth by a neighbor and another friend, she came to the boy’s room.
“She held me for about 30 minutes,” he said. “We cried in each others arms. She must have said she was sorry 100 times. Then we called the police.”
Wearing a wire, the 17-year-old met the coach in a restaurant and tried to get him to confess, telling him that his counselor was legally required to report what the coach had done.
“He asked what it was he did,” he said. When the young man told him, the man said nothing like that ever happened. “He said he couldn't understand why I was saying it.”
Because the coach didn’t confess initially, police taped subsequent phone conversations. Finally, they got what they needed, and the case went to court.
“He was charged with 21 counts,” he said. “He pleaded no contest to two counts and served 18 months.”
Though free again, the boy, still in high school, now lost his mother to rheumatory arthritis.
“It got into her lungs and she was put on a ventilator,” he said. “I believe the actual cause was heart failure.”
After her death, the young man found journals that were supposed to have been thrown away: “She wrote about how in love with the coach she was. That’s why she always had him over and had me spend the night at his house. She wanted to have a relationship with him.”
In the years that followed, and in spite of the abuses, betrayals, and the loss of his parents, the young man found an inner strength. He went to John F. Kennedy University and earned a bachelor’s degree, and he found the courage to enter therapy.
“My therapist was amazing,” he said. “I personally wouldn’t change any situation I’ve gone through. I’m very happy with who I am today.”
Today the young man with short hair and blue eyes—undeterred by his past—is pursuing a master’s degree.
And yes, he even enjoys playing basketball.
“Each experience teaches us something,” he said, “and each should be valued regardless of how difficult it was.”
.
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
30 scars and a lost childhood
This column was published in the Tri-Valley Herald in March 2007.
Thirty scars cover her forearm. All through her childhood, while girls her age were playing with friends, she was alone.
“I used to daydream about what my first sleep-over would be like,” she said, “all of us girls sitting around on warm couches swapping stories and giggling about our secret crushes.”
A good student growing up in the Tri-Valley, this young woman enjoyed her studies, but longed to play after school with friends. But her father wouldn’t let her.
“My dad didn't allow me to leave the house under any circumstances,” she said. When he came home every day around four o'clock, he would always interrupt her homework so they could “play.”
At first, she enjoyed the attention that had started when she was very little. “My dad and I would play until my mom pulled into the driveway,” she said.
Her father even insisted they have playtime before she went to sleep, so her mother left the two of them alone. Before he left the room each night, her father would thank her for being such a good girl and say the reason he played with her is because he loved her.
As she grew older, she knew something was wrong. And by 8th grade she worked up the courage to challenge her father and one day told him, “I don’t want to play with you anymore. I want to have friends and my own life. I am sick of school and I am sick of you."
Amazingly, he was kind and said he supported her decision.
She reveled in her new-found freedom, but almost before she knew it, her father led her into the garage and hit her hand and arm 36 times with a hammer.
As a doctor put a cast on her arm, she realized she would need to keep silent if she hoped to live.
“After that day, if I so much as flinched while my father played with me, he would scar my arm with the end of his cigarette.”
As she entered high school, the young girl started acting out. She began to swear and do drugs and one day in defiance lit a cigarette and stubbed it out on a school administrator’s desk.
In spite of her unacceptable behavior, her teachers truly cared about her, she said, and reached out to do everything they could.
Finally, thirty scars, nine casts, and countless tears later, she realized she needed out, and shared her story with a trusted adult. She learned that the special attention she’d received from her father was called incest, and only then—contrary to her understanding—she learned this molestation was illegal.
“I lived in four different foster homes before I was permanently placed into a group home with 29 other girls,” she said.
Soon she began working with a lawyer to prepare for trial against her father. She remembers it was a Monday when, at 14, she walked into the courtroom.
“My eyes connected with his,” she said. She quickly looked away and caught a glimpse of her mother who sat beside her father, gripping his hand, still in love with him, angry and frustrated with her daughter.
Tugging on her attorney’s case file, she told him she couldn’t go through with it. “The fire that haunted me in my nightmares burned deeper and brighter that day,” she said.
Over time, as her mother realized the truth and filed for divorce, the young woman wrestled with her father’s actions through years of therapy.
Now at 21, she still struggles to pull her life together, and sometimes wonders if it would have been easier to keep silent and wait for the end of high school when she could have quietly escaped the nightmare that was her home.
Against her sea of troubles, she has taken steps, and because she’s certain she wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for the teachers who reached out to help, she has a dream of one day becoming a teacher herself.
“Half of the blood I carry inside of me belongs to a monster,” said the young woman, who works part-time and attends college. “But I don’t care about him and I don’t care to know what he’s doing.”
What she does know is that he has never been punished for stealing her childhood and nearly destroying her life.
Thirty scars cover her forearm. All through her childhood, while girls her age were playing with friends, she was alone.
“I used to daydream about what my first sleep-over would be like,” she said, “all of us girls sitting around on warm couches swapping stories and giggling about our secret crushes.”
A good student growing up in the Tri-Valley, this young woman enjoyed her studies, but longed to play after school with friends. But her father wouldn’t let her.
“My dad didn't allow me to leave the house under any circumstances,” she said. When he came home every day around four o'clock, he would always interrupt her homework so they could “play.”
At first, she enjoyed the attention that had started when she was very little. “My dad and I would play until my mom pulled into the driveway,” she said.
Her father even insisted they have playtime before she went to sleep, so her mother left the two of them alone. Before he left the room each night, her father would thank her for being such a good girl and say the reason he played with her is because he loved her.
As she grew older, she knew something was wrong. And by 8th grade she worked up the courage to challenge her father and one day told him, “I don’t want to play with you anymore. I want to have friends and my own life. I am sick of school and I am sick of you."
Amazingly, he was kind and said he supported her decision.
She reveled in her new-found freedom, but almost before she knew it, her father led her into the garage and hit her hand and arm 36 times with a hammer.
As a doctor put a cast on her arm, she realized she would need to keep silent if she hoped to live.
“After that day, if I so much as flinched while my father played with me, he would scar my arm with the end of his cigarette.”
As she entered high school, the young girl started acting out. She began to swear and do drugs and one day in defiance lit a cigarette and stubbed it out on a school administrator’s desk.
In spite of her unacceptable behavior, her teachers truly cared about her, she said, and reached out to do everything they could.
Finally, thirty scars, nine casts, and countless tears later, she realized she needed out, and shared her story with a trusted adult. She learned that the special attention she’d received from her father was called incest, and only then—contrary to her understanding—she learned this molestation was illegal.
“I lived in four different foster homes before I was permanently placed into a group home with 29 other girls,” she said.
Soon she began working with a lawyer to prepare for trial against her father. She remembers it was a Monday when, at 14, she walked into the courtroom.
“My eyes connected with his,” she said. She quickly looked away and caught a glimpse of her mother who sat beside her father, gripping his hand, still in love with him, angry and frustrated with her daughter.
Tugging on her attorney’s case file, she told him she couldn’t go through with it. “The fire that haunted me in my nightmares burned deeper and brighter that day,” she said.
Over time, as her mother realized the truth and filed for divorce, the young woman wrestled with her father’s actions through years of therapy.
Now at 21, she still struggles to pull her life together, and sometimes wonders if it would have been easier to keep silent and wait for the end of high school when she could have quietly escaped the nightmare that was her home.
Against her sea of troubles, she has taken steps, and because she’s certain she wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for the teachers who reached out to help, she has a dream of one day becoming a teacher herself.
“Half of the blood I carry inside of me belongs to a monster,” said the young woman, who works part-time and attends college. “But I don’t care about him and I don’t care to know what he’s doing.”
What she does know is that he has never been punished for stealing her childhood and nearly destroying her life.
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Lessons learned in prison
In 2001 and 2002, Donna Miranda Perez lived with a secret she dared not tell anyone, a secret she would live to regret.
A legal assistant with a good salary, Perez had attended high school in San Francisco and earned a 4.0 grade point average. Though at 18 her talent as a singer landed her a job in Los Angeles, she soon found her way home to the Bay Area and enrolled at San Francisco State University, where she earned a degree in Accounting.
But by 2001, her oldest daughter, just ten years old, was suffering from cerebral tumors, and in spite of Perez’s education and the income she and her husband earned, it wasn’t enough to pay for the medical expenses and make ends meet.
So she secretly started to embezzle from her employer.
“I was working for a high-powered attorney,” Perez said, “but this was still not enough, so in a two-year period I managed to steal $66,475.”
Arrested in November 2002, Perez spent 16 months in county jail at Santa Rita. Then she was sentenced to prison.
“Prison was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she said. “Try to imagine never laughing, smiling or feeling any type of happiness. It’s a completely different world.”
During her first week at Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla, Perez shared a cell with another woman: “She was quite the crazy one. She woke me up in the middle of the night standing naked in front of me. Then she attacked me. She was a very large girl and hurt me pretty badly for no reason.”
Perez said you have to become a fighter in prison, otherwise inmates “will destroy whatever life you have.”
Soon, Perez was sharing a cell with seven other women, and was degraded on a daily basis. Some of the women were not so bad, she said, but some, incarcerated for life, “ran the prison.”
After six weeks, Perez was assigned to go outside the prison to work in the almond fields making eight cents an hour. Still, there were moments she wanted to die: “I hated every moment I spent there and told myself nothing is worth this, nothing.”
During her incarceration, she rarely saw her son and youngest daughter, and no one brought her older daughter to visit. Her marriage suffered, and she received no letters.
To help handle the emotional stress, Perez started writing, including poetry. One poem to her older daughter includes this line: “Please keep my words close to your heart, no matter where I am, in my memories we are never apart.”
But writing could not change the consequences of Perez’s incarceration.
“When I was arrested we lost everything: our house, furniture, cars, everything,” she said. “My husband and our daughters moved in with his sister and her family.”
Perez said her oldest daughter’s health suffered further, and at one point she weighed only 28 pounds. “It was like a knife stabbed me.”
Perez, on the other hand, weighed almost 400 pounds when she was first incarcerated. “I know, terrible,” she said. “But then I began working on not only my inner self, but on my outer self.” Perez began walking six to eight miles every chance she could and eventually lost 160 pounds.
“I left prison weighing 240 pounds,” she said. “My youngest daughter didn’t recognize me.”
Released from the Chowchilla facility after seven months, Perez spent just under two years behind bars: “I learned more in prison than the past 44 years of my life.”
Perez said her life before her arrest was a mess. Prison gave her the opportunity to stop blaming others and start working on finding her own happiness. “I woke up and I didn’t want to feel angry any longer.”
Today Perez pays restitution at $50 a month. She met all the requirements of her 13-month parole and is no longer required to check in with authorities. Her oldest daughter, now 15, requires constant medical care.
Perez works as a part-time legal assistant for a friend—the only person who would hire her—but is looking for full time work.
“I’ve applied for so many jobs in the past two years, but I’m turned down every time,” she said. “I wish someone would let me get my foot in the door and let me prove how different I am today.”
Looking back on lessons she could share with readers, Perez encourages anyone who is blaming others to begin taking responsibility for their own actions. And committing any crime for whatever reason, she said, is never worth it.
“What I did was wrong, so wrong,” she said. “When they say crime doesn’t pay, it’s the best statement to remember in life. I am living proof.”
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