Japan 2012

In 2012 I finally accepted the invitation from my boss at Dai-Ichi Kangyo when I was there in the 80s. I had become Hayashi’s right hand man, my desk next to his. I was his American advisor, a gopher sometimes, a trusted lieutenant and a friend.

When he returned to Japan we continued to correspond and he insisted that one day I should come to visit him in Japan. The expense seemed intimidating and I didn’t have the time, but in my first year of retirement I was cash rich and had nothing but time. My excuses were gone and I finally agreed to come.

I arrived in Japan and Hayashi met me at the airport and was my host and tour guide almost every step of the way. Hayashi is a bit of a control freak but in two short weeks I got to see Japan in a way that most America-jin would never see it. I was the VIP guest in a downtown hotel, visited the Hayashi’s at home in central Tokyo, was a guest along with an old co-worker and his wife at Hayashi’s country home where the Hayashi family was from. I got to become friends with Nagasuchi-san. We had worked in the same place but never really known each other. I went by myself on a carefully planned package tour to Kyoto.

Currency, language, geography were never a problem with my guide.

The first event was a reunion of the DKB staff from Los Angeles in the 1980s. The dinner was at Hayashi-san’s very exclusive club in downtown Tokyo. After the 1980s DKB became a Zombie Bank and vanished in a takeover. My colleagues were the survivors and had been scattered to the winds. It was the first meeting of all of us since those days. It was fun to recognize each other after 25 years and the dinner was an incredibly warm and fun event. It seemed our affection for each other had only grown in the interim.

Ono-san, the class clown, was still the class clown. He was assigned to take me back to my hotel. We walked out into the crush of downtown Tokyo, he raised his hand and a large black limosine immediately pulled up at the curb. Ono-san was the president of a Japanese insurance company.

During the course of the trip, various colleagues were assigned to take me out or put me up. Yamada-san met us a few times and we went to restaurants and shrines. Nagasuki-san and his wife, friends of the Hayashis, picked me up and took me to the country home in Nakano. We spent a few days together and went touring in the countryside, seeing temples and shrines and eating at wonderful restaurants, touring the City of Nagano and Matsumoto Castle. I hadn’t really known Nakasugi-san. He was in charge of IT and we didn’t work together. We became friends on this trip. He and his wife were delightful. I asked him if Hayashi-san had changed at all. No, he said, if anything he was more himself, still the boss, but his loyalty and affection for his team was still strong and it seemed we all still did what he told us.

Hasegawa-san hosted me at a National Park near Mount Fuji. Yamaki-san took me to dinner at a famous restaurant in the Ginza. Arahata-san took me to dinner. At the end of the trip Hayashi had assigned Nakasugi-san to take me to some museum and we both discovered we were more interested in the railroad museum and we cheated and went there. On a trip arranged by Hayashi I visited Kyoto. Tsukamoto-san a junior office in Los Angeles was now a senior executive at a major International Bank and we met him for a very special lunch at his bank.

In a short two weeks I had an amazing trip to Japan, hosted and guided by Hayashi-san. I saw Tokyo, Yokahama, Nagano and Kyoto, shrines, temples, parks, restaurants, gardens and public baths and castles. An extended stay with the Hayashis at their country home. I met his auntie, his brother and saw his daughter a Nippon Telephone executive. It was an amazing trip and the warmth and friendship of my former colleagues was incredible. A short trip but a life experience for me.

A Trip to Ireland

In 2012 I finally went to Ireland. Most of my family and friends and even people I didn’t know all talked about what a wonderful place it was after they had been there. I am proud of my Irish heritage, but after being taught by Irish priests in high school and my experience of not being Irish enough for them, when I was in Europe Ireland wasn’t on my list of things I had to see. Finally in 2012 I went there for myself.  

As soon as I landed I was Irish enough.  I felt welcomed. It is an incredible country with incredible people. I have never been in a place where it was so easy to talk to people. Every town has a Falté shop, a government tourist center where the people are incredibly helpful. In Galway I got acclimated just walking around. I learned pizza shops in Ireland are always Pizza and Kebabs. I went to a poetry reading in a local library where arriving on time got me the last seat available.  It’s not cosmopolitan, it’s not provincial, it’s just comfortable.

In Dublin I toured the city particularly aware of the Easter Rebellion, the Post Office and the bullet holes in the Daniel O’Connell statue in the line of sight for British snipers at Trinity College to the to the Republicans General Post Office barricades. I attended a lecture at Dublin Castle and was invited by the moderator, an Italian Irish American from San Francisco professor at University College in Cork invited me to join him, the lecturers and their historian friends to go the pub.

I took a bus tour to the New Grange, a Neolithic site, even older than the Pyramids. I went to the National Museum of Ireland. I saw artifacts thousands of years old. It wasn’t the history I had shown at State Parks in California, someone else’s ancient history, it was mine going back to time immemorial, Irish stone tools and dugout canoes.

I went to the National Gallery and saw a special exhibit of Leonore Carrington, one of my favorite Mexican artists, an ex-pat of Irish ancestry who made Mexico her home. There was a wonderful docent who showed me around and we saw a small model maybe 8 inches long of “How Doth the Little Crocodile” a crocodile boat with a crocodile crew. I told the docent I had seen the full sculpture all 16 feet by 30 feet on the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City. It was an old friend from Mexico honored in Dublin, like me part of the Irish Diaspora.

I went on to Cashel in Tipperary to see where my family was from. In the graveyard of the Cathedral on Cashel Rock there was a Duggan gravestone. In Tipperary at Brian Boru’s castle I wasn’t a person with an Irish surname, I was one of the Duggans.

Ballingarry is a long and expensive cab ride from Cashel. I got there and walked the main street. There is the Church of the Assumption, two pubs, the Miners’ Rest and the Amby, and a sundries/post office shop. The pubs don’t serve meals. I asked the publican where do people eat in Ballingarry. He said at the Day Break across the street, a 7/11 type convenience store that served chicken wings and snacks.

People told me my cousin Mark Duggan, a veterinarian, was down the street, but he wasn’t home that day.

The only thing of note in Ballingarry was Famine Warhouse, actually 5 kilometers away in the country. Warhouse is where the Royal Irish Constabulary had fled from the Young Irelanders.  Young Ireland had taken over the Commons in the Rebellion in 1848 and the Constabulary sent to break it up had to flee for their lives and took five hostages in the widow McCormack’s farmhouse.   

An hours long gun battle ensued; two rebels were killed.  Reinforcements came for the Constabulary and the rebels retreated and faded into the countryside. Most of the Young Irelanders escaped capture after the event and some showed up in America afterwards. I knew about the Rebellion at Famine Warhouse, where the Irish Republican flag was first flown. I didn’t know it was in Ballingarry where my great great grandfather was from. It was closed for the Day.

I learned a little more about it and began to connect the dots. The Young Ireland movement was an independence minded group made of up of middle class Irish Protestants and Catholics. William Smith O’Brien, the leader was Protestant country gentleman from a landowning family and a member of Parliament.

Michael Duggan my great great grandfather arrived in Missouri in 1849 at the age of 21. He was not fleeing the famine, like Irishmen of the day in steerage to Ellis Island. He entered the United States through New Orleans and went up the Mississippi and bought 500 acres of prime farmland in Brinkstown Missouri.

A young man, 21 years old, from Ballingarry who left there in 1848/49 and arrived in America with enough money to buy a large farm. The Duggans have always been Republican in their sympathies and rebels at heart.

Was my great great grandfather a Young Irelander in Ballingarry in 1848? I don’t know. He certainly could have been.

91 Dead to date this year

On New Year’s Eve of the Lunar Year, a 72 year old madman from Hemet opened fire in a Monterey Park Dance Studio and Club and killed 10 New Year celebrants and wounded 10. He left and went to a similar Club in Alhambra where two patrons disarmed him. He fled and was spotted the next morning in Torrance. When the police approached his vehicle he shot himself and died.

The victims were apparently an older crowd that were celebrating the New Year at a party at the club where they took ballroom, latin and Chinese dance classes. What a sadness. The shooter was an old man who had reported to the Hemet Police where he lived that people were trying to poison him. The victims were also older people who belonged to a dance club. It’s remarkable that the shooter and the victims were all Asian, either Vietnamese or Chinese Americans.

And life goes on in America. Another mass shooting. A couple of weeks ago a whole family from a ten month old baby in their mother’s arms to grandparents were murdered in the Central Valley by gangsters. Eleven years ago a madman killed 7 people at Oikos University here in Oakland. A rare event in 1999 when the Columbine shootings occurred has now become commonplace, disturbed teenagers, madmen, paranoids, and politically deranged people are arming themselves and killing people en masse for all sorts of reasons, political, personal, jobs, race, gangs or sometimes for no discernible reason at all.

In a country of 330 million people these type of people are inevitable but only in America are we insane enough to make sure everyone who wants a weapon of nearly any kind can obtain it and to claim this as a constitutional right. With various loopholes, this includes violent felons and the insane. There are even court cases where the right to buy a gun for the disturbed or the mad is defended. A majority of Americans believe there should be limits but the gun manufacturers and their association the NRA fight common sense controls every step of the way.

Of course, almost all other countries control their citizens owning weapons very tightly. For myself single shot long rifles or shotguns for hunting or even protection are fine. But assault rifles, automatics, pistols, weapons meant only for killing people should be banned and gradually removed from circulation. It’s not going to happen in the United States for now and periodic mass murders like Monterey Park and worse should be expected frequently. There’s nothing rare about them now.

Reaching out to the isolated and deranged with decent mental health services wouldn’t hurt either.

Two days later another overwrought Chinese American man shot 7 coworkers to death in Half Moon Bay. The victims were farm workers at a mushroom farm. He was captured alive a short time later in a parking lot familiar to me from my Half Moon Bay days.

Monday a video was filming at the corner of MacArthur and Seminary at the gas station there, a few blocks from our house. Gunfire erupted and 1 person was shot dead and four people were wounded. It was multiple shooters and was apparently gang related.

91 people have died in mass shootings in the United States this month. This is according to a crowd sourced data base, Mass Shooting Tracker where four or more people shot defines a mass shooting.

Good Kharma

An old AA story is of the man who didn’t believe in God at all. A friend wondered how he could be so sure. The man told his friend he had proof. His friend asked what was that. “Well I was hunting in Alaska right next to the Bering Sea and a wind came up and I didn’t realize I was on an ice shelf and the piece I was on broke off. And there I was on an ice floe floating out to sea. I couldn’t see the shore and I began praying to god to save me. I prayed and I prayed and he didn’t save me.”

His friend asked, “Well you’re here now. How did you survive?”

“Oh, some Eskimo came along.”

I got up this morning, showered and got ready because I was going to coffee and socialize with parents after I dropped my kid off. Escuela Bilingüe is a great school. The parents are wonderful people, professors, lawyers, engineers, and artists; they’re an interesting mix. The once a month Coffee Cart is always an enjoyable social occasion, we stand outside at a picnic table near the drop off and do a cocktail hour with coffee instead of drinks. We mix, we talk, we listen and I float from conversation to conversation. We talk about school, kids, jobs, work, politics, it’s one of my favorite social connections. This morning at  EBI, as we call it, the Coffee Cart was canceled.

At the gate to the school Irma said they tried to get Peet’s this morning, but Peet’s canceled and they had to cancel the Coffee Cart. There was one other parent, someone I didn’t really know. He said he’d wait and see if anyone shows up and would talk to Irma in the meantime. I walked past them at the gate and went to the picnic table. Even though they canceled it, someone’s bound to show up, the notice was in Parent Square online.

In the meantime I talked to Carolyn, while she unloaded kids with Luis at the dropoff. She is from Coachella, down in the desert Southeast of Palm Springs. She’s Spanish speaking as are most of the staff at EBI and I tell her I’m trying to learn Spanish. She’s a young woman, a teacher’s aid but she begins to relax. I learn her husband got a job here and she moved with him. She prefers the warmth of Coachella to the chill of winter in the Bay Area.

Then I go over and talk to Luis for a moment and find out Luis is actually José and I’ve had his name wrong for five years I said. He said we’ve known each other for 7 years, well maybe, but he’s a good guy and we laugh. He speaks Spanish with a wonderful Cuban accent and to my amazement I understand some of it.

The other parent comes back and I offer to share the coffee I’ve brought for myself. His daughter is in the third grade and we chat for a few minutes. I tell him I’m Irish and that they say if the Irish weren’t in AA they could have their meetings in a phone booth and that in AA even if only two people show up they go on with the meeting and before I finish my observation, he interrupts, “I went to a meeting last night in San Mateo.” “A meeting?” I ask, “An AA meeting?” “Yes,” he says. So I tell him “Next week is my 39^th AA birthday.”

Matt is two years sober. He’s dropping his daughter off, whom he is just getting to know and getting involved in her life. He left Kerry’s mother when she was pregnant and they don’t have much of a relationship but it looked like maybe things were changing with Kerry and her mother. But Kerry’s mother is getting on with her life and has a boyfriend and the boyfriend moved in and likes being a foster dad and Matt wasn’t nice about it when he saw him this morning. He doesn’t like him, even though he seems like a pretty good guy. This guy stays overnight with Kerry’s mother, gets up in the morning, serves Matt’s daughter cornflakes and puts her to bed at night.

Matt has been struggling, but he’s got it, he’s sober now, but this is hard. We talk about patience, and meetings. He has a sponsor, but it’s hard. I say, “You know I don’t much believe in god as some sort of chess master, but it’s hard not to feel like you and I a couple of pieces he just moved to where we need to be.”

Matt doesn’t slow down. He is hurting and he needs to talk. He’s a good guy and he knows he needs to be patient but when it looked like he might get a chance to be a husband and a father there wasn’t and Kerry's mother is moving on, it hurts.

I tried to be a good listener. Matt is a good guy. He’s staying sober and trying to lead a good life. But doing that in the beginning is hard, particularly for people like us who began drinking before we had grown up and getting sober hasn’t fixed everything yet. I tried to interject a few AA clichés. It will get better if you don’t drink. Working the steps helps. The shit doesn’t stop when we stop drinking. Patience. Things like that.

I could feel Matt was in pain and this was a crisis. It takes a few years for us alcoholics before life is no longer one crisis after another, before we learn how to live life on it’s own terms, the gifts of sobriety as they come. Everyone around us seems to get it, have the good things, doing well and we’re still struggling. I told him after 39 years I didn’t have a strong urge to drink anymore, but that was only good as I long as I worked the program.

As they remind us in AA, meeting Matt sure helped me, made me grateful, and reminded me that Sobriety is a great gift, a grace from god. It reminded me of my early years in AA and the struggles I had. It reminded me when Church Carmalt, my sponsor, said “work with newcomers."  Of course, I’m still growing and I still struggle a little, but I didn’t drink and over time it got better, and it’s still getting better.

I hope I did Matt some good. It sure helped me.

I had to laugh. Newcomers see god’s hand in everything that happens to them. I had that kind of higher power for awhile and it helped. I don’t believe that’s true anymore, but it’s hard to deny when something like this happens. I may not have been his Eskimo, but maybe I’m someone who listened along the way and shared a cup of coffee.

Another coincidence, this morning I meditated on listening, becoming a good listener. I may not believe in god exactly.  But kharma makes sense to me. I am grateful for good kharma when I see it.

Note:  A few days later I ran into Matt again.  We sat in his car and talked.  He's still in crisis.  Exploring ways to deal with that, he said he wouldn't smoke pot that day and hadn't for some hours.  I'm not sure if pot was his word, like everything else I'm dated but nonetheless he hadn't smoked pot for some hours.  It seems for the last two years Matt has been on what we call the Marijuana Maintenance Program.  In my experience that's not sobriety, better but not good enough.  The first rule of working the 12 Steps is to be sober.  In my experience, if I don't drink things get better.  I'm pretty sure if I do drink they're going to get worse.  And as I heard it in the beginning and believe, mind altering drugs and alcohol are the same thing, just a question of getting to Omaha by plane or train, you're still in Omaha.  I shared my opinion and my phone number with Matt, I haven't heard from him since.  

My meeting with Matt kept me sober, my Higher Power at work.

Disclaimer:  I’m certainly not a representative of Alcoholics Anonymous nor can I say I’m even a member but I know people. Saying that, this is a story. It could happen.

Teacher's Aid

One more time I asked myself what do I want to be when I grow up? At 67 it still resonated. I tell people, I’m no longer immature, I’m young at heart. The last time I asked that question, I became a Park Ranger. I wanted to do something that would be new and fun. And the answer came back, an elementary school teacher. I didn’t want a job, but a job like volunteer gig. On a school tour for Adam I asked the principal how I might do that. She was enthusiastic and told me first to go to the district and get cleared as a volunteer, get a badge and we’d go from there.

Lisa Kantor and I exchanged a couple of emails and we were getting ready to start. In her last email she asked what experience I had. I told her I was a kindergarten Sunday School teacher. I didn’t hear back from her. She didn’t respond to any of my emails or phone calls. She was unreachable. I think maybe Ms. Kantor didn’t want a Sunday School teacher at her school. By that time I had stopped qualifying my church attendance as being Unitarian.  Be honest, let people think what they want. I was in good company with Jimmy Carter. I think maybe I’d just been stereotyped as a “Christian Evangelical.” That didn’t feel good. Even Evangelicals have a right to be in our schools.

Not long after in February 2014 I was registering Adam for Transitional Kindergarten at Colorado Elementary School in Richmond and I asked to speak to the principal there. I met Linda Cohen, a legendary principal in Richmond Schools. We talked and she was quite eager to have me as a volunteer. “When can you start?” she asked. “Tomorrow,” I answered. And so I did, the very next day. Linda had me go to each class from 3^rd to 6^th grade and ask the teacher what they would like me to do. The first year I tutored math, babysat or just distracted disruptive kids, worked with a new immigrant from Mexico who did not want to learn English and worked one on one or in small groups.

I volunteered two days a week. At lunchtime I went to the teacher’s room. I met some teachers, I was part of Coronado Elementary School. After a few months, one morning I got up with that feeling, oh god, I don’t want to go school today. A moment later I realized, wow!, just like a real job. I was showing up.

The next year Adam started Transitional Kindergarten at Coronado and the first day I asked Linda what she wanted me to do. She was busy and said, “Well why don’t you just go to Transitional Kindergarten for now.” We’ll figure it out later.

I found a home. There was no later. For the next six years I was a volunteer teacher’s aid in Transitional Kindergarten. I worked with Licet Santos, the regular teacher’s aid and Pat Boyne, the teacher. We were a team. I did what I could to help, supporting the kids, encouraging them and enjoying them. Little people have always fascinated me, the amount they learn just to get started in life and the physical changes are astounding, learning to walk, to talk, and in TK to be part of a group and that squiggles and symbols can have meaning. It is their first formal step in learning to learn.

My TKers were learning more in that year than graduate students at Berkeley would learn in a year.  I was in awe at what we were part of. These kids were laying the very foundation of their education. They were learning life skills. Recess was just as important as the classroom. They were being domesticated, like wild horses they needed to be gentled. For some kids it was their first experience in the system. They couldn’t leave, it wasn’t voluntary and making a scene didn’t help.

One day I was telling my good friend Bob Weiss about what I was doing and he said, “You know these kids are going to remember you for the rest of their lives.” I hadn’t thought of it, but of course. What a responsibility, memories of Mr. Jack into the next century.

Licet, Pat and I worked together for six years. Licet was wonderful, local, very bright, she should have been a teacher herself, but after a marriage, two kids and a divorce, she needed to earn a living and it was our good fortune to have her as a teacher’s aid. Pat is a professional teacher and did the magic of curriculum, lesson planning, pacing and all the paperwork. I appreciated that I got to be a part of teaching children hands on, but I didn’t have to do the bureaucracy. My style is more Ranger than Teacher and with Pat and Licet, that worked.

In 2019 things began to come apart. Pat was getting toward the end of her career and had a hellacious commute. She had injuries and health problems. Licet was having a hard time too. There were sick days and substitutes and it wasn’t going very well and then we got a substitute who stayed, Miss Chavez. She was a graduate of Cal but had been a truck driver between LA and San Francisco. It was her first year as a substitute and we were fortunate to get her. She didn’t have the experience of Pat Boyne, but she had a lot of heart, wanted to do well, and loved the children. So it was good and then in March of 2020 Covid came.  We were doing distance learning. I tried to join in, but a teacher’s aid on Zoom is just one more complicating element and it didn’t work.

In September of 2020 I didn’t participate but when in person classes started again in the Fall of 2021 I came back. Miss Boyne was the TK teacher again but struggling with the administration over medical leave. She mostly didn’t show up. We had a series of substitutes and just no teacher at all. We did have Miss Pinkston, a wonderful teacher, She was the new Reading Resource person at the school and it wasn’t her job to take over TK.  She did what she could to help.    

I needed something more consistent. I talked to my friend Lourdes, a great 2^nd grade teacher there. She recommended I ask Terra Doby, the kindergarten teacher if she would like a volunteer. She did and we started working together.

What good fortune. Terra Doby is an amazing teacher. If Kindergarteners are a little wild, she is a Kindergarten Whisperer. Her oft repeated phrase is, “Ignore to learn.” And so the class seemed wild from the outside, slowly she began to work her magic on the kids and all but one became happy students, and even the most difficult child improved, got a little better. Instead of letting the difficult kids take over the class she was able to gently bring them in. She didn’t let them distract her and the class. They were ignoring to learn. It was a wonderful experience for me.

During the summer break, Adam and I went to lunch with Miss Doby. Afterwards Adam said, “I wish we had a teacher like Miss Doby in our school.” She is gentle, loves her job and is very good at it.

For their own reasons the administration decided Miss Doby was going to the 4^th grade the following year. She asked me if I was staying in Kindergarten or might want to come along with her. I tell my friends that after 7 years in Kindergarten I’ve been promoted to the fourth grade.

This year has been different, fourth graders are a lot different than Kinders, but they’re still wonderful kids. Working with Miss Doby has been a pleasure. It’s enjoyable just to watch how she teaches.  It's fascinating to watch a Kindergarten teacher who is very different in the 4th grade but just as good.  As her aid, I do what I can to make that easier, copying, cutting, sorting books, just doing a lot of the time consuming jobs that leave her with more time to teach. I also do assessments. I tutor a little and sometimes I walk around and just help. I’m older than when I started this and I found two days a week was taking it out of me. I cut back to one day a week and it made it much more enjoyable.

I love being around the kids, participating in their growth, helping where I can and being Miss Doby’s assistant, doing whatever I can to make her job easier and give her more time to teach. I am amazed and delighted how much the kids appreciate my being there, how they miss me when I’m not there and happy to see me when I return.

Arom, Writing and Retirement

On November 5, 2011 I retired. Sixty-five is too old to wear a badge and a gun and answer 9-1-1 calls in the middle of the night. When I quit I thought I could still do it but I didn’t know how much longer that would last. I had these ideas of starting another career, maybe going to law school or just going to college. People wanted me to stay in Parks, become a boat operator. My heart attack a year before made me realize that I wasn’t going to go on forever, that I needed to stop and enjoy life and that would be OK. So I quit. I retired.

I had some money saved. The last year or two in Parks I even put some more aside on top of the generous retirement credits I got from CalPers. My investments, mutual funds, had grown back after the market crash of 2008 and by 2011 were nearly back to what they had been. I applied for Social Security and there was Social Security for dependents under 18. With my City of San Francisco time and then the State I got 20% of my final pay in CalPers retirement. And with my 30 years of paying Social Security tax there was no reduction to offset the CalPers.

I think this was probably one of the most anxious times in my life. What would retirement be like? I focused on money but really it was about not having a job, connections, identity and status. I had resisted being a retiree when I quit work in 1999 but this time I had no claim to anything else. I didn’t have a good image of retirees. What does a retiree really do? I knew the stereotypes and what I had seen. I didn’t want to raise tomatoes and talk about writing a book. I didn’t want to buy an RV and tour America. I certainly wasn’t going to become a gardener. I had no role model that worked for me.

My Dad didn’t retire until he was 75 and could no longer work and then he just stayed home and puttered. My mother said he was writing a book. When he passed away I found a notebook about the Balkans but it was mostly gibberish and didn’t make much sense to me. My grandfather was still a drunk when he stopped working. My Lashley grandfather was a cripple and sat in the doorway of his tar paper shack and smoked hand rolled cigarettes. My uncle was a working artist and kept working until he passed away. 

I wasn’t going to be a police officer until I was 75. I really never liked working. Before retirement we moved off the island to an apartment near Lake Merritt. As to what I was going to do in retirement I’d made a few transitions in my life so I had at least an idea of how I wanted to start retirement. I would be on vacation, put off making any plans for three months. I don’t remember much of what I did, puttered around, enjoyed living on the Main Land in one of my favorite neighborhoods anywhere, Grand Lake in Oakland.

Suzette and I planned to move to a Spanish speaking country for a year. I was beginning to settle on Uruguay because it has a good government and a European feel to it. Then I realized if European was an appeal that maybe Spain was the right place to go and we began looking into that.

We went to the Spanish consulate and started learning about moving there. We met friends of friends who had lived in Grenada for a couple of years and he had written a small book about it. Then sometime in that year my Father-in Law convinced his daughter that that was a bad move for her in her career, too risky and she listened to him. His torpedo sunk the plan.

When my Social Security check went into my account, it was like magic, we were there, and it was bigger than I thought it would be. My CalPers check arrived and it was a real check bigger than I expected. CalPers seemed like a gift. I didn't get the Juvy job and then State Parks thinking about retirement but CalPers turned out to be a very good deal for me. Medicare kicked in and I got the Senior Advantage from Kaiser. Adam’s Social Security check game and that was another gift. There was a final check from Parks for compensating overtime and unused vacation and it was about 3 months pay. At least for the first year I had plenty of cash and Suzette had a good job. We had money in our pockets, paid our bills and got by. We were going to be just fine.

And in December I started a blog. I wrote a piece about making bread. The ember of writing a biography that had been smoldering for years flamed and in January I began it.  

In retirement, I had the time, and I did what I enjoyed, I wrote every day. I was a writer. One of the things I enjoy about writing, is that when I do a piece, some work on it, an hour or two of intense writing, I feel free for the rest of the day. I produced something and that’s enough.

Suzette went off to work, Adam went to daycare and in the evening I picked them up. I had the whole day to myself. I wrote, I bicycled, I enjoyed the lake, I read, I met with friends, I did whatever I wanted.

The results were readable. Nothing I write is good enough but readable is good. It was a biography for my family, for my great grandchildren, people who will never know me. It was a gift to them.

In July, 2012 Arom, Suzette's 17 year old son moved back in with us. Before in 2007 and 08 Arom spent a difficult year with us on Angel Island and then went to Florida to live with his dad. John was in grad school and it wasn’t a good time for either one of them. One night Arom threatened his father with a knife, the cops were called and Arom picked up a Juvenile record. Arom told us after that John got a teaching job in Brazil and couldn’t take Arom with him. He was coming back to California. As far as I know there was no job in Brazil.

Arom is a good kid. He’s bright, he’s handsome, and when he’s himself he’s very charming; he has a wonderful smile. I knew that from my coworkers and friends on Angel Island.  But the Arom I got was angry. The way I came into the picture didn’t make him any happier. I think Arom was really upset at all the changes in his life, things were out of control and when I was around I was the focus of all his problems. I understood as a kid he was doing the best he could to survive. I tried to be helpful. I think sometimes he’d recognize that and occasionally I’d be asked for advice or help, but most of the time Arom was just angry.

Suzette found us a house to rent in El Cerrito and we moved there, Suzette and I, Paloma and Arom. It was three bedrooms and had a large family room downstairs. Arom had found The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. It’s a popular book in Juvenile Hall and prisons. It’s the Thug’s Handbook or how to be successful by being an asshole. Greene was a minor entertainment company executive, an industry well known for it’s lack of ethics. He rewrote Machiavelli in present day. It’s been one of the top 10 books read in US. prisons ever since. Arom carried his copy around like a bible and did everything he could to make my life miserable. Whenever our eyes crossed he gave me the mad dog look.

At heart Arom really was a nice kid, sensitive and thin skinned; his intimidating angry Black Man never really quite worked. But as a 17 year old with focus, persistence, and righteousness he did a good job of making my life as miserable as he could.

I continued with my writing and got to the end of my story at that time, to retirement and I was done. It was good. Each piece I had done what I needed to get that, wrote first draft dumps, let them simmer, and then rewrote them.  Sometimes I started over with more focus. I'd polish it, revise it and then I post it on my blog. My goal was to publish one piece every week or two and I did. The pieces had to be good enough to put out in public. Years ago my writing had taken a leap forward when I heard the Hollywood saying, “Did you want it perfect or do you want it done?”

I had done it, a first draft a full biography. I knew I needed to go over it, sew it together and make it flow, but I had a first draft and for then that was good enough. I was going to let it sit for awhile before I went back to it.  I needed a break. I was tired of writing.

After that I would occasionally write something but I no longer wrote regularly. I didn't give myself goals or deadline and not much happened.  

It was hard to work with Arom around.  He was the angry young Black man at every opportunity intentionally self centered and rude. He was going to join the Army and began the dance with the recruiter who became his best friend and encouraged him to think of himself as already the almost war hero. Unfortunately he omitted his Florida Juvenile record on his application. When they did a background check that was enough to disqualify him.

He finished high school and graduated. Arom had a sister in Boston who had lived with Suzette, John and Arom in Berkeley 12 years before. She had had a break with the family and moved out of the apartment and went to live with a friend’s family. She had formed a bond with her friend’s mother, Cricket. Cricket was willing to take Arom in when he graduated from high school.

That lasted for most of the summer when Cricket told him they were moving and  he had to leave.  He was coming back to us.  

About that time his grandmother my mother-in-law came up and took over. Arom was going to live with us and somehow he was going to get his life together and go on from there. I put a time limit on that and said he couldn’t stay with us forever unless he was going to school and had a job. We were not going to support him laying around the house radiating anger. It was sad, his real nature being so sweet and his efforts to cope so sincere, but he was making my life miserable. Suzette was passive. Somehow I was the adult who was supposed to give Arom what he needed, to finally begin to cope and grow up. I was the last adult in the world that Arom would listen to. There was nothing I could do to make it better.

He went to Berkeley City College but his attitude had if anything turned worse. The Army had been a big disappointment to Arom and Arom’s coping skills, being a hostile and scary young man, did not help. He looked for work and couldn’t find a job. I asked him how he was going about that. He said he presented himself very professionally and gave me his deepest voice and angry young Black man war hero look. It was unfortunate that Arom did not have anybody whose advice he could accept. He was doing the best he could but with 48 Laws of Power and professional demeanor it wasn’t working very well.

As Fall came I had had it with Arom. He went to classes part of the day and was an angry presence in the house the rest of the day. My agreement with his grandmother was that he could stay with us a short time if he went to school and had a job. Now he was planning to join Job Corps on a nonresidential program and live with us. I had not worked my whole life and retired to be responsible for someone else’s angry teenager.

His grandmother had a big family gathering to celebrate her 65^th birthday with friends and family from all across the country. Arom went down to Corona to stay until Christmas. In the passive way that we  all had it was understood that  Arom was leaving and so he packed everything in his bag and gave me his keys. I knew staying with us wasn’t doing Arom any good. 

After the celebration we returned home and then in December went to Corona for Christmas. Everything was OK, and then it came time to leave and I said we weren’t taking Arom with us.

Elvia, her brother Ervin, and James his grandfather all seemed to think I was responsible for Arom and told me I had to take him. That was one miserable afternoon. The whole Anderson clan screamed in my face, especially Uncle Ervin. Suzette was there but she didn't take part either way. There’s no doubt that people had abandoned Arom when he needed them, but it wasn’t me.  He was 18 now and I wasn’t the person who could make up for that. We left without Arom.

And life went on. Since then no one in the family tells me anything about Arom. When I ask Suzette she says she doesn’t know. At his aunt’s wedding a year or two later he was there and still giving me the mad dog. I figured Arom will be one of those kids who never get to grow up and lives in the nether world of dependency on whomever will let him. Eight years later we were at the Andersons for Christmas and like the good dysfunctional family all is forgiven, or at least not talked about. Arom is not there and no one says anything about him.  And then I see on the wall a diploma from UC Santa Cruz with Arom’s name on it. I did a quick internet search and Arom is working as an IT person in Santa Cruz.

After being with Arom at what was probably the most difficult time in his young life, it gives me a very good feeling to see he succeeded. I don’t know how he did it but to me that diploma said he figured it out and was doing well in life. I didn’t think he was ever going to be able to right himself and he did. Good man!

Unemployed

In 1993 my youngest son Benjamin graduated from high school.  For twenty years I'd been dreaming of quitting my job when I didn't need to earn good money.  I wasn't quite ready, I needed a little more time to think about it but I could see the light at the end of the tunnel.  There were parts of banking I enjoyed and a lot I didn't.  I liked working with the customers, doing a service, I liked analysis, but the most of it was a pain.  It's what I did to make a living.  It was how I payed the bills.  

About this time I was learning to speak Spanish. I was speaking Spanish in LA, listening to tapes, and doing weekends once a month in Tijuana and then I did a two week immersion in Cuernavaca. I returned with a head full of Spanish dreaming of speaking it one day. Back at work I got a call from an attorney. I was reputed to be a CRA expert, a Federal regulation called the Community Reinvestment Act. There was a bank in CRA trouble. Could I recommend somebody? Everyone knew BanaMex, the big Mexican bank, and their California subsidiary California Commerce Bank were having a hard time with the Feds over CRA.

I recommended me. I met with the President of the bank, Salvador Villar, and we argued for an hour. After that personnel called, could I come to work for them? I figured if I stayed at Dai Ichi Kangyo Bank I’d have a bad year trying to appear enthusiastic but at BanaMex I might have a bad year and learn to speak Spanish. I started there January, 1994. One great advantage of a Mexican Bank, during the World Cup, that summer we had extended management meetings in the conference room with a wide screen TV.

I met Suzanne in August of 1994, 8 months after going to work for CCB. In that short period CCB’s CRA problem had been mostly solved. In February I was going to move to the Bay Area. I told Salvador I was quitting. He said, “You can’t quit. Work up there or something, go to the San Jose Office. But you can’t quit.”

So I moved up there and made do. At first I went to the office in San Jose, three days a week, a two hour commute, but that didn’t work very well. Then the San Jose office was closed. I worked at home in Mill Valley. I went down to LA when I needed to. I took care of CRA. I did the job. That did not require 40 hours a week and I didn’t work 40 hours. In Marin I became a regular kayaker. I enjoyed life.

The Mexican nationals at California Commerce Bank were all bilingual and the gringo credit officers were fluent in Spanish. The rest of us, mostly admin, wanted to learn to speak Spanish and two of us were serious, Tom, the bank’s in-house attorney and myself. Salvador hired a private teacher, who came in once a week and tutored us, mostly Tom and me, in Spanish for a couple of hours. 

Eventually at California Commerce Bank I felt I’d worn out my welcome. I had been good insurance for five years, but they didn’t need me after the first couple of years. They were doing just fine. It had been good for them and good for me but it was time to go.

So in October, 1999 I quit. Ironically five years later Suzanne, my wife, got a job with Citibank doing PR and CRA in Southern California. Citibank bought BanaMex and CCB’s CRA officer worked for Susan. Not too long after that Citibank shut CCB down, they didn’t need an in-house competitor for offshore Mexican dollars in the US . In the process they slandered Salvador and the Mexicans for questionable banking practices. Citibank should ever be as professional as CCB was.

In November I started “my year off.” I packed my Honda CRV with supplies, a laptop computer and a bicycle and started a road trip. I would have liked a year to wander but I had a new wife and a month would have to be enough. I got on Interstate 80 and headed East.

My first night camping was at Pollock Pines in the Sierras. I camped on a dirt road deep in the woods well away from the highway. The next morning I started writing. I had recently started working with the book, The Artist’s Way. It was an enhancement of my journaling practice. I can’t remember what I was writing but I do remember from that day on I began to think of myself as a writer. It wasn’t planned or anticipated, I just began to relax and let it be.

In Reno the newspaper had a short article about Shoshone Mike and the Last Indian Massacre near Winnemucca in 1911.  The story seemed incomplete and it started me d reading old newspaper accounts at the Winnemucca library.  Camping near Great Basin National Park I had this daydream, the full moon, the desert, the mountains and Shoshone Mike and his renegade band.  I began writing a story. I don’t think I had written any real short stories since my college days and certainly never finished anything.

The rest of the trip was dreamlike. Years before I had met someone from Nebraska, a place I had never been so that became more or less my destination.  What's Nebraska like?  I spent a week or more in Nevada and then continued East. I passed through Nicodemus Kansas, a Black pre-Civil War farming settlement, where Suzanne’s mother was from and eventually Lincoln, Nebraska. The West ends at the 100^th parallel and as I traveled further East I felt out of place. There were fewer open spaces. At Lincoln I turned around.

I stopped for a few days at a cheap no name motel and spent my days writing. I had begun the writer’s life and I enjoyed it.

North of Scott’s Bluff I detoured to Agate Fossil Beds National Monument. Now that I think of it the whole trip was detour. At the National Monument I saw a painted deerskin, the History of the World by the rangers and local Lakota artists.  It began at creation and spiraled through time to the present, battles, births, horse raids, barn burnings, the Dawes Act, World War I; it was personal and rooted where it was and universal at the same time.

Later I had the same experience reading Norman Davies Europe, A History. No matter how objective the historian tries to be, it always is like the Agate Fossil Beds history, told from the place where the historian is. For Davies it was the edge of Europe. For the Lakota it was Nebraska. 

I finally made it home after a very magical journey and continued to write. I wrote a Shoshone Mike Story. I joined Zoetrope, a writers’ workshop online. Zoetrope is this wonderful mix of new and experienced writers. My first attempt, which I published on Zoetrope was a real lesson for me. Voice, tenses and point of view as badly set as jello, wiggly and all over the place.  I kept writing and workshopping. I did it for a year and the stories got better, much better.

I had a regular routine and I worked every day. I was a writer. Like all of my writing, when I’m good I’m pretty good, but never quite good enough. I have these flashes. My last short story on Zoetrope I really liked. I had learned some things.  I told myself, this life I'm learning, if I keep at it in my next life I might be a Nobel Laureate.  

At 54 people would say to me, “Oh, you’re retired.”  My answer was “No, I’m unemployed.”  I didn’t feel like I retired, I had just quit banking and was clearing my palate before I looked for work again. I didn’t want to be a banker anymore or anything like it.

Who knew about age discrimination?  In Los Angeles I had a reputation and credibility.  In the Bay Area I had none.  What I thought would be an easy task turned out to be damned hard. I started working temp jobs just to get back into the swing of it. They were interesting, sometimes very hard work. My idea was to get into fund raising. I wanted to start at a low level job working with an experienced fundraiser. Learning the trade did not fit anyone else’s idea of what a man my age should be doing. What was wrong with me? To myself it felt like I was disabled. I had a serious lack of ambition and they knew it. I just wanted a decent job.

After a year and a half I needed to earn money with benefits. I got a job at Consumer Credit Counselors of San Francisco. Back in LA in the 70s I had met CCC and admired the manager and the work he did. CCCSF was an affiliate. It was banking related but god’s work and I needed the paycheck. We did a lot of phone appointments. I hate talking on the phone. The salary was half of what I had been making as a banker. Less was OK, half was not good. At the same time I had applied to CCCSF I started the paperwork for San Francisco Juvenile Hall.  Six months after I started at Consumer Credit Counselors I got a call to be a substitute or on call at San Francisco Juvenile Hall .

I worked weekends at Juvy, weekdays at Consumer Credit Counselors. And when I was sure I liked Juvy and might last I quit CCCSF.

I did the on call with San Francisco Juvenile Hall and then went full time in December, 2002, three years after I left banking. A year of wandering, a year of looking for work, and then a year of getting work. It was a long time. The pay at Juvy was not great but it was OK, a good job, and I enjoyed it. Now I wasn’t unemployed I’m a juvenile hall counselor.