Morning

 

It’s fitting that Sirius, “the dog star,” is the brightest star in the night sky, since I am out with Thomas and Maya before dawn. I look for the constellations first, sighting Orion, standing guard with his bow ready to the west, and Ursa Major in the southern sky. (Okay, well, maybe just the Big Dipper; I can never see all of the bear.) Then I walk along the side of the house until I get a clear view of the eastern sky, and yes, there is Sirius on all the cloudless mornings, shimmering away. Seriously someone’s sun, I think, and chuckle to myself.

If we are out before first light—and we are not so much anymore, as the season waxes on toward summer and the light comes so very early—we may hear one, two, or all three of the venerable residents of the neighborhood gossiping loudly from tree to tree, the Great Horned Owls that will sometimes answer if I mimic their call. (If you'd like to hear what we hear, click here.)

We are long past the days now when Thomas would spring up out of bed at 4:00a.m. as soon as I set my feet on the floor. He prefers to sleep in until 5:00 or 5:30, and I let him; old dogs need their sleep. Sometimes, if he’s had a bad night, he will sleep as late as 6:00. He started this, of course, right around the time I brought Maya home, so that the opportunity for me to sleep that late seemed almost possible, a dream come true! But no—the new dog needed to go out early, so even though the old dog snored on, I had to clamber out of bed and get dressed anyway. It is with a grateful sigh that I wonder—Will my life always be blessed with a good dog to wake me early and take me outside to see the night sky? I hope so.

Maya is the one now to literally bound out of her bed when it’s time to go out in the morning. This is the only time of day in which she is animated, and it is a joy to see. Out she pops from her crate—her den inside my den, where she hides during the daylight hours, even though the door is wide open, and she could venture out at any time. She chooses of her own volition to remain where she feels safe, until I come to take her out several times a day, and in those times she emerges reluctantly, dragging her feet, stretching, cautiously stepping out to the patio, her nostrils flared as she sniffs for danger.

But not in the predawn hours. When I am dressed and striding down the hall, I call to her as I turn on the kitchen light, grab my jacket from the hook in the laundry room: “I’m coming, Maya,” and I hear her scramble up. If Thom is up, he trots along with me, his tail wagging. Not like hers, though. In these fleeting moments, Maya’s tail wags her, her toenails clicking as her body tap dances across the floor.

I slide the heavy glass door back, and she leaps down the steps, then hops and skips to the grass, her tail still wagging as she finds the right spot to squat, leaving the old man and I to amble along behind.

While the dogs sniff and snort and pee and poop, I listen for the owls, look for the stars, and think about the tasks before me in the new day. Often, this is a time of affirmations for me.

“You can do this, Kay. Just pick up the phone and call and get past the first few awkward sentences.”

“You can do this, Kay. The quality of your writing is not defined by one person’s criticism or rejection. Get back to work. You know you can write. You know you can.”

It is also, often, a time of gratitude.

“I’m up! I’m ambulatory! I’m functional! Thank you!”

“The marine layer is gently dropping liquid sustenance on my garden! Yay!”

“Maya is happy! Thom is alive! Jenny’s warm little purring body was a comfort last night. I am blessed.”

“All my children and grandchildren are well and safe right now. I am so, so grateful.”

Always, it is a time of meditation, to take deep breaths in the still, quiet air before we go inside to the frenetic energy of feeding and watering and walking and training, to the pseudo-urgency of needing to check messages, check email, check Facebook, check Twitter, start laundry, make lists, pay bills, get groceries, pick up mail, ship books, return calls, and oh yes, maybe just sit and write for a while if I can bring my brain back to equanimity by then.

Those few moments—gazing at the stars, watching Maya hop and spin and dog bow to Thomas (who ignores her), or standing with my hand on Thom’s soft shoulder while we wait for her to finish taking bites out of my rosemary bush—those few moments before the sun ushers in birdsong and traffic noise and all the chaos of the day—those moments are priceless.

Hope Day, 2022

 

Mom and her four goofball kids, circa 1993

One of the first songs my sister taught me to play on guitar when we were teenagers was a raucous, hillbilly, Jesus tune called "He Rose from the Dead" because it only had three chords. The first verse goes thusly:

He rose from the dead

He done just what he said

He rose from the grave

And to us new life he gave.

And because we ourselves were rowdy young lovers of Jesus, we played and sang this tune often, as much for the message as for the practice in switching chords from D to A to G.

Mom apparently listened to us on occasion, although she herself was not a churchy person. "I was raised without religion," she told me once (and good for you, I would later come to conclude, since "religion" has been the bane of my spiritual existence). But she did love music. As I've mentioned on the blog before, I grew up in a house that was constantly filled with music--not with the TV going, as was the case with many homes in the 1950's. The squawk box went off after morning cartoons and didn't come on again until evening. In the meantime, we heard either my mom's favorite show tunes (I'm betting my sister still knows all the words to all the songs in Oklahoma!) or my oldest brother's folk tunes (think Dylan, the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul & Mary). These were supplanted for a time in 1961 when the soundtrack of West Side Story came out on vinyl and that's all we heard for weeks. (And yeah, I still know all the words to all the songs on that one, and I'll bet my brother Kevin does, too.)

Anyway, there came a day when Peg and I sat down to play and Mom said, "Sing that one song about the heroes."

"Heroes? What heroes?" We were puzzled--and probably asked Mom whether she was finally becoming senile--such brats that we were. "We don't sing a song about heroes."

"Yes, you do," she insisted. "That one... oh, what is it? Heroes from the dead."

I don't know which one of us burst into laughter first, but we had a fine time guffawing at my mother's expense. Sorry, Mom. Love you!

Anyway, today is Easter, a day of profound hope around the world, and I think back on this memory at this time every year. I've already pulled my guitar out of the case to sing the song, just for Mom, and I hope you know that if you have loved ones who have passed, it is only their physical body that has returned its carbon to the Universe. Their spirit lives on, and they hear you when you sing.

He rose from the dead....

Dad

 

My dad. Yes, we have the same eyes.

Last week during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, her father, an attorney, was mentioned several times. Judge Jackson said she learned to love the law as a little girl, sitting at the kitchen table, doing her homework while her father, a law school student, studied along with her.

That could almost have been the case for me, except I didn’t come to truly love the law until I was in law school myself. (Reading courtroom dramas like Presumed Innocent and Snow Falling on Cedars or watching every episode of L.A. Law, notwithstanding.) And I had no idea—until I started law school—that my father accomplished his own study of the law when I was a little girl in school, but he didn’t do his studying at the kitchen table.

Let me backtrack just a bit.

My father was born in Wisconsin on the land his great-grandparents homesteaded after immigrating from Ireland. They were farmers. They were poor. But they had come to the Land of Opportunity. When my dad was still a boy, his parents moved with their seven children to Illinois, where they lived in a small house that boasted one indoor bathroom. Dad’s mother died when he was sixteen, and in order to help support his family, he left high school and joined the Civilian Conservation Corp. After a stint there, he joined the Army. When he returned home at the end of WWII, he got a job first as a taxi driver, then as a cop in Highland Park, Illinois, the same suburb he’d settled in after he married my mother.

Mom and Dad moved to California the same year that I was born, bringing with them a few belongings in a U-Haul trailer and, oh yeah, my three sibs. Dad took a job as a security guard for what was then Douglas Aircraft Company, an aerospace manufacturer in Long Beach. He worked swing and sometimes graveyard shifts. When I returned home from kindergarten in the afternoon, he would be in his uniform, ready for work, but eating whatever hot meal Mom had prepared for him, since he had to take his “lunch” to work in one of those cool metal lunch boxes that are rectangular in shape but have a domed lid for storing a thermos. Dad carried a big thermos separately, though, a small fact that made complete sense when my mother explained how my father managed to work full time and attend law school. She didn’t volunteer that information. I had to ask her. The question was no doubt posed sounding something like this: How the hell did Dad work full time for Douglas and still go to law school and do all the reading?

Reason I asked: I graduated from UC Riverside in 1988 with a bachelor’s degree in English and went straight from there to Western State College of Law the following August. I was thirty-six years old and a single parent with sole custody of my four children. I carried sixteen units the first and only semester I attended, and it nearly killed me—literally. I ended up in the ER with pleurisy, and if that hadn’t brought me down, I would have been crushed by the weight of guilt anyway for spending zero quality time with my kids from August to December that year. So I withdrew.

I loved my classes. I loved the law library. I loved the process of studying what the law says and applying it to cases. I loved everything about law school—except having to read pages and pages of case law every single day in order to be ready in case I was called upon in class. To be honest, with four kids and two dogs and no second parent helping, I don’t know how I managed to get through that one semester. I know I didn’t sleep much.

So you understand, then, my question to my mother.

What she said in response gave me a whole new respect for my daddy. There was no room for a thermos in that old black lunchbox because that’s where my father carried his books. It was against company policy for the guards to bring reading materials with them to work. So Dad very carefully cut up his outrageously expensive law books (decades later, in speaking of it, my mother was still pitching fits about how “those books cost a small fortune” and “he cut them all to pieces”) and took them to work in sections, reading on his breaks and his lunch and, I have no doubt, in the still of the night when he was sure no saboteurs or spies or bosses were about. Way to go, Dad.

Here was a man who earned his high school diploma by taking a GED exam, never went to college but had the determination to apply to law school, then slowly and methodically work his way along until he finished—and passed the bar. He was immediately hired by the IRS to do tax law.

This could have been such a Cinderella story…. Except that not long after starting his new job, he began to have some serious medical issues. Within a few months, he was diagnosed with primary amyloidosis, a disease that would have him in and out of the hospital for the next two years until he passed away from its devastation. Damn it.

I chose law school after my undergrad education for the same reason my father did; I wanted to move my family up economically. I wanted to do whatever it would take to make sure my children were provided for. But after my first semester, I had to come to terms with the truth that providing for my children meant giving them what they needed emotionally and psychologically as much as providing food, shelter, and clothing. In choosing a career in teaching, I not only had more time to spend with them, I also had the privilege of nurturing hundreds of other kids, and I wouldn’t trade that for the world.

Still. Check out my pops, y’all. He was a pretty fierce warrior daddy, wasn’t he?