There Is No Fifth Destination

I moved to San Francisco 31 years ago next month. I was soon to be 23 (4 days after arrival), married for a year and a half, and about to become a seminary student at the Baptist seminary at the edge of the known world. I had been told by many folks back in Arizona that I should not let "sin city" turn me around and that I should be very careful that what they taught me in seminary didn't somehow destroy my pure beliefs. Of course, most of the people that provided that advice didn't realize that, even then, my beliefs weren't even close to pure (hence the reason I was moving to San Francisco rather than Dallas).

Despite the fact that we lived on the seminary campus in Mill Valley for the first three years of residence, I never felt like anything other than a citizen of San Francisco. My wife almost immediately got a job in the city. We went to a a wonderful very liberal, very political church in the city. I first volunteered and then was hired at a youth center in the Fillmore... We were San Franciscans in waiting, and upon my seminary graduation in 1980 we made it official. A couple of years later our daughter was born in San Francisco, where she still lives as a proud "San Francisco Native."

It was during this time that I stumbled upon Armisted Maupin's "Tales of The City." First, as a column in the Chronicle and later as the first book in this now 7 (a perfect number?) series.

From the first paragraph of the first story, I felt like I was a part of the Barbary Lane crowd. Sometimes I felt like one character, then at other times I felt like another. Most of the time I felt like I knew every one of the people (they were never characters) in the book and most of them were my friends. The ones I didn't fully know (for example, I didn't yet know anyone like Anna Madrigal) I came to love anyway and to look for them in the environment like someone searching for a unicorn or a magical wizard. I found them all soon enough.

When the series ended back in the 90s, I was overcome with a sadness much akin to the feeling you get when good friends - very good friends - move away, or otherwise disappear from your life. This happened at a time in my personal life (again a feeling of solidarity with the folks on the Lane) when I was a losing a lot of my personal flesh and blood friends. Losing them to AIDS, losing them to moves (both theirs and mine) out of The City, losing them through stupid disagreements, or simple relational laziness.

When the stories stopped coming, it was like my best friends had walked out on me and left me alone and dazed.

It was just about a year ago that I walked into Copperfields Books in Petaluma to be greeted by a new book display with the three word proclamation, "Michael Tolliver Lives!"

It stopped me dead in my tracks.

Armistead Maupin had done it again. While I had thought that my friends were gone forever. I was surprised to find out that, just like me, they had been continuing with their lives. Growing better... different... older. Here's Michael - whose inevitable and eventual demise I had come to sadly accept in the same way I accepted the deaths of so many flesh and blood people - alive, reasonably well, and strolling the streets of The Castro. My personal reaction was much akin to that of a character on the first page of the new book. "Hey, you're supposed to be dead."

It took me a year to get up the courage to finally purchase the book and begin to dig into the lives of these people I had lost. And it took me all of three days (it would have been one, but I had work to do) to tear my way through the book, laughing, crying, gasping, and cheering all the way.

These are my friends! And despite the fact that we lost track of each other for so long, they've come back and I am discovering how deeply I missed them. I spoke about this with a friend the other day and she had the exact same reaction... "Michael's ALIVE!?!?"

Yeah... Michael's alive... and he's my age, and the day after the clerk at the grocery store gave me the "senior discount" upon checkout, Michael gets it from a waitress in Florida. His reaction was much the same as mine.

Anna makes me smile softly with her understanding and her peace. These days she reminds me of several folks I know and love. Brian's daughter Shawna (and Michael's daughter as well, really) reminds me of my daughter; in attitude, and humor, and dress. The City is still The City, no matter what they do to change her.

I've really missed these people. This really IS my life...

There IS No Fifth Destination.

Happy New Year!

Many years ago I ran a recording company that operated more like a business than most of the work I've done in the years since.

Recently I was speaking with a friend of mine about his year end/year beginning tasks as his new fiscal year was approaching on July 1. It reminded me that the fiscal year for the record company had run from July 1 and it gave me the idea that maybe one way to kick start some of the things that I would like to do and some of the new work that I would like to take on, as well as helping me find a way of closing off other work that I would like to end (and have been trying to end for quite some time) would be to re-adopt this model of the mid-year new year.

So yesterday that's what I did. I spent much of the day working through the ideas, goals, and plans that I have had running around in my head for months (some even years), I laid them down on paper, I set up specific goals (some of which I am sure you will read about here over the coming months) and I went completely against my general tendencies and set up a relatively orderly plan and structure to accomplish these things.

I even gave the company a new name... but that's something I will definitely talk about later and soon (there's actually a hint right here in this blog).

In the meantime... one of the things (yeah yeah, I know I've said this before) that I have set myself as a goal is to blog on at least one, and hopefully more, of my blogs every day. If you want to keep track of this for yourself you can link to the RSS feed for this blog and/or any of the others. If instead you would like me to do that work for you, then send me an email at thom@mercreate.com and put "blog news" in the subject line. I'll add you to my new mailing list and let you know when there's something to read.

Like I said... beyond that, there's more news to come, but right now... there's still rent to pay, and I've gotta get back to work!

The Hack vs. The Mack

A reporter for Bill O'Reilly's show actually had the balls (or perhaps just the stupidity) to take on the most honest, most forthright, most intelligent, most informed, most caring journalist in media. And, my hero, Bill Moyers... SMOKED HIM (but in a kindly manner).

Moments like this make me very proud of the people I know, have grown up around and worked for. The people, like Bill Moyers, that have taught me what it means to be a journalist, an American, and a human being.

To quote Moyers himself... He's "a journalist... Bill O'Reilly is a pugilist." As for the hack on a mission from O'Reilly... well Bill... "You're a better man than I am Gunga Din."

Welcome to Hurricane Season

For most people in the U.S. Memorial Day Weekend represents the official beginning of summer, the time when the last vestiges of spring bloom leads to the music, picnics, parties and playfulness of vacation time. It's a party weekend when most people give a cursory nod to honor those who have died for our collective sins but then turn again to another hot dog, another beer and another hose shoe clanging against a metal post. This used to be the way I thought of Memorial Day Weekend (well, that and the fact that it was always the weekend when gas prices went up), the time just before the end of school when you had the first taste of vacation time to come.

Not so much anymore... Last Monday I woke up thinking of the impending start of the Atlantic Hurricane Season (which officially started yesterday, on June 1). I don't mean that I didn't party with some other folks, because I did. It's just that the one thing that kept rising up in the back of my mind was that we were starting the third hurricane season since Katrina. From now until Thanksgiving I will check The Weather Channel, National Weather Service, and National Hurricane Center on an almost daily basis. When there are storms brewing I'll be checking every hour and become nearly obsessed with watching the progress of storms and anticipating where and when they will hit land and/or move safely out to sea. I will keep the hurricane report on my RSS feeds.

This has been my routine from June through November for the last two years. Whether in New Orleans, or safely ensconced in Northern California I have watched, worried, prayed and fretted for six months each year concerned not only for friends in The Crescent City, but friends and family in Florida, and people I don't know in places like Jamaica, Cuba, or the Yucatan.

This year both the temporal and the geographic windows of this worrisome voyeurism have been expanded. With the recent disaster in Myanmar I have had to face full on the realization that we indeed are all connected on this little planet. A number of people have made statements of dismissal regarding these horrible incidents and the less than stellar response of the respective goevernment agencies, but I think it's pretty important to remember that the current administration in this country is also guilty of slow response, of refusing help from foreign countries, and of being thoroughly unprepared for something they knew would happen sooner or lateer under even the best of circumstances.

The fact of the matter is that most of us live on our own small portion of a very tenuous little rock that is hurtling through space at mind-boggling speeds. At any given moment, on pretty much any spot on the planet, something catastrophic is waiting to happen. We cover our eyes, cross our fingers, say our prayers and hope for the best. In the meantime, we laugh and sing and dance; we eat, and drink, and play. Someone might be inclined to suggest that human existence is, and always has been, lived in the midst of varying levels of denial... and we probably do. But if we can also acknowledge that we are all vulnerable to disaster, and that we are all capable of helping someone else, perhaps we really can make it through another half lap around the sun more or less intact.

That's what I'm counting on... Welcome to Hurricane Season.

Heaven Can Wait

Last Saturday I went wine tasting with my friend Joe. It was a great time; we had some excellent wines, a beautiful drive up through the Napa Valley (a place I haven't been in probably 10 years since my major wine haunts tend to be in Sonoma county) under bright sunny skikes with golden rays shining off long tows of green. Acres and acres of vines were breaking forth in an abundance of tiny spring buds that, six months from now, will yield bushel upon bushel of plump ripe fruit that will eventually lead to hundreds of thousands of bottles of wine.

It was a grand afternoon... though the trip was in fact a distraction - a misdirection - of my attention from the actual magic trick that was taking place back in Petaluma. While Joe and I meandered our way through "the other valley," Karen was back home busily preparing the scene of the crime - my new apartment - for a surprise house warming party, gathering foods and libations, and friends from all over town; all coming to MY HOUSE to celebrate my new digs on Fair Street - the first place in my entire life that is really a place that I can call my very own.

I was completely unsuspecting... I had NO IDEA (and I'm usually pretty sharp about these things). When Joe and I finally made it back to my house, he asked to come up, and with me in the lead and Joe lugging a case of wine on his shoulder, we proceeded up the stairs to my little apartment. As I opened the door, a dozen shouts of "Surprise!" greeted me along with raised glasses, banners, streamers, and smiling faces. I'm sure I looked like I had no clue what was going on. It's not my birthday... Am I in the wrong place? 

Karen stepped forward to straighten me out... "Happy Housewarming!"

A few minutes later, seated in the middle of my sparsely furnished apartment ("Where are your chairs?" asked one friend), I gazed around at the wide grins, twinkling eyes and self-satisfied simpers and thought to myself, "These are my friends!"

I've never really had that experience before. I have certainly had friends over the years, and some of them have been - and are - long-term, die-hard friends that have stuck with me and by me no matter how stupid my decisions, chaotic my life, or imbecilic my behavior. But until now, I've never had a collective of friends, drawn from all different places, with different backgrounds, and different points of view; friends for whom the only real common ground is each other. This realization was the true gift of the party, a basic, clear, and somewhat startling realization that this group of a dozen folks (and another dozen or so who came along later) are people whom I love; people who love me.

A little over a month ago, my daughter got married and one of the biggest joys of that occassion was the opportunity to see the collection of crazy friends that she and Andy have gathered around themselves. Last Saturday afternoon I looked around my apartment and around Karen's back yard (where part two of the party continued lots of food, and drink, and conversation) with the joy filled realization that I too have somehow gathered around me a similar community. These people who share our existence together, people that can be counted on to laugh, cry, argue with and support each other despite both our annoying differences and similarities.

At the apartment, my friend Peter offered a toast and a blessing of my new place, saying, "A room of one’s own is where you define yourself, before you exit the door into a world that would rend you asunder. Your house is where your story springs from.
Congratulations on acquiring a room of your own, and let the chapters begin."

And those chapters did begin... right then, with the realization of this new place I have come to out of the long strange trip I've been on.

We spent the rest of the afternoon drinking terrific wines, and enjoying wonderfully prepared foods (including a fabulously marinated BBQ tri-tip , a spinach tortellini salad, a sort of baked veggie/potato casserole that was amazing and more... more... more... and more). One of the things about living in Northern California is that people really do know how to cook (and drink) wonderful, satisfying things. When you combine this with good company, playful laughter (as well as a few hot shot ping pong players) and informed and thoughtful conversation that lasts well into the night, sitting around a a burning fire (and even eating Somores)... well, to me that's about as close to heaven as all this stuff gets.

In fact... I'm pretty sure that I'm not interested in heaven unless it turns out to be like last Saturday night.