Sunday, June 17, 2018


Captain Mike

From age 5 to age 20, I did not see my dad and had almost no contact with him. He later told me that he often thought of us (me and my younger brother, Nathan) but he never once worried about our safety or upbringing because he knew my mother would raise us well.

During those years growing up the name “Mike Loyd” took on a mythical presence in our lives.  It was a name as big as Texas itself.  When we were very young, my brother got mad at me for telling him we had another dad somewhere in Texas.  He thought I was crazy or mean, or both. To me, Texas seemed so far way – like a place in the past. To my brother, it was not even real.  

As we grew older, into teenagers, my mother mentioned “Mike Loyd” more often and my brother accepted that we had a dad we didn't know.  My mother told us stories about when they were kids – she and my father had grown up together, been high school sweethearts. And as my brother and I grew older, she would say that she saw much of Mike in Nathan, physically, but also his sense of humor, and wit.  “You sound just like Mike Loyd,” my mother would say, laughing and exasperated at my brother’s antics.  We always knew it was a compliment.  She only told us good things about Mike Loyd, which made his absence from her life even more bewildering.
 
I had a good childhood without him, though.  Mike was right – my mother was dedicated to us. We moved to Southern California because my stepfather was in the Navy and he was kind and dependable and worked hard to support us.  Mike Loyd thought he wasn't needed. 

But I still wondered who this funny Texas dad was.  I wondered if we looked enough like him if he would recognize us if he passed us on the street. Yes, I knew Texas was nowhere near California, but what if came to San Diego on a vacation or a business trip? (I had no idea what business he was in.)  Or what if he came to look for us? Maybe we’d bump into him. I made eye contact with strangers, so that he wouldn't miss us. 

I had to depend on him finding us, though, because I had no idea what he looked like, other than maybe an older version of my brother. And he might be wearing striped pants.  On the top shelf of my mother’s bedroom closet there was a cardboard box filled with all of our family photos.  In every baby, toddler, birthday photo of me, there’s a man without a face.  My mother cut his head out of all the photos. A headless guy in 1970s style striped pants with a wide white belt standing next to my mother in a mini-skirt.  A tall thin man with strong arms wrapped around a squirming toddler. Why had she cut him out of the photos? And then taken us to California? Why wasn’t he trying to find us?  I didn't understand my parents' choices. 

After I turned 18 – and then got married at 20 – we reestablished contact with the Loyd family – my aunt and my grandmother first, then Mike.  It took years for me to understand and open my heart to the real Mike Loyd.  He was kind and gentle, he was wickedly funny and, yes, my brother looked a lot like him. 

But he still lived in Texas and I still lived in California and, worse, he had his own personal problems he was still working on.  I had perfected thinking about my own loss for many years by then, of not having my biological father in my life.  Even after we reconnected, I held so much anger toward him and felt that he was a very selfish person who had skipped out while my mother and stepfather did all the physical, emotional, and financial work of parenthood.  It wasn’t until after my own son was born, however, that I realized what my dad had lost by not raising us.  I felt sorry for him for the first time, instead of just feeling sorry for me and Nathan.

Mike tried harder and wanted to know his grandkids and be in their lives. My brother and I called him “Mike Loyd,” but he wanted his grandkids to call him “Captain Mike” (he had been a charter boat captain in the Gulf of Mexico for most of his career).  He came to visit us in California, twice.  He played with Miles and Lillian and laughed that they were “silly and annoying.”  I couldn’t take pure joy in his visits, though, taking his every word and interaction with my young children and spinning it back on my childhood: He never knew how silly and annoying Nathan and I were together. We were pretty great kids, too, but he never knew that.  He never played with us on the floor or took a nap with us on the couch.  He never bought us gifts or sent us birthday cards, like he did for my children now.  Why did they mean so much to him now but he had let my brother and I go? Why weren’t we enough for him?

The last time I saw Mike in person was 2005. He came to California. He came to my book party when my first book was published. I took him around to the kids’ schools and activities. He got to know my husband a bit and bought our fishing boat and had it hauled back to Texas.  

Most importantly, he started telling me as many stories as he could. I didn’t ask or interview him – he just needed to talk. He wanted me to know him, but he also wanted to account for the time, for the missing years. 

We even talked about writing a book together.  I was an author and he had some crazy stories to tell about life on the Gulf of Mexico.  He also had an incredible way with words and storytelling – my mother always said that Mike Loyd was one of the most intelligent people she had known and she thought Nathan and I (both of us grew up to be writers and teachers) got our “smarts” from him. 

After that 2005 visit, he got himself into more troubles – both health-related and legal – because of his past, his addictions, his choices.  He wrote me long letters about regret and recovery.  He wanted forgiveness, maybe, but there was nothing to forgive.  By now he was more disappointed in himself than I was in him.  Mostly, I think, he just wanted to be honest with me. To come clean.  I never gave him much back. I listened, but I didn’t respond or agree or ask questions. Or forgive.

Or maybe I did, just by being there and by letting him know his grandkids.

He regularly called to talk on the telephone.  We had long conversations at least once or twice a month and wanted to know what books projects I was working on. He also wanted to talk to the kids, to listen to their stories. He thought they were brilliant and funny and creative.  To them, he was never a mythical, mysterious, bigger than Texas man from the past.  He was just Captain Mike – their grandpa.  He’d always been there.  It wasn’t complicated at all.  

I hope that was finally enough for him.

Friday, January 19, 2018

Judy, Judy, Judy... I'm pretty sure Judy Blume made me want to be a writer. Or at least she made me into a reader. I *was* her target 1970s pre-teen audience and read every one of her middle-grade and teen books about Margaret, Deenie, Sally J. Friedman, and Sheila the Great. I did not read her later "adult" books, but this one intrigued me because a) I'm revisiting writer Judy in my quest to be a YA author, and b) it's based on actual events that happened in 1952, when 3 planes crashed into the well-populated suburb of Elizabeth, New Jersey, within a 3-month period, killing the passengers on board as well as people on the ground. Each of the planes crashed near a school or orphanage, one of them just a few blocks from where the pilot's own daughter attended high school, and after the third plane crashed the old Newark airport location was shut down.
Judy Blume lived through these events as a teenager and decided to tell this amazing story of how the town dealt with these tragedies.
Short version of my writer review: Judy makes it look simple. Her prose is simple and her characters are real people with simple thoughts who use simple dialogue. Although I know it's not as simple to pull off as it looks - and, in this case, she did an incredible amount of research about the crashes and about 1950s America to flesh out these stories - it's ultimately a simple read. Maybe that makes it a great story to read - I mean, I did not put it down! And these people witnessed or lost friends in 3 plane crashes! - but there is not a lot of depth, of language or of character.
The decision to use multiple POV is central to Blume's desire to tell the story of a *town* - an entire community - and, while the thread of the story does connect everyone through the life of a young teen character named Miri (the authors stand-in), there are ultimately probably 20 different character POVs presented. Everyone in the town is connected, and several of the passengers on the doomed plane are also connected to the townspeople. It is a story of intertwined lives.
I understand Blume wanted to do this in order to show how the crashes affected the entire community, and how else to get to know about and care about the passengers on the planes than to introduce them in context, as characters, before the crashes? I found the "everyone gets a POV chapter" method ultimately less satisfying, though, as we just get the surface level of each character's life and the story - and the connections - often feels rushed because of it. Something to think about as a writer, especially as everything I've written so far has been 1st person POV, a single character's life and thoughts.
Breadth v. depth? Which do you prefer?
I am always telling my students (and my own kids) that, even if you have to do something you don't want to do, just be open to the possibility that you could still get something positive out of the experience. I do not always follow my own advice. Today I was scheduled two periods to help out with supervision during our afternoon performing arts rehearsal for the upcoming winter play. I'll admit that I was mumbling to myself about needing time to get other things done besides babysitting high schoolers backstage.
But I took a nice forest walk down to the theater/gym (before the rain & hail started) - so that was the first positive. And then I was sitting there, listening to our director get the kids organized, and then he shared this amazing quote and perspective with them about the need for empathy... Empathy for one another, as they each stretch out of their comfort zones (keep in mind that our performing arts program is *mandatory*) and take great risks in being on stage, singing, dancing, acting. But also empathy for the characters that they will embody. He read a quote about how theater builds empathy. I couldn't find the exact quote again, but I found the source for the idea from the Artistic Director at the SF Playhouse website: "When I think about it this way, it becomes clear why empathy in our world today is in such short supply. It isn’t always fun. To really feel what others suffer is painful. When we enter a character’s grief, her sorrow, his remorse, we kindle those feelings in ourselves. If all the circumstances in the theatre are just right, the lighting, the music, the acting, our hearts will jump to life and ache with the characters as they yearn, and suffer and hope. It hurts us like it hurts them and we feel joined with their humanity."
I was intrigued by thinking about the theater experience - for both actors and the audience - in this way. And I was glad I was scheduled to be there and witness this moment, the implicit education our 14-18 year olds are receiving by being involved in this enterprise, and hearing these words from such dedicated teachers.