Yellow

There are paintings over 64,000 years old, stencils of hands likely made by Neanderthals, in the Cave of Maltravieso in Caceres, Spain. By the time they got to the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc in France, they drew mammoths and bears. Later, horses, bison, and ibex.

It’s a bit late to ask any Neanderthal: Hey, why did you daub that woolly rhinoceros on the wall? Scientists have guessed that they were totems or made up for a lack of words. A few have suggested graffiti. Archaeologist Abbé Breuil proposed this was early magic, a way of influencing the hunt.

My own theory: The caveman had a cave-wife or cave-husband who asked, “Don’t you think it’s about time we freshened up the place?”

Back in South Ozone Park, Nurse Vivian used to wallpaper rooms. My mother had a deft hand, able to match patterns exactly. Other people gave toasters and blenders for bridal showers. For her gift, Nurse Vivian would instead cover their kitchen with Sanitas wall coverings that read “Bon Appetit!” My bedroom had repeating footballs and baseball gloves, perhaps a little ironic given how I turned out. 

Wallpaper was out of fashion by the time I got my first apartment, one floor of a brownstone, on the F Line in Outer, Outer, Outer, Outer Brooklyn.  My roommate/boyfriend at the time, a bank teller, unexpectedly moved in with the guy downstairs, and, given my mood, I painted the walls a vivid scarlet.

By the time I moved into a cold-water flat in Jersey City with my now-husband Brian, my palette had mellowed. We had only one painting disaster.  Brian found a can of Paris Pink on sale in a hardware store on Christopher Street. The label showed a soft rose hue, and not until the dining room was saturated did he realize that the label had faded in the store window. The pastel he imagined turned out to be Highlighter Pink, one shade away from Barbie. It was like living in a Pepto Bismol bottle.

We moved into the Bedlam Blue Bungalow 25 years ago this summer. It was not yet blue, and the bedlam had only just begun, but we went with a safe approach and rollered every single wall with a light blue. This was before Tim moved in with us. And the triplets. And our sons Zane and Aidan. And, altogether, nine dogs. 

This is to say that the home has seen a fair amount of wear and tear.  Spaghetti stains in the kitchen. Science experiments in Aidan’s room.  Peanut butter sandwiches down the furnace vents. The mystery of the bathroom towel rack falling off the wall.

Some of those walls have been repainted. Some have not. When Aidan got his own room, we let him choose the color. I spent three days in the brat cave with a brush only to have him walk in and cry: “You promised me I could pick!” I had. But Aidan, we learned, was color blind, and what I saw as Meadow Mist, he saw as white.

A few weeks ago, Zane “accidentally” punched a hole through his wall. I said to my husband, “Once we get to senior citizen status we shouldn’t have to paint anymore.” I began looking for a professional to restore Zane’s chamber.

Remember that cave-husband? Brian lifted his club and responded, “We should get a quote for the whole place.”

It should have been simple. But then we had to take down the paintings.  And the pictures. And the curtains. And empty the shelves. And move the furniture to the centers of the rooms. As Tim would say if he were still alive, “Sometimes you got to make a mess of your life before you can straighten it out.”

I’ve admitted in these columns that although I am not tone deaf, I am the one in the barbershop quartet most likely to sing flat. Same thing with color. We stood in the dining room looking at samples and Brian asked me which I preferred, Goldfinch or Forsythia, and I couldn’t tell the difference.

A week has gone by, and I’ve grown tired of not knowing where the dryer sheets and the dog brushes are. But my bedroom is now a lovely shade of Skyfall, and my bathroom is Demure. Zane’s boudoir will soon be Hyper-Blue and Aidan’s will be Jitterbug Jade.

Perhaps 64,000 years from now, when archaeologists explore the Outer, Outer, Outer, Outer Excelsior, they may wonder why we painted the dining room Confident Yellow. The a

Morning

Why does a person get up in the morning? Some days it’s a way to escape dreams. For the past year, I’ve had this recurring nightmare that I was running late for my job at Gimbel’s, or at the jail, and the subway stopped. And I had to run, only my feet didn’t move. When I woke up, it was a relief.

But most days most people aren’t waking up from something. Most people are waking up toward something.

Why does a person get up in the morning? To watch the twilight turn golden on Glen Canyon. To see Sutro Tower and the cross on Mount Davidson climb out of the shadows.

The days are getting longer. This week (March 19th) holds the equilux, the date when we have as much daylight as we have darkness, the beginning of spring. Here’s a fun fact: Because the earth has an elliptical orbit, in the northern hemisphere spring lasts for 92.8 days, whereas in the southern hemisphere, they only get 89.8 days.

Why does a person get up in the morning? To see that the California lilacs outside my window have blossomed with crepuscula flowers, a Spanish term for that first purple first shade of dawn. Calla lilies burst between the weeds in our yard. Rosemary and lavender give off soft fragrance. The sky is bright blue as we are in the fogilux -- my own term for the period in San Francisco between the winter rains and June gloom.

As Tennyson said, “It’s spring, and a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.” As we race towards the solstice, for the first time ever, both of my sons are in love. Well, maybe they are in like. Hard to tell with Zane the playah, but Aidan has a date for a senior prom. He’ll be flying to Yakima in May for the formal, but more on that in a month or two. We bought him a suit to wear, and it’s the first pair of pants he has worn since the pandemic began that are not sweats.

In short, there is nothing better than a day in March near the San Francisco Bay, in the hemisphere that gets the longer spring.

This brings me to Crazy Mike. The thing I like least about him is that he makes it so hard to feel sorry for myself.

Why does a person get up in the morning? In my case, it was to make it to my radiation appointment (for my lung) at UCSF. The doctor promised me it wouldn’t take more than an hour. But then they laid me down on a narrow plank, tied down my arms, tied down my legs and told me to breathe regularly.

A robot arm hovered above me and zapped. And zapped. Ninety minutes later, a voice came over the intercom: “We’re 40% done.” The robot zapped. My nose itched. I couldn’t scratch. All four limbs went to sleep. The robot zapped. The intercom buzzed, “You’re not breathing regularly.” Who breathes regularly when they’re strapped down with a cyberknife aimed at their chest?

Two and a half hours after it began, the robot zapped its last zap, and I stood up. Then fell over.

My husband Brian drove me home, but I didn’t think he would get what I was kvetching about. My sons wouldn’t get it. The dogs wouldn’t get it. So I called someone who also had cancer so that I could complain to a knowing audience. Crazy Mike’s response: “Did you hear that Paul Alexander just died?”

“Who is Paul Alexander?” Turns out that he was the man in the iron lung. He contracted polio in 1952. Sister Lil had contracted polio near the same time, just before the vaccine was available, and she never had full use of her hand or her leg.

But this guy? His lungs stopped working and they placed him in a metal cylinder, enclosing his body from the neck down. He lived that way for more than 70 years. Graduated from Southern Methodist University. Earned a law degree. Wrote a memoir. His brother reminisced that in their last days together they found great joy sharing a pint or two of ice cream.

Who was I to complain? My lungs had cost me a morning in spring; his had cost him seven decades.

Why does a person get up in the morning? Sometimes for the blooming Ceanothus. Sometimes for love. Sometimes for the sunlight on the Golden Gate Bridge. Sometimes for that scoop of ice cream.

When in Rome...

There are the girls, Jill and Sarah, and then there are the ladies, SASB and Deidre.

The girls are older than the ladies, although the ladies never discuss their ages. My husband Brian and I go to flea markets and basketball games with the girls. We go to boozy brunches and drag shows with the ladies. We wear our everyday denim with polo shirts to hang out with the girls. We wear dress jeans with collared shirts to visit the ladies.

But all six of us parent teenagers, which is why we all needed vacations. The girls made reservations for theirs in Thailand. Brian and I didn’t think we could get away, but God bless the ladies. When Doctor Doogie told us we had a window of time before radiation and a possible nephrectomy, the ladies jumped in to plan us four a Roman Holiday (apologies to Audrey Hepburn).

As Julius Caesar noted, “All Gaul is divided into three parts.” So too is the tale of this journey: from the Eternal City to Florence to Paris.

All roads lead to Rome. We say that because the ancient empire built 250,000 miles of highway across the breadth of Europe. The phrase is not technically correct; you can’t drive there from California, but a plane will suffice.

We arrived on Ash Wednesday and took a taxi to our Airbnb, just around the corner from the Trevi Fountain. A tourist crowd fills the piazza from dawn to way past dusk, so it’s a lot like staying at Fishermen’s Wharf.

The fountain was established in ancient times as tre vie, three roads intersecting at the Acqua Virginae aqueduct. In 1762, a grand marble cascade was built. Legend has it that if you throw a coin with your right hand over your left shoulder into the pool, you will return to Rome. There must be a lot of people who want a second date with the City of Seven Hills, because 3,000 euros are collected there each day, the money going to feed the city’s poor.

When in Rome, do as the Americans do, which for us meant walking into a bar the next morning. SASB and I learned, however, that a bar is a place to get coffee, not liquor, unless you order a cafe corretto, which means you want liquor in your coffee. Instead, we grabbed cappuccinos and walked up the Spanish Steps.

After visiting the Colosseum, all four of us stopped for un primo, a first course of pasta.

My Italian is lousy. Too many years of French and Spanish have defeated two months of Duolingo. But I did know enough to order a broo-sketta rather than broo-shetta. The waiter’s English was better than my Spanish/French and he delivered it promptly. He asked if I wanted my water still or sparkling.

I replied, “Holy.”

Deidre approved a bottle of Garganega and the waiter filled Brian’s and SASB’s glasses. Too early in the day for me. I reached for my own glass, but the waiter got there first, pouring a sip. “When in Rome,” he shrugged, “you need this to make chin-chin.” We clinked our glasses and toasted Italy.

We chin-chinned after learning to make pasta. We chin-chinned with Chianti, espresso and water — still or sparkling.

And we texted each celebration to the girls in Thailand, who always sent back an emoji, no matter what the time difference.

And then we traveled to another country: Vatican City. For this I wore a button-down shirt with silk necktie and a suit jacket. My mother, Nurse Vivian, would not have settled for less -- “just in case the Pope shows up.” We walked past Caravaggio’s “Entombment of Christ” and Raphael’s “Transfiguration.” But the aha! moment came in the Sistine Chapel.

Michelangelo Buonarroti was a sculptor, not a painter, but there was no saying no to Pope Julian II when he told him to decorate the ceiling. Michelangelo hated the project so much that he destroyed the original frescoes he had drawn of the apostles and fled to Carrera.

But some spark drew him back. Over four years he painted nine scenes from Genesis, the most famous of which is in the ceiling’s center, “The Creation of Man.”

The room was silent as we entered, and no photography was allowed. But as we raised our eyes, one of the ladies dropped her phone and as she picked it up, it clicked. We had captured an image of Adam stretching out his hand to God.

This was our epiphany, the thing we learned on our pilgrimage: Life begins again and again, even when death is sniffing around the edges. There is always a part of us reaching for the divine. And each other.

We have four sisters. We have the girls in Thailand, who texted a Buddha for every Madonna we sent. We have the ladies in Rome, who always discover another reason to chin-chin.

Next week: Florence and Paris.

Kevin Fisher-Paulson’s book, “Secrets of the Blue Bungalow” (Fearless Books, $25), is available at fearlessbooks.com and area bookstores.

Reach Kevin Fisher-Paulson: kevinfisherpaulson@gmail.com

Moxie

Whiskers, a terrier mix, was my first rescue dog and my responsibility. As a kid, I got up at 6 to walk him, and on winter mornings when I got back, my mother, Nurse Vivian, would have a bowl of Frosted Mini-Wheats for me at the Formica table and a bowl of French toast for Whiskers on the floor.

Sullen teenager that I was, the one time I asked why, Nurse Vivian replied, “He’s more excited to see me.”

There’s an unspoken rule in journalism: Do not write pet columns. I have never met an editor who actually likes them. Nevertheless, Jon Carroll, a predecessor in this space, slipped in at least 35 stories about his beloved felines.

I’m not as bold as Jon was, but Krypto, Buddyboy and Bandit each got one column, and Queenie last shared a tale of tails in 2020.  That makes one column every two years or so. And unlike with my sons Zane and Aidan, I don’t need to slip the dogs five bucks when I mention them. Yet still, whenever I submitted a dog column, my editor-at-the-time would write something kindly but firmly along the lines of, “Well, I’m sure it will be a long time before we hear from Bandit again.”

The hounds that have inhabited the Bedlam Blue Bungalow have mostly been rescue dogs, and have until now at least partially Pekingese. Pekingese are called smoosh-faced dogs because they have an almost flat face. Collective-noun aficionados would note that there has been a “pomp” of Pekingese living in the Outer, Outer, Outer, Outer Excelsior.

Crazy Mike says they’re not real dogs and he’s right.  We’re not used to real dogs. We’re used to Pekingese. Although T.S. Eliot claims these pooches fought the Pollicles, the truth of the matter is that Pekes are representatives of the law of inertia. A Peke at rest stays at rest unless acted upon by an outside force, such as hamburger.

All of our dogs have gone through a chewing phase, and at some point, each of them has been blamed for eating our sons’ homework, but truly they never did any more than nibble.

Which brings me to Moxie. Moxie is a Havanese.

Unlike all of our other dogs, Moxie has a snout. She weighs almost nine pounds, and half that weight must be devoted to teeth -- 44 of them.

Which brings us to my bathrobe. At one time it was royal blue, until an accidental rendezvous with a bottle of bleach. I had hoped I could pull off a Sean Connery as James Bond look in my terry cloth, but the truth is I look much more like Fred Mertz.

I’m my most vulnerable in this bathrobe. It means that Moxie has won. She has licked my ear enough to get me out of bed. Most mornings I stick a dog under each arm, walk out to the backyard, and hope that the call of nature persuades them to do their business before Donner, the dog next door, convinces them that barking at the raccoons is more fun.

Moxie gets going right away, but Queenie sniffs each blade of grass before shaking the dew off her lily. This gives Moxie time to attack, and what vexes her most in the morning is the sash on my robe. You’d think that my outweighing her by 170 pounds would give me an advantage, but no.  When she sinks all 44 teeth into something, she means to keep it.

Took me a while to realize that her chewing extended to all my clothes.  There were clues. More missing socks than usual.  The 36-inch belt which mysteriously became 34 inches.

I leave my jeans on the edge of the bed at night. This is a habit born of 20 years of parenting my sons, when I was never been sure whether 3 a.m. might bring a fireman, a police officer or a girl Zane had met at a party.

Running late one morning, I jumped into my jeans, threw on my sneakers on and hustled to Dr. Do’s office, ready for my dermatology appointment.  When I sat down in the waiting room, I realized I had a bigger problem than sun exposure. Moxie had spent the night chewing through the seat of my pants.

I went home, changed my clothes and gave Moxie a stern lecture. But all she did was wag her tail. Then she pooped denim for a week.

The moral of this story? When it comes to enthusiasm, don’t be like your teenager. Be like your dog. It might not get you new Ralph Lauren dungarees, but it very well could get yo

Ornament

On Friday, Compass High hosted its holiday show. It’s a tiny school, student body of 41. You’d think it impossible to put together a band, a drama society and a glee club, but Ms. Ballard convinced these young men and women who learn differently to get together and make something beautiful.

My son Aidan does not perform. Last year, when enrolled in theater class, he told Ms. Ballard that he would take an F rather than step into the limelight. So, she made him the stage crew. Turns out he has a great dexterity for moving lights, microphones and props (theater shorthand for properties). This December, she voluntold him he’d do it again.

The theater on the Notre Dame de Namur campus seats maybe 40 people. As the band launched into “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” I sat in the third row and maybe cried a little.

Sometimes I just want to feel sad at Christmas. My husband Brian and I have watched our sons (Zane and Aidan) in holiday spectacles for 16 years: the Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy Winter Festival and Saint John School Christmas pageant, with the kindergarteners playing out the nativity scene. But this would be the very last one.

Aidan wasn’t having any of my sentimentality. “Dad, there will be a holiday show at the college I go to next year. Or the trade school. And if they don’t, I’m pretty sure Zane’s gonna make you a grandfather sooner rather than later.”

“Bite your tongue!” I said.

But Aidan was right. Why fret about endings when there are beginnings all around? And there are plenty of other events that have always been and will always be.

Like the ornament party. 

It’s a pagan tradition that we Americans have adopted. Somewhere in what is now Germany, people decorated trees with apples to celebrate the solstice. Centuries later, Hans Greiner, a glassblower, figured it would be better to blow apples rather than grow them. They also lasted longer, and so an industry was born.

In my youth in South Ozone Park, there were a lot of plastic and aluminum trees. The neighbors helped each other assemble their trees and enjoyed had maybe a highball or Rheingold beer, while the boys traded candy canes and carved reindeer.

We had the complicated kind of artificial tree, with branches that were color coded and had to screw into matching holes on what looked like a green broomstick. And we were the neighbors’ last stop on the block, so ours was always a little crooked, with branches at the wrong angles and the tinsel hanging in clumps.

Fifty years later, in the Outer, Outer, Outer, Outer Excelsior, that tradition translates to our friends and neighbors visiting us on the Sunday before Christmas Eve, each bringing an ornament to hang on the tree on our porch.

It's the one time of year we actually clean the Bedlam Blue Bungalow. Zane knows to be home. Aidan comes out of his room. Brian lights the Christmas village.

We mull wine and cider with cloves and star anise. We serve cheese and crackers and Nurse Vivian’s famous pigs in a blanket. Crazy Mike brings rumaki (water chestnuts wrapped in bacon, another San Francisco invention). At some point, Uncle Quentin sits down at the piano, and for a while it looks a whole lot like a Norman Rockwell illustration.

And when the last carol is sung, as the guests leave, they each take a lace cherub or a CVS soldier off the tree, so that our holiday is part of their holiday, and their holiday is part of ours.

Took me a few years to figure out how the market worked for this redistribution. Our extended family is pretty eclectic, so we find dreidels, red envelopes and kinaras on the tree. Some friends make origami swans or hand-painted snowflakes. But as is human nature, the nice crystal ballerinas and needlepoint stars go to their new homes quickly. What tends to remain are popsicle-stick sleds and ceramic piranhas.

This is what the solstice is about. Not so much the sublime as the humble.  But we love the homeliest of trinkets because they were gifted out of kindness. Give me the bells made out of macaroni and the clothes-pin angels.

We humans are not perfect, least of all the Fisher-Paulsons. But it is our flaws that make us loveable. We sent out a holiday card, and in the family photo, no one’s hair was combed or cut. Because that is who we are. As we near the longest night of the year, we acknowledge that it is the shadows that define us.

May your holidays be filled with Norman Rockwell moments. But also, may your tree be lopsi

The Streets of San Francisco

Last week, on November 18th, in Florey’s Bookstore in Pacifica, a reader wanted to know exactly where the Outer, Outer, Outer, Outer Excelsior is.

Many years ago, real estate agents named the area wherein the Bedlam Blue Bungalow resides by its borders: the avenues named for a railroad executive (Crocker) and the race that Wonder Woman came from (Amazon). My husband Brian and my sons Zane and Aidan, may be warriors, but they are not Amazons.

Neighborhood names are funny things. Some make sense. Bayview has a view of the Baybay and The the Outer Sunset is where the sun sets. Nob Hill was named after the Nabobs who ran the railroads. The Tenderloin was so named because the cops who worked that beat were bribable, and so they could afford to buy the better cuts of meat.

But just as often the names are arbitrary. We used to live on Fair Oaks, down the block from Armistead Maupin. We called it the boundary between the Mission and the Castro, but people who wanted to sell houses in that neighborhood called it Liberty Hill. San Francisco also has a Little Hollywood and a Lone Mountain, but I’ve never heard anyone refer to either.

Has anyone else wondered why Cow Hollow is so far away from the Cow Palace?

And what about our streets too?. Who does the naming? There are some 2,300 roads in the city I call Frank. James Van Ness was the mayor of San Francisco from in 1855 to 1856-56. He stepped down during the time that San Francisco stopped having a mayor, but clearly was in long enough to get one of the city’s longest thoroughfares named after him. But why designate South Van Ness?  Shouldn’t that make the other side North Van Ness? 

Why does Market stop being Market when it gets to the Castro and becomes Portola, all at once?  Maybe Gaspar de Portola had a little something on the dlDL? 

Why is Circular Avenue a diagonal line?

Even numbered streets are arbitrary. We have a 12th Avenue and a 14th Avenue, but don’t havenot that unlucky number in between, so we named that street after Brigadier General Frederick Funston, who commanded Army efforts following the great quake of 1906. A guy named Victor Duboce was elected to the Board of Supervisors in 1909 but served less than a year before dying. Maybe he really did have bad luck, because his name graces what would have been 13th Street.

Gough was named after a milkman. Don’t hate. In 1855, he was on the committee designated to name roads. He had a sister named Octavia, which probably explains why the two streets run parallel, but never intersect.

Howard was named after William Davis Merry Howard, who ran a vigilante gang. And even though San Francisco hosts a Maiden Lane, Bertha Lane, Lucy, Jessie, Minna and Cora sStreets were not all named after virgins but rather ladies of the night.

For the record, Lois Lane was a reporter and not a prostitute.

She wasn’t the only newspaper writer to get a byway Frank:  Mark Twain Street and Herb Caen Way. And while it might be nice, The Boulevard of the Fisher-Paulsons is too long for a street sign.

In the Inner Excelsior, motorways are named after foreign nations and foreign cities:  France, Italy, Prague, Geneva. The street originally named China got re-named Excelsior but we know there aren’t any pandas there. Japan and India Avenue avenues were re-named as well. It got me wondering whether Russia, the street between Persia and France,used to be called Ukraine but then got annexed.

Re-naming streets can be expensive. When the Board of Supervisors re-named Army as Cesar Chavez in 1995, it cost more than a million dollars to re-make all the signs.

Another head-scratcher: Why do we have the North Bay, the South Bay, the East Bay but not the West Bay?  

A lot of people in the Bay Area refer to the 49 square miles at the tip of the peninsula as “the city.”  Relative term. I’ve lived in Ozone Park, Brooklyn, Hoboken and Jersey City, and all of those places refer to Manhattan as the “the city.”  Since Jersey City is by its own name and definition a city, one wonders why they gave Manhattan, which is only one-fifth of a city, the title.

So yes, we live in the Outer, Outer, Outer, Outer Excelsior, Latin for Ever, Ever, Ever, Ever Upward. You will not find it on a map.  The neighborhood is more of an attitude than a geographic location.

What’s in a name? Our neighborhood, by any other name, would smell as sweet.

Sleepless in Skedaddle

“Take a pause,” Alma texted back when I wrote her that we had a busy October: five book readings, a CT scan, a bone scan, two immunotherapy infusions, surgery to install a port.

We choose friends for a reason or a season, and sometimes we choose them for life. That makes them family. We don’t always know which is which. Most of my college buddies have evolved into Christmas card acquaintances, but 40 years later, the guy who sang bass in the Chapel Choir is still Uncle David to my sons.

When choosing children, we know we mean forever. Even when forever doesn’t work out, like our experience with the triplets. Even when there are days that neither of my sons (Zane or Aidan) is choosing me back.

The rules are different with brethren. Genetically, I’ve got two brothers (X and XX) and even though we never quite chose each other, we never rejected each other either. At least not for long.

I have no female siblings, but there are a few women I’d categorize as chosen sisters: Amanda, Deidre, Jill, Sarah, SASB. That makes Sasb’s husband Mordecai a chosen brother-in-law. By extension, the friends of chosen sisters sometimes become our chosen cousins.

Which brings us back to Alma. She used to bake scones for the market in Piedmont where Jill worked as a barista. Alma and Padraig (her husband) come from Thurles in County Tipperary, a small town where Alma’s family has lived for 400 years. Sarah and Jill invited us all for an evening of dinner and “Ted Lasso” and we clicked. Padraig works in construction and his job has taken them to Jamaica, Canada, Alameda and since June, to Seattle.

Alma has an Irish perspective: She talks with her mother every day. Even though her son and daughter live in another country, she keeps them on her Starbucks account, so they can have “a cuppa” every day with their Ma.

And when any one of us gets worked up, she says, “Take a pause.”

It’s a micro-meditation, a break in the routine. She reminds us to take the time to breathe. When Alma texted this, I thought, “What better place to go for Indigenous Peoples Day weekend than a city named after the Duwamish leader known as Sealth?”

Neither Zane nor Aidan opted to go. Aidan has a theoretical girlfriend in Yakima, who he met online, but prefers to keep the relationship virtual. Zane promised that I would not become a chosen grandfather by the end of the weekend.

Up until the recent holiday, my working knowledge of Seattle came from “Here Come the Brides” and “Sleepless in Seattle,” so I hoped that I’d run into either Bobby Sherman, Frasier Crane or Tom Hanks. Or at least meet a few lumberjacks.

We arrived on Friday, spent a lazy day walking around Lake Washington. Padraig’s cousins, Tony and Denise, came by, and over turkey chili and a few beers, it brought us to poetry and song. Denise sang that no matter how far apart you were from your family, you shared the same moon. Near midnight, she crooned, “Come fill to me the Parting Glass, good night and joy be with ye all.”

(At this point, my husband Brian might say that the cousin of my chosen cousin would be my second chosen cousin once removed.)

Seattle lies in the shadow of the Olympic and Cascade Mountains. It gets a different kind of fog than we do, perhaps a distant relation of Karlotta. The city can’t stick with one nickname, like the Big Apple or Big Easy. It calls itself the Emerald City, Rain City, Coffee City, Jet City and Queen City. This is unlike my beloved Frank, a town that hates nicknames.

On Saturday, we visited the Public Market and took a tour of the Seattle Underground. Turns out Seattle has burned down as many times as San Francisco has.

On Sunday, Alma took a pause from Seattle, and we visited Snohomish, shopping for antiques, stopping in at a vineyard.

With a Cabernet, we took Denise’s advice and filled the parting glass, took a sip but knew that we’d be back. We had indeed taken a pause from oncology and raising spirited sons. But knew that wherever our chosen family lived would always feel like home.

The next morning, we got to the airport only to find that our plane was delayed by five hours. We settled into an airport bar for grilled cheese sandwiches. Brian shrugged, “Even Alaska Airlines sometimes gets to tell you to take a pause.”

Good night and joy be with ye all.

For All the Gary's

Gary, our friend Mark Foehringer’s husband, was the only other non-dancer in the terpsichorean crowd my husband Brian hung out with. Around my age, with gold frame glasses and a receding hairline, Gary was relentlessly enthusiastic. For twenty-three years, while Brian and Mark choreographed and drank martinis, Gary rented a theater, arranged for costumes to be embroidered and hired artistes.

Dancers ignore non-dancers except when the nons are asked, “What do you think of my dancing?” So, at the Ornament Party, after they finished striking the set of the “Nutcracker,” while the performers huddled in the kitchen, smoked, drank absinthe and complained about lighting, Gary grabbed a cup of mulled wine and stood next to me at the piano as we warbled through, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.”

Gary and Mark went to visit family in Ohio in March 2020. Gary died in his sleep, and as far as I know the cause of death was never diagnosed.

I blame a lot of things on COVID, and not just our friends who have died. I blame it for the feeling that Aidan never graduated elementary school. One day, school was cancelled with no closure, and three years and endless Zoom meetings later, he is a junior in Compass High School. I blame COVID for the closing of Le P’tit Laurent, our favorite restaurant. For those 15 pounds I gained. Before the pandemic, I was middle-aged. Now I am … old.

COVID also ended Brian’s dance career. In February 2020, he celebrated his 40th year as a professional dancer. The next month there was nowhere to teach, nowhere to perform, and by the time it was all over, he no longer had a toe to point.

On April 10, President Biden signed into law a bipartisan resolution to end the emergency response to the Coronavirus outbreak.

Don’t get me wrong, but there are things I’m going to miss about the pandemic. Not the death, of course. But I will miss the masks. I skipped shaving for and no one noticed. Remember the early part where we wore cloth masks?  Me, I alternated between masks featuring the Justice League and Captain America. They were all whimsy, not fashion. I did not see one Louis Vuitton mask during the past three years.

I also miss the open road. In April of 2020, I still had to go to work, and on my 5:32 a.m. drive up 101, I had the highway to myself, like Charlton Heston in “The Omega Man.” I miss that year we didn’t have to worry about our sports teams because they weren’t playing. So, we went for months without seeing the Giants or the Warriors or even the Niners lose.

I miss the coziness of the four of us not being able to go out into the world, and me working crazy hours, so Brian taught himself how to cook Five Spice Chicken.    

We were all in this together. When I went into San Francisco General SFGH or Laguna Honda, a nurse would say, “Thank you for your service,” and I would reply, “Thank you for your service.” I miss standing on line outside the Diamond Heights Safeway, six feet apart from the other customers, the four Fisher-Paulsons bubbled together because it was the only time we got out of the Blue Bungalow in the Outer, Outer, Outer, Outer Excelsior.

There was not the expected baby boom, but there was the puppy boom. Just about everyone I knew got a dog. The Sasbs got Jack, and Terry Asten Bennett got Cha Cha the Rottweiler. Queenie and Moxie adopted the Fisher-Paulsons.

Zane got COVID that first November. Zane never had more than a headache but still, no one could come over for Thanksgiving dinner. And though I do love our dinners for 18, I had the thrill of my first on-line grocery order. And even though Instacart substituted carrots for parsnips, and Gravensteins for Pink Ladies (who bakes apple pie with Gravensteins?), and delivered the teeniest turkey imaginable, still and all, sitting there with just the four of us around that dining room table, we were grateful to have each other in the calamity.

The crisis is over. Thank God. I won’t miss the dying, but death has a way of right-sizing us. Whereas Gary could be a little bit of a nerd in life, we see him now as a charming and generous ghost. We who live must carry the optimism that the Garys of the world left behind.

(The Gary Lindsay Dance Scholarship was established to remember him.  Those wishing to contribute, please go to mfdpsf.org)

Soul Sister

Saint Scholastica got the female religious order thing started somewhere between 480 and 547 A.D., and in the world today, there are just over 700,000 nuns.

My mother, Nurse Vivian, had a cousin she called Jetty.  Around the same time that my mother left Johnstown, PA to attend Kings County Nursing School,in Brooklyn Jetty entered the convent.

Sister Jetty was a holy woman -- and a feminist in a black habit with a white wimple.  She said she wore it because it reminded her that you could only see light when you contrasted it with shadow. I once saw Mother Theresa in Greenwich Village and she didn’t look half as virtuous.  My last memory of Sister Jetty: at my mother’s wake, the priest didn’t show up.  She grabbed me by the elbow and said, “We don’t need a clergyman.  I’ll do the service.  You do the eulogy.”

But there are fewer nuns in the world than there used to be.  Around 1965, in the United States, for example, there were about 180,000. Nowadays there are less than 50,000.  Less than 1% of these women are under the age of 40.

Several orders have merged or died out.  Sister Lil, the only Ursuline nun living in San Francisco, said, “I used to worry about who would turn out the lights, but not anymore.”

This was an odd turn of phrase, and it haunted me.  What else would we be turning the lights out on and who would turn them out?  Sister Lil might not be worried, but I was.

We live in an age of doubt, where we question what we used to respect, institutions like the police, democratic elections and the church.  In many ways they have failed us, and so we have lost our faith in them.

So I wonder: Who would turn out our lights? There are only four Fisher-Paulsons in the world, and two of us are in our 60s.  I’m the last known repository of Nurse Vivian’s apple pie recipe.  Unless one of our sons gets serious with a girl who likes antiques, who will inherit Brian’s family Bible?  Or Nana’s opal ring?

Who will turn out the lights of the blow-mold nativity scene that has glowed in the Outer, Outer, Outer, Outer Excelsior twenty Decembers?  Unlikely to be our sons Aidan or Zane.

More than 10,000 years ago, humans noted the length of days followed a predictable pattern, that for roughly half the year, we got more and more daylight, and then the trend reversed. Either end of that cycle became known as the sun (sol) standing still (sister), or solstice.  The summer solstice had the longest daylight of the year, the winter solstice the longest darkness.

There are monuments in Newgrange in Ireland, and at Stonehenge in England, that are aligned with the sunrise on the winter solstice.  The Jews celebrate Hanukkah to commemorate the battle with the Maccabees by lighting candles, finding light in even the darkest of times.  In Iran, Yalda was celebrated at the feast of Mithra, the sun god.

The Romans celebrated Saturnalia.  Emperor Constantine, who wanted to convert everyone to Christianity, rebranded the holiday as Christmas.

Whether we burn the pagan yule log or string lights around the tree, we celebrate this miracle, that dusk may be coming faster than ever, but the dawn indeed will come.

Some days that’s hard to believe in.  The light has gone out on Lucca’s Deli, for instance. And the Western black rhinoceros. And Cable Car Joe’s.

But for some things to begin, other things have to end.  The world had to change. If it hadn’t, I wouldn’t be married to another man, and I wouldn’t have adopted sons, and those sons would not have been young men of color, and we wouldn’t have the rainbow family that we have.

So Sister Lil, as usual, got the sentiment right.  Don’t worry about turning off the lights. Instead, make something worth believing in.

There may not be a whole lot of nuns anymore, but there are inspirational, inspired women, like women I know:  Sasb, Terry Asten Bennett, Sarah and Jill.  They might not practice religion, but they practice spirituality, whether that be through tarot cards, quilting, miniature ponies or Ru Paul.

Although we call Dec. 21 the solstice, the sun does not stand still, but rather hurtles through the heavens per usual. The question isn’t “Who will turn out the lights?” The light never really goes off.  It just changes.

Have yourself a merry little solstice.  May your hearts be light.

God rest ye merry, gentlemen

A difference between the left and right coasts is we don’t see as many carolers out here in the Golden State.  Back in South Ozone Park, we’d stroll around the block shouting in tune at holiday time. Sally Cadden would offer us warm tea and soda bread.  She did this to stop me from singing.

One of the carols was “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” first published in 1760 and likely around for a century before that.  I knew the words, but not the punctuation.  The comma comes after the word merry, not before, and so the opening line does not say, “Hey, you gentleman who are merry, take a load off your feet,” but rather “I hope God rests (or makes) all of you merry.” Let’s just assume God intended not just gentlemen but all gentle genders.

The stanza ends with the phrase “Oh, tidings of comfort and joy.” But you don’t always get both. Sometimes you have to choose between comfort and joy.

There’s been a trend on my iPhone.  When I go in to train my brain, lower my blood sugar or practice my French, I get asked the same question: “How do you feel today?”

The apps provide five emojis to choose from, starting with a very frowny face on the left and progressing toward a very smiley face on the right.

It’s nice that these algorithms care how I feel.  Or at least appear to care.  The cynical part of me says they just want data to explain why I haven’t lost weight or cannot remember the future perfect conjugation of the verb être.

Long time readers will remember that I am emoji-impaired, but I do get that the serious frown on the far left is for misery.  Zane breaking his foot, for example, rated only the second frowniest emoji because, after all, broken bones get better. Brian’s toe amputation, however, was permanent and got the big frown.

The middle emoji I think of as comfort, as in comfortable, all in all.    

That far right emoji? Some people save it for “I won the lottery!” or “My daughter got into Notre Dame!” But for me, it means joy.

My friend Crazy Mike has this game where he asks how I am and I say, “I’m fine.” Then he says, “Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, how do you really feel?”

Crazy Mike knows my feelings are more complex than the five emojis can cover.  The lines get blurred.  Take the misery, for example.  Sometimes there’s a comfort to misery. 

I often love a good misery. I don’t mean to brag, but I got broken up with a lot in 1982.  Seemed like I couldn’t go out on a date without the guy (or gal) telling me we would best be friends.  But there was the comfort of feeling sorry for myself on the couch while eating chocolate and watching “Mary Tyler Moore Show” reruns. I felt morally superior in my melancholy. (We need a German word for that.)

But feelings are also a matter of choice.  For a few weeks now I’ve been choosing the middle emoji, where the expression is neither smile nor frown. But I realize now that the happiness button is aspirational.  It’s not necessarily for where I’ve been, but for where I intend to go.  The question to ask myself is not “How am I feeling today?” but rather, “How do I intend to feel?”

And I intend to be happy.  Don’t get me wrong.  There are a lot of reasons to feel glum, even here in the best city in the world.  There’s homelessness, drought and the closing of Lucca’s Deli.  I will never get my Christmas ravioli again.

But having said all that, yes, I still choose happy.  This time of year I’ve got no excuse. The Fairmont Hotel puts up two-story gingerbread houses.  The Hyatt Regency fills up the lobby with snow and a miniature village.  Mark Foehringer’s “Nutcracker Sweets” at the Cowell takes less than an hour and saves me from watching at least five pas de deux. And then there’s my family in the Outer, Outer, Outer, Outer Excelsior.

If you’re wondering how to reach for cheer, try doing some good.  See if you can spread the cheer. If you don’t have a charity you like, please borrow one of mine.  How about Angels for Minis, to rescue unwanted or abused miniature horses?  Or Angels and Blimps to help disadvantaged families have a little holiday bliss?

There’s a lot more work to gladness than there is to misery, but it’s worth the payoff.  So if you get to choose between comfort and joy, choose joy.

God rest you merry.

Moxie

There’s a new puppy in the Bedlam Blue Bungalow.

Why another dog?  Indeed, why add one more hound to the chaos in the Outer, Outer, Outer, Outer Excelsior?

Suffice it to say we don’t choose the when, the where or the who of a dog.  The dog chooses us.  The other day, Jill and I headed toward Bakersfield to meet a canine that doesn’t have any Pekingese in her whatsoever. Our past seven pack members have all been at least partPeke, a breed that originated in China more than a thousand years ago.

On a cold Saturday morning, we drove down I-5 to meet a Havanese. The Havanese breed was not recognized by the American Kennel Club until 1996.  Whether counting human years or dog years, I’m older than a class of canine.

The Havanese are an offshoot of the Tenerife who migrated from the Canary Islands with the Spanish and then evolved pretty much on their own. 

My husband Brian’s comment: “Well, at least we’re consistent that they’ve all been from capitols of communist regimes.  Our next will be either a Muscovite or a Pyongyangese.”

We stopped at a farmstand, where lemons, candied almonds and rosemary olive oil stood in rows.

Another car stopped.  Sitting in the back was a fluff of black and white, no bigger than a tribble. She was parti-colored.  I was just a little awed by how wonderful and scary it was to meet a creature who weighed less than two pounds.  The little stub of a tail flicked, and I was hooked.

Wasn’t sure how my sons would react. Bandit, who just died in August, had been Zane’s dog, and we had still not picked up his ashes. But I walked in the door with her, and Zane said, “I’m almost crying. She likes us.” Aidan nodded, “Well at least this one can walk.”

The family fell in love and thus began the argument of what to name her.  

The ghost of our late friend Tim whispered that there’s a powerful magic in the naming. Aidan said she looked like a “Panda.”  Zane said “Oreo,” forgetting that was the name his girlfriend teased him with. Brian said that since she was now Queenie’s sibling, we should call her Lil Sister. I was wondering how we’d tell Sister Lillian we named the dog after her, but was saved by the veto of both boys.

Why another dog?  So that Queenie wouldn’t be alone.  She loves a good pack, although she never aspires to be more than Beta. For the first day of the new dog’s arrival, however, Queenie drooled. Poor Queenie. Drool is the pooch’s version of chain smoking.  She does it only when she’s nervous, but her chest fur was soaked.

But here is what wolf packs do. They figure out who’s who by playing. The new puppy quickly installed herself as the alpha.  She chased Queenie around the bungalow, at one point grabbing her tail with her mouth, and sliding all the way through the living room.

“She sure has a lot of moxie,” I noted. Queenie stopped. The puppy skidded to a halt.  Both tails wagged.

Aidan spoke with as many exclamation points as he ever gets: “That’s it!  Moxie!”

Moxie was the name of a nerve tonic, invented in 1876 by Dr. Augustus Thompson, who named it after Lieutenant Moxie, who discovered the bitter root in South America.  Historians doubt that Lieutenant Moxie ever existed, and the gentian root grows in Maine. Much as this column does, Dr. Thompson never let the facts get in the way of a good story. But the advertising claimed only that it would “build up your nerve,”  not your honesty.

Why a dog?  Their lives are short.  And their loss is hard.  But while they’re here, they love us.  Fiercely.  More than our sons do, I think.  Nothing against teenagers, but puppies never complain when you serve them meatloaf for dinner.

Why a dog?  As I type this, Moxie is running circles around Queenie, who attempts to get past her to the backyard.  Neither thinks about orthodontia, Putin’s war on Ukraine or North Korea’s missiles.  They are instead totally in the moment, fascinated by a tennis ball, and they remind us that we’d be a lot better off if we stayed in the moment too.  Don’t worry, be puppy.

Why a dog?Because dogs make me a better human.I want to be half as nice as Moxie seems to think I am

Newel Cap

Around 1967, it was Aunt Rita’s turn to host the family Thanksgiving in her orange-shingled home in Hicksville, Long Island.  Aunt Mildred, Aunt Rita and my mother, Nurse Vivian, rotated who hosted the holidays in an arcane manner.  This much I knew:  Christmas was the big event, and no one wanted to cook on Easter Sunday.

Grand-Aunt Bea was the matriarch.  Right after the turkey went into the oven, she poured her first scotch.  Her contribution to the feast was invariably Heavenly Hash, a mixture of fruit salad, walnuts, Jell-O and marshmallows, held together with Cool Whip.

She also brought the good crystal.  Galway, not Waterford, but it was the one high-class thing in our family.

The boy cousins played football on Cambridge Drive; the uncles watched bowl games at the downstairs bar, and that left Cousin Janey and me to fold the napkins and set the table.  Aunt Bea knew I was the only cousin clumsier than Janey, and so she told her to put out the wineglasses.  Janey picked up the tray, took two steps, then dropped the family heirlooms down the basement staircase.

You’d think there would be more fuss, but no, the aunts made quick work of the cleaning, found Welch’s jelly glasses for the cider and calmed Janey down.  Aunt Rita sighed: “It’s only glasses.  No one got killed.  And one thing’s for sure: Neither you nor Kevin will be carving the turkey.”

In the holiday movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” there’s a scene near the end where the hero, George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart), runs through the town shouting “Merry Christmas!” then rushes into the house, sees his children at the top of the stairs, and just before he hugs them, he kisses a newel cap.  That’s the little knob on the top of the post at the bottom of the staircase balustrade.  In the Bailey home, that knob that kept coming off.  

Took me a while to understand.  He’s got a beautiful wife (Donna Reed), reasonably well-behaved children, and a town that loves him.  But he stops and takes time to kiss an object he knows will always be broken.  He embraced the imperfect life he had, instead of the perfect life he wanted.

Gratitude is not for what we hope; gratitude is for what we have.

My husband’s car got rear-ended in August.  Took two months to get the parts to repair a 10-year-old Prius, but finally in October, it was ready.  The next week, while driving down 101 to pick up Aidan at Compass High, the Prius ran over some metal debris on the highway, ripping open the undercarriage.

Reduced again to a one-car family, we drove the Kipcap to the Antiques Faire in Alameda, and while we waded through comic books and vintage jewelry, someone smashed that car’s rear quarter-panel and drove off.

In the meantime, back at the Bedlam Blue Bungalow in the Outer, Outer, Outer, Outer Excelsior, the hot water faucet started dripping.  The doorbell stopped ringing.  The stove’s ignition went on strike.  Tiles leapt off the wall in the bathroom.

A philosophical repairman said: “Be glad that all this bad luck is happening to objects.  Accidents happen. Better that karma crack your windshield then your soul.”

Not that we humans have escaped all the cracks.  Not all of it’s mentioned in this column, but, among other things: one of us broke a foot, one of us got bullied and had to switch high schools, one of us lost a toe.  Parts of us will never get fixed.

But as we sit down this Thursday, we will be grateful for the broken things.

We are indebted to the scratches on the kitchen cabinet because they remind us that our boys may act out, but they always come home. We are blessed that the Saint Jude statue in the china cabinet has a broken nose, because it reminds us that even saints have a history. We are thankful that some of the 20 dishes on our table are chipped, but there are enough plates for the sons and aunts and uncles who have chosen us as family.

Gratitude is not for what we expect. It’s for what others can expect of us. Deep in my heart I love the fact that Aidan likes my pumpkin pie and expects me to bake it.

We don’t own a newel cap to kiss. Maybe I should kiss the busted doorbell, to recognize that indeed, this is a wonderful life.  And for that we are grateful.

Culture Club

Reading up on Ireland, I came across the phrase "culturally Catholic."  In Northern Ireland the Catholics and the Protestants fought for a century, in what Yeats called “a thing of terrible beauty, a blood sacrifice.  It’s the reason why my ancestors, the Toals, left County Armagh. But in 2022, there are more people now who identify as Catholic than Protestant.  But not like religious Catholic. Culturally Catholic.

What is culturally Catholic? Caffeine free Christianity? A Pew Research Center study from September 2015 stated that 1 in 11 Americans consider themselves Catholic but don't identify Catholicism as their religion. 1 out of 5 Americans is Catholic, but 1 out of 11 sleeps in on Sundays, even though we still like the smells and bells of the ritual. Some of us even remember the Latin.  This nine percent are not ex-Catholics, but we sure don’t say novenas.

The Paulsons are a microcosm of this dichotomy. Brother XX is a devout atheist who stood outside the church during my sister-in-law’s funeral, whereas even as I write this column, Brother X is visiting the Vatican.

As for me? Brian and I may have seven different nativities scenes, but we genuflect only on rare occasion.  And we certainly don't take the local archbishop seriously.  Just like my brothers, though, if a friend's in trouble, we help.

If showing up is the benchmark, then maybe I am culturally gay as well. When I admitted to Uncle Jon that I'd seen only one of the films nominated for best picture last year, he replied, "You're not even gay anymore.” He was right, practically if not technically. I haven’t been to a gym or a gay bar in decades. I still give to causes, but it's been 20 years since I protested in the streets.

Where did I go astray?  Back in the ’80s I was as gay as it got. In 1982, Amanda and I set up an ironing board on Christopher Street and raised money for the first national AIDS switchboard, and we kept marching all through the ACTUP years.

LGBTQI2 is not a uniform culture. We cannot even agree on the initials. We’re a diaspora of boa feathers and leather. If there is an LGBTQ sensibility, it is this: Tragedy happens so you might as well enjoy life.

When did I cross the line from actively gay to culturally gay? Anita Bryant got it wrong. The cure for the gay lifestyle is not conversion therapy. The cure for the gay lifestyle is children. We don’t convert them. They convert us.

My husband Brian and I are underachieving parents, but we’re still so busy building Mission Soledad out of cereal boxes that we don’t have time for Neil Patrick Harris’s “Uncoupled.”

Years ago, my son Zane’s kindergarten teacher said, “Now I know the difference between children of straight parents and of gays: Zane is the only 5-year-old who knows all the words to ‘I Will Survive.’”

When we gays choose to parent, we integrate. By the third time the athletic director at Saint John's school told me I was coaching soccer, I asked, "Did you run out of straight fathers?"  But I agreed and went to the coaching clinic on Treasure Island while others of my generation attended “The Little Mermaid” sing-along at the Castro Theatre.

There's a big difference between practicing parent and practicing gay.  Another one of the gay uncles, David, who worked as a teacher for 30 years, said that if he ever had children, he would never let them have screen time. I told him that if it wasn't for Minecraft and Netflix, there wouldn't be a clean sock in the house.

In assimilating we’ve won something else.  Many of my straight friends have become culturally gay. They watch every episode of “Ru Paul's Drag Race.” They might not quote “All About Eve,” but they whistle show tunes as they jog. Within them beats a heart of disco.

How does this relate to the Outer, Outer, Outer, Outer Excelsior?  Zane and Aidan are not just culturally straight, they’re really most sincerely straight.  And for a long time, I didn't think they got the Catholic thing either.

Zane stopped attending church when he went away, and hasn’t returned since he came back, but one afternoon last week, he said: "My friend got hurt playing football.  Can we light a candle?"

The sun was just setting over the olive trees, and for a moment, it was quiet in the neighborhood. We stood on the porch. On his iPhone, Zane recorded the trembling match as it caught the wick of the St. Jude candle.

This, then, is our culture. In a time of crisis, he may not know where to go, but he sure knows who to go to.

Colonel Mother-in-Law

When you choose family, you also choose the family of your chosen family.  In other words, you don’t choose your in-laws.

Marie Doris Harris Fisher Merrill would have turned 83 years old on Oct. 12.  She was born in Monmouth, a small Maine town of fewer than 5,000 residents to a family that had lived on Wilson Pond for a hundred years. 

Marie earned a degree in nursing in 1960.  She married Jerry Fisher, but divorced him 10 years later. By then she had developed a professional reputation: Marie Fisher, RN, one of the first women colonels in the Air National Guard. So she kept that name for the rest of her life, single mothering both of her sons, Brian and Craig, in the process. My sons, Zane and Aidan, came to know her as Nana, but I referred to her as Colonel Mother-in-Law.

My working philosophy is a product of 1960s television situation comedies.  You could say I learned about chosen family from “The Brady Bunch” and “Gilligan’s Island.” And what I learned about mothers-in-law came from Darrin Stephens’s mother-in-law on “Bewitched.” Played by Agnes Moorehead, Endora was, no surprise, a real witch, and an opinionated one, and watching her I assumed that the in-law relationship would be antagonistic.

In 1985, six weeks into our relationship, Brian and I drove up to Maine to meet his family.  Brian had never brought a boy home before.  Here was the plot complication: For the two years before I met Brian, I had been a strict vegetarian.  On the drive, Brian advised, “My mother is pretty traditional.  Like at dinner.  If she serves it, eat it.”  She served pot roast.

This much I can tell you: If you do not eat meat for two years, your body will forget how to digest it.  I was sick for three days.  Brian’s brother Craig kept saying: “You said he was outgoing, but the only going he does is to the bathroom.” Marie wasn’t sure I would last.  I wasn’t sure I would last. 

But last I did, which was unusual in Brian’s family.  Marriage was a blood sport for the Harris clan.  Brian’s Aunt Jeannie held the record with seven divorces. Brian, though, remains one of the only persons in his generation still with the same person, even after 38 years.

Marie did not treat me as a traditional daughter-in-law.  I was more of an out-`did not get mad at me, even when she would have had a good excuse. 

Like the day of the picnic.  The year that my own mother, Nurse Vivian, died, I was especially sentimental.  Marie was hosting a Labor Day barbecue, and I realized that there were no pictures taken of the Harris family as it was.  Marie lived on Lake Cobbossee at the time, so I told the aunts and uncles and cousins to all go stand on the dock, and I would take a picture from the porch.  Only after I had convinced 18 of them to stand out on the water and say “Cheese” did we hear the crack.  The dock’s support beam had broken, and I had submerged every single one of my in-laws. Marie never even raised her voice.

Here’s the kind of mother the colonel was:  whether high school basketball or Broadway show, despite working two jobs, she never missed an event her sons appeared in.  She was the same kind of grandmother.  She flew across the country for Zane’s and Aidan’s adoptions and baptisms, birthdays and zoo visits.

Here’s the kind of mother-in-law she was:  every June she called and together we puzzled out the Hallmark Christmas catalog and who should get what ornament.  And wherever Brian performed, she would fly in, have dinner with me and be my date.

Marie did not come to our illegal wedding in 1987.  In her small town, married to a Republican, gay marriage was a bridge too far. But 21 years later, when it finally was legal, she called me and said, “One of the few regrets I have is that I did not come to your real wedding.  I’d like to come to your legal one.”

We finally did then have a mother of the bride/groom, and I learned then that family means family.  Sometimes that means apologizing 21 years later.  Sometimes that means just showing up.

Col. Mother-in-Law passed away on May 11, 2014, the eve of Mother’s Day, having taught us that a life of service was important.  We might not choose our in-laws, but we always deserve them.

Eclair

Took last Wednesday off to get our annual physicals. I always think the office is on 15th Street. My husband Brian always knows that it’s on 17th Street. So we take a few extra minutes for my wrong turn on Valencia.

The entire day before, I’d cut down on sugar intake, avoided fatty foods and even worked out for 20 minutes, but alas, the diagnosis remained the same: old.

In my thirties, I had a fantastic doctor who was born the same year I was.  When I turned 40, he prescribed medicine for high blood pressure and acid reflux.  “It’s all genetics,” he told me. “You’re as healthy as I am.  Take these pills every day, and I won’t need to see you for a long time.  Now go skydiving.”  Which I did.

And then a few years later, the pharmacy told me that my prescriptions could not be refilled: “The doctor said you needed to go in for a checkup first.”

Furious, I called his office. “Doctor K-- told me I was as healthy as he was, and that as long as I took my medicine, I was good to go.”

The receptionist coughed. “Doctor K-- passed away three years ago.”

My network then assigned me to a GP in his late twenties. He objected to the idea that the only way I could swallow my cholesterol pills was with mayonnaise, and my blood pressure medicine with espresso. Every time I got on the scale, he tsked.  Finally, he said, “I don’t want to see you again until you’ve lost 10 pounds.”

I never saw him again.

Which brought me to Doctor Rodriguez, who does not judge me. He knows all of the X-Men. He didn’t comment that my weight was higher than at the last annual. He didn’t tell me to cut out salt, sugar or caffeine.  He told me I was doing fine for a person who was having his last non-geriatric examination.

Wait. What? Geriatric? I knew I was post-pediatrician, but with this month comes my Beatles birthday: Will you still need me?  Will you still feed me? It seems a little unfair, like I should have had the chance to grow up first.

“No diet?” I asked.

“For an almost-senior citizen, you’re pretty healthy.  You can even afford an éclair once in a while.”

And since we had the rest of the day off, my husband and I decided to pick up lunch for our favorite nun.

You might not think that the Mission District is the best place to find a Jewish delicatessen, but the sign on Wise Sons said boiled bagels so I knew they had gotten it right.  Brian chose the pastrami Reuben. I picked the vegetarian option, because Brian’s weight on the doctor’s scale was 20 pounds less than mine.

Sister Lillian (Lil Sistah to this readership) lives up in the clouds, under the shadow of Mount Davidson.  She is the only Ursuline to live in San Francisco.  We don’t see her enough, but when we do, I dish up the deli sandwiches and she dishes up the wisdom.  Lunch with Sister is a lot cheaper than therapy.

As my sexagenarian status was on my mind, we talked about growing older. She reminded me that she was the exact same age as my middlest Brother X, and both of them were still going strong.

“But neither of you lives with teenagers,” I noted. Which brought the conversation to my sons, Zane and Aidan, the source of every one of my gray hairs.

“It’s a long journey, but you are never alone,” Sister Lil insisted. “Even when you think you are, we are always there, sometimes walking with you, sometimes cheering on from the side.”

“Even when we make a wrong turn?”

“Especially when you make a wrong turn.  Or when Zane or Aidan goes the wrong way down a one-way street.  Sometimes you’ve got to make a wrong turn to make a right turn.  You talk about growing older, what you really are doing is growing wiser.  You just have to admit it to yourself.” 

By this time, I had polished off my rugelach. As we walked to the door, Sister handed us a box of éclairs. As if she knew. Brian and I got into the car, knowing that no matter how many detours we took, no matter how many flat tires, we always return to the Outer, Outer, Outer, Outer Excelsior.

Sometimes three lefts do make a right.

Cayuga

Although I call this city Frank, it’s got other nicknames: Fog City; the Paris of the West; 415.  Herb Caen called it Baghdad by the Bay.  In general, we agree that it is not Frisco, though sometimes it is frisky.  President William Howard Taft, during a luncheon at the Cliff House in 1911, when talking about the upcoming Panama Pacific International Exposition, called this town “The city that knows how.”

Lisa Erdos, a longtime reader of this column, calls S.F. “The city that tries so hard.” True, but maybe we should call this shining village on the hill, “The city where nothing’s ugly.”

Oh, things may start out as ugly, but San Francisco manages to make even the most profane into the sublime.  Or sometimes just quirky.  This is, after all, a city that names streets after prostitutes.  Minna and Cora, for example, were Barbary Coast sex workers, in an age where a hundred brothels thrived in the City by the Bay.  The story goes that Minna Rae Simpson visited London, became friends with J.M. Barrie and the character named Wendy in “Peter Pan” was based upon her.

Along with its Golden Gate Bridge and Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco has its share of clunkers, edifices with architecture but no art.  For every Coit Tower there is a Vaillancourt Fountain, thrown together in the style a of art aptly called “Brutalism.” My son Aidan’s personal least favorite skyscraper is the Salesforce Tower, which he refers to as the Penis Building. 

But I work in, arguably, the least attractive structure in the city: the Hall of Justice.  If you ever watched an episode of “Super Friends,” you know what a true Hall of Justice should look like. But no, ours is just a gray cement building with some of the same problems as I have. Like me, it’s cornerstone was laid in 1958 and, like me, six decades later, the plumbing is shot.

But San Francisco takes ugliness, even disaster, and makes it into something heroic.  When City Hall fell apart during the great fire after the great earthquake of 1906, we built a beaux arts palace of the people. Our City Hall is the tallest rotunda dome in the nation, higher even than the U.S. Capitol.

(Yes, this is a town where we still haven’t figured out how to help the homeless, but we try.  We had the lowest death rate of any city in the coronavirus pandemic because we wore masks, we kept our distance and we cared.)

Heck, we even have Sutro Tower, which, when rising over the mist atop Twin Peaks, looks like a frigate sailing out to sea. We took a cemetery and made it into the Legion of Honor. 

This theme extends to a dead-end street in the Inner Outer Excelsior:  Cayuga Park.  Odds on are if you’re reading this column you’ve driven above this park on your way up I-280 North.

Demetrio Braceros emigrated from the Philippines in 1973 and took a job with Recreation & Parks.  In 1986, they assigned him to the 4-acre Cayuga Park to “change the atmosphere.”  In a playground surrounded by weeds and gang graffiti, he came upon fallen Monterey Cypress trees and began carving:  statues, shrines and totem poles, and would eventually produce 376 of them:  a “Garden of Eden” pathway, a “Trail of Hope,” figurines made of abandoned bicycles, shrines to the Madonna, tributes to Barry Bonds and sitting logs in the shape of Wonder Woman. Carved into some of the figures are messages, such as “Education is life” and “Let there be light!” 

As for atmosphere, Cayuga Park is not all Zen peace, or the Japanese Tea Garden.  As my husband Brian, my dog Queenie and I walk around it, the BART train above us screeches and howls, reminding us that we are still in a conurbation.

If I was a philosopher, I’d say that there are honking horns even in paradise. But there are also jacarandas in purgatory.

Here’s where we are all San Franciscan: Each of us finds beauty in the detritus.  Even in our corner of the Outer, Outer, Outer, Outer Excelsior, we plant California lilacs.  We xeriscape with glass to create a rainbow.  We make art out of what we can, where we can.  And when we smell the lavender, or the jasmine we have planted, we know why we have made this city home.

Frank is no less mundane than any other metropolis; we just work harder at the magic.

Patriarch

In my Irish/Swedish family back in South Ozone Park, the men tended to die young.  By 67, in fact, which gets me worrying about my own shelf life.  The women, though, tended to live long, so each, in her turn, got to be the matriarch.

Grandma Sadie ruled the family, and when she passed, Grand Aunt Bea took lead.  At some point, Aunt Rita became the oldest woman, and thus the matriarch. She retained the title for more than two decades, passing away just this past year in her nineties.  She was a grand old dame, and in fact was the first person in the family to approve of the guy I was dating, Brian. 

“He dances on Broadway, Kevin. His family came off the Mayflower,” she told me. “You sell blenders at Macy’s.  I’m thinking you’re trading up.  Do what you can to keep him around.”

I did my best.  Moved in with him. Domestic partnered him.  Illegally married. Legally married.  Thirty-seven years later, I’ve done what I can to keep him around, and I’d like to think I had her blessing.

But she made that whole matriarch thing seem easy.   If Aunt Rita had doubts, you would never know it.  

“Fisher-Paulson” is an invented family, or as Aunt Rita might describe it, “Downton Abbey” meets the Bunkers.

Brian and I created the hyphenation when we adopted Zane.  Neither Zane Paulson nor Zane Fisher sounded quite right. We debated, though not long, on “Paulson-Fisher.” But as the one who started out life as a Paulson, I knew that the teachers didn’t get to my name until about two-thirds of the way through the class roster.  And, yes, because I have OCD, it felt better to put the names in alphabetical order.

It wasn’t until after Zane was adopted that we went to court and changed our own last names.  This was before we could marry legally, so I cannot even claim Paulson as my maiden name.

My Brother XX claims that I’m no longer a true Paulson, and refers to Brian and me as his half-brothers-in-laws.  “You guys are your own clan now.”

But in this chosen family, I am the oldest Fisher-Paulson in existence and, there being no matriarch, this makes me the patriarch.

Sometimes the role chooses you.  To misquote Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”:  Some people are born patriarchs, some achieve patriarchy and some have patriarchy thrust upon ’em.  I guess you could say that I’ve achieved my status only by default.  We are a family of choice, four boys and two dogs that don’t fit into most convenient spots, and at least one of us at all times is either figuratively or literally broken.  

In the past few weeks I’ve had a number of opportunities to doubt my prowess as patriarch.  Zane, his foot in a cast, got robbed at the bus stop. Aidan got bullied by students in school.  In neither case was I there, because a father cannot be everywhere at all times.

This column is not the place to discuss commuter crime, repeat offenders or cyber-bullying.  But a father wants his own sons to be safe in his own neighborhood and his own school.  

The bad part about being the patriarch is that people expect you to have the answers.  There’s no mentor for me to ask my own questions:  Did Zane leave his phone in the wrong place?  Was Aidan talking too loud?  I don’t know. 

Protecting them cannot mean standing guard all day.  It means providing guidance. I know only this much: It’s my job to trust my sons, to believe in them, even when I cannot quite believe them, even when the truth is murky.

Maybe that’s the role of the patriarch, to be the family truth teller.  I tell our story, and that story, with all its embellishments and omissions, becomes the truth of our kin.  And I try to be like Aunt Rita.  If I have any doubts, I try not to show them.

My sons will know, at least I hope they will know, that none of us are perfect. Not one single Fisher-Paulson, hyphen and all.  But we do our best.  And we try to make the world a better place, starting with our own neighborhood.

Hallux

My mother, Nurse Vivian, was Irish but lived in the Pennsylvania Dutch part of the Appalachians. There, she gathered pithy phrases for every occasion.  

Some I understood at the time, like “the apple don’t fall far from the tree.” Some I never understood: “Layo for meddlers.” And others I only understood years later: “I cried because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.”

When we had to send our son Zane to Texas, I bought a carton of Saint Jude candles, and we kept one lit in the porch window so that he could find his way home. I wrote a column about that candle — and dozens, if not hundreds, of readers also lit a taper. I like to think that as they whispered their prayers, the match sparked the wick and they ended their message with, “I do believe in the Fisher-Paulsons.”

I don’t know if it was fairy dust or the enduring power of the patron saint of the impossible, but two years later, when Zane returned from all his journeys across the desert and over the mountains, he saw that candle when he walked in the door, high school diploma in hand.

There was one candle left in the box, and I imagined that Jude Thaddeus was saving a little bit of miracle for our next crisis. Which came two weeks later.

I was standing outside of City Hall when my phone rang. It was Papa (my husband Brian), who said: “Can you take me to the hospital tomorrow? The doctor wants to look at my foot.”

On Friday, June 25, we went to the UCSF Parnassus Campus. An ultrasound revealed a blockage in his leg, cutting off the flow of blood to his foot. So, before they addressed his foot, they needed to look at his legs — and on top of that his electrolytes were off. 

At midnight that Sunday they performed an angioplasty, leading to another angioplasty Tuesday morning. By this time, Sister Lil and the Ursulines; Sister Mary Virginia and the Dominicans; and Sister Marilyn and the Sisters of Mercy all offered up novenas. It was a convent-tion(ITALICIZE) of sorts. Saint Jude candles lit from one end of the state to the other.  

One of our friends, Mrs. E., even prayed to Saint Servatius, patron saint of feet.

The cardiovascular surgeon was positive after the procedures. But then Doctor Martrano, the lead on the podiatrist team, stated simply, “We’ve done everything we can, but for Friday we have scheduled the amputation.”

Best case scenario they'd have to take his big toe. Worst case scenario? The better part of his foot.

Brian took it in … stride: “At least it’s not the whole leg.” But not me. This was not a moment of grace. This was a moment of anger.  

For an average Joe, the loss of a toe would be painful. The Amputee Coalition states that 185,000 amputations occur each year in the United States. Each of them is a tragedy. But Brian based his entire career on his feet. He has can-canned on Broadway, tap danced for the President of the United States, and for 40 years has pointed that big toe. I cannot imagine the universe being crueler.

I was mad when we lost the triplets. And mad again when Zane had to go away. I didn’t get the miracle I wanted, and resented whatever intervening deity there might be for ignoring me.

But to mis-quote Mick Jagger: "Don’t pray for what you want. Pray for what you need." I miss the point if I’m praying for the miracle, wishing for a dactyl that is already gone.

By the time this column is in print, Brian will likely have nineteen digits. And that will have to be enough.

The night of Tuesday, June 29, I lit a candle. I’m not asking for a hallux. I’m asking for wisdom. And acceptance. And as I did I whispered, “I do believe in the Fishe

Kitchen Table

The Bungalow wasn’t always blue.  Built in 1926 in the outer, outer, outer, outer Excelsior, by the time we first saw it, in 1999, it was color of day-old oatmeal.   We painted it the same color as Batman’s cape circa 1967.

It’s likely that at some point in its first 74 years, the kitchen was remodeled, but there was little evidence of such.  It still had that old knob and tube wiring which meant that we couldn’t work the toaster and the blender at the same time.

But Nurse Vivian loved that old kitchen.  As did I.  Many of the drawers wouldn’t open.  The sink backed up every other Tuesday, and no matter what temperature I set the oven at, it still didn’t bake anything in under three hours.

The Thanksgiving after Nurse Vivian died, Pop visited.  It was the year of the triplets, and he took us out to Ikea to buy a kitchen table, as my mother had said that and the statue of Saint Jude were my inheritance.

In almost two decades, that table got burns from my chili, and fork marks from the boys.  The rungs on the chairs had been chewed through by some twenty-one rescue dogs all and all, and one of the legs was lower than the rest, so it was always like eating on board a rowboat.

And one day, I think it was either the day we got the thousand-dollar phone bill or the day Aidan got his head stuck in the staircase, we decided to renovate.

Four days before Christmas, we boxed up all the dented pots and PepsiCo glasses and closed the door on our ancient kitchen.  The contractor came in, and reduced it down to the studs and plaster. Everything went wrong that winter: Zane got suspended and Krypto passed away.  

We had moved the refrigerator to the porch.  Brian and I picked up a dozen frozen dinners at Safeway on the theory that we could microwave our way through the crisis.  The next night, the power went out in the entire outer, outer, outer, outer Excelsior.  I walked out to the porch and it started raining.  There are few things less appetizing than unfrozen tv dinners in soggy cardboard boxes.

I stood there and cried.  Zane came out.    By candlelight he saw the turkey meal in my hand, mashed potatoes now paste.  He put his hand on my shoulder, “Some days Dad, you got to tear down the whole kitchen if you want to make it better.”

We would have starved had it not been for Bravo’s Pizza.

When the contractor was almost finished, we had to pick the paint.  Zane chose turquoise, the exact shade of Superman’s costume.  We took weeks to schlep up all the dishes and Wonder Woman coffee cups from the basement.

We never got round to moving the table back.  The kitchen had shrunk somehow, and it no longer fit.

So dinners moved to the dining room.  Prior to that, that walnut table was used for Thanksgiving and maybe Christmas, but now we sat down there every night, held hands, said grace and toasted the best boys on earth.  Bandit quickly figured out where to sit under the table for maximum begging but for me, I feel a little “off.”  The view is better in the dining room, and Aidan has been pulling the leather off the chairs so that they would look as beaten up as the kitchen ones but it still feels sacrilegious to eat Hamburger Helper under a Waterford chandelier. 

He wasn’t quite ready for Zane’s absence to mean such focus on him.  When dealing with Zane skipping an entire week of school, Aidan’s C Minus in Social Studies never caught our attention.

But for now we helicopter.  Brian started looking for a science project, five months before the fair. We sit at the dining room table and review the Math, the Biology, the Vocabulary: “Aidan, what does ‘interrogate’ mean?”

“It’s what you do with my homework.”

 “What is the antonym for ‘sullen’?”

“You know I can’t tell an antonym from a cinnamon. “

“Or between a homonym and a heteronym,” I sighed.  To his questioning look I said,  “Heteronyms: when the way you pronounce a word changes its meaning. It’s the difference between tear in my pants and tear on my pillow.”

“Dad, you do know I’m going to be a heteronym when I grow up.”

It’s been a rough year, but we’ll get through this, even if the kitchen table doesn’t fit anymore. We’re down to the studs and the plaster, but sometimes you got to tear down as well as tear up if you want to make the family better.

Candy Soup

One hundred and ten years ago this week, America celebrated the first Father’s Day. Sonora Smart Dodd sat listening to a Mother’s Day sermon and thought of her Dad, Henry Smart, who had raised five children without benefit of a mother.  Couple of questions come to mind:

1.   Was one of Henry Smart’s children named Maxwell?

2.   If Henry was really “Smart” why was he parenting alone?  Trust me, one of the big reasons that Brian doesn’t divorce me is that he doesn’t want to get stuck with sole custody of the boys.

Nevertheless, the idea caught on.  It never got as big as Mother’s Day, mind you, but Hallmark Cards did see it as having potential for revenue during its slow season.  Nevertheless, all of the presidents, from Teddy Roosevelt all the way through Lyndon Baines Johnson, passed up on the chance of making it an official event.  It wasn’t until Richard Milhous Nixon, in one of the last acts of his presidency, signed the holiday into law in 1972. Forget China.  Forget Watergate.  Thanks to the 37th president (and Sonora daydreaming during a sermon), every third Sunday in June, we get to celebrate the male nurturing spirit.

Back in South Ozone Park, Pop was good about making sure that we celebrated Mother’s Day.  The day before he drove Brother X, Brother Not X and me around, first placing flowers at Grandma Sadie’s grave, and then making sure that each of us had a decent gift for Nurse Vivian the next morning.  Worked every year, except for the year that Pop got drafted to work on that Saturday, so he gave Brother Not X a twenty and told him to pick out something.  The next morning, he presented a bronze statue of a monkey scratching his head and holding Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.  God bless Nurse Vivian.  She put it right on top of the television.

But Nurse Vivian was not quite as good about the reciprocal holiday, so on Father’s Day Pop got three very colorful, very polyester neckties that he wore once on each of the next three Sundays at Saint Anthony’s.

Father Fusco, the rector of that church, fussed over Mother’s Day, belting out the Ave Maria in his worst Queens accent, telling us how every mother was connected to Mary.  He paraded a statue of the Queen of Heaven around South Ozone Park and the parishioners were expected to tape money to it: sort of a Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Virgin-Mother.

But by June, Father Fusco had run out of steam.  He spent his sermon yelling at the parishioners who stopped coming to mass for the summer, and never mentioned St. Joseph, who Brother X called the “the Frosted Father of God.”

Pop never complained.  And we went home after mass, and I burnt his bacon, Brother X broke the yolk on his on his sunny side up egg. 

Even in a classically-structured family, Father’s Day is the Rodney Dangerfield of holidays.   But in a two dad family, we each have to sneak the boys away on the same Saturday so that both of us get surprised.  It’s a little more complicated this year, as Brian has yet anotherdance tour starting this Sunday, so I have to sneak the boys away to get a surprise for him, then a surprise for myself. And I will probably have to wake up early to surprise myself with breakfast in bed.

Zane says that this is why he likes being in a two father household:  he only has one parent’s day to worry about, and Papa does all the work. This is another reason why I love Papa: he has never once given up on this family.

Favorite moment of fatherhood:  three years ago, Aunt Dorla took mercy on us, and took the boys over to her house to make brunch.  She asked Aidan what he wanted to make, and he said, “Candy soup!”

“Candy soup?”

“You take a big bowl and pour candy into it. Then stir it up.”  Sounds like a recipe for family to me.

So this is my advice to my beloved readers:  don’t buy a polyester tie for your patriarch.  This much I learned from my father, and is true of me a half century later.  Dads don’t want gifts.  They want words.  So start this Sunday morning off with the following: “This is why I love you Dad:” then come up with at least one good reason.  

Feel free to throw in a bowl of candy soup.