If you’ve read my blog, you know that I am a lover of questions and you know I encourage my daughters to ask them - whatever they may be.

But, I’ll be honest, this one caught me off guard. And, just to confirm - yes, it was in reference to President John Quincy Adams.

My five year old was in stream-of-consciousness talking and questioning mode as she was both trying to get my attention and trying to pretend that a nap wouldn’t be her best option at the moment.

At some point, in hopefully as kind a way as possible, I shared that I was not going to keep answering questions that I knew she already knew the answer to - that I was happy to answer the questions I could, but I wanted her to try and answer for herself when she could. (This was a modestly diplomatic attempt at avoiding saying that she was driving me absolutely crazy.)

So, I was pretty well tuned out when she dropped this one on me. It worked. She got my attention!   

I was immediately laughing hysterically inside - trying to process exactly where this question came from and how - and if -  I was supposed to pretend I knew or didn’t know an answer. So, I did the obvious thing that any decent Dad would do: I let my 7 year old answer.

Yes. Someone had to have seen John Adams’ penis.

With her confident and informed response to her little sister, I recalled that the 7 year old had been learning about Presidents at school. And, of course, she’d remembered the most important facts underlying our Democracy: William Howard Taft got stuck in the White House bathtub and had to be craned out, and John Adams went skinny dipping in the Potomac. So, again, by a leap of logic easily made by a 7 year old but still suspect by a 5 year old - President Adams’ penis was out for the viewing. (Perhaps, a timely lesson on the value of transparency in Democracy?)

The giggles about learning what skinny dipping means had long passed from our initial discussion, but this burning question persisted in my daughter’s mind. And, I was reminded that the barrage of questions she’d been asking that she already knew the answer to were not bad questions. They were just unnecessary. She had to be reminded she knew the answer already - or could easily find them for herself.

So, the only bad question really is the one you have but you don’t ask.

For so many reasons, this was not just a good question, it was epic. ​

That every day we may ask and be asked at least one good question…

On the day before his 62nd birthday, my Father committed suicide. I’ve written pretty extensively about this in previous blogs. Needless to say, I sobbed. In fact, I broke.​

I was on emotional lockdown. I didn’t want to be around people. I didn’t want to talk. I needed quiet. Noise actually physically hurt. For the first time in my life, I understood what anxiety really felt like.

I was hunkered down. Surviving. It had been almost a year.

Around that time, a homeless friend brought a 10 week old puppy to my Mom’s house. It had followed him from wherever he lived - he would never tell us. But, our friend was drunk and this tiny, fluffy, adorable, little puppy was annoying him. So, he left it with my Mom and said she had to take him.

Mom had a dog.

Mom calls me.

I go see it.

I call my wife.

Now, we have a dog. I should mention here that I am actually allergic to dogs - but the sweetness of this little animal was an antihistamine.

But, wait. Ugh. What just happened!? I didn’t want a fucking dog! I didn’t want any new relationships! I wanted less. I wanted to be left alone. I sure as hell didn’t want to have to take care of some helpless little animal. I was having enough trouble taking care of myself at that point.

I had swooned at this puppy’s cuteness and I regretted it immediately.

But, then I started to love him - Augustus Buster a.k.a “Gus”.

But then, within months, we were at the vet. Gus had severe hip problems, probably wouldn’t live for very long - at least not without severe pain.

Goddamnit! I knew I didn’t want this fucking thing. This was all just a setup for more fucking loss and hurt and loneliness.

I was furious. So mad at myself. So mad at the world. So mad that I had opened myself up to this little animal - this creature for whom we were already predicting his end-of-days in his first year.

I sobbed.

But, I also started healing.

One of my first blogs about my Dad’s death was entitled “Living With Suicide.” Before I got my dog, I wasn’t. I was surviving suicide. But, when I opened myself to loving him, as painful and frustrating and scary as it was - as temporary as it might be - I began to live again.

Today, almost 12 years later, we had to put my dog down. Cancer.

I sobbed. I broke.

I’ve not cried like this since I lost my Dad. I feel the horrible emptiness of losing Gus, but it has also pulled at something deep in the wounds from my Father’s death. I’ve thought about this day since that first visit to the vet. I knew it would be brutal. I knew my dog’s death was coming. But, I had no idea how badly this would hurt.

I miss my dog. I miss my Dad.

My natural instinct again today is to hunker down, but I can see my dog looking up at me with his big, brown, knowing eyes: “did you miss the whole point!?”

Life and love are full of fear and loss and anxiety and vulnerability, but they are also the source of healing and peace and our connection to something beyond ourselves. Life and love take courage, but also create meaning.

Death doesn’t take that meaning away. It reminds us of it.

​

I grew up and still live in a house with no right angles. It’s just the reality of a now 130-year-old structure. Between plaster walls and settling foundations, you are best served just to eyeball distances and angles, or at least eyeball and measure - but trust your eyeball.​

Which is why I stopped in my tracks yesterday and snapped this picture. A marble. Sitting still. On a smooth surface. In our house. Seriously, what the hell? Never seen it. Never conceived of it. Not in our house.

And, like anyone whose brain never cared much for - nor knew much about - right angles, I didn’t really care about how that marble was sitting there. The science. I wanted to know why.

I saw the marble as I was doing post-holiday house cleaning and, as is often the case when I am doing chores, I was deep in my head. I was deep in the sadness of goodbyes to family, shaking off the echoes of my sobbing child - so sad to see her cousin and great aunt and uncle leaving. Fighting my own tears. I was processing the realities of aging loved ones and the impotence of limited time across great distance. I was wrestling with the chronic unknowns of a sick family member now weeks in the hospital. I was wondering about my dying dog - how much longer? What’s our plan?

We all have our stories. Mine is not unique nor is it even particularly extreme. In fact, I acknowledge that sorrow such as mine is born of fortune and abundance. This messiness (the right angle-less-ness) is just part of the rich possibility of human existence.

And, most of the time, I am fine with this. I see it for what it is. I thrive in the fluidity, the uncertainty. It’s probably why I became an artist. It’s how I understand the world and it reinforces my beliefs in why I am on the planet for this relatively brief period of time.

But, there are also times when it is frustrating and even overwhelming, when the lack of right angles starts to feel like formlessness, when I feel the need for structural reinforcement. Stillness and stability from somewhere.

And yet, this marble. Shining. Reflective. Still. Fragile, but whole. Simple, but profound. Somehow insistently present, defying the potentiality - and probability - of its rolling, falling, getting lost.

It couldn’t just be sitting there on the dresser; that would be impossible in our house. It was somehow transcending the crookedness of its world - or perhaps just owning it.

At the same time, the marble also drew my eye to some old pictures of my family. And, given my unsettled spirit at that moment, I just spiraled further into what wasn’t, what was wrong, what was past, what was no more. Memory. Reality. Sadness.

I need a fucking right angle!

Except, I didn’t. I was missing the why of this odd, little marble.

There is no real truth to my memories or my longing or my emotional analyses. There is no truth in my fighting the dissonance and sorrow of here and now. These are tools to futilely seek and feign control over life itself. Struggle.

The truth is in this marble somewhere, this thing that drew me in, out of myself, reminding me of a deeper, more real - and yet more nebulous - truth. A truth of both passing time, and yet, a truth eternal. Of life and loss, of highs and lows, light and shadow. A truth where our connections with others, with the world, and within ourselves manifest as the ultimate why of our existence and the surest path to our transcendence.

A truth where right angles may or may not exist - it doesn’t matter.

This truth is love. Shining. Reflective. Still. Fragile, but whole. Simple, but profound. Somehow present amidst all of the temporary conditions that could start me rolling, falling, getting lost.

Over my 6 years of being a parent, particularly the last few, I have stumbled several times upon otherwise mundane words and phrases that when I say them to my kids suddenly feel newly important. They are never planned, but as they come out of my mouth they do so with a fullness that I immediately recognize and attach to.
 
The first phrase I remember finding re-remarkable as a parent was: thank you. I certainly had said thank you to my kids when they were babies and offered me a handful of their smashed bananas or their slobbery stuffed animal or something like that. This wasn’t the thank you that gave me pause. It was when they were old enough to start to take on tasks, either by request or their own motivation. It was that first time I dropped something and they picked it up for me. Or, the first time her sister needed help and she scurried over to provide it. Or maybe, that first time I asked them to go get something for me in another room and they happily did so – proud to be able to help.
 
Regardless of the specifics, when I said this kind of thank you to my girls for the first time, it felt like a sincere validation of their contribution – their proactive and meaningful presence making purposeful contact with me, with the world. It overtly acknowledged their power to help other people – hopefully reinforced by some sense of what that means, or at least how it feels to do so. Because of this, I have found myself more mindful of sharing my gratitude with my kids not merely as a tool to reinforce the behaviors I want or expect but as a way of telling them they have the power to create meaning with others. I don’t know: maybe I’m just a tired, somewhat defeated, overly emotional parent looking for “a win”, but that feels like something profound to me.
 
Sometime, maybe a year or more, after thank you took on new meaning, another mundane phrase also resurfaced with a sense of newness: I’m sorry. I am certain I had said I’m sorry to my daughters previously for accidentally bumping them in the head with an errant elbow, tripping over them as they crept up behind me in the kitchen, or doing something in the wrong way. But, the I’m sorry that was so meaningful was related to my being wrong about or mishandling something. I’m sorry I raised my voice. I should have handled that better. I’m sorry I got after you without really understanding what happened. I should have listened to understand the situation better. I’m sorry I forgot about or minimized that thing that was so important to you.
 
In these cases, I wasn’t sorry because of an accident; I was sorry because I was wrong. And, those are profoundly different in nature.
 
I want my children to know I am human and I am flawed and I am willing to admit it, because I want them to grow up and be the same way. I don’t want my children to look up to me and respect me because they think I have all the answers. I want them to do so because they know I don’t and they know I know I don’t. In other words, I want our relationship to be based on truth and for that to be a prism through which they seek to know and impact the world around them.
 
Along the lines of truth-seeking, I have most recently found myself thrilled by the random, inane, brilliant, innocent, and humbling conversations I am beginning to have with my kids. In these, I have heard myself repeatedly saying: that’s a great question. Again, this isn’t much of a mind-blower under normal circumstances (it’s often just a way to buy time to concoct an answer), but as I heard myself start saying it to my daughters, it felt like the most important thing I could ever say to them. You have questions. Questions are important. You should ask them. You should seek answers. Please, always ask questions!
 
Beyond the gratitude and power and humility of the thank yous and I’m sorrys, I don’t know what I could wish to instill more in my children than an insatiable curiosity and confident exploration of their lives, relationships, and anything and everything else that makes them wonder. I’ve written previously about two of these questions: 1. What is freedom? and 2. What is peace?
 
I obviously don’t have all the answers, but I think validating the question is more important anyway.
 
I am sure there will be more words and phrases that take on new meaning as my children and my parenting continue to grow up.
 
What word or phrase will be next? Well, we will obviously have to wait and see.
 
But, I think it’s a good question.

​Yesterday, my six-year-old daughter asked me why I put up two fingers as I waved to the homeless man selling newspapers on the corner. I initially explained that I was greeting him as a way of saying “thank you” for always waving and always sharing some positive energy as we sit in traffic at the stoplight. The guy does a great job.
 
She pushed: “But, why do you put up two fingers?”
 
Me: “It’s a way of saying peace to the person, but just using your hands.”
 
C: silence
 
Me (reflecting further): “And, it’s something Bugsy (her grandfather, my Dad) used to always do when he was alive. So, I guess I got it from him.”
 
As she pondered my response for what was certainly only a couple of seconds, I was triggered, as I often am, into the flooding memory of my Father and to the realities of the things he instilled in me that I only sometimes recognize as his. Behaviors. Posture. Perhaps a penchant for cursing. My sister says my hands look just like his (I also happen to wear his ring every day).
 
I am particularly aware of his legacy each April, the month of his suicide - April 27, 2006. I always try to write something around this time as some small effort in helping people know they are not alone in living with suicide. Their loved ones were not alone in their struggles with Depression, with sexual abuse, with religious-guilt-turned-self-loathing. These things killed my Dad, and have killed countless others. There are even more of us still living with them.
 
My daughter persisted…
 
C: “But, what is peace, Daddy?”
 
Me (buying time): “Well, baby. That’s a good question…”
 
I muddled through words like happiness and presence and contentment and safety – although I emphasized that it’s not necessarily about comfort. I spoke of its opposites of anxiety and worry and concern – even physical violence in terms I believe she is ready to understand. I stumbled. I repeated myself. At some point, she seemed to accept at least some piece of what I offered as an answer and she stopped pressing.
 
I was less accepting of myself.
 
My answer wasn’t wrong. It was just a mess. But, maybe there’s something in that reality that’s at the core of the idea of peace.
 
In the quiet moments that followed as we continued down the street, my head again returned to my Dad. What a mess! His struggle. His contradictions. His love for others and hatred of himself. The pieces of me that are of him. My empty dreams of him holding my children. The stories and reflections I will share with my kids in hopes they might understand what may simply not be understandable. Will they get it? Will they get him? Will they be angry? Will they be confused? Will they care? Can they love him without knowing him? Can they learn from his life? From his death? Does it matter?
 
And, once again, I returned to peace. My Father is no longer suffering – for me, for us – despite himself. I understand why he committed suicide. It’s all a big fucking mess, but, yes, I am at peace. He is at peace. My family is at peace.
 
So, maybe at its core, peace is just something that lives deep within us and is not definable, recognizable, or understandable by others. Perhaps peace is as unique in definition as its possessor. Maybe peace is best understood as a personal journey and a process that we must commit to for ourselves, and can only hope for others to embark upon for themselves - and we wish them the best.
 
Throw up the two fingers: Peace!
 
So, perhaps this is a better, if still unsatisfying, answer to my daughter’s question:
 
Me: I don’t know what your peace is, baby. I hope every day that I am doing my part to help you define and find it for yourself, deep within yourself. I hope one day when you are older and have lived through some of the brutality and brilliance that life can put upon you, that I can ask you the same question, and you will know what it means to you, even if you struggle with the words to express it.
​

​Fathers of sons,
While your boys may like to be physical and like to wrestle and fight, please help them understand the concept of touch and of the personal boundaries of others as it relates to touch. Please help them know the difference between consensual play and physical violation – whether that’s with you, your partner, their siblings, their best friends, or strangers. Let them know now that they can say “no” and that they must listen when others say “no”. This isn’t about dating culture, it’s about the right of each of us to possess and protect our own bodies. They can and should start learning this now.
 
Fathers of daughters,
While you dote on your girls, please respect them if they say to “stop” when you playfully pat them on the bottom as they run ahead of you up the stairs, or when you tickle them in fun but it’s clear they are no longer having fun. Teach them and show them now that they are in control of their bodies and that “no means no.” Please help them learn the difference between safe and unsafe touching and remind them that they can and should always tell someone if they don’t feel safe. It doesn’t matter if the one doing the touching says they were playing or was a friend or a family member. If they don’t feel safe, they need to know to tell someone now.
 
Fathers of sons,
Please know your sons are watching how you treat others. They see how you speak to and touch your spouse. They observe how you talk with or about your Mom or Sister or Dad or Brother. They listen when you talk on the phone to people at work. They hear what you say to or about people when you yell at the driver in the car who just cut you off, or comment on the looks of the person crossing the street in front of you. In all of these, they hear the difference when you are speaking to and of a woman versus a man, and they will replicate your gender biases without ever knowing it is happening.
 
Fathers of daughters,
Your daughters will not grow up to be princesses. They will grow up to be women who live in a complex and diverse virtual and physical society. They will work and go to school in and navigate an often cruel and sexist world. Treating them as princesses and crafting a narrative that finding a mate is central to their success, that their hair is their most valuable asset, that their clothes are what make them beautiful will cripple their self-image as they get acne, as their bodies change, start successfully or unsuccessfully dating, or, god forbid, they get sick or have a terrible accident that changes their looks and bodies permanently. You must raise your girls to be strong, bold, independent, and resilient women whose sense of self is in their control and not merely the passive result of a genetic trait or financial privilege.
 
Fathers of sons,
Your boys will not be princes surrounded by admiring legions of women looking to be rescued by love, nor super heroes who will save damsels in distress. Your sons will grow up and get to work for and with women of all shapes, sizes, and backgrounds and should know how to respect them for who and what they are. They need to know that they can have heroes who are women. They need to understand that women and men are different but that that does not mean stronger or weaker, better or worse, deserving of respect or not. When your son is on the playground with a girl, don’t thoughtlessly ask if that’s his girlfriend. Let it just be his friend unless he says otherwise. Positively reinforce and model for him healthy, platonic, inter-gender relationships.
 
Fathers of daughters,
When your daughter is on the playground with a boy, don’t thoughtlessly ask if that’s her boyfriend. Let it just be her friend. You too should model healthy, platonic, inter-gender relationships and not perversely sexualize your young daughter’s budding understanding of her relationships with others. If your daughter kisses another kid or holds hands or even says she loves them, remember that those actions don’t represent mature, adult “understandings” of their meaning. My daughter told us she is “in love” with a boy in her kindergarten class, and when asked what she means by that she says he’s nice to her and they like to play together. Leave it at that! That’s all it is.
 
Fathers of sons and fathers of daughters,
Please help your boys and girls know that the genders are not pitted against each other – that they aren’t “teams” to which they either belong or don’t. Help them understand that gender is meaningless in the face of fairness, personal safety, justice, and love. Help them understand that they should stand for these higher values and defend them at all cost, that they should never be silent in the face of their transgression simply because of someone’s gender. Help them build their identities and their sense of self and others on these bigger values, and surround themselves with people who will protect and promote them too.
 
As I wrote this, I realized that my distinctions of message were largely arbitrary between fathers-of-sons and fathers-of-daughters, but the various interpretations are important. We must all teach our children to respect their own bodies as well as others’. We must teach them to value this respect so deeply that they can’t help but speak up when they feel violated or when they see or believe others have been violated. We must overwhelm any possible sense of shame or embarrassment or isolation with a powerful sense of self, of justice, and of doing right by themselves and others.
 
These are merely the musings of a humble and sad and troubled father of three and five year old daughters, who is trying to learn from the tragedies I read about daily and prevent the violation of the women I love; a Dad and Brother and Friend who can’t fathom the actions of these men; the Son of a sexually abused Dad who committed suicide who is scared to death of the prolonged silence of these victims.

Last weekend, my wife and I finally bought our girls (ages 3 and 5) “big girl bikes.” As soon as we got home (after they loaded their babies on of course), we took them up the street to a relatively flat parking lot where they could try them out. They were mostly fearless and quick learners. Clearly, they both had their challenges and stumbles and a couple of minor spills, but I explained to them that those were just part of riding a bike. They believed me, and kept at it. I was very proud and in the back of my mind knew they were learning something they would never forget – that they could always come back to. “It’s like riding a bike.”
 
A few minutes in, I was encouraging them to explore more of the parking lot – not just ride circles around my wife and me. So, I started jogging toward the opposite end of the lot and encouraging them to follow. Well, it turns out that there is a slight down slope on that side of the parking lot, and by the time I knew anything was happening, my five year old had picked up a little speed (we hadn’t mastered breaks yet) and her front tire was hitting one of those concrete blocks that mark parking spaces. The front of her bike popped up into the air (in a wheelie she’ll be trying to do intentionally before long). As it came down, the back tire and training wheels caught the concrete block and stopped the bike dead in its tracks. She flipped up onto the handlebars and tumbled to the left side while the bike went down toward the right. She looked up at me, startled, and got back on the bike.
 
I realized at that moment that we weren’t out there to learn how to ride a bike. We were out there to learn how to fall off one. I beamed at her resilience. She knew her fall was just part of her riding. (She wasn’t physically hurt and was wearing a helmet, for the record.)
 
In the end, the riding part is easy. The difficulty is getting over the fear, the frustration, the disappointment, the pain of a skinned knee or elbow, the feeling of “I can’t do it” that comes when we fall off of a bike. The challenge, the opportunity, is to get back on. Riding a bike is a skill; falling off and getting back on is the real life lesson.
 
I hope as they continue to improve as riders and fall less and less that my girls also continue to push themselves in ways that make them uncomfortable. I clearly don’t ever want my kids to get hurt, but I don’t want them to get comfortable either. Whether its teaching a kid to ride a bike or anything else we do as parents, I think that crafting opportunities for our kids to challenge themselves and fall (fail) safely is the most important thing we can do.
 
As my girls get older and face their inevitable life challenges in work, health, relationships, or anything else, I hope somewhere deep down they will remember: it’s just like falling off a bike.  

In the mid 1970s my parents, then with two young children and pregnant with me, decided they didn’t want to raise their kids in the homogeneous (read all-white) suburbs. And, for some reason, they thought it a good idea to move into a house two doors down from where my father was helping investigate a murder. My Mom told me that Maw (her Mom) cried and cried about our moving to such a terrible part of town. I can just imagine that conversation!

The house cost $9,000, but the banks had redlined the neighborhood so you couldn’t get a loan for more than $5000 to support any renovations. There was a hole in the floor in the dining room, the one room that was actually lived in, that the sole resident had cut to let the water from the leaky roof drain out. There were no sidewalks. There were no stop signs. And, we had a phone booth in the front yard primarily managed by pimps and prostitutes.

Just a short time into their renovations, my parents saw a young, local reporter named Oprah Winfrey and a camera crew in the park across the street apparently reporting on something for the local news station. Excited and hoping to hear a story about the revitalization starting to happen in this part of the city, they tuned in that night to hear something like this:

“Oprah Winfrey reporting: I am standing here today on the most dangerous street in the city of Nashville. Home to crimes ranging from car theft to drug deals, from simple burglary to cold-blooded murder. Today is no different. At approximately 1 PM in broad daylight, a man was shot to death just down the street from where I am standing. Witnesses say that two men, a middle aged, white man with tattoos on each forearm, a large scar on his cheek and a young black male wearing a black trench coat and black stocking cap began fighting. The young black man pulled a gun and shot the other three times in the chest. The confrontation appears to have been drug related. Police are looking for a black male, age 25-35, last seen wearing a black trench coat and running south on eighth toward the James Cayce Homes.”

Ahh, the same stories we would hear for the next 20 years. At one point, we had to change our route coming home from school because of several murders that had happened along it. We could not drive down the street a block from our home because there were crack houses, prostitution, dangerous vacant lots, and people hanging out in the streets.

At one point during their long process of renovation, for which my Dad actually stopped working (and he provided the primary family income which meant we were also broke), my parents returned to the house after several weeks away to find an extension cord running from our house to the neighbors where it was fueling the window unit air conditioning of a 7 apartment slum, with all the windows open, in 90 degree weather.

Residents of these 7 apartments included a Pentecostal preacher and just across the hall a prostitute.

The man in the house across the street would climb up to his third floor attic window and howl like a wolf at anyone walking down the street.

The nursing home a block behind us was closed, but was full of homeless people, and particularly junkies. Theirs were the needles and bottles I avoided when mowing my yard.

Boots lived in the house on the other side of the alley and spent much of his time walking around the neighborhood.

“Hey Boots!” I shouted as I always did despite never receiving a response.

It was OK. Boots was busy. He walked the street with the focus of a CEO working on a deal. Hammering out details, arguing his point, determined to be heard. His worn khaki left pant leg rolled to the knee, once explained to my Mom as being in preparation for a flood, his Tom Landry-style hat perched carefully on his head, and a worn, white button-up recalling a day when Boots was not so thin and frail. I really don’t ever recall laughing or making fun, I just somehow understood that yeah, Boots is talking to his elbow, his left elbow specifically.

He walked in short but determined steps, his heavy black shoes perhaps explaining the nickname and offering a timeline for just how long Boots had been walking the streets and talking to his elbow. His skin camouflaged in the muddled and muted tones of his now off-white shirt and his faded pants. His pulled-up black sock describing the shape of a left leg that was otherwise almost transparent. His face thin and gaunt with wrinkles tight and sharp was more a story of the shadow of his hat than a determining genetic tale.

I knew him by his clothes and his posture in the setting of the sidewalk across the street from my house. I don’t know much more.

If Boots is the earliest “street friend” that I remember, Walter and Flavio are two of the best. Walter and Flavio were drinking buds. Walter was an illiterate WWII veteran who brought his mail to our house for my parents to help him read. I have no idea where his mail was delivered. Flavio was the friendliest, floppiest, drunk you have ever met, and his speech flowed fluidly between Spanish and English.

One Fourth of July, I was shooting fireworks in the park across the street. (The Fourth of July and New Years were always an interesting time as it became a favorite past-time of mine during these seasons to challenge myself to decipher gun fire from M-80’s.) I was shooting bottle rockets that day with a friend from school, one of the few whose parents actually would allow him to spend the night in our neighborhood, and I heard the familiar jingle of Walter’s shopping cart coming up the street. Walter strolled up, his cigarette appeared more stuck in a wrinkle in his face than in his mouth, and parked the cart on the edge of the street.

I wondered if Walter had just grabbed any old cart or if he had done some shopping around. His was one of the shiniest carts that I had seen, no rust, few dents, no remnant cola spills. It did, however, have the textbook front wheel that never touched the ground. It just hovered there, revolving seemingly of its own initiative, never a part of the rest of the cart.

As Walter approached alone, I noticed that Flavio was already passed out cold, sitting up on the wall on the opposite corner from our house. His head sagged like a medicine ball as if his body had just collapsed under its weight. I think if he had been left there long enough, the softness of his broken down leathery skin, the boneless mass of his body would have ultimately melted together leaving some sort of amorphous spillage. But that’s why Walter was there. I think it was his unspoken goal to keep Flavio from dissolving.

“Hey!” Walter squeezed out in a gruff whisper. “Hey, Anderson. Let me see one of those.”
“Sir?”
“Let me see one of those rockets.”
“Oh. Ok. Here you go.”

Walter took a bottle rocket from me and walked slowly over to the chain link fence that defined the boundaries of the park’s softball field. He carefully propped the rocket in its web. By the time he got over there, Walter was so tickled at himself that he could hardly set the rocket straight. I looked at my friend to see if he was all right and he just looked confused. Watching Walter that day was like watching a kid my age who was up to no good and was having a blast at it. He was just one of us.

It took a second, but I soon understood what he was up to. Walter was aiming the rocket at Flavio. He turned to me and winked, grinning a charming toothless half-smile as he held on to his cigarette in the other half. He took the cigarette from his mouth and lit the bottle rocket. It ignited and took off. Fortunately for Flavio, it took one of those unpredictable curves and exploded a good 20 feet from him. Walter tried again. The next one took off and exploded right next to Flavio, about five feet to his left. Walter was growing increasingly tickled, I was laughing but also worried about Flavio, and my friend was still silent and dumbfounded. Third time’s a charm. Walter lit the third rocket and it shot and exploded right between Flavio’s dangled legs, right between the wickets.

Flavio didn’t budge. He remained there with his head bending the trunk of his spine like a ripe fruit unwilling to drop. A body had never looked so heavy while actually remaining upright. It was a delicate balance of physics I couldn’t figure out. To this day, I am not sure that anyone can really be that drunk. I wonder sometimes if Flavio wasn’t just having his own good time with Walter by not letting him win.

There were still other neighbors like Lash who are part of the fabric of my upbringing but who I only knew as part of that fabric. I only knew as a child looking, seeing.

Lash lived on the block behind us. I have no idea if he went by Lash, if my parents just called him Lash or what, but he was as dependable as the morning sun. For the virgin ears, the crack of Lash’s bullwhip muddied the other neighborhood percussion: bass, backfiring cars, fireworks and gunfire. But to me, it simply said, “it’s a beautiful day.” Lash and his bullwhip told you the weather before you could even step outside. If you heard it, the weather must be clear and warm. He stayed wrapped safely behind a chain link fence, never veering more than a half step away from presumably where his parents or caretakers (I never saw them) had planted him early that morning. Or perhaps he planted himself. I don’t know. I never saw him come or go. He was just either there or not. I also never saw anyone else who lived there with him.

Lash had some sort of significant intellectual disability, and I would guess was in his twenties, thirties, forties, who knows. His body showed the signs of someone whose physical and mental limitations had created a structure that was sizable but only temporary. He stood in the yard with his dirtied blue-gray button-up shirt and gray Dickies, softened to the point of pajamas. Lash stood alone with his shoulders slung way back as a counterbalance to a bulging stomach. His black shoes, with only the soles and toes peaking out, appeared to be a good size-and-a-half too large, strings torqued and tied in a strangle hold hoping to maintain their hold on his feet. He stood in the front yard of his house and bull whipped the old hackberry roots bubbling from the ground. No one knew why. At least no one I knew knew why.

In the unknown of his world, the crack of the bullwhip must have been empowering. The energy generated from that raw leather strip, formed in his hand, Lash’s story, his word to the world. Action and reaction. Power. Production. It gave him an edginess, a danger, a virility. The sound of that bullwhip creating a sparkling explosion of color, of adrenaline. The vibration shooting through his body like an electrical shock. He felt every crack that we only heard. It must have been beautiful; he had been doing it for years.

Strangely, I haven’t seen Lash for decades and I still live in the same house. In fact, I haven’t seen anyone come in or out of that house for decades, and other than Lash 25 years ago, maybe ever! And yet, as I was writing this, a new neighbor who lives next door actually told me Lash still lives there with his family! His name is Billy. I am glad to at least know that now, but dumbfounded by the fact the he still lives there, that anyone lives there. Life is strange. (Update: Billy passed away in 2017.)

But, my neighbors like Billy weren’t always just eccentric or mentally challenged. There was a darker side in both perception and reality. The year I was born and the year after my parents bought their house, the Nashville Banner, one of the city’s leading newspapers, wrote the following about our neighborhood of Edgefield: “Out of the gutters, all you winos. Back in your raincoats, you perverts. Edgefield is going respectable.” Nice.

This was my community. These were my neighbors. Some were my friends. Others scared the shit out of me. And, there was no distance from which to stand and just look at them, much less judge them. I had to see them, I was taught to see them, by very diligent and patient parents. I had to see them for who they were to me and my family and my community, not as generic concepts of the poor, the vagrant, or as derelicts or statistics.

I am not trying to romanticize any of this or the brutal example of life that many of these people represented. It was tragic in many ways. The point is that as the white, middle-class, Christian-raised, heterosexual, mentally stable, educated male that I am, I was the odd ball. If you couldn’t see that, you weren’t looking.

I would come to understand years later after my Dad’s struggles with Depression and ultimate suicide that he, in fact, was more akin to our neighbors than I understood as a child. His empathy with their lives, pain, and circumstances was real, and reveals a lot about him and his own struggles.

So, I guess it’s perhaps not shocking that a kid cultivated in this environment would grow up thinking and seeing the world a little differently. So, it’s also probably not a shock that I would find my way to the world of visual art, or it would find its way to me.


Excerpted from: Creating Matters: Reflections on Art, Business, and Life (so far)