California Dreamin'

I was working on a poem for Melissa these past months. It’s not like I put a lot of time into it, and you’ll see that. I just never finished it, never got it right.

The squeaks and groans of sleeping boys
Have been my lullabye.
If I seek their warmth on a winter night,
They make me their apprentice,
Teaching me the tools of life together:
Piling on, woven legs, contented sighs

I don’t even know if there is anymore to it, other than trying to say something about not making room.

I expose the boys to lots of things they probably shouldn’t hear. For example, when they get out their swords, Melissa had to tell me that “eviscerated” is not a word a 4-yr old should know. And maybe Robinson Jeffers is not the best poetry for them…

“But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from
the thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet
there are left the mountains

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant
insufferable master
There is the trap that catches the noblest spirits, that caught—they say—God,
when He walked on the earth”

---Robinson Jeffers, “Shine, Perishing Republic”

Robinsons Jeffers made Big Sur, the atavistically beautiful peninsula south of Monterey, his home. And so that makes me think:

My sister-in-law’s mother, Lynn Grogan, made a great collage for Melissa’s visitation. I hope you got to see it. Each picture has a great story to tell. But one is getting to me. It’s a picture of Sissy on the California Coast, below Santa Cruz. We were out there in ’99, December, a lovely time on the Central Coast. We took a great drive over from San Francisco, HWY 17 over the mountains and to the Coast. Then it was HWY 1 all the way to Cambria and over into the Salinas Valley. I had always wanted to show her Big Sur.

Anyway, the picture captures a moment before a moment. She is sitting on the edge of a cliff. You can see, if you know to look, some thick clouds on the sea. Those clouds were but a few minutes from rolling into the cliff to be shot up and envelop us. I told her to get ready for something cool. We stood there and then we were in the clouds, a cold, misty, magical moment she always loved.

She was just barely pregnant with John then, we found out later.

She Tommy Boy-ed me later on that day. I was on the side of the road peeing and she comes around the corner with the video camera.