Day: August 20, 2016

My daughter Emma called me tonight, and we rushed to pick up the phone, thinking it might be the call. Not yet, but there was news. She’s somewhat overdue and if the baby is not born by the end of the week, the doctors will induce labor. Emma and baby are fine, but they don’t like to wait too long.

Gulp, somehow, and especially with all the activity surrounding Maria’s trip to India, I didn’t feel it was imminent. It is, I better get my head organized around it.

I wasn’t quite prepared for this, it means I will be a grandfather by the weekend. It is no longer an abstract idea, but a very real and imminent happening, a new chapter, for sure. Lots of people are asking me how I feel about having a granddaughter, about being a grandfather. Maria asked me after I got off the phone.

I don’t know, I don’t think I want to know yet, I think I want to wait and see how it feels, rather than being told how it will feel or trying to guess. I don’t know, that’s the truth. This is new.

I told Maria I had go write about it to figure out how I feel, so here I am.

I do know some things.

I am very happy for Emma. She is building a good life for herself – love, work, friendship, community – and I think she will be a fine mother. I think having a daughter will open her up and bring her to a new and very powerful dimension of her life, it will be even more rich and grounded than it is now.

And I feel this is already bringing us closer. Em and I had some challenging times after my divorce in 2008, it shocked and upset her, as is to be expected. All of that is gone, I feel a very strong and open connection to her now. This is already bringing us closer, and that is a great gift to me.

Emma and her husband Jay share their lives and responsibilities, and she will neither be alone in this, nor will she be married to a partner who won’t want to do his share. All good.  She is surrounded by close and wonderful friends. Her mother and she are close, and Paula lives nearby. She will have plenty of support, I am sorry I can’t provide more.

Emma is already on leave from her job at Sports Illustrated, she and Jay are ready, I remember the strange period when we were waiting to have her, it felt like floating in space, we were between things.

Being a planner, which I am not, Emma was calling to prepare me to get ready. I wouldn’t go down to New York right away, she and Jay will need some time to adjust to this new reality, I might just go down to say hello to my granddaughter and daughter – that sounds wild – and then return for a slightly longer stay.

I am excited, just not prepared to turn myself over to it. Lots of people assure me that I will be bowled over by this, but the truth is I don’t get bowled over by things any more than Emma does. She is quite level-headed about it all.

If I develop a powerful connection with this new person in my world, it will happen holistically and over time. I know myself, and I don’t generally get blown away by things. Many people have told me this will alter my life, but I tend to resist that, either because I don’t like to be told what I will feel, or because it unnerves me. I like my life, I don’t want it altered or upended.

Emma and I live very different lives in very different places and I don’t believe my life will be dramatically altered or that she will be my sun and my moon. If that happens, that will be great. It’s just not really the way I am built, too wary, I guess and live too much in my head. But I won’t know how I feel until I see my granddaughter a few times and get to know her a bit, then I will open up to it, I imagine. I think I just spent too many years being careful.

I very much want Maria to be as much a part of this as she wishes to be, I imagine it will be an odd situation for her in some ways. We are very strong together and I always appreciate and love her presence in my life. I supposed my complex childhood will come into play here.

I saw so much damage done to children in my family that there is something frightening to me about parenting a new child, something embedded in my consciousness, not something that is rational or justified here. It is too easy to mess up a kid. So I will work to remember that my life is my life, it is not anybody else’s life.

And it is surely not my business. I have learned a lot about boundaries, they are my friend, always. This is Emma’s life, it is not mine.

I will work to be open to this remarkable new experience, and allow it to reveal itself to me. I’ve never done this before, and have few  pre-conceptions about it in my head. I hope to feel it, not plan it. Emma says I am great with children, and that is not something I ever heard from her before. I hope it is true.

So the time has come. One of these days soon, I will be on the train to New York City to meet this person I imagine will open my heart up a bit. My daughter’s daughter. Wow.

I hope she comes to visit the farm soon and see the animals. I think it is a great place for a kid. I hope she comes soon before I am too old to run her around and do chores with her. I hope she’ll have the chance to get to know me a bit. We will not be deeply entwined in each other’s lives, not for too long.

I will be 80 when she is eleven.

Perhaps she’ll want to work with the dogs herding sheep.

Emma never much connected to my life up here, although she appreciates it intellectually and wants me to be happy.

I believe she wants her  daughter to love it up here, even if she didn’t And then there is my life with Maria. Having fun with my granddaughter could be yet another wonderful thing we learn to share together. There is no one with a bigger heart.

If you try to follow the presidential campaign in the news, or or cable TV, (which is not really the news at all), you have probably noticed that there are only two sides, left or right, liberal or conservative.

In the last 10 or 15 years, the craven corporations that now practice what was once called journalism have abandoned the idea of taking positions or offering their idea of the truth, they simply present every trend, story, pronouncement or controversy as a conflict between the left and the right. Civic issues instantly become yet another argument that explains nothing, helps no one, and clogs up our political and legislative system like a cheap toilet in a run night gas station.

The very idea of the journalist is fading, journalists are pre-packaged commentators and screamers, their job is to add to the din, not cut through it.

It was once considered journalism’s right to find people with expertise and get them to explain things to the rest of us. Journalists are now mostly trained to check Twitter feeds and argue, not think, and the public has followed suit.

A dysfunctiona, seething man-child like Donald Trump would never have gotten near the presidency just a few short years ago, today 40 per cent of the American public loves him and thinks he is actually going to fight for them.

There are a lot of reasons people might wish to vote for Trump, one of them is that he is angry all the time, and the two-dimensional system that has taken over our political system – there is no statement or event that is not an argument now, this is the seeding ground of polarization – makes almost everyone angry, the left or the right.

Could it really be true that there are only two ways to see any and every political issue in America. Check out the BBC News site, it is interesting to see that stories are presented by reporters and commentators, there is plenty of diversity of opinion, but every story is not jammed into the narrow geography of the left and the right.

There are many ways to see the world, very few of them are on cable news. If you live in the middle, as I do, it is getting lonely. One friend is not speaking to me because I have written sharply about Donald Trump, another stopped speaking to me because I didn’t agree that Hillary Clinton is a murderer and criminal.

Will there be any place for me next time around?

It doesn’t seem to bother any of the people who label themselves so enthusiastically, nor does it suggest much in the way of personal responsibility that both the left and the right, the liberals and the conservatives seem quite paralyzed by what I would considered the paramount issues of our time:  persistent and growing poverty and income inequality, the destruction of land and people by corporations and wars, the diminishment of work and security, the Frankenstein and outrageously cruel system of health care, the endangerment of what some might call life itself by our obsession with wars and by the rapidly expanding corporate industrialism.

The runaway corporate expansion and intrusion in out campaign system is destroying the integrity of our legislative system and is no longer distinguishable from it.

I don’t see myself as a political person, at least not until this year, but I think it is true at the moment that how you vote is who you are.

It seems to me that we have devolved into a sort of teenage culture of wishful thinking and foot-stomping, victimization and resentment. The two-label way of thinking is in many ways responsible for this, it means it so easy for people to hate the other.

Politics is really becoming a culture of blame and outrage, not of resolution or advocacy.  Our media seems to have fully bought into the right-left idea. It certainly makes life easier for them and takes them off the hook.

Whoever succeeds in blaming the other label for the greatest number of things, whether they are responsible for them or not, wins. In fact, when you have a left and a right as the only two choices, no one is responsible for accomplishing anything, just for gathering the best poll data – essentially, a list of who is left and who is right – and winning.

And as a consequence, no one is responsible for anything  other than proving the blind adherence to labels.

Since every story and issue and happening is filtered through these two narrow and spectacularly unsuccessful prisms, there is no longer any such thing as problem resolution, only stagnation, polarization rage and frustration, the perfect trough for someone like Donald Trump to come along and exploit.

I am a creature of the middle, and there are no panel experts for us on cable news or in the political parties.I don’t love the left or the right, neither one has ever quite fit me.

The middle, as we are told, is shrinking, we are becoming a distinct and powerless minority.  I hardly know anyone in the middle any longer.

Something about being patronized and labeled and taken for granted seems to appeal to people, maybe because like journalists, nobody has to think any more. If it’s on the left, some people like it, if it’s on the right, others people like it. It’s the best way to get dumb about politics in a hurry. You simply parrot what others tell you.

Neither side ever listens, changes its mind, surrenders or negotiates. I believe everyone who puts a label on themselves or me is undermining the core idea of democracy, which is a peaceful mixing of ideas that ends up with the best possible solution. In a real democracy, no one side wins all the time, you just do the best you can for as long as you can.

I am often in disagreement with these two sides, they seem shallow and constipated to me, incapable of boldness or creativity or inspiration. They do little more than declare their pre-conceived positions. I especially disagree with both the left and the right when they use or misuse the great power of government and money or violence to determine, design and enforce the moral responsibilities of people.

Both the left and the right seem to have decided what all of our moral choices should be, from going to the bathroom to how we die to having a child to voting dreading law enforcement. They have fixed positions for moral responsibilities, but I don’t see many people taking responsibility for their own moral choices anywhere.

Liberty to me is about making our own choices insofar as it is possible, not surrendering them to government or a political party.

I am waiting for a label that understands that both sides are in perpetual collusion with the corporate industrialists, who have trampled the ground, who have destroyed work, the essential structures of family and community and corrupted the functions of legislative government.

I am not  hearing the left and the right fighting for that ground, and the middle ground, where I live, is in danger of being no ground at all. Perhaps the growing movement to expand the voting rights of independent voters can help the vanishing middle. Although I have to wonder if that isn’t a label as well.

I feel like I am lost in America this year, my voice and place fading as these two utterly unsatisfactory choices are ever more thrust upon us. No idea can live more than a few seconds before it is sucked into the murky maw of conflict. There are so many good ideas and systems and ideologies in the world, it is sad that the people who embrace these shallow labels  are giving up the most precious thing any of us have been given, the very idea of liberty – the right to think for ourselves.

I’m  lost in the middle, but I’m  staying there.

I told Red to get the sheep away from the pony, who was getting annoyed by them pressing in on  him. I said, “hey, Red, get the sheep away from Chloe,” hardly the whistles and short commands of the herding dogs on TV.

I didn’t realize until later that Red, who did move the sheep away from Chloe, had no command like “get the sheep away from the pony,” he simply grasps what I mean. This is happening more and more, even with Fate.

Dogs, like other animals, can pick up our meaning and strong some words together.

So the sheep story got more complicated. Izzy and Rosemary are two beautiful Romney wool sheep,  I have been writing about the one Romney ewe still in need of a home, and yesterday we learned that there are two Romney ewes in need of a  home, both beautiful and one of them is a jumper.

Then we learned that there is a a fertile ram has been with then for at least two months, and while the people who have them have seen no signs of mating activity, that means nothing. I’ve had lambs a half dozen times and I rarely, if ever, see mating activity. But you can bet that it happens.

And to top it off, if these two ewes are pregnant, I’ll lay even money on them giving birth around the time Maria sets off for Calcutta in the middle of winter. I’ve seen this movie before, I can write the script from memory.

The rescue Romneys have re-configured our lives with sheep. Their wool is especially beautiful, and Maria loves selling yarn to her customers. I am not keen on lambing in winter, but it’s hard for us to leave these beautiful sheep in distress, they badly need a home. We will resolve this by Monday.

I sometimes think of Red as my angel dog, he fits into my life so purposefully and gracefully. I thought of this this morning when I went out to mow the lawn, spewing grass and twigs all over the place. Red always sits about 20 feet from me, he moves when the mower gets too close, but never goes near the street or out of my sight.

He sits quietly, watching and waiting. All he asks is to be near me, and he almost always is. Red has the spirit and bearing of an angel, he is ever sweet and patient, strong and tough when I need him to be. He is a beautiful and truly selfless creature, he is always there for me. I think he may well be an angel come to earth to keep an eye on me.