Rethink Thanksgiving

Maybe this will be my new Thanksgiving tradition — trying to change it.

Maybe I'll trot this turkey to the fore each  year to urge people to rethink the holiday. It'll take time before change gonna come.

After all, Jon Carroll doesn't expect to transform holiday charity in one go. That's why each year the San Francisco Chronicle columnist writes an entertaining variation on the same idea, which he calls the Untied Way. He proposes a charity of purest efficiency, calling on people simply to withdraw money from their ATM accounts (as much as is comfortable) and amble down the street, distributing the $20s to those who ask. Givers, Carroll says, should give without favor or fear whether recipients might misspend the gift. Here's Carroll's 2012 appeal. Slowly, slowly, I think, he's winning converts.

So it will be, I suppose, with my Rethink Thankgiving™® campaign.

My proposal is simple: Thanksgiving is for giving thanks; it is not for eating turkey.

We think it's for turkey. All our media perpetuates this conclusion. Lord knows National Public Radio, my daily companion, talks turkey. And talks and talks and talks. Radio doesn't do food very well, but NPR is undeterred, betraying its patrician sensibilities on all its various and sundry shows (hell, Science Friday!) for the Haute Cuisine that should be Thanksgiving. Heaven forfend your turkey come out dry! Worse than scabs and boils!

Tomorrow, I'm sure, I'll have to hear Susan Stamberg's goddamn family cranberry relish recipe (sounds awful! tastes terrific!) on Morning Edition. Again. But I digress.

Executing Rethink Thanksgiving©™ will be difficult but also daring adventure for all willing to try it. It'll take a month of Thanksgivings — maybe a year of them — to change any minds, and once changed, what will they do with Thanksgiving?

Give thanks, of course! Which can — and should — take many forms.

Now, though, it takes one form, and it's often not for the giving of thanks.

Editor's note: Please, for god's sake, don't get me wrong. I am not saying, "Don't eat turkey!" If turkey and trimmings and tradition are the way you give and share thanks, then give it, by all means. Enjoy!

A lot of people this time of year hanker for Thanksgiving — conditioned to it, perhaps — and the smells and crisp air spur memories and longing, and some people play touch football with old friends home from break, etc. etc. etc. I get it.

What I'm saying is that if Thanksgiving means solely the construction and deconstruction of a meal based around a turkey, do something else to give thanks.

I'm not anti-turkey. I'm pro thanks.

Many times I watched my mom go through the Six Stages of Thanksgiving. You're probably familiar with them.

First came Hope, the buoyant deliverance that This Year Will be Different Though All its Parts Will Be the Same, that the bosom of family would resemble the ideal in Technicolor™© on the TV.

Stage 2: Resolve, as the wave of work involved for The Day rose to its crest, the weight of it become a vertical wall leaning forward. Loud sighs issued and kitchen drawers opened and closed in quick succession.

Industry was Stage 3, the surfing of said wave, in various bowls of cold and wet and steaming and whipped foods going through their own stages of being cooked and prepared.

Next came Anxiety, as the wave of work finally crested to crash into ruins and too-cold, not-enough, burned-through substances, and no amount of help or getting out of the way would usher success.

Stage Five was Recrimination for the expectation of others to have this feast on the table in the first place. Asking why Thanksgiving dinner was to be eaten at 3 p.m. anyway was ill-advised at this stage. Nor did helping help.

The final stage was Detente, as mom burned slowly at the table  and we all made every attempt to show appreciation for the dinner and defuse any chance that dad might say something to reignite a volcano. In all the meal, so much turkey and creamed beans with bacon and glorified rice and stuffing and cranberry relish in the shape of the can it came in and potatoes and gravy and crescent rolls, got eaten in 22 minutes, mostly in silence.

That's not Thanksgiving. That's what many families and friends do, but that doesn't make it Thanksgiving. And so tense. So tense. 

Thanksgiving needn't even be a meal, though meals make it a good reason to gather whom you should thank. Thanksgiving need be time and space.

My model for Rethink Thanksgiving is a walk in the park with sandwiches for the meal. Homemade, from the sandwich shop — cheese and crackers! Soup! — it doesn't matter. Just time together.

But that's just an example. Thanksgiving can take a multitude of forms.

The keys are (1) gathering or being gathered, and (2) having a shared expectation of Giving Thanks.

When I was in fifth or sixth grade I composed a prayer that I read at the Thanksgiving table for grace. It was appreciated, but we are not a people given to do such things. I think we secretly wanted to be such people but did not know the first thing about how to give or receive thanks in that way. I felt embarrassed, not by anything anyone did or didn't do, because I know my family loved and supported me, even for trying a homemade heartfelt grace. Mostly I felt embarrassed because it wasn't something we did.

Thanks should be the high point of Rethink Thanksgiving®™. No one has to make a gesture of thanks, but everyone should know he or she can, and it will be returned in kind.

My point: Give thanks. Be thankful for what you have, for the people who make your life what it is. Gather those people around if you can. If you can't, give thanks in other ways: A phone call, a donation, an act of generosity to those who could use one. Maybe that act, that donation, is a turkey, but it doesn't have to be.

Our expectation for a high feast and more food than we can justify only intensifies our divisions: The haves have in abundance, the have-nots want for this one day what the haves have. Food lockers around the country struggle mightily to fulfill that want, and we donate if we can to assuage our separateness, but the other days go on, the divisions remain, just less visible.

Rethink.

What doesn't kill you

A flow chart chronicling good times …

For the record, I didn't go to junior high with Kelly Mills. But really I did.

Because you did too. You went to junior high with me and I with you. We all went to the same junior high, the same special hell, the same goddamned gaping ulcerated hole that marks the major flaw in the U.S. public education system.

Why, in the name of holiness, would adults remove kids from elementary school and put them on a separate campus for two years, there to stew in their own pubescent juices, their id hanging out for all to see,  barely living hair triggers of rage and uncertainty and painful bone growth and sex and cruelty?

And I count myself one of the lucky survivors. I remember some wonderful people who just came apart during that time. Not that junior high caused it, but junior high didn't help.

(Turns out someone took credit for the junior high system. His name was William Alexander, an educator who thought middle graders' needs were being neglected, so the "father of American middle school" ushered in the separate campuses. Penal colonies, more like.)

Kelly Mills last week captured life in junior high perfectly in the San Francisco Chronicle blog "The Poop." I love the photo published with it, a still from the British movie version of William Golding's Lord of the Flies, itself the ideal metaphor for every poorly supervised school recess everywhere in America.

Mills wrote the blog because she was sending her daughter off to middle school (the penal colonies' accepted name now); though Mills thought her sociable kid would adjust, she couldn't help but tumble backward in memory of her own junior high days.

Hers was a time of vicious and mercurial cliques, best friends who inexplicably and instantaneously ostracized her, and merciless mocking. A fitness trainer, Mills said all but one of her staff (and that one went to school overseas) harbored the same bitter memories; men remembered being bullied and beat up. All recalled body issues that were only magnified by ridiculous PE uniforms.

Though her daughter reports students are more tolerant and less openly homophobic than in my generation, the mockery via social media is more insidious: an especially heartless kind of target marketing.

I remember tense bus rides similar to this toon, in which bullies pestered and poked and hit until they got me to react, then turned the tables as if I had threatened them, which escalated usually into hollow threats to beat me down once I got off the bus. The bus drivers usually did nothing except drive the bus. Like Mills said, I felt largely on my own.

My PE teacher made me clean up my vomit after my first mile run, and for most of the seventh grade and half of the eighth, I tried to will myself sick on the days we ran, and couldn't eat scrambled eggs again for another 10 years. I made my parents heartsick begging them to let me stay home.

(He was the same teacher who ridiculed me for pointing out his accounting error that incorrectly gave me a presidential fitness award.) 

By eighth grade I slimmed down and had enough strength to run and eventually run fast — fast enough to delude myself into believing I could make the 1976 Olympic team. Proof alone we were unstable individuals who should not have been shunned.

I undermine the good stuff: Mrs. Coffin's drama class, especially the improv sessions … Mrs. Burch's choir class, even though her style of inspiration was to scream louder (now I wish I had taken drama and choir in high school) … Mr. Lynch's leadership history where we studied the legislative process and even took a week trip to San Francisco and Sacramento to present bills we had written (though it came at the cost of the U.S. history we would have been studying at the time) … Mr. Beebe's hiking club. So many other teachers and adults I'm leaving out; most of them had guts and heart.

Mills found similar to like, but I agree with her on this point:

You still couldn’t pay me enough to go back and repeat that time in my life.

In fact, when I was a substitute teacher I strenuously avoided middle schools. Nothing has changed. Much is worse.

On one assignment, another substitute teacher volunteered to guide me to my classroom. He spent the entire walk explaining what animals these kids were (he had subbed in the same class before) and how I need to establish my dominance right away if I wanted to survive the day.

Along our walk, I could hear teachers screaming — yes, screaming! — at students. Out of the open doors I could hear teachers cutting down individual students for the amusement, terror and relief of others unpicked on.

The school was named after a state lawmaker. I think maybe he died from the heartache of knowing his name graces a glorified juvenile detention facility in his beloved city.

My class turned about to be a dozen students who didn't speak English very well. Not an animal in the bunch. One spoke Vietnamese, the rest Spanish. In what little Spanish I know, I told the majority I don't speak Spanish very well but I'm here to help. Help me, please, I said. We spent the day working together, no trouble, no screaming, no frustration … and I learned some more Spanish.

Vice principals would walk into my classroom at this school, talking through megaphones, with some odd idea they were calming the students for me at 80 decibels.

On another time, same school, attempting to teach math where students had only enough textbooks for every three to share (and they couldn't take the books home), one kid sat in the middle of the rows, a man-child king, letting his court attend to him. He ruled; I was a seventh grader again, a big pimply scared knot of intestines.

I had to work around this kid, picking off his court one by one to attend instead to their work.

Something about the man-child seemed familiar, and I placed him later in the day when he returned to retrieve something. He was a little fireplug of a four-year-old nine years before, when I was coaching Junior Giants baseball in our neighborhood and his mom begged me to sign up her son even though he wasn't old enough. We let him play; he was overjoyed.

When I reminded the man-child, a big goofy smile took over his dull menacing face. "Oh, yeah! How you doing, Coach Turner?"

He might be a high school senior now, might have mellowed a bit, might have stopped being a big jerk. High school was a better time for me (though not for many), a time for settling down and caring less about what others thought of you.

A time for going your own way.

Yeah, you couldn't pay me to go back.

(It just occurred to me that maybe that was old Bill Alexander's intent. He wanted us to face all that social and biological anarchy away from society so we'd learn the hardest way how to toughen up and mellow out. It's the most pervasive kind of conspiracy involving teachers and administrators and parents, to give us something to have to live through. Good ol' teachers and administrators and parents …)

Close to the bone

Our daughter: Mercurial, second on the scene,
instantaneously disenchanted with the status quo;
wanted at least an equal share in everything,
but wouldn't turn down getting more …

Peter Hartlaub socked me in the gut last week — quite a trick considering he was more than two hours away.

Dropped me to the floor, just the same.

As pop culture critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, Hartlaub blogged about what he might have done differently as a parent (read it here if you must pull yourself away, but just for a wee moment …)

Peter's children are quite young; so is Peter, for that matter, but he often writes about events that cross my life path, and tells me things this outsider has always wondered about the Bay Area, where he grew up.

Our son: First born, adopting a
wait-and-see approach to life;
he'd grow out of it …

In his blog "The Poop," about all things parenting, Hartlaub mused about his few regrets as a dad, and invited readers to lay bare their own shortcomings, in a cheery, casual, public manner.

Finding the usual difficulty trying to add comments to Hartlaub's blog via the Chronicle's website, I'll respond here instead.

(Distracting digression: Critiquing pop culture must be exhausting. One would have to live it, first of all, and I'd find that tiring enough. I couldn't do it. I was sports editor for my college newspaper once and could barely get through that, suffering the ironic affliction of not being a sports fan; even my sports column was called "I Don't Wanna.")

Hartlaub's topic touched off a tsunami of emotions in me, and I returned hard to the moments, intense in themselves, when we first sent each of our kids off to college.

All in a rush at those moments, I wondered if I had done what I/we could to have prepared them. I wandered frantically about in my head, searching for the wrong turns and hinky paths I took as a dad, searching where I might have gone better instead.

Our kids are all right, in many senses, more despite me than because of me; they're blessed beyond me with ideas and ambitions and their own voices and minds; I'd been more like a bumper car rink in their lives.

Like Hartlaub, I've had parenting regrets; here are his, and I'll add a bit to the list.

Hartlaub wrote, "If I could do it again I would …"

• Teach my sons more of the fundamentals … Gifted at couch forts and kite flying, Hartlaub said he wishes he had been better at teaching bike riding, baseball catching, shoe tying and the like.

I was the opposite, more apt to coach and teach than to model childlike behavior. I was born a middle-aged man.

• Build a treehouse … Hartlaub recalls his dad having built him a loft when he was a small child. This is the splurgiest of splurges for kids, but I'm sorry I didn't do this. Not that I lacked plans. They're in a manila folder in my file cabinet, and if not they're still tattooed on my brain.

It would have been a treeless house, though, built on the ground with a deck/quarter deck/mountain cliff about five feet off the ground, accessible by stairs and/or rope. The house would change as the kids grew, becoming a homework nook as its childhood charms began to elude them. Finally, it would become my office, where I would have moved all my drawing tools and books from the back of the dining room and front of the laundry room of our first house.

A treehouse is the best bad idea (or the worst good idea): It's a monument to the flush of love parents feel, that they would invest in a structure that would probably not get much use even at the peak of treehouse-loving childhood, and would molder (which is why I planned the house I never built to change use over time).

As years pass, parents look at the treehouses and remember building them, remember the moments that may or may not have happened there; children see the old places and apply the same shining faulty memory. I have two cousins who had a tree fort — no more than a well-built but simple redwood floor with thick redwood planks that tilted out slightly to create low walls — in an oak tree on their property. I'll always remember it as a refuge for scarfing junk food, far from the intrusion of health-conscious parents.

• Yell less: "Not a lot less," wrote Hartlaub. "My kids needed to know who was in charge." But he said he could have cut it down by a third, and attributed much of his yelling to being too lazy to find a better solution.

This was the brunt of Hartlaub's stomach punch. Boy, how I overdid the yelling! Working from home, I had the school pickup duties and more of the day-to-day school volunteer work and general errands. For many, many reasons, our kids' school stressed me out, and I yearned for our kids to do their best and toe the line, when I really should have chilled out. Too many times I took my stress out on them. I'm sure other parents could see me driving away from school, red faced and shouting at the windshield as if in some shadow-play road rage, when instead I was mowing down one of our children with a spoken assault for a missed assignment or misbehavior. They'd get upset (surprise!) and feel horrible, and I would only turn up my volume and invective. What a rotten guy I was!

Were I to take back time, I'd erase those horrible moments. All of them.

No excuses, but parents need parenting class. Such a class carries the stigma of being for unfit or unprepared parents, but we are all unfit and unable. Some parents have innate notions about being good at it, but most of us, despite generations upon generations of precedent, rely on narrow advice or, worse, on our own advice. The worst of the worst advice: "I'm not going to do what my parents did!" Fine, but what are you going to do instead?

Did my parents yell at me? Sure. Did I reject that for myself? I'm certain. But there I was, filling a tiny car with hot air and hot words, withering my children, consenting them to yell at their children.

Better ways exist. Parents need to know and practice — before they become parents.

• Enter the Super-Crafty Halloween Costume Contest … Hartlaub laments not being more crafty with his kids. Ehh. Hard to side with him on this, since it's a floating target. I was far too crafty when the kids were younger, designing Halloween costumes that my wife had to create, creating birthday cake monstrosities that people had to eat. When our kids were old enough to have a say-so, homespun could not compete with Power Rangers, and I think we were all happy to accede to childlike wishes.

• Buy the Merritt Bakery hamburger cake … Hartlaub refers specifically to a signature Bay Area dessert, but means those grand luxuries parents sometimes shell out for on children, sparking lifelong memories.

I'm parting ways with Hartlaub here, too; I'm not knocking, just questioning its worth. My parents took my sister and me to Disneyland a couple of times (I remember being very sick both times, not their fault), and to Yellowstone and Glacier national parks, and camping. Though I remember moments from each, my default memories are of my mom volunteering in the snack bar at the Little League field (I just thought it was cool she would do that, and sell kids baseball cards) and my dad walking with me out to a space in the woods on the edge of a road my sister and I dubbed Turner's Corner, a three-foot shelf of compacted yellow sand that seemed like Ali Baba's Cave to us. My dad had recently stopped working the 3 p.m.-to-midnight shift out at the Air Force base, and was able after a long absence to spend afternoons with us.

I gave dad the grand tour of Turner's Corner (I doubt it resembled much to him) and then we followed a black wasp back home, watching it fly perfect right angles, wondering why it did so, its wings flashing electric blue over the low sage.

It cost nothing and meant everything.

To Hartlaub's list, I'd add one big, bold item:

• Less structure, more time … As with many families, ours was filled with school, Cub Scouts, Girl Scouts, Little League Baseball, girls' softball, swim team, water polo team, rec soccer teams, drama, dance class — even at a glance, a dizzying and daunting array of commitments designed, I suppose, to enrich their lives. Too often they stunted our family life instead; I've written before about coaching and leading Scouting, and how instead of enjoying time together, I just rained another level of anxiety on all concerned.

Given another chance, I'd like to have cut out most of that, maybe even all of it (maybe our children would disagree). We didn't give our kids enough time to play and imagine and create and Not Do Anything, so fearful of what would happen if we left them to their own devices or let them out into the neighborhood (the terrible bane of a lot of parents nowdays; my generation has barely managed to keep the state parks open, and lost the neighborhoods completely).

I never showed our kids Glacier National Park, a place they must see, a place we all must see before we lose the glaciers too. I would have gone to more museums, or more random trips just to see what was around the corner; our son's third grade teacher marveled once at all the museums we had taken him too, but the truth is he held the few trips in vivid recall.

I can hope our kids find something instructive in this as they set out in life. 

The irony: Now my wife and I have a lot of time.

And a young man shall lead them

Asked what he'd do to change Boy Scouts, a young man I've known for several years, moments before he would become an Eagle Scout, said this week that he would make scouting more inclusive, allowing scouts and leaders who are gay and transgender.

It's a stock question in the formal board of review, the final step in a Scout's advancement to Eagle.

Scouts usually answer in practical observation over their many years in their troop — add or subtract a merit badge, make the uniforms less geeky, raise incentives to drive scouts outdoors more often, things like that.

Here was a scout seeking boldly what the Boy Scouts of America will not give.

BSA on Tuesday reaffirmed its ban on gays, after a two-year study of its policy.

The issue has weighed on my mind for many years, and that's where it stuck until this week.

Scouting still wrestles with the issue of protecting its scouts. Unfortunately, the records are rife with adults who found scouts easy prey for pederasty. Sexual crimes against scouts still appear in the news, many of them from years ago, though some ongoing.

I give scouting credit for taking steps to protect kids, because since I joined Boy Scouts as a leader with my son, the organization has implemented clear, sensible steps for which leaders must provide vigilance over scouts' safety. At least two adults must be present at all times on scout activities, for example; scouts can't sleep in the same tent as an adult unless the adults are their parents or guardians (and in our troop, scouts bunk with other scouts and adults bunk in distinct places opposite the campsite). Scouting has also imposed prohibitions on hazing and introduced campaigns against bullying, to protect scouts from other scouts.

But the ban on gays is a major misstep, always has been. Somehow, scouting seems to have conflated homosexuality with pedophilia, as if gays and lesbians would run amok among a sea of boys.

As a corollary, scouting implies that allowing only heterosexual adults guarantees children's safety. Uh huh.

Though I've often joked that scouting is stuck in 1955, offering skits and jokes in its literature that scouts wouldn't have found funny even then, here it is truly mired in the past, and ignores what America really is and what it comprises.

It devalues the rapidly changing social and family structure in the country. It rejects the idea that people who happen to be gay could offer insights and wisdom and scouting instruction too. Snow camping, rock climbing, snorkeling, canoeing, hiking — the outdoors is not the exclusive realm of heterosexuals. It should be for all, and scouting, which touts ideals of citizenship and leadership, should reflect that.

I get it; allowing gays and lesbians in scouting is controversial. It runs counter to the doctrine of many churches that support scouting. In his book On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of America's Youth, Jay Mechling argues that allowing gays in scouting would create logistical problems as churches that often support troops, often at no cost, would close their facilities because a change in policy would violate their beliefs.

In a Los Angeles Times story, reporter Molly Hennessy-Fiske quotes Mechling's response to BSA's decision: 

Jay Mechling, a professor of American studies at UC Davis and a Boy Scouts volunteer, called retaining the policy on gays "a business decision based on religious pressure."

"That's not to say there aren't leaders in the Boy Scouts who feel strongly about morality and homosexuality. But when they see a lot of the troop leaders are churches, they go the direction they think is going to be healthiest for having the most boys registered," Mechling said.

Mechling, 67, is an Eagle Scout who spent 25 years researching the organization for his 2004 book, "On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American Youth."

He said he saw firsthand how the Mormon Church became entwined with Boy Scout leadership, sponsoring troops and camps in the San Gabriel Valley and Catalina Island. He also saw troops and councils elsewhere in the state that quietly accepted gay leaders and members.

"There really is a policy of 'don't ask, don't tell,' because the official Boy Scouts policy is that people's sexuality is not what the Boy Scouts is about," Mechling said.

Though it's a practical consideration — the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, for example, endorses Boy Scouts as a primary activity for boys in its churches — right now many public venues, citing scouting's violation of civil rights by discriminating against gays, have closed their facilities to scouts.

Scouts are supposed to acknowledge God in some way, and in my experience an adult leader here and there will help scouts earn special medals for development of their faith, and sometimes scouting events will stage ecumenical Scout's Own services. For the most part, scouting doesn't press scouts or leaders for an exhibition or testament to their faith. Many troops are sponsored instead by civic organizations — Kiwanis, Elks, Moose and the like — which don't necessarily press an expression of scouts' religions.

Though not privy to scouts' conversations, I doubt that sexuality comes up a lot. Some scouts may use "gay" to mean "lame," and we adults tell them they can't use the label in the troop, nor call others names.

Scouts are mostly interested in getting outdoors, and we don't get out nearly enough. That's where scouts, if they so choose, can develop their faith, but it's certainly where they can think deep thoughts and consider quietly who they are. It doesn't require believing in God or being straight.

I've wrangled with expressing my thoughts on this, wondering what others might think. Short of signing an online petition supporting a deposed Cub Scout leader who is lesbian and a mom of a Cub Scout, I've done nothing.

Then a scout I know spoke up, on the precipice of becoming an Eagle Scout, about the major issue that divides so many about what otherwise is an enriching and ennobling organization. So I join him in his beliefs.

It is such a small thing. Scott Ostler, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote this week about the Penn State scandal, decrying those who salute his courage in writing about how football coach Joe Paterno and top administrators allowed Jerry Sandusky to sexually assault boys rather than expose the football program to bad publicity.

"Zero courage is involved," Ostler wrote. "One hundred percent of the courage in this entire debacle is found in one person: (Jerry Sandusky's) Victim No. 1. There's your courage."

I feel the same; my handwringing is for naught. The courage goes to the new Eagle Scout, and scouts and leaders across the country who risk their quality of life seeking change in an organization that needs changing.

Here's to the crazy ones*

Shawn, drawn on a Mac …

For my 100th blog post, it's fitting to thank Steve Jobs, who made this blog possible.

Co-creator of Apple Inc., Steve Jobs died last week of pancreatic cancer.

(I know, I'm the opposite of news.)

The best descriptor for Jobs is "visionary." He dreamed and imagined what might be. Of course, many people do this, but Jobs was able to marshal minds and hearts, collecting other dreamers to turn his and their dreams into tools. Without which, it turns out, we cannot function. Or think we can't, anyway. 

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford states Jobs' place in the world even more strongly: He effected change around the world, from the way products look to the way people work.

Without such dreams made real, I would not be using an Apple iMac right now to get on the Internet and fashion this blog post. Or attaching this art, which I drew on a Mac.

I don't really admire Jobs for these manna, though. I'm a reluctant consumer of the products he caused to be; though I've owned several Mac computers, each one came to me only after it was absolutely necessary to part grievously with my money for it, after this computer broke irreparably or that one couldn't handle the ever-changing operating system requirements.

The first Apple I got was a clone (geez, remember those? Jobs, deposed early from the company he created, eventually returned and almost immediately killed the clones) from a freelance graphic designer who was moving on to an agency job. I got the computer because all I had was an electric typewriter, which was an infeasible tool for the graphic designer clients with whom I supplied copywriting. Back then I dragged the massive text file onto a floppy disk (one file per disk, usually), and drove it over to the client. Ah, so late 20th Century.

Since the graphic designers used Macs — a direct result of Jobs taking a calligraphy course after dropping out of college and resolving that his computers should accommodate multiple fonts — I got a Mac too, so all of our computers would speak the same language without hassles. When I started drawing on the Mac, I already had the technology that my clients could use. I have loved the Mac mostly because I didn't have to know how it works (that would have spelled the end of me); I just had to know that it works.

That's the limit of my Apple connection, though. One of my children has an iPhone (and wants the newest one, released the day before Steve Jobs died) and an iPad; another has a form of iPod; both have Mac Workbooks; my wife has another form of iPod which I don't think she uses. I have just the iMac on my desk in my office. I have iTunes — I upgrade the software dutifully, as the computer directs me, lest the computer retaliate on its own to impede my work — but I don't buy any music. I'm the same with major software, extremely disinclined to upgrade, and doing so only when clients finally can't read the files I'm exchanging.

I've evolved a disheveled frugality: Unless I absolutely need it, I go without. So many of these Apple products offer wonderful capabilities, many of which I hadn't imagined were necessary — my son has shown me! Look! — but so far I've managed to get through the day without them. I don't even know where my cell phone is most of the time. What a terrible candidate for Apple discipleship I am.

Though I love his chutzpah, this is a side of Steve Jobs I didn't much care for: Engineering hunger in us to replace one shiny cool bauble with another before the first has worn out, and to desire the next shiny bauble and its promises, long before it is even conceived.

Instead, I admire Jobs for that most maddeningly elegant of slogans his company once used: Think different. 

Elegant because that spirit is so inspiring. See it here, an unaired commercial featuring Jobs' own voice (the one broadcast used Richard Dreyfuss' voice). Maddening because it's so often a gift, not a practiced skill, to think different, to see what others do not, to see ahead, to see the way.

{Beautiful copywriting, by the way (see below …)}

Already among the world's most prominent different thinkers, Steve Jobs in death is now among the most revered.

He's at the top of a great heap of different thinkers, whom I encounter every day. People constantly amaze me for what they are able to do, the jobs they have that I didn't know even could be jobs, the places they traveled, the thoughts they think. So different, so far ahead of what I do and think. As the owner of a couple of books on the art of Disney animation, I am flummoxed to see the work of dozens of artists, churning out thousands and thousands of gorgeous concept drawings that no one but the films' art directors, and a few readers of these books, will ever see. They are fantastically beyond my ability to draw, and yet they're often postage-stamp sketches of color and amazing form and depth. Breathtakingly depressing.

When I heard of Jobs' death, my first thought popped out before I could choke it down: My God, he's only seven years older! What have I done?

You're right to say, "Yeah, what have you done?" Of course, you'd be just as right in saying, "Measure different."

I agonize like everyone else — in ways that vary as much as each of us are different — about what I've accomplished, what good influence I've made on anything, and what to do about that deficit now.

My son says I'm too hard on myself, which is my nature. When I measure different, I realize my children are becoming more and many splendored than I imagined — and I imagined much splendor. I'm married to my best friend, who saves me from myself every day. Steve Jobs is reported to have wanted a biography so that his children to learn about him, because Apple and Pixar and everything else had taken him away from his kids. What price global influence?

As far as the other stuff, I still have time, though I take heed the much-played commencement address Jobs delivered to Stanford University's graduating class of 2005. He told the graduates they don't have that much time.

"Death is very likely the single best invention of life," he said. "It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life," he continued. "Don't be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

He admonished the graduates in Stewart Brand's words, from the Whole Earth Catalog: Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

*"Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. (Think different.)" Apple commercial.

… like eating potato chips …

What a photographer my son Liam is: catching me
between jiggles so that the flapping skin resembled
musculature.

Challenging endeavors I overcame this month:

1. Drew caricatures of sleepy teenagers at a high school grad night. One or two caricatures were passable; the rest were simply atrocious, but the grads were too tired or too kind to tell me.

2. Served as emcee at a weeklong early evening camp for boys 7-11 and their adult leaders. This turned out to be an easy gig, because my job was to ramp up the kids' energy level, and I had almost forgotten they don't need much encouragement.

3. Swam from Alcatraz Island to San Francisco's Aquatic Park for Sharkfest 2011.

No. 3 was easiest, easier even than leading a bunch of kids in "Boom Chicka Boom." Or more accurately, steady planning and work toward overcoming obstacles made this endeavor manageable enough to seem easy. Most important, I guess: It was a goal I strongly desired to achieve.

Neurotic about arriving early, I had plenty of time before the swim, so Nancy and
I strolled along the breakwater of Aquatic Park to get a better view of the goal.

My sister Tara, daughter Mo, son Liam and wife Nancy, once all was said and done.
I won this paper cup …

I knew the moment I hit the water around Alcatraz Island, so warm compared to the snow runoff of Lake Natoma, that I had prepared well for the Alcatraz crossing. My next goal  is to draw lessons from the moment, and from the moments leading to the moment. You know, all those corny lessons about setting goals for something worthwhile, goals just out of reach, then making the steps to reach them. Cleaning my office, for example; but for that I'd have to decide it's worthwhile.

I take so many memories to heart: Walking barefoot and bare-chested with the stream of swimmers over to Pier 41 and the ferries … riding atop the ferry, getting as cold as I could stand … cutting my toe on the sandpapery texture of the ferry deck, and truly wondering at that moment about the absence/presence of man-eating sharks … hearing a volunteer tell me, "I used to be as crazy as you" before he helped me out of the ferry with a firm hand … seeing San Francisco from the swells of the Bay, watching it flatten and obscure the landmarks I was hoping desperately to distinguish … clonking another swimmer on the head with my forward stroke, and hoping I hadn't ruined his swim … getting Nancy's help with big and little things throughout the morning … wondering at times whether the shore would ever really appear, whether I had sighted on the proper landmark, whether I had turned in toward the breakwater at the right time … watching a throng of people at the finish line cheering all the swimmers, and seeing my family waving for my attention, happy for my feat … seeing a gigantic tanker chug through the channel between Alcatraz and the shore, just as kayakers corralled the last of the swimmers toward Aquatic Park … not shivering, not even using my towel, on the shore.

More corny stuff: I have so many to thank. My wife and family for supporting me, not only from the time I started swimming but coming out to see this happen over the weekend. My sister even drove up from the Southland to be part of the scene. My parents would have loved this, and it's appropriate that my sister and I were together (too rare an occurrence) on our parents' 50th anniversary.

(Shortly before she died, my mom told tales of her life as we recorded them, and described what a strong open-water swimmer my dad was. Amazing what a mom or dad or anyone you know and love might neglect to tell you! I think of the conversations I could have had with my dad; I remember him encouraging me to keep a steady pace on a really long swim — no more than 100 or 200 yards, I'm sure — that I was supposed to complete for swim lessons when I was 8 or 9; maybe he mentioned he was a strong swimmer, but I chose not to hear.) 

More thanks: My somewhat scary experience trying to swim as a Boy Scout leader, which spurred me to become a swimmer. In the spirit of kaizen (Japanese for "continuous improvement," which reminds me: Thanks Terry Laughlin and your Total Immersion swimming technique which helped me swim without wear and tear on my aging bones), maybe I should say, continue to become a swimmer. I have so much to learn about swimming.

Interesting facts: 1. Only 73 male "skin" swimmers (I like that
better than "non-wetsuit" swimmers, because it's vaguely naughty)
with 27 female "skin" swimmers out of some 900 total;
2. I was not last, though a fellow Cal Poly graduate, same age
from the same year (whom I've never met), finished first among
male "skin" swimmers, third overall, 19 minutes ahead of me;
3. I'm intrigued by Paul and Mark Machin, finishing 43rd and 44th,
respectively; they're the same age with the same unusual
last name, and they finished three tenths of a second apart.
Are they twins? Did they resolve to swim together? Were they
tethered, mechanically or biologically? Is it the same person,
registered twice with two different sets of vitals? I really wanna
know! (Looking at the overall results, posted online, I notice
many more incidents of people with the same last name, finishing
just tenths of a second apart from one another; is this a thing,
I wonder? Do siblings/couples/parents and children make pacts
to swim together on this? Some of these pairings came in very
fast. Hmm, gotta talk my family into joining me in the future.)

More thanks: Leslie Thomas and the people at swim-art.com, for advice and opportunities to swim in the Bay. My swimming friends with Sacramento Swim Enthusiasts, which boasts many eponymous enthusiasts who share my growing love for cold water and are willing to go out very early in the morning, sometimes twice a day (even if it's not the same group each time), to swim.

I joined Team Hydro (on the web site team photo, I'm the only one wearing the pink cap, in the center) on the swim, to raise money for a disease called hydrocephalus. Two brothers started Team Hydro in honor of their sister, who suffered from the disease and who died last November. What started as two brothers, their sister, and two friends four years ago, has grown to 126 swimmers this year (including the youngest in the race, a 10-year-old boy who has hydrocephalus), raising $110,000 to fund two research grants into the disease, for which no cure is yet known. I didn't know what I was getting into when I joined Team Hydro, and wasn't sure if I could do the right thing by raising money. But friends came through big, and it was one last good vibe to carry me into the swim.

It turns out Team Hydro, which got to wear pink swim caps while other swimmers wore yellow, comprises mostly Stanford and Cal alumni, and not being part of either or a college rah-rah type in general, I didn't hang around too much in the Team Hydro section at Aquatic Park. I was grateful for their hot tea at race's end, though.

Alcatraz to me is like scarfing potato chips: One isn't enough, and I've got to have more. I want to swim longer distances, and figure out how to swim faster within the framework of the techniques I learned. Like Team Hydro professes, I'll take it one stroke at a time.

Alcatraz awaits …

Though I don't look anything close to the überswimmer on the right, I don't look like the dude on the left anymore, either.

Swimming longer distances more frequently, nearing the end of my quest to swim from Alcatraz Island to terra not so firma in San Francisco, has changed my shape to something in between.

Saturday, I reach the goal I set some seven years ago, swimming in Sharkfest 2011, weather willing (a friend planned to swim last year's event, which was canceled as the swimmers were ferried out to the starting line at Alcatraz).

Even four months ago, this seemed like a really stupid idea. I was swimming a bit more than a mile most days, but my open water experiences were exasperating tragi-comedies as I sputtered and thrashed in the cold water, and beat myself up over not being able to transfer my pool practice into the chill of lakes Folsom and Natoma near Sacramento.

But steady open water opportunities with the Sacramento Swim Enthusiasts, and encouragement from my newfound friends in that group, has closed the gap. I swim longer distances and practice against all those open water obstacles (no lines, no walls, no clear water) that can throw pool swimmers.  I decided back in February to figure out how to swim in the cold water without a wetsuit, and now I'm accustomed to it and plan to swim Alcatraz that way, in the tradition of the South End Rowing and Dolphin clubs at Aquatic Park in San Francisco, the finish line.

I'm also swimming for Team Hydro, raising money to find cures and treatments for hydrocephalus, a debilitating and life-threatening disease that affects more than 1 million Americans. I'm helping raise money. Wanna donate? Go to teamhydro.org, or my own Team Hydro Web page just for that purpose.

Alcatraz awaits. I can't wait.

Mr. Garamendi, also, is upside down

Just the usual chicanery for which politics is so well known.

Rep. John Garamendi last week pulled what the San Francisco Chronicle's Joe Garafoli called a "rookie mistake" by jumping headfirst into the public meatgrinder that is Stephen Colbert's "Better Know a District" segment of the Colbert Report. It's the semi-regular feature in which, with purposely insipid questions and crafty edits, even the sharpest tool in the Congressional shed comes out looking like an idiot. Garamendi, no rookie, did not miraculously change the outcome of this feature, instead emerging as said idiot.

Colbert repeatedly harped on the incongruous and unsettling fact that Garamendi does not live in the congressional district he represents; his front yard is in District 10, which Garamendi represents; his home is on the other side of the line in District 3. Presumably he has a card table and mobile phone out on the District 10 north (or south?) 40.

Not only did Garamendi, who never met a political office he didn't run for (he was state insurance commissioner twice, lieutenant governor, state assembly in two districts and senate member, plus deputy U.S. interior secretary and candidate for governor) come out the buffoon, he gave me an excuse to showcase some of my editorial cartoons about him. I mean, there's public service, but there's also wondering if Mr. Garamendi might have any other job skills.

At one point, Garamendi's wife Patti got into the act, running for the state Senate office her husband was vacating to become insurance commissioner. It put party opponent and Assembly member (and former Garamendi aide) Pat Johnston in the strange position of competing for the seat against the dubious Garamendi dynasty (below).

The Garamendis "liked" the cartoon so much, they wanted to buy it. Star struck, I may have actually sold it; it's the last time I was asked, thank goodness, because I'd never do it again. My goal was to get the Garamendis to cancel their subscription to The Stockton Record.