Fifteen years ago today, I stood up in a tuxedo in front of my friends and family and watched the most beautiful woman in the world walk down an aisle towards me while a string trio played classical music and everyone we knew watched us stand together and speak magic words that would change us from “engaged” to “married.”

We did not have a rabbi or priest. Instead we found a willing Justice of the Peace and reinvented the idea of a wedding ceremony: We wrote the whole thing together, we planned the new ritual as a celebration of love with music and poetry and flowers. We wrote our own vows to one another and spoke them there, back in time, on an impossibly beautiful day, surrounded by the people we loved best.

It was not a day without hitches. En route to the ceremony, I got into a car accident and only made it to the place with minutes to get dressed and ready.  Like Shakespeare said in the play that brought us together, “the course of True Love never did run smooth.”

Like today, it was Spring in all its glory; sun shining, warm and breezy, nature abundant in greens and flowering colors. It was much like today, but it is separated by oceans’ worth of time and life.

A lot happens in fifteen years.  Small apartments and frantic moves, the dawning of this new thing called “the internet,” jobs and plans, friends made and lost.  We bought a condo, we bought a house. We made two daughters more wonderful and beautiful than anything we had ever imagined possible.  I buried my dad. A lot of things change in fifteen years.

But not everything.

One thing stays the same: There, on that day, in front of those people, I swore that I would love Jolene forever and always and I meant it then with all of me and I mean it today with all of me and if we lived a thousand years past this day, I’d mean it then too, in the same way.

The term “renewing vows” carries with it maybe a sense that they might diminish over time and need to be be made fresh, lest they fade, right? I don’t feel that way.

A vow is eternal; it does not need replenished. But I like the idea of speaking the words again and knowing that they are eternal; not renewed and given new life, but rather acknowledged as being constant and unchanging, while everything else is not.

Fifteen years ago, to publicly proclaim my love for Jolene and make it official in the eyes of the law, I was only able to say these words to the gathering of people within earshot.  Time and technology have given me a worldwide platform, so today, I say them again before the world, and its wide web. I’d shout them out to the whole Universe, if it would hear me.

I love you so, so much, Jolene. Happy Anniversary.

Here is what I said, 15 years ago, and today.  And if the Fates are kind, what I will say again and again, year after year. Time changes most everything. But love is timeless.

1998 Wedding Vows, Spoken Again in 2013 [ 1:29 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Today is the 4th anniversary of my dad, Joel Dobbin’s, last breath.  On other anniversaries, I have mourned him and shared the feelings and thoughts attending the mourning. On this one, what I want to do is bring him back.  Not forever, but for a time, and I want to do it by having his ideas and his voice live in your thoughts and imagination. I cannot perform this miracle alone;  for a trick such as this, I will need his assistance.

I always implored my dad to WRITE DOWN all of his fabulous stories; there’s a book in them.  And once, he started to.

I remember the occasion.  My dad had lifelong friends who I referred to as my “uncles.” Friends from boyhood into adulthood who shared his adventures and life. And when I was old enough, they regaled me with tales of their misspent youth. It was after one such visit to a gathering of them, when I was about 11 years old or thereabouts, where I was in tears laughing at them, that he did sit down to a typewriter and began telling some of them. This story has existed only on one hard copy from a manual typewriter, tucked away in a folder and hidden in a basement for decades.  I now rescue it from that imprisonment and bring it to the cloud of information that is the internet and invite you to share in Joel Dobbin’s company for just a little while, and laugh along with me. Here are the words as he typed them.  Page 1 of this text is missing, which I believe laid out the cast of characters that comprised his gang of friends and adventures. “Suk” (rhymes with crook) is Larry Sikora, my father’s faithful right-hand man.

Please, enjoy this story, and for a time, however brief, bring him back to life in your thoughts as you animate his words with them:

——–

The Great Bubble Juice Caper, 1954

Pictured left to right: Bobby "The K" Kontoff, The Late Billy Lussman, Joel "Dobbs" Dobbin, Larry "The Suk" Sikora. Coney Island, circa 1954

Setting up for a caper was a bit more complicated than it had to be.

That was because being fifteen in Brooklyn in 1954 meant one’s behavior must at all times conform to the rigid standards of “The Code.”  And the basic tenet of “The Code” stated that in all endeavors, one was obligated to get away with stuff. Never tell the simple truth if you could get away with a complex phony excuse. Even if you had the money in your pocket, clip a candy bar instead of paying for it.

“The Code” often made life somewhat more difficult, but no self-respecting kid would ever dream of violating its rigid standards. Even a simple thing like a subway ride was made more complicated by “The Code.” A subway ride at the time cost only a dime. Probably the greatest bargain in the history of mass transportation. However, “The Code” never allowed one the luxury of merely dropping that dime in the turnstile and boarding a train.

Adherence to  ”The Code” demanded that whenever possible, the subway ride was to be sans fare.

For The Boys,  this meant that all subway rides must originate at the Neck Road station on the Brighton Beach line. The Brighton Beach line ran above ground from Prospect Park station to its terminus at Brighton Beach, following a straight line path along East 16th Street throughout the length of the above ground Brooklyn route. The Neck Road Station was built alongside of some of the ruins of the bleachers of the old Sheepshead Bay Race Track.

To circumvent the station toll booth, it was necessary to climb the old bleacher stairs, slip around the steel and barbed wire barricade the city had erected to keep us kids from climbing up the old bleacher stairs, jump down to the ground, scramble up the dirt embankment that led to the train platform’s rear retaining wall, gain a precarious hold on the seven foot concrete wall and hang there until the downtown train pulled into the station. Proper procedure required one to wait until the doors of the train had closed and it began to pull away from the station before scrambling over the wall to the station proper.

This precaution was deemed necessary as in the law abiding age of the 1950s, any self-respecting adult would have collared us and brought us to the subway authorities. It would have been unthinkable for any of us to resist the natural authority of a grown-up.

It was a pain in the ass, but but the satisfaction gained knowing once again we had gotten away with stuff made the effort worthwhile.

We got nabbed by  a cop once.

Kontoff had the lookout duty and he fucked up (as usual) and the cop was standing there waiting to collect us as we climbed up onto the platform. Suk and me weren’t too worried. We had long since evolved a never failing plan of action to cope with such emergencies.

We immediately started to cry.

(more…)

Here is visual magic and a surefire way to know that your senses are merely pictures of pictures and not to be explicitly trusted. See that little circle in the center of the swirly hypno-coin?

Stare at it and try not to blink for about 30 seconds or so. Then quickly look at any picture.  Any one.  It could be on a separate tab on your browser, but it works best if it is a photo on your desk or in your hand.  Watch it crawl and shift as if Reality itself is warping and shifting around it.

Trippy, no?

Newspaper taxis appear on the shore, waiting to take you awaaaaayy. Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes and she’s gone and all that.

So on Friday, February 22, 2013, I had somehow found my way to being a featured storyteller at an event called “The MOuTH at the Mark Twain House.”

It was organized and spearheaded by NPR personality, voice, and all-around-rockstar Chion Wolf. Originally, it was supposed to be in conjunction with the MOTH Radio people, but they (as it turned out) proved to be dicks, so Chion and Jacques Lamarre, from the Twain House, stuck a “u” into MOTH and made their own event (You should totally like them on Facebook, btw.)

Being February and close to Valentine’s day, the organizing theme for this, the inaugural kick-off of “The MOuTH” in Hartford, Connecticut, at the amazing Twain House and Museum auditorium, was “stories about love.”

I told the best story about love I know. I hope you all enjoy it.

What you need to know going in: For the first 30 seconds, I make reference to a quotation that was carved into the wall behind me, as a kind of unspoken communication to the audience of “Hey, don’t worry– I’m quick on my feet; look, this observation could not have been pre-planned, so relax a little, secure in the knowledge that the guy with the mic is going to be funny and listen-able to.” The quotation is “There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus.” But there’s an accidental line through an S in “Persuasive.”

Ok, without further ado, here’s me, telling the truth about love to an audience of strangers. And also, to the woman I love more than everything.

edit: If you are here from NPR/The MOuTH, and you enjoy my story-stylings (and have copious amounts of earbud-time to fritter away), there’s more where this comes from at the weekly storytelling podcast I do with my friend Keith Field. Keith is approximately 300 times funnier than I am, which you will soon come to know if you become a fan of the podcast/show. It is at http://www.thetimehascomepodcast.com/ and there are literal DAYS worth of content in there.

To listen in your browser, click the Play triangle or choose “play in pop-up.”

Josh Dobbin at the Mark Twain House [ 25:38 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Thought experiment.

Imagine you meet a guy who tells you he’s REALLY into noose-craft. Loves nooses. Knows how to tie them blind-folded, can tell you about different ropes and thread-counts and how they affect a noose, he can explain in great detail the technical differences between choking nooses and neck-breaking nooses, how a hemp rope differs from a nylon rope, all about nooses through history. He’s a real noose aficionado.

Imagine he’s got a big noose collection, maybe even a special room where he keeps them all, and he spends time cleaning and organizing them. If  somebody questions him, he gets mad and says they don’t know the difference between different types of knots and says they need to get more educated about nooses before they talk about them. He tells you he never wants to kill anybody with one, he’s just a knots-man who enjoys the skill of crafting them.

That guy would be a friggin’ creep, right?

Nothing illegal, perfectly constitutionally protected interest to have.

But still.

Creepy, no? Dedicating so much headspace and thought to a device built just to kill human beings. There’s gotta be something really unwholesome underlying it all.

Guess what? Assault-rifles, semi-auto “tactical” handguns, etc. are creepier.

So is the guy you know who is really into them.

He may be you, reading this now. Dude:  Stop being a creep. It is time for a new hobby.

Spread the word.

p.s. Here’s why it is a creepier interest. Nobody ever walked into a mall, school, college campus, movie theater, water tower, McDonald’s, Sikh temple, grocery store parking lot, etc.  with a collection of nooses and took out a whole bunch of people with him before hanging himself.

Christmas, 1979. I was six, my parents were invincible, eternally young-but-still-adult demigods (or so it seemed to me), Santa existed and I wanted a Big Trak.

See, there are two different “nineteen-eighties.”

There were the “Eighties-that-Were,” the things and the styles and the mood of the time period as it occurred: the big hair and the “Greed is Good” and all that.

But there was also, at the dawn of the 80s, the idea of the 80s to be. It was all space-ships and futurism. George Orwell’s “futuristic” date, the inversion of 1948 was within spitting distance. Computers were huge, hulking refrigerator-sized machines that were kept in the basements of companies like techno-dragons, and tended to by occult programmers who might as well have been doing magic. But we knew that they were *getting smaller.* They were going to be IN OUR HOUSES, the magazines told us. Soon.  The future had not yet arrived, back then in 1979, but I remember it felt like it was on its way.

It was in the zeitgeist, I think, in the late 70s. At least, that’s how it felt to me, even if I didn’t know what the word “zeitgeist” meant at the time. Everywhere you looked, there were images and ideas of lasers and space-men, of robots and computers.

(more…)

Hopefully, one day you all might get a chance to read it. 

A Forward for Parents
(Children, feel free to skip this part and get to the good stuff)

“Yet the old time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as “historical” in the children’s library; for the time has come for a series of newer “wonder tales…”
L. Frank Baum, 1900, INTRODUCTION TO THE WIZARD OF OZ
—-

I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it.
-C. S. Lewis, INTRODUCTION TO THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE

This book is many things.

It is an adventure with magical creatures, cliffhangers and dread villains, dark powers rising and a only a small band of heroes to face them. It is at once a fairy tale with funny talking animals and a story about strength and resolve and finding one’s way when the path is uncertain. It is also, I think you will find as parents, a kind of love letter to a very specific moment in a child’s life, when they stand on the precipice of being bigger than they once were. Not yet “big,” but no longer just small.

But here’s the thing I feel you must understand. While it is all those things and maybe even more, it is also meant to be for girls.

At first, it was for my daughter, and now, it is also for yours.

It is a girl’s story of wonder and imagination, of discovery and growing up. A girl’s story of sovereignty over her own mind and beliefs. Boys have plenty of those. This? It is for your daughters.

Will boys read it and listen to it? Certainly. Boys can love it. There is much in here they will enjoy; there are sword battles with shadow monsters; there’s armies on the march and goblins and giant monsters who need defeating.

I hope that  your boys, if they listen along or read themselves, will be captured by the story and need to follow it to its end.

They can read, they can listen, of course. I encourage them to do so.

But it isn’t theirs. That’s OK; there is much in the world that is theirs, there are many books on the shelf that are meant for them. This is your daughter’s book.

I began this introduction by saying this book is many things. Indulge me for a moment when I tell you what else it is.  Or at least, what I have intended it to be. Suspend your disbelief, like a child of eight or nine may, and know this:

If you believe hard enough, this book can also a be a magic spell.

 You balk, perhaps, because you are grown and have made a habit of disbelieving in magic. This is an unfortunate habit. But I tell you truly: What you will do now is magic.  I will tell you how to cast this spell and why you must.

Your girl is getting bigger. All of the princess-toys and dolls she has, she still loves and she still wants more. But soon, she will not; they will become things that get packed away. Not yet. But soon.

Soon, too, (sooner than you think) she will no longer need or want you to read her stories at bedtime. Your window on this era of her childhood is closing. There is nothing you can do to make it slow its descent. Nothing.  But here is what you can do.

Read the words of this book, every night, out loud to her.

Set aside a half hour each night to continue your visit together into the magical realm of the Tember. You will stay right where you are, yet go places that can’t be and move through time and you will do it together. You will create, in her room, a portal to another realm; a window into a Never-Was that will exist as long as you keep the spell going. You will travel there, with her. You will create voices and characters that she will come to know and trust and love.  She will love Lammie. Everyone loves Lammie.

And the one you make with her will be different than the one I spoke to my daughter. But it will be yours, together. With your voice and your time, just by speaking, you will create scary (but not too scary)  villainous characters, that will thrill her and fill her with a sense of agency and power when you both, in the telling and hearing, defeat them, as she knows they must be defeated.

For this is a spell that you and she will cast together, as storyteller and listener, over the next series of many weeks. Maybe a month or more. This is a serious spell you are casting. A spell of memory and wonder.

You will summon shared visions of castles and forests and living toys, of unicorns and wolves and wise old owls, of swords and crowns and wands and chalices. This is a full-length novel you and your girl will be embarking on; it is a journey. Trust me. Trust her– she’s big enough now to go on it. Depending on when you start, the leaves on the trees may go from green to gone; or from gone to budding and green. There are some chapters that are too long for one night’s telling; she will want to hear more and you will have to tell her, “We’ll stop here. But tomorrow. More tomorrow, I promise.” When this happens, you will know the spell is working.

She will be a bigger girl than she was when you start and here is the magic you will work:

When you have come to the end, you and your girl will have accomplished something grand. You will have completed a journey, together. And that will never go away; in the years to come as she puts away her stuffed bears and crowns and castles until they no longer remain at all, this journey, this telling, will still remain. As she gets older and the world opens up to her and she grows, this time period, right now, will be captured for you both as a warm memory of a long and exciting journey you took together. It will live as a timeless time when she was small and she looked forward each night to the next twist and turn in the tale.

This is a hard truth for you, parent, but no less true for its hardness: Childhood, her childhood, is only a moment and it is fleeting and lasts no longer than an eyeblink. What you will do, with this book you hold, is create a memory of that moment, of you and her together in that moment, that lasts forever.

Magic lasts forever, and this is magic. It is a spell that works, and I know it works because I have cast it myself. It begins very briefly with a Daddy, telling his girl a story, then gets quickly to the good stuff. If you are a Mom, please feel free to change it to a Mommy, and all the “he”s to “she”s.

Now. The journey will begin.  Don’t worry, you won’t get lost: I will tell you the map.

“”The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–
Of cabbages–and kings–
And why the sea is boiling hot–
And whether pigs have wings.”
Lewis Carroll, 1872

Here’s the thing. Conversations are ephemeral entities. Stories told to the open air soon become silence and live on only in the memory of the listener.  Which is not to say there’s no merit in talk. There’s something very wonderful about discussing the sublime and the absurd and the sublimely absurd (or absurdly sublime, I suppose) with a good friend.

But crafting a document of some kind gives your stories at least a fighting chance at something approaching immortality.  Well. Immortality may be a little too lofty a goal, I guess.  What I mean to say is that the stories might outlive and outlast the tellers, which is what every teller of every story ever hopes for in the telling.

For the past few weeks, I have been getting together with my friend Keith Field, to record our conversations, stories and thoughts into audio documents and I’m publishing those  documents as a podcast, available both at the website I set up for them (www.TheTimeHasComePodcast.com) and on iTunes.  The first two episodes are up now;  a new one will be posted every Tuesday.

I wanted to do this for a host of reasons. The first and most immediate is that it gives me a very good excuse to spend time talking with my dear and old friend who never fails to make me laugh uproariously.

But beyond that, what I’m hoping to do is create a series of storytelling recordings that my daughters will have for when they are older.  I have one single recording of my father, and now that he is no longer here to tell more tales and stories, I treasure it more than gold or jewels.  I would love for my girls to have a vast wealth of such treasure, when that time comes, so I’m collecting it for them now.  Not like I have any plans to do any mortal-coil shuffling in the near future;  I’d like for them to enjoy the stories and talks while I’m here, too, hopefully for a very long time to come, if the Fates are kind.

In any case, along the way, if these discussions and tales and thoughts and ideas prove entertaining to an audience outside of this very small circle and can get you through mundane tasks like folding laundry or doing dishes or household chores (that’s where I generally listen to discussion-based podcasts), then everyone wins.

With that in mind, please join us at http://www.thetimehascomepodcast.com to listen in and join the discussion, if you want, in the comments sections. If you’re on Facebook, throw us a “like” and validate our very insecure egos. (And get updates on when new episodes are posted and access to ancillary media– embarrassing photos and documents and links, pertaining to each episode.)

Go to the Time Has Come Podcast Site >
 

My littlest one goes to kindergarten next fall. Quite a journey from that early diagnosis and intervention. We’re still on it, the journey, to be sure. But there are no words to tell how amazed or how proud I am of this brilliant, tough, wonderful little girl, who taught herself how to learn in the most miraculous way. She knocks me out, that kid.

What’s the T.S. Elliot line?

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Yeah.

Three years ago today, my dad, after an epic and days-long struggle with chemo-related pneumonia, breathed his last breath. In true Joel Dobbin fashion, it was as much on his own terms as he could swing it. He didn’t want to die in a hospital bed. By dint of sheer will power, he kept himself alive long enough for us to get him home. It was a mad rush of logistics; arranging for medical supplies and oxygen generators. I spent the night previous at the ICU with him. All night. He was lucid and aware, even though medical science said he should have been far from it.

April 17th, 2009. It is really only now, with this much time and distance from that day, that I can honestly examine the memory of it.

I’ve got moment-memories and snapshots that crop up from time to time, but I generally don’t go back to that day. In the confines of my head, I mean. It has been too white-hot, all the actual reality of it. My daughter, 4 years old, crying in the bathroom. The hollow sound of the car-door closing as I walked to my parents door, now for the first time in a world where he no longer lived. Stepping outside in the night air with my brother, quaking from the mind-bending unreality of the then-current reality.

Time and distance. Here’s something. Think about it this way.  Givens: that the Earth revolves around the sun at 90 miles a second or so and that the solar system travels at 136 miles a second in the revolving of the galaxy and that the galaxy itself moves at 185 miles a second.

So along the Universe’s timeline, the you that existed a second previous, reading that last sentence,  was at least 411 miles away from the one in the current second. Physical distance traveled, just by sitting perfectly still.

Conclusion: The me that arrived at my parents house to sit next to my dead father’s body is (if my math is correct, which is always a questionable proposition) physically distant 38,883,888,000 miles from the me typing at a keyboard right now. 38 billion miles.

And there are times when it seems that far and then some. But not today. Today it is as close as the next breath. Tomorrow, it will go back, but today is different. Today I mourn my dad.

See, here’s the thing. I don’t mourn all the time. Even when I remember or summon up moments and events to turn them over in my head and try to see them from this or that angle,  I don’t actively mourn. I also don’t have the time or luxury; there are two little girls and a beautiful woman in my life that need me present in the present moment and I am very glad to ride it with them, most of the time. And all of my littlest one’s care and her journey, this past 3 years have been their own epic. And one that does not allow for a split in attention. This is not to say I don’t feel sadness from time to time, or the piercing of the sudden bittersweet moment– there have been many instances of one of my daughter’s numerous triumphs  where I’ve been acutely aware of just how much joy my father would have had from sharing the moment. Still. That is its own thing, and those are moments: it is not mourning. I feel a sadness then, in those moments, not expressly for me, but rather for him, that he did not get to see enough or know enough of them.

There are those who will not believe it, but to be honest, I very seldom mourn for me. 

(more…)

There are a million things to say about the Trayvon Martin killing. There are political and racial angles, there’s gun issues, there’s notions about how all of these things intersect with gated communities and homeowner associations (HOAs). There’s the reactionary politics and the need for “side-taking” in increasingly polarizing times when everything ultimately breaks into camps along “right” and “left” factions.

But all of these millions of things have been said and are being said. And they should be.  They need to be said.  What I want to express here, however,  is a different thing.

For all of us, on whatever side we fall, Trayvon Martin is ultimately an abstraction. His death and the official police reaction (or non-reaction) to it are viewed, as a matter of necessity, through our own personal filters and the  attitudes we hold and therefore the actions we take.

For many people on the right who feel, on a  territorial level,  threatened upon any discussion of issues involving citizens and firearms and have an almost reflexive need to gainsay what they perceive as “left-wing thought”, the reality of this young boy’s life  has been reduced to an abstraction of media overplay and hysteria and it aids their confirmation bias about a “left wing media.

A loose collection of facts having precisely nothing to do with his shooting,  concerning school suspension or pot use* along with an article-of-faith style belief that “mainstream media” is  a de facto biased and specifically hostile force acts as some kind of totem to transform him into an unknowable uncertainty; he exists  a potential  thug/criminal/menace and blameworthy in some respect simply because there is a conditioning to think every story HAS to have two equal and opposite sides.

The boy who died is lost in the shuffle there.

And on the part of those moved to anger or tears or gut-churning frustration and rage at the situation, we too engage in a form of abstraction. By necessity, but still.  For as much as it is a heartening and proper thing to see young people proclaim, “I am Trayvon Martin,” together, as much as it seems like the proper and correct response to don hoodies and act in solidarity– on a fundamental level, they/we are NOT Trayvon Martin. Metaphorically, symbolically, as an poetic expression, we are LIKE him or those that we know and love are LIKE him and “there but for the grace of god” and all that– but the I AM construction is a poetic device.  You are not. I am not. I am not saying that these marches, these discussions are all not needed or important. They are.  But there’s something being lost here that I think needs to remain.

Trayvon Martin is dead and only got to see seventeen summers and will not see an eighteenth. No one image of him is going to sum up who or what he was: He was, like all of us, an accumulation of time and images. But unlike us, his accumulation is done. He is dead and his father will never get to hold him again and his mother will never get to hold him again. We get to talk about it all and get to be angry and sad or outraged.

There are a million intersections into a million different sticky areas of society contained within this set of circumstances and you can get lost in the weeds depending on who you are talking to and what branches you start down. But they are all abstractions from the reality of this very simple set of facts:

A young boy was walking to his father’s house and he was mistrusted a priori by an overzealous, twitchy man who confronted him for no defensible reason at all and then killed him.

Everything else is commentary. We engage through metaphor, we abstract and discuss broader issues, but the reality is this: A boy went walking one night and didn’t make it alive to his house.

Here’s where my head is at, at the moment, when I think about this.

No matter who you are, on what area of the political spectrum you fall, this is what I want you to consider, when considering Trayvon Martin and his family.

Each and every parent out there can tell you a laundry list of near misses and childhood scares that act as a narrative thread to describe a child’s first ten years.

Ask them. If you don’t have children, ask your parents.

Late nights with high fevers, falls from stairs or monkey bars. Waiting on test results, the existential shaking with relief when they came back all OK.  Ask any mother or father: there was the time they got lost at a fair or an amusement park for ten panic-filled minutes. There was the time they fell into the pool and didn’t know how to swim; the aunt or uncle who pulled them out by their hair. The broken arm that, for a lucky chance of angle and momentum could have just as easily been a broken neck. The car accident where everybody was somehow OK.

Every one of us here, our first few years are a collection of near misses and close calls. Every one of our kids.  Your kid. My kids.

Consider, before you abstract Trayvon Martin in one way or another, that for two people, he was not an abstraction or a political football or a cause or an exegesis on racism and assumptions about black males. He was their little baby who survived all those fevers, those falls and tumbles, those million and three lucky breaks that early childhood give us.  He, like us, made it through all that and, if I am allowed here to be guilty of the act that I am naming, I will imagine that his parents may have breathed a sigh of relief when they looked at their increasingly grown young man that those days, for all their moments of parental terror and uncertainty, were things of the past.

But he didn’t survive his walk home to his dad’s house.

———–
* about the pot use:  If you were to shoot every 17 year old boy who smoked pot when I went to High School, there would be no graduating class. When you see conservative media discuss young black kids and pot, there is always the language of “dealer.” You know what they called a 17 year old who smoked pot in my school? A 17 year old.

My oldest daughter is at an age now, caught between implicit belief in things and learning how things really work. She can understand how it only seems that the sun rises and sets, but know that we’re on a rotating sphere, which in turn revolves around a cosmic, nuclear furnace.

And yet she still believes in Santa Claus. It is a magical time. I use that word advisedly; it is specifically magical;there are instances of magical thinking, the first steps in parsing the universe with a small but accumulated body of knowledge.

In the world of photography and filming, there’s something called “the Golden Hour,” or sometimes “The Magic Hour.” It is usually the first or last hour of sunlight; when the sun is nearer to the horizon and spreads out light in a more diffuse way. It bathes everything in a beautiful softness that only lasts so long; shadows are less dark and colors are warm and painted with edges of gold.

It got me thinking about my own “golden hour” of childhood, and the things I believed in, as articles of faith. I wrote them down in a quick list, stream of consciousness style, more for personal reference than anything else. It ended up sounding almost like a poem, as I said it out loud, although I didn’t intend for it to be one.

In no particular order:

Quicksand, lasers, blood brothers and pinkie-swears, dim mak death touches, Muhammed Ali Marvin Hagler and Bruce Lee (my holy trinity), magnifying lenses as superpowers, plastic surgery as spycraft, radioactive spiders and cosmic rays, elves and little folk–always ducking just out of sight in walks through woods, wish-granting lamps or rings to be found at tag sales, whoosh sounds and cracks from kung-fu movies- practice hard enough and they would happen, King Arthur and Excalibur, ninjas and samurai, might for right, the good guy always wins, a hidden island soon to be found teeming with dinosaurs, Cropsy the axe-killer and his lame dragging leg-listening for it from inside a tent, fighting sleep, indelible ink triggered by fire-alarm levers, urine-activated dye in pools,no matter who your dad may be: my dad could beat up your dad, the danger of swearing on one’s life, the *possibility* of a hand appearing under the bed and the dark thrill of lowering my head over the side to peek down, that drinking from Nostradamus’ skull leads to powers and curses, registering hands and feet as deadly weapons, ventriloquist’s dummies being inherently haunted and not to be trifled with, the lethal combination of Pop Rocks and Soda  and the untimley demise of Mikey (a kid I knew knew a kid who knew his family, so he said; he swore it was true), prisms and pendulums, pulled flower petals as divination to peer into a girl’s heart: she loves me not, three-time widdershins walks around churches leading to lands in universes next door (but only so long as you knew your widdershins from your sunwise), dwarf-crafted swords somewhere in Norway, Hitler’s quest for the Spear of Destiny, the existence of mithril, later adamantanium, twenty sided dice, Batman, Superman and Green Lantern but never Aquaman.

Magic words and spells: sounds of power to be uttered like Shazam that could transform the weak and worthy in a flash of light into the strong and destined; a secret language of the apes hidden in the pages of paperback Tarzan books, unknowable ancient Hebrew letters in arcane configurations that could spell secret divine names to work magic best left unworked, Witch Mountain and returning to it; staring hard at a pencil and willing it to move.

My parents as invulnerable and immortal; always adult but never old.