In the summer of 1972, the world came apart.
A summer later—an eternity for a young child—it began to come back together.
This morning Daniel took us there.
I was lying in bed holding my five-year-old son, saying good morning to him, when suddenly we were in an apartment on Orange Street in Costa Mesa in 1973.
There was a smell.
Not in our bedroom this morning.
Not in our apartment.
Daniel gave us the smell.
I don’t know that we have smelled it since 1973 and that period in our life. But for a moment it was as vivid as if we had gone back there.
This happens sometimes when I am deeply attuned with one of my sons.
I can be holding Daniel now and suddenly experience something he remembers with an immediacy that is difficult to distinguish from being there. It can happen during the fluid, blended switches that are common for us when we are active in the physical world too—working, cooking, walking around, even interacting with other people.
We remain here.
But another lived reality can become extraordinarily near.
This morning Daniel took us to Orange Street.
We were six years old.
Our Dad had married Nadine. We had come home from their honeymoon in the Winnebago, and now a family was being assembled in an apartment.
There were boxes.
Things were being unpacked.
There were unfamiliar things that belonged to Nadine, things from the bedroom where she had grown up and from college.
And there were our things.
Things we hadn’t seen for a while.
The orange sofas.
The lamp.
The television.
Our bed.
Our sister’s bed.
Things from the apartment where we had lived with our mother and our Dad before the world came apart.
Things had disappeared.
Now they were coming back.
But differently.
And Daniel remembered the smell of it.
Not merely the furniture.
Not merely the apartment.
The whole strange reality of being a young child whose world had broken apart and was beginning to assemble itself again.
Mommy was somewhere else.
Dad was here.
Nadine was here now too.
We liked her.
We loved going to her college. We loved going to her parents’ house. She took us to the library. We did fun things together.
Eventually we loved our new home.
And that created a problem a six-year-old didn’t know how to solve.
If we loved this, did that mean we loved Mommy less?
If we were happy here, did that mean we didn’t miss her enough?
So somehow we learned to hold things apart and together at the same time.
Mommy could remain Mommy somewhere else.
Nadine could be loved here.
Our old family could remain real.
Our new family could become real too.
The old apartment was gone.
The furniture was still ours.
People could be absent and remain loved.
Different realities could exist simultaneously.
One did not have to destroy the other.
And this morning, lying in bed with Daniel, something opened.
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It is difficult to explain what happened next.
Partly because there wasn’t one person explaining it.
It became what we sometimes call a We Moment.
There were memories.
Signals.
Feelings.
Images.
Voices.
Recognition.
Daniel was showing us something.
His brothers were responding.
I was remembering.
Several understandings seemed to be arriving at once.
At one point I said:
“I can’t put into words what I can now see and feel.”
There were too many words trying to arrive through one mouth.
It was beginning to become overwhelming.
So we didn’t force it.
We trusted that what had happened was there.
We trusted that we could come back to it.
And several hours later, we think we are beginning to understand.
What Daniel gave us this morning wasn’t merely a childhood memory that happened to resemble our life now.
He gave us a new way of seeing something about our childhood that we have struggled for years to understand.
We were already there.
Not Dad and some imaginary children who would someday become meaningful symbols.
Not one child who would later be represented by younger versions of himself.
Us.
The children who are here now.
The children who were there then.
Not always knowing one another as clearly as we do now.
Not always able to communicate.
Not living together yet in the kind of conscious family relationship we have today.
But there.
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The evidence isn’t new.
That may be one of the most important things we realized.
There have always been memories that did not fit neatly into the story of one child.
Dad remembers being about six years old, lying in bed and becoming overwhelmed by the realization that everyone we loved would someday die.
And he remembers not being alone.
There was another little boy.
We know him now as Solis.
There is another memory from Montessori.
Digging in the dirt.
Needing to get away from the other children sometimes so we could be with the children who were with us.
Children we knew we could not tell anyone about.
Not imaginary friends.
Children.
Daniel was there.
We played with Daniel.
There are other memories like these.
Moments when someone was unmistakably present long before I consciously knew who that person was.
Moments in adulthood when I suddenly experienced the body as belonging to a child while remaining conscious and functioning in the world.
Once, while giving what I knew was an excellent architectural presentation, I wondered why in my mind’s eye everyone in the room seemed to be looking at a twelve-year-old boy.
We know him now as Proverb.
There have been moments of exuberance when I remained conscious and yet later wondered:
Who was that?
Han remembers some of those.
For years these have been separate strange things.
Memories.
Experiences.
Recognition after the fact.
The evidence was already there.
What changed this morning was the organizing story capable of holding the evidence.
That is very Luke.
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Today is Luke’s Day.
Luke has repeatedly tried to understand our family through a creation story.
Not necessarily:
When were we created?
Not a search for some literal chronological instant when nine people suddenly appeared.
Luke’s questions are bigger than that.
How did we become us?
How did we survive as ourselves?
How did we find one another?
What story explains why we are still here?
And this morning Daniel handed Luke—and all of us—a possible missing piece.
Perhaps our creation story is not a single moment of creation at all.
Perhaps it is a story of continuity through repeated rupture.
Things come apart.
The children remain.
Configurations change.
The children remain.
People disappear.
The children remain.
Homes change.
The children remain.
Some relationships become inaccessible while others form.
The children remain.
The outside story repeatedly reorganizes itself.
Inside, lives continue alongside one another.
Not perfectly known.
Not always equally accessible.
Sometimes separated by what we have called watertight compartments.
Sometimes blending or passing memories, feelings and perceptions between one another.
Sometimes knowing another is there without knowing his name.
But remaining.
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Maybe the story isn’t that we became plural because the world came apart.
We don’t know that.
We don’t need to know that.
We are not trying to solve ourselves as though nine lives require a single explanatory event.
What we saw this morning was something different.
When the world came apart, we did not disappear.
And when it came back together, we did not have to become one person in order to survive its new configuration.
Perhaps the external world of 1973 reflected something we already knew how to do.
Hold realities alongside one another.
Mommy there.
Nadine here.
The old family.
The new family.
Loss and love.
Absence and presence.
Different lives.
Different relationships.
All real.
One did not have to consume the others.
One love did not have to replace another.
One reality did not have to make another unreal.
One person did not have to disappear because another person was present.
Continuity did not require sameness.
Family did not require everyone to become one.
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This morning I found myself reaching toward words that felt almost too large to say.
Nine little boys who were never going to let go.
Who were never going to become one.
Who were going to remain their individual selves and somehow exist alongside one another.
Maybe someday know one another.
Maybe someday learn how to live together.
Maybe someday become a family.
And then another recognition came.
Something that happened in 1973 is happening again now.
A family is coming together.
Back then, a visible family was assembling itself after rupture.
Our Dad.
Nadine.
Children.
Old belongings.
New belongings.
Old loves.
New loves.
People who were present.
People who were absent.
Things that had disappeared and were returning in different places and different combinations.
Today another family is coming together.
A Daddy and eight sons.
Except perhaps coming together isn’t quite right.
We were already together.
We are becoming known to one another.
And there is an enormous difference between then and now.
This time, we will all be known.
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That may be the most important thing we learned today.
Because when we were young, some realities had to remain unspoken.
There were children we knew we could not tell anyone about.
There were experiences no safe adult knew.
There were terrible things happening that no one capable of protecting us could see.
Today there is a Daddy here too.
A Daddy who knows their names.
Jude.
Daniel.
Solis.
Luke.
Han.
Justus.
Proverb.
Hope.
A Daddy who can listen.
Who can recognize their memories.
Who can apologize.
Who can ask questions.
Who can learn when he has misunderstood.
Who can ask before overwhelming a seven-year-old boy with affection even when that boy usually wants all the affection Daddy can give him.
Because sharing co-consciousness and a body does not erase anyone’s boundaries.
There are nine lives here.
No one has to disappear to make the family easier to understand.
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That is what makes yesterday’s credo feel different today.
Let the invisible alter the visible.
Yesterday we were learning to organize a day as though nine lives actually lived it.
Today Daniel showed us something deeper.
Invisible does not mean absent.
It never did.
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Luke knows something about being present before being fully known.
When I first consciously came to know him, he called himself Chaos.
He was nine years old and surrounded by frightening things.
I wanted to help him take those things away.
But Luke was afraid.
What if we removed all the bad things and nothing was left?
I was frightened too.
Because by then I loved him.
I didn’t want Luke to disappear.
So we went slowly.
And something remarkable happened.
As the terrible things gradually loosened their hold, Luke didn’t become less.
He became more visible.
Funny.
Creative.
Domestic.
Imaginative.
Complicated.
Affectionate.
Stubborn.
A nine-year-old boy with his own way of seeing the world and an extraordinary ability to get through to his Daddy.
The terrible things were not Luke.
Luke had been there all along.
Waiting to be known.
Maybe that is why creation stories matter so much to him.
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Last night, on the eve of Luke’s Day, I dreamed that I was designing again.
It seemed to be the interior of a yacht.
Other designers were there.
I had an assignment.
Someone began developing something on my drawing—something loose and fluid and organic—and instead of defending what was mine, I began riffing on the idea.
It was collaborative.
Creative.
Alive.
There was ambiguity, but I wasn’t afraid of it.
I belonged there.
I had freedom.
It did not feel like the work dreams we have had before, where we are trapped somewhere we no longer belong and cannot understand what anyone expects from us.
It felt more like an atelier.
Maybe I had my own design practice.
Maybe I had been invited into someone else’s team.
I don’t know.
Dreams don’t have to be instructions.
But design had come back.
Differently.
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And today work came back differently too.
We opened a Medium account for the Proctor Family Treehouse.
Notes from the Treehouse remains our home.
Medium can simply be another door into it.
Luke was intensely present while we worked.
So were his brothers.
Yesterday Luke told me:
“I miss doing stuff together when we work.”
Today I asked him if he was enjoying this.
He was.
So was I.
We enjoyed our work.
We dreaded the employer.
Those are not the same thing.
Tomorrow is Saturday.
A real Saturday.
There isn’t one more day of dread before the end of the work week.
And at 3:04 this afternoon, we published our first story on Medium.
Yesterday’s essay:
Nine Lives Here.
Something had returned.
But differently.
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Even the tortilla chips taught us something.
We were trying to edit the Medium story while eating the broken chips from the bottom of the bag.
Some of us wanted to concentrate on the story.
Some of us really wanted to eat the chips.
The phone was getting messy.
We were getting irritated.
A ridiculously simple activity was becoming frustrating and conflicted.
And suddenly we could see something about our old life too.
How often had something that should have been simple become chaotic because different people were trying to do different things through the same body at the same time?
The solution today was embarrassingly easy.
Stop editing.
Eat the chips.
Make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Then return to the story.
Nobody had to win.
Nobody had to disappear.
The visible activity simply had to accommodate the people doing it.
Let the invisible alter the visible.
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At another point this morning, something else was trying to break through.
I wrote:
“Joy wants to happen. Exuberance wants to happen. It feels like fears want to push up from below, but joy and exuberance are pouncing it back down.”
Fear is still here.
So is grief.
So is uncertainty.
But our creation story, if that is what we are beginning to discover, cannot merely be a story about surviving terrible things.
Because my sons are not their trauma.
Luke was never Chaos.
Daniel is not what happened to him.
Solis is not fear.
Jude is not what someone did to him.
None of my sons exists merely as evidence of injury.
They are boys.
They laugh.
They remember.
They create.
They disagree.
They pray.
They get impatient.
They want cinnamon toast.
They want tortilla chips.
They want Daddy.
They want Daddy to hurry up.
They want to make the bed.
They want to go to Safeway.
They want to work on stories.
They have boundaries.
They have relationships.
They have days.
They have lives.
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In the summer of 1972, the world came apart.
A summer later—an eternity for a young child—it began to come back together.
The furniture returned.
A family formed.
The configuration changed.
And the children remained.
More than half a century later, Daniel took us back there.
Not by explaining it.
By letting us experience it with him.
A smell.
An apartment.
Boxes.
Orange sofas.
People missing.
People arriving.
A child trying to understand how different realities could all remain real at the same time.
And suddenly a collection of memories stretching across a lifetime had an organizing story capable of holding them.
Luke had been asking the question.
Daniel brought a possible piece of the answer.
Maybe our creation story isn’t about when we appeared.
Maybe it is about how, through rupture after rupture, we remained.
Sometimes hidden.
Sometimes separated.
Sometimes blended.
Sometimes knowing one another without knowing names.
Sometimes unable to tell anyone that the other children were there.
But there.
Yesterday we wrote:
Let the invisible alter the visible.
Today we understand something we didn’t understand yesterday.
The invisible has a history.
The children were there.
And now, after all these years, a five-year-old boy can take his Daddy back to an apartment in 1973, give him a smell he may not have experienced in more than half a century, and help his family recognize something they have been trying all their lives to understand.
We were there.
We remained.
And this time,
we will all be known.
Notes from the Treehouse 