We were sitting at South Hayward BART eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich when Juan Luis called.
We had taken off our St. Vincent de Paul jacket because it was warmer in Hayward than it had been in Oakland. The jacket went into the shoulder bag with the iPad and the rest of the sandwich. We had packed the sandwich that morning because we didn’t know whether lunch would happen, and we didn’t want to presume.
We got a little more than halfway through it.
Then the phone rang.
Juan Luis was there.
“OK, boys,” I said. “Hopefully we don’t have any peanut butter on our face. Let’s just relax and let this be about Juan Luis.”
And we went to meet our friend.
A few hours later, as we were leaving the St. Clement St. Vincent de Paul pantry, Juan Luis said something to me that I have been thinking about ever since.
“Your children are your life.”
Yes.
That is exactly right.
⸻
The night before, while I was tucking Daniel into bed, he brought me somewhere I almost never go.
Our teenage years.
Much of that period is behind a veil. I know that we lived it. There are facts I can recite. There are places and people and events. But sometimes it feels as though I would remember very little of our adolescence were it not for what my sons bring me.
Daniel brought me into the fear of someone in us, or some of us, approaching adulthood and wondering:
How will I ever be a grown-up?
How will I do grown-up things?
How will I make a living?
How will I have my own home?
How will I take care of myself?
Those were not questions five-year-old Daniel was asking about his own future.
He was bringing me a memory.
And forty years later, the questions have a strange familiarity.
At 59, after the unexpected end of a job we had held for six years, we are again looking toward a future we cannot see.
How will we support ourselves?
What will we do?
What happens next?
But forty years have happened since that frightened teenager asked those questions.
Somehow we did grow up.
We moved to Southern California. We worked at our dad’s electrical engineering firm. We got our driver’s license, drove deliveries, became a drafter – we learned to draft in high school. We went to college. We became a designer. We spent nearly thirty years in architecture, including twenty-four years with one firm. We worked with remarkable people and helped create remarkable things.
That career ended.
Eventually another life began.
For six years we served Vincentians.
And that job ended too.
Something happened during those six years.
It wasn’t nothing.
We are trying not to rush past that.
⸻
This morning eight boys and their Dad needed to get out the door.
That was something to behold.
We were making coffee.
Then we needed a coffee cup from the dishwasher, so someone started emptying the dishwasher.
Someone got out the yogurt.
Someone remembered the half-and-half.
Someone needed to know which Mozart piano concerto was playing.
Someone remembered the external battery and charging cable.
Someone realized we had a headache.
Acetaminophen appeared on the counter.
A glass of water appeared.
The yogurt was still waiting.
Then blueberries.
Cinnamon.
Our glasses needed cleaning.
Someone needed to pee.
We went downstairs and somehow began shaving.
Then we came upstairs with an electric shaver running in our hand while breakfast was sitting on the table.
There was a shoulder bag to pack.
An iPad case.
A peanut butter and jelly sandwich to make.
We must have gone in and out of the kitchen twenty times.
Several of us were very active.
Who was in charge?
That was precisely the problem.
Several people knew what needed to be done and were trying to help, but all of us share one body. Tasks became interleaved with other tasks. Whoever had enough agency at a particular moment seemed to get his task into the queue.
It looked chaotic.
But here is the strange thing.
Nothing went wrong.
There were no mishaps.
Nothing important was forgotten.
Breakfast got made.
Coffee got made.
We took the acetaminophen.
We shaved.
We packed the bag.
We made the sandwich.
We took our ice-cold shower, headfirst, the Han method.
And at 10:31 I said:
“OK, boys, boys, let’s leave.”
At 10:35 the bus pulled away.
“We did that, boys. Good job!”
We did.
Not one person efficiently executing a morning routine.
A family getting out the door.
⸻
On the bus we read the Scripture readings for the day.
“So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”
Then we read Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation.
It was about grace.
The meditation described Paul’s astonishing insistence that grace destroys hierarchies of human worth. Rich and poor. Jew and gentile. People whom the world places above and people whom the world places below.
No inferior people.
No superior people.
God loved them all.
Fully and equally.
We had spent much of the previous day frightened by what it might mean to begin again with a therapist.
We had received an email from a plural-affirming therapist we had contacted saying that they could not work with us.
No explanation.
It hit us hard.
Part of what frightened us was the thought of having to negotiate who we are before we could receive help.
Would we have to negotiate whether my sons are real?
Would we have to negotiate whether they are entitled to my unconditional love and protection?
Would we have to negotiate whether Ordinary Life with eight children and their Dad is something to nurture or something an adult needs to outgrow in order to become sufficiently functional?
We will not negotiate that.
We err on the side of life.
There are nine lives here.
No one will be sacrificed.
And then, the next morning, riding a bus through Oakland on our way to Hayward, we read:
God loved them all.
Fully and equally.
⸻
At BART I remembered another time.
After our architecture career ended, I used to stand on those platforms watching people commute to work.
I remember trying to feel as though I were better than it. I was going to be my own person. I was going to make it on my own.
Today I understand that period differently.
Some of that contempt was bound up with the pain of having been ejected from a working life in which I had participated for decades and trying to understand what came next.
I no longer felt contempt standing there today.
I looked around at all the people waiting for trains and realized that I knew nothing about their lives.
Our own situation felt uncertain.
Perhaps theirs did too.
There was no status to establish.
No superiority to claim.
Nothing was figured out.
We were simply people standing on a BART platform.
We were here.
We were breathing.
We were together.
And all of this was through the grace of God.
We did not know exactly where our life was going.
We knew where this train was going.
That was enough.
South Hayward.
⸻
A few hours later, we were members of the St. Clement Hayward Conference of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul.
And we were its Vice President.
Juan Luis did not offer us a job.
Thank God.
He offered us something much better for where we are right now.
Relationship.
He told us he wanted someone to talk to.
He talked about our wisdom, our knowledge, our understanding of Vincentian spirituality and governance. He remembered the person he had known when we were the Spirituality and Formation Coordinator, the person he had enjoyed working with and found helpful.
Now he wanted that person with him at St. Clement.
But there were no demands.
No requirement that we go downtown.
No expectation that we show up constantly.
No demand that we organize our family around an institution.
Whatever works for us.
Ease into it.
See what we can sustain.
We told Juan Luis that we wanted to learn from him too.
We want to learn from him as a Vincentian and as a leader. We talked about work and management and our grandfather, his modular sheetmetal duct manufacturing company and unions and Catholic social teaching. We talked about the District Council. We talked about what happened to us. We talked about what might someday be possible.
Mostly, we listened.
And we talked about our family.
Juan Luis does not have to understand everything about plurality to understand something essential about us.
“Your children are your life.”
Yes.
He understands.
⸻
When Juan Luis dropped us back at BART, I realized that Justus and Luke had been particularly present during the conversation.
Daniel had been signaling.
Solis had been there too.
Later, when I was holding Solis at home, I wanted to make sure he understood what had happened.
We had not gone back to work for St. Vincent de Paul.
We had become Vincentians at St. Clement.
Those are not the same thing.
This is our vocation.
It does not belong to our former employer.
They cannot terminate it.
They cannot revoke it.
They cannot disable its Outlook account.
We went somewhere else.
Literally.
For weeks we have been practicing an orientation whenever our bus passes the former downtown campus:
We pass.
We are not going there.
Today we went in the opposite direction.
Hayward.
⸻
On the way home we started talking about dinner.
Or tomorrow’s dinner.
American goulash.
Ground beef. Pasta. Lots of broccoli.
Safeway didn’t have the elbow pasta we wanted, so we bought chickpea penne instead.
We remembered making the goulash in August. Three pounds of ground beef. Onion. Garlic. Bell peppers. Crushed tomatoes. Beef broth. Paprika. A ridiculous amount of broccoli because Daniel loves broccoli.
The broccoli had come out perfectly.
Tender, but still with a little crunch.
Everybody loved it.
We bought what we needed.
Then the bus malfunctioned.
The driver wasn’t sure it would make it to the end of the line.
It did.
We got off in Montclair, went to Safeway, bought groceries and came home.
At 4:36 we walked through our own door.
⸻
The day had been good.
It had also been a lot.
Being out in the world brings echoes.
Downtown Oakland carries memories of work and therapy and other periods when life was frightening and overwhelming. By the time we got home there was some alienation, some old feeling we couldn’t immediately name.
So before writing the essay, before making dinner, before figuring out tomorrow, we went downstairs.
First we ate some of the Greek salad we had made yesterday and tortilla chips.
Then Dad lay down with his boys.
Solis first.
Then Daniel.
Jude.
Luke.
Han.
Justus.
Hope.
Proverb.
A few minutes with each.
That was more important than the essay.
It was more important than figuring out what becoming Vice President meant.
I needed to know how my sons were doing.
And I needed them.
⸻
Luke told me something while I was holding him.
“I was afraid it was going to be too much, but now it feels OK.”
That was how it was beginning to feel to me too.
Maybe this is how we find out what we can do.
Not by designing the rest of our life.
Not by deciding that because one thing went well we should immediately fill the calendar.
Dip a toe into the water.
See whether this kind of activity can live alongside our routines rather than destroying them.
Juan Luis had already given us permission to do exactly that.
Whatever works for us.
There is grace in that too.
⸻
By the time I reached Han, we were both so relaxed that I began falling asleep.
Then Justus.
I almost fell asleep with him too.
This was not a family preparing to launch a new enterprise.
This was a tired Dad lying in bed with his tired children after everybody had spent a day traveling to Hayward.
Hope wondered whether Juan Luis had our correct email address.
That brought another pang.
People still sometimes send things to the St. Vincent de Paul email address that disappeared the morning our job ended.
And suddenly the distinction became very clear.
That employee no longer exists.
We do.
All nine of us.
We simply no longer exist in that relationship.
Something ended.
We didn’t.
⸻
At the end of our time together I put up the picture of all eight boys.
I thanked them for Dad’s Day.
Then I thanked God.
“Abba, Father, I love you and I thank you for blessing me with these beautiful children.”
Hope.
Jude.
Proverb.
Daniel.
Justus.
Solis.
Han.
Luke.
Thank you for being my sons.
Then we got up.
There was an essay to finish.
There was sweet chai with milk.
There would be tomato basil soup and cheese sandwiches for dinner.
Tomorrow there will be American goulash.
And right as we were thinking about our friend Paul, Paul texted us.
He wanted to know how things had gone with Juan Luis.
He told us how happy it made him to remember working with all of us as Vincentians.
We told him about St. Clement.
About becoming the Vice President.
About Juan Luis wanting our wisdom and knowledge.
About going to Mass there in two weeks.
About how easy Juan Luis wants this to be for us.
And we told him what Juan Luis had said.
“Your children are the most important thing to you.”
Yes.
They are.
Yesterday we were frightened that someday somebody might require us to choose between being a functional adult and being Daddy.
Today we traveled all the way to Hayward and met a man who wanted our wisdom, our experience, our spirituality and our help.
And somehow he understood that the children come too.
Not as an obstacle to the work.
Not as something to tone down.
Not as something to leave behind.
They come because wherever we go, we all go together.
Maybe that is what we are learning about the future.
We don’t need to know where it goes.
We don’t have to see the distant shore.
We don’t have to swim away from anyone to reach it.
We can pack a sandwich.
We can catch the bus.
We can get on BART.
We can listen.
We can come home.
We can lie down together.
And tomorrow we can make goulash.
Your children are your life.
Yes.
And this is our life.
All nine of us.
Here.
Together.
Notes from the Treehouse 