I used to love September. For me it was more a time of renewal than of winding down for winter. We didn’t have much color to mark fall, the mountains I grew up in were covered in evergreens- several species of pine, plus incense cedar, manzanita, live oak and buckthorn. The black oaks were the only ones who noticed the seasons changing, going from green to drab brown and then bare, waiting for the snow. September meant the end of August heat, the beginning of school, new teachers and that year’s crop of new kids and TV shows and resumption of contact with my favorites. I loved September.
That started to change twenty years ago today with the death of my father. I was adopted early and raised in the woods by sociopaths. A violent, lecherous drunk and his enabling second wife who were the same age as my grandparents, (Depression/WWII era), and very damaged. They couldn’t qualify for standard adoptions even then because of their age and because the daughter from her first marriage had flatly refused to stay with them, had gone to a judge and told of the asshole expecting her to be an adjunct wife and her mother not protecting her. So in 1958 or '59 full custody of the fifteen year old girl was granted to her father with no visitation.
I survived them, worked my ass off, graduated at 16 and left. I’d started looking for my birth parents as soon as I’d gotten out of high school, scattershot against a very closed system, with no success. I had just turned thirty years old when one of the reunion registries I’d signed up with and forgotten about years before left a message on my phone saying that there was a woman that wanted to talk with me.
A little sexist, I suppose, but I assumed it was my mother. It actually turned out to be my paternal grandmother, who had also started looking for me as soon as I’d been old enough and had shown the family stubborn streak, (and more than a little willingness to fib and commit ‘social engineering' towards her goal ::grin::), and never given up looking.
From the first conversation my contact with my birth father was a revelation. We were peas in a pod, like twins separated at birth. We had many of the same interests, the same temper, we read the same genre of books, even had the same driving habits. I once asked my stepmother to look over an early draft of a paper and she didn't get a paragraph in before she burst out laughing, saying she refused to believe that run on sentences were genetic. They may not be, but the cast of mind that produces them and edits later probably is. We loved the wilderness and photography and animals and neither of us suffered fools quietly. For several years after I would sometimes do or say something in passing and my aunt or stepmother would catch their breath because of the resemblance, because I had some of his gestures and expressions. Genetics is funny stuff.
He’d known that he had a daughter from his relationship with my mother, but nothing else. In going through some of his old writings I found poems he’d written when I was a child, wondering about me. We talked frequently that summer, he came down to SoCal and we drove back up to the Bay area together to meet the rest of the family. I can’t tell you how strange, how spooky, it is to walk into a room full of people you resemble after having been unique all your life.
On the drive up I could feel him stomping on his impatience and reactivity, reining in his temper with both hands trying not to spook me. Because he wanted me to stay around. That was such an amazing feeling, to know it mattered to him and that he wanted me to like him enough to override his impulsiveness and his sharpness so he didn’t scare me off with it.
We talked, we made plans, we slipped into an easy assurance with each other with astonishing speed. We fit. I’d always been interested in scuba, leftover vestiges of a fascination with Sea Hunt and Jacques Cousteau, I suppose, and he promised to teach me to dive the following summer.
Such a casual assumption, that we’d have years to catch up.
My good aunt had invited me up to central Oregon to visit and see the sights and the homestead ranch that she’d gotten from my grandfather. The ranch he’d earned forestry management awards for near Fossil.
It was my first time in Oregon, a chance to get to know my talented, difficult aunt and her Hewlett Packard, PhD husband. We drove around for days, feasting on the visual gamut of what Oregon had to offer and settling into liking each other. In three months, I had gone from being me alone against the backdrop of my own life to being part of a family with history and quirks and a place to fit in.
The day I flew home from Oregon my uncle called. I figured he was checking to see if the flight had been okay, but instead he said, ‘ There’s no easy way to say this, your father’s died.’. I couldn’t breathe. I literally felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach. I could hear my aunt crying in the background. I cried for three days. And I don’t cry.
It was only three months, we’d talked on the phone a lot, but only met in person once, that week on the trip to meet everyone else. It didn’t seem possible that I could be so devastated over someone that I’d know for such a short time.
At thirty, I’d finally gotten my life pretty well in hand. I was an RN, worked in critical care on my own schedule, had my horses, including the stallion that was the first living thing I’d ever witnessed being born, in 1976, the son of my first horse. I’d survived what could laughingly be called my childhood and the years of itinerant poverty after I had to drop out of college after freshman year when the grandmother who was supporting my education had been killed. I’d dragged myself through bouts of homelessness and back through nursing school seven years later at a community college before finally earning the degree.
I’d gotten tough, surviving. I’d been diagnosed with PTSD in my late 20’s, not surprising, really, all things considered. I’d been a little concerned, actually, that I hadn’t had any really deep emotional connections or investments. I wasn’t sure that I still could allow myself to be attached to anyone or anything, (besides, Sonny, the stallion), it was too dangerous, the world was too unstable, so many people were manipulative and just plain nuts. I hadn’t let anything mean too much to me in a very long time. In a backhanded way the overwhelming grief of my father’s death was an affirmation that I was still capable of loving deeply. Of allowing profound attachment.
A very backhanded comfort.
My father was born with aortic stenosis and had had three AVR’s, (aortic valve replacement), by the time I met him, But he’d been stable for years, he climbed Mt Whitney every year, he ran almost daily. He’d just finished a run, come in and gone into the den to work on some of the films he was editing. He had enough warning to call out to my stepmother, but even though they lived only blocks from the hospital, they couldn’t get his heart restarted. He died. September 29th, 1991, twenty years ago today.
He was 47, three years younger than I am now. I have the same conduction defect that he died of. I have arythmias sometimes. I’m one of those who can feel them, many can’t. I’ve never been on a monitor when it happened, so I don’t know if it’s V-tach or SVT or plain old PVCs, (premature ventricular contraction), but so far it’s been self limiting. It’s sensitive to electrolytes, so I watch my potassium and calcium/magnesium intake and it stays under control.
Ten years later, September 2001, was the second major blow to Septembers for me. On September 9th, Sonny, the son of my first horse, the companion who’d been with me more than half my life, been around the country with me, through thick and thin, the longest standing relationship that I’ve ever had with any living thing, colicked and died in my arms at age 25.
He didn’t know he was old, I never told him. He looked and acted like he had since he was eight or nine, he was eternal.
Arabians tend to be long lived and disgustingly healthy and he was no exception. Not many stallions, even the Crabbet line of the Arabs, are really kid safe, but he was. He loved children. Well, attention of any sort, really, he would stand to be admired for hours.
One of the pastures I rented for him and his mother in the midwest, when we were stuck there, was on a farm with a young daughter in the family, two or three at the time. She’d stuff kitchen scraps in the pockets of her little overalls and toddle out to the pasture and he’d head over and wait for her at the fence as soon as he saw her coming out of the house.
He would stand like a stone while she tugged at her pockets, trying to free the goodies, and take then with the utmost delicacy from her outstretched hands. He learned quickly that if he moved too fast, she’d get scared and go away, so he was very deliberate whenever she was near.
She’d wander around the pasture and he’d follow her, carefully, nose a couple of inches off the ground so that they were eye level with each other, exploring. I wish I’d had today’s cameras handy back then, the memory of their slow peregrinations of the pasture are something I’d love to be able to share with more than words.
We piled five kids at a time on him for her birthday, (with adults to steady them), and he ambled around like walking on eggshells to keep them on top, squealing with delight. Later, back in California, a friend was the activities director at a local nursing home, so every now and then we’d throw bath blankets down so he wouldn’t slip on the tile and walked him into the lobby and wheeled the elders up to pet and love on him, (and sneak him corn chips & cookies when they thought I wasn’t looking). They’d mostly grown up with horses at the time, and the scent and feel of a horse brought back many fond memories. They often couldn’t remember what they’d had for breakfast but everyone remembered the days the horse came to visit.
I still have that bloodline here, grand and great-grandfoals from him. They're smart and sensible and athletic as hell. My first horse delivered him, literally, into my arms when I was 14, and he died just after I’d turned 40. My touch and voice and scent were the first and last things he knew in this life.
Damn, I still miss him. Two days later, the Towers fell and the world changed. And five days after that, my alcoholic step uncle killed himself, leaving three kids and a grandchild.
I’m still mad at him over that, for bailing on his kids because he was too damned lazy to fix what he’d screwed up, leaving us to clean up his damned messes. And even madder at my stepmother for not allowing him to seek treatment. For being more concerned with the ‘reputation’ of people who’d been dead for decades and couldn’t care less than with living people who had a right to honesty and assistance to get themselves on track. The misery and waste of lives that came from that still pisses me off whenever I think about it.
I used to love September.
Fri Sep 30, 2011 at 5:51 AM PT: Hey, the Rescue Rangers ride again! I just realized it was my 3rd anniversary on the site. Being picked up and republished is a nice prop, thanks, folks.