Take What You Love

Roatan, Honduras

After a hellish eight week surrender to cancer my mom passed in April. The surrender came on the heels of a heroic twenty-five year war with that patient enemy. Diagnosed and treated in the mid-90’s, she beat the enemy back into initial retreat. An anxious woman, the yearly oncology appointments post-cancerous retreat were more hellish for her than they would be for most. On the rare occasion when her test would result in a false positive for tumor markers, the next few weeks were torture. Along with being patient, cancer is a crafty enemy. I see those false positives as false flags, luring her into a sense that everything just might be alright, until it isn’t.

She passed peacefully and with little to no pain in her beloved bed (she really loved that bed) at home overlooking the bay in her favorite place on earth, her adopted hometown of Newport Beach. The last two months were rough. Free spirited into her eighties, being confined to a bed and beholden to her children for all of life’s necessities didn’t suit her at all. The resulting frustration meant she said what she had to say and it wasn’t pretty. We hurt those closest to us and March, 2021 was Normandy for our family. She was the American forces, we were stormed. April represented truce and healing and when she passed on the twentieth she was surrounded by us all and love and sadness filled the room, but not regret.

I am self aware enough to know I am pretty fucked up. Emotionally. Spiritually. For everyone other than Bezos and the other billionaires, Covid was rough. Comparing your insides to other people’s outsides is never a good idea, but it’s been an especially challenging eighteen months. Just as we emerged from world-altering health crisis, my mom was diagnosed. Her March on my house of cards ego coincided with me fighting a war on another front. As mentioned in this forum before, I am an alcoholic. March, 2021 represented a year without an AA meeting and most of those months were without routines and workouts, putting my coping skills at an all-time low. The afternoon she unleashed her harshest truths I went home to an apartment whose size seemed to validate the names she called me, sat in the dark and cried. I thought about using, weighing the escape of a few hours from my self-hatred against twelve years without mind altering substances. Those scales weren’t as tipped as you might think, you normal people. But twelve years of meetings, steps and talk ruined my relapse, for I knew I wouldn’t enjoy it. Too much sobriety in my head for a decent high.

March under siege and April in truce gave me time to look past her hospital bed and out on the bay and start to reconcile our complicated relationship. The beginning of an idea started those last few weeks. Take what I love and leave the rest.

Sandab was amazing at huge decisions. Those decisions shaped my life and I am so grateful for her foresight. In 1968 she used her indomitable will to move us from Pomona, Ca to Newport Beach. She got out while the gettin’ was good and they could (barely) afford a house in Newport at that point. If they had waited five years like my dad wanted, we would have stretched to buy in Chino Hills (I am told this is upscale Chino and if more than 25 people were going to read this I would be worried about the Chino Hills hate.) Because of her will, we ended up in a place that defined me in ways most places can’t. Newport might be a man in an oversized Tommy Bahama shirt bellowing at you about immigration control while he underpays his undocumented housekeeper. Newport could be a place where real housewives actually undersell it’s craziness and austerity, where women with real implants seem obsessed with the term fake news. But one thing Newport is not is passive. It will mold you. My sister fought being molded and moved away, like some do. But isn’t that another way of being molded? The magnet attracts or repels, but either way it’s affecting you. Many of the things I love most about myself are because of this crazy town, and that was her decision. Beach kid. Defiant, but respectful, liberal. Reader. Coach. So much more. Did she need that decision validated over and over? Yes, she did. Did she set fire to this town I love on the daily and get in flame wars with people I grew up with over politics? Again, yes. But I love my Newport mold. I’m leaving the rest.

After fighting a two-front war, I did what any self-disrespecting addict would do, I ran. AA sloganeering offers two versions of fear, FEAR can either be Face Everything And Recover or Fuck Everything And Run. I chose the latter. I ran all the way to Honduras. Like my home town, when I go, I fucking go big. I ran to Central America to escape her words ringing in my head, away from seeing people I know everywhere I go (hometowns, love and hate), and to avoid having to talk about a complicated subject in the simplest of terms. I am writing a book and in a hut on the beach in Central America I would finish it. Hemingway but sober and with Airbnb. Not Ernest, my talent level is more Mariel. Not even “Manhattan” Mariel, more “Personal Best” Mariel.

But, dear reader, I did not escape, did I? Shockingly, my thoughts are still my thoughts in Central America. Maybe I thought her words in my head would be in Spanish and (despite a few weeks of daily Babbel lessons) I don’t speak it yet. But they persist in English. And I am still an alcoholic 2,300 miles away from home. Distance, it turns out, isn’t a cure. So I’ve tried to pivot those thoughts from a long running essay on my shortcomings to one about finding the beauty and ignoring the ugliness.

I am sitting at a beat-up wood desk in a screened-in porch off my one room hut in Roatan watching some local children play on the dock where yesterday I sat and soulfully thought. These four boys, all eight years old, have been fishing off the dock using plastic water bottles wrapped with line and a hook since I arrived. A few minutes ago I asked why they weren’t fishing today and they said they ran out of hooks. They chanted “No money, no hooks” in broken English as they laughed and did flips off the dock. I know from our awkward, broken-English-but-more-broken-Spanish talks they fish so they can eat but until hooks somehow appear they can perform backflips off the dock for passing tourists in fishing boats. Their pivot towards joy with no worry about how these hooks would arrive forced me to see the parallel. Leave the worry about hooks and take the chance to enjoy back-flips off docks.

Hooks, purple Lamborghinis and luxury bags are ample in Newport Beach. Both on the surface under any microscope, Newport is beautiful and ridiculous. If the 2000’s were an episode of The Bachelor, 2020 would have been hometown visits for Newport. The year where the true craziness comes out. Mom grew up poor in Maine with the angry defiance of the generationally poor. Because of her and Dad, I was raised a comfortable, people-pleasing liberal in a city full of conservatives. So you would think 2020 would be the year I hated my beloved city. Mask disputes that played out like road rage. Election fraud accusations from Newport parents who definitely yelled at the ref for cheating their beloved Hudson out of a championship, even though his team lost 35–7. But I don’t hate her toxicity, I love her beauty. On the hot/crazy scale Newport ranks high in both. And when she has a Trump boat parade or one of my neighbors causes a scene at Starbuck’s because he is forced to wear a mask I can take what I love and leave the rest. When my friends from other cities question how I can live in such a place I can smile like an indulgent husband and say you don’t know her like I do. I can appreciate her beauty and be grateful for my cruiser bike rides along the boardwalk at night. I can smile at my elementary school on the water. I can bodysurf at L street and see six friends on my walk from sea to my bike. I take what I love and leave the rest.

I am not sure if Newport taught me how to love my mom at the end or my mom taught me how to love Newport from the beginning, or both. But as she grew more frustrated with me I remembered how much I love reading because of her. How many countless hours of peace I have found through her, and now my, love of reading. After one tough night of her expressing herself rather freely regarding my life, I remembered that the unapologetic and unedited thoughts that drove me to cry in the dark also taught me to think freely and that in one moment she taught me that big thoughts should be rewarded, even if they might be wrong. Junior year of high school. AP English. I wrote a paper on The Great Gatsby with the theme being Nick Carraway was gay and in love with Gatsby. I had no problem with him being gay, I was merely pointing out that Nick writes about Gatsby in a sexual and adoring way and the book has the feel of a love triangle between Nick, Daisy and Gatsby. I backed it up with evidence; a scene in which Nick wakes up with the obviously gay Mr. McKee at 3 am and they are both only in their underwear. I quoted passages where Nick’s physical description of Gatsby seems sexual. Now, maybe I was wrong. There are Gatsby scholars who actually went to Ivy League, not party, schools who would disagree and say I was just being salacious. However, in 2021 that idea is viewed as respected enough to be argued in academic papers written by scholarly types. In 1981 I got a C- and was told I missed the point of the book. As a teacher, my mom tended to avoid inserting herself in school matters. Not that day. Full of a scary mixture of indignation, ahead-of-her-time ally-ism and intellectual mother bear, she marched into Newport Harbor High for the first and only non-sports reason the next day, called Mrs. Orbach a homophobe and demanded she show both of us how my work wasn’t as well-written as the other papers. “You punish imagination in an English class because you have none” she said. I cheered on the inside while I grimaced on the outside. I loved her for standing up for me and for being so pithy in her defense. But I knew like many of Sandab’s tilting at windmills the actual windmill was never tilted, my grade remained the same. To say Mrs. Orbach didn’t embrace my presence in class after that would be an understatement. But I learned not to accept small minded people and that lesson was much more important. I love her for showing me that ideas are amazing things, whether you agree or disagree with them. Take what you love and leave the rest.

She didn’t say I love you very much until the end and if she cooked me nine meals in my lifetime, I would be shocked. One Christmas she got my dad the same sweater, a lavender zip number from Costco, twice. Her love language was a cocktail of slightly angry and very funny political discourse. She hung up on me frequently when I didn’t agree with her or chided her for trolling conservatives on Facebook. But she never wavered in her belief of what was right. Her last week on earth she had a friend of my sisters, who has done extensive work for displaced families and children along the border, fly down from NorCal for a videotaped interview. The weeks before that she was weakened to the point where it was hard to hear her “teacher’s voice” but that day she sat upright and asked very smart and probing questions in a strong, clear voice regarding the plight of the families down there. Energized by an issue, she burned brighter and as I watch and rewatch the video I know love her. Take what you need and leave the rest.

When I called my mom to tell her I was an addict and needed help she politely declined. That is the most generous way to describe her reaction and she deserves that generosity. The daughter of the town drunk she spent her childhood moving from apartment to apartment, unsure where her next meal might come from and teetering between oversized, charming and handsome Frank and angry, abusive Frank. She and my grandmother escaped to California and things got better, but not until junior high. Looking back on that call, I am sure it took her back to that uncertainty, that fear. I spent the next thirty days alone, getting clean in a motel room in Carmel, Indiana. For half a year I was in massive self-pity, not an attractive place to be. It is more painful for me to remember the self-pity than the withdrawls and let me share with you, the withdrawls were bad. I felt she had forsaken me. After six months of listening to me complain about my family, my sponsor looked up from the step guide, cleared his throat and in his distinctive country drawl said “When y’all stop focusing on what they done to you and start focusing on what you done to them life gets a whole lot better.” Fuck. I went to work thinking about what Frank had done to her and then how I had made it a thousand times worse. Fear I would become him and hurt her. Fear I would become him and die alone. Fear that I had ruined everything. But there is a gift under that wrapping of fear. I emerged knowing my sobriety was my responsibility. After a lot of work, I see now that she had done her time, her penance, with alcoholics. In me, she saw Frank. In my lies prior to getting clean, she saw his lies. Compassion isn’t just seeing the other person’s pain, it is accepting how that pain limits them. I like to think of myself as an intelligent man, but not understanding this until the end, when her hand was in mine as we looked out on the bay, haunts me.

I came to Honduras to escape Newport closing in on me. I cannot wait to get back. I came to escape her voice. I leave loving it. I ran away from home and memories of her only to find the best memories of her here. My healing is coming slowly but I will take it, and leave the rest.