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I went on a walk earlier in my neighborhood, as I often do. It’s beautiful here, in Santa Barbara right at the foot of the mountains. Golden-yellow and red fallen leaves all along the sidewalks, spilling over into the street. I live by a park, which is also nice. People often bring their dogs and kids there.
On this walk I continued listening to an audio book, Winter Journal, by the fantastic writer Paul Auster. If you don’t know Auster’s work, go out and buy some of his books asap. He’s a Jersey-born Boomer author whose prose is a magical mix of subtle, simple, stylistically elegant, as well as profoundly human and relatable. He is a stylist of the highest modern degree. I can’t recall anymore how I discovered his work but it was years ago. The book was a thin, blue-covered novel called Invisible, semi-autobiographical fiction about a young writer fleeing New York City for a tangled, complex dramatic mess in Paris. The Sixties.
I’ve always been fascinated with the sixties. First because it’s my parents’ generation. Second, because in high school my mom granted me her old records and I discovered Dylan, The Doors, The Stones, etc. It was a secret revelation; “punk before punk” I thought then. (My friends and I were hardcore punk rockers; this is in the late nineties, early aughts.) Later, at the start of my wild, lurid, alcoholic twenties, I’d discover that my mom, as a crazy, out-of-control teenager herself, circa 1964, had met the Stones, been invited back to their hotel party in LA, had partied with them, and had subsequently gone to their recording studio while they recorded a new song. (Yes, it’s possible I am Keith Richards’s son. Kidding. Though it would make a hell of a lot of sense.)
And then my “second mother” (Diane Lake: Click here), aka, my childhood best friend’s mother who sort of became my surrogate “replacement mother” when I was in my pre-teens until my best friend and I severed ways to go to different high schools. I remember her as often kind, sometimes loud and verbally angry, very religious. Their family went to church (this was in Ojai, California, where I grew up, 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles, in the mountains) several times per week. Despite the fact that my mother had a horrible, explosive rage towards the church (she wrote a whole book about it), and my father was a burning atheist, I got baptized at said church when I was 12, around 1994.
Later, in 2013, when I was just under 30 and living in a tiny illegal garage-turned-studio in North Oakland in the San Francisco Bay Area, my childhood best friend’s father, Diane’s husband, died of a rare skin cancer. We all got to say goodbye. In fact I wrote him a seven-page letter and read it out loud to him and his family. About half a page in I started crying; soon the man and I (he’d been, too, like a second father throughout the nineties) were hugging and I was weeping into his naked, hairy, now skeletal chest. He told me, “You’re going deep, Michael. You’re going deep.”
A week later he died. A few months after this, Diane revealed a massive, tortured secret she’d kept for half a century: Back in the chaotic, rancid, grotesquely experimental sixties, she’d been deeply involved in the Manson Family. She’d been One of The Girls. Crazy, huh? I couldn’t square the woman I’d known as a second mother in my youth…with this new strange reality. The story is this: Diane’s parents had been true, authentic hippies. They truly did “tune in and drop out.” Her dad was an artist. They moved often. Once Diane stumbled down the street from their LA apartment and saw the Doors playing in a park, circa 1965. By age 12 she was doing acid with her folks.
She and her parents had met a young, strapping, charming Charles Manson while visiting a commune. It was the late sixties. Manson befriended the 14-year-old Diane. Finally he asked where her parents were and she took him to them. Manson asked if he could take her and, unbelievably, they said yes. Thus began Diane’s brief and incendiary tenure with one of America’s most discussed and written-about psychopaths. She was NOT involved in the Tate or LaBianca murders. But she did testify in court after they caught Manson and her testimony helped put the man behind bars. Diane approached me sometime in 2015 about ghostwriting her memoir. I said yes but it got weird/complicated and, in the end, she found two literary agents/writers who did it. The book came out a few years ago; it’s called Member of the Family.
Anyway. All this to say: Listening to Paul Auster discussing his childhood and youth in the 1960s reminded me of my “mothers,” and my fascination with that time period, and my own youth in the nineties. In the book he discusses his father’s sudden death at 66, and how they never got to clear up “the fog” between them, all the unsaid things, the mysterious questions. It made me think of my childhood best friend’s father, who I did clear things up with. And my father, who I suppose I haven’t. The truth is: I don’t know if I can clear things up with my father. The miscommunication, the confusion, has always been The Whole Thing. Meaning: The problem—the spiritual divide—between my father and me has always been that we are so profoundly, fundamentally different from each other, that there simply does not seem to be a way of bridging that chasm.
Let me be clear: I love my father, dearly. And he very obviously loves me. He is a good man, no question. (Almost everybody loves my father once they interact with him.) He is truly kind, thoughtful, judicious, honest. There ARE ways, of course, in which we are incredibly similar: We both have a pretentious arrogance about us sometimes. I have his stubbornness. His selfishness. His lack of desire to be around other humans too often. His perhaps overly practical, analytical mind. In other ways I’m much more my mother: Sensitive; dramatic; controlling; angry. But none of these traits are “totalizing.” I have some good and some bad traits. Or perhaps better: Some helpful and some unhelpful. Don’t we all?
I love walking and listening to someone like Paul Auster. His words (and his own voice) pour out like honey into my heart and soul. He reminds me that life is sweet and short, just a passing moment. As I’ve grown older I’ve started letting little things go more and more. Why not? No need to cry over spilled milk, right? My father last week said he liked one of my other Substack posts. (Sincere American Writing.) He said he was shocked by how “optimistic” it was.
But here’s the thing: When I think of death it’s not generally from a negative perspective. Americans always think of death in a negative light. Maybe that’s the crux of the problem. I think of death as inevitable, firstly, and a relief, secondly. Not a relief as in I hate being alive, but in the glorious, positive sense that we get this shimmering, transient experience of being here and then that necessarily is terminated because we’re biological creatures with expiration dates. And that’s fine. Why not? This axiom does not threaten me. I am not afraid of death. The moments just before death, yes. But not death itself. The cessation of consciousness. I wouldn’t want to live for 300 years. Knowing life ends makes what we have now that much more spectacular and important.
Don’t waste it. This is why I write. This is why love matters. Love of self, of others, of existence.
Beautiful. I feel similar relief in my new comprehension of human death 🧚🏻♂️💛 I have a list app in my phone. One of my lists is labeled: “To Do/Stuff I Need.” Paul Auster is on that list, thanks for sharing.