{Originally Posted on Clotted Cognition}
When my mother moved back to Dallas in 1989 she bought this town home. It’s a gorgeous place, one that almost takes your breath away when you walk in. The street was one that had been taken over by architecturally designed town homes that were mostly higher end and populated by people without children. In general, the people in those town homes were older, retired, or better off young professionals. It was close-ish to the predominantly gay area in Dallas, so there were several gay couples as well. The street was named Travis Street and it was also the street on which my first home stood, 40 years ago last month.

We used to see one of those gay couples out walking every day. Well, one would walk and push the other in a wheelchair. Their love and devotion to each other was clear and I remember thinking that I hoped I would find that sort of devotion someday, too. Unless you’ve experienced what it’s like to take care of a once healthy partner, I don’t think the sacrifice is truly imaginable. This couple continued to take their walks, to slowly make their way down the street to get a glimpse of the life outside, traveling the street as any couple would who had been together for a long time.

And then, the man in the wheelchair died. This was sad enough and devastating, I am sure, for his partner. But the sadness was not to end to there, nor was the devastation going to be small. Instead of being allowed to grieve in his own home, surrounded by his own memories of times had in loving company, the family of the man who died, the man who owned the home and its contents in legal name only, unceremoniously kicked the grieved partner out onto the street. How could they do such a thing? Easy: with all legal recourse. They didn’t care that the man they were throwing out onto the street has cared for their relative when they were nowhere to be seen; he had assuredly cleaned up after the inevitable failures of the man’s body and had still found a way to push him down the street every single day. They didn’t care that the man they were throwing out had loved their relative as they clearly never had, nor did they care that this man was a human being.

{Originally posted on P E N S I E V E}

In its 15th and final season, hospital drama ER resurrected the dead: Anthony Edwards reprised his role as Dr. Mark Green last week in a series of flashbacks by Angela Bassett’s character, Cate Banfield.

When ER debuted in the Fall of ’94, I had an infant and a two-year-old, and I’m sure escaping into TV melodrama was a welcome respite from the “storms” my little ones ravaged. I remember lying on our sofa nursing my son–right side, left side, right side, left–through ER, the news and then late nights with Leno and Letterman.

During the episodes leading up to his death, Dr. Green takes his daughter to Hawaii, to teach her “important” life lessons–how to drive, how to surf…I really don’t recall much else.

Except a last admonishment to her, one that has haunted me in the ensuing years.

“Be generous. Always.”

It struck me as odd, then, that a parent’s dying words would speak to generosity. It was unsettling for some reason; I judged those words as somehow falling short. In my mind, as a believer, I felt like he should have offered some great spiritual insight, something with eternal value, something … more. Of course, I realized it was television after all, and the series had never before offered anything substantively spiritually enlightening; but still, I saw it as missed opportunity.

Originally published on Halushki.

One of the most important responsibilities
- nay, obligations – of any parent is, I think, to encourage our children’s
daily awareness of all that is magical and mysterious in our great,
big fantastical world.

And, yes, I am a hippie.

To point our children toward a sly glimpse of the crystalline fairies
in a drop of dew….

To wonder in awe at Titan voices booming across the evening sky during
a summer thunderstorm….

To marvel at orchestras captured on silver discs, musicians trapped
like microscopic genies to be released in song only at the listener’s
wish and command….

Ah bliss! Ah joy!

To support and stimulate their creative selves and thusly nourish their
hearts and souls with the food of poets and saints!

(And I’m not talking cigarettes and day-old baguettes.)

But, as a bittersweet fact of life, every day my children grow a bit
older and, so too, a bit too wise for the world’s magic.

Mostly, I blame science.

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