Author: Joshua B. Kay

Emergence: A Spring Appreciation

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spring shootsMarch passed in its typical, indecisive style. Though the Michigan winter loosened its grip, it also clamped back down every couple of days, a rough reminder that it could still send us diving under our blankets.

Yet when the sun was high in the sky, it was no longer a teasing, distant disk that offered light but no heat. Now we could feel it. As March went on, much of our record snowfall melted away. We opened our jackets and welcomed the sunlight against our pale skin. Pond-sized puddles formed on sidewalks and along curbs. Most nights, they froze hard and slick.

April has started with the promise of a consistent run of above-freezing highs. After the winter we’ve had, it’s no surprise that a 45-degree day feels balmy. I was happy to tuck my parka into the closet in favor of a light jacket.

We wince at enormous potholes, swerving our cars to avoid them if traffic permits. My son says it’s like the giant slalom in the Olympics. And when you’ve got no choice but to hit one of these craters, trouble follows. Crumpled hubcaps decorate the curbs of our busiest routes, and tire stores are having a banner spring.

Filthy, icy piles of snow remain, like tiny glaciers, layered and compacted and full of grit. My driveway is clear now, but there were three inches of ice there for months, four or five at the base of the curb cut. Hacking it out made my shoulders burn.

As we clean up, sweeping away winter’s mess and turning our faces to the sun with relieved appreciation, we search our garden for signs of life. There’s not much there yet, but this morning, as I set out for work, thin crocus leaves greeted me, barely peeking from their pale sheaths.

When You Were A Lion

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You were a lion once.

Your luminous golden eyes could pierce the darkness, and you could leap impossibly far and high. Your body would extend gracefully in the air, supple and sure, and you’d land with hardly a sound. When you were at rest, you lounged with casual, leonine confidence. And when you decided to act, you were nimble and swift, stealthy when the occasion called for it, an athlete and hunter through and through. You walked with grace, and it seemed you could balance on a razor’s edge. You, my dear, could prowl.

When you rubbed your face against us, we called it a “cuddle.” Same with when we would put our heads down at your level, and you would head-butt us with a soft “clunk.” I know that you were claiming us as your own, as part of your domain. But you enjoyed it, too. You even admitted as much with your purr: sonorous, rumbling, guttural, a sound of pure pleasure.

Ah, you could be fierce. The occasional mouse that would venture in was dispatched quickly and quietly, though the mess was admittedly unpleasant. And the meerkat stuffed animal we gave to you and your mother traveled from room to room, clamped in your jaws, you yowling and roaring around it, the sound muffled by its stuffing. It was nearly as big as you, but no matter. Up the stairs and down you went with it, your pride in the “kill” evident in your swaggering walk and flashing eyes.

You were not all ferocity. Indeed, you chirped sweetly as you trotted up to us, and we stroked you, plunging our hands into your plush fur, marveling at your softness as our fingers sank in. You’d sometimes roll over, offering up your belly to be rubbed, but not for too long. You couldn’t stay that vulnerable, and when you’d had enough, you’d grab our hands with your paws, claws out just a bit, just to warn. As loving as you were with us, you doled out your affections selectively. You hissed at many who dared approach, but even your hiss was nonchalant, like you didn’t need to put much effort into warning outsiders to stay away. They’d get the message. You even managed to hiss softly at the vet in your final moments, and although it was appropriate, I was sad that it was the last sound I’d hear you make.

Your life was long, little lion, much longer than such ferocity and energy can last. As the years went by, the meerkat fell by the wayside, mocking you from a spot near your food bowl. You slept more. Any mice that may have come into the house had little to fear from you. You had earned a good retirement.

For over eighteen years you lived and loved. Even the last year had plenty of good times. You weren’t ready to go yet, and we understood that. You were still too full of life and pleasure; your discomforts seemed minor and fleeting, and your golden eyes continued to shine. But then your decline accelerated, life slipping away bit by uneven bit. In your final couple of weeks, as if you knew what was soon to come, you were even more social than usual, seeking us out even as your eyes dulled and your fur became disheveled and you lost weight you could not afford to lose. And when you stopped visiting us as much, and you spent your time resting and waiting, we came to find you in your warm retreats, offering our caresses. Though you leaned into our hands, your purr had fallen silent. There was nothing left to do, the vet said. But that was no surprise to us, because we had known you when you were a lion.

In the end, you held your head high and we put our hands on you one last time, feeling your warm, magnificent pelt. Each of us said goodbye and cradled you as you left us.

There are moments that remind one of the inescapability of adulthood. Deciding that it is time to help a pet go from this life is one of them. The decision was hard, yet it was right, and we made it at the right time. Now we are left with memory.

Making Stuff Up

/ Joshua B. Kay / 3 Comments

Writing fiction and finding myself, or is it the other way round?

Indiana Jones: “I’m going after that truck.”
Sallah: “How?”
Indiana Jones: “I don’t know. I’m making this up as I go.”
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

When I was a kid, up through middle school and into high school, I wrote a lot. Short pieces. Long pieces. Articles for the school paper. Stuff for classes. Stuff just for me. Some was fiction, some was not. Most of the fiction I wrote at the time was short stories, but when I was about fifteen I completed a sci-fi novel that went on for over 250 pages and took up at least five 5 1/4-inch floppy disks that I backed up obsessively, worried that my beloved documents would one day disappear — which, sadly, they have. That book was great fun to write. Back then, I was able to make stuff up, and it seemed like I didn’t have to do much to make that happen. Ideas came; stories came; I just wrote them down and tried to make what was written mirror what I was thinking as well as I could.

I was lucky to go to a middle and high school that taught writing in an inviting, conscientious, thorough manner, and I thrived there. In ninth grade English, we spent some time studying mystery novels, and I fell in love with noir classics like The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon. I loved the terse language, the grit, and the human mess of those stories. My teacher assigned us to write a short mystery story, and I cranked out a little noir piece of my own. I don’t remember anything more about it, but I do remember that my teacher wrote only one thing on my paper: “You should be a writer.” I glowed and thought to myself, “Yes! That is all I have ever wanted to be.” I felt understood and encouraged. Her words fit with who I thought I was.

In 10th and 11th grade, my English teacher drilled us in sentence structure and challenged us with literary analysis. She had written a book on grammar and usage, akin to Strunk and White, and she made absolutely sure we knew our way around a sentence. My writing improved. I loved that teacher, and I was lucky to have her for two years right before she left the school for new adventures. As a junior, I joined the student newspaper, which was a serious thing at my high school, and learned new ways of researching and telling and editing stories.

Yet even as I continued to write, my dream of writing professionally was slipping away. It was too unreliable. It wasn’t safe. What if I failed? Safety was valued in my family. Professionalism of a certain kind was valued — a safe, preferably prestigious professionalism. It’s not that the messages were so explicit. Rather, they spanned generations and were transmitted in life choices, family stories, and side remarks, and those beliefs became my own.

I have been in safe professions for a long time now, first as a psychologist and then as a lawyer. I have taught and practiced in both fields and currently teach in a law school clinical program. In the course of my education, teaching, research, and practice, I learned a great deal about technical writing, and I published academic articles. For many years, I wrote little else.

I’ve been privileged to do interesting, meaningful work that genuinely helps people, and I’ve been lucky to do that work with wonderful colleagues. What told me something was wrong was that I still felt stuck and unfulfilled. I was in danger of descending into the doldrums and losing the energy I needed to do my work well and to be happy. I felt irritable and, sometimes, depressed, even as my work went very well by any objective measure.

So I spent some time — well, a lot of time — listening to myself. I would sit in a quiet place, or walk in nature, or go for a bike ride, and listen. I would talk to my wife, and she and I would listen together. What I eventually heard, when I finally let myself hear it, was that I needed to write, that there was a yearning in me that hadn’t been fulfilled in a long time.

I started writing again. Yet for many months after I heeded this call, it didn’t seem that any stories would come, so I wrote short essays for my blog. In writing those, I sorted out some things about my family, my sense of the world, what I most love to do, and where I fit in. Eventually, a colleague and I started a writing group — it’s just we two, over beers, exchanging short stories and essays and fragments that we noodle around with. Every couple or few weeks, when we meet, I like to have something new for him to read. It’s driven me to put words to paper regularly.

In response, the floodgates opened, and stories started peeking around the corners of my mind. I’d spot them as distant, fleeting visions, like seeing someone skulking in an alley and slipping out of sight, but then some decided to come out into the open, inch closer to me, and stay awhile. Many started as fragments of scenes or dialogue or character, and then some of those grew beyond fragments. I started to write fiction again, and in doing so, I welcomed back a part of myself that I’ve missed.

As my stories have grown, I’ve been enjoying my job more, in no small part because it no longer bears the burden of my identity being built upon it. Instead, my sense of identity has become more about what I most enjoy doing and my values, which includes things like giving myself the space and time to be creative and being fully present for my wife and kids. My job, on the other hand, is what I do each day to help clients, teach students, and make a living. This letting go has made me better at my work. I haven’t let go of the need to work hard at it and do it to the best of my ability. Instead, I’ve sorted out what my job actually means to me. It has an important place in my life, but it’s not as prominent a place as it once had. And what I’ve found is a greater ability to focus in my work on what my students need from me in order to grow and achieve while helping our clients.

Meeting my better self, a younger, more creative, more free and loving and whimsical self, has been powerful and liberating. My wife has noticed. My kids have noticed. Friends and other family have noticed. I feel an ease and new sense of energy that shows. In those alleyways of my mind where the story ideas were hiding, I’ve found what is truest about myself, even though I’m making stuff up.

Spinning the Cranks

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Cycling through the natural world

A short, smooth stretch of what is otherwise a poorly paved road allowed me a break from watching for ruts and potholes. I biked under a clear, deep blue sky, and the trees wore the rich, darkening green of summer. Frantic cawing drew my eyes up to my right, and I saw three shining crows wheeling wildly through the air above a tree. Then I saw the raptor. It beat and spread its powerful wings, accelerating and slowing, rising and falling, squared off in a duel against the crows. I could not tell as I passed whether the crows were trying to force the raptor into the huge evergreen or working to chase the bigger bird away from it. I also couldn’t tell what sort of raptor it was, thanks to its frenetic dance with the crows and the glare of sunlight against its feathers as I rode by. Elijah would know, I mused, thinking about my nine-year-old son, who loves birds of prey above most things.

As I rode on, I thought about the fact that had I been in a car, I would have missed seeing the arial duel. I had heard that these things happened from time to time but had never seen for myself. And though I would not have known that I had missed anything if I had zipped by in a car — radio on, windows up and shutting out the world or down so that the roar of the wind drowned all other sound — I felt a pang of regret for all that I must miss as I drive.

Pausing on a dirt road ride / Joshua Kay

Pausing on a dirt road ride / Joshua Kay

Once, on a night ride with friends along the wonderful network of dirt roads just outside of town, we were spread side by side and chatting amiably under the moonlight when our voices were drowned out by spring peepers trilling in a wetland, unseen in the dark. We fell quiet, overwhelmed and mesmerized by the mighty sound of the tiny frogs. As we passed, I thought to myself, “This is why we ride our bikes out here at night.” A few minutes later, my friends took off on one of their traditional sprints to the next “stop ahead” sign. I didn’t join this one; I’m no sprinter, and I knew I would catch up to them anyway as they slowed and panted and laughed. Then we’d ride on together again under the moon and stars. I have driven that stretch of road in that season at night. From a car, I have never heard the singing of the frogs.

On Huron River Drive, which undulates and twists alongside its namesake northwest of town and provides our best road cycling, I can smell the river and wet stones, a mineral, almost metallic, smell. The tires are quiet on the pavement. If I’m going hard, then my mind is focused only on maintaining the effort and keeping my form. Pull up on the pedals, kick over the top, power through the downstroke, “scrape” the sole of your shoe through the bottom before pulling up again. Minimize upper body movement. Stay loose. When I’m spinning easy, my mind is calm with the rhythm of the pedaling: tick tick tick tick. Either way, I feel untroubled. In the breeze, hearing the sounds around me, breathing the air, inhaling the moist, earthy smells, and seeing the shining, wide river, I feel close to nature.

Riding along one stretch of the river road on a particularly mild, early spring day, I saw a broad cluster of purple crocuses tucked in the new, bright green grass in the roadside ditch. The violet beauties threw open their petals to the sun, their bright orange stamens glowing in the light. Had I not been on my bike, they would have remained hidden to me, a swath of beauty unseen in a ditch. I slowed to admire them. It was as if they were standing in formation and saluting all who would notice. Cars raced past.

Bikes are quiet. Riding the road, I sometimes inadvertently glide up to deer, and though they do depart when they finally notice me, it is with a nonchalance that suggests that they feel unthreatened. I have seen a cluster of wild turkeys skulking in the tall grass, lanky and lean and saurian, their sharp eyes glinting and scaly heads bobbing and twitching as I passed. There are wildflowers and weeping willows, small creeks flowing fast into the river, long-dead trees lying jagged and half-submerged, and just a small ribbon of road winding alongside. Riding on it, all of the sights and sounds and smells are accessible to me.

River roads are often beautiful. There is so much life along a reasonably well-preserved river, and the natural curves of the waterway and the roll of its surrounding land make for good riding. They make for good driving, too. There is a sign along our river road to notify drivers that it is a scenic route. Scenic though it is from a car, many of those drivers have no idea.

When I Heard “Divorce”

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Some things can’t be fixed. Some never needed fixing.

One evening, when I was ten years-old, my mother walked into our cozy den, where I was watching television. She looked calm, and her voice was even, but when she asked me to come into my parents’ room, I could tell that something was wrong. It wasn’t that she never asked me to come into their room. It was simply that my radar for emotion, the same ultra-sensitive radar that most kids have, was pinging like crazy. I slowly got to my feet and followed her to the back of the house. We passed through the dining room and went down the short hallway to the two bedrooms. My brother and I shared the cheerful one straight ahead, the one with bunk beds and model airplanes and Legos and scores of children’s books. My parents’ room was on the right. As I walked to it, I kept my eyes on the floor.

When we entered the room, my dad and my three-year-old brother were sitting on the bed. My mom joined them, but I hovered near the door, reluctant. “Come sit,” my mom said, and I did. “Dad and I have something we want to talk to you about.”

I don’t remember exactly what my parents said next, but it was about troubles in their relationship. They emphasized that they loved my brother and me very much and always would, and that none of what was happening between them was our fault. There was talk of “grown-up problems,” but all I could think was, “Now we kids will have problems, too.” I recall listening to each of them saying the things that parents are supposed to say at times like these. They made it sound so simple, but my life was getting more complicated with every word they said. The bottom line was that they were getting divorced.

When they were finished, I looked at each of them, then at my brother. He was such a serious kid, somber and seemingly older than his years, and his little brow was furrowed under his crazy curls. I wanted so badly to protect him from what was happening.

“OK,” I said to my parents as matter-of-factly as I could, “now that we know what the problem is, let’s fix it.” My budding analytical mind combined with my childhood optimism: where there was a problem, there must be a solution, just as surely as “what went up must come down.”

My mom tilted her head to one side and looked at me with eyes filled with love and sadness. She said something like, “There’s no way to fix this.”

My brother started to cry. I followed. It felt like pieces of me were flying off and spinning away, and I couldn’t catch them fast enough.

At the time, I was in a private school in Los Angeles. Though my parents didn’t talk to me much about it, I had the impression that they could barely afford to send me there and perhaps only did so with help from my grandparents. At my school, the boys wore navy corduroy pants and white or sky blue polo shirts with the school name emblazoned in an arc over the left breast, and the girls wore light blue or navy jumper dresses with button-down, white blouses. The headmaster was a former US Navy man who whistled like a boatswain over the intercom to get our attention. Every morning, after his ear-splitting, three-tone squeal and gruff announcements, the whole school marched out onto the blacktop playground in lines to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. There was a monied, mainstream feel about the place. Intact, rich, Protestant families were the norm, and I was a Jewish kid with divorcing parents. Looking back now, I am aware that there were other kids who fell outside the usual student profile, too, but we were the exceptions that proved the rule.

Like a chameleon, I worked to fit in, generally well-liked, involved in student council, a reporter and then editor-in-chief of the school paper. While all of these efforts served as cover, they actually accentuated my feeling of “otherness.” I had become part of the school establishment in a place that felt foreign to me, part of a club I was pretty sure I didn’t really want to join, even if part of me desperately wanted to be a member. I thought that any day, my peers would realize that I’m not really one of them and send me packing. Now, with the news that my parents were getting divorced, the sense of difference was joined by shame. There was no one at school that I was willing to talk to about what was going on at home. The day after my parents told me they were splitting up, I remember sitting in Miss Cooley’s fifth grade class and feeling numb and distant. With my school friends, I kept quiet about my family.

Holding in my feelings, I started to experience anxiety, and I developed an angry edge. By all accounts, I had been a very mellow, sweet kid. My anxiety and anger were new, and I neither understood nor knew how to handle them. And while I remained a “good boy,” not getting into trouble or misbehaving, my insides squirmed and I started to worry about things. Most of all, I worried about my brother. I stepped into more of a parenting role, and I felt like he needed me to take care of him and that something might happen to him if I didn’t.

It was a hard time, but it also spurred growth in me and in my family. My mother gained strength and independence. She started to search for a job, figuring out what she wanted to do, what would work for her and for us. She went on interviews, and she got some offers. Her confidence grew, and after she worked at a job for awhile and decided it wasn’t for her, she got another, and then another, as she found her way. Her newfound strength made her a better mother to us, more able to give us guidance and support.

My family’s challenges made it necessary for me to do more around the house. I learned how to do laundry, ironing, housecleaning, and cooking and became independent at doing all of them. Perhaps this sounds minor, but these are wonderfully practical skills, and I like being able to do them proficiently without thinking much about it.

Eventually, I also learned how to maintain a home. A couple of years after the divorce, my mom met the man who would become my stepfather. I hadn’t been able to fix what was going on in my house when my parents split up, but my stepdad actually could fix the house itself. He was a patient, inviting, and straightforward teacher, helping me to develop a handiness that I probably would not have gained otherwise. Just as important, he was also my first guitar teacher, guiding my initial, tentative steps into making music on six strings.

There was a lot that was hard. Blending families as each of my parents remarried, seeing my dad on a schedule, and struggling with a sense of shame and increasing anxiety were all difficult. Yet I cannot imagine my life any different, and I am grateful for what I gained. My mother met her challenges head on and became a stronger, more complete and independent person and parent. I learned how to take care of a household. My stepfather has been a powerful influence on me, as instrumental as anyone has been in building my confidence, because he saw me as fundamentally capable and took the time to teach me everything from home maintenance to folk, rock, and blues tunes on the guitar.

The night that I heard “divorce,” my first reaction was to try to figure out how to fix the situation. But now, if I could talk to my ten-year-old self that night sitting on my parents’ bed, as he felt overwhelmed by the news and his own sense of responsibility, I would tell him not just that he can’t fix it, but that he doesn’t need to. It never needed fixing at all. As he dealt with sadness and shame and anger and anxiety, I’d want him to know that the experience would be part of what would make him a good husband, father, friend, and teacher. I’m glad I know that now. I wish I knew it then.