Last week, Michele and I celebrated our 25th Anniversary on the East Side of the Sierras. We had a stellar anniversary dinner at the Lakefront Restaurant – elevation 8600 feet – and two days of anniversary wandering around. We are soul mates but it has not always been an easy 25 years – for either one of us – but being together has always outweighed being apart. And for a couple of soulmates that love the desert, the mountains, and each other, this was a delightful place to be. 
We had Easter at Michele’s familial home the weekend after the Indiana pizzeria said they wouldn’t cater a gay wedding. Sitting around, what I like to think of as the typical American family table, we had a couple of interesting conversations about politics that spilled over to religion (or religion that spilled over to politics). We were, very roughly, evenly split between Liberals and Conservatives and the Conservatives were spit between those who had gone to church that morning and those who hadn’t.
One thing we did agree on, surprisingly, is that people should have the right to be assholes, within limits, but that governments shouldn’t. To be clear, I wouldn’t say that we completely agreed, but we did come close to agreeing that there were differences between public acts in public spaces and private acts in private spaces. We all agreed that if a store is open for business, they have to serve everybody that walks in, but we differed on how restrictive they could be in the hypothetical catering of a wedding.
That conversation drew us into a – unexpected, for me – minefield. Maybe it shouldn’t have been unexpected, because I was the primary wanderer, owing to my fascination with religion’s special privileges. It is illegal for me to take peyote because I enjoy it, but, under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, I can take it if I am taking it as part of my religion. My question was Why should religion get special privileges? The only answer I got to this question was something along the lines of We are a Christian Nation, as if that would answer it. As the conversation staggered on, however, my question did get answered in a fashion.
To back up, when we are in Napa on a Sunday morning, or around a religious holiday like Christmas, Michele usually goes to church with her step-father, Jim (who was one of the church goers in the group, duh!). During the conversation, Michele’s stepfather said something, I don’t remember what, that led to Michele countering that she wasn’t raised as a Christian and wasn’t a Christian now. Jim was surprised, If you aren’t a Christian, why do you go to church with me? Michele said that she went because she enjoyed it. That was even more surprising to Jim.
Isn’t that why you go? asked Michele. No, I don’t go because I enjoy it, I go because, as a Christian, I have to go, Jim said, laughing in a dismissive way as if that should be self-evident. In a way it was the answer that I had been looking for.
Still, not being a believer, Jim’s answer shocked me. Actually, I am a little reluctant to say Not being a believer, because I think of myself as a believer in A Divine that transcends what we know of the ordinary world. I don’t believe that science knows all the big answers and we are now only working on filling in the details, I don’t believe the world is all material and we are only a result of our DNA. I do believe that there is A Mystery, I’m just not a believer in any particular religious dogma (and I especially don’t believe that there is a personal God that cares how we act, that holds a grudge if we don’t go to church, that is interested in how we have sex or what we ate for lunch).
My life is not governed by a god telling me to live it a certain way. Not being a believer in that dogma means that I don’t get my morality from somebody’s interpretation of what God wants us to do. The church goers were pretty adamant that, without God telling us the rules or providing the moral guidelines, to say it in a little less dogmatic way, we would have no morality. Michele said that she is a Scientist and her morality is based on the scientific principle that acts have consequences. I sided with Michele and added that I liked the Buddhist Eightfold Path that includes don’t harm others and the Church goers looked at us like we must not have any moral principles at all, like maybe we were OK with serial killing.
Looking across the table, I could almost understand that somebody could believe that they weren’t homophobic, but their God is and they have no choice but to follow along. That gulf between our beliefs, between our belief structures, seems much bigger than I had imagined.
Michele is showing her pictures at Sweeties. They are beautiful but I am not sure what to call them, let me explain.
About a year ago – maybe a year and a half, maybe eight months ago – Michele got a Sunprint kit for Granddaughter Charlotte. If you know Michele well, you will know how hard it would be for her to not get a Sunprint Kit for herself. It just hit all her hot buttons. Anyway she did and she started playing with it right way (when I say playing, I mean playing in the deeper sense, as in playing the piano).
The process is simple: place something on a piece of bluish, sensitized, paper and put it in the sun, then develop it in water. What happens is the bluish paper fades in the sun leaving only the shadows blue. In the water, the shadows turn white and the exposed paper turns blue, reversing the exposed image.
It didn’t take long for Michele to get interested in the mid-reversal.
She first took the paper out of the water and tried scanning the dripping wet paper, trying to control the paper with paper towels and rags. The she tried photographing it with her iPad, and – finally – using a camera on a tripod. After about a year, the mid-process scans and photographs were hidden away in the computer and the finished – but not as interesting – Sunprints graced every available horizontal surface.
Then Michele started printing the mid-process images – eventually on Epson Hot Press Bright, 100% cotton fiber, acid-free, lignin-free, paper – and they were beautiful. Framed, with hand torn edges, they make a striking show.
Michele’s artist statement says, I am not big on change, even though as the iChing claims, change is the only thing we can be certain of, so it is in my nature to try to hold on to memories and bits of beauty. One of the things I love most is my garden, if you can call it that, since it is really just a tamed bit of woods in Portola Valley. I’ve noticed that every day the garden changes, just a little; something new has bloomed, something else has withered away.
Thinking we might soon be moving from our home, I started using sunprint paper as a way to record the flowers in my garden. As I did this I became fascinated with transitory images that emerged as the water hit the paper. It is a brief moment when dark and light comingle as they exchange places. These giclée prints freeze that moment during the processing of impermanent images of impermanent blossoms that grace our impermanent residence on this ever-changing planet.
Reading that statement and looking at my pictures of Michele’s opening at Sweeties, below, reminds me that we are both trying to do the same thing, freeze that moment.
Our species has probably been getting married since we crawled down from the trees and started walking upright into the savanna. Certainly we have evolved into a species in which partnership to have and raise children is a huge benefit and that must have been formalised and codified early in our collective history. Weddings used to be political – political in the smallest sense, at least – and were usually arranged by the families. In many parts of the world, weddings still are arranged and love is a byproduct at best, but not here, not now. Here, now, couples try to mold those old traditions into new forms that better fit today’s realities, the couples love, and their spirit. Jason and Rachel succeeded in doing that admirably.
To back up, the whole purpose of going to Oregon was to go to the wedding of my nephew, Jason Stein to Rachel Sterry. Jason and his new wife live in Oregon City and the wedding was in Milo McIver State Park, about 45 minutes out of Portland. As we drove out, having no real idea of where we were going, I kept thinking This is crazy, this is really in the boondocks, then Oh yeah? It is no where near as crazy as making everybody go to Death Valley for our wedding!
When we got there, it didn’t seem crazy at all, the park was beautiful and the wedding itself was in an outdoor cathedral.
The wedding was lovely and touching as most weddings are, but what most struck me was how well matched Rachel and Jason feel and how much their wedding reflected that. In their vows, they spoke of being in love with each others bodies, minds, and souls and, watching them beaming at each other, that seemed so true.
Even though weddings no longer cement a political alliance between families, they are still one of the few events that will bring a dispersed family together – in this case as far away as Australia – and it was fun to see people I hadn’t seen since the last wedding. That was a good part of the enjoyment for me (and being with my wife, Michele, and having my daughter, Samantha, son-in-law Gabe, and my grandkids, Charlotte and Auggie, there).
Fresh cooked crab (with a torn part of a paper bag in one of its claws, it had been trying to hold on when Michele put it in the boiling water).
As Michele and I were getting ready to watch the 49ers beat the Seahawks, Michele suggested she get some popcorn and hot dogs. She thought it would be a nice touch, typical football game food; I thought, What? Crab is much more typical playoff food after all it comes in season just in time for the playoffs, before I caught myself , realizing that hot dogs are – indeed – the quintessential game time food. At halftime, as we waited for the teams to come back so San Francisco could finish off Seattle, we ate our hot dogs. But, in the second half, as it became increasingly certain that Seattle would win, I started thinking about watching those Super Bowls with my mother and stepfather.
Growing up, college football was a much bigger deal than Professional Football, my stepfather – who my mother had married while I was stationed in Korea and did not feel like much of a father figure – however had season tickets to the 49ers at Kezar Stadium. Kezar was a much smaller stadium – only 18,000 people between the goal lines – than Cal’s Memorial Stadium or Stanford Stadium, and watching the 49ers play there, in the early 60’s, seemed more amateurish than watching the actual amateurs (and I think college players were amateurs in the 60s).
I was living in Oakland at the time and, a couple of years after the Raiders came to town, I got season tickets. Oakland was a great place to live that always seemed to be getting the wrong end of the stick compared to the much more glamorous San Francisco and that carried over into football. The 49ers were in the NFL and the Raiders were in the new AFL which was considered inferior. My stepfather, Sherry, was very gracious about the NFL’s superiority however, and several times we took each other to our team’s games.
After the first Super Bowl, Sherry and I talked after the game. We both agreed that Green Bay was almost unbeatable, after they beat Kansas City Chiefs 35 to 10 (most people considered the real Super Bowl to be the NFL Championship game in which Green Bay had beat the Cowboys). During the second Super Bowl, while Green bay was crushing Oakland, Sherry called me several times to talk during the game. We agreed to watch Super Bowl III together at his home.
My mother was not especially interested in football, college, professional, or otherwise. As an aside, I played football in highschool and it occurs to me that my mother never came to a game. End aside. As uninterested as she might have been in the game however, my mother was interested in having a nice lunch for the occasion. In those days, going to a professional game was more formal and the men would wear sports coats and ties – maybe this is where the term sports coat came from, something to wear to watch a game, that would be more casual than a suit – and I am sure that I showed up for Super bowl III wearing a coat and tie.
Going to my mother’s was usually a formal occasion and this luncheon was no different even though the occasion was a football game. The women were probably wearing dresses, the TV was probably black and white, and most people expected the NFL to – again – beat the AFL team. In this case, the NFL team was the Baltimore Colts that had gone 13-1 during the regular season and the AFL team was the New York Jets. The Colts had crushed the Cleveland Browns 34–0, in the NFL Championship Game, and the Jets had to come from behind to beat the Raider’s in their Championship game (they had previously lost to the Raider’s in the infamous Heidi game, named that because NBC had cut away from the game, with the Jets leading, to broadcast the film Heidi).
At halftime, we broke for lunch, in the diningroom, with the Jets leading 7-zip and we were served fresh crab with a salad. Today, it seems so incongruous, even slightly archaic, but it started a Parsons/Stern family tradition of getting together for the Super Bowl with fresh crab.
Unlike the 49ers, the New York Jets increased their lead in the second half and beat the 19-point-favorite Baltimore Coats 16-7.