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slapshot-to-the-heart · 6 years

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Need the Sun to Break

Here’s part III of the Chaos and the Calm series! I’m absolutely falling in love with Harry and Alex, and I hope you are too. Please come in and talk to me about it, and ideas, predictions, feedback you might have- I don’t bite and I love hearing from you all!

Need the Sun to Break

October 2018

Back of the room/How come my friends already know you?/I feel like a kid/Too shy to speak up so I keep it hid

Harry’s eyes darted across the room, hoping to catch a glimpse of Alex. She had arrived at his house a few hours prior, but they hadn’t been together for a bit. Nobody really knew they were dating yet; things were so early that they had decided to hold off on announcing things for a little while. That being said, Harry wasn’t so confident he wouldn’t let things slip accidentally if someone asked him. He was so proud and excited to finally be able to call her his, but he respected that she wanted to take things slow. He had told her that things were going to move at her pace, and he wasn’t about to break that promise. So naturally, he was thrilled to see Alex engaged in what seemed like a fascinating conversation with Clare. It was the first time they had met— Clare was usually back home in Britain— but the two were already acting like old friends, and for that Harry was eternally grateful. When hearing that she and a few of his friends that worked at the label were in New York for some event or another— he thinks he heard something about a Beyoncé concert— he had jumped at the chance to host them at his house. He had been a bit apprehensive about inviting Alex over, not really for any other reason other than the fact that she wasn’t going to know too many of the attendees. She knew Julia, obviously, and by extension Matt, but other than the two of them, she was kind of at a loss for people to talk to.

Seeing her get along with his friends was endlessly relieving for Harry. Seeing Alex slightly tipsy with his friends, spilling part of her drink on herself then laughing while mopping it up only made him fall for her more. When she got up to go get a napkin to sop up her dress, he followed her into his kitchen. Smirking slightly, Harry leaned against the entryway for a moment while he watched her open and close no less than six drawers in her quest for a napkin, or a paper towel, or what, Harry wasn’t entirely sure.

“Where is that blasted towel…” Alex muttered, turning around and spotting Harry.

He walked over to the oven, where a towel hung on the door handle. “Looking for one of these, love?”

Alex shot him a nasty look, plucking the towel out from his hand, walking over to the sink, and running part of it under some water before blotting her dress. Harry had always loved green on her, said it brought out her eyes. “Y’know, Alex, you were drinking Chardonnay. I don’t think it’ll stain too bad.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah. I mean, I figured. Better safe than sorry though, you know? Wouldn’t want to wake up tomorrow and find a massive stain on it.”

Harry nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense. I’m glad to see you’re getting on so well with my friends.” He added, holding one of her hands gently in his.

“Clare’s an angel.” Alex blushed. “It’d practically be a sin to not like her.”

I need the sun to break/You've woken up my heart/I'm shaking, oh/My luck could change

He chuckled. “Yeah, you’re not wrong there.” As Alex leaned up against the bar, picking at a loose thread on her sleeve, Harry realized just how much his life had changed in the past month. He was falling for her even more than he thought possible, and it terrified him. He had never felt the way he felt about Alex with anyone else, and he had never let anyone in the same way he longed to let her in. Seeing her so completely at ease, talking to his friends that were becoming hers, with her hair up in high ponytail and barely a trace of makeup on her face, gave him pause. Made him think of how long he had wanted her to be his. Made him remember the night he realized he had fallen in love with her.

...

The £3 bottle of rosé long since drank and the sun long since set, Harry turned over on the old quilt to look at Alex. She was in that strange liminal stage of sleep; he wasn’t sure she’d hear him if he talked to her, but didn’t want to take chances. They had fallen asleep in the meadow like so many times before, from the time they were kids and their parents would frantically search for their whereabouts to the night before he left for the X-Factor to now, both of them 22 years old with their entire lives ahead of them. What would our 10-year-old selves think, Harry mused, if they could see where we were now? After a few moments of pondering, Harry didn’t think that their younger selves would actually be all that surprised. Him, maybe. But Alex had always had nothing but complete and utter faith in him and his music, and he always knew that her designs would take her as far as she wanted to go, even when they were sixteen and she was photoshopping his face onto Justin Timberlake’s body. She was just about to start a job at a new firm in London, and he was leaving the next afternoon— this afternoon, Harry thought with a grimace — to America to begin writing for his solo album.

The two of them had fallen asleep sometime a little past one o’clock, and Harry noted with a cursory glance at his watch that it was nearing five. Alex looked so peaceful on the blanket, and Harry had to stop himself from tucking a stray piece of hair that had fallen in front of her face behind her ear. It hit him like a ton of bricks right as the sun peeked over the horizon, and Harry knew that he was well and truly fucked. He realized that he was in love with his best friend as the light hit her face just right,. He had never known that her hair looked so red in the sunlight. Then again, he had never known that he was in love with his best friend until a few moments ago. His breath caught in his throat. Shit.

...

Been in the dark for weeks and I've realized you're all I need/I hope that I'm not too late

Ever since Alex had come back into his life, she had turned his world upside-down. He had stopped himself from telling her how he felt countless times, fearing the worst possible reaction. And God, had it been hard. So it was incredibly paradoxical that now that Alex was finally his, his was more terrified than ever about his feelings. Alex knew that he cared about her; he hoped that much was obvious. What she might not have known was just how deeply he fallen in love with her. He hadn’t said it yet, and it was eating him alive. He was committed to what he promised her, however, and wasn’t going to move anything forward until she was ready. As he leaned up against the counter, holding a still-empty tumbler that once upon a time had held a scotch straight, he realized a simple truth. Something had brought them together that May night, in the exact time and place and space where they needed to be. Whether that was God, the universe, whatever, Harry didn’t know. What he did know was that it no longer mattered that he had been pining for her, and that she didn’t know just how deeply his feelings ran. The only thing that mattered, the only thing that held any kind of significance for him as far as Alex or anything else was concerned, was that they were together. They were together, and they were happy, and how fast or slow their relationship went was all for naught as long as that remained true.

Interrupting his thoughts, Clare came over to wish the two good night, leaving Alex with a tight hug, a new contact in her phone, and a promise to meet for coffee later in the week. After she left, the two moved to a slightly more quiet and secluded spot, settling on a pair of plump chaises in an alcove off of the main living room.

“Did you get the chance to talk to anyone else?” Harry asked. Clare was wonderful, but the last thing Harry wanted was for her to be stuck feeling isolated from the group with only one or two friends that she could rely on.

Alex nodded. “Yeah, I had a pretty… animated conversation with Ella and James a few hours ago,” she said carefully, giving a small smile. “Took the mick out of me for being a Liverpool supporter, but they’re alright other than that. Got to talk to Lia before she left, think she said there’s an early meeting she’s got to be at tomorrow.” Taking a peek out of their small refuge, Harry noticed that the number of guests had indeed started to dwindle.

The party was winding down, guests had been tricking out for the last twenty or so minutes, and somewhere in the midst of his conversation with Alex the playlist had been switched from classic rock to nothing but Abba— not that he was complaining.

“I should probably get going,” Alex murmured in his ear, timidly squeezing his hand with a gentle smile. “It’s a Sunday and I have to be at work by eight.”

Harry nodded. “‘F course, love. Stay safe, text me when you get back, okay?” Alex lived nearly an hour’s subway ride away, and Harry had never been too fond of her having to travel so far, particularly so late at night. Her apartment building was fairly safe, but the surrounding area had been subject to a string of muggings in the last few weeks which had caused him a fair bit of worry.

“Of course.” Taking a quick glance to be sure they were free from prying eyes, Alex leaned in to give Harry a quick kiss on the cheek.

Oh, butterflies/You steal my sleep each night

As the clock struck three in the morning, Harry woke with a start. The few hours of sleep he had gotten had been fitful, and no amount of laying in bed or cups of tea seemed to help. With a dissatisfied grunt, Harry swung his legs over the side of his bed, pushed himself up, and padded out to the living room. Clicking on the TV, Harry flipped through channels, rolling his eyes when he was that all that was on was reruns of the Great British Bake Off and golf. Bake Off it is, he thought. Ever since Alex left, she had been on his mind. Not in the worrisome, slightly-crazy ‘I can’t stop thinking about her and I need her to be with me 24/7 way,’ in the ‘I’m so in love with this woman and it scares the shit out of me’ way.

Things were going so well as a couple, Harry couldn’t help but grow worried. Things were going so well that he began to question everything. He had never felt this content in any of his former relationships, never this assured or confident or certain. And that’s what scared him. Things were going so well that Harry thought it was inevitable that something would go wrong, that things would crash and burn before they even had a chance to learn what it meant to be a them. He was so worried about how things would turn out, so worried about their relationship, because he had never felt this way about someone before. Harry had had girlfriends before. Plenty of them, in fact, Harry grumbled, remembering the days when he could scarcely go for a walk with a woman for fear of her being deemed his ‘next conquest.’ He might have even loved one or two of them. That wasn’t the issue. He had never fallen so hard for anyone before, had never felt same way around anyone before, and he had never felt like he had so much to lose. God forbid anything went wrong, Harry stood to lose not only the love of his life, but his best friend. Stop thinking like that, he tried to beat into his head. Don’t make something out of nothing. Rationally, he knew that there were no real reasons to perpetually be stuck in a ‘worst-case-scenario’ mindset, but he was finding it difficult to dig himself out of it.

I'm halfway gone/Sleepless, I'm battle worn/And you're all I want/ So bring me the dawn

Taking a deep breath, Harry looked down at his hands, the same ones that had held hers only hours before. He didn’t need anyone else to tell him how his relationship ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ work. It was only him and Alex. It had always been him and Alex, ever since they met in primary doing the Year 5 musical. Peter Pan had left something to be desired in terms of quality, but what it had accomplished was a friendship that Harry had cherished ever since his days in green tights. Harry didn’t know how their relationship would turn out. That wasn’t up to him. He could continue to love Alex, keeping their happiness at the center of every decision he made. He was weary from overthinking and weary from outside opinions, but he knew that the only thing he could reply on was the love he had for Alex and the hope of everything to come.

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stephenmccull · 3 years

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The Making of Reluctant Activists: A Police Shooting in a Hospital Forces One Family to Rethink American Justice

The beer bottle that cracked over Christian Pean’s head unleashed rivulets of blood that ran down his face and seeped into the soil in which Harold and Paloma Pean were growing their three boys. At the time, Christian was a confident high school student, a football player in the suburbs of McAllen, Texas, a border city at the state’s southern tip where teenage boys — Hispanic, Black, white — sung along to rap songs, blaring out the N-word in careless refrain. “If you keep it up, we’re going to fight,” Christian warned a white boy who sang the racial epithet at a party one evening in the waning years of George W. Bush’s presidency. And they did.

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On that fall evening in 2005, Christian pushed and punched, his youthful ego stung to action by the warm blood on his face. A friend ushered Christian into a car and drove through the bedroom community of Mission, passing manicured golf greens, gable roofs and swimming pools, to the well-appointed home of Dr. Harold and Paloma Pean, who received their son with care and grace. At the time, even as he stitched closed the severed black skin on his son’s forehead, Dr. Pean, a Haitian exile and internal medicine physician, believed his family’s success in America was surely inevitable, not a choice to be made and remade by his adopted country’s racist legacy.

Christian’s younger brother, Alan, a popular sophomore linebacker who shunned rap music and dressed in well-heeled, preppy clothes, agitated to find the boy and fight him. “Everybody shut up and sit down,” Paloma ordered. Inside her head, where thoughts roiled in her native Spanish, Paloma recalled her brother’s advice when they were kids growing up in Mexico: No temas nada. Eres una chica valiente. Never be scared. You are a brave girl. She counseled restraint, empathy even. “Christian, we need to forgive. We don’t know how the life of this guy is that he took that reaction.” This is a country that recognizes wisdom, Paloma thought.

The Pean family’s tentative truce with America’s darker forces would not last long. In August 2015, when Alan was 26 and under care at a Houston hospital where he had sought treatment for bipolar delusions, off-duty police officers working as security guards would shoot him through the chest in his hospital room, then handcuff him as he lay bleeding on the floor. Alan would survive, only to be criminally charged by the Houston police.

The shot fired into Alan’s chest would extinguish the Pean family’s belief that diligent high achievers could outwit the racism that shadows the American promise. Equality would not be a choice left up to a trio of ambitious boys.

Nearly six years later, the Peans remain haunted by the ordeal, each of them grappling with what it means to be Black in America and their role in transforming American medicine. Christian and Dominique, the youngest Pean brother, both aspiring doctors, like their father, have joined forces with the legions of families working to expose and eradicate police brutality, even as they navigate more delicate territory cultivating careers in a largely white medical establishment.

Alan has seen his studies derailed. He remains embroiled in a lawsuit with the hospital and wavers over his responsibility to the fraternity of Black men who did not survive their own racist encounters with police.

And Paloma and Harold, torn from their Mexican and Haitian roots, look to buoy and reassure their sons, propel them to the future they have earned — even as they wonder whether the America they once revered doesn’t exist.

“People don’t want to admit we have racism,” Paloma told me. “But Pean and me, we know the pain.”

Harold Pean doesn’t recall being raised Black or white. His native Haiti was fractured by schisms beyond skin color.

Harold was 13 when he, his sister and five brothers woke on a May morning in 1968 to find that their father, a prominent judge, had fled Port-au-Prince on one of the last planes to leave the island before another anti-Duvalier revolt pitched the republic into a season of executions. His father had received papers from President François Duvalier demanding he sign off on amendments to Haiti’s Constitution to allow Duvalier to become president for life. Harold’s father refused. Soldiers arrived at the Pean house days after his father escaped.

The Republic of Haiti was marked by Duvalier’s capricious cruelty during Harold’s youth, but as the son of a judge and grandnephew of a physician, he enjoyed a comfortable life in which the Pean children were expected to excel in school and pursue professional careers: engineering, medicine, science or politics. In school, the children learned of their ancestors’ brave heroics, African slaves who revolted against French colonialists and established a free republic, and they saw Black men and women running fruit stands, banks, schools and the government. “I didn’t experience racism as a kid,” Harold remembers. “When you find racism as a kid, that makes you doubt yourself. But I never doubted myself.”

Two years after Harold’s father fled Haiti, his mother joined her husband in New York, leaving the Pean children in the care of relatives. In 1975, Harold and his siblings left Haiti and immigrated to New York City. New York was cold, like being inside a refrigerator, and the streets were much wider than in Haiti. His father had found a job as an elevator operator at Rockefeller Center.

At the time, Harold’s older brother, Leslie, was attending medical school in Veracruz, Mexico, where tuition was cheaper than in the States, and his father urged Harold to join him. A native French speaker who knew no Spanish, Harold learned anatomy, pathology and biochemistry in a foreign tongue. And he was fluent in Spanish by the time he met María de Lourdes Ramos González, known as Paloma, on Valentine’s Day 1979 at a party in Veracruz. Harold remembers the moment vividly: a vivacious young woman spilling out of a car in the parking lot, shouting her disapproval at the low-energy partygoers. “‘Everybody is sitting here!’”

“They were so quiet,” Paloma remembers. She pointed to the man she would eventually marry, “You! Dance with me!”

Growing up as the only girl in her parents’ modest ranch in Tampico, a port city on the Gulf of Mexico, Paloma was expected to stay inside sewing, cleaning and reading while her three brothers ventured out freely. She felt loved and protected but fumed at her circumscribed life, pleading for a car for her quinceañera and pushing her father, the boss at a petroleum plant, to allow her to become a lawyer. Her father thought she should instead become a secretary, teacher or nurse. “I said, ‘Why are you telling me that?’ He said, ‘Because you are going to get married, you are going to end up in your house. But I want you to have a career in case you don’t have a good husband, you can leave.’” That good husband, Paloma understood, could be Mexican or white. She remembers her father saying, “I don’t want Black or Chinese people in my family.”

After earning a degree to teach elementary school, Paloma moved to Veracruz. When she was 21, her father installed her in a boarding house for women. Watched over by a prying house matron, Paloma and Harold’s courtship unfolded under the guise of Harold teaching Paloma English. The couple dated for several years before Paloma told her father she wanted to get married to the handsome, young medical student. Harold had returned to New York, and Paloma was eager to join him.

Her father was skeptical. He had spent a few months in Chicago and seen America’s racial unrest. “He told me, ‘My daughter, I don’t have any objections. He’s a good man, but I’m scared for you. I’m scared for my grandkids because, let me tell you, your kids are going to be Black. And I don’t know if you are ready to raise Black kids in the U.S.,’” Paloma remembers. “At that moment I didn’t understand what he meant.”

In the early 1980s, as Harold and Paloma started their lives together, the news from America spoke to racial divisions. The country was seized by a presidential campaign, in which the actor and former California Gov. Ronald Reagan courted segregationist Southern voters at a Mississippi fairground a few miles from where civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. In Miami, Black residents protested after an all-white, all-male jury acquitted four white police officers who had beaten an unarmed Black motorcyclist, Arthur McDuffie, to death with their fists and nightclubs. Beaten him “like a dog” McDuffie’s mother, Eula McDuffie, told reporters. Over three days of violent street protests, 18 people died, hundreds were injured, buildings burned and President Jimmy Carter called in the National Guard.

The couple lived in Queens, where Christian was born in 1987, and Harold found work while pursuing medicine. He inspected day care schools for sanitary violations. As he traveled around the city’s streets, he never felt imperiled by the color of his skin. “People said there was racism, but I didn’t see it.” On the few occasions he noticed a police officer or shop security trailing him, he put it out of his mind, trying not to pursue the logic of what had happened. “We never talked about it in the house,” he said. “We were concentrating on achieving whatever goals we had to do.”

He told me, ‘My daughter, I don’t have any objections. He’s a good man, but I’m scared for you. I’m scared for my grandkids because, let me tell you, your kids are going to be Black. And I don’t know if you are ready to raise Black kids in the U.S.’ At that moment I didn’t understand what he meant.

– Paloma Pean

Moving with common purpose, Harold and Paloma went wherever the young doctor could find work. Caguas, Puerto Rico, where Alan was born in 1989; back to New York for Harold’s residency in internal medicine at the Brooklyn Hospital Center; then Fort Pierce, Florida, where Dominique was born in 1991; and eventually to McAllen, Texas. Harold’s brother, Leslie, had established his practice in Harlingen, 20 miles north of the Mexican border. Harold was comforted to have family nearby and Paloma wanted to reach her family in Mexico more easily. Still, the first hospital that recruited Harold offered an uncharitable contract; he had to cover half the costs of running the medical practice while seeing only a few patients.

Harold remembers few, if any, other Black doctors in the area. Paloma was more certain about the dearth of diversity in the medical ranks: “We were among the only Blacks in the [Rio Grande] Valley and the only [primary care] doctor.” Three months into the contract, Paloma, who managed the office’s finances, could see they were losing money. She pressed her husband to renegotiate. When he refused, she went to the hospital herself. “I love the Valley,” she told the administrator, her optimism unimpeachable. “But I came here to work. My husband is a very good doctor and you are not paying what he deserves. If you don’t pay him, we are going to move.” Stunned, the administrator, who was white, agreed to her demands, and Paloma returned triumphant.

Daily life was a blur. The couple worked assiduously at the medical practice, finding allies at the hospital who applauded their diligence and, by Harold’s account, rooted for their success. But race was never far from the surface. When a medical assistant at the office told Paloma that another doctor had asked her repeatedly if she was still working with “the Black doctor,” Paloma fumed. At the medical center’s Christmas party that year, Paloma approached the doctor. “‘Are you so and so, the doctor?’ I said. ‘Well, I’m Paloma Pean, and I’m here just to let you know the name of my husband. My husband is Harold Pean. P-E-A-N. His last name is not Black.’ And I said, ‘Thank you, and nice to meet you.’ He opened his eyes big, and then I left.”

At home, Paloma insisted on a Catholic upbringing, and the family prayed every evening after dinner in three languages (Paloma in Spanish, Harold in French, the boys in English). Harold pushed his three boys in the ways his own parents had. “I was expecting them to be either a doctor or a professional, like my parents expected us to be professionals.”

That was the period in which the three Pean boys — Christian, Alan and Dominique — tried to sort out their Blackness in a place that was almost entirely Hispanic and white. Accustomed to being surrounded by Latinos in Florida and later in McAllen, Paloma recalled her father’s warnings. When the boys started nursery school, they were the only Black babies. “That’s when I thought, I need to start to make them very proud of what they are.”

The questions about skin color came early for Dominique, the youngest brother. His fellow kindergartners watched Paloma, a Latina, drop off her son for school in the mornings, and a cousin, who was Chinese, pick him up after the last bell. (Paloma’s brother had married a Chinese woman.) “They asked me if I was adopted,” Dominique remembers clearly. He told his mother, “I don’t look like you.” Would his father, pretty-please, pick him up at school to show the kids, once and for all that, no, he was not adopted? It was a conclusive victory. “The kids stopped bringing it up. ‘OK, you’re Black!’”

The boys steered in different directions, employing sports, fashion and culture to signal their preferences to the perplexed children of McAllen. “I really identified with my Hispanic side, but when people see me, they see a Black kid,” remembers Dominique. He ventured to look “more Black,” braiding his hair into cornrows and wearing FUBU, a line of clothing that telegraphed Black street pride. Meanwhile, Alan forged a collegiate look. He listened to “corny, white boy music” (Christian’s words) and dressed in Abercrombie & Fitch.

The boys were left to their own to make sense of the off-handed remarks at school and on the football field. You’re Black, you’re supposed to jump farther. Do Black kids have extra muscles in their legs? You sound smart for a Black kid. You sound white. Does anyone know if the Pean brothers have big dicks?

“There was open ignorance back then,” Christian remembers. The boys absorbed and repelled the remarks, protesting vigorously only when the N-word exploded in front of them. One of Alan’s friends on the football team asked him, “What’s up, d…igger?” replacing the N and smirking knowingly. Alan responded, “Why would you even do that?”

It never occurred to Dr. Pean to give his teenage boys “the talk,” the dreaded conversation Black parents initiate to prepare their sons for police encounters. The day Christian came home, blood running down his forehead, Harold argued against pressing charges. “The chief of police was my friend, and I had a lot of police patients,” Harold said. “I would meet white people or Black or Hispanic, and I never thought they would see me differently.”

Where Harold was silent, Paloma was explicit. The history of African Americans amazed her. Dominique remembers his mother saying, “Being Black is beautiful. They came to the United States as slaves, and now they are doctors. That blood runs in you, and you are strong.”

Of all the sons, the oldest boy, Christian, seemed the most curious about exactly what his heritage and his skin color had to do with who he was. Why hadn’t his mother married a Mexican man? Why did other kids want to know if his dark skin rubbed off? Could they touch his hair? At age 6, Christian told his mother a Hispanic girl at school had called him the N-word and his mother a “wetback” as he sat in the cafeteria sipping a Capri Sun.

The racist lexicon of American youth befuddled Paloma. She asked Christian, “What does that mean?” “That word is bad,” he responded.

Christian’s doubts about his father’s faith in American meritocracy emerged early. After he endured racist slurs and other offensive remarks at school, Christian told Harold that he felt he was treated differently “because I’m Black.”

“No, Chief,” his father responded, “hard work gets rewarded. It’s not going to help anybody to get down on your race.”

As mixed-race children, the legitimacy of the Pean brothers’ Blackness trailed them into adulthood. At Georgetown University, Christian found an abundance of Black students for the first time — African Americans and immigrants from Nigeria, Ghana and the Caribbean — and unfamiliar fault lines began to emerge.

“When I was in high school, there was never Black immigrants vs. Black Americans,” Christian said. But in college and later in medical school at Mount Sinai in East Harlem, Christian fielded questions from other Black students about whether scholarships for people of color should be set aside for African Americans descended from slaves, not children of Black immigrants like him.

At the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., Dominique was facing similar questions about his racial camp. When he joined the board of the Student Organization of Latinos, he was asked, “Are you Latino enough?”

“When I’m on the street, people see a Black man. But when I’m with my Black friends, they’re like, Dom, you’re not really Black,” he said. The questions followed them into their personal lives: African American women berating Christian and Dominique for dating women who were not Black.

If the Pean brothers’ Haitian and Mexican roots called into question their rightful membership among African Americans, the police discerned no difference. After graduating from high school in the McAllen suburbs, Alan matriculated to the University of Texas-Austin, a sprawling campus filled almost entirely with white, Hispanic and Asian students. Alan, laid-back and affable, made friends easily. It surprised him then when a security officer trailed him at a store in the mall while he shopped for jeans. “That was the moment when I was like, ‘Oh, I’m Black,” he said.

In August 2015, Alan Pean started the fall semester at the University of Houston where he had transferred to finish his degree in biological sciences. Within days, he began to feel agitated, and his mind slipped into a cinematic delusion in which he believed he was a stunt double for President Barack Obama. At other times, armed assassins chased him.

Alarmed by Alan’s irrational Facebook posts and unable to reach him by phone, Christian called his parents, who were sitting in a darkened McAllen movie theater. He urged them to get to Houston. This was not a drill. In 2009, Alan had spent a week at a hospital for what doctors believed was bipolar disorder.

In the lucid moments between the delusions traversing his psyche, Alan knew he needed medical help. Around midnight, on Aug. 26, 2015, he drove to St. Joseph Medical Center in Houston, swerving erratically and crashing his white Lexus into other cars in the hospital parking lot. As he was hustled into the emergency room on a stretcher, Alan screamed, “I’m manic! I’m manic!”

The following morning, Paloma and Harold flew to Houston and arrived at St. Joseph Medical Center expecting to find sympathetic nurses and doctors eager to aid their troubled son. Both Harold and Christian had placed calls to the emergency department, alerting them to Alan’s mental health history. Instead of finding their son being cared for as a man in the midst of a delusion, Harold and Paloma discovered doctors had not ordered a psychiatric evaluation or prescribed psychiatric medication.

Barred from seeing their son and galled by the hospital’s refusal to provide psychiatric care, Harold and Paloma went to their hotel to try to rent a car so they could take Alan for treatment elsewhere. They were gone for half an hour.

In his hospital room, Alan became more agitated. He believed the oxygen tanks next to his bed controlled a spaceship and that he urgently needed to deactivate a nuclear device using the buttons on his bed. He stripped off his hospital gown and wandered into the hallway naked. A nurse called a “crisis code” and two off-duty Houston police officers, one white and one Latino, charged into Alan’s room. They were unaccompanied by any nurses or doctors, and they closed the door behind them.

The officers would say later that Alan hit one of them and caused a laceration. The first officer fired a stun gun. When the electroshock failed to subdue Alan, according to officers’ statements, the second officer said he feared for his safety and fired a bullet into Alan’s chest, narrowly missing his heart.

Paloma and Harold arrived back at the hospital to find themselves plucked from their ordered lives and hurled into a world in which goodwill and compassion had vanished. Alan was in intensive care with a gunshot wound, and police officers were asking questions about his criminal record. (He had none.) Alan would be detained for attacking the security officers, they were told, and it was now a criminal matter.

Christian flew in from New York, Dominique from Fort Worth, and Uncle Leslie from McAllen. Inconclusive conversations with a hospital administrator strained their patience. “That’s when I was told that we had to have a lawyer to see him,” Leslie said, trembling even as he recounted it nearly six years later.

Paloma was bewildered that her appeals for fairness went unanswered. “I was expecting they would allow me to see my son immediately. I said, ‘My son is a good boy. Let me go and see my kid, please! Please!’” She felt like a ghost, wandering the hospital unstuck in time. Suddenly, the complexions and accents of everyone around her mattered: One police officer was surely white, she thought, the other Hispanic, but maybe born in the U.S.? The nurses were Asian, perhaps Filipino?

Days later, the hospital relented, and nurses led her to a glass window. Alan lay sedated, a tube down his throat, handcuffed to the hospital bed. Paloma’s chest tightened and she felt faint. “I pinched myself, and I said, ‘This cannot be true.’ I screamed to my Lord, ‘Please hold me in your hands.’”

“That’s when I really understood what my father was talking about,” Paloma told me. This, she thought, is how America treats Black men.

Over the next few weeks, it became impossible to unravel what exactly had happened to Alan. Sgt. Steve Murdock, a Houston police investigator, told Christian that Alan had been out of control, picking up chairs, acting like a “Tasmanian devil.” When the hospital eventually allowed the Pean family into Alan’s room, Alan was groggy, his wrists and hands swollen. Standing by his bedside, Uncle Leslie asked Paloma, Harold, Dominique and Christian to hold hands and pray. A week later, Alan was transferred to a psychiatric unit, and his delusions began to lift. A few days later, he was released from the hospital.

It was pouring rain the day the Pean family left Houston. Alan insisted on driving — he always drove on family trips — and his parents and brothers, desperate for a return to normalcy, agreed. Paloma prayed on her rosary in the backseat, nestled next to Christian. Alan drove for 20 minutes until someone suggested they stop and eat. At that moment, Alan turned to his father, “Did I really just drive out of Houston with a bullet wound still in my chest? Pop, I probably shouldn’t be driving.” Dominique drove the last five hours home.

Back in McAllen, neighbors passed on their sympathies, dumbfounded that the Pean’s “well-behaved” middle child, the son of a “respected doctor,” had been shot. Just as Harold years before had sewn up the gash in Christian’s head left by a racially charged fistfight, he and Christian now tended to the piercing pain in Alan’s ribs and changed the dressings of his wound.

That Alan survived a gunshot to the chest meant he faced a messy legal thicket. The police charged him with two accounts of aggravated assault of a police officer and, three months after the shooting, added a third charge of reckless driving. The criminal charges shocked his family.

“At the time, I thought the police and the hospital would apologize, or go to jail,” said Dominique. “If a doctor amputated the wrong leg, there would be instant changes.” A lawyer for the family readied a lawsuit against the hospital and demanded the federal government investigate the hospital’s practice of allowing armed security officers into patients’ rooms.

The seed of injustice planted in Alan’s chest took root in the Pean family.

In October 2015, two months after the shooting, Christian summoned the family from Texas to New York City to march in a #RiseUpOctober protest against police brutality. On a brisk fall day, the five Peans held hands in Washington Square Park wearing custom-made T-shirts that read, “Medicine, Not Bullets.” Quentin Tarantino, the film director, had flown in from California for the event, and activist Cornel West addressed the combustive crowd. Families shouted stories of loved ones killed by police.

Harold had never protested before and stood quietly, taking in the crowds and megaphone chants. Paloma embraced the spirit of the march, kissing her sons with hurricane force as the crowd made its way through Lower Manhattan. She found common cause with mothers whose Black sons had not survived their encounters with police. “We were very lucky that my son was alive,” Paloma said.

The Peans’ attorney had advised Alan not to speak publicly, fearing it would torpedo the lawsuit against the Houston hospital. Christian had his own reservations; he was applying for orthopedic residency programs, a notably conservative field in which only 1.5% of orthopedic surgeons are Black. “Everything is Google-able,” he told me. “I wasn’t sure what people would think about me being involved in Black Lives Matter or being outspoken.”

When protesters began to chant “F— the police!” Christian moved into the crowd to change its tenor. He argued briefly with a white family whose daughter had been shot in the head and killed. This isn’t how we move forward, he told them. Christian wanted to summon empathy and unity. Instead, he saw around him boiling vitriol. The protest turned unruly; 11 people were arrested.

Afterward, Alan expressed shock at the crowds, so consumed with anger. Christian wondered, How many of us are out there?

Six months passed, eight months. Expectations of quick justice left the Pean family like a breath. The Houston Police Department declined to discipline the two officers who tased and shot Alan. Mark Bernard, then chief executive officer of St. Joseph hospital, told federal investigators that given the same circumstances, the officers “would not have done anything different.”

A brief reprieve arrived in March 2016, when a Harris County grand jury declined to indict Alan on criminal assault charges, and the district attorney’s office dropped the reckless driving charge. The family’s civil lawsuit against the hospital; its corporate owner, IASIS Healthcare Corp.; Criterion Healthcare Security; the city of Houston; and the police officers dragged on, one lawyer replaced by another, draining the family checkbook.

The Peans, meanwhile, registered each new death of a Black person killed by police as if Alan were shot once more. “It was all I could think about, I had dreams about it,” Dominique said. “I felt powerless.” Memories stored away resurfaced, eliciting doubts about a trail of misunderstood clues and neon warnings. Dominique had been close in age to Trayvon Martin when the Florida teenager was killed in 2012. Dominique remembers thinking, “It’s terrible, it’s wrong, but it would never happen with me. I have nice clothes on. I’m going to get my master’s and become a doctor.”

Even Uncle Leslie, who each year donated generously to the Fraternal Order of Police and had brushed off the numerous times police had stopped his car, caved under the overwhelming evidence. “I never related to the police killings until it happened to us,” he confessed. “Now I doubt about whether they are protecting society as a whole.” He has stopped giving money to the police association.

By 2017, Christian, Alan and Dominique had reunited in New York City. For a time, they shared an apartment in East Harlem. Their industrious lives resumed in haste; young men with advanced degrees to earn, careers to forge, loves to be found, just as their parents had done at that dud of a party in Veracruz.

Primed by his own experiences, the nick on his forehead a reminder of earlier battles, Christian pressed the family to speak out. Appointed the family spokesperson, he expanded the problems that would need fixing to guarantee the safety of Black men on the streets and in hospitals: racial profiling, health care inequities, the dearth of Black medical students. Working at a feverish pace, he aced crushing med school exams and pressed more than 1,000 medical professionals across the country to sign a petition protesting Alan’s shooting and the use of armed security guards in hospitals.

“My perspective was, we should be public about this,” Christian said. “We don’t have anything to hide.”

He embraced activism as part of his career, even if it meant navigating orthopedic residency interviews with white surgeons who eyed his résumé with skepticism. Would he be too distracted to be a good surgeon? He delivered a speech at his medical school graduation, and wrote a textbook chapter and spoke at the Mayo Clinic on health care inequities. Medical school deans asked Christian to help shape their response to the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, and friends sought out his opinion. “For many people, I’m their only Black friend,” he said. Christian has told the story of Alan’s shooting over and over, at physician conferences and medical schools to shine a bright light on structural racism.

Over the months we spoke, Christian, now 33, juggled long days and nights as chief resident of orthopedic trauma at Jamaica Hospital in Queens with his commitments to Physicians for Criminal Justice Reform, Orthopedic Relief Services International and academic diversity panels. He is the über-polymath, coolly cerebral in the operating room and magnetic and winning in his burgeoning career as a thought leader.

Christian’s family imagines he will run for office someday, a congressman, maybe. “He’s charismatic, he has good ideas,” said Dominique. “He’s got big plans.”

Dominique, too, has tried to spread the gospel, pushing for action where he could. He led an event in 2016 at the University of North Texas in Fort Worth using Alan’s story as a case study in the catastrophic collision of racism, mental health and guns in hospitals.

When he moved to New York for medical school, joining his brothers, Dominique was anxious when he spotted police officers on the street. “I would try to be more peppy or upbeat, like whistling Vivaldi.” But with each death — Stephon Clark, Atatiana Jefferson, Breonna Taylor, Daniel Prude, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Daunte Wright — he has come to view these offerings as pointless. “After Alan, it doesn’t matter how big I smile,” Dominique decided.

Now 29 and a third-year medical student at Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine in Harlem, he said, “You can have all these resources and it doesn’t mean anything because of the color of your skin, because there is a system in place that works against you. It’s been so many years, and we didn’t get justice.”

Dominique has devised a routine for each new shooting: watch the videos of Black men and women killed by police or white vigilantes and read about their cases. Then set them aside and pivot back to his studies and school where there are few other Black doctors in training.

“I can escape by doing that,” he told me. “I still need to do well for myself.”

For Alan, as the years passed, time took on a bendable quality. It snapped straight with purpose — a talk show appearance on “The Dr. Oz Show,” presentations with his brothers at medical schools in Texas, Massachusetts and Connecticut — and then lost its shape to resignation. Survival had bought him an uneasy liberty: He feared squandering the emotional potency of his own story but remained squeamish at the prostrations demanded by daytime TV shows, the tedium of repeating his story in front of strangers, doubting whether his life’s misfortune was fueling social progress or exploiting a private tragedy.

In 2017, Alan enrolled at the City University of New York to study health care management, digging into a blizzard of statistics about police shootings and patients in crisis, and transferred the following year to a similar program at Mount Sinai. But by last fall, Alan had settled into a personal malaise. He dropped out of Mount Sinai’s program, and spent hours in his room, restless and uncertain.

Why is it so hard to register that an unarmed person should not be shot?

– Alan Pean

“I’m still working with coming to terms with who I am, my position in the family,” said Alan, 32. “Christian is an orthopedic surgeon. Dominique is in medical school.” After years of pursuing various degrees (biology, health care management, physician assistant, public health), that might not be who he is after all.

“Inside I didn’t want to do it,” he said. “It translates as a failure.”

“Alan goes back and forth about whether he wants to write about it or go back to his regular life,” Christian said. “I see him all the time, every day, being disappointed in himself for not being more outspoken, not feeling the free will to choose what to do with this thing.”

Isn’t it enough that he survived?

Alan sees a therapist and takes medication for bipolar disorder. He practices yoga. When he breathes deeply, his chest tingles, most likely nerve damage from where the bullet pierced. After a great deal of thinking, he has turned to writing science fiction and posting it online. The writing comes easily, mostly stories of his delusions told with exquisite detail — people, good and bad, with him in a place “that looks like Hell.”

Outside of his apartment in New York, there are few places he can find sanctuary. Even as the coronavirus emptied the streets, he walked around the city, his eyes scanning for police cars, police uniforms, each venture to the store a tactical challenge. He selects his clothes carefully. “Never before 2015 had police officers stood out to me. Now, if they are a block away, I see them. That’s how real the threat is. I have to think, ‘What am I wearing? Do I have my ID? Which direction am I going?’

“If I were a white person, do they ever think those things?”

Reports of new shootings stir up his own trauma, and Alan trembles at the betrayal. “Why is it so hard to register that an unarmed person should not be shot?”

Covid presented new trauma for the Pean family, and underscored the nation’s racial divide. The three brothers largely were confined to their apartment. Dominique attended medical school classes online while Christian volunteered to work at Bellevue, a public hospital struggling to treat a torrent of covid patients who were dying at a terrifying pace. Many patients spoke only Spanish, and Christian served as both physician and interpreter.

The patients coming to Bellevue were nearly all Black or Latino and poor, and Christian grew angrier each day as he saw wealthier private hospitals, including NYU Langone just a few blocks away, showered with resources. The gaping death rates between the two hospitals would prove startling: About 11% of covid patients died at NYU Langone; at Bellevue, about 22% died. “This wasn’t the kind of death I was used to,” Christian said.

At the peak of the epidemic in New York, Christian video-called his dad at home in Mission, Texas, and cried, exhausted and overwhelmed. Harold and Paloma had largely shuttered their clinic after several staff members became infected, but Harold continued to see urgent cases. Knowing the dangers to front-line health care workers, Christian was scared for his parents. “I was worried my dad wasn’t going to protect himself,” he said. “And that I was going to lose one of my parents and I wasn’t going to be able to say goodbye.”

All that was stirring inside Christian when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin callously murdered George Floyd in May 2020, sparking protests across the globe. Black Lives Matter demonstrators filled New York City’s streets, and Christian and Dominique joined them. Alan did not; the lockdown and blaring ambulance sirens had left him anxious and hypervigilant, and after months indoors, he feared open spaces.

“I’m going to wait this one out,” he told Christian.

On the streets, surrounded by the fury and calls for change, Christian wore his white doctor’s coat, a potent symbol of solidarity. “I wanted to show that people who were on the front lines of the pandemic realized who the pandemic was affecting was reflective of the racism that led to George Floyd’s death.” When they returned home, Christian told Alan that the multiethnic makeup of the protesters surprised him. “I think maybe people’s minds are changing,” Christian said. “It was beautiful to see.”

Nearly a year later, on April 20, 2021, a jury found Chauvin guilty of murder, and Christian felt a wash of relief. But in the days that followed, news coverage erupted about the fatal police shooting of a 13-year-old Latino boy in Chicago, and the death of a 16-year-old Black girl in Columbus, Ohio, also at the hands of police. The Pean family was unusually muted. “We only exchanged a few texts about it as a family,” Christian said. “We said maybe things are changing, maybe not.”

The Pean sons will scatter soon: Christian to Harvard University for a trauma medicine fellowship; Dominique to medical rotations at Nassau University Medical Center; and Alan to McAllen, where he will oversee the financial operations of his parents’ business. It will be Alan’s first time living alone. “The one semester I was almost going to live by myself I was in Houston, and I got shot. I need to do this by myself to know I can.”

Watching violence unravel one of his son’s lives has haunted Dr. Harold Pean — the threats to Black lives in American cities not escaped as easily as a Haitian dictator.

But Harold, 66, is reluctant to allow Alan’s shooting to rewrite his American gospel; the shooting was a personal tragedy, not a transmutation of his identity. He pushes the memories from his mind when they appear and summons generosity. “Whatever the bad stuff, I keep it inside. I try to psych myself to think positively all the time,” he said. “I want to see everyone like a human.”

He has convinced himself that no more violence will befall his sons or, someday, his grandchildren. Still, he can no longer reconcile the tragedy of Alan’s shooting with his Catholic beliefs. “If God was powerful, a lot of bad things would not have happened,” he said.

“It’s difficult for him to acknowledge that he’s struggling,” Christian said of his father. “He’s a resilient person. He’s never talked about the added burden of being a Black man in America.”

“I think Paloma is the one keeping my brother together,” Uncle Leslie told me.

But who is keeping Paloma together? To her sons, her husband, her fellow parishioners, Paloma, 63, brims with purpose. She’s a fighter, an idealist. But at night, she sleeps with the phone beside her bed. When it rings, she jumps. Are you OK? In her dreams, she is often in danger. Many nights, she lies awake and talks aloud to God. “Why? For what? Tell me, Lord.” (She speaks to the Lord in Spanish. “In English, I think he will not understand me!”)

Paloma’s activism is quietly public: her presence in the community of mostly white doctors; her motherly boasts about Christian and Dominique becoming physicians and Alan’s return to McAllen; her insistence that racism is real in a part of the country where “White Lives Matter” signs abound. “I’m on a mission,” she said. “I want to disarm hate.”

But deep within her, that sense of purpose lives beside a fury she can’t quell and a disappointment so profound it can make it hard to breathe. She wonders if God is punishing her for abandoning Mexico, and whether the U.S. soil in which she chose to grow her own family is poisoned. “Sometimes I feel like I want to leave everything,” she told me. “I feel like I don’t understand how people can be so selfish here in America.”

They are dark thoughts that go largely unspoken, secrets kept even from her mother, age 90, who now lives with them in McAllen. Six years have passed since Alan was shot, and Paloma still has not told her mother what happened in that Houston hospital room. Nor will she ever.

“The pain I went through,” Paloma said, “I don’t want to give that pain to my mom.”

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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gordonwilliamsweb · 3 years

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The Making of Reluctant Activists: A Police Shooting in a Hospital Forces One Family to Rethink American Justice

Use Our Content

It can be republished for free.

“People don’t want to admit we have racism,” Paloma told me. “But Pean and me, we know the pain.”

Harold Pean doesn’t recall being raised Black or white. His native Haiti was fractured by schisms beyond skin color.

“They were so quiet,” Paloma remembers. She pointed to the man she would eventually marry, “You! Dance with me!”

– Paloma Pean

The racist lexicon of American youth befuddled Paloma. She asked Christian, “What does that mean?” “That word is bad,” he responded.

“No, Chief,” his father responded, “hard work gets rewarded. It’s not going to help anybody to get down on your race.”

“That’s when I really understood what my father was talking about,” Paloma told me. This, she thought, is how America treats Black men.

The seed of injustice planted in Alan’s chest took root in the Pean family.

Afterward, Alan expressed shock at the crowds, so consumed with anger. Christian wondered, How many of us are out there?

“My perspective was, we should be public about this,” Christian said. “We don’t have anything to hide.”

Christian’s family imagines he will run for office someday, a congressman, maybe. “He’s charismatic, he has good ideas,” said Dominique. “He’s got big plans.”

“I can escape by doing that,” he told me. “I still need to do well for myself.”

Why is it so hard to register that an unarmed person should not be shot?

– Alan Pean

“Inside I didn’t want to do it,” he said. “It translates as a failure.”

Isn’t it enough that he survived?

“If I were a white person, do they ever think those things?”

Reports of new shootings stir up his own trauma, and Alan trembles at the betrayal. “Why is it so hard to register that an unarmed person should not be shot?”

“I’m going to wait this one out,” he told Christian.

Watching violence unravel one of his son’s lives has haunted Dr. Harold Pean — the threats to Black lives in American cities not escaped as easily as a Haitian dictator.

“I think Paloma is the one keeping my brother together,” Uncle Leslie told me.

“The pain I went through,” Paloma said, “I don’t want to give that pain to my mom.”

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vcg73 · 8 years

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Untitled M*A*S*H fic for Caitallolovesyou

These three chapters are all I have so far but I hope they give you a smile. (And that I don’t end up taking too long to write the second half!) Since I teased you with it I didn't want to keep you waiting. *hugs*

Set post-series. Features Charles and Hawkeye, plus a couple of family members.

Chapter One

She watched him, studied him, growing more concerned for him with each passing day. Mother and Father seemed to notice nothing, but then, when did they ever so long as their children were behaving in a proper manner and not causing any sort of scandal?

But Honoria Winchester was not so blind as they when it came to her beloved brother.

Charles had been different since Korea. Quieter, more introspective, less inclined toward the bluster and bombast with which he armored himself against the world. And he never listened to his music anymore. That alone was cause for concern. Charles had been in love with the classics; Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, and particularly Mozart, since he was in short pants. Medicine was his particular genius, his profession and he had worked hard to refine his knowledge and technique until he was rightly regarded as one of the finest surgeons on the east coast; but music had always been his passion.

Since his return, however, neither work nor play seemed to give him satisfaction. The music, in fact, seemed to cause only pain. Their parents had treated the entire family to an evening at the symphony a month after Charles returned to Boston, intending to celebrate his safe return, but instead of enjoying the performance, his features had been set in a stiff expression all evening that could have passed as a calm smile if one did not question it too closely, but which appeared to Honoria to be more of a pained grimace.

She had assumed that he needed time to adjust to being back in the civilized world. That he would be fine once he’d had an opportunity to adjust to his new position as Chief of Thoracic surgery at Boston Mercy hospital. Charles had always been a strong believer in the benefits of a healthy work and leisure balance, devoting full attention to whichever he was engaged in at any given time. However, the latter occupation seemed to have disappeared entirely. Golf games and cricket matches with colleagues slowly disappeared from his schedule. Gourmet dinners, formerly one of the highlights of his existence, seemed to give him indigestion and had given way to plain fare. Evenings at the ballet or opera became increasingly rare. And he formed no attachments at all.

It had been nearly a year and Charles had become obsessed with his practice to the point that he rarely seemed to leave the hospital. Her brother was gone when Honoria rose in the morning, and back home long after she had retired for the night. He was using duty as an excuse to avoid seeing friends and family. When she had last seen him, a week ago, Honoria had been startled by the haggard look of him. Oh, he was tidy enough; immaculately dressed and properly groomed, but he looked as though he had not slept in weeks. He had also begun noticeably losing weight, suggesting that he did not eat as often or as healthily as he ought, and his formerly ruddy complexion was now unhealthily pale. He had clearly given up on his lifelong habit of a brisk sixty-minute constitutional at mid-day, to refresh him in body and mind.

Sensing that the time to intervene had arrived, Honoria tried cornering him and talking to him, but he was a master at putting off conversations he did not wish to have. However, if he thought he was going to hide in his duty and be able to avoid her forever, Charles Emerson Winchester had another think coming to him!

Quietly, clandestinely, Honoria slipped into her brother’s office at Boston Mercy and spoke with his secretary. She arranged for a two-week vacation, confirming her suspicions that he had already racked up enough hours on shift just in the past six months to have earned twice that amount of holiday time. Madeline even expressed relief, telling her (“Not that I would ever gossip about our doctors, you understand, but…”) that Charles’ colleagues had been after him to take some time before he ended up on the wrong side of the surgical table.

That, though likely exaggerated a trifle, steeled Honoria’s resolve. Come Monday, her brother was taking a break. Whether he wanted one or not.

~*~*~*~*~

“A vacation? My dear girl, I cannot possibly be spared for an entire week! There are patients, board meetings, a veritable plethora of duties which cannot possibly . . .”

“Two,” she interrupted calmly.

Charles spluttered to a halt. “Excuse me?”

“Two weeks. It’s all ar-r-ranged, Charles darling,” she said, taking a sip of tea and flashing her most pleasant smile at him. “T-two weeks in the c-c-country. You are taking what I believe is called a r-r-road-trip in the common p-parlance. Your colleagues w-w-were delighted to be rid of you. P-perfectly happy to c-c-cover for your absence. M-m-madeline was q-quite efficient about arranging things.”

He gaped at her. “Madeline conspired with you on this? The two of you went behind my back? The cheek! The treachery! The gall! I’ll have her sacked at once!”

She smiled even more brightly. “You won’t. In f-f-fact, I believe you sh-should consider a raise. J-just for putting up with you and your t-t-temper.”

“My temper is perfectly fine!” he blasted, defying the statement with his own volume. He seemed to realize this and turned to pacing about the room instead. His voice was quieter but no less irritated when he continued, “This is absurd. I will not be herded along toward some idyllic pasture like a stupid sheep. I have duties, responsibilities, commitments you cannot possibly understand!”

Charles continued on in this vein for several more minutes. He fretted and grumbled, not seeming to notice that he was receiving no counter argument until he abruptly ran out of steam and sat down in the chair across from his sister, fuming but silent. Exactly as she had known that he would do if she remained patient.

Honoria got up, setting her teacup aside and crossed to perch lightly on her brother’s knee, wrapping her arms around his neck and resting her temple against his, just as she had done when they were children and she was the one in need of comforting. Charles’ arms came around her waist, relaxing against his will as he responded automatically to the familiar gesture.

“I’m w-worried for you, my Chuck,” she said softly, using the childhood nickname that nobody else on earth was allowed. “You aren’t w-w-well. You haven’t been yourself since the w-w-war, and I don’t think you will be until you t-t-talk to someone. I’ve arranged for that as w-w-well.”

His lips primmed in distaste. “You know I don’t believe in that psychological twaddle,” he said, his tone noticeably less annoyed than it had been before. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not, and that isn’t w-w-what I m-meant.”

Charles pulled his head back to look up into her face. “Not a doctor, then?”

“Oh, yes. A d-d-doctor,” she said with a laugh. “J-just not that sort.”

Charles struggled to maintain his disapproving air, but failed to resist her coaxing smile. Honoria had always known how to manage her big brother. His eyes narrowed curiously. “Where have you got up your sleeve?”

“F-f-father is allowing you to b-borrow the Duesenberg,” she told him.

A smile quirked his lips. “Is he aware of this generous act?”

She batted her lashes innocently. “I’ll tell him . . . ev-ventually. Perhaps at the w-w-weekend.”

Charles laughed in spite of himself. “You are a cheeky girl. I suppose I’m expected to drive to the scene of my own kidnapping?”

“Of course,” she said. “D-d-driving is quite relaxing, I’m told. And the early s-summer s-s-scenery is lovely in M-maine. P-particularly the c-c-coastal towns.”

Now he just looked confused. “Maine. What could anyone possibly find to do for two weeks in Maine? It isn’t as though we know anyone . . .” When she continued to smile expectantly at him, Charles suddenly put the clues together. He wagged his finger scoldingly under her nose. “Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no! My dear young woman, you cannot possibly be suggesting that I go to Crabapple Cove.”

“I am, and you are,” she said succinctly. “You m-m-may think I paid no attention to your l-l-letters, brother dear, but I assure you that I d-did. You spoke more often and more f-fondly of Captains P-pierce and H-h-hunnicutt than you probably knew. I b-b-believe it would do you good to s-s-spend time with someone to whom you do not have to exp-p-plain your ongoing d-difficulties.”

“What difficulties?” he grumbled, wary but unable to avoid her now that she was so close and so openly concerned with helping him. “I’m perfectly sound.”

Honoria stroked her thumb over his cheek, not nearly as round and rosy as it should have been, then traced one of the shadowy bags underneath his eyes. “Are you?” she said gently. “You c-came home, but n-n-not all of you returned from that place. Did it?”

Finding himself unable to lie to her face, Charles attempted to avoid her probing gaze, ducking his head against her chest to hide his expression. He shook his head, not willing to risk his voice trembling.

“I c-can’t understand. Not entirely,” she said, stroking the hair over his ear. It was getting too long again. “B-b-but I think your friend may. I s-s-stayed in touch with the elder Doctor P-p-pierce after our f-f-family reunion. He’s kind; v-very sweet, once one m-m-moves past the endless b-b-bad jokes. From your letters, I s-s-suspect the son is m-much the same.” She had met and become friendly with the families of many of Charles’ colleagues and camp-mates during an event dreamed up by Dr. Hunnicutt and arranged by his wife Peg.

Charles cleared his throat and said quietly, “He is. Hawkeye Pierce could try the patience of a saint with his endless buffoonery, but . . . he is a good man, and an excellent physician. I actually learned a great deal from him.”

Honoria smiled, knowing that for Charles there could be no finer compliment. “There’s a w-weekend medical conference in M-m-manchester. It ap-p-pears to be roughly an hour from their h-h-home.”

“So I may as well drop by while I’m in the neighborhood, eh?” he said, eyes beginning to twinkle as he caught on to the spirit of her plan. Honoria had known that he would handle this better if he had a legitimate excuse to make the trip. “Well, I suppose it might be good to get away for a few days at that. Weather conditions should be ideal for a spot of fishing, and it wouldn’t do to be rude.”

Honoria kissed him on the forehead. “Thank you, Charles. S-sinclair will bring the car around f-f-for you at seven.”

Charles raised an eyebrow. “And I suppose my bags are already packed for me too.”

Hopping up from his lap, she smiled. “See you at b-b-breakfast?”

Rising to his feet, Charles looked down into her face. “I suppose you think you’re very clever, don’t you?”

“If I g-g-get my Chuck back, I w-w-will consider myself very c-c-clever indeed. And very blessed.”

As she left the room, Honoria heard her brother mutter, “No child, it is I who am blessed.”

Chapter Two

The medical conference, if one could call it that, was an utter waste of time. The special topic of the gathering was advances in podiatry. Hardly something Charles found worth a three and a half hour drive north.

Still, the journey had been scenic, the climate warm, with a gentle breeze that had coaxed him to roll his window down and breathe in the pleasantly fresh air. He could not deny that it felt good to relax. Perhaps he had been working too hard at that. To go somewhere new and allow his activities to go unscheduled for a change felt good. His sister would be unbearably pleased with herself if he were to admit that she had been right, but that was a price he just might be willing to pay.

Particularly if she proved equally prescient about his upcoming visit to the shore.

Charles could not deny that he was nervous about seeing his old camp colleague. He had grown fond of many of the people with whom he had endured the hellish conditions of Korea; Colonel Potter, BJ and Hawkeye, Margaret, Father Mulcahey, and even that rapscallion of a Maxwell Klinger; but since the war, he had not spoken with any of them. In fact, he had done his best to avoid even thinking of that time, or anyone connected to it. He had wanted to believe that he could simply return to the life he had previously enjoyed, and put all of that dreadful business behind him.

Unfortunately, reality had proved somewhat less accommodating than his daydreams. So long as he worked, he could center his concentration on that, and only that. Not unlike the marathon sessions of meatball surgery performed in that far away M.A.S.H. tent, where only the utter refusal to think of anything but the instruments and delicate tissues beneath one’s hands could get a person through the endless hours.

No, it was his time away from the surgical table that frequently proved his undoing. It was impossible to sit quietly enjoying a drink, or a game of cribbage, or a concert somewhere, and pretend that he did not feel guilty for his very leisure. For being alive, healthy and well-off, living a beautifully civilized existence when so many others had not received that same gift.

How many young men, just boys most of them, had failed to returned to their homes and their own beloved pass-times because there had simply not been time, or advanced enough equipment to save their lives? Because a different patient with a slightly better life expectancy had been deemed more able to benefit from their limited resources, leaving the doctors with the grim choice to save as many as they could in the time allotted, and leave others to die?

They haunted him, those boys. The soldiers, the civilians, the many prisoners of war whose lives and future contributions to their society had been destroyed by a damned ‘conflict’ that never should have touched them at all. Like that quintet of Chinese musicians whose bloody faces he still saw whenever he heard the beautiful strains of Mozart. Their faces and the sound of their poor but lovingly played instruments lived on in his dreams. They shamed him with their talent, and hope, and the endless joie de vivre that had driven them to embrace beauty in the midst of horror. Had enabled him to feel a little bit of normalcy in the midst of chaos.

Right up until the day that they had died.

Charles closed his eyes and swallowed, determined not to allow his thoughts to wander down that unforgiving path yet again. He was supposed to be taking a holiday, and he deserved a good one, damn it all!

“Doctor Winchester?” a voice said from off to his left.

Charles opened his eyes, startled by the familiarity of that voice. He turned, mouth already half open to greet his old ‘swamp’ mate, when he instead found himself facing an older gentleman wearing dark slacks and a shapeless yellow sweater with patches at the elbows. “Oh, er, yes? Yes, I’m Winchester.”

The man smiled brightly and rushed forward to shake Charles’ hand, behaving for all the world as if he were greeting a long lost friend. “I knew it had to be you as soon as Dr. Wickshaw started his lecture and I spotted that long-suffering expression on your face. My son described you to a T!”

That was why this fellow looked so familiar. His crinkled blue eyes, long ski nose, and the voice were a dead ringer for, “Doctor Pierce, of course!” Charles shook the old man’s hand cordially in both of his own, determined to display his finest manners to combat whatever impression the son might have given. “It’s a sincere pleasure to meet you, sir. Your son spoke of you a great deal as well. My sister informed me that you would be open to a guest, but I hope she wasn’t taking advantage, or bringing you too far out of your way.”

Doctor Pierce dismissed the idea with a quiet ‘pshaw’ and a wave of his hand. “Glad to have you, son. And call me Dan. Any friend of Hawkeye is a friend of mine. He’d have come with me, but Rosie Maynard decided it was time to have her baby this morning, so I came on ahead. The good thing about retirement is that there’s never a bad time to take a day off.” He grinned, his eyes sparkling with fun. “Now, what do you say we scram before one of these doctors catches on that we don’t belong? Wouldn’t do to get off on the wrong foot with these fellas!”

He cackled at his own joke and Charles politely offered a wan smile. Oh, yes. This man was definitely a Pierce. “Indeed. My car is in the rear parking area. Will I just follow you back to your place?”

The gray-haired man’s eyes danced. “Only if you want to drive at an old man’s walking pace.” He laughed. “And that would be one hell of a walk for me! No, my neighbor was coming out this way to see his daughter. I just hitched a ride with him, since I knew you’d be driving. Figured you might like someone to show you the sights.”

Surprised but not displeased at the idea of an on board navigator, particularly as he found himself unexpectedly liking the man, Charles nodded. “I hadn’t expected such forethought, but that is an excellent suggestion.”

Doctor Pierce did not seem to take offense at his inference that thinking ahead did not necessarily run in the family. He simply chatted along in an amiable fashion about whatever came into his head as they walked outside. Then, “Oh, my.” He rushed forward to take a better look at their ride, circling the car like a treasure-hunter finding a lost tomb. “This is fine. Just fine! How’d you ever come across a beauty like this?”

The man was all but drooling as he ran a gentle hand over the smooth red two-tone paint covering the right fender of the gorgeous 1924 Duesenberg Roadster, which had been kept in pristine condition for the past 30 years.

“Father bought it new during a business trip to Indiana. This car is Charles Emerson Winchester II’s pride and joy.”

In fact, it was a mark of how concerned the man was that after Honoria’s explanation at breakfast of his son’s sudden journey out of town, Dad had expressed more concern for his health than for the borrowed auto. Charles had merely had to promise upon the life of his future firstborn that he would allow no damage to come to it.

Daniel Pierce grinned like he’d just won a surprise jackpot. “Now I’m definitely glad I didn’t drive here. I’ve never had the pleasure of riding in a car like this one. If I happen to vanish on the ride back, just tell my son that I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

Charles laughed, opening the door for the older man and then taking his time about getting situated in the driver’s seat, just to give his host a bit more time to enjoy the luxurious leather seating. It was refreshing to discover that not everyone in the Pierce family was an uncouth heathen.

Chapter 3

The journey eastward was a pleasant one. Charles was not in a particular mood to chat. In fact, he could not recall the last time that he had been; but his monosyllabic responses did not seem to deter his companion in the slightest. Like his son, Daniel Pierce had been blessed with an unlimited gift of gab, and he kept up a virtual soliloquy as they drove, discussing cars, music, and movies. It seemed that the town council had just approved the addition of a new movie theater to the outskirts of nearby Spruce Harbor, and it was the sensation of all its neighboring burgs, including Crabapple Cove. “Lines a mile long to get in, every Friday and Saturday night!”

“And what film is the populace currently enjoying?” Charles asked, rather curious to know what rural America would be in such a fever about. Popular cinema had never his particular entertainment vice, but he had learned to enjoy an occasional flick during his sentence in Korea. A M.A.S.H. unit tended to be either feast or famine as far as diversion went. Either one was up to his eyebrows in work, or all but desperate for some form of mental stimulation. Movie nights filled that bill, if only just, and at times the more simplistic or sensationalistic that film was, the easier it was to allow it to transport one away from the painful reality of their situation.

His guide’s eyes lit up. “Heard they just got a new Monroe film this week! “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”, I think it’s called. Though if a woman built like Jane Russell came knocking on my door, I sure as hell wouldn’t turn her away for her hair color!”

The old man cackled in a lecherous manner that once again reminded Charles of his son, and he found himself chuckling along. “Neither would I, as a matter of fact, and I do take pride in being a gentleman. Perhaps it would best to experience this cinematic masterpiece for ourselves, and gather more intelligence on the matter. Just to make an informed decision, you understand.”

Pierce gave his shoulder a friendly thump. “That’s what I like to see; a man of science!”

He turned to pointing out local landmarks as they approached his home, chatting about people and places he knew, urging his visitor to experience all that the village and nearby town had to offer. It was clear that he was quite proud of his home, so Charles just nodded and smiled, and tried to pretend that he was not at all taken aback by the miles up miles of rural scenery, populated by little more than trees, farms, and the occasional bovine.

To say that Crabapple Cove was small was to be entirely too generous. It was miniscule. A virtual blink and one would never know they had been there. And yet, in direct contrast to its size (Pierce assured him that the outlying farms and independent properties that made up the rest of the town proper stretched far beyond ‘downtown’, which was apparently what they were experiencing now.) there was an absurdly enormous banner stretched across two tall poles as one entered it, urging visitors to be, ‘Welcome to Crabapple Cove, Maine! Home of the nation’s finest blueberry pie!’

“And is the confection worthy of such a boast?” he asked, sitting up a bit taller and enjoying a feeling of pride as he noticed the locals beginning to pop out of their homes and businesses to gawk at the beautiful luxury automobile sliding down their quiet streets. (Street? Charles could not swear to it that they had more than just the one.) And given that he had seen nothing but farm vehicles and a couple of worn family sedans, he was not surprised. From what he knew of small towns, they probably would have been equally curious if he had wheeled in on an old velocipede. In a place where everyone surely knew everyone else, any stranger would be cause for curiosity.

“Best pie on the east coast,” the other man boasted happily. “Berries are in season now, so you’ll have to find out for yourself. For my dime, Jenny’s Place serves the best, but Hawkeye would argue for Mable’s Diner. Oh, this is it. Just pull up here to our left.”

He eased his father’s car into an empty space along one side of a long board walkway next to a small office that he could now see had a sign painted in one corner reading, “Benjamin Franklin Pierce, M.D.” Hanging from the doorknob was a tiny paper sign on a string that read ‘The Doctor is In’.

It gave Charles an oddly warm feeling, while at the same time reigniting the butterflies in his stomach. The elder doctor Pierce had been nothing but kind and welcoming, but suppose the younger was only being polite in granting him leave for a visit. He might be no more pleased to have a reminder of their time in Korea than Charles himself had been during the past thirteen months.

Luckily, his fears were put to rest before he had even managed to do more than shut the driver’s side door behind him. The door to the little office came open and there stood Hawkeye, big as life and twice as noisy as he slammed back the door and jogged out to meet his visitor with a huge smile that caused his eyes to practically vanish into the deep laugh-lines surrounding them. He hopped off the boardwalk to vigorously pump Charles’ offered hand in greeting.

“Charles, I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but damn if it isn’t good to see you.” He laughed and shook his head, still grinning from ear to ear as he admitted, “Thought I’d mean it even less, but it’s great to have you here.”

It was strange somehow, to see Pierce dressed in a neat short-sleeved blue checked shirt and a pair of slightly wrinkled gray trousers, rather than the Hawaiian print shirt and loose army-green field issue of old. His hair seemed grayer now, and had been trimmed more neatly than Charles had ever seen it, as if in direct contrast to the slovenly appearance he had previously favored as a subtle middle-finger to military regulations.

Charles found himself smiling back, clasping Pierce’s forearm with the hand that was not still being warmly clasped. “I know precisely what you mean, and I find myself sharing that sentiment. It’s good to see you as well. Thank you for agreeing to host me on such short notice.”

“Glad to. We always keep a spare room warm for company. Don’t we, Dad?”

Hawkeye let go of Charles, then clapped him on the back almost as if he needed the physical contact to prove to himself that he wasn’t imagining his old colleague into this incongruous place and time. He looked to his father, who said, “Indeed we do, son. Indeed we do. Help me with these bags and we’ll get your friend settled in.”

“That isn’t necessary,” Charles protested half-heartedly, privately glad that he did not have to personally haul all four of the suitcases his sister had packed. He was rather embarrassed as he looked over the wealth of belongings. “To be quite frank, I’m not certain what’s in most of these. My sister became a bit overzealous in her plans to ship me off on a holiday. She seems to have prepared for every possible terrain and climatological contingency.”

Daniel just smiled, hefting the smallest of the four cases out and testing it for weight. “My late wife was like that. More prepared than the Boy Scouts of America, and God love her for it. Her forethought saved us from some sticky business more than once.”

Between the three of them, they made short work of the luggage. Then the elder Dr. Pierce excused himself to go check on a few neighbors, leaving them to chat.

“He supposedly retired when I came home to take over the practice, but he likes to keep his hand in,” Hawkeye said, flopping down on his side atop the neatly made guest bed and propping himself up on his elbow to watch Charles unpack. “They’re getting used to me, but you don’t replace an old country doctor overnight. And I wouldn’t want to. They keep the checker boards warmed up and the gossip mill cranking, just hoping he’ll stop in.”

Charles allowed himself a delicate snort. “Sounds rather dull to me, but I suppose when one chooses a provincial life, they soon run out of options for entertainment. Although your father was telling me on the way in that you just got a theatre in town. Very civilized indeed.”

Hawkeye did not appear to be insulted by his slightly condescending tone. Indeed his grin just got wider. “Well it’s not your kind, filled with the music of classical snores in B Flat. It’s just a little one-screener, but they show a pretty decent variety of movies. Abbott and Costello the first month, then we had a western. Did they show “Shane” up in Bean Town?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Charles said dryly. “The wild west is not precisely my cup of tea, nor are sticky, crowded, childish pursuits in general. However, I am reliably informed that you currently have the beauteous Miss Monroe on display. For such as she, I would be willing to suffer the degradations of a public cinema.”

The other man grinned. “You old dog, I always suspected there was a human heart beneath that rusty suit of armor. Or a human something anyway!” He cackled wildly at his own innuendo, making Charles roll his eyes and toss a pair of socks at his widely gaping mouth. He missed his target, but they did bounce satisfactorily off of his victim’s forehead, leaving a startled expression that was more than pleasing. Hawkeye sat up. “Say, you hungry? I could give you the grand tour, ending in the best steak and potatoes you’ve ever tasted over at Mable’s.”

“And perhaps a sampling of the blueberry pie,” Charles agreed, feeling his stomach already growling at the mere thought. It had been a long time since breakfast, and the luncheon served at the conference had been more of a risk than he wanted to take.

Hawkeye’s blue eyes lit up. “Now you’re talking.” He jumped up, calling something behind him about meeting downstairs in ten minutes as he abruptly left the room.

Charles stared after him, a bit surprised to find himself smiling quite naturally for the first time in months.

There was something refreshing about seeing his old camp-mate so seemingly happy and comfortable in this place. As if a rough-edged puzzle piece that could not be made to fit into a particular picture had been plucked from there and connected back into its own proper puzzle. As unsettled and distressed as Pierce had been during his final weeks in Korea, even spending some time in a sanitarium undergoing treatment for a nervous breakdown, this tiny town appeared to have been the correct balm to ease his mind and spirit.

Although he wished it very much, Charles doubted that being here would do the same for him. After all, it was likely the emotional connection of family and familiar sights that had helped Hawkeye, not the locality. And heaven knew that familiar surroundings had done little to soothe his’ own troubled soul . . .

“Hurry up, Winchester! The town isn’t going to come up to your room and introduce itself!”

The shout, coming up the stairs, startled him. He glanced at a small clock sitting on the table next to the guest-bed, surprised to see that nearly fifteen minutes had drifted by while he stood here woolgathering. Shutting the suitcase, he picked up a light sport-coat that went well with the tweed trousers and button-down he had chosen for the conference and pulled it on. A bit formal still, but what of it? It behooved one to make a good first impression, even when there was nobody worth impressing.

“Coming,” he called down, quickly checking himself in the small vanity mirror attached to a dresser. More than satisfactory. “One cannot rush perfection, Pierce.”

A merry laugh echoed up the stairs. “We only have two weeks, Charles, and I’m starving. I’m sure the people of Crabapple Cove will be willing to settle for passable.”

He found himself smiling again, and shook his head. There had been a time when he would have sold a kidney to be rid of that man, and yet here he was. Unpacking his belongings into a guest room smaller than the linen closet back home, and about to embark on a guided tour through the place that had spawned one Benjamin Franklin Pierce and unleashed his madcap antics upon the world.

What’s more, he was happy to be doing so.

Perhaps his sister had been wiser than she knew.

TBC

#caitallolovesyou #M*A*S*H fic #Set post-series just because I felt like it #This is not my usual fandom and is my first attempt at a M*A*S*H story.

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how2to18 · 5 years

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CRABAPPLE, PRICKLY GOOSEBERRY, bittersweet, and devil’s walking stick — are these the names of thorny old monsters in some dark children’s fairy tale? Nope. They are simply the flora that vine the paths of the forests and hollers of the Smoky Mountains. A brave five-year-old girl named Ernestine must journey through these persnickety snatchers in the early morning shadows in order to deliver mason jars full of fresh milk to the neighbors who live far away. It is 1942, and the husbands are away at war. The wives and mothers run the farms, raise the children, milk the cows. These country neighbors take care of one another in their time of need.

This is the framework for Kerry Madden-Lunsford’s Ernestine’s Milky Way, an achingly poignant tale of independence, resourcefulness, and good old-fashioned neighboring as seen through the eyes of a strong-willed little girl in the wartime South. The illustrations, by Emily Sutton, brush the pages like the powdered wings of butterflies. There are sturdy rock houses and old wooden fences, hand-sewn blankets and dusty banjos, everything surrounded by watercolor bursts of soft country colors — trees, leaves, grass, and plants. Flowers and vines are like their own characters. The facial expressions of the people make you ache for home. Any city-dwelling child is bound to look up at the parent, or teacher, or sibling, or babysitter reading them this story and ask, “Can we please go the woods tomorrow?”

I met Kerry Madden-Lunsford during my first MFA in Creative Writing Residency at Antioch University in Los Angeles. I was immediately drawn to her; she emanates a warm and welcoming vibe, with sparkling blue eyes and a wide, down-home smile. She dresses like a hippie teenager from the ’60s who has met her future self, an older, wiser earth-mother. Currently she directs the Creative Writing program at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, where she covers the desks and tables of her classrooms with books — dozens of picture books and chapter books, and middle-grade and YA, and, sprinkled in between, weathered copies of classics, like cherished relics from a magical library. Reminiscent of your favorite elementary school teacher, she actually writes out the lessons — infused with words of wisdom and anecdotes — in a comforting cursive on the board. She connects with everyone. She connects with their work. She was my first workshop leader, and her editorial letter about the 20 pages I had submitted told me everything I needed to know about her — namely, that she was a very old soul with a very young heart. You can sense this about her. You can feel it flowing from the pages of her books.

I recently visited Kerry at her home in the hills of Echo Park. We sat together over bagels and coffee with her husband Kiffen and their dazzling little dachshund, Olive, to talk about her latest release, the aforementioned Ernestine’s Milky Way, as well as her prior work.

She is the author of eight books, including the lauded Maggie Valley Trilogy set in the Smoky Mountains of Appalachia. The first in that series, Gentle’s Holler (2005), was a PEN USA finalist in Children’s Literature, and it’s easy to see why. The book shares some strands of Ernestine’s world as it explores the life of a 12-year-old girl and her adventures, with her eight brothers and sisters, in the Smoky Mountains in the early 1960s. It’s heartwarming and heartbreaking at once. Imagine a mash-up between A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Coal Miner’s Daughter, and you’re nearly there. Mountain country folk ridden with worries about money and bellies swollen from hunger are the characters that anchor Madden-Lunsford’s work. But the families in her stories rely on mutual affection and a resourcefulness that flows like pure mountain spring water to get them through the rough times.

Her December 2018 essay in the Los Angeles Times, “The Christmas Suit,” is a blistering meditation on family addiction — a deeply caring mother’s despairing attempt to stave off the crippling inertia of frustrated emotion. It’s a different side of Kerry, a flip of the coin. It reveals something tender and truthful about a majority of authors who write picture books, middle-grade, and YA: that they are seasoned individuals whose brave flights of fancy trying to survive adult life are the pearls of wisdom hidden in the sealed-shut shells of books that celebrate innocence, or the end of it.

TIM CUMMINGS: Where did you grow up?

KERRY MADDEN-LUNSFORD: That is a complicated question, though it shouldn’t be. The short answer is that I grew up the daughter of a college football coach, and we moved all the time. For years I said that I lived in 12 states, but my daughter, Norah, reminded me that it’s actually been 13 states. Alabama is lucky number 13. I used to remember all the states by mascots and teams rather than towns. My father’s first coaching job was for Father Lopez’s Green Wave (High School). He married my mother in between football and basketball season.

He was both the coach for both outfits, so he had the basketball season printed on the wedding napkins to build up team support. “Follow Janis and Joe on the Green Wave.” Always the coach, he informed the principal, Sister Annunciata, that the school dance should be held in the library, so the students wouldn’t mess up his gymnasium floor in fancy shoes. He only told me this story a few weeks ago or it would have been in Offsides, my first novel about growing up the daughter of a football coach. Sister Annunciata shut that suggestion down flat, and the dance was held in the gym. I asked him if he chaperoned, and he said, “Hell, no.”

Because some people are going to think that I am the daughter of John Madden, which I am most definitely not, I finally had to write an essay called “I Am Not John Madden’s Daughter.” My father has recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s dementia and he sometimes wakes up from naps, talking old football plays or what defense he ran at the Sugar Bowl in 1977 as the defensive coordinator. He did this while we were in Rome a year ago, and my mother said, “Snap out of it! You’re in Rome!”

How did you come to writing?

I’ve told this story once or twice, but I really do credit my fourth-grade teacher, who told me I was a good writer. It was the first time a teacher ever said any such thing. They usually said, “Aren’t you a nice tall girl who listens well?” They said this because I was shy. So it was a relief when a teacher noticed more than height or shyness. That day, I walked around my neighborhood of Ames, Iowa (Iowa State Cyclones), noticing everything, and wrote a story called “The Five Cents,” thinking it was about the “the five senses.” I never was a good speller. I remained a shy kid, and later some of the nuns began to suggest I might have a vocation to join the convent. I wrote about everything, but mostly I read — I read all the time and that absolutely formed me as a writer.

Who are your greatest influences?

My parents were great influences for humor and resilience, but I rebelled quietly because I was not a girly-girl or an athlete (unless field hockey in ninth grade counts, along with golfing on the boys’ team in high school), so I set out to find ways where I could create my own identity away from the gridiron.

I was definitely influenced (terrified) by Helen Keller and facing her fate when I had to get glasses in third grade. The doctor told my mother, “she’s blind without them,” to make a point. When I sobbed in my father’s arms about my horror of going blind (I think I also threw up in the bathroom), he shouted, “By God, nobody is going blind in this house!” I cried, “But how do you know?” “Because I said so!” It made no sense whatsoever, but I believed him.

I adored my babysitter, Ann Kramer, who was a wild tomboy in Ames, Iowa. I loved the coaches’ wives because they were such good storytellers. I was incredibly influenced by my first best friend, Pattie Murphy, in high school because she was so funny and irreverent, presenting a good girl persona to the powers-that-be and then whispering to me filthy things that were horrible and hilarious. We got caught cracking up laughing in the worst places — in class, at midnight Mass, on stage in Ten Little Indians. She was the first friend to make me laugh. We were miraculously “the new girls” at almost the same time in a school, Knox Catholic, where the kids had been together forever; even their parents and some grandparents had attended Knox Catholic.

I was very influenced by my Aunt Jeanne, who gave me books, and my Uncle Michael, who taught me about art. I lost them both to suicide when I was very young, and I wrote about them in Offsides as a way of atoning for not paying more attention. I wrote an essay about that this past summer.

I do think I was most influenced by getting to study abroad at Manchester University my junior year in college. A group of British drama students adopted me and showed me a whole world of art and theater, and I worshipped them for their hilarity and brilliance. I also had wonderful professors in England, who paid attention to me in ways I had never experienced during my first two years at the University of Tennessee. Plus, nobody in England cared if I went to church or watched football. They wanted me to write plays and “drop the grotty trade school occupation of journalism,” and I was very happy to oblige. I’m now writing a novel inspired by that time called Hop the Pond, which also has themes of addiction and features the Brontë sisters and their brother, Branwell.

When I returned to the University of Tennessee from Manchester, I often pretended to be a British exchange student (yes, I was insufferable because I couldn’t bear leaving England for Tennessee). I changed my major to theater, and I came to know my professors in Tennessee who taught us theater history, acting, directing. I was grateful for the encouragement and attention they gave me as a student (and a girl in the South) who wanted to write plays. The only contemporary playwright I knew of at that time was Beth Henley, and I hadn’t yet heard of Wendy Wasserstein.

Our theater department was still cranking out suggested scene study pairings of mostly Inge, Albee, and Williams, and maybe, once in a while, Lillian Hellman. I wanted to write plays, so I stayed in Knoxville after graduation and began an MFA in playwriting. I was the only student in the course at the time, but it gave me two years to learn to teach “Voice and Diction” and to write plays while working at a bookstore. Those two years in Knoxville influenced me because that is when I fell in love with Southern literature. I dropped the faux British accent, and my patient friends were grateful.

Finally, I think my greatest influence just happened this year. She is my cousin, Maureen Madden O’Sullivan — or, simply, Mo. We met for the very first time last May; her grandfather and my great-grandfather — Patrick and Joseph Madden — were brothers in Roscommon, Ireland. Mo and I have lived parallel lives in Los Angeles for 30 years, with many friends in common. She has been sober since 1982, and I have a family member who suffers from addiction, so she has taught me how to really let go — to breathe, to meditate, to eat better, to make gazpacho, to take walks by the sea. She also has stage-four cancer and is doing everything to live and take care of herself, from chemo to acupuncture to meditation to plant medicine to sound therapy to massage to simply taking joy in everything. She is the light of my life, and when I complain about us not meeting sooner, she says, “We met at the perfect time.” She is more evolved than I am.

I have gathered all the letters and texts we have written to each other since May in a compilation, and it’s currently 440 pages. It’s ridiculous, I know, and I don’t know what the project will be, but I am so grateful for Mo. I know I’m a mother, and I love being a mother, but around her I am not a mother. I’m just me again. A friend said I should call the book or whatever it’s going to be: 23 and Me and Mo.

Could you talk about your dual life as director of Creative Writing in Birmingham as well as a working author, teacher, and mother in Los Angeles?

I’ve been living this unplanned dual two-state life since 2009. I wrote an essay about making the decision to accept a tenure track teaching job in Birmingham, Alabama, and living on an air mattress for a while. I came alone the first year; the second year, my sixth-grade daughter, Norah, joined me and she was like a little cultural anthropologist. She came home from school the first day and said, “We played the name game and we had to say what we liked. And all the kids said they liked only Auburn or Alabama. I know they like their state and ‘auburn’ is a very pretty color, but what I am supposed to choose? When it was my turn, I said, ‘I’m Norah and I like books.’” I realized I had given the child no information about Alabama, so we had a crash course in football so she could catch up. Whenever I hinted at wanting to return to Los Angeles, she would say, “You can go be with Daddy. I like it here. I love it here. All my friends are here. Alabama is great!”

When I realized we were in it for the long haul, we got a rescue dog, Olive, who flies back and forth with me to Los Angeles. I had a terrible flight before we got Olive, awful soul-sucking turbulence, and Norah thought I was crying out “Hell Mary’s” instead of “Hail Mary’s.” After the trip, I vowed to drive or take the train, but it only took a four-day train ride from Los Angeles to Birmingham sitting up in coach class to get me back in the air. Then I got Olive. She has rescued me in countless ways every single day. And she truly is my emotional support animal on planes, along with the occasional emotional support Bloody Mary or glass of red wine.

I love my job as the director of Creative Writing at UAB. I love my students. I learn from them all the time. They come from all walks of life and many of them are first-generation college or they are returning to college later in life. I do miss living with my husband, who has four more years until he retires from LAUSD, but we get to spend summers and holidays together. We also cook and watch movies together. We do this by saying, “One-Two-Three — Go!” and then we hit play at the same time and mostly we’re in sync on Netflix. And because he is a wonderful man, he also goes to visit Mo, and we all have dinner and Skype together.

Our son is in Los Angeles, our middle daughter is in Chicago, and our youngest lives in the dorm at UAB. During the academic year, I live with Olive in what I call my “Alabama Retreat House.” Lots of sweet students and kind faculty drop by from time to time and other friends, too. Birmingham is such a cool city — a bright blue dot in a big red state. One of my L.A. friends visited, and she looked around the house and said, “You’ve created a little Echo Park in Birmingham.” I have filled the place with books and art from mostly “Studio by the Tracks,” where adults on the autism spectrum make art. Started by Ila Faye Miller in what used to be an old gas station, it’s a fantastic studio located in Fannie Flagg’s old neighborhood of Irondale.

I’m currently working on three novels — two are children’s books and one is for adults. I’ve adapted Offsides into a play, and I’m writing a little poetry and always picture books. I am thrilled that Ernestine’s Milky Way, written in this Alabama Retreat House and edited in a 1910 bungalow in Echo Park, has found a home at Schwartz & Wade.

What are your thoughts about the MFA Creative Writing programs these days?

I think they’re valuable because they allow students to find their people. I didn’t find my people in an MFA program, because I was the only student in my program at the time. However, I kind of made my own MFA with a writing group in Los Angeles — we met for 15 years, regularly. Those writers are still some of my dearest friends. I’ve also joined an online group of children’s picture book authors, who are brilliant, and a wonderful local group here of smart women writers. I find I need the feedback and connection with other writers — a kind of forest-for-the-trees thing with all the teaching I do. We also show up and support each other when our books come out.

That is the most valuable aspect to me of the MFA program — finding our people and getting to teach upon graduation. I feel incredibly fortunate to have taught in both a traditional BA and MA program here at UAB and a low-residency MFA program at Antioch University in Los Angeles.

What’s the most important thing you relay to your students?

I hope I encourage my students to trust themselves — to know that they do have a story to tell. I use play in the classroom (storyboarding and making book dummies) and I get them to take risks or chances with writing sparks, exploring narratives. I also talk about the importance of showing up for each other when success comes along. In other words, go to the reading, buy the book, go to the play — it’s such a long and lonely road to go alone, so I encourage them to cheer each other along the way and offer a hand. It’s so much better than being competitive and harboring jealousy.

Of course, it’s natural to feel envy, but I have been so fortunate to have friends who show up and are genuinely pleased, and I hope I do the same for them. I encourage my students to be good literary citizens and also to spend less time online. I offer the advice I need to listen to myself, especially when I fall into the online rabbit hole.

Can you tell us about your love of picture books and children’s literature?

I read to our three kids all the time. My son’s favorite book was Where the Wild Things Are. I even read that book last year to a group of incarcerated men at Donaldson Maximum Security Prison who had never been read aloud to before. I wrote an essay about that experience.

Anyway, I loved reading to our children when they were small, and my husband was a fantastic reader, too. I used to seek out books with great writing and stories. I hid the Berenstain Bears from the kids because I hated books where we had to learn a lesson. I never really thought of writing for kids because I was writing plays and novels for grown-ups. But I began falling in love with stories like Swamp Angel by Anne Isaacs, and anything by William Steig. The kids loved Chris Van Allsburg, as did I, and of course we loved Eric Carle, Margaret Wise Brown, Ruth Krauss, Roald Dahl, Ann Whitford Paul, Cynthia Voigt, Eve Bunting, Jacqueline Woodson, and Lane Smith’s The Happy Hocky Family. There are too many to begin to even name. One of their favorites was “What Luck A Duck” by Amy Goldman Koss, who later became a friend.

We read stacks of books, and as they grew older, they began to tell me what books to read. My son, Flannery, begged me to read The Giver and The Phantom Tollbooth. My daughter, Lucy, fell in love Laurie Halse Anderson’s book, Speak. She wasn’t a huge reader at the time, but she liked that book a lot and said after school one day, “Mom, I felt like reading it at the lunch-table with all my friends around. What it is up with that?”

I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn out loud to them and we watched the movie together. Norah used to have a little shelf of books in the minivan, because she was terrified of finishing one and not having another at hand. She used to ask me, “Can I bring three books?” and I would say, “You may bring them, but I am not carrying them.” When we moved to a different house a few years ago, we donated 20 boxes of books and it still has not made a dent in all the books we have.

Tim Cummings holds an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles. His recent work has appeared in F(r)iction, Lunch Ticket, Meow Meow Pow Pow, From Whispers to Roars, Critical Read, and LARB.

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movingstoriesla · 6 years

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12. Sam M.

Meet Sam, who lives in Pasadena with his wife and two kids, and works in downtown LA as a vice president at a major consulting firm. As someone who describes his mother and stepfather as “itinerant hippies,” his childhood took him all over the Midwest and the Northeast.

During that time, I got really comfortable being driven around in cars to random places and sometimes taking the train. I got really into the idea of just getting into a car and going somewhere. We would drive from Connecticut to Saint Louis to visit my grandparents for Christmas and my parents would just drive straight for two days.

I also got into the habit of flying. I have a four-and-a-half year-old right now, and I would never do this to my four-and-a-half year-old, but my parents put me on a plane by myself when I was four. When my mother and stepfather got married, they bought a one-way ticket to Europe and bought me a ticket for a plane to fly me to stay with my step-grandmother, who I never met, in Phoenix. At the time, this is the early 80s, you have to be five to fly alone, so they told me, “Just tell the stewardess that you're five.” As any good four-year-old, I think every third sentence out of my mouth was “I'm five! I'm five!” But they put me on a plane by myself, flew me to Phoenix. And then I have these odd memories of six or eight weeks that I spent just driving around the Southwest, with my chain-smoking grandmother-in-law inside this Cadillac with windows sealed up and driving through the desert.

After briefly living in Chicago, Saint Louis, and New York City (“I really got into the habit of riding the subway, walking to the Museum of Natural History”), Sam’s family moved to Connecticut.

When I was about 10 years old, I got a bicycle, and this is right around the same time as the movie Peewee's Big Adventure came out. I was all excited about riding a bike because of that movie.

And then by middle school, I started to learn how to take the bus. In the town I grew up in Connecticut, called Norwalk, there was a bus but it ran on one-hour headways. The Wheels Bus. I got really used to riding the Wheels Bus around. I could even take the Wheels to the transfer station and go to the big mall down in Stamford or I could ride my bike. I got into doing longer distance bike rides, like 14 miles as a young kid.

Where would you go for 14 miles?

The beach or the mall or some other friends' house. There were model train stores we'd go to. Probably at that time I was playing Dungeons and Dragons, so we'd go to the hobby store. Just walking, riding a bike, riding the bus.

How did you know where you were going on your bike?

It comes from this constant theme in my life, that you can go places. We were always going places to visit people. My biological father worked for the Chicago and Northwestern railroad company in Chicago. He was a Marine and served in Vietnam, and he's very good at mapping. At an early age, he taught me about maps and knowing where you are. I've always liked looking at maps and by the time I was 10 and got a bike, I also started really using maps. I kind of vaguely knew about these places we would go, and I'd use maps to find them. “Oh, by the beach, there's a place where you can get ice cream, play miniature golf, or a video arcade; I want to go there.” I started to find out where my friends lived, in terms of a physical address, and so I went to their houses. I think that's how it came to be, I knew how to read a map, I knew how to look at the map and identify the roads I wanted to ride my bike on. They weren't the busy roads, and I'd start riding my bike or taking the bus there.

And then how did you figure out the bus?

I can't remember exactly how, but they have the paper bus schedules and I learned where the bus hub was, which was at this place called the Norwalk Mall. Kind of a seedy place. You'd go to the Norwalk Mall and there was an office for the Wheels station that had all the different timetables and all the schedules. I remembered I just grabbed a bunch of stacks of schedules and figured it out. This was pre-Internet days, so you just had to get the paper schedules. Our town had a bus, and there was a more regional bus that connected towns up and down the Connecticut coastline. I learned how to take the regional bus. It was all paper time schedules. “Take the 11:52, I'll get there at 12:45, and then there's a 1:15.” None of it ever worked that way of course!

Do you remember how you thought about it? Like, “I'll just take the bus!”

I think my parents told me, “Go ahead, take the bus.” I was an only child. My parents put me on a plane by myself when I was four; I was fairly independent. My parents have always been pretty laissez-faire. The older I get, the more I realize I think they were kind of shocked at how independent I was, so I think they just let me run with it.

Sam got his driver's license when he was 16 years old (“that pretty much ended my use of any alternate transport for a while”) and went to college in Troy, New York (“if you're walking to the class and you saw the bus go by, you might as well just walk to your destination because it would take just as long to wait for the bus”). After college, he got a job in San Diego.

I pretty much drove my car around San Diego, lived very near my places of work. My commutes were like, 10 minutes. I was always cognizant of renting a place near where I worked. But I liked San Diego at the time because back in the early 2000s, you could get anywhere in about 20 minutes in the car.

After about two years in San Diego, I changed jobs and the new job was in downtown. I had started to drive to work but parking was really expensive. I would park further and further away to find these free parking spaces, but there were fewer and fewer of them. After about a month of doing that, everybody in my office said, “Hey, the company can pay for a trolley pass, you can take the trolley to work” and that's when I first started taking the trolley in San Diego. I'd drive down to the trolley stop near my apartment, park for free, and then take the trolley to work. And that's when I got into the habit of riding public transportation in California..

My girlfriend at the time, now my wife, used to take the train down from Long Beach. That was actually the first time I heard of people taking the Amtrak train in California. Now, if I have to go to my Orange County office, I just take the Amtrak train down and take a Lyft. I have done the bus connections down in Orange County. It's pretty rough. The Orange County buses are just not as frequent.

After San Diego, Sam moved to San Francisco with his then-girlfriend (now wife).

I ended up taking a job in San Francisco and moving up there. The two of us each had one car, and in San Francisco, having a car is really challenging. When we moved in together, we were like, “We can't have two cars. This is crazy,” so my wife sold her car. That's how we paid for the honeymoon, actually. Sold the car and funded the honeymoon.

Sam and his wife then moved to Los Angeles.

When we moved to LA in 2006, we kept the one car. I had been commuting down here for awhile, from San Francisco, so I got to actually test out a bunch of little areas where I thought we could live. Stayed in Long Beach one time, I stayed in downtown, I stayed in Koreatown. I actually stayed in the hotel that was the predecessor to the cool LINE hotel, it was just a Marriott. There was nothing around there. Now I kind of wished we lived there [laughs]

So I stayed in all these places and one day I stayed in Pasadena, and I was like, “This is really nice. There's places we can walk to, like in San Francisco. I can take the train to downtown, so I could probably live in Pasadena and not need to own a car.” So what's what we did: we moved down, we rented a little apartment near Lake and Colorado in Pasadena. My wife got a job in Monrovia, so she used the car to go to work and I took the train into downtown. At that time, there was carsharing in LA. It was Flexcar, before Zipcar bought them. I joined Flexcar. They actually kept some cars in the Fuller Seminary School lot, which was right near my apartment. So if we needed a big car for the weekends, like to go to IKEA and get a piece of furniture, we would get the carshare, go there for two hours, and come back and carshare is done.

I got a job with the City of Santa Monica and was living in Pasadena. My first thought after taking the new job was, “How am I going to get there? I've got to a buy a car.” Really, at the time, the most direct and time efficient way to get to Santa Monica was by car. So not only did I buy a car, I thought, “I'm going to be in this car a lot, it should be safe,” so I bought a big SUV. This is contrary to the belief of Santa Monica as a green and sustainable city, mind you, but that's what I did. For six years, I just drove a car, back and forth from Pasadena to Santa Monica. That was my commute and it was horribly depressing.

I would get up really early. I would get up at 4:30am, leave the house by 5am, get to Santa Monica at 5:25am. It was a very short commute in the morning. And then go run on the beach and shower and start working around 7:30am. Driving home, I'd try to leave between 3pm and however late I needed to stay, since sometimes I would do night meetings. And I would keep the journal of how long it took me to get home and my general feeling. Every day and every commute. Was I anxious, was I frustrated? I did this because some days it'd be like, “That was the worst ever” and then I'd flip through my journal and be like, “No, the worst ever was...” I remember this: it was a rainy Tuesday in 2011 when it took me three hours to get home. That was the worst. I did this, just to give myself a little sense of grounding because the commute just gets to you.

After the birth of his second child, Sam decided to take a job closer to home and got a job in downtown LA.

I had a daughter in 2013 and here I was, leaving the house at 5am, not getting home until 7 o'clock at night. Thinking that I'm never going to see my family! And we bought a house at that point. We still lived in Pasadena but we bought a house. Actually the house we bought was closer to the freeway than our apartment, so that saved about 15 minutes on my commute. But I said, “I can't do this commute anymore, it's just going to kill me,” so I ended up taking a job that was here in downtown LA. That was great because I can start commuting again by train or by bus.

And with this new job downtown, our house is actually further from the train station. Before we bought a home, our apartment was close to the Lake Avenue station on the Gold line. But my house now, I'm geographically closest to the Fillmore station. However, if I want to ride a bike to a station, I would ride to the Highland Park station because it's all downhill, so I hardly have to pedal. But more often than not, what I can also do is drive to the South Pasadena station, park on the street for free, take the train to work and back, and then I've got my car and can go to the grocery store on the way home or pick the kids up from school and daycare. Two kids now, so, I have to do all that kind of stuff too!

If I'm not going to drive and if I don't have to do any errands after work, I will often just take the 256 bus that runs down Avenue 64, right down the street from my house. That connects to the 81 bus at the corner of Figueroa and York, and I take the 81 bus straight into downtown and more frequently than not, that's how I get here, a regular local Metro bus.

How long is your commute with the buses?

It's about the same between buses or trains. If I drive and take the train, I've got to take the Gold line to the Red line. If I take the buses, I can sometimes take the 256 to Highland Park and take it down to the Highland Park Gold line station, or connect with the 81 bus, it all takes about the same time. All in all, I leave my house around 4:45am and I get into downtown about 5:30am. Takes about 45 minutes. But with this new job, I've joined a gym, so I get here at 5:30am, go to the gym, and I'm ready to work at 7:30am. I like it, because on the way home, I can get home by 5:30pm. So unlike working in Santa Monica, I've got a pretty predictable time that I can get home and spend the evening with my family.

I also teach at UCLA. I used to try to take transit there but that was grueling. My class starts at 8am, and office hours start at 7am. I would try to take the same bus at 5am, usually meaning I have to walk from my house to Figueroa, which is about a half-mile walk, and I get on the 81 bus, take that to the Gold line station at Highland Park. Gold line, Red line, Expo line. Get off Expo and Westwood, get on the Big Blue Bus Rapid 12, and take it up to UCLA. That would take about two hours in the end and it was okay because I could legitimize it: I'm sitting there on the train, working on my lectures for class. But now that I've done it for a few years, my lecture work is a lot more complete, I don't have to spend all that time. More frequently than not, I just take a Lyft from my house. I leave at 6am and get there about 7:15. It's funny to see these Lyft drivers use these navigation apps to try and beat traffic. I keep telling them, “Guys, it doesn't matter. It's going to take an hour and 15 minutes at this time.”

And is there always traffic at that time?

There always is and it's always going to the Westside. I did that commute for six years: the 110 to the 10. It's kind of painful, but it's going to be consistent and these drivers take me on all these crazy routes over Coldwater Canyon or Laurel Canyon. They take all these weird routes through residential neighborhoods. It's everything people hate about Waze, which is sending cars through these residential neighborhoods. There aren't normally cars on these streets, the streets are really narrow. All these lines of traffic, all these people looking at their map apps, figuring out where they are. It's really funny to me.

I do own a bike. Occasionally I'll ride my bike around Pasadena. I did it more before I had kids and now with two kids, mostly we've got to take them in a car, since we've got the car seats installed and all their snacks and juice boxes inside. I use my car mostly on the weekends, to go to Costco or to go to soccer or ice skating practice. I take the kids to the school and daycare sometimes. I do get really freaked out now though, when I drive longer distances with the kids in the car. I'm like, “This is so unsafe. If we got into a wreck now, all these cars are going 70 miles an hour.” I've become so accustomed to riding on public transit that I feel safer on a bus or train.

Do you ever take your kids on the train or on the bus?

Sometimes. I've taken my son on the bus, I've got a good picture of him on the bus. We've done the train a couple times, it's just logistically still a little bit challenging, because you need to bring the snacks and their favorite book and their stuffed animals. For 626 Golden Streets, we just walked down Mission Street in South Pasadena from our house. More often than not, I'll walk them in their strollers because most of the places we go to in Pasadena are about a mile from our house, and I can just load up the stroller and go. Sometimes I go running with them in the stroller. It's really good training because it's 100 pounds of kids that you're pushing up hills. If you run without them, my pace is about one minute per mile faster!

What do you like about getting around LA?

I love getting around LA outside of my car. My early experience of LA was just like, “what the blank.” It was just utterly confusing. I remember driving around, being in my early 20s, and some friend has a friend whose friend is a producer and having a party at some secret club or something. I just remember driving these roads and it never seemed like the same place, or even the same city. The only place I knew consistently was this karaoke bar in Koreatown that we'd go to a lot called the Brass Monkey. That's actually where I took my wife on our first date [laughs] That was the only place I knew, it was Koreatown and everything else was...I don't know.

I have a good friend I've known since middle school who lived in LA and he kind of knew LA. He lived in Studio City and I thought Studio City was right next to Hollywood. I didn't know the layout at all and when I came back in 2006, I still didn't know the layout; but after about a year of kind of living in Pasadena, I started to understand the layout and appreciate where all the different parts are. I think that's what I like the most about LA now: it's so diverse and spread out and I like getting around particularly sitting in the seat of a bus or a train because I can see all the cool stuff that's there.

One of my favorite experiences ever was the very first CicLAvia, when they closed downtown streets to cars for the first time. They closed 7th Street and I got there early. I rode my bike down 7th Street and I've never seen the architecture. I've never had any reason to go west of the 110 on 7th Street. But CicLAvia opened it up and it was like, “Wow, this is amazing,” all these cool little shops, and you get down by MacArthur Park and the architecture around there was really cool. Seeing there's people living here and it just really made me realize what a vibrant city it was.

I did this fellowship program a couple years ago where they send you to Europe and they send some Europeans here. So now about once a year, a bunch of Europeans arrive in LA, and every time they come, I try and organize a transit trip, where I get them on public transit. Most of them don't know that we have transit but I like to show them LA is a lot more than movie stars and beaches. It's a really vibrant, dynamic city. If you can try to get out of your car and get out of the protection of your vehicle and just live in the city, you'll really experience it.

What do you dislike the most?

My absolute least favorite thing about LA is whenever someone shows up late and says, “Oh gosh, sorry I'm late, there was traffic.” It's my least favorite thing. Like, no, traffic exists; it's a real thing every day. It's not like all of sudden today there was traffic congestion. And complaining about traffic, talking about traffic, concerns: it's a fact of life. It used to kind of drive me batty in Santa Monica, I'd go to these public meetings and residents would say, “You know, it took me an hour to get to Beverly Hills at 5 o'clock?” And I'd think, yeah, that sounds about right.

It's this notion that you should be able to get somewhere really fast. I guess having grown up in places like New York City, we never used our car in New York City. We had a car, it was broken into pretty much every week and things were stolen, and it was essentially a motor with a box around it. I mean, it was so bad in New York in the early 80s that we would have parts stolen from our car, like the battery. We used it to go and leave the city. That was the only reason we had the car, to go to the airport or the Aqueduct horse racing track.

I think living there and appreciating that in a city, you don't just drive everywhere. I think that's what I don't like about LA, this idea you should just be able to get in your car and drive to every place. Not that I dislike driving or people that use cars, it's just that it's not the way to get around and live in a city.

What could you see being improved about transportation in LA?

The big challenge here is that we've got so many different operators and systems, and Jane Q 6-pack or whoever on the street doesn't know that. A lot of people don't realize there's 88 cities in the region. They don't know when they're going from Monterey Park into the City of LA back into Vernon and then some other city. They don't know that some of these cities have their own transit agencies, while some of the cities transit systems are run by Metro. There's a lot work being done to unify the various public transportation systems, and it's still not there yet. I think that to me is a singular item to focus on, and that is unifying the transportation experience in the greater LA area.

When I was in Santa Monica, we were trying to make an app that would be that singular connection, in terms of allowing you to plan, pay for, and get real-time updates for any trip on any mode of transportation; and there's a lot of people now who are trying to make a similar app. The Transit app is getting close, it now has a ticketing component. But once you standardize the ticketing, the payment, and the branding of it all, I think that can unlock so much user potential, because then people can simply understand how to use all these different modes. Right now, people feel a little intimidated by public transportation. They don’t know when the bus will arrive, which bus to take, how long it will take, how much it will cost, and what time they will get back home if they take the bus. So they fall back on taking their own car. It’s easy to drive in LA, to some degree.

The flipside of that coin is that we really have to stop subsidizing free parking so much because people have this idea that they can drive from home to wherever they want to go at any time and park right in front, because in so many places, you just pull up and park in the lot right at your destination, and often it is free. What got me out of my car and onto transit in the first place was parking and the price of parking. I was in San Diego when I didn't want to park in downtown, and the same thing happened when I was in San Francisco; it was just too expensive to own two cars and store one that you were going to use once a week. I think here in the LA area, we don't do that enough because, back to that spread-out challenge, out in San Gabriel it doesn't make as much sense to have meters and priced parking. In my neighborhood in Pasadena, they don't really enforce the overnight parking restrictions because there's not a lot of multifamily housing and we're in this secret corner next to LA. But in other parts of Pasadena, they're really militant about the need to buy an overnight parking permit. When I lived by Lake Avenue, if I was parked a minute over the time limits for free parking, I'd get a ticket. So here in the LA area, because we’re so spread out and so diverse, many people have very different understandings and comfort levels around paying for parking. A lot of the work I do is around getting people to understand the true costs of driving alone in a car, and how pricing of parking and other aspects of transportation can influence their travel decisions.

There's a lot of moving parts, and I think once we start to get some kind of consistency on the transit systems and the different modes available, we can get some consistency over the land use regulations, parking, and then that's where all these new State Senate and Assembly bills about density come in. I think we'll start to see this consistency and coalescence around transportation and land use. And it's also going to work on the external side: the costs of driving a vehicle are going to go up, whether it's through congestion pricing or fuel pricing or something else.

From my perspective, I just try to show people how easy it is to use public transportation, and how a person that dresses like me, in a suit and tie, can ride the 81 bus down Figueroa at 5 o'clock in the morning and be totally fine, and then get back home to my family in time for dinner. So I just like to be an ambassador from that standpoint, to help promote what I think are the solutions to improve transportation in LA.

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