No answers

Sometimes you ask “Why” and there are no answers. Sometimes you say it with a question mark, or an exclamation point, or both, and still the answers don’t come.

Sometimes there is just no answer.

Four days ago, a 29-year-old woman who apparently had everything committed suicide. I didn’t know her well, hadn’t seen her since she graduated from high school, only mentioned her occasionally in conversation. Her parents, for different reasons, had a great impact on our lives and, ultimately, on the places where we are today.

Why does this affect me so? Why has it had such an impact on Jill?

Because this was not supposed to happen. It was the last thing anyone would have — could have — anticipated. No one would have thought, or could have imagined, why someone with so much would end everything.

No one ever can.

••••••

I grew up in a small town, or at least I thought it was small. Compared to Houston, 35 miles to the north, Texas City was — and is — a small town.

And with around 40,000 residents, it is 2½ times larger than Reidsville, N.C.

From 1993 to 2001, I lived in Reidsville, moving there as the managing editor of a small newspaper and leaving there to be the managing editor of a national education magazine. I’ve said often that leaving the Houston area to move to a small community where tobacco and textiles were the prime industry felt like going from fifth to first without hitting the clutch.

And yet, during those eight-plus years, my life changed in ways I can’t imagine. Looking back now, it’s hard to believe I didn’t leave with a permanent case of whiplash.

To sum up, while living in Reidsville, I:

• Turned 30.

• Got a divorce, rediscovered my love for theater, remarried, changed careers, bought a house, and had Kate, all within an 18-month period.

• Discovered shortly after Kate was born that we were having twins.

• Found a series of surrogate families — and my children at least one additional grandma — that we’ve stayed in touch with over the years.

When we left to move to Northern Virginia, it was time. The many things that Reidsville offered, the hooks and lures that held us there, had their allure. We could have stayed.

Something told us — both of us — that we needed to move on. And I’m glad we did, for our sakes, and for the sake of our children.

But there is something about living in a small town, or growing up in a small town, that never leaves you. It’s an extended family you can’t leave behind.

••••••

I just don’t get it.

I don’t think anyone else does either.

Separating the intellectual from the emotional is difficult most, if not all the time.

Retrospect helps you point to signs, like putting the pieces of a puzzle together. But, ultimately, it doesn’t answer the central question: Why?

Jill and I had not seen Lindsay in years. We heard about the different things in her life from friends and acquaintances with whom we still maintain contact, but like all too many people we encounter, she was another person from a place we lived in a decade ago that we assumed was going to be OK.

Her parents are extraordinarily kind people, who’ve done nothing but help us — and others — over the years. Our lives intersected with theirs at various moments; the memories we share of each other are good ones, lasting ones, or at least I’d like to think so.

But as happens all too often in this life, people you care about drift away. You don’t mean for that to happen, but life intervenes and it does.

And then something like this happens, and abruptly, without warning, you are slung back into memories of a time you had left behind.

•••••••

First and foremost, I’m a chronicler. I would like to be someone who can develop scenarios and turn them into classic fiction, but my writing at heart comes from everyday life. Why create something out of nothing when there is so much around you to chronicle?

That said, although I love biographies, I’m not a person who typically follows others’ blogs, just as I don’t expect you and others to follow mine. I hope what I have to say is something that is of interest to others — at the very least my children — but if not I can say without question that writing has provided me with an outlet that otherwise I would not have.

Earlier this week, I happened to find Lindsay’s blog (http://applebloggingjeans.tumblr.com) and could not stop reading it. It’s a fascinating chronicle of a young, caring, witty, and extremely intelligent woman facing life in her 20s. Naturally, I found myself looking for clues, hoping something would answer my central question, knowing that nothing would.

Somewhere in my reading, I happened on this paragraph that I can’t seem to shake:

“I am, at my core, a person who fights everyday with who I am at my core— both an open book, ready and willing to share all that I am with the world, and a person who deals with many of my own demons, triumphs, blessings INTERNALLY and without desire to share those things even with those closest to me.  I have been, for as long as I can remember, a walking contradiction.”

••••••

We encourage our children to be open about their struggles. We try to be open about ours.

Of course, bookstores are chock full of memoirs from people whose families did an incessant data dump on the author, who suffered so much in the process that they managed to get an autobiography and an Oprah/VH1 episode out of it.

That’s not what we’re trying to do, in our dealings with our kids or even in this chronicle I’m putting out there for them — and you. What we want them to know is that they can come to us — no matter what.

I think they do know that. And I pray, every moment of every day, that they feel like they have someone to share their thoughts with.

No matter what.

A PSA for Parenting

Dear Children of Mine:

I am blessed to have four wonderful kids, all with individual talents and strengths. But, as your parent, I also feel compelled to remind you of one single, simple fact: You don’t know everything.

Sorry about that. I realize it comes as a shock.

Before you get, well, um, “unhappy” with me about this statement, I hope you will understand that it comes from experience. Every person goes through a phase in which their parents know absolutely nothing. Zip-eh-dee-doo-dah.

I hope that by your junior or senior year of high school that you will think differently, and that you’ll follow in my footsteps by apologizing to your parents for the phase in your life that featured monosyllabic grunts, shrugs, and that all-too-familiar eye roll.

Just in case you’re wondering, I’ve developed a little translation manual that I use on a semi-regular basis to break through the communications barrier. It goes something like this:

Part I: “I don’t know” is the tween/teen equivalent of, “I refuse to incriminate myself under rights granted by the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.”

Part II: “I forgot” is code for “I ignored you.”

Part III: “Whatever” is code for “I’m not ignoring you. I’m just not listening to what you have to say.”

Part IV: “I’m sorry” is code — especially when directed at a sibling — for “Not really, but I had to say something to get Mom/Dad off my case.”

So, you see, we actually do know something. And we love you in spite of it.

Truly, we do…

Sincerely, Your Dad

A Belated Gift

Our life together is so precious together.
We have grown. We have grown.
Although our love is still special,
Let's take a chance and fly away somewhere alone...

My father and John Lennon were born 12 days apart. They had a mutual love for Elvis and married early, as adults from that generation did. Tragedy helped shape their lives — Lennon’s in his childhood, my father’s after he became an adult.

This year, both would have turned 70 -- Lennon this past weekend and my dad on October 20. Neither made it.

The similarities stop there. We all know Lennon’s story, which is endlessly retold and reshaped every few months or years. My father’s story is more mundane, but no less important, at least to me and to other members of my family.

This past weekend, en route on another traffic-infested trip from Northern Virginia to New York with my girls, I stuck in the “new” CD, “Double Fantasy — Stripped Down.”

Lennon’s first album in five years, “Double Fantasy” was a long-awaited rebirth for the former Beatle, who emerged from a self-imposed period of domesticity that followed the breakup of one of the best — if not the singular — rock bands of all time. In between, he suffered through an attempted (and finally thwarted) deportation by the Nixon Administration, dealt with fans’ lingering (and, for many, ongoing) anger toward Yoko Ono, separated from her, dove into the wilderness of drugs and drink, and finally emerged, a mature man. And within two months after hitting 40, he was dead.

While I liked “Double Fantasy,” I wasn’t thrilled by it, in part because I didn’t understand the place Lennon was at then. (And, to be honest, I was never much of a Yoko fan.)

“Stripped Down” intrigued me, however, and as the boredom of the New Jersey Turnpike wafted past, I found myself listening in a new way to Lennon’s valedictory effort. I flashed back to the night we all found out, watching a Monday Night Football game between the Miami Dolphins and the New York Jets when Howard Cosell broke the news. For a moment I was 15 again, a place no one in their right mind should want to revisit.

My dad was not much of a Lennon fan; he preferred McCartney. He didn’t understand or appreciate Lennon’s politics, which were out there for someone living on the Texas Gulf Coast. In fact, if you came right down to it, he was happy to ditch the Beatles for Elvis any day of the week. Our entire family was affected far more by Elvis’ death than by Lennon’s.

Still, on the Tuesday after we found out, I came home after school and rummaged through my dad’s records, where I found the first three Beatles albums. He skipped the psychedelic stuff but returned for “Abbey Road” — “Come Together” played over and over in our house — and he loved “Imagine” (except for the no God part).

It's been too long since we took the time.
No one's to blame.
I know time flies so quickly.

I thought about going to Central Park and visiting Strawberry Fields on the birthday anniversary, although I knew it would be filled with people playing guitars, singing, weeping, and flailing their way through the Beatles/Lennon catalogue. That I couldn’t take, especially when there were more important things to tend to: my children.

So, I spent the weekend with my girls and Ben, running them to various things that mean something to their lives (Ben to an audition, Emma to the Cake Boss bakery in Hoboken, and Kate to every kiosk and trinket she saw). I never made the turn right to go to Central Park.

Driving back to Virginia last night, I put the CD in again briefly and listened, thinking of my dad and the weekend. As the songs played — even Yoko sounds a little better in the “Stripped Down” incarnation — I regretted briefly not making the walk on the beautiful fall day. Then I looked at my daughters — Emma napping on the passenger’s side, Kate sitting in the back looking at the laptop — and realized I had been where I needed to be all along.

Nobody told me there’d be days like these.
Nobody told me there’d be days like these.
Strange days, indeed.

STOP!!!

This sort of crap has to stop.

For the past week, I have been immersed in discussions and debates about how to improve public education. So immersed, in fact, that I didn’t take the time to watch and read the stories surrounding the recent deaths of five teens that were subjected to anti-gay bullying.

Today, I finally saw the heart wrenching video posted by Ellen DeGeneres and read the stories about the deaths of Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi and four others who took their own lives over the past month. With each story I read, my jaw dropped further and my heart bled a little more.

Why is this happening? Are our heads buried so deeply in our own navels that we can’t look around and see the damage that bullying causes? When are we going to wake up and accept the fact that tolerance is something we need to instill in our children? Or that our so-called morals should not be a mask for intolerance toward others?

For some reason, adolescence and the onset of puberty only seem to heighten the cruelty gene. Trash talk becomes a form of bonding for kids who want to be edgy and cool but aren’t mature enough to have an actual conversation about the confusion they live through every day. And the environment is ripe for bullies who find power in the vulnerability of others, whether its sexuality, ethnicity, disability, or religion.

As a kid, I was bullied and harassed over my appearance, my nerdiness, my inability to connect to my peers. Why?

Because I was — God forbid — “different.” I loved theater and movies as much as football — just like my dad did. I did not go cruising, to the roller rink, or get to make out with girls in cars on the Texas City levee. I did not get invited to parties; to this day, even though people think I’m an extrovert, in a crowd I still look for the one-on-one conversation. People perceived me as arrogant, but being a smart ass was a mask for my fears. I could not beat you with my fists, but I could with my words.

Looking back, the smartest thing my parents ever said to me was, “We don’t want you to grow up with our prejudices.” They recognized that they grew up in another era and a different time, and they were smart enough to encourage me, with their guidance, to develop my own set of values and sense of judgment. Even though we disagreed on politics, they taught me that respecting others’ views is just as important as having my own.

Several years ago, I spoke on a panel in Columbia, South Carolina, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. (The first of five cases that were combined into the Brown ruling occurred in Summerton, a small town about two hours away.) During the Q&A session, a woman asked me why I thought bigotry still exists in our schools.

My answer was simple: “First graders aren’t bigots. They’re parrots.”

Somehow, I managed to not succumb to the pressures and taunting I still remember, and today, I’m the proud parent of four very “different” children. But I didn’t grow up in a world where bullies lurked behind video cameras and computer screens, hiding behind a new and very dangerous layer of invincibility.

I begrudgingly became part of “The Social Network” when my children started showing an interest in it. Now, I love Facebook and the opportunities it provides to connect to far-flung friends and acquaintances, but a primary reason I’m on it is to monitor their pages and accounts vigilantly.

My kids are in four schools in three states, but fortunately, I think they’re in the places that suit their personalities. We are trying to raise them as individuals, without the prejudices we have.

That’s why, tonight, I let Kate go to a church lock-in wearing a borrowed Halloween costume. She called it her “Lady Gaga Taco.” Yes, I cringed and wondered about the social repercussions she would face, but then I realized it was her expressing her personality. I admire her bravery.

Before we left, she showed me a piece of art she is working on as part of her community service project. On a canvas marked with x’s and o’s, she had written: “Live with Love in Your Heart. And Mend a Broken One.”

My heart breaks for the families of the boys who committed suicide, feeling there was no other way out of the lives they led. The anger I feel toward their perpetrators is at a boil.

This bigotry and hatred has got to stop — now. We must start mending broken hearts.