Richie Havens, the Voice of God

People have used the phrase "the voice of God" in a lot of ways. To me, I hear Richie Havens' voice and I hope that's what God sounds like. That unique combination of authority and compassion is so hard to find. His voice just cuts right through to the soul.

I loved Richie Havens. I love Richie Havens. My dad had the soundtrack to the Woodstock movie, which is where I heard him for the first time. And I heard this.



Later, seeing this in the movie, made even more of an impression on me. He had his eyes closed nearly the entire time. He wasn't singing the song - he was channeling it.

That's what Havens did. He was a channeler. The voice that sang those songs was deep and heavy with emotion: sadness, empathy, heartache, elation, joy. He could add new meaning to unexpected songs. His versions of "Just Like a Woman" and "Here Comes the Sun" are legendary.

But have you heard this? The original is a classic, but he finds new depths of despair in this song.




I was very surprised a few years ago to hear Richie Havens' voice again in a movie. Remember Collateral? With Jamie Foxx and Tom Cruise (back when people still thought of him as an actor first)? This was on the soundtrack.



The lyrics are simple, but Havens does so much with what he's given. The song is impossible to imagine with anyone else's voice. Even the moans - could anyone moan with as much conviction as him?

God bless Richie Havens. I'm heartbroken to hear of his passing. He was one of the first connections musically that crossed my dad's generation and mine. And many years later, I had the opportunity to see him live at Seattle's Folklife Festival. I've seen big name legends. I've seen Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Solomon Burke. But seeing Richie Havens was like touching eternity. I could have sat in the grass and watched him all night, and I think he would have been content to strum his guitar and sing all night.

Inspector Gadget Saves the Day, Maybe

My kid is watching an Inspector Gadget movie that he found on Netflix. I want to save you the trouble, in case your small child is thinking about watching it.

If you're able to tolerate Inspector Gadget, it's fine. It's about the Inspector discovering some giant egg that hatches into a gigantic flying lizard who wreaks havoc all over Metro City. Wacky hijinks ensue, and everyone seems to have a different idea what to do with the lizard. The mayor wants to turn it into a tourist attraction. Dr. Klaw wants to use it to destroy the city. Inspector Gadget wants to make it his juggling partner.

There's some weirdness in the show. Penny is 16 and doesn't look much like her original version. (Her voice is identical, which frankly is just weird.) There's a GadgetMobile, inexplicably voiced by Bernie Mac. (My guess: 1) money, 2) he wanted to impress his kids.) There's a Scottish bad guy, for no apparent reason.

The whole premise of Inspector Gadget is that everyone is incompetent. Let's just lay that on the table. The inspector is the biggest buffoon, of course. Every time he solves something, it's by complete accident. But the bad guys are also incompetent, and come up with absurd schemes that never work. And never make sense. The mayor is an idiot, the chief is a doofus, pretty much everybody is an idiot except the dog.

Here, the movie ramps up the incompetence factor. Dr. Klaw (who has the best voice of the show) wants to control the lizard, so he has his henchmen try to feed it some kind of remote control electronic device blah blah whatever. The lizard won't eat it. What kind of super villain has plans that fail because an animal won't eat something?! Goon.

The Scottish assistant is also incompetent. Penny is helpless - she seems more of a damsel in distress than she ever did in the show, in fact. She does a lot of screaming and flailing and crying for help. She has a boy who seems to have a crush on her (again, was there ever a boy in the show? We didn't need this subplot.)  The boy's also an inventor, but he completely fails at inventing some kind of potion that ends up saving the day. So the world is saved because Inventor Boy screws up.

It's a fine waste of time, but just be prepared as an adult to yell at the screen a lot. It's computer generated, so it doesn't have the warm feel of the original cartoon. One other difference: it sadly doesn't have the voice of Don Adams, who passed away in 2005. The guy who does the Inspector's voice does a fine impersonation, but it's clearly not the original voice.

I always thought that the device of the show was that Penny and the dog were the real brains behind the Inspector. But here, nobody has the brains. They all seem so confused that it's amazing the entire city doesn't come crumbling down around their ears. It's a little disappointing on that front. Still, like I said, if you're stuck inside and your kid has to watch something, it's not the worst thing on Netflix.

What the hell?

Maybe there have always been stupid people in the world and it's just easier to hear about them because of the connected world. Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Instagram, everything makes it harder to hide your offensive stupid horrifying behavior.

But an honest question here. What the hell is happening in this country?

• In Florida, a police sergeant shows up at a shooting range with targets that resemble Trayvon Martin. You remember Martin - the 17-year old boy who was shot dead by his neighbor, who then tried to hide behind the "Stand Your Ground" laws in Florida? Now he's a shooting target. Nice.

• A judge in Montana emails around a "joke" that apparently suggested that President Obama's mother had engaged in bestiality. 

Let me say that again, just to be clear. He sent an email that suggested that the mother of the President of the United States had sex with a dog. Nice. Remember all those times when people said things like that about Barbara Bush? Yeah, me neither.

The judge has since retired. He wasn't terminated. He retired, which means that now the state will be paying a lifetime pension to a racist idiot.

• In New York, a teacher assigns her students to "think like a Nazi" and make a persuasive argument as to why "Jews are evil and the source of our problems."  The school has apologized. No word as to whether the teacher faces any punishment for this heinous behavior. 

• This comes after ANOTHER New York teacher was called out for story problems about beating slaves. The assignment was in 4th grade.   Nine and ten-year old kids were asked questions like "a slave was whipped five times a day. How many times was he whipped in a month?" No word if this teacher was fired, but the whole school is undergoing "sensitivity training." Ahem.

• And then, there was the Georgia teacher who took it one step further, asking questions about how many beatings Frederick Douglass received. Also, this lovely example: “Each tree had 56 oranges. If eight slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?”

In GEORGIA. Which has a history of, y'know, slavery. Again, no word if the teacher was fired, but the principal was apparently looking into "what staff development is needed for the teachers."
 
Can someone explain exactly what kind of human resources training is needed to remind people that beating people is wrong and treating human beings like property is also totally the fuck wrong?! Jesus almighty Christ on a cracker.

I don't even know what to say. If a teacher assigned my kid something like that, there would be hell to pay. I'll be damned if some tone-deaf idiot is going to be indoctrinating my kid with their stupid racist 19th century ideas.

And the rest of them? I don't even know. What I'm going to do is raise my son to be open-minded, and to not be afraid to question authority. We all lose when people behave like absolute pigs and no one speaks up.

You Are Being Watched

We were in a fast food place the other day. I was pouring a cup of diet Coke from the fountain. I didn't even think about it, because I had done it so many times. Place the cup under the ice dispenser, get ice, put the cup under the Diet Coke spigot, push the button, fill the cup up near the top. Wait for the bubbles to disperse. Fill it up again, and wait again, and then fill it to the top.

That's just how you do it.

And then I realized I was being watched by a pair of seven-year-old eyes.

It's a humbling thing, seeing your child watching you. I wish I had been doing something really cool, like recoding a website or dismantling a carburetor. Or cooking the perfect omelette. But instead, I was just pouring a cup of soda. And my kid was watching me to see how to do it.

It must happen all the time. All the things I do all day that I don't even think about, and he just studies me like a walking textbook. Pouring cereal. Tying my shoes. Making coffee. Shaving my face. So many things.

I remember doing it myself, of course. I have clear vivid memories of watching my dad as he did the simplest things, things he hadn't even realized were things, if you see my point. Things like parallel parking. Like throwing a football in an effortless spiral. Like ordering food in a restaurant. And I watched him, because that's how you learn how the world works. You watch your parents. And the way they do things is the way that it's done.

Is that a little scary, parents and parents-to-be? Good. Because you need to keep it in mind. You are being watched all the time. Whatever you're doing - good, bad, lazy, admirable - your children have their eyes on you. Make yourself someone worth watching.

Photo from flickr user @ANDYwithCAMERA. Used under Creative Commons license.

"I've Got You."

We were watching the ocean waves crashing, far out in the distance. My son and I were walking on the beach, looking at patterns in the sand, looking at shells. I was lazily watching him. He was happily running on the beach, filled with joy. 

It was a bitterly cold day on the beach. But it was the ocean, and when you have a chance to see the ocean, you see it. We had traveled out to the Washington coast, and after a lackluster day, we drove to a place where we could walk out on the sand and see the ocean in its full glory. 

The weather was turbulent. We had been hit with a couple of surprise rain squalls. There were white caps on the water, and the waves seemed particularly explosive. 

A group of kids was out closer to the edge of the surf, and I heard their parents getting excited because the tide was coming in closer. The tide crept in toward them, soaked their shoes, and they went running away giddily. The tide kept rolling in, slowly but determinedly.

"Son, we need to get back," I called. "The tide's coming in too fast. We don't want to get wet." 

And then the tide devoured the beach. It came up to our feet, and it kept coming. My shoes were suddenly waterlogged; then it was up to my ankles. Then my calves. Then my knees.

It kept coming in, like a bathtub that had filled up suddenly. Oliver began panicking and screaming. I grabbed his hand, and we ran as hard as we could toward the dry sand, while the water roared around our legs. 

The water was up to his waist. He was running in slow motion and screaming at the top of his lungs. He was about as scared as I've ever seen him. I just held tight to his hand and I kept shouting back, "I've got you! I've got you!"

"It's trying to pull me in!" he screamed.

"It won't. I've got you, son. I've got you." We ran and ran. 

Finally, the enraged wave receded, and we were able to reach dry land. His mother, shocked, raced up to greet us. Oliver was still screaming, shivering from the bitter cold water that had drenched him. We ran back to the car where my brilliant wife had stashed an extra set of clothes for him. (I had no such luck. I didn't expect to need an extra pair of clothes. I had to drive back to town and buy a pair of emergency sweats.) 

~     ~     ~

They call them sneaker waves. We didn't see it coming; you never see them coming. The tide was actually going out, or so we thought. That's why we were so complacent. We thought we were safe.

Sneaker waves are dangerous things. They are impossible to predict and they take people completely by surprise. They pull people out to sea. It happens. I don't like to think about it now, but it does happen. Sometimes, they pick up floating logs or huge rocks, and then you have a dangerous wave with a weapon. Imagine, seeing a 1000-pound rock floating in toward you, being carried by an out-of-control wave.

I had seen the signs. The signs on the ocean beaches don't mess around; they use phrases like "you can die" and "you will be swept out to sea." But I didn't think about them. I thought those warnings were for people stupid enough to go wading out in the water. I didn't think we were in danger on the sand, so far away from the edge of the water.

I can't even describe how fast that wave came in at us. It moved with the speed of a monster tentacle in a horror movie; you think you're safe and suddenly PHWIP! it's wrapped around your waist. We went from dry and safe to overwhelmed and terrified in a matter of seconds. 

If it had kept coming, I don't know what would have happened. I would have picked him up and run if I had to. I would have thrown him to shore if I had to. It hit with the speed and the shock of a car crash, and here I am, a day later, sitting in a warm office, still shivering at the memory of the wave that tried to pull me and my son into the Pacific Ocean. 

The Rules Haven't Changed

(Note: I'm going to start working more to keep this blog more active. I have lots of readers out there, apparently. Thousands of you have found this post about double-swaddling, and I'm grateful to each of you for reading it and sharing it. I keep being amazed that people still read this blog, and especially that you still read posts I wrote years ago.

I used to blog a lot more when my kid was smaller. Now that he's older, I have to remind myself I'm still a blogger dad. I'm putting it that way because "daddy blogger" just seems like an insult. 'Oh, you're a daddy blogger, how cute!' No, I'm a dad. Who happens to have a blog. My job is being a dad.) 

When Oliver was little, it seemed like I would blog daily about what was going on with him. When he was a baby, it was easy. First of all, I was home with him for the first year of his life as a stay-at-home dad, so I had lots of time to sit and contemplate his existence. He didn't do much, but it was amazing watching him. He would roll over, he would look at me, he would reach his little doll-like hand out to me, and I would sit and think about how miraculous it all was, and then I'd write a blog post about it.

I'm working now, and he's going to school. So we don't spend nearly as much time around each other.

I'm fortunate, though. My wife and I have a staggered schedule, so she goes to work early and I get the morning shift with him. He wakes up three hours before he goes to school, so we have plenty of time to be with each other. He plays with Legos, he reads, he watches old shows like Godzilla and the Power Rangers and the Fantastic Four cartoons, and we eat breakfast and we talk about stuff. About school. About the kids in his class. About stuff.

And then we drive to school at a breakneck pace, trying desperately to make it before the second bell rang. Usually, we miss it but I just walk him to class anyway.

When he was a baby, I had to feed him bottles of Mrs. B's milk. It was very hard at first, and for the first couple of times, he fought and thrashed and wouldn't let me feed him. It was upsetting for me, and obviously, he wasn't digging it either. So I looked around a couple of other blogger dads, and I figured out that the more anxious I was at feeding time, the more anxious he was going to be. So I started forcing myself to be calm during feeding time. "You're all right, little man. It's just me, and it's just your lunch. No big deal." The more I relaxed, the better it went. Success breeds success, so the better the feedings went, the better I felt about them.

The same is still true. Especially now that we know he has Asperger's, I have to pay more attention to how he's feeling at different parts of the day and how I might be contributing to that, consciously or not. Our mornings have been problematic for a while, and I realized what the problem was. We have three hours - THREE HOURS - to get ready for the school day. And yet, I'd been waiting until the last five minutes of the day to ask him to do some basic things - going to the bathroom, putting on his socks and shoes. And my son is not a person who likes to be rushed. So he'd dawdle, and he'd get distracted, and inevitably it would take him twenty minutes for him to do something that I could do in 30 seconds. And we'd be late.

What's wrong with that equation? What's wrong is that I'm thinking about how I would do it. I would move faster. I would look at the clock. I would realize how late it was. Well, my son is not me. He does things at his own pace. And I just need to accept that. Instead of trying to force him to be me, I need to accept who he is.

And for me, that meant changing our schedule. Now, I give him a full twenty minutes to do those final last-minute steps before we walk out the door. And it works! We make it to school sooner. There's also less yelling, less hectoring, and less resistance from him. I just give him enough time to do his thing. If he gets distracted, I still nudge him back on track. But it's not an emergency anymore. I'm respecting who he is. And I have to remember that my anxiety level feeds directly into his. When the last conversation before school includes a lot of yelling and badgering, it can't be good for his psyche. I like it this way.

So the rules when he was a baby are the same as they are now. When I'm stressed, he's stressed. When I calm down and relax, things go better. He's still the same kid he always was. And I'm still the same dad, who sometimes forgets that.

Weirder than Life Itself

We were watching some goofy story on CBS Sunday Morning about an underwater sculpture park.

My son took one look at it and declared, "that's weirder than life itself."

We don't need to go to church. My son is in touch with the mysteries of life. He gets it.