The other path

For some reason I was thinking about fonts last night. In high school I loved those IBM Selectric typewriters that had the interchangeable type balls. And when I got my first Mac back in 1985, I designed my own font (a laborious process, I'll tell you that much).

But before last night it had never occurred to me why I might be so fascinated by fonts. The answer, I think, is that when I was a kid--maybe eight or nine years old--our family friend Jack tried to teach me calligraphy. While I wasn't very good, an appreciation for beautiful characters stuck. I still remember Jack saying something about how the white space between and around the pen strokes was as important as the strokes themselves.

But the impact Jack had on my life goes far beyond an interest in fine lettering. And so last night I realized again that I'm guilty of doing one of those things that I do: namely, telling many people over the years about the difference someone has made in my life while somehow neglecting to tell that person himself.

MY PARENTS WERE HIPPIES which has always given me plenty of colorful tales to tell as an adult. As a kid, though, I hated it. I didn't want to be different. (A kind fifth grade teacher once silenced one of my classmates who had shared in class about my hippie parents by saying, "If hippies have children like Michael, more hippies should be parents.")

But by the time I was in my twenties, I was nostalgic for those happy times in the 70s. Five years ago I went to a Sting and Annie Lennox concert in Portland. Most of the people in the audience were roughly my age, but by and large they were straight and coupled. I began to wonder about my own life and what path it might have taken had I never come out but had instead married a woman. It wasn't a pretty picture. And thinking about that, I realized that having hippie parents who were willing to go their own way and do their own thing had given me the courage to do so myself.

I shared those thoughts with my mother who said, in relief, "I'm so glad to hear that... I'd always worried that I'd ruined your life by being a hippie."

To which I replied, "Actually, I think that is what saved it."

WHICH BRINGS ME BACK TO JACK. Yes, my parents were hippies. But we lived in Burrton, a town of 800 in Kansas. We were a long way from the West Coast. Jack went to Reed College in Portland and brought the West Coast home to us. There are countless things that differentiated my family from others in our town; I credit Jack for many of them. I can't remember what other people talked about, but Jack's stories were about Buddhism, calligraphy, home-brewed beer, poetry, and small bands from the coast. I don't know if it's true or not, but I've always believed that Jack was the reason my mom cooked Chinese food and gave us yogurt with breakfast.

Jack was my Auntie Mame in a sense: for a little kid in Kansas in the 70s, his stories were larger-than-life. It was as if he'd come back from the Far East with tales of how different life was there. His experiences were far richer than anyone else's I knew. Whether he was talking about something I cared about or not, he had a bigger view of the world than just about anyone who came to our house. And he expanded my own horizon.

We sometimes teased Jack... kids have a knack for pouncing on anyone who stands out. But he helped teach me to appreciate what was unique about me. And that, as the poet once said, has made all the difference.