Column 7 – Something else was born before the day our baby came into my life

Originally published by reminagine.me
Photography: Hank Cherry

ON NEW YEAR’S EVE three years ago, I asked my wife to marry me. Right around midnight, as she recalls, I said something romantic, like, “I don’t have much money and I’m old; will you marry me?”

Thankfully, she said yes. Getting engaged was a milestone along the rocky road from where I was not long before we met—reeling from the simultaneous loss of a marriage, house and job—to where I am now, a first-time father at the unlikely age of 50.

But I don’t want anybody to get the wrong idea. Even though I often felt truly down and out during the darker days of those years, there were always reasons to get up off the mat—stories to write, waves to surf, friends to enjoy, adventures to be had. In fact, if there’s an upside to the kind upheaval I was going through in my mid-40s it was that I had some money from selling my house and I had time on my hands from having no job. I could do what I wanted to do, and who was going to tell me not to?

I coached a kid’s soccer team. I played baseball. I shot pool with Sean Penn and reported on the largest Army airlift of endangered desert tortoises in history. And, at the height of life’s craziness, I started a weird band with five women (including a drummer, flautist and two singers) and two guys. Our music never made it out of the rehearsal space, but some interesting songs happened within it, not the least of which was a little ditty called “Psychosomatic Baby.”

At times, life was so trippy it felt like I was having an extended out-of-body experience. Which was cool and all, but where was it going? After all, at 45, I wasn’t really going to become the rock star of my teenage dreams. More to the point, I had this nagging sense that I was in danger of missing out on some things I thought I could be pretty good at—like being a husband and a father.

It would be convenient and romantic to say that the moment I met my wife was the moment the fog lifted and I suddenly knew who I was and what I was meant to be doing. But, really, if I hadn’t started to turn things around first, we wouldn’t be talking about my wife.

See, women actually don’t ask that much of men: mostly, they want us to know where we’re going and who we want to go there with—in that order. It helps to commit to both with a little passion.

So, where was I going?

While mucking about in the psychic wilderness of my new, unfettered circumstances, I had my share of adventures, experiences and misdeeds, too, but I’d become a dilettante, poking my head into whatever flights of fancy caught my eye. It didn’t take too long to realize I needed to commit to something that actually meant something to me or I’d end up doing something truly regretful, like artisanal coffee roasting, or even road cycling.

There was this one thing I’d dreamed of since moving to Los Angeles in the early 90s, and that was starting my own publication. I wanted it to be smart and sexy like the city itself, and I wanted its stories to breathe with substance and depth. I wanted it to be fun while taking the civic responsibility of storytelling seriously.

This idea had become even more urgent, in my mind, in the Internet-driven era of junk-food journalism and click-bait infotainment. The only problem was that nobody wanted to invest in a printed publication celebrating long-form journalism, essays, short stories, poetry, art and photography. Today, it seems almost hilarious that I even tried to sell that idea. But, I liked it and I didn’t have a better one.

There was one taker, though, and she was my former boss at the LA Weekly, a wonderful editor with a passion for great storytelling who had connections to top-notch writers who shared our values. Now, I had a destination and a fellow traveler, but still didn’t have anyone backing the plan.

When I returned from that trip to Costa Rica I told you about a couple columns back, I decided I was done waiting for permission, in the form of investors, to move ahead. I took that money from selling the house and invested it in my dream. Who was going to tell me not to?

Slake: Los Angeles debuted in the summer of 2010, occupying shelf space with the likes of The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta and other cosmopolitan journals—and it looked good doing so. Our issues became bestsellers and our stories won prestigious awards while our events attracted thousands of people who wanted to commune over ideas, art and literature.

The search for an iconic image for the cover of the third issue, “War and Peace,” brought me to my wife, Ingrid. Or brought me back, I should say.

Ingrid and I had been aware of each other for a few years before we finally met. I remember first seeing her at friend’s birthday party not long after my divorce and thinking, “Who is that!?” Apparently, I thought it out loud because my friend told me to stay away as she was spoken for, which wasn’t surprising.

Her relationship ended about a year after that encounter and she invited me to an art show that featured some of her paintings. I couldn’t make it, but I looked up her work—classic oil-on-canvas paintings that evoked the old masters—and was impressed. To me, it was a refreshing contrast to the sometimes silly “outsider” art trending at the time.

We later ran into each other at a restaurant and exchanged emails, but for a variety of reasons that could fuel a ditzy romantic comedy, we kept missing the opportunity to connect.

Good thing, too, because I wasn’t ready. But with Slake, I finally knew where I was headed and I was going there with gusto.

But I still needed that perfect image for “War and Peace.”

Then, I remembered a painting of Ingrid’s—old boxing gloves hanging on a wall. The image was both understated and exceptionally charismatic. It was just what we needed, and it was also an excuse to get in touch.

Turns out we had moved within a couple of block of each other. Our first date was at the coffee shop we could both throw stones at from our front doors.

When I asked her to marry me a year later, Slake had just about run its brief and semi-glorious course, having nearly wiped me out financially. But, it did its job, because she said yes and my life has never been richer.

Next—when a family starts as an idea.