BAY BOY: FROM SAN FRANCISCO TO COOS BAY WATER

One or my favorite writers traveled across the country from California to New York.

He called the Hudson “the river of his birth” which got me going.

You can tell if you have a favorite author if they ‘get you going.’

I thought of the river of my birth, except it wasn’t a river.

It was a bay, which turn out to be a ‘Life Theme.’

I was born in San Francisco but it could have been in any military hospitals from Bremerton Navy to Letterman Army.

You get that when the old man is one of the few, the proud.

My dad was a legend to his guys.

And a good dad to his kids.

He and my mom got a taxi to the hospital. In those days the moms went it alone after checking in.

Buy the time he got back to base he had to turn around and go back to the hospital.

The big joke was I was almost born in the cab. If I had they would have named me Chevy.

Not sure why, but I have thoughts.

 

From Bay To Bay

After I learned more about the military from two years in the Army, I asked the old sergeant why he didn’t make the Marines a career.

“I’d been to Korea in 1950, and heard all about Vietnam in 1954. I was infantry with a wife and two kids. I’d been to sea on the Boxer. My next stop would have been Vietnam. I knew combat from the running ridges to city streets and had a feeling I’d die if I went to the Vietnam jungles.”

The wife and kids part made sense. So did the jungle part with these numbers:

 

Over 8.7 million Americans served in the Armed Forces during the Vietnam era from 1964 to 1973 (1).  More than 3.4 million were deployed to Southeast Asia (1) and approximately 2.7 million of those served in the Republic of Vietnam.

 

It made more sense after I became a husband and father of two kids myself.

 

He didn’t ship over after extending a year. Five years was enough Marine for the old Marine.

From there it was five years in college, an insurance job in a shirt and tie, and my second bay.

I grew up near Coos Bay in the town Coos Bay wanted to be: North Bend.

My first fish was a bullhead caught off the Charleston bridge.

I carried the clam bucket on the mudflats.

Then everyone left town. I still get yearnings when I go back, not so much for San Francisco.

But the bay boy life hung with me.

I married a woman named Bayes.

I’ll do the math: that’s three bays.

 

The Family Bay Boy

A question for the first time dads out there:

What did you do when your partner told you they were pregnant, if you didn’t find out together?

My wife likes to say I had her call the lab for confirmation while I listened in.

What really happened? I had her call the lab while I listened in.

Why? It wasn’t to get things started with mistrust.

We lived in Northwest Portland down the street from Good Sam.

“So we’ll go to Good Sam?”

“No, we’ll do a home birth.”

“Home birth it is.”

And it was. In her work she had delivered a small town’s worth of babies in their homes.

During labor my mom called and asked if I thought I ought to be in a hospital.

“Yes, mom, but if I left now my wife might get upset, and no one wants that.”

 

Since then we’ve all gone through things, life things, and keep up the momentum.

I’ve got wife-pride that’s only shadowed by the mother-pride I see in her.

Even better, I’ve got son-pride, daughter-pride, and baby-pride.

Time rolls, nothing stops that, but the people in our lives make us stop and look.

The view from here is hopeful. It has to be hopeful.

Hope for a better world, better leadership, a better environment.

But I couldn’t hope for a better family on their way forward.

For my small part it feels like a high tide for this bay boy.

 

Someone told me long ago
There’s a calm before the storm
I know, it’s been coming for some time
When it’s over, so they say
It’ll rain a sunny day
I know, shining down like water

Yesterday, and days before
Sun is cold and rain is hard
I know, been that way for all my time
‘Til forever, on it goes
Through the circle, fast and slow
I know, it can’t stop, I wonder

I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain?
I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain?
Coming down on a sunny day