The champagne incident, where I ended up grounded for a month, happened right before the start of ninth grade. The truancy crisis happened midway through, while I was still fourteen. After nearly losing custody of me my mom knew she had to monitor me more closely, but it was hard to do working fourteen hour days. She sat me down and explained that now that I was sitting on the bubble of one more unexcused absence leading to foster care, I was going to have to take full responsibility for my decisions as much as possible. She would help me whenever I asked (I remember her helping me type a paper), but most importantly, I needed to be honest with her. “I understand that you are a teenage boy and you will do things you don’t want me to know about. But if you do get into trouble, it will be much worse for you if you lie to me about it than if you tell me the truth.” From that time forward I decided to just open up to her about a lot of things, and we became much closer. I probably wouldn’t have been able to go to music camp that summer if we hadn’t made such strides in developing trust and mutual respect. It turned out that having your mom as an ally and support made life much easier!

The music and theater programs at our high school were among the best in the state, but just down the road ten miles was a university town that rivaled or eclipsed us. We hated them, of course, and there was even a big football rivalry between the two high schools. But my mom worked at the university, and had friends and associates in that community. Perhaps even then she was thinking of relocating there. When I returned from my triumphant experience at music camp the summer musical at our high school was midway through rehearsals. Since it was summer school, it was more like a community theater production, with adult members of the community performing on stage and in the orchestra. The lady that had been functioning as the rehearsal pianist was a “fan,” and she invited me to take over for her, since she preferred to play the cello anyway. It was a breakthrough moment, as even though I had only been playing for three years my skills were approaching a professional level. It turned out to be a pretty creditable production of The Sound of Music, and I loved performing in the orchestra. My mom tried to do me a huge favor, but I didn’t see it that way. A doctor and his family who lived in the nearby university town had a bedroom available as one of their several children was leaving for college. I think they still had three teenagers at home, all of them heavily involved in music. She brought me over to visit them, and I got a chance to play their piano and see the bedroom where I could spend the rest of my high school years, if I chose. It was a great opportunity. They were attractive and kind people, and were offering to take me in for the sake of my talent. But it would mean betraying my high school and leaving behind my “Chompain Bunch.” I couldn’t do it! Still, I can’t help wondering how much better my life would have turned out if I had taken that fork.

During Spring Break of my sophomore year in high school (I was fifteen) my mom decided she would take a drive down to UC Santa Barbara to visit my eldest sister, Stephanie. She would have been twenty then. She was majoring in Religious Studies and Library Science. The Religious Studies department at Santa Barbara was one of the best in the world. It was secular and was more like “the history, literature, traditions, sociology, and psychology of world religions.” My sister was a lesbian and radical feminist. Decades later she joked that she was considered a “paleo-lesbian” by the younger crowd, steeped in feminist history, philosophy and literature. I found her fascinating. My mom invited me to go with her, six hours driving each way. I hadn’t learned to drive yet, so I couldn’t help in that way, but I kept her awake. We talked the whole time, there and back. It was really good for us. In Santa Barbara I was bewitched by the beauty and sunshine. We went to the beach, visited campus, spent time at the Mission and botanical gardens, and stayed with my sister and her [housemate, lover, friend?]. A highlight of the trip for me was getting to sit in a meeting of the gay/lesbian alliance. I knew I was bisexual, maybe even gay, but was hoping to get more of a sense of that world. The meeting was stimulating: they talked about issues of gay rights, politics, identity. But I was very disappointed with the gay men. The lesbians all seemed to be very deep and intellectual, with a full-flowering culture that was deeply grounded. The men just seemed to me to be shallow and hedonistic. Perhaps it’s not fair, it was just one meeting, but I remember feeling a little crestfallen. But nevertheless, that visit to UCSB planted the seeds that resulted in my decision to go there for college a few years later.

The relationship my mom and I forged during that time lasted throughout the rest of her life, not counting the last two years of my drinking, where I mostly avoided her. But once I got sober at twenty-three we established a pattern of talking on the phone every two or three weeks for two or three hours at a time. Eventually I got to a point where I was hesitant to make any major decision without discussing it with her first. My siblings sometimes resented how I seemed to have become her “favorite,” but I think it was really just that I was kind of “special needs” and had opened up to her in ways my siblings could not. I only have my experience to go by: I know they struggled with her hyper-critical tendencies. She and I would really go at it sometimes. I stood my ground many times, but she was always a font of wisdom and insight. And we laughed a lot! She was diagnosed with frontal-temporal dementia (FTD) in her late seventies. It was quite progressed by then, probably developing since her sixties. I will have more to say about that later, but for now I can only mention that as it gradually became apparent to me that she and I would not be able to have the deep conversations we were accustomed to much longer, an aching grief came over me that was like heartbreak in slow motion.

Me and my mom, with my little brother Drew and our family dog, Gizzard.