I finished watching Battlestar Gallactica Season 2.5 and it made me think about my father

Never Done: I finished watching Battlestar Gallactica Season 2.5

Humility is about seeking wisdom from others, right? Especially when we have some resistance to the wisdom? So ... how many times did my friends have to tell me to watch Battlestar Gallactica before I did? Ten? Twenty? Fifty? And why didn't I believe them earlier? Because I don't think of myself as liking SciFi. But they told me I'd like BSG. But I didn't think I would. I know this might not seem like the most world-changing issue to ever come down the pike, but if I think about it in terms of being open to new experiences, and about being a person who says yes to other people -- two qualities which I really love in others, and which I think are particularly important for parents of teenagers -- then it's actually pretty significant.

Plus, I have a HUGE daddy complex on Admiral Adama, and I just can't stop watching him. He *is* my dad. He's tough and compassionate and humble and powerful and seasoned and rational and willing to admit when he's made a mistake. Just like my dad. I recently had a reader request (I had a reader request!) for more info on my dad. Such a huge subject, one's parent ... where to start? I guess the big thing in my family is that in addition to my father having all the above qualities, he also, it turned out, had the ability to keep a secret. A big secret. From everyone he loved. Including his wife and two daughters.

He was an optical engineer, and he designed cameras. When I was a kid, I thought he designed eyeglass lenses, and then I thought he designed camera lenses for consumer cameras. I really didn't grasp what he was doing at all, but I thought it was in the way that kids don't grasp what their parents do if they have confusing (to a kid) middle class jobs. But it turns out it wasn't that at all. It turns out that nobody understood what he was doing, and for good reason; it was top secret.

Part of the problem with writing about his top secret life is that I still have some child-like confusions about it, which make me feel a little embarrassed. Also, I am getting on a plane for Germany in a few hours, and I haven't packed, and it's the night before my mom's yortsayt, and I didn't do my taxes yet, and I am generally distracted. So let's take this in the spirit that it's OK to say a little, and if it remains impressionistic and mysterious ... well, that's what it feels like to me most of the time. My dad took film footage of the Able and Baker bomb tests in the Bikini Islands. His work there connected him with some people in photo reconnaissance, and he ended up working at Boston University Physical Research Lab, where he was part of a team building cameras that could spy on the Soviet Union. It was the Space Race, and the Soviets had gotten Sputnik up into orbit. Eventually BUPRL was bought out by Itek Corporation, and my dad and his colleagues got a CIA contract to design and build the first aerial reconnaissance satellite camera. So over the next I don't know how many years, he was flying to Palo Alto and Cape Canaveral and Washington DC and wherever else people fly when they are doing high-level top-secret military industrial complex work, but we didn't know about any of it. He was meeting with Rockefellers and Presidents and heads of CIA and NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) and NASA, and I pretty much pictured him making eyeglass lenses in Lexington, MA.

I mean, I was little. He would come home and build me stilts to walk on, and he would plant corn and grow grapes and we would make wine and tap maple trees and sugar off and build furniture in his wood shop and then he'd go away and then he'd come back and sometimes he'd be upset and sometimes he'd be distracted and usually he was pretty stable and powerful and rational and compassionate and humble and tough, just like Admiral Adama, but he was my dad.

I don't know how he kept it all together -- living a secret work life and full family life. We didn't find out until it was declassified. (Al Gore declassified the work in 1995 so that he could use the photographic imagery to study deforestation in the Black Forest.) And when I say "we" I mean, all of us, including my mother. My parents were incredibly close, and they always told us there were no secrets between them, so imagine what a mind-fuck it was for my mother to learn that there had been a huge secret between them for thirty five years. Imagine the effects of thirty five years of secrecy on the family. Imagine my father's relief when the wall finally came down. (His blood pressure came down to normal, without medication; his anger and depression eased.) And imagine why, when ten years after he died, after I never got enough information about his real life, I encountered BSG, I might be fixated on watching the strong, complex, cutthroat yet compassionate military leader at work. And by the way, it's the same reason I am obsessed with Mad Men -- because I get to watch Don Draper, a strong, conflicted, brilliant, complex, cutthroat man with a secret, at work.

So it might not seem like the most world-changing event to come down the pike, but it means something to me. And now I'm going to start watching Season 3.

Family Dinner

Never Done: Ate at Enzo's Brick Oven Pizza

It's three blocks away. I walk past it every time I return my car to its home in Karen and Todd's driveway, and every time I go to the post office, and every time I go do basically anything in Windsor Terrace, which is also three blocks away. And yet after living here for 4 months, I had not gone in. And then I did. And it was good.

I ordered a Puttanesca pizza to take home for me and Josh -- olives, capers, garlic, spinach, mozzarella. Anchovies optional. I opted against. (Call me picky, but I am not fond of hairy food.) And as I sat there waiting for it to come out, I noticed what a family place it is -- a single mom with a huge glass of sangria, her kids getting up to go look at the beautiful eel in the fish tank; the waiters completely relaxed with the gay family with the baby; big plates of pasta and other homey Italian food .... It reminded me of the one restaurant near where I grew up. It's no longer there (but there are others now) and I don't remember it's name, but it was an Italian place in either Bolton or Clinton, MA, and I used to order cheese ravioli.

Mostly, growing up, we ate dinner at home. My mom was a great cook, and my dad liked to cook when he was around (although his dishes were complex and took forever and thus weren't well geared towards hungry kids.) My sister and I both learned to cook when we were quite young, and were responsible for making our own school lunches when we were still in elementary school. (My mom didn't like mornings.) But as I was saying, usually we ate dinner at home. We went to restaurants if there was an occasion, like if we were in Boston for something else. I never really thought about it at the time, but my dad must have eaten his lunch every day at restaurants, and I would be surprised if they didn't include a martini or two. In some ways it was very Mad Men, even though it was far from New York. But he was still a New Yorker at heart and soul, and his work brought him into worlds I could never have imagined, even if I had known what he was really doing. The more I think about it, the more I know there was a martini or two at lunch. No wonder he wasn't hungry when he got home, and wanted to do other stuff before dinner. And no wonder my mom wanted to feed us kids early - and move on with the evening and progress into the night. But they compromised, and found some magic hour that seems to have been tolerable for everyone.

I don't really have family dinner in my life now. Josh and I sometimes eat together, and we sometimes don't. We sometimes have other people over, and we sometimes go out. There's very little ritual or stability around dinner time, and I don't think I miss that. But sitting in Enzo's waiting for the pizza, I realized I will want to create a stable dinner culture for a child who comes into my life. I won't want it to be inflexible, but I'd like there to be some there there. Something usual from which we can depart when we want to. In other words: family dinner. Sometimes taking these smaller Never Done opportunities bring me the largest shifts of consciousness.

Readier and readier

Never Done: Hosted a Living Room Adoption Film Festival

When I started Google searching films about adoption, the same ones kept popping up on the list: Secrets and Lies, My Own Private Idaho, Mommie Dearest. I adore the first two, and I've only ever seen clips from the third, but none of them was exactly what I was hoping to see at the festival. I wanted to see films that would scare me straight out of wanting to adopt a messed-up "older" child. I chose three.

Mother and Child: written and directed by the extremely talented Rodrigo Garcia, with an amazing cast (Annette Bening, Naomi Watts, Kerry Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Jimmy Smits, Shareeka Epps, and Cherry Jones as a Catholic nun in an adoption agency) playing characters whose lives intersect, all around themes of parenthood and adoption.

Lost and Delirious: Canadian lesbian boarding school adoption genre piece, complete with pillow fights, spiked punch, Shakespeare quotes, fencing, falcon training, the wise Native American man, closeted lesbian teachers, and tragic lesbian suicide. One of the main characters was adopted, and struggles so much against abandonment that it ends up pushing her over the edge. I watched it thinking, "OK, so what if she was my kid? What would I want for her? What would I do for her?" Also, I was completely distracted throughout this entire film because the girl she is in love with is played by Jessica Paré -- who plays Megan Calvet, Don Draper's secretary turned fiancée on Mad Men.

Second Best: William Hurt plays a lonely village postal worker (in England) who fosters and then adopts a troubled 10-year-old boy who reveres his messed-up outlaw incarcerated birth father. This film was the most realistic, I believe, in terms of the process one goes through in order to foster then adopt. Starting with a home visit, and then weekend visits, and then fostering, and then adopting -- all while unilaterally deciding to parent this child through his outbursts, regression, and self-harm.

I loved watching these films in community, with Josh, Heath, Abigail, Alex, and Beatrice. They all (the films, not the friends) made me cry, and they all made me realize that I am growing readier and readier through this process of adoption preparation. Which is to say that when one of my friends said she was afraid that James (the boy in Second Best) was a ticking time bomb, I realized that I was not afraid that he was; I knew he was. I knew he was going to tick and go off many times before his adolescence was over, and that it was just what William Hurt was going to expect, and stay steady for. And by extension, it is just what I will need to expect and stay steady for.