What it's like to be a perfectionist

What does it mean to be a perfectionist?

It means second-guessing yourself. Continually.

It means procrastinating for fear that you’ll “get it wrong” and (worse) that someone might see you get it wrong. It means criticisms are evidence you’ve already gotten it wrong and that someone has seen it. It means that, because of this, you hate people looking over your shoulder or viewing your work until you’re sure it’s “done” or “ready.” Sometimes, it never is.

Perfectionism makes you snap at people when they interrupt you during a task, because you need to focus to ensure you don’t make a mistake. One that people might see; one that will give them an excuse to ridicule you.

It means being an introvert because you don’t trust others. But you don’t trust yourself, either.

It means thinking before you speak. And thinking. And thinking. Until your thoughts tie themselves up in knots that wrap themselves around your tongue.

It hinders decision-making and can leave you paralyzed.

It means expecting the worst because, at least that way, you won’t be disappointed.

It’s believing you’ll never be able to live up to your parents’ or peers’ or employer’s or partner’s perceived expectations of you, and it means adopting those expectations as your own.

It’s a reaction to believing you’re unlovable. Inherently so. But you can’t control that, so the only remedy is to control what you can by earning people’s respect and substituting it for the love you’ve convinced yourself is unattainable.

Yes, it’s controlling. It’s a desperate attempt to control a world that seems chaotic, hostile and overwhelming, but mostly it’s an attempt to control the one thing you think you can (or should be able to) control: yourself. Because of this, it controls you, and you hate that.

It means seeing everything as your fault because, at least that way, you can control it by “doing better the next time.”

It means you seek approval. But you shun it when it’s offered for things you don’t think you deserve ... and sulk when you don’t receive it after working very hard on something you’re very proud to have accomplished.

It means having a very, very hard time with the reality that life isn’t fair, because it feels like fairness is the only thing standing between you and despair.

It means taking breakups hard and layoffs even harder. At least you can rationalize breakups because they’re based on love, not respect. Love is unpredictable. Respect isn’t supposed to be. If you do a good job, you’re supposed to be rewarded. When it doesn’t work out that way, you feel cast adrift, deprived of the life raft you’ve been clinging to: your hard work and ability.

When you lose a job, you blame yourself for taking that job in the first place, because (of course) you should have known better.

It means Woudla, Coulda, Shoulda and What If are couch surfing on your medial temporal lobe. Regret and foreboding team up in an unending tag-team match against your reason and your serenity.

You feel the need to look in the rear-view mirror, peer under the hood and keep your eyes on the road, all at the same time. You have to be on top of everything. Otherwise, the unthinkable will happen. You’ll fail. And people will see it. And they’ll never let you live it down.

It means sleepless nights lost to anxiety and fitful sleep haunted by nightmares.

It means high blood pressure and low self-esteem.

It means you’re constantly asking yourself, “What have you done for me lately?”

It means playing the diplomat and getting slammed from both sides.

It means avoiding conflict and trying to please everyone.

It means thinking you’re never good enough.

It means loving spellcheck for saving your ass and hating it for making you look the fool.

It means always having to say you’re sorry: repeatedly apologizing for things that are your fault, and for things that aren’t.

Failure is the enemy. When you fail, you beat yourself up for it publicly in the hope that self-castigation will keep your critics at bay. But it doesn’t. They revile and ridicule you anyway, so you get beaten up twice over.

It’s being governed by worry and a continual readiness to shift into fight-or-flight mode ... if you don’t live there already. It’s a gateway to defensiveness, cynicism and, if you’re not careful, superstition and paranoia. But because you are careful — to a fault — you’re less likely to get there. At least that’s something.

It means you seldom stop to smell the roses, and you miss out on a lot of life’s beauty. That’s a mistake, too, and you beat yourself up over that. Another regret.

That’s what it means to be a perfectionist. At least part of it. Of course, this list isn't perfect ...

Age brings more reminders of what we've lost

It’s a well-known phenomenon. You hear that song on the radio, and it takes you back to your senior prom, your first concert, summer camp or some other event relegated to memory. It activates that memory and makes it new again. You know you can never go back there again, but in that moment, you remember what it was like to be there.

You smile a little smile, and maybe you get choked up a little, too. It’s the essence of “bittersweet.”

Because music is such a potent reminder of the past, it hurts to realize it’s going to stay there. That’s what happened a couple of years ago, when a large number of famed musicians from my childhood all left us: David Bowie, Glen Frey of the Eagles, Prince, George Michael, Leonard Cohen, Merle Haggard, Keith Emerson and Greg Lake of ELP, Leon Russell.

It wasn’t just the year the music died, it was a year a part of us died, because with their deaths, we knew they’d never be making new music again. We’d never get another chance to see them in concert. Even if their bands had broken up, there had always been a chance they’d get back together, at least for a reunion show. No more. I remember thinking about that when John Lennon died. There would never be a Beatles reunion. Maybe there wouldn’t have been one, anyway, but there had always been that hope.

Hope is about the future; memories are about the past. They work best in tandem, and when we lose one part of that equation, we’re a little worse off for it.

We didn’t just lose musicians in 2016. My childhood sitcoms were decimated by the deaths of Florence Henderson (The Brady Bunch), William Christopher (M*A*S*H), Abe Vigoda and Ron Glass (Barney Miller), Alan Thicke (Growing Pains) and Garry Marshall (creator of Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley and Mork & Mindy).

They live on in reruns, but in some ways, that’s just as hard, because whenever you see them, there’s a chance you’ll be reminded that they’re no longer with us.

This happens to me a lot, with music, TV shows, landmarks, mementos, old photographs.

I see movies starring Alan Rickman or Robin Williams, and I can’t help but be reminded how much I valued their talents … and now, they’re no longer here.

TAKEN FOR GRANTED

You take things for granted when you’re young, at least I did. When I first became aware of things, I assumed they’d always been that way and that they always would be. I think the first time I realized they wouldn’t was when I moved back to my hometown, Fresno, at age 15, after six years away. The radio station formats had changed. The big discount department store called White Front, where everyone had shopped, was gone. The Lesterburger fast food chain, which had been ubiquitous in the 1960s, had gone out of business, too. It all seemed surreal, impossible even.

Three more years passed, and there was a new freeway and a new football stadium. Both were big improvements, but I still remember sitting on the splintery wooden seats at the old stadium and watching Fresno State’s football team rout Los Angeles State (back when it had a football team). The splinters aren’t a pleasant memory, but the game itself is, and they’re tied together in my soon-to-be-55-year-old mind.

Going south on a trip to San Diego last weekend on U.S. 101, I passed through the area where I lived for six years as a child and young teenager: Woodland Hills. I was reminded of riding in my parents’ Buick LeSabre down that same Ventura Freeway to see the Dodgers play every summer in the 1970s. People mention Bill Buckner’s error on his gimpy leg for the Red Sox in the 1986 series, and it triggers memories of when he was my next-door neighbor in Southern California, making circus catches in the outfield for the Dodgers before that leg slowed him down.

When I went back to Fresno as an adult a year or two ago, I went back to eat at the first Me-N-Ed’s pizza parlor on Blackstone, where my folks introduced me to my favorite pizza (cheese and black olives) when I was 5 or 6. Yes, it’s still there, and that’s comforting. But it also reminds me that my parents aren’t, and that will never stop hurting.

When I see high school football games, I remember when I used to cover them as a reporter for the Tulare Advance-Register. When I drive by my old office, I remember when I used to work there.

"BACK IN MY DAY"

Then there’s the music.

Whenever I hear the Eagles’ Best of My Love, I remember sitting by the radio in my room, listening to the week’s top 40 countdown and wondering what would be No. 1 that week.

When I hear Have You Never Been Mellow? by Olivia Newton John, I think of riding to summer school at A.E. Wright Middle School, the ride so much longer than it needed to be because of all the stops they made in the canyons and foothills west of the San Fernando Valley. And me, sitting there, my legs cramped and hurting because, even at that age, I was far too tall to fit comfortably in bus seats designed for third-graders.

Maybe it’s because I’ve done so much historical writing that these memories hit me so often, but I think it’s the other way around: The feeling that the past is somehow slipping away has prompted me to keep some portion of it alive, if only in recorded memory. I suspect it happens to a lot of people like this, even if they don’t write any of it down, and that’s why our elders reminisce so often about the way things used to be “back in my day.”

My dad did that, and now I’m doing it, too.

It’s bittersweet to remember the things that are gone, but the alternative, forgetting them, is far worse.

This is what it's like to be laid off in America

This is what it’s like to be laid off in America. Whether you’ve been working at an auto plant or a steel mill, at a department store or a white-collar job.

It means telling your family you no longer have a job, and feeling like you’ve let them down by failing at the one thing that you’re best at. The one thing they were counting on you to do.

It means trying to act “professional” even though you’re suddenly without a profession.

It means no longer living from paycheck to paycheck, because now you’re living from no check to no check.

If unemployment is low, you see yourself as part of the bottom 5 percent. If it's high, you feel like just another statistic.

It means asking others for help even as you update your resume to read that you’re a “self-starter.”

It means knowing you might not have the money to pay the rent, but that you might not have the money to move, either.

It means being pissed as hell that you’re losing your health insurance. That you might have to accept a job that doesn’t include that benefit. And that the government still hasn’t figured out how to be compassionate to its citizens when it comes to their health.

If it even wants to.

This is what it’s like to be laid off in America …

It means starting from scratch in the middle of life. It means putting plans for vacations and celebrations on hold. Indefinitely.

It means changing your personal information on Facebook from “works at” to “worked at,” and signing up for LinkedIn again, which you’ve let lapse because you’ve never had much use for it and thought you never would.

It means listening to people tell you how sure they are you’ll find something else, something better, and agreeing with a smile because it’s socially acceptable, even though deep down inside, you have no idea whether it’s true or not.

When strangers ask you what you do for a living, it’s too embarrassing to tell them you’re unemployed, so you cushion the blow by saying you’re “between jobs,” even though you know they’ll get the message, anyway. Which is something you didn’t want to share. But, again, it’s the socially acceptable thing to do.

And if you’ve got impostor syndrome, if you feel like you’ve been faking it all along, you take this as confirmation. But knowing you were right doesn’t help because you’d been hoping you were wrong.

Yet now you have to put your best foot forward and sell yourself again, even though you’ve been made to feel as worthless as you have in a very long time. You know it’s not your fault, but that doesn’t stop the emptiness that somehow manages to tie itself in knots down in the pit of your stomach.

It means feeling taken advantage of, betrayed and used. You find yourself saying the words “irrelevant” and “expendable” in your head, and applying them to yourself.

This is what it’s like to be laid off in America …

It means putting on a brave face for co-workers at your going-away party, even though you know you might never see them again and, yes, you’ll miss them. They say nice things about you that make you choke up, and they give you heartfelt gifts. This makes you feel like you’re a Viking at your own funeral, receiving treasures to preserve you in the afterlife, and you tell yourself you were slain in battle and that being a Viking is pretty damned cool.

You tell yourself that there are far worse things in life, like incurable cancer or losing a spouse — that it would be far worse to wake up each morning without the love of your life beside you, or knowing that you only had a short time left to live. But knowing these things doesn’t help; it just makes you feel guilty for feeling bad about your own situation when others have it worse, and that guilt is like toxic frosting on top of the pain you’re already feeling.

It’s being told that it’s nothing personal. That it’s a business decision. And you want to tell them that people are more important than their bottom line, but you know it won’t make any difference, so you keep your mouth shut and act professional. Like you understand. Like you’re comforting them. But they’re the ones who don’t understand.

When they say that, it’s like when your significant other breaks up with you and says, “It’s not you. It’s me.” And you want to say to the bearer of this bad news, “If it’s your fault, then why aren’t you handing in your resignation?

You wish it had been a performance issue, because then they would have just written you up and you would’ve had a chance to improve. Then you would have had some control over the situation.

Not like this.

You wonder if you were let go because you were making too much money. If you did your job too well and they could no longer afford someone with your skills. Was this your Catch-22? If you do well, you’ll get a raise, but at the end of the day, that will be the cause of your termination?

You feel like collateral damage, marginalized into the minefield of someone else’s bottom line.

It’s hating that your former employer did this to you, but wishing the best for the people who still work there. Your former comrades in arms. Your friends. It’s trying to reconcile those two feelings in the back of a mind beset by new worries and fresh disappointment.

But mostly, you just feel empty and rudderless, hurt and alone. And disempowered.

This is what it’s like to be laid off in America.

Mother's Day orphans: When your mom's no longer here

Mother's Day is not my favorite holiday. Father's Day isn't, either. I remember being young and asking, "Why don't they have a Kids Day?"

"Because every day is 'Kids Day,'" I was told.

Yes, kids sometimes have it easy. I know I did. I have no complaints about how I was raised, and I couldn't be more grateful to my mom and dad for their patience, generosity and the hard work they did to raise a sometimes difficult boy. Especially when that boy was enduring the crucible that was (and, from what I hear, still is) middle school. It's not hyperbole to wonder whether I would have survived those years without Mom and Dad.

Which brings me to why, at least in part, Mother's Day and Father's Day aren't my favorite times of year - now, far more than when I was a kid.

First, I'll invite you to look at where the apostrophe is in those names. It's before the "s," which makes it singular, and that's how I always took it. Mother's Day was a day for me to appreciate my mother, and for you to appreciate yours. Here's the rub: I haven't had a mother for 22  years now (and, as of last August, I don't have a father anymore, either).

It's fine to say that all mothers deserve to be appreciated, and I couldn't agree more. They should be appreciated every day of every year they're on this planet.

My mom isn't on this planet anymore. Yes, I still appreciate her. But no, I can't give her a schmaltzy Hallmark greeting card to tell her oh-so-imperfectly how much - and at the moment, I wouldn't want to. I'd just want to give her a hug (even though she was chronically off-balance from the polio that left her half paralyzed as a child), and tell her I loved her so she could hear me.

Please don't tell me she can hear me from heaven or "the other side of the veil," because even believing that wouldn't make it the same. It doesn't for me, and I doubt it does for anyone else, either.

It will never be the same again.

It's not just the winter holidays

I've heard people talk about having a blue Christmas, sometimes invoking the all-too-clinical-sounding term "seasonal affective disorder." They don't enjoy the winter holidays because they bring back memories of times spent with loved ones who are no longer there. Mother's Day does the same thing to me, and if anything, it's worse, because there was only one of her, and this day is supposed to be about that one person.

For years, I've tried to shrug it off and not get too wrapped up in sorrow over it, because my mom's death remains the single most traumatic event of my life. When my father passed away last year, he'd been unconscious in a hospital bed for 10 days, and as hard as it when he died, I'd had time to prepare myself.

When my mother died, it was sudden. I was working one evening when I got a call in the back paste-up shop at the newspaper where I was working (back when they still had such things). I heard my dad sobbing on the other end. He never cried. But when he told me Mom had gone to lie down for a nap and hadn't woken up again, it just didn't compute with me. She had been ill, but not that ill. I hadn't seen her since Christmas, which had been more than two weeks earlier, and now, I never would again.

So, Mother's Day isn't a cause for celebration to me. As much as I appreciate everything mothers all over the world go through for their kids, none of them is my mom. I know the same thing will happen at Father's Day this year, and it will might even hit me harder because this will be my first year without Dad, and the day often fell right on his birthday.

None of this is to say you need to tiptoe around me Sunday. I won't take offense at others who, unlike me, have a Mom who's still here to celebrate. Just excuse me if I feel a little left out. I might not even show it on the outside, but it's there, and I wanted you to know because I doubt I'm the only person who has this kind of reaction. And as important as it is to celebrate your mom (please do!), it's important that you know there are other feelings associated with days like these. 

I still miss my mom. Even if there were 365 days to honor mothers, she'd still be the only one I'll ever have.

In memory of David H. Provost, father, mentor and friend

I stood in the imaginary batter’s box at one end of the back yard in Woodland Hills, waiting for the pitch. There were imaginary baserunners, too. And imaginary fielders. Just beyond the “outfield fence,” in the next house over, lived a real live baseball player, Bill Buckner, then at the beginning of his career with the L.A. Dodgers.

But on this field, in our back yard, it was just me, my dad, and a Whiffle ball. He’d come home after work – a day working as the dean of new program development in the Cal State University Chancellor’s Office bracketed by an hour or more in rush hour traffic each way. And he’d play Whiffle ball with his only son in that back yard.

Sometimes, he’d be too tired, and looking back, I can’t really blame him. A man in his forties in a high-pressure job doesn’t always have enough energy to get out of the car, walk through the house and out back to engage in a game of Whiffle ball – or ping pong, a game he taught me how to play. He even built a basketball court, complete with a permanent, regulation 10-foot hoop and a square concrete slab on which to bounce that ball until your hands were caked with dust the consistency of chalk.

I never played competitive basketball, or baseball or, for that matter, ping pong, but my dad gave me the opportunity to try all of them on for size – this 6-foot-8 giant of a man whose own foray into competitive sports consisted, to my knowledge, of some recreational basketball in Australia in the early 1950s, where he did his postgraduate studies. He was so much taller than the rest of the people on the court that he was able to score almost at will in one game and wound up with more points than everyone else combined.

Wilt Chamberlain, eat your heart out.

Fan

But mostly, Dad enjoyed sports from the stands – or in front of the TV. In fact, his love of sports went back long before the age of television: He vividly remembered listening to the 1939 Rose Bowl as an 8-year-old boy and how thrilled he’d been to hear USC score the winning touchdown with a minute left to beat Duke 7-3. It was the only touchdown the Blue Devils had allowed all season, and Dad was a USC fan the rest of his life.

How big a fan? In 1974, we were watching the Trojans play archrival Notre Dame on TV, and Dad was so upset he stormed out of the house when the Irish took a 24-0 lead. I don’t know where he went, but shortly after he left, the Trojans scored a touchdown to make it 24-6; then star running back Anthony Davis returned the second-half kickoff for another score.

“Dad, you’re missing this!” I remember saying aloud, pacing back and forth in front of the TV (just as he would do), waiting for him to come home as USC scored another touchdown, then another, then yet another. By the time he got back, the Trojans had scored 35 points in the third quarter and led 41-24 on their way to a 55-24 victory. Dad had missed the best part of one of the greatest comebacks in sports history.

Dad took my mom and me to half a dozen Dodger games each year, and one of them was the last game of the 1977 season. That one was special because we got to see Dusty Baker hit his 30th home run of the year, the first time four players from the same team (Ron Cey, Steve Garvey and Reggie Smith being the others) all hit 30 or more home runs in a season. And I got to see it, thanks to my dad.

We also saw Fresno State’s football team beat Bowling Green twice in the California Bowl. And we got to see the men’s basketball team dismantle fifth-ranked UNLV 68-43 in perhaps the greatest basketball game ever played at Selland Arena in downtown Fresno.

Mom, as a rule, didn’t enjoy sports too much; she’d go off and do her own thing while Dad and I were watching football in the family room. But when we moved back to Fresno in 1978 and the basketball team became a regional powerhouse, she caught the bug and began rooting for Boyd Grant’s Bulldogs as hard as either one of us.

All three of us were part of the famous "Red Wave" of Fresno State fans who packed Selland Arena (aka Grant's Tomb) to watch the Bulldogs' suffocating defense dismantle one foe after another. 

One year, Dad and I went to the mall and bought Mom a custom red T-shirt with metallic lettering that read “I love Mitch Arnold,” in honor of her favorite player. He kept it in the closet of the house where I grew up long after she passed away.

Partner

Mom and Dad were married for 39 years until she died of a stroke on Jan. 9, 1995, just shy of her 63rd birthday. Stricken by polio as a child, she’d been told she’d never walk again, but not only did she walk – despite being almost fully paralyzed on the right side of her body – she earned a degree from UCLA and then went to work at Douglas Aircraft in Southern California, which is where she met my father.

He asked her to marry him on the spur of the moment when they were smooching in the car, and she said “yes.” They were married Sept. 1, 1956.

They seemed, from the looks of them, to be a bit of a mismatch: my father at 6-8 towering over his 5-foot-2 bride; this beautiful woman on the arm of the professor with the dark-rimmed glasses. When she couldn’t get up off the couch or needed help steading herself as she walked, he was always there with a hand to help her. His lasting impression of Richard Nixon, whom he met before Nixon became president, wasn’t anything political; it was that Nixon had once helped steady my mom when she stumbled as the three of them were walking together. That cemented Nixon in my Dad’s mind as a good guy. Sure, there was Watergate later on, but he had shown compassion toward my mom, and that’s what Dad remembered most.

During all the time my parents were married, I never heard Dad yell at Mom. Oh, he’d raise his voice and had quite a temper, but he never took it out on her. He never remarried and, although he flirted with women from time to time and even had a couple of girlfriends, there was never any doubt that Mom was, and always would be, the love of his life.

My parents tried for years to have a child, without success. Doctors told them they could find nothing wrong, but after six years, they had pretty much resigned themselves to a childless marriage. Then, in 1962, Dad was recruited to run for state Assembly. He’d been teaching at Fresno State for a few years by then, and as a former debating champion at Pomona College, he’d caught the attention of the California Republican Party.

It was an uphill battle, as he was running in a heavily Democratic district, and he was out on the campaign trail when he got the word from Mom that she was expecting. He lost the race by a handful of votes and never ran for office again; but he became a father in the process. He considered it a good tradeoff.

Teacher

I often asked Dad why he hadn’t run for office again, and he told me he preferred to teach.

He loved it so much that he continued to do so at Fresno State as long as he could, after the “traditional” retirement age, teaching into his 70s. In 2004, at the age of 73, he even taught a class for free. That’s right. And they almost didn’t let him.

Of all my father’s many professional accomplishments, it was this the singular act that, to me, said the most about his character.

A budget crisis in California had forced Fresno State to cancel several sections of a political science course. All the remaining classes were full, leaving some students without a class they’d need to graduate. So Dad, who had just retired, offered to teach a section for free.

The university rejected his offer, leading Dad to ask, “Why the heck can’t someone volunteer?” Officials contended it would actually cost the university money, based on a complex funding formula, but Dad wasn’t buying it: “It is difficult to figure out how that works,” he said. “I have a serious problem with that kind of logic.”

A story about the university’s rejection of his offer appeared on the front page of The Fresno Bee. Then, three days later, the university reversed itself and allowed him to teach a class, after all.

Not only did Dad teach the class, he taught everyone in the community at large something about the importance of character – and of putting students before the almighty dollar.  

Father

Dad also taught me a few personal lessons that I’ll never forget. Perhaps foremost among them was the value of an education. When I was struggling as a freshman in high school, failing more than one class, he told me once as he was driving our gold Buick LeSabre that I had two choices: I could start taking school seriously, or I could wind up in a minimum-wage job or doing field labor for the rest of my life. I listened, and the next year, I was earning all A’s and B’s.

He also taught me that victories are infinitely sweeter when they are earned. For a while, when we started to play ping pong, I never beat him. Ever. He wouldn’t let me win just to make me “feel good” because I was a 12-year-old kid; he wanted me to enjoy that feeling of accomplishment he knew I’d get when I finally did beat him.

He knew what he was doing, and he was right.

He was honest in action and word alike. When I wrote a novel I was sure he’d enjoy, he told me it hadn’t really grabbed him. He wasn’t harshly critical, but he didn’t offer false praise to spare my feelings. On the other hand, when I wrote a book on discrimination, he said it should be in every classroom in the country. So when he told my wife, Samaire, that her Mad World novels were some of the most exciting stories he’d read, I knew he was telling the truth. Although the two of them only knew each other for five years, they developed a close bond and heartfelt friendship; Samaire dedicated the third book in her trilogy to him.

Although he spent most of his career in the classroom, Dad did take a couple of detours from his job as a tenured professor at Fresno State. In 1966, he took me and Mom back to Australia, where he spent a year teaching as a visiting professor specializing in American government. His 3-year-old son played with plastic trains, drew crayon pictures and befriended imaginary dragons in an apartment overlooking Botany Bay in Sydney.

Politician

Dad was twice a finalist to become president of a Cal State university – once in Chico and once in Bakersfield – and he served for six years as dean of new program development for the entire university system. He wrote a textbook on California politics that went through 17 editions and served as a political analyst on virtually every Fresno TV station during election season over a period of more than two decades.

He served as chairman of the California Republican Assembly president of the statewide Academic Senate. He liked to talk about how he had invited then-Gov. Ronald Reagan to speak to the latter body, amid criticism that faculty members weren’t interested in hearing from a conservative politician. Dad introduced Reagan to tepid applause but said that, by the end of the session, he had won over the room to such an extent that he received a standing ovation.

He also recalled a visit to Reagan's office in Sacramento, where the governor invited him to try some jelly beans.

Dad was an interesting character, politically speaking. A lifelong Republican, he was nonetheless once branded the “pink professor” for a wholly imagined sympathy for communism. Yet despite his conservatism, he did hold a number of views that could only be described as progressive, and he valued a willingness to compromise well above any rigid allegiance to partisan dogma. In his later years, he often lamented the gridlock that evolved from a growing refusal to see the other side of things. He’d been trained as a debater to argue either side of a given issue, so it was natural that this refusal to listen to other points of view didn’t sit well with him. It’s yet another value he passed along to me.

Adventurer

But Dad’s life was so much more than politics.

He hitchhiked the Australian Outback during his first stay there (enduring an encounter with leeches in the process). He visited Egypt, Italy, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland, Hawaii, Alaska, Arizona, Utah … and I’m sure I’m leaving something out. We flew in a helicopter together on Maui, where we also drive the infamously curvy Road to Hana. We visited Stonehenge, Edinburgh Castle, York Cathedral, Monument Valley, Waimea Canyon, the Oregon coast and Haleakala crater together.

Along the way, he introduced me to his love of photography, shooting seemingly endless rolls of slides with his trusty Minolta. He taught me how to “frame” a photo and explore different angles to find just the right composition. We once arose before the crack of dawn to drive around the San Joaquin Valley, taking black-and-white photos of old barns and dilapidated buildings as the first rays of sunlight crept over the horizon, creating shadowy ghosts that appeared to linger among the beams and rafters.

Supporter

Dad was also a fan of science fiction from way back, from the literary world of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke to the on-screen entertainment of Star Trek and Star Wars. We watched all the movies in both series together up until the late ’90s, but there was never any doubt which franchise we both preferred. In the ST vs. SW debate, he came down squarely on the side of Trek. He introduced me to The Original Series in the early 1970s, and I’ve seen every episode of every incarnation – big and small screen – since.

He enjoyed folk music (Glenn Yarbrough, who died just a few days after he did at the age of 86; Simon and Garfunkel; Peter, Paul and Mary) and endured my   preference for bands like KISS, Aerosmith and Queen with good grace. He might not have agreed with my tastes, but he respected them: He was the kind of person who picked out Christmas and birthday gifts he thought you’d like, rather than just buying something he would have liked to get himself. He knew I liked dragons, so he picked out a dragon-themed wallet for me; he knew I liked “Star Trek,” so he bought me a “Star Trek”-themed mug. Little things like that from a very big heart.

There were big things, too. He bought a car for me to drive after I got my license. When I was a teenager, we visited Kauai every other year for about a decade. After Mom died, he took me on trips to Maui and England.

He also put me through college at Fresno State, where I graduated summa cum laude (all A’s except for one B and a single C). I was proud of my academic achievement, and I once suggested that I take one of my dad’s classes to see how well I would do. He had a reputation as a good but very challenging teacher, and I wanted to test myself, but Dad pointed out it would be a no-win situation: If I didn’t do well, it would be a discouraging setback, and if I aced the class, people might think he’d showed me some sort of favoritism.

There were all those things he did for me, and then there was just who he was. I would not be who I am today without my father’s love of language, history, science fiction, sports, logic … the list goes on and on.

For years, Dad and his colleagues would gather every week at 4 p.m. at a Fresno watering hole to “solve all the world’s problems” in the space of a couple of hours. Club, as he called it (not “the club,” just “Club”) was primarily a gathering of political science professors: my father’s best friend, Karl Swenson; Freeman Wright, Maurice Van Gerpen and Lyman Heine were among the regulars. They met at Fresno Feed and Fuel for a while, then switched to Sutter Street Bar & Grill at the Ramada for many years, where I was initiated as a sort of adjunct member of the group (not being a professor) for several of those years. Dad would almost always order a martini and an O’Doul’s.

Giver

Dad worked as a professor into his 70s and taught many future leaders, including onetime Assembly Republican Leader Mike Villines, Fresno City Councilman Craig Scharton and Fresno Bee Executive Editor Jim Boren,

His health declined in later years, but his mind remained active even after he sold his home and moved into a long-term care facility. As long as you kept your sense of humor, he’d often say, you'd have a life worth living. His favorite comedians included Red Skelton, Jack Benny, Tim Conway and Carol Burnett. He was himself an inveterate punster, which I’m happy to say has rubbed off on me (although others may not be quite so happy about that!).

A couple of years ago, Dad helped me by providing information and firsthand recollections for my book Fresno Growing Up. His insights, as always, were invaluable. One of the last times he made the trek out of his care facility was a year ago, when he attended my launch party and signing for the book in downtown Fresno. In his final months, he told me repeatedly how proud he was of me and how much he was looking forward to reading my next two books, both due out next year. One is a history of Highway 99 in California, to which he introduced me; the other is a novel called Memortality about a woman who can bring back the dead through the power of her memory.

I wish I could do that with Dad now. In a sense, I’m doing the best I can with this remembrance, which can never come close to doing justice to perhaps the most accomplished man I’ve ever known, not to mention my greatest supporter and lifelong friend.

My father passed away Aug. 6, 2016. We’d seen him a few weeks earlier and held a three-hour conversation with him about politics and life, the past and the future. As always, he was gracious, telling us we should get going as the day stretched into late afternoon because we had a long drive ahead of us and shouldn’t be traveling too much after nightfall. “Watch out for all those nuts on the road,” he’d say. Every time.

I talked to my dad on the phone two days before he lost consciousness. He didn’t seem to be feeling too well, so just before I hung up, I told him something I said too infrequently.

“I love you, Dad.”

He told me he loved me, too. Those were the last and best words we ever exchanged.

Note: The photo that appears above shows my father and my mom, Lollie Provost, in the early 1970s.

Meet Isis: Cat, companion and the truest of friends

Allow me to introduce you to Isis. Not the goddess (although she sometimes behaves like one) and certainly not the terrorist group.

Isis is a cat. My cat. And I’m her human.

As I write this, Isis is in severe kidney failure. She’s only nine years old, and she doesn’t deserve that. She deserves so much more.

I met Isis at a PetSmart store on one of those days when they bring in shelter pets and hope someone bonds with them. Isis was there, with her brother, who was running all over the cage, playful as can be. Isis wasn’t having any of that. She just casually came up and said “hello” to me, nudging her head up against the cage when I put my hand down to pet her. Right away, we were comfortable with each other.

I had a name picked out for her right away. I was going to call her Frejya, after the Norse goddess, because her crystal blue eyes and glistening white and grey coat, with a hint of tan, reminded me of a book I’d read by Elizabeth H. Boyer from the early ’80s. I’d read it a long time ago, and if I remember correctly, one of the characters was a woman or goddess who’d been magically transformed into a cat.

But then I was informed that she already had a name: Isis. I liked that, too, and I figured that, since she already had it, I wasn’t going to take it away from her. Isis she would remain.

Isis came along at just the right time, and she’s been there during the hardest time of my life. Since I’ve known her, I’ve been through a divorce, been laid off from my job of fourteen years and watched my father’s health gradually decline.

Isis was there for me the whole time, and along with my mother and my wife, Samaire, hers has been the most comforting presence I’ve ever known.

She nearly always came when I called her name, and even today, in her weakened state, she still does. Sometimes, she lies down at the foot of the bed, and the moment I say her name, she’ll turn around and look at me, then get up and walk like some miniature white tiger on padded paws right up to me and curl up next to me, purring.

When everything was going wrong and I was struggling with depression, I imagined she was that white tiger, and that she was there to protect me when I no longer had the hope or energy to fight myself.

Now, I have to protect her. She spent the past week in the animal hospital on IV fluids and she seemed to perk up a little, but at the end of that time, she still was barely eating and her kidney numbers weren’t much better. The vet said he recommended euthanizing her.

Samaire said she didn’t think we should, and I realized she was right. I wouldn’t make that kind of decision for a family member who walks on two legs. How could I do that for my beloved white tiger just because she walks on four?

Besides, I want more time with her – even if it’s only a little bit. I’m typing through tears here, and I don’t cry very often. Not to complain, but I’ve been through a lot, and I’ve learned to deal with loss and numb myself to pain pretty effectively. But not this kind of loss. Not this kind of pain.

All the talk of rainbow bridges and “better places” doesn’t mean a thing when you face the prospect of losing someone you love deeply and someone who has loved you so unconditionally for so long.

Right now, Isis still isn’t eating on her own, but she will swallow (grudgingly) the food we put in her mouth, and we’re giving her subcutaneous fluids to keep her hydrated. I’m spending as much time curled up in bed beside her as I can because, to me, every moment now is precious.

I wanted to introduce you to Isis, because I may not have many more chances to do so, and because everyone should get the chance to know someone this special. An unfailing friend. A white tiger. Someone you know without a shadow of a doubt really loves you.

That’s who Isis is to me and, whatever happens, it’s who she’ll always be.