Look to the Tidepool and Other Lessons from My Parents

"It is advisable to look from the tidepool to the stars, then back to the
tidepool again." -John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea Of Cortez

My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake, and they live in a state of constant, total amazement." -Joe vs. the Volcano 

My parents, especially my dad, tried to teach me not to swear. In this lesson, they did not succeed. For most of my adult life, my peers have been either zoo keepers or biologists---the ubiquity of swear words in my vocabulary is a testament to the influence of those two foul-mouthed peer groups over an albeit half-hearted parenting effort. I think their conviction on this particular point of discipline was weakening by their fifth and final child, as were many of their more traditional parental convictions. The first four in the birth order wore them out on those, rascals that they were. I remember the look of glee on Mom's face the first time she ever uttered the word "fuck" in front of me. It was as if all of her release from the thrall of my dad, her strict upbringing in a Midwestern Lutheran orphanage, and the societal expectation of feminine gentility were contained in that moment. Once I recovered from my initial shock and awe, I was proud of her. But there was one word (with all its forms) that was allowed no tolerance, and my aversion to using it stands up to the passage of time and the pressure of peers. To proclaim, as any child or teenage girl inevitably will, that I was bored, was to risk a torrent of shaming from my mother. I can't remember using the words "bored" or "boredom" much beyond my early teenage years, when I suspect mom went all in with her conviction to share this lesson with her last born. I don't recall a single lecture on drugs, alcohol, or sex, but there were many on the Sin of Boredom.

Mia in one of the great sycamores of the Laguna Canyon of the 1960s.
We road bicycles and picnicked under the huge branches.

The lesson was simple: there is no cause for boredom in a wondrous world. Inside was a creative carnival of toys, books, records, art supplies, make-believe forests, jungles, farms, and zoos; outside was the whole wide world and my home town of Laguna Beach with hills of chaparral, valleys of sycamores, and the shore of the greatest ocean within walking distance. Mom urged me to meet that sycamore from within its branches, watch the roadrunner catch lizards on the roof, read all of the Chronicles of Narnia, then reenact them in the garden, sing, paint, sculpt, depict and be utterly amazed every moment. If you are inside you have your imagination, she said. If you are outside you have wonder. To find yourself in a state of boredom is to have failed the world, not vice versa. The "B" word---the one swear word I hesitate to utter---will be forever anchored in my psyche. But I think I might be better served by fearing the word less and living the moral more: be awake in the world!

My mom, Mia, lived that lesson all the years of her life. She was relentless is her cheerfulness and her ability to find things to love. When I slip comfortably into a hearty laugh, I am following her example. Game to try new adventures, she was a joyful companion down the trails of Kauai's native rain forests, across the channel to Santa Catalina Island, and over the green at posh golf courses in search of tagged sea otters. She was equally at home under a comforter watching Dancing with the Stars. Much like Harry, mom's default state was that of choosing to love---except when it came to cilantro. 

Mom at the harbor at Avalon. The crossing from Newport was her first
 time at sea in 40 years of living in California.

Tracking otters with Michelle Staedler
at the most exclusive of golf courses.

While I believe my father's brilliant, expansive mind was prone to bouts of boredom, it was he who guided me down the sandy path to the beach and under the fence to the chaparral hills. He was my ambassador to the sea.  In all of my earliest memories of the ocean, I am accompanied by my dad and his camera. We experienced the waves and tidepools together, but while I felt the cold water on my toes, and giggled as the sand crabs tickled my fingers with their feathery legs, he was the distant artist watching, composing future paintings of a little girl at the shore to hang in the houses of others. These photo sessions at the beach with my dad returned closeness between father and daughter that was perhaps truest to who he was at heart. He was sharing with his littlest one his unique vision of the world---teaching her not only to look with an artist's eyes, but to see deeply. 

5-year-old Gena in a tidepool at Laguna Beach, 1968.
Photo by my dad, Robert Krantz

One evening when I was 17,  I sat with Dad on his balcony overlooking the ocean at dusk. My parents were separated and he had moved into this cliff edge house in South Laguna where I would come every week for dinner. I didn't really like the dinner visits, my dad often spoke in an intellectual language that I couldn't (or wouldn't) understand. I think he meant these talks to bring us closer, but I felt very far away.  The dipping sun backlit the leaf of a potted orchid revealing a ladybug traversing its underside. We both watched in silence for a moment, then I said,  "The ladybug's feet must be interacting with the surface of the leaf in a way we can't see so that she doesn't fall." Dad looked at me and smiled. "Yes" was all he said, but I saw pride in his eyes.  Because of him I can see universes and galleries bound together by the tides and the borders of a tidepool, and I care to imagine the sticky feet of a ladybug.

The adhesive hairs of a ladybug's feet with a scanning electron microscope.
Photo Jan Michels

Dad in his element in his classic torn jeans

Holding my dad's hand

The themes of this blog---to look at the world mindfully, to celebrate the beauty of the small and humble, to feel a part of a great oneness with the universe (yes, dad, I was listening when you talked about quantum theory)---all find their origins in the lessons of my parents. Their gifts to me could not have been more disparate or more complimentary. Mom was a champion of the unloved and the metaphorically orphaned, while Dad's view was more philosophical, lofty and unyielding (even when delivered in torn jeans from the humblest of apartments towards the end of his life). Every moment I am among the trees or stooped over a tidepool, they are watching with me: my mom admiring the ingenuity of a hermit crab and my dad the incomprehensible number of atomic interactions that make up the rock and the anemone. 

Rock and anemone

This last week of June is one of somber significance to me. June 21st marks the seventh anniversary of my mom's death just hours before her 86th birthday. She had been sick for over a month and in hospice for two weeks when she succumbed to the flood in her lungs known as congestive heart failure. She died in her bedroom, in her apartment in the pink "frat house" on Cliff Drive, in her beloved Laguna Beach, with her children, grandchildren and trusted friends at hand. I was witness to her final breath, to her final knowing of the answers that elude us all until that moment. She followed my dad who passed nearly fifteen years before, and seemed to speak with him in her final days of transitional consciousness. Now we are, all five of their children, orphans.

The pink "frat house"

This year, Father's Day and this anniversary have aligned like two partial sets of chromosomes merging into an embryo. My parents were very different people who's lives merged in post WWII Chicago. While their marital bond would dissolve in the Southern California beach town where my father brought our family in search of a dream, Mia and Robert Krantz joined forces in their creativity, love of their children and grandchildren and their acknowledgment of the power of a beautiful view.  As I stand at my front door waiting to step out, I am well equipped to look out with my father's eyes and my mother's heart. 

Happy Birthday Mom! 

Happy Father's Day, Dad!

View from Heisler Park in Laguna Beach where both
 mom and dad admired many a sunset