When I was younger I occasionally liked to fly kites from my yard, which was unusually large and offered plenty of runway to put it in the air and room to get it over the treetops. My success was moderate and more often than not a down draft would ground it on top of the neighbor’s roof before I could get any distance.

But one day, when I was 13 or so, all the elements for kite flying – tail construction, wind speed and direction – must have been in perfect order because the kite hung like it had wings of its own, stretching out with almost perfect string tension, hardly a waiver in the sky and so I began to ease more and more line out. It didn’t matter how much string I let out, the tension held and the kite itself began to get smaller and smaller; still visible but this time if it came down it was going to spare the neighbor’s roof and end up in another neighborhood entirely.

I had been out in the yard for so long that my mother and her boyfriend Tom came out to see the marvelous flight of this kite and eventually, after running through a very large amount of string on a reel, we tied a new reel onto the old and by now the kite was but a speck on the horizon that you might not even notice if you weren’t holding onto the other end of it.

Eventually hours passed and dusk was making it difficult to even see the thing but the string was up and the speck barely visible when my mother went inside the house and soon after Tom and I were distracted by an argument coming from the basement. Through the window I could see father #2 gesturing wildly and yelling this and that and I knew he was drunk again and making a stop-off at our house, which he did once in a while, to show off his alcohol-induced manhood. He was a gentle man while sober but took on this absurd tough guy persona when inebriated beyond all reason.

Seeing all of this, Tom left me to go inside and aid my mother in whatever craziness was going on and I watched the window, still holding onto the kite like a lifeline. The kite was pulling harder but I held tight as the argument got worse and Tom shoved my dad in the chest.

Right then I hated that bastard boyfriend for laying a hand on my dad. He may have been drunk and belligerent but he was also ineffectual and cannon fodder for a larger man which Tom was. I knew what my dad was – damaged goods, but it hurt seeing him pushed around like a rag doll, and seeing it done by this lug with one tenth the character that my dad had even on his drunkest day, left me with nothing but anger.

I just wanted that asshole to keep his hands off my dad but I couldn’t let go of the kite string to say or do anything. I was frozen. It was so dark by now that all I had was a string with no kite in view and only the thought that it must still be aloft because there was tension on the line leading upwards. Because we had let out so much string it was probably literally miles away by now. But as the kite faded from sight the basement window seemed to get larger and take on the presence of a television screen.

I was frozen solid.

I couldn’t move to stop the frenzy in the window because I was tethered to a piece of string – a piece of nothingness at this point and I felt only loss, humiliation, shame and anger. The entire heated exchange probably didn’t last that long but it seemed like hours had gone by and I just stood there.

After my dad had gone, I held onto the string for a while longer, seeing only the first 30 feet or so, staring into the blackness, distracting myself by trying to imagine what house or business the kite was hovering over. Would I find it in the distant schoolyard in the morning? Maybe it would make the papers as folks traced the miles of string back to my house.

As much as I didn’t want to do it, I finally just let go and the string whipped out of my hand and was gone like it was fleeing the scene of a crime but I was never able to let go of that image through the basement window and when the kite left forever I’m sure that a piece of me went with it.

On the long running sitcom Seinfeld, there’s an episode where Jerry’s friend George Costanza comes to the sudden conclusion that everything he thinks and does invariably turns out to be wrong and if that’s true then the opposite must be right. He immediately applies that convoluted logic to a beautiful woman sitting at the lunch counter: “Hi. I’m George. I’m unemployed and I live with my parents.” For comedic purposes she kicks a chair in his direction and alluringly invites him to join her.

Laughs or logic? Well, a little bit of both because I often practice a variation on the same theme when I catch myself relying on some tired old knee jerk reaction that has, much as George Costanza observed, failed time after time. The difficulty is in recognizing the knee jerk reaction as failed behavior and then consciously making a decision not to go there again.

This is, especially at first, ridiculously hard. You’ve got to step outside yourself and clearly listen to that nonsense you’re spewing and then, making it even harder, make a judgment call on your own nonsense. Most of the time people just say and do the crap they’ve learned since their escape from the womb and have no sense of the resultant impact on themselves and others.

To a degree, and I’m in no position to grade myself but, I’ve been doing well with this tact and while George’s approach was broad and random (again, for comedic purposes), mine is applied with careful consideration to the fact that my knee jerk reaction might actually be appropriate from time to time.

You see where this gets tricky? Most people go to psychologists because they don’t know what’s wrong in the first place so those people are temporarily exempt from this application until they’ve identified in what ways they’re screwed up. You can’t start the car until you’ve found the keys.

However, if you’ve dragged yourself over the emotional coals long enough and you’ve pretty much got a handle on your own foibles then you’re probably ready to give it a go.

Impress your friends and family with your new social gymnastics. Watch their jaws drop as you make completely different choices! Used to watching people recoil at your castrating humor because you were a miserable, depressed child? How about not doing that and instead using that wit to join in the fun with others! Take the self-deprecating route. Drop the Don Rickles and try out a little Rodney Dangerfield (he had better material anyway). How about the next time your wife/husband asks you to help with something, you turn all expectation on its ear and say (gulp) yes!

The situations are endless and I swear this thing works and if you act now you can transform what’s left of your half-ass existence into something slightly meaningful. I’m not saying this is a 100% success rate deal but it’s better than being a nay-saying, self-serving, control freak nutbag, so self-absorbed as to be sucked into your own spongy self.

As the master himself testified: “Every decision I have ever made in my entire life, has been wrong. My life is the complete opposite of everything I wanted to be. Every instinct I have, in every aspect of life, is it something to wear, something to eat, it’s all been wrong.”

Pure Costanzian logic.

My father, by marriage to my mother (hereafter referred to as father #2), formally adopted me at age 5 and lived with us for the next few years or so until their eventual divorce. He was a brilliant man whose growth was tragically stunted by his mother’s stubborn refusal to allow him to accept a full scholarship in art offered him by the University of Michigan.

She might as well have shot him in the head and finished him off because she had already crippled his creativity with her selfishness.

Instead of a proud parent sending her gifted son off to college she guilted him into staying near her, inadvertently providing him a lifetime of regret and lost opportunity, tentatively propped up by booze and cigarettes.

While he still lived with us I got a taste of his talent a few times at the kitchen table when he’d do freehand drawings of animals and knights and whatever else I might request. I still have the drawings and while they’re only sketches, to me they are broken pieces of what he might have been; documents confirming that, yes, here was an artist without a canvas.

But it didn’t stop with art. He was a top notch musician (trombone), noteworthy magician and amateur academic whose brain assimilated information at a prodigious rate. He would digest books, any books, at lightning speed and with ridiculously accurate recall. After their divorce when I’d go and visit him at his new house I used to loan him books just to watch him go to work on them; like tossing a fat juicy steak into a lion’s cage, he’d have them quickly scanned, cataloged, indexed and hand me back the t-bone.

He was like some kind of mental Houdini, able to dump down half a case of beer a night and still explain the Warren Report to me the next day. It was like the most amazing frat party trick imaginable. How did he have enough brain cells left to complete the task?

If anyone was made for college it was this man of unlimited intellectual resources, just bursting at the seams with knowledge for any and all things, but it was never going to happen and a large chunk of the blame lie with him, who talked a good game but pretty much gave up on himself. He was the unrequited scholar, a learning machine that couldn’t be stopped until his heart succumbed to the onslaught of Camel straights that ended his potential once and for all at the relatively early age of 57.

Frankly, I was glad. It sounds cold but I was glad that he was free of the lost ambition that dogged him each and every day. It was a waste…a shitty waste of a brilliant mind and the only thing he had to show for it was a backroom full of empties.

A year and a half ago my mother was notified that she had an aortic aneurysm, a discovery made by a radiologist while looking for something else. These aneurysms are like a ‘run’ in women’s hosiery; not a big problem in their small form but when they finally give way, the hosiery is useless and has to be discarded. In any event, surgical repair isn’t recommended (based upon certain risk factors) until the aneurysm reaches a specific length so the doctor does periodic monitoring until the decision is made to repair the tear.

I insisted that she not trust this potentially life-threatening condition to any local physicians and offered to drive her back and forth to the Cleveland Clinic whenever she needed. We’ve made several trips since that discovery and each time I try to unearth more and more things that I didn’t know about the family and believe me, there appears to be quite a treasure trove of withheld gems.

Now in her eighties, it finally became clear as to why these items have leaked out of her in dribs and drabs for all these years. The reason was firmly rooted, as it often is with people, in appearance. She obviously decided a long time ago that there was going to be a ‘presentation’ of these family skeletons that would retain their mythical, Hallmark qualities with all warts removed.

While discussing her mother (the grandmother I never really knew except in photo album pictures) she alluded to the fact that there might have been some anomalies in her mother’s parenting skills. Up until that very point in the car I assumed her mother to have been a hard working, saintly woman who died of breast cancer at a relatively young age, all of which was basically true, except…

Except that there might, and it’s only a ‘might’ at this point, have been a little scrape or two on the saintly bumper.

So when she let slip with a portion of a larger revelation I naturally asked for details, details, but she came back with the hesitation move followed by the “I better not say anymore”. And so I’m like, “Oh no, you’re not going to toss out a teaser and then leave me hanging”, but she got busy building fortress reinforcements and I had to scale the wall.

“Why do you want to know?”, she asked. “Because”, I said, “it helps me gauge just how far the nut has fallen from the tree and I gain some perspective on parts of the family I’ve never known.” Well, we went back and forth until she relented and, while still not turning the faucet open all the way, told me a story of her mother’s infidelity, how unrepentant it was and how other parts of the immediate family dealt with it.

Her mother’s well-documented (except to me) affair actually kept her away from the house many entire nights while my grandfather worked evenings, most of the siblings were gone, and the youngest of the brood was still at home (pause here and consider).

All of a sudden so many things fell into place in my understanding of the family dynamic. First of all, my grandmother took human form and became just as flawed as everyone else in the family. Secondly, I understood why my uncle, he being the youngest child, looked to me like a wounded animal the entire time I knew him and, finally, “say what?”.

I felt like a crack in my understanding of the extended family had burst open and flooded my brain with some measure of relief. Certain facets of our family just didn’t make sense without this part of the puzzle.

What does this tell us about family secrets? They’re absolutely worthless attempts to maintain appearance and don’t do anyone any good whatsoever. Whatsoever.

Before she opened up, I asked her why she didn’t want to tell me what happened with her mother and she told me that she didn’t want me to think poorly of her. “Mom,” I said emphatically, “I don’t think poorly of her or otherwise because I don’t know her but if you told me something of her life maybe I’d get a sense of my grandmother. Besides, she’s long dead…who are you protecting?”

“She’s dead”. I couldn’t repeat it enough. The idea that the deceased needed protection from their above ground folly seemed ridiculous to me, as if her mother needed to be seen only in a single dimension so that we would all believe she had no faults. All I could think was how burdensome it must be to spend your life lugging around that heavy bag of illusion. Pop open that case of Samsonite secrets and set yourself free!

But that’s the way my mother’s always been: revealing bits and pieces of stories and if I don’t pull a Mike Wallace on her she’ll simply stop short of the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I’ve even heard things that she passed off as the truth only to hear her revisions later on.

Appearances are simply that, visuals with no substance. Wisps of vapor with no other purpose than to throw you off the scent and deceive but for what actual good? To my mother’s credit, more information has been released under my own personal freedom of information act so stay tuned as I climb into the ‘Sodium Pentothal Special’, bound for Cleveland and traveling through time.

Godparents are assigned to you, based upon their relationship with your parents, as sort of a backup team that can come in off the bench if any of the starters are injured or taking a leave of absence. In general, the system makes sense. Parenting is a full-time, hands-on job that can be interrupted by the unknown and children don’t do real well with the unknown.

Oh no! Mom’s on crack! The coach signals the bench and, boom, you’ve covered. (Note: hypothetical scenario for instructional purposes only)

Again, you’re in no age-shape to make these decisions so the hope is that the second team is as good or better than the first and, if you’re lucky, the second team is an enhancement to the first while the starters are still in. That makes for good team chemistry.

I like sports metaphors.

Anyway, I lucked out with the Godparents thing. I got Jim and Dorothy and while they never replaced the starters, their impact on my developing psyche was monumental.

They were a couple who, for whatever reason, never had children of their own and yet loved children and, best of all for me, made an extremely generous gift of themselves…Dorothy in particular. From these bench reserves I learned certain irreplaceable arts, especially the art of laughter.

Jimmy had a sly wit and a bemused demeanor in the midst of socializing but Dorothy would come totally unglued. Her laugh had a complete arc to it, humbly beginning like the rumblings of a pre-eruptive volcano and progressing through stages of hysteria until she was literally gasping for air and yelling, “stop, oh please stop” and just when it looked like a life threatening seizure was about to take her from us, she’d lift her exhausted self upright and collect her wits for the next joke. My mother used to tell me that when they’d go out to dinner Dorothy would inevitably lose it and the entire room would be looking to get a glimpse of the crazy woman, but she didn’t care and she couldn’t have stopped it if she’d wanted to; this was intrinsically who she was.

Whatever the occasion I always positioned myself near her to bask in that unbridled laughter, so primal and so liberating and so contagious that I was relatively unconcerned what the joke was even about.

That was how I came to understand the power of laughter. Like any of us, I’m certain that Dorothy had her crosses to bear but she also had the ultimate emotional tonic, an immersion in laughter that freed her from the commonplace and set off a spark so bright that I wanted to be in the room when the fireworks started.

I don’t know how it must have been for Jimmy when she passed away but they were both extremely pragmatic and he likely took it painfully in stride. Even so, the silence in that house must have been somewhat unsettling.

Since that time, Jimmy has passed on as well and even though they no longer move through the physical realm I think of them often and Dorothy’s laugh is as fresh in my consciousness as the first time I heard it. I admired her because she went all out and left nothing on the table; fearless, unselfconscious and uncompromising.

I just wanted to be near the joy that was her.

I wish I had an answer to that question, because the nature of my patriarchal lineage is somewhat of a mystery and not by my own choice. My biological father (hereafter known as father #1) left us when I was 1 year old and so, for the most part, I was unaware of him in my life until he showed up out of the blue one day when I was 10.

He was a curious figure, revealed so suddenly and unexpected, and I did what little me pretty much always did and that’s to observe, suck it all in and try to sort it out later in a way that caused me the least amount of distress. I still use that method today, albeit begrudgingly, but by now it’s an adulthood reflex.

Anyway, there he stood as my mother introduced me to him and I hardly knew what to say. Who is this guy who looks vaguely like me and why is he standing here and ‘can’t I just go outside and play’? But no, play is not an option when dad (dad?) is putting in an appearance. You never know when he’s going to bolt so you have to do the time.

I began playing the drums when I was 8, just like him, and he took some interest in my drum set that was stricken with a broken snare drum head. The ghost of my father handed me $10 and told me to go get the snare head replaced and, soon after, he was gone. Gone like the apparition that he was to me my entire life. Gone like a cool breeze that hits you in the face and then moves on randomly.

Not too long after; my mother, me and a friend were driving in a busy urban area when my mother casually pointed out that the man weaving back and forth on the sidewalk was my father. And again the breeze washed over me, as it turned out, for the last time and all I had to show for it was the afterimage of his drunken backside swaying from side to side like wind-blown clothes hanging from a line.

That’s it.

Much later on my mother let me know that he had surprised her as much as me by asking her if she’d consider reconciliation and getting back together. Imagine that, letting bygones be bygones, bury the hatchet, all’s well that ends well and other such nonsense after taking a prolonged powder.

Geez, even at 10 I thought it was ridiculous for a person to just pop up and suggest something like that with barely a nod to the missing past 9 years! I came away with the unchallenged opinion that my father was a lame-ass and that’s not necessarily the kind of thing that you want a child to be thinking about a parent.

Over the years, and even into my 50’s, I’d wrestled with the idea of seeking him out, even though he tried to mask his whereabouts (as he did to his other children by different marriages), but never followed through even though we nailed down his location. I was both compelled and afraid to confront him for many reasons and, finally, his recent death released me from the decision making process.

I have anecdotal evidence, via my mother, that he, indeed, helped to create me and my brief visual at least gave me a form to work with but, in my tangible world, he remains the same haunting presence that I spotted when I was 10 and I now know for certain that there are such things as ghosts.

That relatively modest sized globe rotating upon my shoulders is the planet I have resided on my entire life. To a larger extent it’s Earth, but for any practical purpose the machinery that dominates my thoughts, emotions, antics and general aspirations all occurs in my head.

Really, it should have its own address.

Perhaps I can blame the problem of ‘living in my head’ on my station as an only-child but that’s likely only part of the cause since I’m sure there are plenty of well-adjusted, well-socialized only-children thriving in the world. That’s just a guess and maybe we’re all, to a degree, whack-jobs.

An extreme example of living in your head might be Sybil, the literary sufferer of dissociative identity disorder, better known as multiple personality disorder. But even Sybil caught a break because she always had somebody to talk to.

No, mine isn’t the pathological kind, just the annoying ‘social/relationship time-out’ kind where not only do I retreat into my head but my head does a 360 and goes right up my ass. This doesn’t make me dangerous, just annoying and people wonder where I went even though I appear to still be sitting in one place. It’s almost psychological sleight of hand.

If there were money in that I’d have another career.

My head space is fairly well-appointed with its own roll-away cot that is always handy for a relaxing nap or simply lounging. The décor is basic contemporary muddle with moments of razor sharp lucidity. I try to keep well organized but things get away from me at times and I have to waste time just picking up. That’s time consuming and inefficient but I just slap it down on the list of ‘things to do better’ and that’s become quite a daunting list.

I’ll have to do better at making less daunting lists.

In the last few years I built on an addition, a room of cynicism and agitation that I believe many middle aged people build out of sheer necessity. Actually, it wasn’t an addition per se; I just sort of converted my sun room into something more useful.

While I’ve always found it a restful little bungle-low, my wife’s not real impressed with my head space and lets me know often that my digs are not HGTV worthy and I’d be better off spending less time there and more time visiting the tangible world that she lives in. I have every reason to believe she’s right and I’ve been going to my head space less often but, damn, I just can’t bring myself to stop paying rent there just yet.