True confession: I’m a failure at sitting meditation. Whenever I’ve tried it, I’ve either fallen asleep, or ended up with a mind so full of ideas that I had to stop right then and find a notebook and pen, or a computer, so that I wouldn’t lose them. I admire people who can sit and count their breath, but some of us – like me – just aren’t wired that way. Our minds are never still, never silent. How, then, can we find some of the peace and awareness that meditation offers to others?

Well, if you’re me, or if you’re at all like me, you find it through the written word. In my case, I use a technique outlined by Natalie Goldberg in her book Writing Down the Bones, which was first published twenty-three years ago. It’s a form of meditation that applies Zen techniques to timed free writing, and it’s called Writing Practice, because, like sitting meditation, you do it every day, for a specific period of time, and with total focus.

But how is it meditation? It actually works in much the same way as guided meditation. By opening your mind – writing whatever comes – you clear away whatever mental obstacles might be there. I’m going to ask you all to join me in a brief session of writing practice in just a moment, but first I want to share the basic rules, which are my modifications of Ms. Goldberg’s originals.

1. Keep your hand moving. This means once you begin writing, you don’t stop to read what you’ve written until the time is up. Don’t self-edit. Don’t worry about grammar, spelling, or punctuation. Don’t cross anything out. Don’t even worry about staying in the lines. Personally, I often write on graph paper, purposely ignoring the grid lines.
2. Be specific. If your writing involves colors or scents or shapes, describe them. Are you writing about a memory of a bird? What kind of bird? A robin? A parrot? A grackle? In writing practice, the devil is in the LACK of details. Specifics give you the definition you need to really enter a memory, or savor an idea.
3. Don’t think. This really means don’t analyze. The idea is to keep the flow of words going, without any hesitation. They don’t have to be complete sentences, and you’re not writing for publication. The only wrong answer in writing practice, is not writing.
4. Lose control and go for the jugular. If something comes out that makes you feel naked, vulnerable, afraid, don’t shut it down. Dive in and explore it, and use the energy it provides. You may surprise yourself.

Now that you know the rules, we’re going to do a five minute session. When you do writing practice on your own, it’s generally best to start with five or ten minutes every day, and work up to half an hour, even an hour. Five minutes is a good starting point though, because most of us can find five minutes sometime in their day.

You should have a couple of note cards and a pen. (You can use your own pen, if you’re a pen snob, like me.) For daily writing practice, I recommend using a spiral notebook. Nothing fancy. I’m using this cute purple one one right now because the paper is pretty and it fits in my purse, but you can get perfectly good notebooks in fashion colors at the nearest dollar store. Today, we’re using note cards because they’re stiffer than paper, and a little less threatening.

For most people – me included – the easiest way to begin is to start with a single phrase. I like, “I remember.” If you get stuck, don’t stop writing, just repeat, “I remember,” and keep going. If you change memories, that’s okay. Just keep going.

So, I’m starting the timer.
Ready. Set. Write.

With a legacy like that, it’s not surprising that stepfathers are largely underrated. Children make the distinction between their stepfathers and their “real dads” as if these men are not truly human, and in a greeting card industry that rakes in roughly 7.5 billion dollars a year, finding a Father’s Day card for a stepfather is only slightly easier than finding that needle in the proverbial haystack.

It seems appropriate, then, for me to talk about a really wonderful stepfather: mine.

I’m not sure exactly when my mother met my stepfather, Ira, but I think it had something to do with a singles event at the UU church in Modesto, California. I do know that their first date was on Valentine’s Day, 1982. Ira was taking his son, who was about my age, to see Marcel Marceau perform in Berkeley, and he asked if my mother and I wanted to come along. His son fell asleep, I hadn’t had dinner and had to beg for a bagel from the snack bar – have you ever tried to eat a bagel and cream cheese in a theatre? – and the police pulled us over on the way home because Ira was weaving, not because he was drunk – I don’t recall there being alcohol involved at all – but because he was tired. It was not an auspicious beginning, especially when you consider that, unlike in a movie, you can’t hold a whispered conversation during a mime show.

Nevertheless, two months later, on Good Friday, my mother and Ira were married. My aunt and uncle were late, the organist – who was also hosting the wedding – was more than a little bit tipsy – and I boycotted the ceremony in protest. Well, I was only eleven.

Over the next few years, my mother and I learned to alter our Gilmore Girls-esque relationship to include a man, but it wasn’t easy. In fact, the first several months were not unlike first contact with an alien species, despite the fact that my mother had been married before. My stepbrother defected to his mother’s house, which actually eased the pressure at home, but I know it also hurt Ira more than he ever let on.

At the same time that I was adjusting to junior high school, and all that entailed, I was also watching our refrigerator turn into something that held such oddities as brewer’s yeast, sweet acidophilus, tofu, and plain yogurt. Ira, it seemed, was a health food nut. Far worse, however, was the truly frightening lack of taste buds he seemed to exhibit: the man liked mild cheddar.

He, of course, learned how to buy female sanitary products, to have all the parts of a meal ready at once, and to deal with a kid who had no compunction about yelling back when someone yelled at her.

There were screaming matches, slammed doors, and trips to family counselors. There was a three week period when my mother had moved to a new city to start a business ahead of us, and I was stuck alone with him. And eventually, there emerged a sort of truce on my part balanced by infinite patience on his.

By the time I was in high school, our relationship had progressed to the point where we had a warm friendship. I think we bonded over the two things we had in common: living with my mother, and a habit of staying up into the wee hours of the night devouring books. In my case, it was fiction, and in his it was math, but when it’s one in the morning, and there’s no one else awake, you share with the person who’s there.

While my mother slept, I would finish a chapter, wander down the hall to Ira’s office, and ask, “Want some tea?” And we’d sip tea, and talk about what I was reading.

Alternatively, I’d be curled up in bed engrossed in a novel and he’d knock on the door. “Melissa,” he’d announce, “I have to tell you something new I discovered about the number eleven.” Yes, it’s true. My stepfather, in addition to swallowing enough vitamins to nearly rattle, does recreational math.

By the time I was a young adult, Ira and I had formed some traditions of our own, like going out to lunch and to a museum on Fathers’ Day. One year, it was the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, which advertised their Fathers’ Day festivities with the truly painful slogan, “Take Dad to See a Mummy.” Another year we went to the San Francisco Arboretum, and after a great lunch in the Richmond District, I convinced him to take the coastal route out of the city, and we nearly got lost in the fog.

We’ve both mellowed in the twenty-seven years he and my mother have been married, and as much as I might like to pretend I am solely my mother’s daughter, the reality is that Ira did all the things a father is supposed to do, without any of the thanks he deserved. He has coached me through advanced algebra and helped me survive calculus. He has edited my papers, helped me run lines, and supported every cause I asked him to.

Together, we have planned surprise parties for my mother, shared secret stashes of chocolate-orange cookies, and watched all of Reilly: Ace of Spies, the Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot mysteries, and several seasons of Planet Earth. Well, I watched Planet Earth – he was always snoring by the time the opening credits were over. He has held my hand in the emergency room, and let me rant when I was so mad at my mother I never wanted to speak to her again.

These days, when I call my parents, while I talk to my mother more frequently, the conversations I have with Ira are often more interesting, because he still offers new paths for me to explore. I don’t call him “Dad.” – Actually, more often than not, I address him by any number of affectionately insulting nicknames, of which the first was Gorilla Gams (his legs are seriously hairy) – but, however tacitly, we both acknowledge that he has been more of a father to me than anyone else in my life.

Stepfathers are special creatures. Like fathers, they are tasked with some of the messier aspects of parenting, but without the intrinsic parent-child bond, and without the same recognition. So, while the tea I’m drinking this morning is not made in Ira’s style – with a used teabag and water microwaved until it’s just beyond tepid – I raise this cardboard cup in his honor. He had to wait until I was twenty-five years old and married for me to tell him I love him. Here’s hoping other stepfathers have a shorter waiting period.

Let me make one thing clear: those tag lines promising “no more tangles” and “no more tears” were filthy lies.

You should be funny, but laughing only with me and never at me. You should be prepared to offer mugs of hot coffee or glasses of cold tea, as necessary, and you should be certain never to let me feel discouraged, even when I write something that patently sucks.

You should be maternal, cajoling and nagging, but also cheering me on, loudly.

Oh, right, and you shouldn’t cost me a cent.

Green and blue foam “noodles,” the aquatic colors matching the stripes in my swimsuit, were my toys, alternately forming an ersatz raft, or a free-floating obstacle course.

I floated on breeze-created waves with my eyes closed, later opening them to sudden disorientation caused by the leafy canopy of the trees, and higher up, the beginnings of a mackerel sky.

Yesterday, she’d moved her web away from the shelter of the trees, perhaps to improve her tan, or catch a juicer form of insect.

Today, I walked out to see her, and the web is gone, but for a single strand. I am strangely bereft, and the yard seems lifeless. Birds and buzzing things don’t fill her gap.

If they were watching a movie, he would watch her face, cataloguing each expression as it passed across her face – interest, amusement, frustration, satisfaction. Even if it was a film he had no interest in seeing, watching it with her was an experience not to be missed.

Sometimes she would catch him in the act. If she was brushing her hair, or standing in the kitchen, with her leg on the counter as if it was a barre, she would see him from the corner of her eye, he thought, and stop what she was doing, and ask if he needed something.

I’m just looking at you, he would answer. Can’t I look at you? And she would blush very prettily, and shrug and tell him that she supposed he could.

He thought the way she ate fruit was positively sinful. Grapes were pressed between her full berry-red lips, and though he never saw the movement of her jaw when she bit down on them, he saw the pleasure explode into her eyes when the flavor was released. Bananas were nibbled at, savored, and he especially loved to kiss her just after she’d finished one.

But it was the way she ate watermelon that riveted him. She would sit in the blue high-backed chair under the soft pink bulb that lit their kitchen table, with her bare feet dangling just above the floor, and her thick hair twisted into a messy bun, because, she’d explained, she didn’t like the way it felt on the back of her neck.

She didn’t pick up watermelon wedges and eat them sandwich like. Instead, she would lay them flat on a plate, and methodically remove all the seeds, using just one tine of her fork to pull them from the moist pink flesh of the fruit. Then she would begin with the very edge of the slice, and begin eating, using the fork to scoop up each bite.

A single slice of watermelon could last for an hour, with her, for she split her attention between her fruit and whatever book she was reading. She would hold the book open with her left hand, turning pages by half-lifting it and stretching her finger. Her right hand would wield the fork, which she set down after every few bites, to use her napkin, or lift her water glass and take a sip.

Watching her, he could taste the sweet flavor of the fruit, combined with the familiar scent of her sun-warmed skin, and feel her soft curves beneath his fingers.

He thought she was beautiful.