How We Keep Spinning...! The Journey of a Family in Stories

By Kevin Fisher-Paulson

Kevin Thaddeus Fisher-Paulson is beloved all over the San Francisco Bay area, and beyond, for the stories of family he has told as a weekly columnist
for the San Francisco Chronicle. While telling his stories, Kevin has stumbled over more than a few truths about foster care, gay marriage, interracial family, rescue dogs, and cupcakes. Many thousands of print readers in northern California, as well as digital readers around the world, are touched every week by those truths. This book is the first bound collection of selected columns. These are the stories of Kevin, a cop, and his husband Brian, a dancer, along the journey of raising two challenging boys in the Bedlam Blue Bungalow of the outer, outer, outer, outer Excelsior, that most mysterious edge of San Francisco. These stories have drawn a loyal readership of interracial and adoptive families, families dealing with learning challenges and disabilities, gays and lesbians, and people who love the City.

When not writing and parenting, Kevin serves as the Chief Deputy of the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department. He earned a degree in Writing and American Studies from the University of Notre Dame, with subsequent coursework at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop and the University of Oregon. His memoir A Song for Lost Angels, originally published by Fearless Books, earned finalist status in two different independent book publishing contests and is now available under his own imprint, Two Penny Press.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kevin Fisher-Paulson
• Release date: Nov 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463823873

Kevin Fisher-Paulson

When not writing and parenting, Kevin Thaddeus Fisher-Paulson serves as the Chief Deputy of the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department. He earned a degree in Writing and American Studies from the University of Notre Dame, with subsequent coursework at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop and the University of Oregon. His memoir A Song for Lost Angels, originally published by Fearless Books, earned finalist status in two different independent book publishing contests and is now available under his own imprint, Two Penny Press.

Book preview

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE by Leah Garchik

INTRODUCTION: Sometimes the detour is the journey.

1. It doesn’t matter who wins. It doesn’t matter who loses.

2. Never sidestep the tough conversations.

3. Cherish regularity.

4. A White House without a dog is like a Kremlin.

5. The journey is sometimes a circle.

6. What makes us special is what makes us extraordinary.

7. Life goes on, even when you don’t expect it.

8: Sitting on the pavement happens sometimes.

9: Make room for Papa.

10: Keeps spinning!

11: March for those who cannot march.

12. Don’t tell the bumblebee she cannot fly.

13. Do call it Frank.

14. All lives matter.

15. Life is short: Eat the bacon.

16. Middle names reveal our true selves.

17. Stay angry, and be kind.

18. Hug someone today. And really mean it.

19. We are all in the outer, outer, outer, outer Excelsior.

20. We all read the Chronicle.

21. Every once in a while that blue piece that you’ve had in your hand for so long, the one that doesn’t fit anywhere, turns out to be a corner of the sky.

22. Life gets renewed. There is no death. There is only change.

23. Let go of expectations.

24. A family shares a certain degree of nescience.

25. 389 months of gay matrimony is no prettier and no uglier than any other matrimony.

26. A rose by any other demonym would smell as sweet.

27. Teachers do what they do by nurturing, and you can’t do that while packing heat.

28. Lunacy gets a bad rap. The earth is bipolar, and it keeps spinning.

29. Try typing with nine fingers only.

30. Sometimes the meaning of life is Covfefe.

31. Don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.

32. It only matters what you call yourself.

33. E pluribus unum.

34. Family means nobody gets left behind.

35. Sometimes your oldest enemy becomes your oddest friend.

36. If angels whisper mysteries, then the secret is to let go.

37. Always believe in your son.

38. Sometimes the parts that don’t match make the best family.

39. Dogs are better than children.

40. When in Rome…

41. Don’t make any plans for after you’re dead.

42. The wheels keep spinning even you don’t know why.

43. Sometimes people can change only when they go inside.

44. Resistance is needed now more than ever.

45. Love as hard as you can for right now.

46. Growing up is a hard thing to measure.

47. A geek is a very knowledgeable and enthusiastic person.

48. The holiday is not about what we eat, but who we love.

49. Every family has its happy faults.

50. When life gives you broken furnaces, make s’mores.

51. Celebrate this day with a cup of grog, Matey.

52. Most of the good curse words have obstruents.

53. We Wish You a Merry Samhain!

54. Recognize the zenith of your nadir.

55. Subtlety is not always the best strategy.

56 Gratitude cannot be reduced to an emoji.

57. It takes a nerd to be a coyote whisperer.

58. Even when your heart is broken, your heart goes on.

59. Sometimes you got to tear down as well as tear up if you want to make the family better.

60. What did the duck say at the lipstick counter?

61. Coach Kevin says don’t say anything mean.

62. Treasure each moment with your family, because you can only be sure of the now.

63. Some days I’m the only calm person kneeling in a pool of blood.

64. We may not be journalists, but we are on a journey.

65. You never know which words will be the last. You might as well be kind.

EPILOGUE: This column is about an Irish woman from a small town.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is dedicated to Zane and Aidan, my two sons. You are both likely to roll your eyes when you read this, but know that the family the four of us have created is the greatest miracle I have ever known.

PREFACE

I always thought it would be elegant to have a neighbor with a hyphenated last name, and Kevin Fisher-Paulson turned out not only to fulfill that dream, but also to class up the back page of The Chronicle, where I used to live. It wasn’t that either of us had been raised as sophisticates.

He’s from Queens, I’m from Brooklyn. We both grew up as members of the scorned bridge and tunnel crowd. The class he’s brought to his weekly Chronicle column was the ease with which he’s shared his life.

Reading his fast-flowing column — being drawn into his family, his habits, his history, his marriage, his fatherhood — has been like watching Fred Astaire dance. His personal story is complex. He is a gay man in a marriage of many years, a relationship tied together many years before any legislature thought to make it legal. He and his husband have two sons, boys born into difficult circumstances and lovingly adopted and reared by the couple. It’s often been a winding path, but Kevin’s been able to take his readers’ hands (and hearts) and lead us down the path with him. The best artists make it look easy, and Kevin makes it look easy every week.

I imagine him writing every column with a smile on his face. It’s a hospitable expression. He has a way of inviting you into his life without explaining, assuming you’ll understand, that you won’t need formalities, that after a few paragraphs you’ll be on a first-name basis with everyone who populates his personal village. And you are.

You feel immediately as though you’re sitting at the kitchen table in that blue bungalow in the outer, outer, outer… oh, just start reading and you’ll be right there, alongside him.

That’s where I was as one of his fans, and that’s literally where I was in the printed Chronicle.

It’s a joy to give a neighbor a cup of sugar. — Leah Garchik

Leah Garchik was a longtime next-door columnist to Kevin Fisher-Paulson in the San Francisco Chronicle.

INTRODUCTION

Sometimes the detour is the journey.

My parents were called Hap and Nurse Vivian. Hap was short for Harold Aloysius Paulson and Nurse Vivian was a nurse, the only one for about six blocks in South Ozone Park, so all the neighbors went to her if they needed an ear pierced or an ear stitched back on.

Parked in front of our row house was Hap’s red Chevrolet station wagon, the kind with the two big fins coming out of the back. There was a hole in the floor on the Passenger side, so Nurse Vivian never wore high heels. Once every six months or so, Hap loaded up his wife and three sons to drive the family to visit his in-laws in Johnstown. Because Hap hated maps, we never travelled the same way twice, sometimes stopping for fried tomatoes at the Dutch Pantry, sometimes getting just plain lost. This was at night, and Nurse Vivian lost her patience around about the third back country road, at which point Hap said, Vivian, I’m following the moon.

One autumn, we’d gotten as far as the Pennsylvania turnpike, and the old Chevrolet gave up her muffler. Wouldn’t start. The rain got heavy then, and Nurse Vivian cried, but Hap, he put his hand on her shoulder and said, Vivian, the flat tires, the getting lost, the detours. They are all a part of the journey. Maybe even more important than the getting there.

Nurse Vivian said a quick Hail Mary, jumped out of the car, and stuck out her thumb. Turns out the driver who stopped was going to a house two blocks away from her sister. Turns out even hitch-hiking was part of the journey.

In the next fifty years, I met a chorus boy named Brian, then in the Broadway production of La Cage Aux Folles. We fell in love, got married (illegally), ran away, dogs found us, children found us, got married again, and for the most part, have lived happily ever after. He continued hoofing, and I became a deputy sheriff, thus fulfilling the Western stereotype of the deputy and the dance hall girl.

We found a bungalow in the outer, outer, outer, outer Excelsior, which had just enough backyard for our pack of rescue Pekes. Sixteen years ago, in a story told in another book, we fostered medically fragile newborn triplets — one with a hernia, one with a broken arm, and the third with a hole in his heart and a colostomy. We nursed them to health, and about this time, Brian and I bought an actual car, a Saturn Vue we called the Griffin. Buses are well and good, but just try getting a three-seat stroller onto the BART. The miles rolled by.

Around the ten-thousand-mile point, we lost the triplets to the idiocracy that is California’s foster care system.

But then we met Zane. Zane was a crack baby, born addicted with a series of challenges. He did, however, have the most personality we’d ever seen in a ten-month-old. He chose us, moved in and once again I became Daddy, and Brian became Papa.

Aidan, a boy with a completely different set of challenges, also chose us two years later.

Somewhere along the years, the Griffin got hit one too many times, and we found a lovely little Prius we call the Kipcap.

The journey has never been straightforward. We’ve driven the Kipcap across the bridge when the doctor feared Aidan had meningitis. We raced the Kipcap to Saint John’s School the day Aidan got his head stuck in a concrete staircase. The Kipcap rolled all the way to Davis Veterinary Medical Center for our crippled dog Bandit to have a chance to walk.

We’ve gotten lost many times along the way. The boys flushed magnets down the toilet and the sewer line broke. Zane got expelled from day care, from grade school, from middle school. The dining room burnt down, but the kitchen table remained. And we figured out somewhen that just sitting at the table, holding hands, saying grace and eating spaghetti was the best rest stop we would ever find.

Along the way, I’ve told the story of this journey, and like in the Canterbury Tales, we’ve met pilgrims who were making the same trip, towards this mysterious place called family. And I learned that I had to look in the rearview mirror, to understand where we had been, before I could put the car in drive.

Hap was right. Sometimes the detour is the journey.

Nurse Vivian was right as well. Sometimes you got to stick your thumb out and ask for help.

1

It doesn’t matter who wins. It doesn’t matter who loses.

The Excelsior Baseball Diamond is so small that little leaguers are discouraged from swinging for the fences lest they hit one of the cars parked on Madrid Street.

Not that I need to worry about that with my ten-year-old son. Aidan plays baseball with the Saint John Eagles. He’s what coaches call a daisy picker. Like other children with ADHD, Aidan loses interest sometime after the second pitch. But he can tell you about any raven flying overhead, and the Excelsior Baseball Diamond has an excellent sky to watch, bright blue in the center, with occasional Maxfield Parrish clouds skimming the horizon of the San Bruno Mountains.

While Aidan stands in the outfield staring at the La Precita murals, my twelve-year-old son Zane rides his skateboard to the basketball court to play pickup. Zane got himself expelled from parochial school last year, and so is not encumbered by the peer pressure of organized sports.

One of those murals reads Coming together through sports.

The Archbishop doesn’t know this, but in the San Francisco Youth Baseball League (SFYBL) there is no such thing as traditional marriage. But no gay marriage either. They don’t ask who’s the husband and who’s the wife. They don’t ask me who’s the deputy and who’s the dancer with Sean Dorsey Dance.

No, the only question they ask of any couple is, Who’s the coach? and Who brings snacks?

I coach. (My husband Brian brings snacks.) When I grew up in South Ozone Park, my older brothers, when choosing sides for a stickball game on Sutter Avenue, always relegated me to not even home plate, but first base umpire. But here in San Francisco I coach baseball.

Brian says that I coach because I’m the loud one. My style consists of yelling what the kids already know (HIT THE BALL! CATCH THE BALL!) occasionally peppered with phrases I picked up from other coaches (You’re on the bump next inning) and gestures like slapping my thighs (Keep your knees bent in the infield).

However, what I do best is stand there when a ten-year-old has struck out in the last inning and let him cry on my shoulder. You’d be surprised at how important this task is.

But this is community. Every parent gets a position. Could be the woman with the hijab coaching third base. Could be a guy on the Board of Supervisors bringing granola bars.

The refreshment bringers have their own code, which they do not explain to the coaches, but this much I understand: bring lemonade for the hot afternoon games at Moscone Field and bring a flask for the early evening games at Miraloma. Took me a while to figure out which Dads had espresso in their Starbuck’s cups, and which ones had beer.

And because this is community, no one loses.

On the Excelsior Baseball Diamond, my family is not unique. Yes, we have three rescue dogs who bark at the pitcher. Yes, we have two rescue sons, neither of whom pays attention to the game. And, yes, Brian insists that I am the rescue husband. For the Fisher-Paulsons a good day consists of better than a D-minus on the test, and the Fire Department not being called in. My oldest son is black and my youngest son is of mixed race, but in the San Francisco Youth Baseball League we never assume that the red-headed shortstop has the red-headed father. This has been a rainy season in San Francisco, and for unknown reasons, the majority of the precipitation has occurred on Friday nights. Thus the first three Saturday games were cancelled. But on the fourth Saturday, the Eagles walked out onto the field at Madrid and Moscow, threw a few balls around and waited. And waited. And waited. The umpire arrived. The other team never did. I walked up to our head coach, a handsome Latino guy with enough enthusiasm for both of us, and said, Do me a favor. Write Aidan down as pitcher.

Doesn’t matter. This is a forfeit.

Yeah, I know. But now I can say he pitched a perfect game.

The Excelsior (Latin for Ever Upward) is a forgotten neighborhood, the last working-class neighborhood in the city. The one that Starbucks refuses to move to; even Peet’s will not lay claim. You won’t find the history of the Excelsior Baseball Diamond on Wikipedia.

The Eagles strike out a lot. They walk the batters. They drop the ball.

But San Francisco is a baseball town. Let San Jose have hockey. Let Santa Clara have football. We have the Giants. And even in the most remote neighborhood, on our secret baseball diamond, we have little girls who sometimes catch the ball. And little boys who sometimes hit the pitch.

And it doesn’t matter who wins. It matters only that we have a few good moments on a sunny Saturday afternoon. And every once in a very long while, the game is perfect.

2

Never sidestep the tough conversations.

The Bedlam Blue Bungalow in the outer, outer, outer, outer Excelsior suffers from Lousy Housekeeper Syndrome.

Brian/Papa dances five jobs, so he’s got an excuse. But when I come home, I focus on the boys and the dogs, not the dishes. My mother, Nurse Vivian said that she’d rather have a happy family than a clean house, and it’s her one advice I actually