Warrior Pose (29 page)

I'm struck by how much of American culture is formed by television shows and their relentless streams of commercials. It reminds me of a night long ago, during my first news job in Eureka, when our television station, KVIQ, got knocked off the air during primetime.
The phone banks lit up immediately. I was the only one there, preparing the 11
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newscast. Out of curiosity, I began to randomly answer some of the calls. People were angry, shocked, even frightened, demanding the problem be fixed immediately or their favorite programs scheduled for rerun.

“I've been waiting all week for this show,” one caller almost screamed. “How can you do this to me?”

I did my best to explain how the programming was fed in from a cable by the parent company of our station in San Francisco. It had malfunctioned. There was no way to know when it would come back online and there would be no rerun. Many callers went ballistic, like addicts in withdrawal. Even though at the time I was making my living by being on TV, I never related to those shows very much and wondered why we allowed ourselves to become so manipulated and dependent on our TV sets, living vicariously and separated from reality. It was all I could do to keep from suggesting that the agitated callers relax and read a book or maybe talk to their kids.

“Why don't you join Rotary?” Marshall is a new friend who does village banking in the third world. “We meet every Wednesday for lunch at the Hotel Del. You can launch a service project, get involved.”

His offer is intriguing. There are more than 250 members in Coronado Rotary: bankers, lawyers, accountants, money managers, retired admirals, city council members, and the mayor. The club is wellheeled and funds projects around the world, including clean-water systems in Africa, facial surgery for deformed children in Mexico, and camps for disabled kids at a facility just south of town. It's an opportunity to be involved. Do something meaningful again. Widen my shrunken world. I'm eager to join, but have to confess that I can't sit for the meetings. Marshall calls the next day to say that the hotel staff came to the rescue, agreeing to bring a poolside lounge into the ornate conference room where the club meets weekly for lunch.

By the time I've attended my third meeting, I have an idea for a new Rotary project that I could spearhead. When I think of
humanitarianism, the first person who comes to mind is Father Joe from the Klong Toei slum in Bangkok. I call him in Thailand and ask what we could do to help in his efforts to combat the sex-slave industry. “Village banking,” Joe says immediately. “We need to give these women a way to start small, home-based businesses and become self-reliant.”

Inspired by these words, I launch a Rotary project to bring village banking to the poor women of Thailand and fly Father Joe to Coronado to speak to our club. Within a few months, and a ton of help from my fellow Rotarians, we're able to raise enough money to establish the first Grameen Village Bank in Thailand. Grameen is a revolutionary system of compassionate banking spreading throughout the third world that provides small, low-interest loans to people with no assets. For as little as twenty dollars, an impoverished Thai woman can establish a home-based business, often something as simple as growing vegetables for market or weaving baskets. This allows her to generate survival income and helps her keep her daughters out of the hands of the sex-slave gangs. It also keeps me connected to my past life and gives me a sense that I'm still an active citizen of the world, contributing something to humanity, doing something with my life.

I've always had compassion for those who suffer. Every time I was in a war zone or place of crisis, I was always deeply touched by those hit hardest, especially the children. I did everything in my power to show the world what was happening and tried to help in any way I could. This project in Thailand reminds me of that part of myself—the person once filled with care and concern. But I can't shake a growing sense of malaise and ennui, especially lying down in the back of the room at Rotary on my lounge chair. I'm fat and getting fatter. In a body brace. My cane leaning against the armrest. My meal precariously balanced on my belly. There are food stains on my shirt and a mess on the floor beneath me.

The sense of being weak, tired, unworthy, and insignificant is like a tsunami always washing over me. There's no way I can ever travel to Thailand to see what we have created, and I'm not sure I even have the energy to keep pushing the project and raising more
funds. Worse, at every Rotary lunch I'm always being treated like the walking wounded, and I cringe every time someone offers to bring me a dessert or help me stand up. I know they mean well, but it always makes me feel eviscerated and impotent.

Bottom line: Instead of being a prominent foreign correspondent dashing off to a new adventure, covering an important story that helps chronicle the history of the world, I am now the fat crippled man lying on the lounge in the back of the room dribbling his food all over himself. My identity is so shattered that I can't even begin to face it, much less piece any of it back together, and while I don't like it when others show me pity, I'm dripping with self-pity. It's like I'm falling into a bottomless abyss.

To deal with this emotional turmoil, Prozac has been added to my regimen of prescription medications. It's an antidepressant that numbs my mind, helping me forget about what my life has become. It also makes me feel like I'm pulling a thick wool mask over my head to hide from the world. Like running away without going anywhere. When it works, I'm almost happy and Pamela and I still manage to share moments of laughter, romance, and intimacy. Then periods of darkness hit like sudden storms. I lash out again, start new arguments, brood and withdraw even further. As a result, we spend more time in different rooms. It must be difficult for her, wondering what she has gotten into and where it's all going.

“You have great compassion for others,” Father Joe says after I confide some of this to him on one of his return visits to Coronado Rotary. “But I see your inner turmoil as well.” He is the only one I've told about the heartache and the darkness. As he continues to counsel me, he pulls his chair close to my recliner and speaks with a mixture of tenderness and strength. “You need some compassion for yourself. You have to accept what your life has become. And you need to find your Soul.”

My heart is heavy as an anvil, and I'm aching inside for something to grasp onto, but I'm uneasy about where Father Joe is heading. I'm all too familiar with the violence that has been committed throughout the ages in the name of someone's God. I've witnessed firsthand the role religious intolerance can play in war. I've reported on the
scandals, hypocrisy, and self-righteousness of various creeds and cults. I don't think I can handle being preached to, I'm not sure that I can ever accept what's happened to me, and I can't imagine joining a church.

Father Joe surprises me. “I don't care if it's Christ or Krishna, Buddha or Mohammad,” he says. “It's not about religion, it's about Spirit. Anybody who tells you their way is the only way, even if it's a jolly old Catholic priest like me, is a deluded fool.” Father Joe's credo of activism and engaged spirituality has always touched me at the deepest level. Jesus said we should serve the poor, turn the other cheek, and love our neighbors, and that's what this wonderful man does. He has his priorities straight and practices what he preaches. “You see,” Father Joe continues, “no matter how big our field of vision might be, there's always a bigger picture. Find the true voice of your Soul and listen to it as carefully as you can. Then do your best to follow the advice you receive.”

With this, he reaches out and takes my hand into his as a rare flood of tears begin streaming down my face. I don't quite know what to do with Father Joe's advice, but this remarkable man has become one of the few people in the world I completely trust, and I'm desperate to find some meaning in the void my life has become.

Our Coronado friends have long invited us to join their community church. Inspired by Father Joe, I put my resistance aside and make this my first tenuous step. Raised by secular parents, I have rarely attended a church service and never could relate. Fortunately, the community church is light, more of a social event than a service. The pastor is affable, nondogmatic, and humorous. I listen, analyze, and try to accept it all—but I am doubtful, cynical, suspicious. Still a journalist at heart.

Yet even though I'm so wary, I keep returning to the Sunday services. There's something stirring inside of me, a nascent spiritual sense I've never known. Tonight, just before falling asleep, I said my very first prayer:

The next day, Wednesday, March 13, 1996, we learn that Pamela is pregnant.

CHAPTER 17

Shining Light by the Sea

I
'D LIKE TO THINK the pregnancy is a divinely orchestrated moment, an answer to my first prayer, but my rational mind dismisses this idea as patently absurd. We've wanted to have a child for more than a year and have been seeing a fertility specialist for months. The treatments finally worked. It would be foolish to think otherwise.

Still, it's given me a sense of purpose far beyond anything else in my life and helps me find something within myself I thought was gone forever: hope. Who cares that at forty-eight years old I will be a “dino-daddy” when the child is born? Who cares that I'm disabled and severely limited in what I can do? Why worry that there will be no running on the beach, chasing a ball, camping, hiking, or coaching at his soccer games? People with serious disabilities have proven to be wonderful parents, I tell myself, as I jump into the preparation process with the fervor of old.

Six months into the pregnancy, we learn that our child will be a boy, and we begin turning an upstairs bedroom into a nursery. The centerpiece is a large, white crib with musical mobiles dangling overhead. I even manage to mount a safety gate at the top of the stairs. This accomplishment makes me feel satisfied, like I'm still worthwhile despite my crippled body. Downstairs, we design a playroom with built-in cabinets and a Murphy bed for the eventual playdates and sleepovers with little friends. This is work I used to
be able to do. Now it's far beyond me and I have to hire someone to install everything.

Before we know it, Pamela is in labor and we are in the hospital delivery room. On December 13, 1997, Morgan Bradford Willis arrives in the world.
Morgan
, a name of Welsh and Old English origin, means “great shining light by the sea.” Like most Americans, Pamela and I share European ancestry, and the image of living by the sea and bringing a shining light into our lives feels perfect. I watch Morgan as he makes his debut in the world, and I cut the umbilical cord myself, listening to his first cry. When the doctor places him in my arms, I stare at his tiny face and a new kind of love floods my heart. It's an emotional experience beyond anything I have ever known.