My Half-Sister Jeanne

I met my half-sister Jeanne when I was ten years old.  Before that I did not know she existed.  My father's first marriage and the two children it produced were kept secret from me and my sister, Tracey, until the day in 1966 when my brother Jim rode his Triumph motorcycle out to California from the East Coast, walked into my father's office, and said, "So, where you been?"

A couple of days later my 24-year-old sister Jeanne blew into my life like a fresh breeze through a stale corridor.  

Like all of us Weddles, she was an incredible story teller, capable of transforming any event -- no matter how mundane or traumatic or sad -- into an outrageous slapstick comedy that would have you falling out of your chair with laughter.

When I knew she was coming over to visit I percolated with excitement for days.  Jeanne's coming!  Oh man, it's going to be so great!

She loved to laugh and had a passion for the absurd.  Thus she was the perfect audience for the silent comedies I was buying from Blackhawk Films with my paper route money.  Jeanne got every gag in a Buster Keaton or Laurel and Hardy movie and guffawed over the subtlest gestures or details.

So it was only natural when I began making my own silent comedies -- first with my parents' Sears Super Eight Camera, then with a Yashica Super 800 -- that I would cast Jeanne in the movies.  If she had lived in the 1920s I'm convinced she would have been a great comedienne, a rival to Mabel Normand.  She mugged hilariously, threw her whole body into absurd contortions, and was a hit with audiences every time.

Jeanne's theater of the absurd traveled with her wherever she went.  When my brother Jim and Jeanne and my father all went to Vegas in 1971 to see a stage production of Cabaretstarring our actress friend, the great Jane Johnston, Jeanne, Jim and my father went bar hopping.

The evening got crazier and crazier, until finally Jeanne led the group into the Palomino Club, which was the premiere strip joint in Vegas in those days.  She introduced herself to the manager as Diamond Lil, a headliner on the East Coast Burlesque Circuit.  My father then assumed the persona of her manager and proceeded to negotiate for Diamond Lil to headline at the Palomino.

Nothing ever came of it, of course, and the group moved on to other adventures.  That kind of thing happened with Jeanne all the time.

I became an avid sky diver in my early 20s.  When Jeanne found out I was doing this, she said, "I want to come watch!"  Which is how she ended up in a Cessna prop plane that had no door on its right side.  We ascended to 13,000 feet then each of the parachutists dove out of the open side of the plane.  The pilot forgot Jeanne -- an observer -- was still in the compartment and went into a steep spiraling dive to get back to the airstrip to pick up the next group of sky divers.  By the time he landed, Jeanne looked like a Warner Brothers cartoon character desperately gripping the sides of the compartment, her eyes the size of golf balls.  

Instead of complaining to management about the incident, Jeanne quickly wove it into another hilarious tale that she told over and over again, to great effect.

Then there was the time she was employed at a company in Orange County.  One day her boss, Mr. Gibbons, said he would be working at home and asked Jeanne to bring him some important files from the office.  Jeanne arrived at his house to find the front door open.  She stuck her head into the foyer, and called out, "Mr. Gibbons?"  No answer.  But the stereo was playing easy listening music so she ventured into the house, calling out, "Mr. Gibbons?  Mr. Gibbons?"  

She found him sprawled out on the living room couch, stark naked, feigning that he had fallen asleep.  Jeanne left at once.  When she saw Mr. Gibbons on Monday morning she acted as if nothing had happened and he -- massively uncomfortable -- did the same.

Jeanne did not contact HR because there was no such thing in those days.  She did not cry and go to therapy to process her trauma.  Because there was no trauma.  It was just too juicy an anecdote!  Jeanne quickly transformed it with each telling into a hilarious slapstick romp, always pausing to note that "poor Gibbie" had the tiniest little peepee.  Many times over the years that followed my sister Tracey and I would beg Jeanne to tell "The Mr. Gibbons story" and she always rose to the occasion, adding new comic embellishments each time.

When I wrote Battlestar Galactica, one of the characters, Gaius Baltar, became the leader of a religious sex cult.  I named one of the his primary disciples Jeanne.  When she saw the episode, Jeanne cackled with glee.

In 2015 I wrote an episode of The Strain that recreated the day my brother walked into our father's office to ask, "So, where you been?"  My whole family came to a screening of the episode, including Jeanne.  I sat behind her as it was shown. I had thrown the name of my father's best friend, Ken Shaw, into the scene and when the father character said it, Jeanne laughed and murmured softly, "Ken Shaw."  That's what I miss so keenly -- Jeanne's ability to pick up on the subtlest of personal references in my work.

We didn't know it at the time but that screening was the last time all of the members of our family would be together.  Not long after that Jeanne was stricken by a massive stroke that left her bed ridden and blind.  I visited her a number of times and on the last occasion said, "Jeanne, tell me the Mr. Gibbons story again."  She laughed softly, "Oh poor, Gibbie," she murmured "he had a such a tiny little peepee."

I miss my big sister terribly.  For her memorial I put together video woven from our home movies.  I have attached it here.  Check it out and see for yourself the force of nature that was Jeanne Weddle.

Speaking at the Buster Keaton convention

On Friday night, October 2nd, the International Buster Keaton Society was generous enough to invite me to speak before their convention.

My topic was my memoir, The Birds That Fly Backwards.  While the book is not about Buster Keaton, he looms large in the narrative.  I told the Damfinos (the name we Keaton heads have chosen to call ourselves) how my father introduced me to Keaton, and how that galvanized my imagination and led to me becoming a writer and filmmaker.  

I described my father -- an ex-Marine who had fought in the bloodiest killing fields of the South Pacific.  Dad lived in the fierce grip of post traumatic stress and he inflicted that stress upon his family.  He was moody, explosive, and too often violent.

But he was also incredibly charismatic.  Because he had almost died in combat a number of times and seen friends die, Dad believed in living each moment to the hilt.  His favorite saying when daring someone to step out of their comfort zone in the wild parties he threw was: "You may never pass this way again!"

He terrified me.  But he also fascinated me and I was desperate to connect with him.

Because he was my Dad.

One time I told him I hated school because I had bright red hair and the other kids taunted me by calling me "Red."  Dad said: "Don't you know that one of the greatest comedians alive today is a man named Red Skelton?  He's a great pantomimist, revered the world over.  So the next time those kids call you 'Red,' you say to them, 'Thank you.  It's an honor to be named after a great artist like Red Skelton.'"

Soon I was watching The Red Skelton Hour every week then performing his pantomimes at my father's parties.  People roared with laughter.  And no one roared louder than Dad.  He had a laugh that was a force of nature -- a great wind of hilarity that shook the entire house and was impossible to resist.

Once when I took a particularly spectacular pratfall Dad was there to give me a hand up.  He said, "That was worthy of Buster Keaton himself."

I said: "Who's Buster Keaton?"

In the days that followed Dad recounted the basic facts of Keaton's career and explained why he revered him.  Soon his obsession became mine.  I used my paper route money to buy Keaton movies from the Blackhawk Films mail order catalogue and studied them carefully.

When I was 14 I bought a biography -- Keaton by Rudi Blesh, which remains the best bio on Buster to this day.

In it, Blesh described the development of The Three Keatons vaudeville act.  Buster was trained by his father in the complex art of slapstick clowning.  The two became so close that they could read each other's minds on stage.

But as Joe Keaton pushed 50 he became a severe alcoholic.  He began hitting Buster for real on stage because he resented how his son had stole the limelight, and Buster would have to beat his father off with a broom, while still keeping it funny.  And all the while the audiences screamed with laughter.

Blesh taught me that comedy is tragedy from a distance.  And to be great, a comedian has to draw upon deep and often painful emotional truths and twist the pain to make it comedic.  All great clowns -- from Charlie Chaplin, to Woody Allen, to Richard Pryor, Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, Sid Caesar, Jerry Lewis, Lucille Ball, Lily Tomlin, and Carol Burnett -- understood this.

The book also struck deep because the relationship between Joe Keaton and his son so closely paralleled my relationship to my father.  And like Buster, when I came of age I usurped my father, which was painful for both of us, but something that absolutely had to happen as it does with most fathers and sons.

All of this is described in The Birds That Fly Backwards and I explained it in detail to the Damfinos.  I was floored when I got a huge ovation at the the end, and when people kept coming up to me over the next day and half to say how they were deeply moved by my presentation.

I think this is because most of the presentations at the convention over the past 30 years have focused on historic descriptions of how Keaton's movies were made.

No one had ever spoken about why Keaton's work had such a deep effect on them and why they were drawn to it.  I realized everyone in that theater could have told a story of their own that would differ in specifics but would have much in common with mine. 

We all came to Buster Keaton because he could express our pain and get us to laugh at it.  He made it bearable.  And in a convention all of the people moved by his work can form a new family.  One filled with love and fellowship and passion.

It was one of the greatest weekends of my life.  Thank you Damfinos everywhere! 

Happy Birthday Buster Keaton

Happy Birthday Buster Keaton!  He was born 130 years ago today.

For the past two days, I have been attending the Annual Convention of the International Buster Keaton Society in Muskegon, Michigan.  It has been an incredible experience.

Two days ago, a group of us took a tour of the Bluffton neighborhood on the shores of Lake Muskegon.  This is where Buster Keaton spent every summer of his boyhood from 1905 until 1917, when his family's vaudeville act broke up.  Here he could leave the pressures of performing and constant travel from one city to another behind and for two or three months play baseball, pilot his motor boat around the lake, fish, devise elaborate practical jokes, chase girls, and spend time with his family -- his father Joe, mother Myra, sister Louise, and brother Harry.

The Keatons bought property in Bluffton on a hill overlooking the lake in the summer of 1905.  America was still a half wild nation.  The frontier had just recently been settled.  Millions upon millions of acres of open land stretched in great expanses across the heaving continent, much of it still incredibly cheap.  A decade earlier, Buster's father had participated in the land rush at Oklahoma's Cherokee Strip to stake a homestead claim.  And a decade before that the United States Cavalry had been fighting Native American tribes on the Great Plains.

By 1905 Joe Keaton no longer needed to homestead.  He was a headliner in vaudeville -- then the dominant form of popular entertainment -- and had entered the ranks of the middle class.  After buying the lakeshore property in Bluffton, he became a real estate promoter for the area.

Within a few years hundreds of vaudevillians had settled here.  Why Bluffton?  Respectable white Protestants regarded actors as undesirables.  Most fine hotels refused to rent them rooms.  Instead, actors and performers had to accept being segregated in theatrical boarding houses.  Just as the Irish had settled in Boston and the Jews in Brooklyn, and the Polish and Germans in Pittsburgh, the actors now settled on this undeveloped beachfront to build a community of their own.

The modest wood bungalows that lined the unpaved streets housed magicians, comedians, singers, animal trainers, and acrobats.  Since they were not welcome in the Wasp yacht clubs of Muskegon, the actors opened their own yacht club in Bluffton, and their own nightclub, and their own baseball field.  They had their own taxi service, which consisted of an elephant owned by one of the animal trainers.  The pachyderm gave drunken revelers rides home from the saloon, or the ball field, or the beach.

The Keatons and other actors had their own boat docks and their own vessels, which ranged from small ten-foot skiffs to huge yachts.

Today, a surprising number of those houses still stand.  Bluffton remains a bucolic vacation town, quiet and filled with friendly people.  Many of them threw their doors open for us and proudly told us about the history of their homes and their neighborhoods.

The Keaton house was torn down decades ago, but a new house with an almost identical footprint sits on the same lot, along with the original retaining wall that still has the names of Buster's parents carved into its aging cement.  They were engraved there in 1914.

As a teenager, Buster invented all kinds of elaborate Rube Goldberg contraptions.  When a neighbor who lived just up the hill complained about tourists using his outhouse without his permission -- indoor plumbing was decades in the future -- Buster rigged a trip wire that caused the walls of the outhouse to collapse and expose the interloper for all the neighborhood to see.  I had read about this many times, but it was something to actually stand on the hill and look at the spot where the trick outhouse once stood.

There were many other outlandish inventions.  A trick fishing pole that was connected to pulley underneath a dock to fool a tourist into thinking he'd hooked a massive underwater creature while Buster and his friends urged him to keep reeling in the monster.  Elaborate alarm clocks that went through fantastic mechanical chain reactions before snatching the covers off of snoozing neighbors, and so on, and so on.

But two stories I heard the other day affected me more than the comedic ones.  Like one of my other heroes, Sam Peckinpah, Buster Keaton populated his movies with layers of references from his private life.  This was more than an inside joke.  It was a way of personalizing his films, which gave them an aura of truth that made his comedies both funnier and more more poignant.

We heard two such anecdotes the other day.  One of Buster's neighbors in Bluffton was a vaudevillian named Big Joe Roberts.  Roberts had a yacht that tied up to his personal dock.  It was called "Damfino."  Keaton gave that name to his doomed ocean-going vessel in his classic short comedy The Boat.  It conveyed Keaton's stoic attitude toward the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.  At the end of The Boat, Buster and his family end up marooned on a desert island in the pitch of night, surrounded by a void of inky black darkness.  When Keaton's wife asks him where they have landed, he shrugs and mouths the words, "Damned if I know."  Or Damfino, which was also the name of the doomed vessel that brought them to this limbo.

It summed up a fatalistic attitude that Keaton maintained in his personal life and as the stoned-faced character he played in his movies.

The other story we were told was about a boating accident that occurred in the waters right below the Keatons' house.  It happened after Buster left there for good to go to New York to break into the movies.  Kids racing a speedboat lost control of it and two people were thrown out of the boat and drowned.  Keaton knew the victims and was filled with remorse when he heard the news.  He told friends he wished he had been there because he felt he could have saved the victims.

Years later, Buster staged an almost identical boating accident in the thrilling climax to his film The Cameraman (1928).  But in the movie -- shot in Newport Harbor, south of Los Angeles -- Buster saves a young woman.

The tragedy he failed to stop in life was averted in the fictional world of film.  This is what Keaton taught me: using art as a vehicle for healing your personal wounds.  And when you do that, it's a sure bet you are addressing the wounds of your readers or audience.  Art helps us come to terms with the emotional conflicts we fail to solve in life. 

My Fathers Four Kids

Out of my father's four kids, my half-sister Jeanne had the roughest, most conflicted relationship with him.

Jeanne was Dad's first child, born while my father was in the South Pacific, fighting the Japanese.  Dad often told the story of how he found out he was a father.  He was coming down a muddy road in the jungle, returning from a "push" (Marine-speak for a military offensive) when his unit came upon a group of Marines headed the other way, going into the fight my father was just leaving.

One of the Marines in the opposite column was a friend and he shouted to my father, "Hey, Slim Jim!  You're a father!  I just heard it over the Mosquito Network!  Your wife had a little girl!"  The Mosquito Network was set up by the armed services to give soldiers in the field a feeling of connection with America.  Big band performances were recorded, and so were personal announcements and messages to the soldiers from loved ones back home.  The LP records were shipped to the South Pacific and played over short wave radio.  That's how it came to be announced that Slim Jim now had a daughter named Jeanne.

My father returned from the war filled with the violence and aggression that the Marines and the enemy had instilled in him.  Things did not go well with his young daughter.  Now four years old, Jeanne had been raised by her mother and grandmother -- a household of women.  Her father arrived as an invading alien presence and she was not happy about it.

On the first night, Jeanne walked right into her mother's bedroom, as she often did, hoping to sleep with Mommy.  To her abject horror, this alien creature called "Dad" had taken her place.  Her eyes widened as she realized neither of them had any clothes on.   Dad yelled at her to get out. 

There was another story about those early years that Jeanne and my father liked to tell at family gatherings.  They would trade off in mid-story, each one handing portions of the narrative to the other.  And they both laughed as if it were hilarious.  

But it wasn't.  It was a horror story that we were all being encouraged to view as funny to help the two of them deny the stark underlying reality.

Here it is:

Dad was sitting in front of the radio, listening to a ball game as he spread red hot horse raddish over crackers and devoured them.  Jeanne appeared before him and said she wanted some.  Dad said she couldn't have any because the horse radish was too hot.  Jeanne insisted.  Dad denied her.  Finally, Jeanne went ballistic.  As Dad liked to tell it, Jeanne had been spoiled by living in a house full of women.  Any time she was refused something, she threw a shrill tantrum and got her way.  Dad decided it was time to teach Jeanne a lesson.

Jeanne would lean close to Dad as he told this story, her eyes shining with amusement.  Except if you looked closely it was not joyful.  It was amusement that fought desperately to hide her darker feelings.  "And you taught me, all right, didn't you Dad?"

She would bray laughter and Dad would return a knowing chuckle until someone would plead, "So tell us what happened!"  Jeanne would nudge my father and say, "Tell 'em, Dad."

And so Dad told of how he watched Jeanne pitch a fit.  "It was incredible.  She was bouncing off the walls and ceiling, screaming because that always worked before, she always got her way.  So finally I said, 'Fuck it!  You want some?  Okay, here ya go.'"  Dad shoveled a heaping pile of mouth blistering horse radish onto a cracker and shoved it into Jeanne's hollering mouth.  

Jeanne's eyes popped wide with astonishment and then she shrieked -- not a tantrum scream this time, a scream of pure agony as she rushed to the bathroom to throw up.

We did our best to laugh, and Jeanne encouraged us, leaning against my father and saying affectionately, "Oh, Dad..."

All of us kids were abused to varying degrees by our father, but Jeanne got the worst of it by far.  When we all reunited in California, my half-brother Jim was much more adept at handling Dad.  This was in part because Dad walked out of his first marriage when Jimmy was very young, so he did not have the traumatic memories that Jeanne had.

When she became an adult, Jeanne and my father had long periods of sustained closeness that would inevitably be disrupted by a fight or fit of rage from Dad.  Jeanne's method of dealing with Dad was to withdraw.  Completely.  She would not come see him or return his calls for months at a time.  Once they did not talk for more than a year.

This was a passive-aggressive move, not the best one for resolving conflicts, but it inflicted considerable anxiety on my father.  He would talk incessantly about Jeanne, wonder why she had cut him off, because in Dad's mind he was always the injured party, never the aggressor.  It was fascinating to watch Dad rewrite events as he described them -- even when I had been there to witness them.  He recast himself as an innocent, a cool-headed loving father who thirsted for tranquility.  In truth, he desperately wanted to be that kind of father, but constantly fell short, and he knew it.

One time when they had not talked for months, my father pulled his car next to Jeanne's at an intersection.  He frantically waved at her, rolled down the window, and called out to her, but Jeanne just stared straight ahead and drove off when the light turned green.  Dad was devastated.  Years later I asked Jeanne about the incident.  "Of course I saw him," she said.  "I ignored him because I knew it would drive him crazy."

And yet they loved each other.  In the good times, there was nobody more fun to be around than Jeanne and Dad.  

In my teenage years I collected silent movies -- by Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, and Charlie Chaplin.  There was no better audience than Dad and Jeanne.  They howled to the heavens with laughter.  Then I asked Jeanne to be in the Super Eight silent comedies that I was making with my Yashica Super 8 Camera.  Jeanne was hilarious!  A born actress!  Any time she came to our house I stuck her in one of my movies.  Sometimes she wasn't in the mood and I would pout, refusing to talk to her.  

The zenith of our cinematic experiments was Return of the Tramp, a silent movie starring my sister Tracey in Charlie Chaplin makeup.  Tracey was fantastic -- the spitting image of Chaplin.  My father was in it, too.  For years he had begged me to put him in a movie.  I finally granted his wish by casting him as a bartender in a scene with Jeanne, who played "Lil -- The Dance Hall Queen."  Jeanne wore an outrageous curly wig and gyrated so hilariously my father kept cracking up while the camera was rolling.  "Dad, you gotta stop laughing!" I admonished.  "I can't help it," he kept bleating.  "She's so damn funny!"

When I was 13, my father, Jeanne, Jimmy, and his best friend Gary all went on a trip to Juarez, Mexico.  They came back with an assortment of outlandish souvenirs and an even more outlandish set of stories about their experiences.  They had been drinking in a restaurant off the town square when someone started a contest about who could find the craziest souvenir.  One by one, they disappeared into the teeming stalls of vendors and came back with their trophies:  a bamboo and wire bird cage, a velvet Elvis painting, a bullfighter's cap, a gold painted plaster replica of Michelangelo's David.  Then, when properly lubricated, they all went to the cock fights.  Gary was a little too lubricated because halfway through a match he suddenly disappeared from the top row bleacher they were seated on.  "There he is!"  Jeanne cried, point to the ground some ten feet below where Gary lay flat on his back, out cold. 

As I listened to these tales at age 14 they seemed like the most exciting adventures one could possibly imagine.  So I began agitating.  "I want to go to Mexico with you guys!"  Jeanne became my ally, "We have to take David," she said with a wicked laugh.

And so, a year later we went to another Mexican border town, Nogales.  My mother did not go and neither did my sister, Tracey.  But Dad's first wife, Jean -- mother to both Jeanne and Jim -- came.  My father had not seen his first wife in more than 25 years.  At one point as we walked the streets of Nogales, Dad and Jean fell behind us and talked for a long time about their two kids and how proud they were of both of them.  Later I heard Jimmy and Jeanne whispering about how wonderful it was to see their parents reunited, if only for a weekend.  It's the irrational heartfelt dream of many kids from broken homes: to see their divorced parents reconciled.

In the early morning hours we ended up in a Mexican nightclub.  An emcee with a hideous comb-over introduced a series of singers wearing ill-fitting wigs.  Jeanne loved them all.  I can still hear her laugh, reverberating across the club, filled with her lust for the absurd.  That crazy nonsensical chaotic night was one of the greatest in my entire life. 

On our way back to the hotel in Phoenix, we stopped at a gas station.  They still had gas station attendants in those days and one came out to greet us.  He had a red baseball cap and about half his teeth tucked behind his unshaven cheeks.  As he focused his bloodshot eyes upon us, Dad called out, "Ahoy, Bucko!  We're in need of some high test!"  I remember Jeanne doubling over with laughter and saying, "He does look like a Bucko!"

She doubled over again the night my father died.  Not with laughter, but with grief.  Dad was already in a coma when she came through the door and the sight of him in the living room in a hospital bed caused her to break into violent sobs.  "Oh, Dad..." she said with such stricken sadness.  She remained at his side all night, until he drew his last breath at 3:30 in the morning.  Even after he died, she stayed with him, gently stroking the curly black hair on Dad's icy forearm and talking to him in gentle tones about all of their unfinished business.  

Jeanne taught me that relationships are complicated.  People are not made up of one emotional color, but many colors.  Their worst behavior is not the sum of who they are.  Neither is their best behavior.  All of her life, Jeanne yearned for the father who had at times been so cruel to her.  Yearned to be with him, to be close, until she could not stand it anymore and had to go away for a time.  But she always came back.

Just as she always come back to me in the night as I lie in my bed, unstuck in time, traveling through all of the moments of my life.  So often Jeanne is there, with her grand laugh, her love of the absurd, and her love of me and her brother and my sister, Tracey. 

My Mother

I first began writing it as a story about my mother being struck by a brain tumor and the how she dealt with the impact of this tragedy.  But as I was writing the first episode I began to realize the memoir could be much more than that.  I could use the last year of my mother's life as a narrative spine from which a series of flashbacks would sprout to tell a more expansive story of my family.  

The climax of the saga would be the last week of my mother's life, which she spent in my bedroom before dying with my sister and me at her side. 

I hit upon this approach four years ago, while visiting my mother's home town in Ireland.  It was Easter in Blessington, a small farming community just south of Dublin.  On Sunday I climbed the bell tower of our family church, pulled the rope, and rang the bell for my Mom.  It was a profoundly moving experience.

My mother is the hero of The Birds That Fly Backwards.  She was the one who held the family together.  She endured my father's emotional abuse and shielded her children from the many nasty ways in which he betrayed her.  My mother forced my father to strike a bargain to save their marriage.  For the sake of the children.  That phrase has become a cliche.  But reducing it to a cliche denies the painful emotions associated with such a pact.  

My sister and I benefited enormously from this arrangement.  My father also benefited.  He had a domineering personality.  If you walked into our home in the 1960s you would think my father ran the entire show and needed nothing from anybody.  But in fact he desperately needed the emotional equilibrium my mother provided.  If they had divorced, Dad would have fallen apart.  He knew that, which is one reason why he kept rebelling and trying to prove he did not need Mom.

When my father turned 65, my mother revealed she had saved a bunch of money while working as a secretary in an architect's office.  She offered to take Dad on a trip anywhere in the world.  My father said he wanted to go to Guadalcanal, where he had fought as a Marine during World War Two.  And so they went, in 1986.  Once there, Dad broke down and confessed he had lost his identity and emotional equilibrium in the war.  Mom held him and promised to help him regain his stability.  No other woman would have had the tenacity and empathy to do that for someone who had often been so cruel to her.

That was my mother's most important gift to me.  Empathy.  She always tried to see the good in other people.  She never judged them.  She approached everyone with an open heart.  As a writer that has been one of my fundamental principals: to approach every character I write about with empathy, an open heart, and to try to understand them rather than pass judgment on them.  My mother taught me that.

She took me by the hand when I was two and led me along the beach so I could set foot in the ocean for the first time.  She loved the ocean.  In family photos and home movies if a body of water appears in the frame, you will find my mother turned toward it.  "It brings me such peace," she used to say.  She would inhale the sea breeze and you could feel the visceral effect as it filled her with quiet ecstasy.

Every morning and night I walk along the cliff in Malibu and pass the bench she used to sit on during her last year on this planet.  I look out at the ocean where her ashes now swirl and I think of her.  Sometimes I talk to her, expressing gratitude for all she did for me and my sister.  

Her family came from Ireland to start a new life in America.  She couldn't afford to go to college, so she became an American Airline stewardess instead because it was one of the few jobs in the 1950s that gave women a measure of independence and financial freedom.  My father had not even graduated from high school.  But together Gloria and James Weddle grabbed hold of the opportunities of the post World War Two boom and managed to put both of their children through college to provide them with opportunities Gloria and Jim never had.

Whatever their shortcomings, that remains a stunning achievement.