Jill Barnett - New Beginnings

For Mike, his children—watching them grow up, the boys who pulled funny but awful pranks on each other, his imaginative daughter and her stories, and Mickey the fearless, who would try anything because his brothers did it—made Mike understand what his own father has missed.

Early on, Mike made his decision about what kind of father he wanted to be: a father who kept the peace and used bargaining chips, who went out of his way to make everything even for his children as much as possible.

He gave the older ones both the same bike on the same Christmas. Each child always had the same number of gifts, even the same dollar amount spent; it was a pattern that lasted until the two oldest boys were teenagers, when his work ethic came into play and he made Scott and Phillip earn the right to use the car or boat keys.

But for most of their lives, he had chosen to be a father who measured the cake into even sections before anyone ever cut it. Unlike March, who from the time when the kids were young, would let them battle it out or choose to make her life easier by picking the winner with some trumped-up reason the boys always bought into without a lick of resentment.

But then along came Mickey, the youngest and his namesake, who grew up trying to find a place amid all the strong Cantrell personalities. He was close to his mother in a way lost to Mike. To his sister Molly, he was half pet and half annoying little brother, the one who chanted stupid kissing rhymes out the window during her teenaged years whenever a boy came to pick her up for a date. He was challenged by a pair of brothers who were more than a decade older, and who he worshipped at the same time he constantly tried to keep up with them.

To level the playing field full of powerful 9.75 siblings, Mickey had to be a 10.0. He learned to throw caution and thought and fear out the window and “just do it.” Following his brothers boarding down the toughest mountain faces made him fearless before he ever started school, and eventually turned him into a hotshot, the Cantrell who sought the limelight. In almost every moment of family video, Mickey’s antics dominated most of the camera time.

Being the youngest he had to work hard to fight for a place in his family. It wasn’t easy to come after a sister like Molly and his older, dynamic brothers, who taught him he could only earn their attention by breaking all the rules.

Suddenly there was no way Mike could even the playing field for his youngest son. Mickey spent more moments in the emergency room than all the other kids combined, was suspended from kindergarten, held back a year, but then went on to skip the third grade. In junior high, he was the only honor roll student suspended, after he managed to sneak into the administration building and change the school bell system so the bells rang every two minutes. The limelight was important to Mickey, whether the light was positive or negative.

Mike had never been or wanted to be the kind of father who inspired fear in his kids, but Mickey tested his well-thought-out father plan to the limits. There wasn’t a book on parenting or child psychology in existence to help him prepare for raising his youngest son, or to make him understand Mickey’s surprises that were always waiting around the corner for him.

March gave Molly her old Brownie camera when she was barely ten and bought her a good thirty-five millimeter when she was in junior high and planning a trip to Washington DC with her class. By high school, Mike had built a darkroom for Molly in the back corner of one of the garages and she was chronicling Cantrell life moments in both black and white and color.

One Sunday afternoon, post Forty-Niners’ football, Molly dragged Mike and her out with the excuse that she had an assignment to do a family portrait for a photography project in school.

Indian summer burned through most of California in early October, days where the temperature in the city was still seventy-five degrees at four in the afternoon and the later sunsets would turn the western skies red and purple. It was that warm when Molly insisted they travel across town to the hillside where March and Mike were married, and she took a couple rolls of film of them all over that hillside.

There were moments that afternoon, sitting on a rock or leaning against a twisted cypress tree when March looked up and caught a certain look in Mike’s eye.

He squeezed her shoulder. “I think this was where we were standing when May dumped that Singapore Sling on Rob.”

March began to laugh and ruined their pose.

“Mother! I can’t get a good shot with you bent over.”

“Sorry. Your father’s making trouble.”

“Daddy…please.”

“Okay, shortcake.” Mike leaned in and said, “I can still see your mother swatting bees with that huge straw hat.”

March tried not to laugh again but failed at the image of her mother hitting Mike’s dad in the back of his bald head. “Your father looked pretty dumbfounded when he turned around and saw it was her. I felt sorry for her, standing there embarrassed. She was just so scared of bees.”

“After your mother smacked him a good one, my first thought was to find some way to paint honey all over his head. Figured your mother could get even for the crap he’d put me through.”

March looked at him and patted his hand. “I know. I don’t think he knew how to be any other way.”

“Hel-lo. Earth to parents.” Molly stood in front of them, clearly annoyed. “Would you two please pay attention to me? I need you to look at the camera before I lose the perfect light.”

Mike looked at her. “You need to stop making jokes, sunshine. You heard your daughter. We need to look in the camera before she loses the perfect light.”

March jabbed him in the ribs.

Molly walked back, muttering, “You two are such a problem.”

Mike looked at her. “We’re a problem.”

“Good,” March whispered.

So they spent a Sunday on a hillside, smiling into a camera lens, Mike goosing her or poking her, and annoying their daughter when they laughed too hard. Later, whenever March asked to see the shots, Molly was always too busy. She showed them one or two shots that were not as good as March knew Molly could produce. When March said as much, Molly told her she had turned her only good prints in to her teacher and she would make more copies when she had time.

They spent Christmas that year at their house in Lake Tahoe. On Christmas morning under the tree was the best gift March could ever remember. The photo Molly took of Mike and her was amazing. Their daughter had caught all the love and humor between them as they looked at each—best they each could be because they had each other—captured forever in celluloid.

March had started her official life as a Cantrell on a San Francisco hillside, and four kids and almost thirty-four years later she was still on a San Francisco hillside. Though her generation had once sung about the sounds of silence, the sounds of the city were what she loved: those white mornings when the plaintive notes of foghorns floated above the bay, the deep water and moisture-thick air magnifying every sound so that whispering wasn’t really secretive at all.

At noon, there was the chatter of people at the corner deli on short lunch hours ordering salami and Jack cheese on fresh sourdough (Dijon mustard and pepperocini, no pickles). Muni trams rattled regularly on tracks over the Avenues, and freeway traffic during rush hours hummed like distant swarms of bees. Horns honking, voices, and air brakes, close to home the distant clanging of a cable car bell at Leavenworth & Hyde and the soft rumble of an automobile changing into low gear to power up the hill were merely single moments in a day where the constant din of life was going on around her.