Holding Up the Sky_final EPUB 9.12.25

“My beautiful world is falling apart,” she sang. She turned repeatedly around the room, singing with a bright smile on her face with no apparent recognition of the gravity of her words.

“My beautiful world is falling apart.”

Several weeks later, Linda found Alana playing a hopping game in her bedroom. Alana explained she was hopping from island to island because, she said, “There are crocodiles in the water between the islands.” Linda read the signs and arranged for Alana to see a child psychiatrist. She described him as a “talking doctor.”

Seeing a shrink at the age of four was unusual in those days. To my father, it would’ve been unthinkable. I’d seen a psychologist twenty years earlier after graduate school to help me manage turbulent emotions after returning from the Peace Corps. Dad looked askance. He had asked, “What good will it do?”

Alana’s talking doctor lived in Sausalito, a forty-five minute drive from Berkeley, and the biweekly trip offered an opportunity for Alana and me to escape the drumbeat of medicines, labs, and hospital visits for her sick sister. We eagerly sought to rediscover the magic that Alana and I had invented on playgrounds, at the beach, and during picnics in her first years before Kathryn. On her visits to the “talking doctor,” we would piggyback an outing together.

The wheels made a crunching sound as they rolled over the mixed gravel at the house of Dr. S.

“Here we are, honey,” I murmured. Alana opened her eyes as if on cue. Her proto-meditation complete after a long drive around the San Francisco Bay, she raised her arms so I could unbuckle and lift her out of the car. I opened the gate into the yard of Dr S’s office. “I’ll be right here,” I said quietly, following our routine. Without a word, she followed the short path to the sliding door where the talking doctor was waiting.

An hour later she came trotting out, a bit of a bounce in her step; she seemed refreshed. She was ready for our adventure.

“Where shall we go, Daddy?” she asked, her face wide open, eyes like saucers under arching eyebrows. “What did you decide?”

“I have a special place, a secret place, a place we’ve never been to before,” I announced. She looked up with anticipation. “It’s a place almost nobody knows about. We are going to the bridge, under the bridge.” She beamed as I lifted her into her seat.

“We can go under the bridge?”

“Yes, I know a secret way.”

Then, haltingly, I asked, “Did you enjoy your hour with Dr. S?” Part of me wanted a glimpse of where Dr. S was going with Alana. What was he finding out? But I was questioning myself as well. Was this really the direction I wanted to go with her?

“We played with stickers,” she said. “I told Dr. S a story with the stick-ons.”

“Did you tell him about our afternoon?”

I didn’t know we were going under the bridge,” she said.

“Yup, under!” I decided to stick with my job of creating something fun and memorable for the two of us.

Alana had been over the Golden Gate many times, and we always loved to poke around the Presidio, explore Fort Point, Land’s End, and the beach. But we had never been under the bridge. Somehow, deep inside me, I felt that crawling around the gigantic structure would offer us some solace, a way to see a part of the world that stays in place, that has weathered many storms.

We crossed the Golden Gate from north to south. “Look how high we are,” I said, pointing off toward the city, far away and down below.

“I can see a ship. There’s another one.” I could hear her fingers tapping the glass, her voice pitched with awe.

“And just about underneath us right now, way far down, is where we’re going to be in a few minutes,” I said.

Parking at Fort Point, I found my old passage behind the Fort, a place I had visited often as a graduate student in the 1970s. In those days, (before 9/11), it was possible to scale the steep, grassy slopes and wind one’s way to a point directly under the span.

“Let’s go straight up here, honey,” I beckoned to her, extending my hand as we started up the steep slope. The air was clear and crisp. The wind made our cheeks rosy.

Up we went, holding hands, laughing and giggling, our excitement rising with each step up the grassy hillside. The undercarriage of the bridge dominated our view. Out through the latticework, we could see the afternoon sun shimmering on the Pacific. The steel girders of the huge structure crisscrossed and soared above us. We stood like Lilliputians beneath it.

“Can you see the top, Alana?”

“I can only see the bottom,” she said, peering up into the web work of steel painted International Orange.

The cars made muted whooshes hundreds of feet above us.

“Look, Daddy,” she exclaimed, “a doll.” A weathered Raggedy Ann was lying in the grass. “And there’s a radio.” A small transistor lay battered and forgotten. We poked around at the footings of the great soaring beams. A blanket of urban detritus lay about, undisturbed after a long fall: discarded rivets, car radio antennas, plastic bags, pieces of someone’s diary, a woman’s address written on a corner of a piece of paper, a lighter, a chunk of molded plastic. A small gathering of trash and treasures had made the same fateful drop from high above, each with a story contained in or about it, waiting patiently to be discovered, perhaps put back together.

“What are these big things, Daddy?” Alana said, pointing at some rivets lying in the grass.

“They are called rivets. They are like nails for steel, and they hold things together, like the bridge.”

“Magic holding-together things.” She paused.“They must be magic to hold this giant thing,” she said waving at the bridge.

Piles of rivets, each nearly an inch thick, some a half-foot long, broken and jagged, lay strewn about the hillside. They were worn and looked as though they deserved a rest after a long life of service. Most were fractured, as if from having been mis-struck. They were heavy, of solid steel, covered with faded, reddish-paint matching the strong hue of the mother bridge.

“Oooh, they are heavy,” Alana said, picking one up.

“So right you are, little one. These pegs hold together all those big pieces that go from there to there, up and down, and across,” I said pointing up to the crossbeams. The heads of the rivets formed long, even lines and complicated patterns at the intersections of the beams.

Though thick and heavy, they were tiny compared to the girders they fastened, and we marveled at how the million small steel pegs could hold that massive conglomeration of metal above us.

I stared up, blankly. Where are my rivets? Where do I find rivets to keep my world together? The seismic waves of Kathryn’s illness had stressed the trusses holding up our lives. I could see no way to repair them.

“Can we take some home?” Alana asked. “The holding-together things?”

“The rivets? Great idea,” I replied. “Let’s pick out three or four of the best. You pick three and I will, too.”

We poked around, bending over to sort through the rivets, selecting the ones with the most paint.

“This is like Easter eggs,” Alana squealed, as she darted around.

Her ebullience gave me a small lift out of the gray funk that had come with so many hospital hours visiting her sister.

The Bay air was beginning to cool in the late afternoon, and we made our way back down the hill, many pounds of rivets pulling on my backpack.

At the foot of the hill, we spotted an open gate to Fort Point, a large fort built before the Civil War, now dwarfed and tucked under the bridge that was erected seventy years later. With daylight still left, we clambered up its walls and steps to a small wooden lookout nestled high on the fort wall.

“Your castle, my princess,” I exclaimed, with my hand extended toward the sea. Alana beamed and with fresh energy ran up to me on the parapet walkway and threw her arms around my legs, giving them a tight hug.

“I love being under the bridge, Daddy.” Her head arched up, eyes glistening with joy.

That’s when it hit me. I had taken my four-year-old to a psychiatrist, and here she was giving me therapy. Alana was my magical holding-together thing, a small rivet for me and the family.

“And I love you, sweetheart,” I murmured, my arms pulling her close.

Near us, a large window of the lookout lay open, facing west. Solid beams of honey sunlight bathed the surroundings. I sat Alana on the sill, a few rivets in her lap, and snapped a last photo for the day.With the sun setting behind us, we loaded up the Datsun and headed home, a collection of unlikely, reddish-orange treasures nestled in the seat.