Over The Side

 

I have had vertigo for a long time. Perhaps it is actually Acrophobia. I’m not sure when it started. When I was a young boy, I was the one who was fearless about climbing over the side of a roof on a six or seven story apartment building and making my way down the outside fire escapes to retrieve a ball. I actually earned spare change doing that once in a while.  But something happened as I grew older.

The most recent catalyst was a documentary about New York City by Ric Burns. As the photography depicted the rise of buildings, I could not help but envision myself going off of them, unwillingly. I find the feeling both recurrent and unpleasant.

I never wished to go to the top of the Empire State Building. There was that scene from Sleepless in Seattle that I enjoyed, but it didn’t display the sense of vulnerable height. I guess that I didn’t feel that when I climbed over rooftops.

I do not enjoy the thought of balconies, but I venture out onto them, always. At first I gaze to the horizon, then I look down. I feel the dizziness, that queasy, weak feeling of collapse and what that might mean. It is at that point that I find a grip on myself. I set about the process of affirming that I will live.

I prefer the window seat on an airplane. I don’t feel vertigo then. I don’t think that some emotion will sweep me over the edge. Or propel me through the skin of the plane. I am at relative peace, considering my circumstances.

I think it is that the wind rails at the walls but does not get in. I think it is the wind that has a sense of fate, sometimes. I can only smile as scientific data organizes itself in my mind about what the wind is. Friction and attraction in orbit. Turning in space.

But then I’m up high and the turning is sending me uncontrollably over the edge. What is that? Why does that happen?

I tend to prefer the upper level crossing when I drive over the George Washington Bridge, but I choose an inside lane. I have always smiled when I crossed the Tappan Zee, even when the wind created chaos. What is waiting over the edge? Haven’t I been there before? Do we mingle with over the edge for all of our lives?

It’s not a welcome acquaintance, but we all felt it necessary sometimes.

I like to dive deep. Under the water, where you need an extreme sense of focus. I passed those tests. I am certified to dive deep.

There is a reef in Grand Cayman.  My dive instructor said, “One hundred and twenty feet down and you establish neutral buoyancy, and then sit back and enjoy the ride. Neutral buoyancy is the equivalent of being weightless. One piles on a certain amount of baggage for this dive. It is proportional to the equation of body weight and the differences between salt and fresh water. It is regulated by an air jacket that can be inflated appropriately. The basic idea is to cause you to sink and then have your jacket balance you.

My instructor continued. “Over your shoulder is the most beautiful blue that you have ever seen. It is inviting. It will seduce you. It is six hundred feet deep and then you will die.”

When I dropped down, there was something that he hadn’t mentioned. I could feel the blue and the way that it pulled at me. I focused on my instruments and on the passing panorama of the wall. Was it the absence of wind? Or was current now the wind?

The brain coral has a design symmetry that elicits a kinship. I floated, weightless, neutral buoyancy achieved. Is it a different kind of epiphany when your body resonates in conjunction with your mind?

Floating but not falling over the edge and falling, which is where this began.   Swept over the edge. Struggling against it. Knowing it will come. Wanting to step back into some cocoon. Discovering an alternative.

Sometimes I turn my face from the screen. I feel the images whirling. It’s just heady and my body feels it differently, than I did when floating along that wall.

Astrologically, my sun sign is in Gemini. I’m predestined to fall in love with a breeze. Under the water, I am sometimes transformed. But that recurring, helpless feeling of being swept over the edge… The seductive blue so far under the surface… The current is a breeze in a different world.

I am frightened by height and attracted by depth. What we jettison to fly we use to help us submerge when we dive. The saying among divers is that any dive from which you surface alive was a good one. I question that application to height. The wind in my hair and at my back shouldn’t make me need to hold on tighter. I was not born to fly but I seem to have a tendency for diving.

 

Perhaps I am just afraid to truly fly. Maybe a leap is so different from a dive, maybe they are both the same. I know more about how to surface than I do about how to pull up. Swimming to the light is like flying. But if I am blown over the edge I won’t be able to fly upward because of what holds me here.

I’ve seen the sea turtle and the moray eel up close and wild. The birds have not been as accessible. The frantic nature of captured flight is so different from the powerful smooth strokes of airborne freedom. A bird in a building is never at rest until it has found a way out. But I’d just get pulled over the side. When you cannot fly, the final way out is to collide. I feel that plunging fear, and I fear how it influences my life.

The ride back from a dive is the sweetest of all rides. The sun and the air are like angels at your side. Skimming the waves and balancing a smile. It was a great ride and you’re still alive.

I remember the opening scenes from the film version of West Side Story and how they excited me. That must have been before. I feel vividly queasy when Al Pacino plays the Devil on a rooftop ledge. I try not to go to the ledges any more. But they still find me in my dreams.

Music and poetry can sweep me over this edge. I can ride and fly on those succulent waves. Sometimes it doesn’t feel real. Sometimes it just feels vain. What does it mean to fly when you can’t fly away?  The sky is above us. The sea almost moves like a flame.

 

 

I am losing my hair, or more correctly it is migrating. What was once covering my forehead now seems to grow out of my ears.  Where there was once a smooth stomach, there is now a soft fur of hair. For reasons that I can only assume are vanity, this stays in my mind. My hair was always thin and I also had the unfortunate trait of ears that tended to stick out. I did not look good in a crew-cut. When long hair came into vogue, I embraced the style with passion.

My generation was identified by hair. It was a symbol, a “freak flag” that identified a person as having certain ideas. People with hair that hung down passed their shoulders instantly earned respect. As one of my friends from that time said, “When I see hair that long, I think old.” This was not the bad kind of old, but an old that meant that one was not a newcomer to having a rebellious nature. We were so identified by it that the one word could be the title of a Broadway musical and everyone knew exactly what it meant. We happily drove barbers out of business.

Hair felt good. Guys dreamed of girls with long straight hair. Joni Mitchell and Michelle Phillips were young men’s fantasies and part of that was because of their hair. We looked at myths where hair was a strength with renewed interest. For Samson, it was his source of power. For Rapunzel it was a pathway to freedom. Mother Earth’s hair saved Buddha. The hair of Medusa spoke of her rage and vengeance. The most beautiful hair that I ever saw belonged to a red mane girl with whom I went to college. Her hair hung perfectly straight down to her waist and when we were in classes together, I would sometimes lose myself in the sight of it. It was simply beautiful and I imagined its perfumed scent.

We used our hair. Sometimes it was camouflage behind which we could hide. It gave nervous fingers something to do. When I was interviewing a champion runner, she told me that when she was warming up she would sometimes pass an opponent on the track and use her hair to brush against the other girl as she sped by her.

Teachers, policemen and parents tried to either induce or force haircuts on us. We countered by saying things such as, “They didn’t even make Jesus cut his hair.” We stuck together. We looked at Bob Dylan’s tangled and uncombed head of hair as an indication of his genius and non-conformity. We hung posters of Albert Einstein with his wild shock of hair. We adopted him as one of us. Kojak was one of them. Hair meant freedom and the lack of it was symptomatic of a certain rigidity. I suppose that Yul Brenner was the exception.

Looking back at these oversimplifications and categorizations, one has to smile at their naiveté. It is not unlike listening to twenty-somethings throw around the word “hippie” today. But I also see the current styles as ones which pay homage to a militaristic, utilitarian perspective. Clean, crisp and dispassionate bonding with the way that things must be is what their hair says to me.

I have never dyed my hair or had any treatments given to it, but I did used to cut it to gain a professional advantage. If I was interested in a promotion, I would cut my hair in order to show my sincerity. After I got the position, I would grow it back.

When I was in my mid-twenties, I met a girl who told me that she did not like hair. She kept hers cropped very short and it accented the almond shape of her face and made her eyes prominent and seem more inquisitive. She was Winona Ryder before there was a Winona. Her distaste for hair was not as much of a political statement as it was a personal preference. This intrigued me, a girl who did not wish to have long hair. It was the first time that I realized that our non-conformity had become conformity. I wonder if people see themselves this way today. It’s hard to be exhibit a rebellious nature when you are wearing a team’s baseball cap or sporting designer labels, but were we any different really?

 

Recently, I asked this woman for her feelings about hair and this is what she told me. “What do I have to say about hair??  From a women’s perspective?  It is a shield, a protector, provocative,   a place to hide, a way to shine, attract and wrap someone or trap someone, not unlike a spider’s web. It is a ritual washing, rinsing, creaming, spraying, coloring, making us into different beings than we may be after all. Women of the Caribbean take great pride in their braiding techniques. Waspy women wear blonde bobs, they are proud of their heritage.  They can be 82 and the bob will still be the bob.  It is an identifier.  African-American women spend more on their hair than any other ethnic group, they embrace their ethnicity through their hair, or shun it, again, through their hair.  They straighten it, curl it, hair is never what we want it to be.  It is a source of dissatisfaction.  You can, like Lady Godiva, ride naked on a horse if you have long enough hair. In the bible, Mary Magdalene washed Christ’s feet with her hair.  I found that abhorrent, it was here that hair was obvious to me, for the pleasure of men.  And yet, there are rules for hair, women over 40 shouldn’t have long hair, they are too old, meaning unattractive.  Hair is an object that makes the woman an object and tells her when she is old.  I wanted nothing to do with it.  I couldn’t anymore.  It betrayed me.  It had to go. I couldn’t comb, brush, force it to do things it didn’t’ want to do, all for the attractiveness of it.  You have obviously never ironed your hair or slept in rollers the size of beer cans, in some cases actual beer cans.  Hair inhibits one.  It is a time waster.  It focuses energy where it doesn’t belong.  It is the ultimate vanity.”

I will not do a comb over. I will not shave my head. My hair is shoulder length and now when I run my fingers through it, I feel little brittle ends breaking off.  Is this just part of aging?

I don’t know what it is like to have a recognizable face. No one has ever stopped me on the street and said, “Are you Ken Hart?” So when I talk about names of celebrities, it is just names and pictures and, of course, their artistic work. I admire that James Taylor accepted his baldness openly and I thought less of Paul Simon for his baseball cap. I have male friends who have great heads of hair and I have noticed that there is a certain confidence that seems to go along with it.

Perhaps my friend is correct. It is an ultimate vanity and a source of judgment, but we didn’t always feel that way, did we?

Last week, I was driving on a country road that wound past a high school. It was a sunny day and the students were taking gym outside. On a softball field, there was a class of girls playing ball.  As I drove passed, in that second, I counted eight who were playing with their hair as they waited for the next pitch, one was even the batter.

You can tell the people who grew up playing catch from those that did not. It begins with the way that they wait. Some smile with relaxed anticipation, confidence and enthusiasm. Others aren’t at ease. They tense and a grimace of dread comes over them. Sometimes they hold up a protected hand.

My dad played catch with me. We never lived together but whenever I was at his house or went to houses of his friends, magically, some projectile would appear and we would throw it between us or he would prod me to throw it with someone else. Those were high stakes catches. I knew that my dad wanted me to make him proud. Catching and throwing was a way to do that.

I played catch year-round: baseballs, footballs, Frisbees, soft balls, hard balls, whiffle balls. We played catch. Sometimes under the glow of city street lights. Sometimes in the glare of a hot sun. Sometimes in the rain or the snow or cold so brutal that the impact of the ball on your hands would sting and turn them red and  then numb.

The distance between the people says something about the catch. There has to be the expectation that the other person can reach. There has to be the feeling that you can. There is a need for some accuracy. I do not think that I have had a true friend with whom I did not play catch.

You remember your catches. It is not unlike remembering the times that you were kissed. An easy feeling develops.  People remember catches between them. There is a bond that is established. You gauge coordination. It resets the way that you think about a person. It is like working together. You remember participants. I wonder if everyone does and if they recall that bond?

There are those competitive catches, when you measure what your partner has to offer, you push boundaries.  Then there are those times when you try to aid your partner’s success. You toss easily and with obvious direction. Cooperation and competition are joined and related. It is the essence of the process.

Sometimes catch is like foreplay, it’s used to warm up, but other times it is the main event. Can catches be epiphanies? I can remember them as if my body is moving in slow motion and the world has slowed down.

When I played baseball as a kid, I was a catcher and a first baseman. I didn’t like being a catcher but I could do it. I didn’t close my eyes when the batter swung, although I wanted to. The gear was hot and the “cup” uncomfortable, so often I didn’t wear one. Until the day that Danny threw a fast ball and I missed it and it lodged right between my legs where the cup should have been. I went into shock immediately on impact. I could not move except for the involuntary reaction of closing my legs which had the unfortunate byproduct of keeping the ball lodged right where it struck as I slowly keeled over, the ball dribbling out. My friends saying that I looked like I had laid an egg. After that, I decided that it was easier to put up with the chafing of the cup.

Conversely, I loved to do a stretch and scoop at first base. You could see the throw coming low. You had to trust your eye hand coordination and the glove. You could feel it in the web, and then the appreciative smile from the infielder who threw it. These few seconds of captured smiles and catches… What causes us to remember them so vividly? You wonder if through the decades those glimpses exist only for you or if they are shared as well?

 

I only really remember one catch with my brother. We were both married and he came to where Val and I were living in Fairlawn. I was coaching football and when he saw the ball lying around, he said, “Want a catch?” We were never easy talking with each other. I was a shadow and the older brother with whom he never lived and who disappeared for years at a time.

His arm was stronger than mine and he rifled the ball in my direction with poise and determined speed. He was going to show his older brother, and he did. Somehow it became easier to talk while we were throwing the ball. It felt right and, upon reflection, somehow sad that this was our only truly memorable catch. Maybe if we had more of them we would be in contact today. I don’t really know, but I do believe in the power of catch.

It’s calming and exhilarating at the same time. The person puts a little bit of himself into each throw, and as you receive it, you accept what you have been given. It is a conversation without words. It can be a response to harsh words and then the projectile is not flung with the speed of competition. It is hurled with an expression of anger. Not quite a punch, but it travels with that velocity.

Catch can be love. When Val and I were first married, we bought a fuzzy tennis ball that came with a set of Velcro paddles. They may still be in my barn, the Velcro worn and the original ball long since chewed by Keats. This was cooperative catch, and we would try to make it last. She would inevitably say, “just a couple more” and I would be disappointed. I loved playing catch with her. I enjoyed those exchanges so and I do not believe that I will ever throw the Velcro paddles away.

It can be interspecies.  Although I deeply love my Frisbee sessions with Fitzgerald, he brings it back. He does not throw it. But my Mom had a Bichon named Dandy. If you took a soft beach ball, Dandy would head butt it back, soccer style. We went on and on in the basement for hours. After that he would run downstairs and wait each time I arrived. We played catch. In that instinctive way Dandy lives for me, playing catch.

 

Catch is a problem solver. Maybe if people so at odds could just play catch for a while something would change. Maybe just a softening that grows out of that mutual respect given by catch. I know that there are hypothetical catches. I know that sometimes a teacher feels that he is playing catch with his students. That is a fine blend of cooperative and competitive catch. However, there is something about the engagement of other senses. What does eye hand trigger in the brain? There is something about its enduring qualities.

Field of Dreams comes to a conclusion with a catch. It heals. It crosses lines. It feels fine.

His recorded name is actually Quinn Fitzgerald. It has something to do with the alphabet and the number of litters that occur in a traceable line. He was born in Montvale, NJ. The breeder said he was very social. He was so very small. We brought him home to a house where he had an older brother, actually through blood lines a cousin, but always his older brother. At first Keats begged for the opportunity to kill him. We declined and eventually he accepted his sibling and taught him with a stare and if necessary a nip on the ass. Fitzgerald was totally devoted to Keats.

Time passed and their relationship grew stronger. Keats had been sick but he was the better swimmer. Fitzgerald could do just about anything that an athletic challenge placed in front of him. But  he worshipped his older brother.

He bonded with Valerie. Keats was so clearly my dog and she had never experienced the true bonding of an animal. He followed her every movement. He slept curled at her feet in our bed. She pressed her feet to him and her arms to me; Keats preferred to sleep on the floor.

They were hardly prefect dogs. They marked. I had been slow to allow Keats’ castration and well….he developed the habit of marking and Fitz picked up the scent and imitated. We tried to be stern and failed and lived with the endless cleanings up and the occasional outburst of how disgusting this was.

They did not like children with one exception, our grand-daughter Hazel. Keats made an exception and she stroked him with love and abandon. Fitz was too frisky and unaware of his strength. He is and was exuberant.

Chief among his skills and lovable nature are both his ability to catch a Frisbee and his learned behavior of giving it back so that it can be thrown again. Another is his fierce loyalty and protective nature. He charges into any fray with abandon if he feels a member of his pack is threatened.

He prances with flapping ears and quickness and grace. He has a single focus. He is protecting by whatever means necessary. There was one time when a visiting dog snapped at Val. Fitzgerald literally flew down the stairs and placed himself between her and the now unwelcome intruder. He lunged and bared his teeth and snarled until his adversary cowered. He never left Val alone again when the visitor was in our home. This happened just as my awareness knew that something wasn’t right, and then it was.

He mastered the fetch instinct. Throw a stick, yeah he’ll go and get it every time and bring it, or some chewed version of it, back to be thrown again. Sometimes you have to laugh because it is a pathetically small chewed version of it and he drops it at your feet with such hope.

 

When I throw the Frisbee he is in total focus. When Keats was still alive I would take them down to the field next to the lake that borders our property. I would throw the Frisbee as hard as I could and as long as I was capable of throwing it and he would fly. He would leap. He was perfection. Eventually Keats would head towards the lake and he would obediently follow and wait for me to throw sticks into the water so that they could swim.

 

These are Irish Water Spaniels. They are both liver brown and have a coat that resembles a standard poodle. They are known as clownish, but that is a deception. These are serious dogs.

 

While we were away, Keats was killed. As best we can figure, on a snowy predawn morning, a truck swerved out of control, up onto our lawn and ended his life almost instantly.  By the time we got home, the pet sitter service, had shut the doggie door and Fitzgerald was, for the first time in his life, alone. He could smell his brother’s blood out on the lawn. We weren’t there. Is this the fate of any unreserved submission to a family, that there will be times when no one is there?

 

After we got home, he howled like a wolf to the other dogs across the lake. It went on for several nights. I’m not sure if it was mourning, communication or the trumpeting announcement that he was now in charge.

 

The Frisbee and his absolute devotion to Valerie became the sole focus of his life until I created a vegetable garden. I instructed him how to urinate along the protective fence (do not ask how) in order to ward off gophers and other animals. He was now a dog with a job and his devotion to task was more than admirable. He patrolled the garden day and night. He set his senses to communicate any change in its environment. He lived to crawl as close as he could inside of Val’s skin.

Fitzgerald’s athleticism was and is extraordinary. Imagine a 80 pound dog prancing along the top of the back of a couch like a cat and then, on a whim, deciding the fly through the air to a vacant chair. That is Fitzgerald. More than one startled visitor has been frozen by the sight of his airborn form and its unpredictable nature.

I’m told that the strength in the fetch instinct is one of the criteria that is used for the initial selection of police dogs or those that are used in rescue operations. It is not what his breed is noted for, but he sure does exhibit those traits.

Why did we name him Fitzgerald? He had grace and a nature that enjoying showing off and he was always so pretty. Keats and Fitzgerald in canine reincarnation, how crazy is that? Their spirit and poetry of motion…

I never really wanted to read stories about people and their dogs, but suppose the way that they perceived their animals was a reflection of something else? And what might that something else create in the spirit of those creatures? Do you believe that the way that we communicate with others changes who they are? Not just, abject response…but the nuances of it. Do they matter? Do they seep into genetics? Is this what I really mean by old friends and family?

About the female dogs in Fitzgerald’s life; there were two. Madison was nicknamed “good sex.” She would romp and then happily allow him to endlessly hump her. They danced the stimulated eroticism of their youth and did it playfully.

Stella was “rough sex.” She was my daughter’s pit bull beagle rescue dog mix. She and Fitz played hard. Afterwards his neck was scratched and he was exhausted. Stella was happy.

I threw the Frisbee every day for 10 months of the year. The bond was solid. He wanted it, he expected it, he caught it, and he brought it back with grace and fluidity. He needed it. He quivered in anticipation of it.

With the exception of when Hazel was here every day, Fitz was always the baby. It was his nickname. He cries when he does not have access to the open window of a car. He excitedly snatches at food that is offered on the tips of fingers, but he is decidedly gentle in licking from the open palm. His level of interest in permanently high and his attention span decidedly low, unless you are throwing a Frisbee.

When Stella came to live with us, Keats looked at me with a “you’ve got to be kidding” expression.  I’m not sure he felt or thought anything like that, but sometimes we interpret the actions of all creatures with whom we live. And his actions did seem to take that approach. His pack had grown again and there were other issues. We couldn’t fit all three of them into the back seat of the car. Someone was going to be left home. It surely was not going to be Quinn Fitzgerald, if he had anything to say about it.

Whenever either of us gave the slightest indication that we were going out, and this could be anything from the putting on of shoes to me collecting my wallet or even the mention between us of a place that we needed or wanted to go, Fitz was right there, wanting to be first in line. He still is. If for some reason he is left behind, he communicates his disappointment by doing something that he knows he isn’t supposed to do.

Tired of collecting my garbage from the front lawn, or picking up a shredded box of tissues from the bedroom floor, we put up a series of gates. Childproof gates are not meant to withstand the efforts of a large and determined Fitzgerald. If one area of mischief is closed off, he finds another. If he is unsuccessful, he eventually knocks down the gate. When you come up the stairs,  he greets you happily and then runs outside to wait, and you know that you must search to find whatever little message that he has left this time.

As I have said, Fitz is a marker. This is not an attractive aspect of his personality and one that makes life with him, at times, difficult. There was the time when Val came to me and asked, in a way that let me know that she had been holding back from asking for some time, if I could please be more careful in the bathroom. I was at first horrified to be told that my bathrooms had a distinct odor that was being caused by my carelessness. What made it worse is that I could not recall the careless behavior. I am there and awake for the event and I could not for the life of me figure out how I could be “missing” with such frequency. It took me about two months of Val shaking her head and cleaning the bathrooms with a disturbing frequency for me to realize that it wasn’t me at all. Fitz had been sneaking into the bathrooms and imitating me, except that when he lifted his leg well, he isn’t quite that high. When we started closing  the bathroom doors  all the time, the problem disappeared. I was relieved and annoyed at the same time but there was a part of me that just had to laugh. I should have seen it earlier. I had watched him cover Keats urine with his own countless number of times but it just never occurred to me that he was doing the same thing with me.

Watching Fitz tire is like waiting for something that you are not sure will ever come. To this day, he goes full speed and then suddenly he just flops down and sleeps.

I know that some people feel that having an emotional attachment to an animal is decadent nonsense. The reasoning is that with all the people suffering in the world, how could such care and emotion be poured into an animal? The diet that he eats would be a nutritional upgrade for many human beings. How can one participate or even condone such behaviors? Wouldn’t that money and care be better off donated to the starving children of the world? I’m not unsympathetic to this logic but I don’t accept it. I do believe that wherever and whenever you can exchange loving interactions with the creatures that inhabit this world that world is a better place for it.

On Friday, May 17, Fitz went to the groomer for his spring cut.  He grows out over the winter and because of the tight curly nature of his coat, our practice was always to let him grow out over the winter months and then get him cut short late in the spring. It is always a delight to see his lithe and well-toned body and how the cut even increases the amount of energy that he has. He becomes a puppy again, although he never strays far from that state of being. The groomer found two lumps on the side of his neck and she did not like their location or their feel. That afternoon, we took him to the vet.

Her initial diagnosis was not positive. She told us that she believed that he had a condition called lymphoma. Basically cancer of the lymph nodes and that not only the 2 nodes on his neck were swollen but that all of the external lymph nodes on his body were swollen.

How could this be in an animal so healthy and filled with life? Why wasn’t he acting sick? There must be some mistake. She performed a needle aspiration biopsy. The results were inconclusive. This particular form of cancer does not leave its victims a lot of time, perhaps a few weeks, perhaps two months. She wanted to perform a surgical biopsy but that would leave him in a coned collar for two weeks. He would not have the freedom of his beloved doggie door. The spring garden was it. It was Frisbee season. There were so many things for him to do. So many new things to investigate… I asked that she repeat the needle biopsy and she did. The results came back positive for lymphoma.

I am still in a state of disbelief. I watch him all the time looking for signs that his energy level is slowing down. It is not. He is eating like a horse.  There has been no treatment yet and there will not be any except to ease the impending discomfort. The vet tells me that animals with this condition just lose interest and wither, or that the lumps become large enough to be obstructive and prevent swallowing.

In the meantime, Fitzgerald is romping, hoping for butterflies to chase, patrolling the garden, and of course, catching the Frisbee. But this is not a piece about his death. It is a story about his life.

I wish to capture those moments of carefree agility before they aren’t there any longer. I want to pay homage to his inquisitive nature. All animals have unique gestures that endear them to us. Fitz lies on his side and rubs his forepaws up over his floppy ears. He is not annoyed when he does this. He is totally in that second of feeling.

Perhaps if each instant of reality is everlasting, he has realities enough to sustain him forever.

 

 

Old Friends and Family

There is an old saying that you can choose your friends but that you cannot choose your family.  Would it not follow that you would feel closer to your friends than you would to your family? There are times in our lives when we truly believe this and then there are times when the logic of that idea seems absurd. Looking at the differences in the two kinds of relationships makes me wonder about the power of genetics. In most cases, the only family member that one gets to choose is one’s spouse, the person with whom you create family. What is the connection of family? Does it tell us who we are? Does it define our past? Does that mean that all of those decisions are already made for us from the moment that we are born?

I try to choose my friends wisely. As I matured, it was more and more important to me that a friend was someone with whom I felt comfortable. In our generation we believed, for a time, that we could create a new definition of family. We could choose the people with whom we identified ourselves and we could redefine who and what we were and are. But without the attraction of “blood” I have found that those relationships don’t usually survive the challenges of life.

When careers become important, the first thing that we seem to let go of is friendship.  It is the time that we no longer have to be with our friends and the ways in which they seem to change? Why doesn’t family fall victim to the same constraints? What sustains it? Don’t the people in our families seem to change less over the years and decades than our friends do?

Friendships are often born of common interest and location. What attracts us is the comfort of that commonality, the togetherness of it. Family is similar, but having your mother’s eyes doesn’t really change. Having your father’s temper is a lifelong assignment. The connections that are created by those things don’t have to be liked, they simply are. Of course families can also fall apart but you still have the same eyes, the same temperament. In one sense it doesn’t matter if you accept it or not, your challenge is to learn to live with it. Friendship isn’t like that.

In our years of rebellion, we tend to shrug off the commonalties of family, but as time goes on we tend to find our way back to them. But it is rarely this way with friendships. When friends drift apart, the likelihood of them finding their way back to each other is substantially less than it is for family.

Is it obligation that returns us to family? The weddings, the funerals, the births and of course the holidays. In my twenties, I lived with a group of people who believed that we had forged connections and traditions that would last the rest of our lives. One of these was a second Thanksgiving. We would all go off to our “obligation meals” and then happily return for the meal that we chose to have with our chosen family. While exchanging letters with one of those participants recently, he remarked that he had forgotten those meals and that they were a nice memory.

Perhaps that is one reason. All that old friends have after a time are memories, and memories sometimes fail and sometimes become distorted. These things don’t seem to happen as frequently with family memories. Why do we tend to see those more as moments that have defined us than we do our memories with friends? Are friends people that we want to look forward with and family people with whom we wish to look back? Is that one of the changing perspectives of age?

Childhood friendships that withstand the transition to maturity, that survive the pressures of adult obligations would seem to have similar qualities to those of family, but do they? Aren’t they also different from the connections of blood?

Does the size of a family make a difference? If you have brothers and sisters and cousins and a large extended family, do they become more important in your life based on the sheer quantity of them? If you come from a small family, do friends fill that void and therefore become more important? Is one of the functions of friendship to replace family?

 

Love is different. Love of family is something that you are taught from your earliest years. It is almost instinctual. Love of friends comes and goes. Some of it is sexual attraction. Some of it is the exuberance of youth. Some of it is the shared experiences. The basis of the familial love seems to be identity and trust.  People tend to innately trust family and to be suspicious of those from outside. One is taught at an early age to be wary of strangers, but to embrace family.

James Joyce wrote “…friendship between a man and a woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.” This discounts the idea of platonic love, but what does it say about the nature of the relationships between people of different genders within a family? It isn’t a consideration. Genetics changes the nature of friendship. They are not friends, they are family. People within families usually don’t describe other family members as friends. They are either close or not close.

Has social media made it more convenient to keep up with both friends and family or has it made it easier to not actually see them? Does communication through these networks carry the double-edged sword of staying in touch but not really going out of your way enough to actually touch?

Do the children of divorced couples whose parents have remarried create a different definition of what family means? Can one actually have multiple families? Do people whose marriages did not work out have a different perspective on what family means? Have they made family more transitory?

Do women and men have different ideas on what family is based on their gender? In the film the Godfather Part 2, Michael Corleone’s mother tells him that he can never lose his family. Does that old saw of wisdom still ring true in the 21^st century? Are friendships at their best substitutes for family? Do they mimic them?

How does one join a family? Marriage creates relationships that are dependent upon the success of the marriage. My mother used to have the expression, “he is your uncle through marriage.” It was a qualifier that relegated the person to being family but not really. It was her way of saying that there was no blood.

What does the blood change?