I am so lucky as to have old friends. Old friends go all the way back to before you carried the weight of your world, or at least to before you carried all of it. They’ve stayed in your life despite all the shit you’ve done and they’ve done, good and bad, which could have carried them away from you, but didn’t, or not permanently, anyway. Somehow, they remain. They know, if not everything about you, enough to see your greatest strengths and your regrettable weaknesses, yet still love you to death.. They take your entirety. They look forward to opportunities to see you – it’s never a chore. You know without even thinking about it, by the sheer number of years they’ve been around, that they’re not going anywhere, and so you can exhale a big sigh of relief and be truly yourself.
When you are with old friends, you can watch dynamics play out that are decades old, or decades in the making, but you never find them wearing, or dull. They are simply there – familiar, comforting and renewing. I was renewed, quite recently, by a weekend away with old friends at a cozy, well-worn farmhouse in New England.
Most remarkably, there was a member of our party, the hostess in fact, who didn’t go back as far as the rest of us, but it felt like she could have. Old friends will embrace as one of their own anyone who wants to be there with them. Anyone who takes them all on because she loves one of them, and who is intuitive and observant enough to know what is reassuring, and worth preserving about their interactions. And, of course, who is lovely herself. Such a person is readily counted as one of the old gang.
Razzing and laughter at dinner gave way to reminiscences into the night, and no one felt like they had to be a certain way, do a certain thing, or even show up. I myself got wasted on Benedryl due to my concern that the smells of the old house meant certain asthma, and went to bed hours before the others. But there was no opprobrium; just the gentle teasing that make you feel the love. A late breakfast, hair of the dog for some, the New York Times crossword, and once we were all refreshed, we splintered off into our different activities. Some chose walking, others biking, still others swimming or reading. We all managed to congregate on the grass outside the old farmhouse for a slow afternoon. No one felt bored, no one felt slothful. We were all just happy to be relaxed…and together. I can’t remember the last time the air felt so fresh, the view so beautiful (meadow, blue sky and distant trees) and time such a gorgeous slow motion swirl of sunshine, buzzing insects, moving clouds and an occasional smile or wordless message exchanged among the celebrants. All set to the magical soundtrack coming from a tiny speaker.
The magic lasted through several meals, a movie, another morning crossword, even up to and past the time to separate. The feelings we shared – of peace, acceptance, good will, love – stayed with us. I had the very good fortune to ride back to my everyday life with the oldest of these old friends. We listened to music and took in the scenery together. I did not bury my head in a book, or lose myself in my own thoughts. I was there, with my friend, nodding and smiling, through all the great songs we bobbed to, all the gorgeous vistas, and the occasional comment offered by one of us. I wanted to be there for as long as I could.
This oldest of friends and I had been sitting together on the grass the day before, during the magical afternoon where time slowed, and at one point we began reflecting on how old friends differ from regular friends. “It’s as if there is a drill that goes through all your layers, all the phases of your life that have accumulated, and old friends can see the different striations, all the different layers that make you… you,” I offered. “I get that, I get that, “ my friend said, nodding in his very beatnik way, the giant heart walking on two legs that he is. “And it’s the core that served as the magnet from the very beginning,” he then observed so brilliantly. Then he went off in a different direction, inspired perhaps by the almost impossibly large and very old pear tree right in front of us. “Maybe an old friend is like an old tree. The trunk is solid and can be counted on, and the many, many limbs aren’t strange, even if they go off in different directions, twisting this way and that. You just look at the trunk and see that they are all part of the one tree.”
I liked that, thinking that each one of us is a tree, with many limbs, and together we are an orchard, where it is safe and lovely to lie and look up at the moving clouds, and float with the sweet perfume of memories, carried by the soft breeze of here and now.
On the way back, we stopped for a piss. His piss, by the side of the road. After I told him that I didn’t want to see him pee, and that he had to be out of my sightline or have his back to me at the very least, he did what he needed and returned with a bouquet of Queen Anne’s Lace. He had pulled them from the side of the road after the deed was done (from a different spot, I’m presuming), and taken the longest stem of one and wrapped and knotted it around the others for a tie. He dropped them onto my lap with the barest of smirks. About fifty miles earlier, I had been sappily watching wave after wave of that wildflower pass by, and remarked to the air, “I love Queen Anne’s Lace. It reminds me of my childhood in the Bronx.” The air, it seems, was paying attention. He doesn’t go back all the way with me to the Bronx, this friend, but far back enough to be there, in my orchard. The sweetness of his gesture summoned up the full range of feelings shared among us all.
“We’ll always keep in touch, no matter what happens.”
From buzz feed.com; 16 Pictures of Animals Holding Hands, February 14, 2012
“I’ll never betray you, no matter what happens.”
“I’ll always love you, no matter what happens.”
These are things we all say in a moment of raw, intense feeling. We really mean the first part; boy do we mean it! It floods us and makes our lungs expand and maybe even our nostrils flare and there is no doubt how sincere we are about that feeling. It is a beautiful, naked pledge about our intent at that moment, offered when we are so overcome with emotion that we willingly expose ourselves.
But that second part, “no matter what happens,”… isn’t it a bit of an escape clause? A ceding of responsibility? We expose ourselves, yes, but aren’t we clinging to just that little bit of a fig leaf? No, no, we say! We are just paying homage to the unpredictability of life in the architecture of our pledge, because let’s face it, life happens to us. If anything, that underscores our pledge, right? Makes it all the more sincere, because we will prevail no matter what unexpected things happen to us! And anyway, it’s true!, Things do “happen” to us! Don’t they?
There are undoubtedly times when circumstances are radically thrust upon us, not by choice. An example, of course, is death. Another is powerlessness, say, in the case of a young child, who does not have the means or know-how to overcome obstacles placed in her way by parents’ actions or choices. How about some sort of apocalypse? A contagion decimates our population, all technology breaks down and transportation and communication become virtually impossible. That would definitely be something that happens to us. What about a devastating illness to us or a loved one? What about being fired from your job (assuming it is not because you are an unbearable jerk or lazy ass)? What about an asteroid hitting the earth? Yes, there are indeed many ways in which life “happens.” And to be fair, far less dramatic but no less powerful turns of events also can “happen” to us. People who are dear to us suddenly have needs that conflict with ours or each other. Or our finances change, and that requires radical adjustments. The list is endless.
But what about choice? Our lives are not just left to free-floating chaos, are they? Every day, no matter what “happens,” we make choices that affect how we handle or navigate what has “happened.” Moreover, in many if not most cases, the very thing that “happened” happened precisely because of a choice, or a cumulation of choices. We made it happen. Or we let it.
From Peanuts, by Charles Schultz
We make choices every day that direct our journeys on this little speck of rock. Thousands and thousands of choices. Little ones, big ones, easy ones, and excruciatingly hard ones. That last kind, many people avoid making, and they passively ride time for as long as they can without actually making a choice, until the choice is made for them. By waiting, we think we have absolved ourselves of the responsibility of choosing. But the truth is that’s a choice as well, and in most cases anyway we kind of know, deep down in our guts, which way things are more likely to go as a result of our not making the choice.
So, when friendships falter, it’s due to people deciding something. Perhaps it’s due to them deciding, in the midst of feeling overwhelmed by other things, that making the time for that phone call to that particular friend is a low priority. Whereas, calling some other friend to talk remains a high priority. Maybe it’s because that low priority friend has been making us feel bad more and more often, criticizing us or judging us. Maybe that low priority friend doesn’t seem as necessary to our well being as they used to. Regardless of the reason, it’s a choice. To give up reading fiction, because the demands of your job come first no matter how unreasonable or soul-destroying they have become; that’s a choice. To ignore exhortations from your spouse or your mother to stand up straight so you won’t fold in on yourself as you age; that’s a choice. And when it turns out, therefore, that you are indeed stooped over in your middle age, well, that was your choice, not really just genetics “happening” to you. To live with unhappiness because it is too difficult to rectify it, or because you believe making changes will shatter the happiness or stability of someone else; those are choices.
In many cases, the choices we make are the right ones for us. You could even say they are always the right ones, because they reflect what we really want or feel capable of at the time. But even when right for us, they come at a price, and so it’s easier to pretend we aren’t making them. Maybe they come with someone’s hurt feelings, or maybe with our own disappointment in having to let go of something that we did want, but not as much as the other thing we chose.
I just wish people admitted their choices as choices. I think it would empower them. That certainly has been the case for me. Realizing I had made choices and that not everything had just “happened,” led me to take a long hard look at why I had made those choices. I understood more about myself, and facing new, difficult choices became easier.
So I won’t use that formulation, “no matter what happens,” to drive home the truth of my pledges. Instead of saying “I will always [fill in the blank] no matter what happens” I will say “I feel with all my heart that I will always choose us.” Us as friends, lovers, colleagues, teammates, partners in crime, whatever. Unless, of course, I know I wouldn’t really make that choice. Unless, there is something or someone I know I would choose instead when really pressed about it.
Found at thetraveltester.com
Chances are our lives will never go exactly the way we want them to, because, well, things do happen. But the truth is, they’re going pretty damned close to where we want them to, because we make the choices everyday that lead us there.
The tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is so much a part of our popular culture that virtually everyone knows its key premise, without ever having read it, or even knowing who wrote it (Robert Louis Stevenson). For some reason (I’m guessing insanity), Jekyll wants to segregate the selfish, depraved and conscience-free half of his nature from his altruistic, civil and dutiful side. He dreams of how wonderful it would be if each half could function without inhibition, free from the influence of the other. Sounds to me like a rationalization to let the dark side go nuts. Jekyll invents a potion to achieve the schism, the actual scientific means by which he accomplishes this left a mystery to the reader. After Jekyll drinks the foul brew, hideous, corporeal Hyde begins to roam the night. Unrestrained by the goodness and civility of Jekyll, Hyde not only degenerates into a murderous fiend, but becomes harder and harder to control. A cautionary tale, indeed.
Well, it turns out that I too have a “screw that!” conscience-free side to my personality, though thankfully she is neither villain nor murderous fiend. I have decided to call her “Estelle.” The most subversive thing Estelle ever did was to buy the loudly ticking antique pendulum clock that is now hanging just to the left of our family room television, despite knowing darn well that the men in the household didn’t want anything distracting from their view of whatever sports game or movie was on, let alone something that made noise and moved. She may also have had a hand in my apparently sudden decision, while accompanying my daughter to a piercing shop, to get a nose stud at age 52 (C’mon! You’ve wanted one for YEARS, you gutless suburbanite!), but I’m not sure about that one.
found at bokehphotography.uk.com
Estelle isn’t out to make trouble. She is just the morality-free, propriety-free, completely selfish truth teller who has finally learned how to jab her way forward to “keep things real.” She tells it like it is… loudly. Indeed, the longer I pretend not to hear her, the louder she gets. Like that ticking clock she insists “Oh yeah? Well here I am! Get used to it!” I first came to know her in the wee hours, when she’d awaken me in the dark, hoarsely whispering to me about how I’d been on autopilot for much of my adult life, navigating according to values or standards that never quite fit me. About how, as a result, the current configuration of my life was suffocating me. About how for years I’d been a pretender in my marriage, my own home, to my family and friends, trying to convince everyone and myself that I was happy.
My inner truth-teller, Estelle
Naturally, at first, Estelle frightened me, and I tried to hush her up. But she wouldn’t relent. Estelle was the first one to tell me that there was no way I could pull off preppy, country club clothing. (With those bazooms and that unmistakably Semitic visage??) To flat out say that I’d never be friends with the women in my synagogue’s Sisterhood so why did I keep trying (You don’t even like them!!). To pester me into admitting out loud that I had developed somewhat of a drinking problem. Nothing gets by Estelle. Her inconvenient and sometimes painful truths are often disruptive, but they are always liberating, even if at times anti-social. For example, Estelle helps me understand that when I nagged everyone in my family not to eat potato chips from the bag, it was really just because I resented being the only one who cared about a clean sofa or being the one left with the broken, saliva encrusted detritus at the bottom of the bag, but now that I have the house to myself, I too can happily jam my hand into the bag, cram chips in my mouth and lick my fingers, all while watching Dawn of the Planet of the Apes at an unsustainably loud volume on the surround sound. Estelle says, “This is awesome!”
But while I am thankful that Estelle keeps me honest and helps me cast off the “supposed to’s” that dull, dishearten or, worse, crush me, I have realized that, of course, Stevenson is right. Even when it comes to my loud-no-bullshit-can’t-help-but-love-her Estelle, free reign would be a disaster. She must remain an internal force, a passenger on my crowded bus of characters. There will be no potion taking for me. For though she keeps the constructs of others from making me miserable, Estelle unleashed would be a misery to everyone else. She is blunt, inconsiderate, obnoxious, unintentionally but unsparingly hurtful. I learned this when, over the last two years or so she began taking more liberties, perhaps giddy with her vindication that she had been right about so many things.
On one such occasion, my daughter and I had just concluded a long, overwrought argument in a restaurant, my husband and son trying desperately to act like they weren’t with us, even though we were all at the same table. It finally seemed like my family would be able to move on to a nice dinner; peace and harmony had been thrown up in the air, but were once again beginning to settle on us like a blanket. Nevertheless, upon hearing the last half-hearted diss my daughter flung at me, which ordinarily I would have easily ignored for the greater good, Estelle came roaring forth. I found myself actually snorting and loudly muttering, in the most unmotherly way imaginable, “Give me a break.” Fortunately, all at the table, including my daughter, were so astonished at this aberration, the complete abandon of such a declaration, its sheer reckless nerve, that everyone started laughing and dinner was saved. But in another surfacing of Estelle, I wasn’t so lucky. My son was fervently and sincerely, if a just a wee bit sanctimoniously, trying to explain why something had mattered to him, and Estelle burst free, changing my aspect so completely that she was virtually corporeal like Hyde. Momentarily whisking me to some far away place, where she apparently knew I’d secretly rather be, she blithely sighed, “Blah, Blah, Blah,” in an absent-minded, sing song kind of way. My son and I were both shocked. We had just seen and heard something or someone that wasn’t at all the entity usually in charge, and this force, whatever it was, was completely unconcerned with his feelings. Estelle, it seems, doesn’t give a good goddamn about anyone but me. My son told me it was probably the coldest, and therefore the most hurtful thing I had ever done or said to him, and I could see why. Yow.
Poor Estelle! She only wants me to remain true to myself. She champions my causes. But she has indeed led me to hurt people I love when I’ve let her steer the bus. She takes me to the other extreme. So, to actually remain true to myself, my entire self, I’ll take her under advisement, but negotiate compromise and find my center. Thanks Estelle! Now, will you shut up?
My son told me recently about a driving “adventure” that he and his buddy went on. The rules of the adventure were this: you drive straight ahead until you reach a T intersection, and then you have to turn right. You continue on straight, or making right turns, until you can go no further. While I was digesting the idea that, only by pure dumb luck I didn’t get a call from Chicago, or Terre Haute, telling me not to worry, they’d be back the next day, my son related with relish and a bit of cackling glee how they ended up in what could be described as the slums of Danbury, CT, a mere 35 minutes away, in a dead end by some housing projects. “Why always a right turn?” I asked him.
“It’s easier,” he said, with a look that said, “D-uh!”
I had reason to think of this driving game again when my friend Diane told me about her current heartache. She had met a man on the west coast when she was out visiting her grown daughter, and their chemistry had been immediate. Apparently, they lit each other up, body and soul, like a generator plant on the New Jersey Turnpike. Because she’d go out 2 times a year to visit, she was able to spend extended time with this man, and they fell deeply and madly in love. Skype and phone calls carried them between visits. After a few years, the time had come when they began contemplating combining their lives, but because both of them had strong family, social, professional, even soulful ties to their own communities 3000 miles apart, they faced some tricky obstacles. They had started talking happily and dreamily about splitting their time on each coast, assuming they could find the way to make their professional activities more portable. While Diane had no friends or community connections on the west, her daughter was there, and she looked forward to the adventure of gaining new friends and activities there. And she would still be spending plenty of time with her family and friends on the east. Her man had both family and siblings on the east, and his kids on the west were virtually grown, ready for their own adventures. Nevertheless, this great love of her life seemed to be balking, talking with anxiety and dread about the huge changes necessary for them to be together on a day-to-day basis. He thought he’d be able to carry most of his work with him, but what if he couldn’t? What if he missed his much larger social circle on the west too much? What if he hated living on the east coast, with its gray cities and variable weather? What if, to accommodate him, she ended up spending more time on the west and began resenting him? What if their projected net worth as a pair really wouldn’t be enough to sustain the kind of lives to which they were accustomed or the resulting travel costs? Diane began feeling hurt. Based on what she understood, these possibilities did not seem likely. And wasn’t their love worth the changes? Wouldn’t the day-to day-joy of being together make everything else seem manageable? Fun, even? She wondered if he had just been indulging in a dream of love, one that evaporated when compromise became necessary, while she had been committing her heart.
“It’s not that,” I told her. “He’s just afraid to make a left turn.”
“Huh?” was her response, but I saw from her face that she could already sort of grasp where I was going.
“Diane,” I said, “this is probably the first left turn this guy has made in about 25 or 30 years.”
Dick Grossberg – CD Clocks
Despite the rules of my son’s driving game, young people make left turns all the time at the craziest intersections. They deliberately put on their left signal, having possibly decided at the last minute that’s where they want to go. They move out in the middle of the intersection with all the attendant risks, and nimbly or not so nimbly make it happen. Sometimes with bravado and confidence, sometimes with elevated heart rate, drawing in breath through clenched teeth or muttering “fuck” under their breath, but they make it. They follow a college sweetheart to a new city, a new country even, with no real plan for their future. They quit a job they realize is making them sick or just not leading anywhere they particularly wanted to go, and begin an entirely new career or profession from nothing. They decide they will go to Bhutan before they settle down into a routine life, and suddenly discover a burning desire to become a Buddhist monk. Why can they do this? Is it just because young people are braver? Do they take more risks because they don’t have the life experience to think through all the possible negative consequences? In other words, are they blissfully ignorant?
I think that is definitely so, but instead of worrying on their behalf, which they never appreciate and indeed chafe against, I think we should take a few lessons from them. I used to be one of those mothers who always offered a nervous litany of concerns and fears about her kids’ choices. Offered the litany without solicitation, of course. It just bubbled up out of me, like a compulsion, and I convinced myself I was doing the right thing, counseling my naïve and judgment-impaired children, throwing water on their fires. It started when they were very young, and became so ingrained in me as a protective impulse, that at some point I couldn’t be any other way. I immediately went to that place where everything that could go wrong would, and into the dread, of course, I factored in the weighty heartache and fresh worrying I would personally experience when things inevitable turned sour. What a drag! How did I get so negative and fearful? And I’m not even remotely as negative as most people I know!
What saved me? I started noticing, finally, that there were some people who, when I mentioned something my kid was going to do, something that I felt okay about, would start going through all the things that could go wrong. They set forth all the reasons I should discourage my child. I started noticing that these were the same people who plan out every detail of their vacations, and always find it necessary to proudly point out how they were able to get a spot close by to an event because they charted out their course days earlier and made sure to arrive an hour early. All risk is managed away to provide as smooth a ride as possible. No supporting a kid’s dream, because a dream isn’t practical and almost certainly will fail. No pursuing their own dreams for the same reason. And certainly no left turns! So many of us will continue down a path that really isn’t suited to us, that is leading us astray or to a dead end, rather than make a left.
But perhaps it isn’t just the ever-spreading tumor of worry that drags us down, away from the risk and the rightly earned delight from successfully making a left. After all, when we are older, our vehicles are longer. Instead of a zippy little car or jet ski built for one, maybe two, they are freakin’ tractor-trailers, or huge tankers that carry all the people, responsibilities and ties we’ve accumulated. They don’t turn easily. They take up the entire intersection as they swing round, creating a disturbance, and threatening to upset our cargo. It makes sense to avoid that left! But is it sense or fear that keeps us from taking it? Is it our forgotten skills or long buried sense of adventure?
I know of people whose lifestyles involve changing locales every 5 or 7 years for professional reasons. Their craft never seems to get too big to turn. They find fun and adventure in every new place, and remain nimble, flexible, daring. Sure, moving is a pain, but they do it with good cheer and make the best of it. They have many friends all over the country with whom they keep up contact and visit. They have safe ports all over. But for those of us who stay in one port for too long, our crafts just seem to get bigger and bigger, maybe even stuck, and other ports begin to seem foreign, scary, hard to navigate, not worth the effort.
Maybe our crafts are not as big as we think. Maybe we just haven’t made a left in some time and we’ve lost the stout heart for it. I think even a person who once led an adventurous life for many years can lose heart if they’ve been settled for a while. They might even still make the occasional right, which isn’t nearly as scary, and tell themselves they’ve been making lefts.
No question, the left turn is far more challenging, even dangerous at times. And yes, being parked, or going straight, or even turning right is much safer. And maybe the surroundings we’ve been in for such an extended period of time are wonderful in many ways that we are loath to give up. But maybe what lies to the left is the promised land, the incredible place we never found because we just wanted to avoid that left. Maybe, if we go for it, we will discover that our craft, while indeed carrying a load, isn’t really that huge and heavy after all, and that we can in fact travel back and forth, keeping the delights of our old port while discovering even greater enchantments at a new one. And in the process, maybe we might realize that the young do not have the market on adventure and exploration, and that there is something to be said for venturing forth without a clear sense of what could happen. Maybe it keeps us young, and what’s wrong with that?
I told Diane, “Tell him to turn on his signal, take a deep breath and get ready for the adventure of a lifetime. Or get on board and remind him how.”
I had a friend Iris. I say “had” because I ended the friendship definitively and incontrovertibly, about 18 years ago. I said, “Have a nice life,” and hung up on her. You can’t get any more final than that. This was in the old days, when there was an actual receiver to hang up, which somehow made the gesture all the more powerful. But really, all I did was sweep away the spectral traces, the very contorted and disturbing ghost, of a friendship which in truth had disappeared years before that. What led me to such an abrupt and uncouth snipping of any remaining thread? Well, perhaps it was a case of a slow boil finally and suddenly erupting and spilling over. For years, it seemed, Iris had not really cared about our friendship and had done a number of things to show me that. Either that, or she was so self-absorbed that she hadn’t even realized how shabbily she had treated me.
Found on images.search.yahoo.com
We had been close for years in college. The way we met would forever go down in history. I had dated a boy named Gil my sophomore year, but by the end of the summer we had broken up for various reasons. I still loved him, however, and he and I and kept finding our way back to each other on and off for the next 5 years. During one of our “off” spells, he got himself into a spot of trouble, when he mentioned to a girl he had met that he wanted to see the filming of Pinocchio being shown on campus later that week. That girl was none other than Iris. According to Gil, who came to my door on the night of the movie in a panic, Iris was like a steamroller, jumping on Gil’s remark as though he were asking her on a date, and accepting his offer before he could even understand what hit him. Young and inexperienced as he was, and completely lacking in fortitude and finesse, Gil gulped and accepted this turn of events. Except that he didn’t. He spent the next couple of days trying to round up a group to join them, and when that failed, he showed up at my door, an hour before he was supposed to “pick up” Iris, pleading with me to accompany him right then and there so that the “date” wouldn’t be a date. He must have really been desperate to ask me of all people, since we had a confusing and somewhat painful history ourselves, and, indeed, his showing up at the last minute, making me his last resort, attested to that. Still, on some level he knew that our friendship, whatever the rockiness of our romance, was of strong enough stuff to withstand his turning to me for help that he knew I’d give. That’s what I like to think, because the alternative would mean that not only was he inept with Iris, but he cared more about getting my help than wondering if he was causing me any discomfort or heartache by reminding me that he was dating (although apparently not dating Iris).
In any event, we arrived at her door, Gil having talked nervously the whole way there, breathlessly thanking me for saving him, and when the door opened, there she stood. Shorter than us by one third, with very long, thick and wavy auburn hair, a face full of freckles and large brown eyes. Eyes that looked very confused at that moment to see me standing there. Gil mumbled some kind of incongruous, scrambled, and possibly intentionally incoherent introduction, and off we walked toward the hall where the film would be shown. As we shambled awkwardly across the quad in the dark, the proverbial big elephant lumbering right beside us, I considered. Why did I agree to this? Why did I agree to help this boy who still had strings to my heart, who was being a clod? And why couldn’t he have gone to the movie with Iris, and then afterward simply not follow up? She seemed friendly. Spunky and with a strong essence, but certainly not scary. I reached a conclusion. Iris didn’t deserve any of this, and I was going to rescue her. So I addressed myself to Iris, and almost exclusively to Iris, with genuine interest about her background, what she was studying and where she grew up. The dialogue flourished, and poor Gil was as much of a third wheel as he was confounded. It seemed that Iris, having swiftly concluded that Gil was not worthy of her attention after showing up unexpectedly with another girl, was thankful for somewhere else to direct it. We found that we had an easy rapport, and a mutual desire for friendship.
At the the end of the night, which included a stop for a late snack during which Iris and I never stopped gabbing while Gil just sat there like a stone, we made plans to get together later that week. In any event, we went on from there to be good friends. She was direct and assertive, yes, but she was warm, kind, unguarded. She was the most emotionally brave person I had met up till then. Her friendship meant enough to me to keep it away from Gil when he and I inevitably reconnected. He almost certainly thought I was respecting his very clear preference to have as little exposure to Iris as possible, but in truth I was shielding Iris from Gil’s contempt. I cared for her too much to subject her to it, especially when there was a part of me that believed that he just didn’t “get her.” There was a part of me that felt his inability to be straightforward with her or even spend one evening alone in her company was tied to his inability to connect with me. For after all, Iris and I shared emotionally honesty and intensity. We were brave, while Gil was not. When we talked, it was with trust and comfort. I cared for her enough to listen to her tell the story again and again that we met because a boy had asked both of us out for the same date, even though it gave me a pang each time. It gave me a pang because it pulled up my disappointment with Gil for turning to me for help when what I wanted instead was his love, and it pulled up my disappointment with my dear friend Iris, since she knew that Gil was my great, unrequited love.
Later on that year, when Gil and I had another attempt at romance that ended badly, at least for me, I went over to Iris’s. It didn’t seem ironic at all. She did something that I will never forget. She read me a story. I was sitting on her bed crying, and without explanation, she brought a picture book over to the bed and began reading it to me. Like a mother to a child. By the end of the book, I felt soothed, calmer, safer. It remains one of the sweetest, gentlest things a friend has ever done for me. Another thing that I will never forget was how, after I had graduated but came back to visit Iris who was then a senior, we spent the day walking and talking around Providence. At one point, I took her hand like I did with my friends when I was 8. We held and swung hands for a good block and a half. She was the only girlfriend I would have ever felt safe enough to do that with, and I was trying to tell her that she was dear to me. I couldn’t say it aloud, but it seems that she understood and accepted it with her usual wholeheartedness.
We both lived in New York City at the same time for two years and kept up, but once Iris entered the world of high-powered public relations she began to morph from the unguarded, warm, down to earth friend I had known into a competitor. A shined up, stylish and businesslike associate headed for higher things. Her ambition seemed to take over, and she hardened. I moved away and married, and she met and married Todd, a junior law associate who seemed just as enamored with being a young professional as she did. On the rare occasion when we saw them, their interactions with us and with each other seemed to be one witty, acerbic remark after another looking for an audience.
I guess those years apart really sealed the deal. For when my husband and I moved back to the New York area after 7 years in Boston, Iris and I just never got anywhere near where we once had been. Where, in truth, we had not been for almost a decade. Whatever plans we made that involved she and Todd coming to Westchester for the afternoon seemed always to have conditional status, cancelled at the last minute due to their deciding they were too tired, or wanted to spend the beautiful day going for an ambling country drive. When it was our turn to go into the city to meet Iris and Todd for dinner, we always did. And Iris always seemed to welcome my coming into the city with my two year old, in stroller, for a play date with her one year old at her apartment.
The incident that finally stung me into understanding that I no longer meant anything to Iris occurred when she and Todd took a week’s vacation at Lake Mahopac. She actually was the one to make the call, to tell me about their planned trip. About how, since they’d only be about 30 minutes away, they could use the opportunity to come by for a visit. I had just given birth to my son, and told her that of course, of course, I’d really love for them to come and meet our new family member. And I meant it. I meant it when I said it. Because I wanted my friend Iris to look with me, down at my little boy.
We arranged that she would call me when they got to Lake Mahopac, or maybe she just said, “Let’s you and I talk when Todd and I get there.” She also gave me their telephone number there. After not hearing from her, I called on the third day of a seven day vacation, and asked when they’d like to come. Iris’s answer: “We’re waiting for a rainy day, so we won’t feel like we’re missing out on any of our vacation.”
Of course the rainy day never came. Either that, or I might have said, out of some sense of self-protection, “Oh, that’s all right. Let’s forget it and do it another time.” I can’t remember.
I got off the phone profoundly hurt. I went to my husband and told him what transpired. “She doesn’t care about you,” he said bluntly. I spent the next several months coming to terms with that and realizing that she had been putting no real effort into the friendship for years. It was all just half-hearted rote. Phone calls every so often and broken plans to get together, and no real connection anymore. Certainly there was nothing left that would make either Iris or I want to make the effort, let alone compel us, to be there for each other, wholly and firmly there: on site, at the scene of the action, in sadness or joy. The difference between Iris and me, I sadly realized, was that I didn’t want that to be true. It seemed she didn’t care whether it was true or not. Had she understood well before I did what we had become? Had she intentionally put distance between us for some thoughtlessness of mine of which I was clueless? Had she been consciously or unconsciously viewing our relationship the way one does a spent houseplant, which one tends without much enthusiasm and secretly wishes would die already so you wouldn’t have to water it?
So I was completely unprepared when Iris called me six months later. I listened in stunned silence, my neck and head getting hot and my heart beating like crazy, as she asked me if I’d like to come to her apartment (which would have entailed travel for over an hour into the city, with my now 3 year old and my 6 months old infant) for a play date with her 2 year old and to meet her new baby.
Somehow, this call was an even greater insult that the last one. Did she not know how badly hurt I was to realize I was now no longer one of those would-be-a-delightful-addition-to-a- vacation-for a-few-hours friends, and instead, over the years, I had somehow become merely a perfectly-adequate-activity-that-could-fill-some-time-only-if-other-options-were-rained-out friend? Didn’t she know that I had been grieving this newly ascertained truth that we were no longer close? Hadn’t she blown off my invitation for her to meet my new baby? Yet she was inviting me to undertake the difficulty of bringing my 3 year old and infant to her apartment, complete with all the equipment and accessories that would require . Didn’t she know that for her, for all those years, I had swallowed my pang and smiled every time she seized the opportunity to tell people that we met when a boy asked us both out for the same date? Maybe she did that because, to her, that’s all she and I had been reduced to: a funny, not so funny story. “Iris,” I croaked, in a voice choked with emotion, “you treated me so badly last summer that I thought you wanted to end the friendship. So no, I won’t be coming into the city. Have a nice life.” Click.
Did I handle it well? No. Of course, I know that. I didn’t say, “Iris, what you said and did last summer hurt me terribly, and here’s why.” I just blurted a whole bunch of stuff. Then I hung up on her. No question, I was temporarily insane, overwhelmed by a flood of emotions that I only vaguely understood. I pulled a “nutty,” as they say. I even purposefully tied up the phone for about 15 minutes afterward, rambling on to my husband, seeking his consolation. But as I stared at the now silent phone, still quaking, I couldn’t help but wonder whatwould I have done, if an old friend angrily told me I had treated her so badly that she wished me a nice life and hung up on me. And it occurred to me that I would have called back repeatedly till I got her, and pleaded to know what I could have possibly done to upset her so. If she were someone I really cared about, that is. I was therefore left to consider two possibilities. One was that Iris felt so angry that I was, to her mind, hostile and outrageous for no fathomable reason, that her anger trumped any caring or interests she had in finding out why I would say such a thing and trying to make things right regardless. In that scenario, she was the mistreated friend and I therefore wasn’t worth one more minute of her time. The other possibility was that my husband was right. She didn’t care. Either way, it meant there was no friendship to save. And so I stood up, put away the phone, took a deep breath and picked up my bereavement where I left off, now with a fresh stab of grief.
Still, 18 years later, I sometimes think of her. I think of how she read me a story and how we swung hands. Those were two gifts I will always treasure. I think of them last…. and first. First, the memories come to me. Then, I wonder how she and her family might be doing. Next, I feel the grief for a lost friend and especially that honest vulnerability and emotional bravery that once were, and maybe still are, the wonderful truths behind her brash façade. Then, last, always, always last, I return, with gratitude and affection, to those moments of true exchange and friendship when we were young.
Nothing makes you grasp how weird sleep is quite like going to sleep for the night in the clothes you wore that day. You take off your shoes and, still wearing shirt, pants, socks, and even the leather belt you had on, just lie on the bed (blanket optional), and sleep for seven or eight hours. People will give you a bunch of different reasons why we don’t normally do this. Like, it’s not comfortable, or you need separate sleep clothes to absorb the sleep smell we all generate (that’s just weird right there!), or if you don’t perform the ritual of undressing and washing, you’ll accumulate all kinds of grime on your face, etc. But these are just sacraments we’ve adopted to prepare for and regulate a most bizarre phenomenon. To sophisticate and romanticize something primal and animal and out of our control: we simply turn off, shut down to a bare minimum of breathing, beating, and chemical regulation. We hibernate like bears, only for several hours and not months at a time. And our dens are in the modern equivalent of caves. Compartments we’ve sectioned off, in dwellings that also have bigger shared compartments for food stores and communal domestic activities.
When you sleep in your day clothes, there is no formal break between your routines for day and night. You take away that tiny moment we’ve indoctrinated ourselves to notice (or, more accurately, created in the first place for our own reassurance). That moment we think we have deliberately chosen to embark on our journey to the restful, restorative, magical, mystical and even potentially frightening world of dreams. When you sleep in your day clothes, there is no ceremony. There is no moment. You just simply move to a bed and stretch out in a horizontal position.
The bed is the key. A lifetime habit of romanticizing sleep doesn’t disappear in one night of being too lazy to get up from the couch after a late television movie. No, to realize how weird sleep is, you have to deliberately decide, “Hey, you know what? I’m gonna go to sleep in my bed and in my clothes!” And you have to do it for two nights in a row at least, if only to shake the notion that sleeping in your clothes makes you a bum, a dysfunctional loser who might as well be passing out drunk. By the second night of sleeping in your day clothes – not the SAME clothes of course; you have to put on fresh clothes each morning! – you will feel instead like you are conducting a legitimate experiment to investigate the reality of sleep, and be shod of the guilt of abandoning conventions shared by all upright members of society. Yes, folks, I did this. Having the house all to myself now that the kids are in college helped. And I’ll even admit that it didn’t start out as an investigation, but merely as an act of defiance. Why bother going through all the rigmarole? I can do whatever I want. I can go to sleep in my clothes!!
But it turned out to be quite informative. It made me see how sleep is merely the recharging of our organic batteries. Sleep, after eating and expelling waste, is perhaps the strongest proof that we are, albeit very advanced creatures, creatures nonetheless. For even though we are never more vulnerable than when we are while sleeping, we must do it. In the end, it is compulsory. We can’t function without it for very long. There we are, completely defenseless, while our brains and our organs recharge and we generate more bone marrow, more neurons, more enzymes. And because deep down – deep, deep deep down – we know we are defenseless, we protect ourselves as much as we can, both physically and psychologically from this stark truth. We invent words like “slumber” to connote activity, a journey through the netherworld. Indeed, we kiss our loved ones goodnight, as if we are all going somewhere. We perform all sorts of rites such as putting on special, cozy garments, or tucking in our children and giving them a bedtime story. We sleep in the privacy of bedrooms, in homes locked for the night. We graciously offer guests the chance to rest undisturbed in private guest quarters, secure in the unspoken understanding that we are nearby sentinels who promise not to spy on them as they sleep. And we in turn don’t allow just anyone to see us sleep. We don’t sleep in front of the contractors who are doing work in our homes, or even good friends, unless we happen to be bunking with them on holiday. When we seek to economize in our youth, and stay in hostels while traveling, it makes us uncomfortable to sleep communally, but we take a calculated risk and put on a show of bravado, even as we clutch our backpacks or money holders close to our bodies. If we are unfortunate enough to fall asleep during a class or a lecture, we always awaken with a sense of mortification, not because we care about having insulted the teacher or the presenter, but because people have seen us in our vulnerable and undignified state. What if we drooled??
One exception that we all seem perfectly willing to make to our careful protection of ourselves in sleep, is napping on public transportation. It seems that from the earliest invention of public transit, we simply had to accept that the rocking, the jiggling, the boredom and the long passages of time would lull some of us into sleep and it just couldn’t be helped. So there is this shared willingness not to watch the guy leaning against the bus window softly snoring, or the couple, weary after a day of sightseeing, nestled into each other with eyes shut. We know that the same courtesy will be accorded to us, if our exhaustion gets the better of us on the commuter train home, or on the six hour plane ride. Indeed, given length of a typical flight, and the relative lack of movement allowed, we have actually come to feel quite safe and appropriate sleeping on a plane. In the case of flights far across hemispheres, we really have no choice. We come up against that compulsory need for recharging, even if we like to think of it more as an acceptable activity rather than what it actually is: a public shutting down. And so we make allowances, and respect the privacy of the snoozing traveler. Well, in most cases we do. Sadly, the introduction of the smart phone with camera has resulted in the potential for ridicule, as this photo taken of me on the way back from a youth trip to Nicaragua demonstrates. I’m the one with slack jaw.
But rather than dwell on the ignominy of shutting down like a switched off robot, ultimately I choose to celebrate what sleep indicates about our complexity of design and functioning. We are advanced organisms, requiring large amounts of energy for diverse and incredible tasks. We propel ourselves through space. We solve problems (and make some). We find our own fuel and make it even more appetizing. We create, and destroy and communicate. And, of course, we think. We contemplate and ruminate and theorize, and – need I say it? – navel-gaze. We even find ways of dressing up sleep so that we don’t have to face how basic and limited we nevertheless remain. If all that means I must be little more than a large body bag every night, so be it. I can’t choose to keep from shutting down, but I can embrace it and all that it allows me to do when I’m awake. Now, where are those pajamas?
From my kitchen table I can see that lamp. That floor lamp I finally came up with an excuse to get rid of (it really is far too puny for our oversized family room, and I had no other place to use it) and temporarily replaced with a bigger, more me kind of a lamp. Before the day went out, my son asked, with his panic barely contained, “What did you do with that lamp?”
“What lamp?” I innocently asked, without any actual innocence.
“That lamp that was in the family room? Did you get rid of it??”
I told my son that I still had it. “But see how much better this lamp is for the space?” I sweetly suggested. He was not fooled. “Can you put it back?” he pleaded. He then dropped the cement. The fixative that would tie that fuggin’ lamp to me for all time. “I love that lamp. It’s been in every home we’ve ever lived in. I remember that lamp from forever.” And then the coup de grâce: “…It’s my childhood.” Just like that, I was doomed. Doomed to keep that lamp for all time, till I die.
I understood the power of the lamp for my son. For I too had THE item, a small mass produced print, purchased at some such place like Alexander’s (in the Bronx) or Woolworth’s, of a Paris night scene by Maurille Prévost. This cheap replica, printed on swirl-embossed paper to suggest actual brushstrokes, and set in a common, 1960’s ready-to-hang frame of the sort found everywhere in tasteful or striving middle class homes across the country, was so dear to me that my eye would scan the wall for it virtually every time I was in our kitchen in Rockland County. Before that, when we lived in an apartment in the Bronx, I’d look up from my spot on the smooth-tiled foyer floor (the small sofa seemed reserved for my Dad or visiting adults) and find my familiar friend reassuringly in its place, my proof that I was in the right home. When my parents were preparing for a garage sale prior to moving from their Rockland home to a more suitable dwelling for retirement years, I quickly grabbed the print off the wall and held it close. “Were you thinking of getting rid of this? Cause I’d want it,” I whimpered. And moments later I was the happy owner of my childhood companion, which I promptly hung up in my home, to the confusion of my husband.
So I knew that lamp, that damned lamp, was not just a lamp to my son. My 18 year old son, skilled in never appearing to break cool when it served him, actually voiced a plea for this unoriginal, this unremarkable, this you-should-be-ashamed-of-yourself-sorry-excuse-for-a-lamp lamp, with bond paper dyed and embossed to look like a genuine tanned-leather shade and dark-brown bronze pole complete with matching, hammered base which no lamp should ever have, ever again. He was desperate. Believe me, I knew this from recognizing that same imploring expression of poorly disguised anguish my mind’s eye recalled from my very own face. Worse, I was 35 at the time! But, I wasn’t going to let on just how well I knew. “Okay, sweetie,” I said with my inner Oscar winning actor’s most benevolent patience. “For you, I’ll switch them back.” And as I turned to go, when my face was safely “out of scene,” and out of sight, my inner actor, who is, actually, me, dropped the act and celebrated my coup in grasping the truth: “That’s his lovey.”
Of course, I’m a smug dope cause my lovey is that dumb, cheap, embossed paper print with the cook arriving for work via bicycle and with his chef’s hat on already, while he’s still straddling the bike, at an establishment simply and humbly called “Restaurant.” And I remember the love I had, have, for my lovey. The joy that filled me as though I were a child again when my mother, in the manner of a carnival barker awarding a small kid a prize that was worth absolute crap all the while making the kid feel like she was getting gold, told me “It’s yours!” And I couldn’t bring myself to ruin my son’s not-so-secret, young child’s stab of joy and relief. So I said nothing to him. Nothing to let him know I was on to him. Knew his secret. And even more importantly, nothing to let him know that that very same lamp had been a prick at my heart every single time I looked at it.
I had purchased that lamp during a New England style colonial antique furniture-browsing day with my mother-in-law and sister-in-law, about 4 years into my marriage. Why I was even in that particular browsing experience was a source of mystery to me, since I despise New England colonial antiques, and deep down always did, but my apparent inability to say, “no thanks, Mom, I hate the kind of antiques you love” when she brought up the idea to go browsing for the new home in the “country” that her son and I recently acquired (and so What better place for “country furniture” right?) had something to do with it. I suppose it was tied to the very impulse that later led me to suggest out loud that I might buy the lamp. It was an obligatory outing with “the matrons.” Not that my mother-in-law or sister-in-law were particularly matronly or even were aware they were serving that function. We poor females don’t always know when we morph into a member of the matrons, those women who, among so many other stultifying suggestions and comments, imply to you that furniture shopping is something “the women” do to feather their family nests. And furthermore know how to do primly, and respectably, and for not too much cost because we want to be responsible in our spending after all. And being with the matrons, I didn’t say, couldn’t say, couldn’t admit, “I hate furniture shopping. I couldn’t give a shit about what my furniture looks like, really,” or say “Guys, I’ll shop for my furniture when I good and feel like it, and it won’t be this New England, stripped of all ornamentation or frivolity, and painted or stained only in muted shades that suitably convey puritan plainness, humility and purity shit. It’ll be something positively vulgar, like florid and overly carved Victorian pieces or something out of the 50’s version of the future,” or even “There’s really something messed up about the fact that women do this in groups, to help each other, right? Where are the men? I mean, HELLO! Don’t you realize that we are still doing the same shit our very hairy hundreds of thousands of years ago predecessors did?”
So there I was, along on this activity. For some reason, probably just because it was along our path, we walked into a furniture store that was not filled with colonial antiques or reproductions, but with newer, somewhat everyday, tasteful furnishings. Maybe, understanding what felt like my only way out, I scanned around for something, anything that I could live with. Or maybe the selection just seemed so much better than it was because it appeared after a sea of items I couldn’t ever imagine owning, that I really thought I liked what was in the store. But for whatever reason, that’s when it happened. “What do you think of this lamp for our living room?” I asked. BOOM. There it was. My surrender to the matrons. And one moment later, the fog cleared, and I understood that I had selected something that I really didn’t love or even want, but I held steady. I must have figured, better to get it over with, offer up the sacrifice, and then never have to go through this ceremonial joint furniture shopping ever again. Only I couldn’t have known then that it was the beginning of a long line of offerings that became second nature to me, and led me so far away from myself that I mourned my absence.
To be fair, neither my in-laws, nor anyone else, required my offerings. Indeed, over the years my mother-in-law developed a love affair with expressionist and folk art, which she indulged in freely by altering many of her colonial pieces with paint and decals of bursting blooms, or wildly colored finishes, and by transforming her walls into galleries for some of her own very vivid, unabashed and often quite thrilling expressions of color, form and movement. She was feeling free to be herself. Why wasn’t I? Maybe, once you suspect deep down that you have entered a life that isn’t quite working for you, you do whatever you can to disguise your true impulses and desires. Maybe you do whatever you can to prevent yourself and others from knowing the truth: you do not feel yourself. You do not feel alive.
And so I loathed that lamp. For 19 years I secretly loathed that lamp. But now, well past 50, I finally decided I could simply get rid of it. I no longer felt tied by some inexplicable, self-imposed obligation to temper everything in my style, my home, words that leave my mouth. Yet, here is my son. To him the lamp is his childhood, and he loves it. The strange thing is, that somehow rehabilitates the lamp for me. I can look at it and it no longer pulls up an unpleasant association just outside my conscious language. It is my son’s lovey, … and that is… so cute. I love that lamp! That is the lamp my son looked up at and felt reassured by! How could I ever get rid of it? What was I thinking?! And so, that lamp is now among my favorite items in the house. The house we will be listing on the market this spring, now that my husband and I have separated. I will be sure to keep that lamp in every home I live in, so that my son will know he’s in the right place, or one of two right places of course.
Back to here, from my seat at the kitchen table, I see the lamp. And shifting my eyes I see that I am also in perfect line with that print. THE print, my lovey. Suddenly the thought occurs to me, what if my mother or father had an unpleasant association with that print? What if it was an awful association? I call my mother immediately.
“You remember that little print of the cook outside the restaurant on his bicycle?”
“No.” That puts me on notice right there that I am probably on safe ground.
“The one that used to hang in our foyer at Bronx Boulevard and then in our kitchen in Rockland?”
“No, honey, I don’t remember it? Why?”
At first, my lovey not having an anguished past that my mother would instantly recall and convey to me disappoints me. It made my lovey a bit more… prosaic. The possibilities had been endless. It could have been something that my mother’s wandering and ultimately abandoning father gave her that she couldn’t quite bring herself to throw out. Or it could have been an imposition by her mother-in-law, who firmly declared that it was fitting and expected to see it hanging there in the foyer every time she visited our apartment that was so much smaller and less glamorous than hers. I try to inject some drama.
“Well, you gave it to me because I remembered it so dearly from my childhood, but I was wondering if it turned out that it had actually been a source of emotion for you. You know, like, maybe Grandma Gussie gave it to you and you secretly hated it?”
My mother chuckles kindly as one does at a child with a wild imagination. “No, dear, I probably just picked it up somewhere. I would do that. I’d see something that would strike me, that I’d like, and I’d get it.”
Touché.
Well, it turns out that my lovey is really quite a layered symbol after all. Far from prosaic, it now serves not only as totem of my youth, but also the ability to allow unabashed expression of myself that I once wielded and now wield again. And on top of that, while the materials used for the print and frame were inexpensive and unimaginative at the time of manufacture, they are “vintage” now, and the content, the lovely little scene by Prévost, is quite striking. I rise to wipe layers of dust and grime from the unprotected surface, it occurring to me that the dark colors I always assumed were part of the print might actually be forty years of accumulated film. As the brighter colors burst from under the damp dusting cloth, I realize that the scene has always been a window into my mother’s tastes that I had not really ever looked through.
I heard from my mother that Melvin Beylis died. I’m using fictitious names for privacy, so this man I remember with fondness is going to be named Melvin Beylis. The last time I saw Melvin was close to 30 years ago, and, before that, was when I was a teenager. But my memories of him from that time, and indeed from my entire youth, are as vivid as the most intense memories can be. As vivid as memories are when they are of someone who epitomized a time and place for you. Melvin did that. He and his wife Myrna epitomized my life in the Bronx, in the 14 story building that seemed to my young eyes to tower above the shorter apartment buildings and townhouses lining Bronx Boulevard.
Melvin always had a glint in his eye and a warm chuckling smile for me. His voice was barrelly and resonant, though he didn’t talk much. But when he did speak, his accent sounded vaguely exotic to me, a deep rumbling of a way of speaking that was so comforting and familiar, yet foreign in some way. I think his slightly darker skin tone and saucer sized brown eyes added to this notion that he was exotic. I couldn’t know then that what I was hearing was simply a mellifluous Bronx accent. A more sing song version of the hard pronunciations surrounding me on all sides, but flowing out of Melvin with their edges just ever so smoothed off, and sprinkled with his one of a kind giggle. His dark, caramel giggle.
Melvin’s receding dark hair was slicked back with the natural hair oil most men allowed to accumulate back then, to the apparent approval, or at least with the toleration of their wives and girlfriends. He seemed big and tall, despite rounded, stooped shoulders, and enough extra weight and body hair to look a bit like a shuffling bear. Someone that you wanted to hug, especially when you saw that warm smile and heard that mirthful sound emanating through parted teeth. But my best friend, Laura, told me, by her face and body posture, that her father was not as warm as cuddly as he appeared. She seemed almost a little afraid of him, in a respectful way, the same way I felt about my own father. And so I didn’t hug him, or dissolve into unguarded affection, even though he seemed so inviting. And when I hung back, I could sense the affirmation from Melvin: yes, that’s the right distance.
I could also sense but not articulate the ways Melvin was different from my father, Bernie, who had a jauntier and harder edge – who seemed more “hard-boiled” – or how Myrna was different from my mother Shirley. Myrna’s hair was a difficult to describe warm brass color, somewhat poufy if not bouffant, and highly sprayed – the kind of hairstyle that gave you no clue as to the wearer’s age, and which she could carry, and indeed did, for the rest of her life. Myrna spoke as someone with not a shred, not a hint, of any self-doubt. Someone who owns a space as soon as she walks into it. Someone whose voice modulates from sarcasm to authority to sly wit, but never falters or softens. She conveyed a confident, unassailable assessment of the facts at all times, never a gentle questioning or exploration. In contrast, my mother Shirley was less apt to offer a viewpoint or perspective, and only did so to be sociable. She spoke with the same accent, and with some measure of steadiness, but next to Myrna she seemed more understated. Indeed, her two steps forward one step back way of making herself understood seemed practically genteel, and a bit at odds with Bernie’s gruff but good-natured swagger.
It’s surprising to me to realize now that they all had the same Bronx accent. They all said “ar-right” instead of “all right” and “draww” instead of “drawer.” They all said, “prahhl-ly” instead of “probably” and “beeyoo-ti-fuhhl” instead of “beautiful.” But they all sounded so different from each other, anyway, merely from the added ingredient of their individual attitudes, their different handling of words and emphases. And perhaps because my own parents were too familiar to me, too much the norm, I never realized that they too spoke with the same dialect. The same rolling and pitching and dropping out letters and merging of syllables. The same accent I must have had, realize now I still have, when I’m spending long hours with my sisters and the conversation gets animated. If it weren’t for Melvin and Myrna, and the study of them that living across the hall allowed, if it weren’t for remembering their immutable and undeniable patterns and their warmth – for there was occasional warmth and mirth even in Myrna, behind the caustic surety – I might have never understood just how much I lost.
We moved away when I was 7, and though I remained friends with Laura for many years (our parents making it as easy as they could for us to see each other regularly and for sustained periods), in my new surroundings I began a process of transformation, a washing out, that led me to the wider world, but at a price. In Rockland County, an increasingly settled area known as “upstate” but only 30 minutes from the Bronx, I mixed with kids who spoke differently. Their parents were from other parts of the city, or from New Jersey, or even farther afield, and they didn’t have the hard r’s I did or say “dawwg.” Many of their parents were professionals or college educated, not like my father the cop or my mother who went back to school to become a teacher only after we were all in school full time, and these adults spoke with a loftiness and expansiveness that seemed like a softer music to me. I wished I had understood then that it was blander. It wasn’t as lively, or, indeed as alive as the way Melvin and Myrna spoke. And, without even realizing it, I softened my edges. In my little 7 year old brain, then 8, then 9, and so on, I mimicked and strained out the harsh sounds in my words before they slipped from my mouth. I modified. I took two steps forward and one step back.
By the time I was living and working in Boston, my exposure to people from all over the country, first at college and then at law school, had ensured that I spoke, if still recognizably from the mid-atlantic states, not at all the way I did when I left the Bronx. Not at all even the way I did when I first arrived at college and met a boy who wrote home about his new girlfriend’s New York accent. More muting, more conforming, more blending, more sophistication I thought, did me the service of rendering me unidentifiable as a Bronx native. In most conversations with my sisters, ones I have with them when others are around and I’m not completely unguarded, I speak differently from them. I even triumphantly noted a time or two in the past that I have come to lose much of the accent they still possess. The one disturbing blip occurred when I worked in a New York law firm my second summer in law school. I had some trouble figuring out the right poised and measured responses to give to partners when they asked me to take on more work, and this led to a coaching session with the partner looking out for the summer associates. He began his helpful, patiently condescending advice with the apparently sympathetic phrase “I, like you, came from a lower, middle class background.” This he apparently discerned from my inadvertent occasional slip back into harder more “Bronxonian” speech patterns while living in the city that summer, since I never discussed my heritage or socio-economic background with anyone at the firm. I remember my ears burning with outrage and humiliation, even as I dismissed him as a wannabe, a poseur.
In my early adult life, I completely lost touch with Laura, and not just because I lived far away. I ensured the demise of that relationship, first having managed to make her feel increasingly bad whenever we got together by always pointing out all the ways in which our lives and styles had diverged, and then by becoming insufferably self-absorbed, as people who are actually insecure do. It is only now, thinking about Melvin’s large brown eyes and occasional baritone rumblings, and then Myrna’s brash and unflinching assertions, that I remember how I loved the patterns of my childhood. The charm of its familiarity and reliability. At some point, just a few years ago, I came to understand that when I lost Laura’s friendship I lost something fine and rare, and that her giggling, no doubt a gift from her father, lit me up and made me smile, but it was too late. We had spent our entire adult lives apart, and there was no basis for friendship anymore. There was no longer any basis even 25 years ago, when I told her in an unwelcome phone call that I had heard she had stumbled on her way up the aisle at her wedding, a wedding I should have been at and indeed had been invited to. Far away as we were from each other even then, she could not have understood that I was not trying to point out her awkward moment with intent to diminish her, but was instead lamely trying to reach out, to tell her that I could well imagine her charming giggling at her misstep and the unspoiled and gorgeous and sweet, sweet joy of that moment I wished I could have seen, if only to remember all we shared as children. Even way back then, despite that vague awareness of what I had lost, and that fumbling attempt to reclaim it, I continued moving, if not entirely away from the cradle of the familiar, determinedly insensitive to it. This, I realize now, is a particular thread, a pattern, that repeats and repeats in my tapestry. A tapestry that consequently wasn’t as bold or as lively as I now wished it had been. As I now wish to weave it.
I think of how Melvin and Myrna represented the Bronx to me, how over the years they and Laura grew more cordial and less warm toward me on those occasions when I did see them, and, in Myrna’s case, true to her tell-it-like-it-is nature, barely cordial. And I find myself so very relieved to discover that those hard r’s and stretched out diphthongs are not completely gone, if only I relax and become completely unselfconscious, and that instead of taking one step back after my two steps forward, I can look around, giggle, and simply wonder aloud good-naturedly if I’m out too far.
Some people use the accusation of “gazing at your own navel” to dismiss a self-exploratory mental exercise as useless, self-indulgent, narcissistic, or worse, primitive. Something an ape might do. But an ape doesn’t ruminate as we do, not about its navel or anything else, and so I reject that characterization. To people apt to describe self-exploration as navel-gazing I say: sadly you are lacking in curiosity, self-awareness and frontal cortex complexity. For engaging in a deep consideration of one’s own ideas of the world is the sign, not just of wanting to soak up social, cultural, emotional and intellectual interactions, but of seeking to develop an understanding of one’s self in relation to all that information. Isn’t that how we improve? And so, I humbly offer you the fruits of my navel-gazing. My intent is to invite you to spark your own inward exploration. E. Marmer
