The Mantra

The mantra of early 21st century America: “He’s such a great guy, but he’s not a great guy for me. He’s a great guy for someone else.” Some add sorrowfully, “It’s so hard when you really love a person.”

You hear it everywhere: on streetcorners, in bars, at the next table in a restaurant, by the racks at the discount clothing outlet… Imagine a nation of people too wonderful to be right for each other!

Bet on the Fly

Agent 95, a youthful character who figured in many posts from the earlier years of this blog, asks me, "How much does my love cost you?"

"Your love doesn't cost me a thing," I vow.

"Yes it does. If you don't get me an iTouch I won't love you. I'll stop speaking to you. If you talk to me I'll act like it's a fly buzzing."

"Yeah? How long are you going to do that for?"

At first they say "forever," he and his younger brother Agent 97, but they settle on next Thursday as a reasonable goal.

"You can't," I dare them. "You can't do it."

"Did I just hear a fly say I couldn't do it?"

"Go ahead, try," I laugh. It's the surest bet ever.

Two minutes later he's asking, "Dad, can I use your laptop?"

Peacock Blue

The empty envelope had my childhood address in peacock blue ink, and hers in the corner.

Empty, and with two corners slit. I’d found it in a box of old books when I was rearranging the garage. Maybe the letter was somewhere among all these boxes, with a dozen others she’d sent, but I had no idea where. Maybe I’d thrown them out in a seizure of anti-nostalgia, or they’d been lost in one of my dozen moves.

Was it a letter rhapsodizing about making love for the first time? Or pleading with me to go to the same college as her?

Peacock blue: the color of junior year of high school. Her handwriting: careful, regular, every letter standing straight. A schoolgirl’s handwriting, belonging to someone who thought that to be mature is to do things correctly.

Peacock blue. We wrote letters obsessively though we lived only half a mile apart. Outranking the late-night phone calls and intense afterschool talks, the letters were for deep, enduring questions that couldn’t be allowed to evaporate into air. They’d continued into the first year of college, traveling a thousand miles. Then they’d stopped.

The smallest souvenir can take you the furthest back.

We’d been landmarks for each other, like pencil marks on a wall to record your height. Impersonal. Not that it could have been anyone—no, we really liked each other. But we hadn’t even had selves yet to know. I didn’t know who’d written those letters, or answered them.

I tried to wonder what she was doing now, but it didn’t work. If I’d learned that she’d been married, divorced, had children—my God, by now she could have grandchildren—had this or that illness or occupation, they would be arbitrary facts, unattached to a solid form, like pushpins without a map to pin them on.

What I would have thrilled to see, what could have told me something, was, What is her handwriting like now?

Why Love Is Not of the Body

"There are too many of us to have sex with. There's a whole world to love, but too many marriage certificates to hand out." -- Byron Katie

What think'st thou the difference, then, 'twixt friendship and love?

Love demands; friendship requests.

Writer Without a Story: The Man-Woman Thing

A middle-aged man wearing a conference nametag walks through the lobby of a hotel, a grateful smile on his face, tears flowing unrestrainedly down his cheeks in full view of airline pilots, flight attendants, bellhops, concierge, and arriving guests. What does he think he’s doing? What kind of New Age foolery have I gotten brainwashed into?

It could be that I’ve been working on my shame. Or my fear and terror. Or the accumulated pain of being a husband, an ex-husband, a father, a son, a brother. It doesn’t matter what has unlocked my tears. It doesn’t matter who I think I am or what particular hairpin turns and long straightaways have driven me here. I’m here, that’s all, I’m letting the tears flow in plain sight for the first time in my life. You look at me. Are you disgusted, worried, embarrassed, amused? Good. That’s what I want.

Let’s say we’ve been working on the man-woman thing. A lesbian has stood up and said that for the first time in her life, after doing one of our exercises, she has felt trust in men, and she invites any man to walk up and embrace her. A stunning woman in expensive clothes and perfect makeup has stood and told us what it has meant for her to be unapproachable, to be dependent on the armor of her face. A young man has stood and told us that when he was a child he molested younger boys. A man with an earring and a prim voice has told us he knows we think him effeminate, and he’s been thinking of himself that way all his life.

Or maybe sitting in morning meditation I felt hands clutching my arm and then a woman’s forehead leaning between those hands, and I put my free arm around her and held her, eyes closed, for half an hour as she shook and cried, my arm cramping, and I knew I would have stayed there till my arm fell off. And afterward she wrote me a letter and told me it was the first time in her life she understand what it felt like to be breathed by another human being.

Or I had sat on a lawn in the southern California springtime and shared worksheets with a woman who had been terribly hurt by a male relative as a preschooler, who told me that being with me was the first time she had ever felt free of her belief that men were shallow and harmful and untrustworthy, and then I’d watched as she stood in front of three hundred people and said so.

“It was like falling in love,” I told my roommate, and he said, “I would drop the ‘like.’” I didn’t know her last name or where she lived or what she did for a living. It wouldn’t have mattered if I hadn’t known her first name, either, or if we’d never exchanged a word. We worked together for an hour or two and shared a special meal. We looked into each other’s eyes and saw ourselves. Then we parted. And it didn’t matter if we never saw each other again, never spoke again during the school, although we did. We had gone through the entire course of a relationship, from first meeting to inevitable ending, in two hours.

Those women helped me as much as I them. The lesbian taught me that I am not suspect. The stunning woman taught me that I do not have to be either covetous or intimidated. The woman who leaned on me taught me that I am everyone and I don’t care who sees it. The woman I shared a meal with taught me that love arises and falls away and lasts forever at every moment.

And if I honor her and treasure her memory and wish her joy for all her life, how much more shall I do so for the woman who lived with me for sixteen years and bore my children and raised them with me and taught me and traveled with me and suffered from me, and who parted from me with the greatest honesty and kindness and wisdom?

A Valentine from Richard 6.0

Belatedly, in my 50s, I find that I have all the problems of a gifted child. Transitions and big moments are hard for me. Holidays, vacations, house moves, big purchases — I’m liable to ruin them by sulking or retreating or throwing a tantrum. I don’t know what’s expected of me, and I get angry at those who expect something. When a good time is ending, I’m likely to say something that ruins it, perhaps because I don’t know how to say I’m sad it’s ending.

Valentine’s Day has often been a bad day for me, and thus for those who’ve loved me. I have a big romantic streak but I’ve mostly hidden it, out of embarrassment. I never quite believed that I was supposed to murmur endearments, declare my devotion in impassioned phrases, let myself be swept off my feet; stranger still, I never quite believed that others wanted that from me. (“It never entered my mind,” as Sinatra is singing while I type this.) Only in the past few years have I learned to show my romantic self, and I’ve loved it. And I’ve learned that the best thing to do on a special occasion may be precisely the clichéd, corny thing I always looked down. Buy the flowers, buy the candy, light the candles, dim the lights. You don’t have to feel bad because you’re not chartering a jet to fly her to Paris. Or because you’re not as above it all as you thought.

The saving grace amid my ignorance and immaturity has been that I’m able to learn, and to teach myself when no one else will. There’s a saying, “When you lose, don’t lose the lesson,” one of the many adages, mottos, and slogans with which I cement the rough-hewn stones of my personality.

So I keep fixing the bugs and glitches. I calculate that I’ve gone through at least five versions of the Richard software and have just launched the sixth:

1.0: childhood (a naïve, enthusiastic startup)
2.0: adolescence (a huge flop – almost sank the company)
3.0: first marriage (brought me back a long way)
4.0: bachelorhood (this version didn’t stay on the market long, but earned big profits)
5.0: second marriage (I thought this would be a perennial)
6.0: ?

Whoever gets version 6.0 is going to get the benefit of a lot of trial and error, late-night sessions and working breakfasts. But during the upgrade, I don’t have a valentine.

I’m planning to spend it like any other day. Wednesdays are my busiest evenings, come to think of it: group therapy and tai chi. The tai chi attendance will be light, and those of us who make it will throw each other bouquets of wry half-smiles.

Who will be my next valentine? And when? A year from now, five years, ten? I can handle any of those answers. I have good things to learn from being alone, giving myself time for reading, writing, solo walks, and long, recklessly confessional emails. Evenings and weekends of stepping out the door without a plan, but with a smile.

There are special pleasures, though, in observing forms. So I need to ask someone to be my valentine.

Reader, how about you?