Friends

Today's post is a rewrite of a piece I posted nine years ago.

 

            I don’t see much cause to be thankful for Facebook, where it is estimated that many will spend two years of their lives doing whatever. But I am grateful that Facebook turned “friend” from a noun into a verb. You don’t just have a friend – it’s something you do. And I don’t mean that you click something on your “device” to create or announce a new relationship. To friend somebody is not quite the same as to “befriend” them, which one dictionary defines: “to act as a friend to someone by offering help or support.” To friend someone involves more dimensions than help or support, and does not simply involve an offer, a gesture, however sincere.

 

            As psychologist Rob Pasick noted in his book about men, Awakening from the Deep Sleep, most of us typically don’t have friends – we have contacts. I believe he is right, as far as any generalization can be right, about men who are younger than I am. When you are trying to build a career, a life stage that my friend Peter summarizes as being “on the make,” contacts are important. And, to our loss, they sometimes take the place of friendships. This was never really true about me during my teaching career because with tenure, my career curve pretty much stagnated – I was not on the make and thus didn’t need any contacts. No, my reason for not having many friends was different.

 

            Once I retired, I continued not to have many friends. I hung out with Kim and Kim’s friends. She is much better at friendships than I am. She phones people, sends them cards, gets together for breakfast or lunch. Not me. I have acquaintances who I am always glad to see and talk with, but I never made the follow-up “let’s get together” phone call, despite Kim’s prodding. I do not take action to friend my friends. (A collateral benefit: I have few enemies, either – none I know about.) My basic model of a friendship occurred when I was working at Starbucks and I’d engage in a few minutes of conversation with customers who were invariably incurious about me. We would “connect,” usually, and then they would disappear.

 

            My new friend, Don, told me that the average male has 1.67 friends. That seems maybe a little low, even for me, but close. To friend somebody is a lot like loving them, in the sense of attachment and commitment. But love, for me at this point, gets into deep sexual water that I’ll save for a future post. Suffice it to say that I love Kim and she is my best friend, and these are two somewhat different things.

 

            So, you are probably not asking, what is my problem? The problem is that I don’t see it as a problem, because I see real friendships as deep and enduring, despite time and space. And unlike those who feel good about having a lot of Facebook friends (aka faux friends), I feel good about my relationships with the few friends I have, even though they may disappear for years, or be miles away. I think of Peter, an Amherst friend who flew out to see me and with whom I instantly resumed a friendship with the warmth, openness and depth that I remember from college and our few meetings since then. Or Jim, a colleague, who with his wife Angie we see once or twice a year, but who keeps in touch by responding to my blog.

 

            Distance may not be a problem for friendships. In fact, it may enhance them. Most of my current friends (except for you, Alice, and, Jerry and Fleda, and more recently, Don,) don’t live close. I sustain these friendships by writing this blog, and by occasionally hearing back. I work better with pen pals because I find that I can open myself better in writing than I can in person. The David in my writing is a filtered or created version of me, a persona. I learned this when I wrote my book about my recently murdered schizophrenic brother, and I, the narrator of the book, became a better brother to him once he was dead than I was when he was alive.

 

            My act of friending, then, is pretty much an act of writing. Sorry about that. And the deep, warm and open friendships I imagine may be just that – imagined. Works for me, though.

 

I remember reading some of my love poems to a class of students. One of them asked how my wife liked my being so open with my feelings. I said that I’m not really very open, and when she asks me how I feel about something, I usually say that I will get back to her on that in a few days. Or it’s like the old truism that when you ask a guy how he feels and he says, “Fine,” what he means is, “I don’t understand the question.”

 

 

Not One of My Gifts

            Some people have a brain that’s good at seeing how things work. Physical things. They can look at a machine, or a household mechanical problem, and figure out how to fix it, often without having to consult an instruction manual. I think Kim’s whole family shares the genes that make such simple miracles happen. This ability is not one of my gifts.

 

            Let me share a few examples.

 

            I bought a leaf-mulching machine. Plug it in and a plastic string whirls around, chopping up the leaves you dump in the top, and out comes the leaf mulch at the bottom, ready for the garden. Easy. It came in a box that included 4 metal legs, a frame where the legs attach, another piece containing the motor and strings plus an on/off switch and a socket for the plug, and a wide funnel on the top where you feed the leaves. Easy. Except I could not get the damn thing together. The legs went on simply: 4 legs, 4 slots to stick them in. But the piece with the motor would not fit on top of the leg assembly! And the funnel would not fit on top of that! As I studied the problem, I was further annoyed at the idiots who had manufactured this machine and then I saw that all of the writing on the outside of the housing was written upside down! How could I trust these incompetents?! It then occurred to me, in a flash of insight, that I had the troublesome middle piece upside down. I turned it over, and everything fit together. I was a little nervous plugging it in, but it hummed enthusiastically. Problem solved.

 

            An earlier story of my success occurred several years ago when I was visiting my younger brother, John, who was living in a small apartment in Phoenix. As he walked me around the place, he complained that one of his kitchen plugs was broken, so he could not use his toaster. I looked at the cover and noticed it had a little button toward the middle. I pushed the button and it clicked. “Try it now,” I told him. He did. It worked. John was amazed. He said it had been broken for weeks, and he thought I was a genius. I don’t know where I had learned about the Ground Fault Interrupter (GFI). Probably one had saved me from electrocuting myself while plugging in a wet toothbrush and I heard the button click. Whatever – I felt like a hot shit.

 

            But the best of my mechanical achievements occurred a few months ago when I successfully assembled an Inversion Table that I bought on Amazon. Lying on it is supposed to be good for the back, stretching out the vertebrae that gravity has been compacting for decades.  It (the table, not my spine) had hundreds of parts, including bolts and screws of various sizes. This, I thought, will require consultation with the instruction manual. I began the process laying everything out on the floor of our basement. Quite a display!

 

            About eight hours later, I was finished. I tried it, carefully climbing on and tilting it back beyond level, and it worked! By that I don’t mean that it helped my spinal health. No, I simply mean that it did not collapse with a loud metallic crash, injuring and humiliating me. I called Kim down to witness my triumph. She gave me a hug and told me that I can do just about anything, and that I should have more confidence in myself.

 

            Well, perhaps. But what I did was write an email to the company that made the inversion table, complimenting them on the quality of the instruction manual, explaining that I’m usually not good at this assembly stuff, but I sailed (slowly) through a complex process. Please, I said, pass my compliments and my thanks up or over to those responsible for writing those instructions. I realize now that my note says more about me than it does about the quality of the instructions. I have told more than one repairman, “I can’t fix many things, but I can fix your paragraph.” I tried to make my experience about writing.

 

            We sold the inversion table in a garage sale when we thought we were going to sell our house and would certainly not have room for it in a condo (that we did not buy). And besides, Kim’s back was too sore for her to ever use the device, so up the basement stairs and out the door to a lucky buyer. He does not know how fortunate he is that he did not have to assemble the thing. My eight hours of work saved him maybe two hours.

 

Please note that I have not written about dealing with computers. I am, laughably, tech support in our home . . ..

 

This just in:

 

Successfully fixed Kim’s camera lens when I noticed two tiny loose screws, and I found a tiny screw driver.

 

Bill in Bed

        Bill in Bed

Bill tells me he is having a crisis of faith.

Tears slide into his beard.

 

He lives in a hospital bed on the glassed in

porch of his home. His dog

 

dozes at the foot of his bed. The tv sends

lively ghosts from the corner.

 

He tells me he is afraid he is never going

to get well again. I decide

 

not to cry. I see creases in the skin

of his bald head propped

 

on the pillow. I wonder if the radiation

caused them. I remember

 

my father’s death, a death I missed. 
Bill tells me

 

late last night a friend said it is

all right to lose faith

 

but not all of it. I decide not to cry.

I picture the tumor locked

 

into Bill’s brain, tentacles inching into

the wet folds, squeezing,

 

with pitiless eyes and a beak. Bill says

he envies my trips out west.

 

I decide not to cry now.

 

As we talk I stroke Bill’s unparalyzed hand.

I rub his foot, but

 

I’m uncertain about touching his left hand,

still indented where his rings

 

were removed. The nurse arrives, takes

Bill’s blood pressure, gives

 

him a shot, checks his skin and the response

of his pupils. Sue

 

joins us, kisses Bill’s forehead. Tells

the nurse and me she sleeps

 

here with him, likes to cuddle in bed,

jokes that they make out

 

heavily when people aren’t around. I rise

to leave. Sue asks

 

the nurse to make room in the bed for her when

she turns Bill over.  Sure.

 

I say it’s OK they are married. Sue and the nurse

lift, using some leverage tricks,

 

relocating the tube leading to the urine bag hooked

on the frame of the bed.

 

I try to stay out of the way. I’m uncertain

about touching. I’m having a crisis

 

of faith. Sue leans down

 

to arrange Bill’s head on a pillow. His good arm

reaches to circle her neck, holding

 

her in a fierce headlock of an embrace. I

can not see her face or Bill’s.

 

I am jealous of this broken dying man. I see

now the death I missed.

Homecoming

            Our homecoming was joyful, but not without some apprehension. We parked in the driveway to save us a few steps hauling all of our stuff to the front door, and we saw that the folks who had plowed our driveway in the winter had plowed our gravel – a lot of it – into the garden. I imagined what it would take to get it out from its tangles in leaves and mulch, especially since the garden featured some large sculptural rocks.

 

            And then all that stuff in the car to deal with! We both carried boxes and bags in from the car, and Kim was in charge of unpacking and putting things away, as I didn’t remember where anything went, and she didn’t want to be ordering me around. I did put a few of my things away – clothes that Kim would re-hang properly and drawers for my toiletries (not my favorite word) that Kim would re-organize for me.

 

            Mainly I retreated to the basement, where I intended to reactivate our internet and television service. Fortunately, I had called Spectrum to end our vacation hold status. But unfortunately, I had called for that reactivation to begin the day after we returned, so I had to call them back. The Spectrum guy was patient with me and said it should be on within the hour, but it might take a day. It was an hour.

 

            This was only a partial solution, as I still needed to know how to use our two remotes (one came with the television, the other from Spectrum) to watch regular television and to stream Netflix, Prime, and Hulu. I was able to do the streaming, and I did manage to stumble upon the ABC network, but I’m not sure how. We do like to watch Sunday morning programs on CBS. I’m writing this on Saturday – will let you know how it goes.

 

            My next challenge was to hook up more electronics so we could tell Alexa what music we wanted to listen to. I hoped plugging it in would do the job, but Alexa told me she was having trouble locating my internet service. After a bit of searching online, I learned that what I needed to do was to hold down one of the two buttons on top for 15 seconds, and then a yellow light would go on, and a few seconds later I would be good to go. It worked! I gave myself a big pat on the back. Kim was too busy opening and emptying boxes to give me a pat until I asked for one later.

 

            So, for me, the initial joyfulness was mixed with an awareness of all the work that we had to do – not just unpacking and then finding things we hid from people who might be examining our house, and finding things whose regular location we had forgotten, and setting up electronics, but also in our daily routine of housekeeping and yardwork. We were planning a major grocery shopping trip – about an hour away. We needed to get new bird feeders as we had sold ours in a garage sale, thinking we were going to sell the house and move away. We needed a new leaf-chopper to replace the one we had sold, so we could recycle our leaves as mulch. 

 

            On top of all of this was and is the Spring Cleanup of our property – all the weeds in the gardens and the leaves covering gardens and bushes. And the beach needed maintenance – sticks and some big logs. In the few days we have been back we have put in maybe ten hours dealing with the driveway gravel in the gardens.

 

            But then, after a three-day flurry of activity, we reawakened to why we love this place. Aside from having a kitchen that works well, and (thanks to me) a television that works well, we sat on our warm porch and watched the birds discover our new feeder. We have seen twenty species as I write this. And we sat at breakfast, watching the sunrise and seeing a blur that might have been an owl whiz by our dining room window. And while I was working on the garden gravel, I heard a pileated woodpecker hammering high in a large dead tree, and I heard an eagle overhead. We saw the brilliant blues of Torch Lake, and at night the full moon’s reflection on the still waters. And I heard the call of a distant early-morning loon.

 

            And we thought – this is not Atlanta. We are seeing and hearing birds at breakfast, not motorcycles and fire engines. Our windows show lake and birds – this morning a male turkey strutting his stuff for three females – not Atlanta’s traffic zooming by, or stopped in a jam. We love it here. Yes, we are going to need some help – people our age do. We are going to try out some people next week.

 

            Yes, there is a lot that we miss in Atlanta – mainly being close to family, but also our very cool loft space and the friendships that we were starting to build. We miss the great vibe of the Stacks and Cabbagetown – artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers, etc. (in addition to the occasional vandals who climb the fence to get in). And we miss Atlanta’s warm weather in April, especially after coming home to a bit of snow and thin ice on the lake. And we do feel a bit isolated here, though it’s an easy one-mile drive to our local market, with some speeders flying by, but the roads are open. We miss having good restaurants within walking distance, but we have the Torch Lake Café a mile away, an OK restaurant that will be open all week in a few days.

 

            But every day we are here we are reminded, despite all the work, how much we love this place. By “this place” I mean the Bark House – its beauty and livability (thank you, Kim), and our place on the shore of Torch Lake – the sunrise, the birds, the deer (even though they ate a lot of flowers this winter), and Michigan itself – hard to love a complex state, but still – it’s our home.

 

            Tomorrow we look at a condo for sale in Traverse City. It’s located in the old mental institution where we lived while building the Bark House. The plan, at least for now, is to rent it out in the summer and live there the rest of the year – close to shopping and the hospital and a short walk to restaurants in the Commons (as it’s called). It’s not big enough for full-time living. We’ll see how it goes.

The Trip Home

            The first part of the trip home to Michigan was packing. Kim’s part of the job was doing all the packing. My part was carrying stuff to the car. She has a great special sense and can picture how things fit – into boxes, and then the boxes into the car without sliding around. I don’t have that ability, though I am good at opening jars and reaching things on high shelves.

 

            We decided to make this trip, as much as possible, an adventure. What we (Kim) had in mind was – as much as possible – to get off the Interstate and onto smaller more scenic roads. We had to take I-75 out of Atlanta, and we left by 6:30 in an attempt to beat the traffic. And we stayed on the Interstate for much of the first day, but a surprise near Knoxville reinforced our small roads decision when we encountered a large truck stopped in the center lane (ours) while the traffic on either side moved relatively freely. I saw it in time and applied the brakes, but I had under-estimated how the weight of our loaded 2015 Toyota Highlander would increase braking distance. With the help of some urgent warnings from Kim, I stopped our car about six inches short of a collision. Some of the stuff that I had loaded in the car without Kim’s supervision shifted a bit, and I felt something hit the back of my seat.

 

            We made it to our motel in Lexington, Kentucky a little after 3:00. We had been snacking on cookies, peanuts, and, frankly, anything Kim would hand me, so we weren’t hungry for dinner. The Hilton Garden Inn features a bar and restaurant, and we chose the former, where I had the best Manhattan ever – even better than mine. Back to the room, a brief struggle with the tv remote, and then to bed. We slept for eleven hours.

 

            We awoke to rain. It rained all day.

 

            It was time to shift our trip into small-road adventure mode, so after a little map-study we saw how we could get to highway U.S. 127, which we figured would take us all the way to Northern Michigan. Just a brief drive on I-75, with trucks splashing water all over our windshield, confirmed our decision.

 

            Traveling on Highway 127 turned out to be just the adventure we were looking for. We drove through beautiful farmland, flowering trees in dramatic cliffs where the road was carved through mountains, and the occasional Amish wagon. We also saw evidence of the terrible flooding that hit Kentucky – fields under water, and trees down from the wind. Fortunately for us, none of this impeded our travel. What did impede our travel was trying to stay on Highway 127, since it led us to downtown Cincinnati, where it merged with a number of other roads and changed names a few times. While looking hard for the “127” I managed to drive the wrong way onto a crowded one-way street. Fortunately, Kim’s arm-waving from the front street got the traffic to allow us off the one-way. We hopped back onto the Interstate, figuring that would take us to a motel.

 

            It did. But it was dismal in ways I won’t describe here. We bypassed the fast food restaurants and headed toward a small town a couple of miles from the motel, where we found a restaurant/tavern and had a martini with dinner. The problem was that we did not know how to get back to our motel. We did not have an address to tell Gertrude, the name we gave to our GPS voice. We drove around a bit, hoping to see something familiar. Nope. We saw some people on the sidewalk and, hoping for more information for Gertrude, asked them what state we were in, Ohio or Indiana. I don’t like to imagine what they were thinking, but they told us Indiana, which was no help. We finally saw some familiar landmarks in the form of about a mile-long string of fast-food restaurants, and we made it back to the motel for another good sleep.

 

            The next day we instructed Gertrude to avoid the Interstate on the way home. It was our best day of travel – farmland (often flooded), swollen rivers and streams, the occasional Amish wagon (seldom seen on the Interstate), small towns featuring a four-way stop sign or maybe a traffic light. We found a small breakfast place somewhere in Ohio (or Indiana), populated by a few farmers and no strangers, where we enjoyed home made corned beef hash and eggs, plus coffee and juice, plus two slices of lemon curd cake that the waitress’s mom made, for $20. It was a friendly place with the personable small-town charm that seems to be disappearing from America. It was one of many highlights of our trip.

 

            Warm feelings when we crossed into Michigan, and warm again when we hit familiar roads just outside of Traverse City. Some apprehension when we drove in and saw all the fallen trees cut and stacked next to our little dirt road.

 

 

More on our homecoming – and our departure from Atlanta – in a future post. Still digesting it all.

 

            

Drownings

            I wrote “Drownings” years ago. Everything in it is true.

 

            Drownings

 

From fifteen feet above myself unbreathing

there on the dock I evaluate those feet,

mine, splayed on the boards I painted.

The camp nurse bends over me to insert

the hard S-tube down my throat. My cool

eyes consider the restless boat,

the waterskies aligned, the tow-rope

a heap. No waves move onto the shale beach.

A benign Lake Champlain accuses me

under a Vermont sun, and I want to disappoint

all these people by dying out from under them

on such a smiling day.

                                       Fifteen years

after my drowning, Jeff chases ducks off

a dock's edge. He sinks beneath the tidal

sheen of Five Mile River. I know he must bob

soon to the surface. I pass my son going up

on my way down.

                               Phillip's drowning

finds him clinging half swallowed beneath a dock

in the Fox River. At dinner in the cottage

I almost too late hear his cries above the voices

of aunts and cousins. I pull my dripping boy

from the suck of the lazy river.

 

In a film a child falls from a high window

bounces to his feet, runs off. We can

do that on our good days: drowning

through a late spring afternoon held

to my desk by a student's whine, or

through the bed my wife avoids

like my eyes, or through a drive

to scare the boys with my braking:

to be saved, emerging into changed air

and light, or to drown down through green

water into a deeper world where we breathe

through our wounds and join all the other

drowned children alive at last.

 

            Not exactly sure where “breathe / through our wounds” came from – except, perhaps, the feeling that it’s our wounds that make us alive, like “all the other / drowned children” with whom we share the wonders of being alive.

  

Curse

 

            We recently watched a series on television where a Sicilian grandmother places a curse on a man’s family for mistreating her granddaughter. And sure enough, a couple of generations later, two identical twins are born, one of them psychotic. Their lives are miserable. The curse worked.

 

            My questions are, Why did it work? and How did it work? The simple answer, of course, is that it worked because it’s a movie. And I believe that in real life, a curse can work if the person upon whom the curse is inflicted knows about it, and he falls into some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. I get that. And I understand that some people might believe other people are cursed, and they treat them accordingly, fulfilling the curse. Racial prejudice may run in this vein.

 

            But what about a curse that is uttered to the universe, and no people know about it? Does it have any power?

 

            The opposite of a curse, I suppose, is a blessing. Setting aside the semi-automatic “God bless you!” after someone sneezes (a practice that started, I read, during the plague years as a way to ask God to prevent the sneezer from getting the plague), how is the blessing supposed to work? Divine intervention? If so, is that the enforcement mechanism for curses as well? Again, it may be that if a person knows he or she is blessed, that may become a self-fulfilling prophecy, driven by optimism. And if others believe a person is blessed, well, they may confer the blessing in the way they interact with him.

 

            (And of course there is a great southern expression I learned in Gainesville: When you say to someone, “Bless your heart” using the right tone of voice, what you are really saying is, “You are pathetic and need all the help you can get.” Those of you from the South may want to confirm this . . ..)

 

            What about curse words? It’s easy to see “God damn you!” as a curse, in ways we have been discussing. But how about “Fuck you!”? If that’s a curse, what’s the intended outcome? I assume that “curse words” are words used when cursing someone, but I’m not sure how “shit” fits into a curse, unless there is a missing verb in the imperative mood.

 

            (By the way, isn’t it charming that the word “mood” is used as a grammatical term? A question can be posed in “the interrogative mood,” and questioning is indeed a mood – as evidenced by my opening questions. And don’t you tell someone what to do when you are in an imperative mood?) (Please forgive this English teacher digression.)

 

            Back to cursing. (Instead of typing this, I should have written it in cursive . . ..) Despite the uncertainties about whether and how curses work, I still think it useful to issue a well-placed curse from time to time. What can it hurt? And I know from personal experience that it feels good to lay down a curse or two.