Wife wants to come to my family's Christmas

I got an email from Wife a couple days ago, as follows:

Dear Hosea,

I still very much love and miss our family -- which is how I think of [your relatives]. The greatest Christmas gift you could ever give me would be to include me in family festivities, not because I'm depressed and lonely up here,or I'm not getting my fair share of time with the boys (that's really entirely up to them at this point) but because they're good people, and I enjoy their company. I would enjoy sharing the holidays with them, including you. I guarantee I can be civil,and better than that, and I think we mutually proved that at Son 1's thesis defense, for which I thank you again. [Looks like I haven't posted that story yet and it ain't gonna happen tonight.] The only time you rebuked me, you were right -- and I did remember my question and ask Son 1 later.

Please just consider it -- maybe not this year, but maybe for the future. If you think you could ever entertain the idea,maybe you could run it up the flagpole this year. I honestly think the rest of the family would be fine with my being there..

Wife

 

Wow, is she just completely  tone deaf? Does she not realize that the only reason the rest of the family put up with her so long was for my sake? Apparently not. In any event I replied like this:

 

Hi there!

 

Sorry I didn't reply to this right away, but I wanted to give it some thought rather than just replying off the cuff.

 

I will admit that my very first reaction when I read your letter was that I thought it would feel a little weird. [Imagine her coming to Thanksgiving some year that Marie is there too.] But then my second reaction was that you are absolutely right when you say [my family] are good people. And we all want good people in our lives. Don't we? That's when I decided to think about it more carefully.

 

Here's what I came up with.

 

It's not strange that you contacted me first to ask about this, but in the long run I think that's not your best strategy. If you approach the family through me, then it's going to look to everyone like you are there as my guest, or like you are somehow under my wing. But that's not really true any more (except where it concerns medical insurance!) and in your email below you take care to make a point that is different in subtle but important ways. Specifically, you make it clear that it's really not about me at all: you want to spend time with these people for your own reasons, on your own initiative, because they are good people. It's about you and them. I am sort of an afterthought -- maybe not literally, but for these purposes and in a manner of speaking.

 

But in that case I think your best strategy is not to wait until Christmas rolls around again a year from now. Work on your own independent relationship with these people during the year. You may not be able to get out to [my mom's city] very often, and my mother doesn't drive as much as she used to. But Brother and SIL are peripatetic, because SIL's work takes her all over. Maybe you could drop her a note about fashion, or invite them over to tea the next time they drive up the coast. Or maybe those are bad ideas but you'll think of something better. But the core point is this: if what you want is a relationship with these people that is independent of your relationship with me, then the way to get it is to work on developing the relationship with them directly without using me as an intermediary.

 

Once you've laid that groundwork successfully, then I think next Christmas should take care of itself. At least, that's the way it looks to me.

 

I don't know if this is helpful, but it is the best I have come up with.

 

Merry Christmas,
 H.

 

I'm a little afraid she'll do it. but on the whole I think that's a risk I'm willing to run. I don't think anyone else will accept her invitations.

 

It's really late and I'm going to bed. Night-night, all!

How many times have you died?

A couple days ago I found myself thinking about death, and an interesting thought came to me.

Of course, meditation is supposed to help you let go of craving so that you don't fear death. And classical philosophy likewise was supposed to help you keep calm in the face of death. In the Phaedo, Socrates says that philosophy is the daily practice of death.

But really, how can any of us be calm when we are about to die?

Well, what I realized is that when it is my turn to die my body probably won't be calm because instinctively my body is designed to want to live at all costs. If I fall, my body will be afraid. If I drown, my body will be afraid. In either case that physical panic is sure to disrupt my mental equilibrium.

But if I am just getting weaker, if I simply know that one day I will go to sleep and not wake up ... I no longer expect that to frighten me because I realize that I've been through it before. At least twice.

When Wife and I left graduate school I found it disorienting. Sure, there were things I had to do: get a job, move into our apartment, make dinner, ... that sort of thing. But I realized that all my life I had understood my entire existence in terms of school. I had spent all my time being tested and having to please other people. And now, at a stroke ... that was over. (Or so I thought.) Now that I was no longer in school, I [thought that I] no longer had to care whether I measured up to other people's standards. I no longer had to worry about constantly improving myself. If I decided that This Is Good Enough, I could just sit down and stop growing right here. It was up to me.

Of course that was never really true. I still had to be measured by my boss's standards if I wanted to keep my job. But thinking it gave me a feeling of autonomy and agency that I had never had before. So in a sense it didn't matter if it were literally true. Measured in terms of its practical consequences for my outlook on life, it was true enough. And it meant there was a whole stable-full of fears that I didn't have to worry about any more. I could just let them go. They no longer applied to my life.

The same thing happened during the period when I was separating from Wife. A lot of concerns that dictated how I related to other people gradually fell away. I had built up a stable-full of fears about how to handle the intimate relationships in my life. These fears had governed how I interacted with Wife, and with D, and even to some extent with Debbie. But I realized I could just let them go. They no longer applied to my life. And the internal ground rules governing my relationship with Marie are very different.

And this is what I think -- intellectually -- an awareness of the nearness of death will mean for me. I think it will mean that all the things I used to worry about will fall away ... that I will realize I can just let them go ... that they will no longer apply to my life. No point worrying about This or That when I'm dead. And if I'm close enough to dead, maybe I can stop worrying about them today anyway. If I have so far failed to achieve this or that dream ... well by that time I'll know they ain't gonna happen. And I will have to be OK with that, because I'll have no choice.

Thirty-two years ago, I died as a Scholar. Five years ago, I died as a Husband. When it comes time for me to die as a Man ... well, nobody knows the future but I somehow think it will be easier than it would have been otherwise because I've had practice.

How many times have you died?

Almost dying on the road

Have I told you about my car troubles lately? No? Good for me.

Two months ago my car stopped working. More exactly it was racing and the mechanic said he couldn't get parts for it any more because it's 31 years old. He tried putting in a remanufactured part and it was worse than before. Can I live with the racing? Then it started overheating even when it wasn't racing. I didn't bother to go back to the mechanic ... just stopped driving it.

I borrowed a car from my mother that she wasn't using ... it used to be my dad's car before he died. And I started trying to figure out what kind of car I want to get. Yeah, right ... make a major decision about a major purchase without Wife badgering me into it? Good luck.

Then the borrowed car started to behave oddly. I didn't take it into a mechanic. There were reasons -- I was traveling for Thanksgiving and then for two weekends afterwards -- but of course the main reason was that I couldn't make myself do it. My social anxiety made me rather do anything than pick up the damned phone and make an appointment.

Finally the boys both came back from college for the holidays. (Son 1 graduated.) And I drove them to stay with Wife for a week. The following email to Marie picks up the story from there.

Hi love!
 

I drove the boys to Wife's place this evening.
 

Have I told you about the troubles I’ve been having with my dad's car that I’m borrowing from my mother? For the last couple weeks it has been slipping out of gear unpredictably as I drive. (This means the car continues to drift forward at almost a constant velocity because of the First Law of Motion, but pressing on the gas accomplishes nothing besides racing the engine.) That’s the short version. There’s a lot more narrative but none of it rises even to the level of correlation, let alone causation.
 

So the drive to Wife's town was a little too exciting. (Only once did we nearly die, I think. The other times I wasn’t too worried.) Once there we discussed with Wife and she let me leave my dad's car there and borrow one of her cars to come home. [She has two.] Tomorrow the boys will take my dad's car to her mechanic.
 

On the way home I nearly died again, for a totally different reason: some crazy man coming the other way swerved out of his lane into mine, coming straight at me. I swerved onto the shoulder and he missed me. But I drove the rest of the way home very skittishly.
 

I got your email about [stuff that happened in her day] but all the same I hope your day was less interesting than mine.
 

Glad to be home safe and sound,
Your Hosea

 

Her response was less polished than some of her emails have been at other times:

 

FUCK! 

Fuck, fuck, fuck!

Jesus, love, this kind of shit is not supposed to be happening to you!

Okay, sweetness.

I probably wasn't helpful there.

But FUCK!

You are not allowed to die, LEAST OF ALL TAKING YOUR SONS WITH YOU!

Dearest.  Sweetness.  My beloved.

I'm really wishing I had studied feminine wiles more in my youth, because there's no logic I can employ that you can't beat me at.

But, fuck.

If you're driving a vehicle that you know might randomly fail in a way that will kill you, don't drive it.

Please?

Of course, there's nothing you or anyone can do to protect yourself from random insanity by strangers, but operating failing machinery is a known, and avoidable, risk.

Think of it this way:  would you tolerate something professionally, if strangers' lives were at risk, rather than yours and your sons?

Finally, I am SO VERY GLAD you are home safe.

Rest now.

Always your Marie.

 

Of course she was right, and I told her so without trying to explain or exonerate.

 

Wife's mechanic said it might cost $5-7000 to fix. It's not worth that. So my mother had it towed back to her place while she decides what to do. And I'm driving one of Wife's two cars because I can't get my ass in gear to buy a new one of my own.

  

New job in February?

Hey all!

News from work. 

Some of this may be old news, or may reference posts I've made in the past. But right now I'm working on my cell phone instead of a computer ... and even if I were on a computer I'm too drunk this evening to go look up all the relevant links to earlier posts. So for the moment I will content myself with repeating for your benefit a couple of emails I recently sent to Marie. Enjoy. (Or skip it ... I mean, hell, why not?)

__________

I was talking with my boss today. On the one hand, now that I was have been reclassified as a non-manager, I have no raise this year because my pay is too high for my new categorization. On the other hand, my boss is going to be opening a new managerial job in February … in Sticksville ….

 

He told me about it in the course of the conversation about my salary. The context clearly meant "In case you want to apply for it and win back your managerial status." He did NOT say any words to suggest that, if I were to apply, I would be particularly favored to get the role. (That he said nothing in this regard actually tells me nothing about his thoughts on the matter, though. He ought to say nothing like that.)

 

The nature of the role is that this manager will be the Plant manager for my function. In other words, right now my boss has a dual role: on the one hand he is the local  Manager for this function for the Sticksville plant; and on the other hand he is responsible for all the North American region. This means he is always working: evenings, weekends, holidays. (I guess it helps that his family is all still in Europe.) He will be hiring to separate the roles. After hiring this person he will retain the responsibility for North American regional topics, and this other person will take over responsibility for the tactical, local issues in the Sticksville plant.

 

It's an interesting thought. On the one hand, it's a position that plays to my weaknesses: personnel management (it's a large department there) and factory operations (my perceived unsuitability for which is exactly why I was never considered for his role in the first place!). As far as subject matter is concerned, my strengths are all on the regional side, not the local side: [example 1 and example 2]. But of course my boss isn't going to resign his Directorship and hire for THAT spot!

 

On the other hand, if I don't apply for it then my boss is entitled to wonder, Gosh, you whinge and whimper about being displaced from your existing role but when I give you a chance to take on a comparable role – in fact, one that commands a good bit more real power because of the larger headcount, only maybe one that requires a little more actual work – you can't be bothered. Why should I take your whimpering seriously?

 

And inside the department, on the one hand there is the dynamic that it is always hard to elevate a colleague over his former peers; on the other hand I've always been geographically distant from everybody else (and until recently I had the title of a manager) so I wasn't exactly a colleague. There has always been some distance in the literal sense, and that has probably contributed to distance in the emotional sense. Whenever I visited Sticksville I have always been treated as something of a visiting VIP. (OK, that overstates it … but it is directionally correct even if it overstates the magnitude of the vector.)

 

If I overthink it I will do nothing. If I underthink it I may do something stupid. I may anyway … there's an argument that all choices here are stupid choices, for different reasons.

_________

Then a few hours later, after a couple of drinks, I added more, but my email system seems to have lost it. 

The gist was:

• I don't want to live in Sticksville because it's boring. I'd rather live in the major metropolis an hour away, though I'm not sure I'd like the drive. 

• I've had managerial roles before and been successful in them. It just takes a lot of work because I am playing against type every step of the way.

• I don't like the plant in Sticksville, nor most of the people there, because (with few exceptions) they are simultaneously condescending and stupid. The attitude is basically a smug assurance that "We don't have to understand you because we are going to do things the way we've always done them — because we've always done them that way and for no other reason — and nothing you can do will ever change that. So fuck off."

• I suspect my current job will be eliminated in a year as no longer necessary. Maybe I'm being paranoid. But if I were making a hard-headed business decision about it, that's what I'd say.

Fun, huh?

Sent from my iPhone

Irritating workshop

At work today, HR put on a three-hour workshop about how to develop yourself and your career, and I spent much of the time clenching my teeth. I went because I thought I needed to go, but the whole thing made me feel irritated and profoundly uncomfortable.

Why?

One obvious little thing was that the presenter didn't listen to us. At one point she announced that "all" internal company job postings can be found in a certain database. One of my colleagues said softly, "No they aren't." And quick as a whip she replied "Yes they are," and went on. Really? Would it have killed her to listen to the possibility that maybe there's something she didn't know? Why couldn't she have said, "That's interesting -- during the break please come talk to me and tell me what you've found missing"? She could still have been privately certain that my colleague was an idiot, no harm in that -- but she would have sounded more open to her audience. As it is, ... well why should any of us trust an HR department that won't listen to us?

At another point -- right at the beginning -- she asked us to list the things we wanted to get out of the workshop. She wrote down on the board the ones that corresponded to what she wanted to say. But about half of the suggestions didn't fit her agenda, and she just dismissed each of them with a flip little remark and moved on to the next one. So at the end -- guess what? -- she could look at the board and say we'd met all the expectations.

But these aren't the real reasons. These are just excuses.

The real reason I was clenching my teeth is that the whole topic makes me feel deeply unsafe. I'm not sure why, so I'm writing this post in order to figure it out.

I mean, in the abstract you wouldn't think there would be anything wrong with the idea of planning your career, would you? If you can figure out that there's another job you'd like more than this one, why not apply for it? If it requires that you have some different experience first, why not arrange to get that experience? It all sounds pretty harmless at that level.

But that's not how I react to it. Every time the topic comes up I feel profoundly threatened.

Really? How interesting. So tell me ... what tools did she explain that the company makes available for your career advancement? Just list what she listed, in order.

First she mentioned the system of training classes available through the online HR portal. Many of these are web-based classes; some are conducted in-person, in a classroom. Your manager might assign you a class, or you can self-assign ... though of course if you assign yourself a class that requires you travel to another city and then be out of work for a few days in class your manager has to approve the budget and the time away. But there are quite a lot of these classes, covering a wide range of topics.

Do these classes make you nervous?

Heavens, no. I've taken quite a few of them. Many of them are actually pretty good.

What's next?

There's a mentoring program. I volunteered to be a mentor once, about three years ago, but the "mentee" assigned to me didn't really need a mentor. She had been with the company even longer than I had. But that was the fall of 2015, and since that time I've really felt my ambition in the company wilt pretty suddenly and significantly. I never volunteered again, nor have I volunteered to be a mentee. I think I even wrote a post once, wondering why my levels of ambition shifted so suddenly and trying to imagine whether it had anything to do with my father dying about then. That is, I can't think of a causal connection but there is a correlation in time so who knows?

So you haven't joined the program. Does it intrinsically bother you?

No, I guess not. I participated in a similar program at a (much smaller) company years ago. It was OK then. I suppose this one is too.

What's next?

Next she talked about a Buddy System that is supposed to align every new employee with a seasoned buddy who can show them the ropes. She stated flatly that this was in place everywhere, but none of us at our site had ever heard of it. Anyway it's for new employees, so it doesn't especially apply to me.

What's next?

The Career Development Discussion. This is a formal discussion that centers on you (the employee). The other attendees are HR, your manager, and his manager. Before the meeting you fill out an extensive set of forms all about what you enjoy doing and what you really want to do. Then the others tell you what they see as your strengths from the outside, and help you figure out what you have to do in order to get from where you are now to where you want to be.

Sounds useful. Have you ever participated in one of these discussions? Or do you want to?

I'd rather remove my own appendix with a kitchen knife.

Aha. Now we are getting somewhere. Why?

I don't want those people to know what I really want to do.

Why not? What DO you really want to do?

At work? In the context of this company? I don't even know. But there is no way that I would trust any of those people with that kind of information. I assume that the HR department will always be institutionally antagonistic to the kind of person I am. That is, not every single HR representative is necessarily evil (though the people who rise to the top sure look that way) but all of them want a rational system that allocates the people in the organization in an appropriate way to the functions that have to be done. Well any such allocation will start by firing people like me, because I don't belong there. I'm not sure where I belong instead -- it's easy to say I belong in a philosophy department somewhere, but that might not be true either and anyway probably none of them is hiring. But the work I do for this company isn't who I AM, it's just what I DO. Which means that according to any rational system for allocating talents to tasks, I am misallocated. To rationalize the system they should fire my ass. There's no way I want to let them know that! I need the job.

My boss ... well, he's a mensch, most of the time. He probably wouldn't fire me. But I assume he'd look at me askance and no longer know what to make of me. He'd probably respect me less. People get uncomfortable when they catch a glimpse inside me. It's like ... once, years ago I worked at a small company where everyone knew each other pretty well. I was knew, and so one of the developers sat down with me at lunch to get to know me, and asked what I was reading over lunch. It so happens that recently I'd decided I wanted to read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, because it's well-known and I never had. So I had to tell him I was reading Aristotle. About ethics. "Oh, are you taking a class on the side?" "No, I just wanted to read it." "Oh." [Dead, uncomfortable silence.] "Well I'm really interested in ethics," he tried to suggest, lamely. [Further silence.] Finally I asked him what his hobbies were and we started talking about golf. I know bugger-all about golf, but I kept up a stream of questions and learned that golf was basically this guy's entire life outside of work. We pointedly did NOT talk about Aristotle. And that's not a performance I want to repeat.
This is part of why I hate the mantra to "bring your whole self to work."

My boss's boss? I assume he'd just have no time to waste on whoever I really am or whatever I really want to do.

I also assume that if I did identify anything else I wanted to do outside what I'm doing now, everybody would tell me I'm unqualified for it. In performance reviews I always ask what I can improve, but that's about finding specific flaws in a specific task. I don't really want to be told that I'm simply unqualified, lock, stock, and barrel. But I'm sure I would be.

Why are you sure you would be?

Because I don't fucking belong here! Because if I have managed by coincidence to find a specific task I'm good at, the best thing I can do is sit in the corner and do JUST THAT -- nothing else -- and hope nobody notices me.

Didn't you use to be ambitious? Didn't you use to want everybody to see you?

Yes and no. It's complicated.

Fine, what's next?

Well there is the annual goal-setting process. We do that every year. It's not exciting. Whatever. And there's a process where each boss has to rate his higher-level employees according to they potential: are they ready for the next step? are they better left just where they are? or what?

How do you feel about that?

Well now that I no longer have direct employees I am going to be slid backwards a step. Once you hit a senior level of expertise, the only possible "advancement" is by managing people. Ever since Laurence Peter and the Peter Principle I thought we all knew that some people are really good at DOING but not so good at MANAGING, so that "rewarding" a top performer by making him a manager is often counterproductive. But that doesn't seem to matter.

You've been a manager before. Do you want to do it again?

Not these days. I was always playing against type. I could do it, but it took a lot of work and was very hard for me.

So you just want your job to be easy? Do you think everybody else at work has an easy job?

No, of course not.

So why should you?

Ssshh, talk quieter. If they hear you they'll start wondering the same thing. I did mention, didn't I, that I don't want them to fire my ass?

You did. What's next?

Next she explained the whole concept of career bands, which is what I've just been talking about. She also explained that if you are at my level, basically the only way you will ever advance (back to management) is to leave town, because our office is so small there's nowhere to move to inside it. I asked, "What about advancing as a technical specialist?" She explained that there is such an option in other parts of the company, but our division has chosen not to implement it. Tough luck, except you can always look for a job in another division. Again, that will require moving. Also you are likely never to find out about such opportunities unless you network your little heart out.

Have you?

That sounds like a lot of work. Admittedly I know it is possible to fuel it with passion, but I haven't really gotten there yet.

Has it occurred to you that the reason the company would be likely to fire your ass if they knew the real You has nothing to do with your hobby of philosophy, and is actually because you are so lazy and entitled? That you rely on being smart to coast by doing enough that people are happy with your work, even though if you were graded on the effort you put in you'd be scraping the bottom of the bucket? Do you understand that?

Not until you said it just now. Gosh, thanks.

Are there more of these tools?

God yes, the notes in my notebook go on for another ... [flips quickly] ... five pages. Do we really have to talk about them all now?

No. Not now, at least. I think we've gotten a couple layers deeper into what makes this reaction of yours tick.

Yeah. Thanks a whole hell of a lot.

Any time ....

Back-dated post on prodigies

I just found a note that I wrote myself back in June, so I posted it today but dated as if it had been posted in June. You can find it here.

Inga

Of course, another part of the reason that I spent Monday thinking about old friends so much is that I had just reconnected with one a couple days before. Nothing romantic this time, although Inga was a pretty girl back when I was in college. But Son 1 is due to graduate next weekend and is looking for a job ... ideally with the Federal government. I seemed to recall that Inga had worked for some other branch of the Federal bureaucracy years ago, so I thought maybe I could look her up and ask her for some advice for him. Even if she weren't interested in talking to me again, everybody loves to be asked for advice ... right? It's flattering.

So I dithered and dawdled for way too long and then on Saturday I finally composed the following e-mail to her.

Hello Inga,

I hope this finds you well. Yes, it has been decades since we spoke last; and no, I haven’t kept in touch during that time. These days I am in contact with only a couple of people from college: Marie, whom you might remember; and Schmidt, whom you might not. Some years ago I connected with M-- on LinkedIn, but after saying “Hello” we never continued the conversation.

 

I’m writing to ask your advice. My Son 1 graduates from college this month, and is hoping to find work with the federal government. By itself that tells you almost nothing, of course, and I’ll add some details in a minute; but my basic question is, Do you have any advice for someone beginning such a job hunt?

 

Son 1’s degree is in Security, from [his college], with a minor in International Relations. His senior thesis studied the process of naval acquisitions, or, Why the Navy won’t get the 355 new ships they are asking for. When I asked him to write an elevator speech to explain his goals in a nutshell, he sent me the following two sentences: “I have been studying global security, international affairs, national policy, and intelligence matters, and how to present those topics in both written and verbal form. I am looking for intelligence, policy, or security jobs that will get my foot in the door with the federal government.”

 

Son 1 has submitted a few applications already, but the federal government is so vast that I know I am out of my depth giving him job-hunting advice. But I also know you went through that process successfully, even though you are doing other things now; and if you had any generalities you were willing to pass along to someone who is just starting, he and I would be grateful.

 

Other than that — gosh, I could catch you up on 35 years worth of news but I can’t promise it would hold your interest. At a high level it follows a familiar arc: marriage, house in the suburbs, dog, two kids ... followed by separation, selling the house, sending the kids off to school, and moving into a small apartment in town, not in exactly that order but close enough. (The dog died of old age.) I’ll spare you the details unless you ask. And I’d love to hear your own story. It’s true I found hints on the Internet, at least enough to find an email address, but no more than hints. If you are interested in picking up conversation after this long, that would be grand.

 

But in any event, I would still be very grateful if you had any advice I could pass to Son 1.

 

Hoping to hear back, and with all best wishes,

Hosea

I wrote this while sitting in the Denver airport between flights; and after sending it I got up to walk around for a while. Nobody gets an answer right away to anything like this. She would have to find it in her email (could be days), read it, then decide if she even wanted to reply to me, then get around to writing it ... all this stuff. Right? No point being antsy about it. But of course I was.

Finally I couldn't stop myself from pulling out my phone to check my mail. She had answered already -- in eight minutes. Hot damn. She wrote:

Hi Hosea,

 

I'm absolutely thrilled to hear from you and would be happy to offer whatever input I might have of value on the joys and pains of Federal life. And, shockingly, I also genuinely AM interested in whatever additional life details you might care to share. My story, in a nutshell, is married to the love of my life but temporarily physically separated while (finally) working on my doctorate, retired from bouncing around the State Department and Intelligence Community, failed as an artist but loving my garden, and not had any dogs for way too long. I promise you more details too, should you so desire.

 

I'm absolutely available to either email or talk with your son, but do ask for a few day's pause, first. Unfortunately, you caught me right in the middle of writing a final due Monday. (Joy!) I'll be free to talk on Tuesday, and then heading home to hubby on Wednesday, but am most available to talk after that.

 

Also, if you're on Facebook and interested, I'm "Inga." I'd be happy to be your friend (not that there's ever been a time I haven't considered myself just that).

 

All my very, very best,

 

Inga

 

And yes, this made me giddy for the rest of the trip home. As I say, I'm not expecting anything romantic out of it -- did you notice that after I told her I was separated she was very careful to slip in the words "married to the love of my life" as if they were tossed off casually? I did. But it was great to hear such enthusiasm from somebody I had been very fond of 35 years ago.

 

We exchanged a couple more emails very quickly, including phone numbers. Then yesterday I called her and we talked for half an hour or so.

 

She sounds just the same. She said the same of me. I got time to tell her just a bit about my life and to tell one "Proud Poppa" story -- her first question, though, was "Are you happy?" which you may remember was one of my leading questions to Marie three years ago. And I heard a bit about what her life has looked like.

 

One thing, from the job hunting side. It turns out that the work she spent 16 years doing for the government was literally, exactly what Son 1 wants to do. So I am more than ever determined to get the two of them to talk ... maybe in a week or two, during the holidays.

 

On the other hand, I can already see a complication if she and Son 1 start talking regularly, so that he takes one of her calls while visiting Wife (or even if he just mentions her in Wife's presence). Inga's first name in real life is the same as D's, and of course Wife now hates D with a purple passion. I can see that becoming an awkward scene until Son 1 can explain to her that they are two totally different people who happen to share a first name.

 

Also, Inga is doing some research for her dissertation that will pull her towards this part of the country, so she has already told me that some time in the spring she will be stopping into town to see me.

 

I keep saying that there's nothing romantic here, by which I mean we're certainly not going to end up fucking. But God knows I feel a frisson that comes because she was a pretty girl that I was very fond of 35 years ago. And I found a photo of her on the web ... she's still a pretty girl, even if she's in her 50's. So yes, I have a bit of a goofy grin on my face and a spring in my step. It's a good feeling.  

 

Old letters

Son 1 graduates from university in a week. He'll be coming home until he finds a job, and will have to park his stuff in my storage unit. So last Sunday I went out to the unit to organize it so there would be room.

Termites had gotten in, eating the door frame and damaging some of the boxes (though not, so far as I could tell, their contents — or not much). So I moved everything into the (happily vacant) unit next door, throwing out a bunch of trash in the process and making some room for Son 1. 

I wrote Marie a long email about the whole effort and considered pasting it in here, but the only part that really matters is one or two paragraphs near the end that touch on the most emotionally relevant part of the four and a half hours of work.

__________

[After talking about moving the physical stuff — bunk bed frame, camping supplies, an old chair — I then wrote about the boxes of paper, which are far and away the largest part of my storage. Some of this is old business or bills that I can probably shred once I sort through to make sure nothing important is hiding there. Besides that, though ....]

And letters. I have at least two different boxes full of letters, and I only looked through the one that I had to rebox. But there were letters from grandparents, teachers, form letters I'd kept because God knows why; letters from my friends in Canada, keeping up with me after I moved to California [back in the early 1970's]; letters from high school friends when we all went different directions to college; letters from friends at college. Oddly enough I found none of yours, and I know I kept them. They must be in the other box. But I found letters from correspondence I'd forgotten all about: C—, the summer after my freshman year; R—, filling a whole folder of his own; K— griping about whatever she felt like griping about [and lamenting "Why aren't you here when I need you?"]; D— apologizing for not having written in so long [and enclosing a photo of herself in a wimple captioned "Does this look appropriately penitent?"]; even one from L— obviously sent after I had graduated, saying "Nobody seems to have the slightest idea if you are coming for Ren Fayre! Are you?" (Actually that one was signed "Sybel" and it took me a while to figure out who Sybel was.) 

[L— was a woman Marie had been in love with for several years and they were briefly lovers; so while I mentioned her letter because I thought it would be funny I didn't mention that there were actually more like three of them. For a brief time L— went by the name "Sybel" and the only way I worked out who that was (lo these many years later) was that she signed one of her letters with that name and also her legal name.]

It left me ... is there a word for it? "Nostalgic" is probably closest, but it implies too much sadness and I wasn't exactly sad. "Very aware of the past" might be a better way to put it. And it left me shaking my head a little at how much I walked away from when I got together with Wife and dropped completely off the face of the earth as far as all my existing friendships were concerned. Hmm. Maybe sadness is an element of it after all? It's hard for me to think of the right words. 

Maybe I'll go full Californian and summarize all these emotions with "Oh wow." Sure. That covers it.

__________

The letter goes on after that, but to me that's the heart of it. Last night Marie and I spoke on the phone; and while she sympathized with all the work, she didn't much comment on this part. But it lingers with me. Yesterday I spent too much of my time at work googling old friends or trying to find them on LinkedIn and wondering what any of them would say if I sent them a note all these decades later.

Wondering ....