Fillette

One of my friends from college died today, at 1:53 pm Eastern Time. She had been suffering from fourth-stage sarcoma and died in the arms of her husband and two grown daughters. I'll call her "Fillette," or "little girl." That's not far wrong to describe her the way I remember her, and it has echoes of her real-life name as well.

Until last August I had been out of touch with her since the summer I got married, way back in 1984. I had googled her a few times and found an email address, but never actually sent her a note. Or maybe I did but the address was no good. Anyway, last summer I found an address that worked, and sent her a quick note. That's when I found out she was sick. I sent her a longer email and she said she likely wouldn't have the energy to reply to it … but maybe some day …. 

Of course that day never came. She got sicker and weaker, and then died. I got back in touch with her just in time to lose touch permanently.

So I never really knew her as an adult. My memories of her are all as a college student: warm, friendly, open, childlike … naïve and with a tendency to suck her thumb just a little when she was abstracted or thinking about something else. Cute. If I hadn't been so neurotically afraid of romantic relationships, I would have liked to gotten close to her. As it was we were just good friends. The year after I graduated I came back to town for a month to visit old friends and I stayed at the house she shared with four others. It was a lot of fun. Of course, sex would have been fun too, but I didn't know how to get there from here.

I'm trying to think what I feel about this, to describe it for you. I'm sad, of course. I'm a little shocked that someone I used to know as a peer is dead, although I'm close to 60 at this point so that's going to happen more and more often. Six years ago when I found out that Lisa had died, it was disorienting. But I really have no right to think of it that way.

And I'm sorry I waited so long to send her a note. In my mind I can't rule out the fantasy that she and I might have rekindled some kind of conversation. I don't know what that would have looked like, though. She was married and lived many miles from here, so there was no chance of anything romantic. And my conversations with, for example, Inga, have dropped off to a bare trickle just because there is nothing to sustain them in real life. One reason you can't go back to old friendships on the same terms as before is that both you and the other person have moved on, nearly always in different directions. You strengthen ties by repeating the contact, over and over; when they have lain dormant for decades, don't expect them to come back to life. My experience rekindling friendships with Marie and Debbie are very much the exception, and both cases involved sex. So the fantasy I had of rekindling a conversation would probably have proven false even if I had written her a couple years earlier.

Still, I'm sorry.

On the other hand she's out of pain, and that's good.

   

"Vice and indulgence"?

I keep reading people on Twitter who point out that the Roaring Twenties followed on the 1918 flu, because partying till you drop and wanton dissolution are the natural responses to the social isolation of a global pandemic. See for example a couple of recent articles linked here that warn of a "post-COVID sex fest" and "an era of vice and indulgence."

From the New York Post

From the Daily Mail

My worry is that I don't think I ever learned how to live a life of wanton dissolution. Is there somewhere I can take remedial classes, to be prepared when the time comes?

     

Christmas planning

So today we finalized the plans for Christmas. I mean, we had basically known them for at least a month, but we clarified all the details.

As with Thanksgiving, as with the Fourth of July, Brother and SIL and I will meet at my mother's house. We will take care to spend the whole time masked and socially distanced, while also enjoying each other's company and celebrating a very quiet version of Christmas.

Son 1, as you recall, has his own apartment. Son 2 still lives in the town where he went to University (in another state) — he graduated in May — but he drove back "home" for Christmas. He spent one week with me to make sure he wasn't infected, and then moved to Son 1's apartment, where he plans to spend the rest of Christmas Break. Son 1 and Son 2 were both invited to join the rest of us at my mom's house, but turned it down on the grounds of COVID-19. Best to stay away from other people, to reduce the overall risk of infection. And after all, my mom is 80 years old.

That's all logical. Then I discovered today that they will spend part of Christmas Day visiting Wife. Again, I can understand the decision:

• If there's any chance they might not see her on Christmas, she gets self-pitying and emotionally manipulative.
• By contrast my mother, Brother and SIL, and I try hard to be grown-ups about the whole thing. We treat Sons 1 and 2 as adults, and let them make their own decisions.
• It's not practical for them to visit both houses on Christmas, because Wife lives 90 minutes from Son 1 in one direction, and my mother lives 90 minutes from Son 1 in the exact opposite direction.

I get all this. It's all very logical.

But sometimes it can be a burden being so damned intelligent and mature all the time, you know? I was disappointed when I heard I wasn't going to see them over Christmas. Now I feel jealous: you'll spend time with her even though she's obviously a horrible person, but not with us? Whimper, whimper, whimper …. It's stupid. I know it's stupid. That doesn't stop me from feeling it.

It's also not their job to manage my feelings, is it? That's my job. I know that. It still hurts, though.

            

Sloth

Yesterday I wrote about distraction. But along with the distraction I am seeing just enormous levels of sloth.

I have gotten into a pattern where I get up in the morning, fix and east breakfast, and then go back to bed for 30-60 minutes more sleep. Today I had a nap in the afternoon, as well. That's two naps during the day, and I'm getting ready to go to bed early tonight.

I am accomplishing almost nothing -- maybe one task a day. There's a lot of holiday cooking that I normally do every year around Christmastime. Haven't done it this year. (Wait, I made one batch of cookies. Which I then ate all myself.) Today I finally went to the store to get all the ingredients that I need. Or pretty much -- at any rate enough to get started and well under way. Came home, put them all away, had lunch, had my second nap. Then got up and played Solitaire. Oh … it turns out that one of the ingredients I got was wrong: I needed this variety and I got that variety instead. That's easy: just go to the store to return and exchange it. Right? Haven't done it yet.

So let's look at that list again:

• excessive sleep
• lack of motivation (rarely leaving the apartment unless I really have to)
• overeating
• overdrinking (though I've had none today, huzzah!)
• for the hell of it, let's toss in "social withdrawal" which is pretty much a defining feature of 2020 

A quick Google search will confirm that these are all well-known symptoms of depression. I take medications for that already. I hope this doesn't mean I need more. Probably it means what I need is a kick in the pants: if I were more active, I'd feel like being more active, in a "virtuous circle." That's logical, at any rate.

Or I could just go back to bed. What the hell, right?

      

Distraction

 I remember back when I was in college, some time during the late Stone Age (the early 1980's), I got a job on-campus for the summer between my Junior and Senior years. This wasn't the first time I had been away from home outside of school, but it was the first time I actually lived on my own: rented my own apartment, got myself to work, bought my own groceries … you know, #adulting.

I didn't have a car (or a driver's license), so my apartment was within walking distance of my job on-campus. And whenever I had to go to the grocery store, that meant walking too. Among other things, this limited how much food I could buy at a time. (Now that I think about it, the city had a good bus system. Why didn't I ever use it?) I didn't have a lot of friends who stayed in town over the summer. There was R, and he and I got together once or twice for dinner. There was Marie, but she and I were sort of on the outs at the time: at one point I stopped by her place to discuss political philosophy (yes, it really was as lame as it sounds) and the afternoon was deeply unsatisfactory for both of us. Also this was in the days before mobile phones, or the Internet, or even personal computers. So when I wasn't at work I had a lot of time on my own. 

I read a lot. (That was the summer I read Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy.) 

I wrote a lot of letters home. ("Wrote" by hand. Printed, because my cursive is hard to read. Mailed in an envelope, with a stamp.)

I played a lot of Solitaire. (With, you know, a physical deck of cards that I shuffled and laid out with my hands.)

And I remember thinking, years later, that it was a good thing I was under-age for buying alcohol at the time. Because with that much time alone, if I had been able to buy booze and drink it, I might have had a problem by the end of the summer.

Why am I thinking of this now? Because recently I noticed a couple of things.

These days I have a lot of time on my own. (I live alone, and with COVID-19 I mostly work at home.)

I have a car, which means that my grocery shopping is not limited by what I can carry in my two arms.

It's been a very long time since anybody carded me for buying alcohol. (Do you suppose the grey over most of my beard has anything to do with it?)

My most recent personal computer has Solitaire installed on it … which my last one did not, and which my work computer does not. (The company takes a dim view of computer games. We should be working on company time, dammit! And I guess I can see their point....) 

And all of this means that I weigh more than I have in many years, I'm drinking as much as I have since starting this blog (except for when I've been at one of those riotous parties thrown by my neighbors, but there's been none of that under COVID-19), and I'm playing an awful lot of Solitaire.

Anything to distract myself. 

During the day, this seems like a bad trend. Late at night, after a few drinks, it doesn't worry me so much. Maybe that pattern isn't a consoling one.

There's a story told that Robert Benchley, late in his career, was asked by a young reporter to say something about his career and his life. His answer was, "When I first came to New York I had a full head of hair, I weighed 135 pounds, and I was a member of the Temperance Society." 

There is a moral here, but I'd rather not look for it too closely. 

        

Two questions from Twitter

 As usual I wasted too much time browsing Twitter today. In the process I ran across a couple of questions people posted, that caused me to think a little while.

What have you already spent over 10,000 hours at?

• The answer I posted was "Fatherhood."
• But also I spent that much time on my marriage, trying to understand Wife and learn how to live with her before finally throwing in the towel.
• And writing blog posts: not just here, but I mean short, informal essays generally. (In my case these are indistinguishable from long letters, and I include letter-writing in those hours.) I haven't spent the time learning how to create convincing fictional situations, or portraying characters evocatively, or anything that will ever help me write the Great American Novel. But the kind of thing I'm writing right now? Sure, no question.
• On the other hand I'm not sure I can say the same thing about any of the skills I use at work. Do you suppose that's a problem?

What has almost killed you?

I didn't post an answer to this one, and I feel funny answering it. In many ways my life has been absurdly privileged and safe. I grew up comfortably middle-class. I don't take part in extreme sports. I don't ski, or deep-sea dive, or race cars, or anything dangerous like that. Why could I even imagine that there have been things that might have almost killed me?

But then I realized that yes, actually I could think of things, even in my bland and cossetted life. Not many, but some.

• Middle-school bulllying. (Pretty sure they didn't intend to kill me. But there was one time where it's lucky I fell like this instead of like that, or I could have snapped something.) 
• Near misses in traffic. (Once on the freeway I drove beside a wreck as it was in the process of happening. I'm sure there have been other cases I just don't remember right now.)
• Once when I was four I almost ran off the edge of a high cliff, just for the hell of it. And then stopped, turned around, and decided to go the other way. 
• I have the vaguest memory of falling into a swimming pool years and years before I ever learned how to swim, and being fished out by some nearby adult.
• Falling on the ice and banging my head. OK, maybe the concussion didn't really come close to killing me. I don't really know. But if you wrap that together with the driving in white-out conditions I'd done a couple hours earlier, I can definitely say that that day was a scary  one.

And those are just the events that come burbling up in my memory without me trying too hard. Probably there have been other events too, that I'm just not thinking of.

How does anyone ever make it to -- let alone through -- adulthood?

      

Debbie talks about her daughter's family

 I just got off another Zoom call with Debbie. We didn't end with "I love you" this time -- I think we are both consciously backing away from that -- but she's having a tough time.

On the one hand she's still taking care of her mother, which is as difficult as ever. Tonight her mom got confused over what medicines she was supposed to be taking, and the whole discussion was very hard before she finally let it go and went to bed.

On the other hand this week she flew back to the state where she lives now, and where her daughter and son-in-law live with their two baby boys. And that trip too was very difficult. She visited briefly with her daughter's family, besides taking care of a couple things on her own side that had to be attended to. And she says her daughter's family is under huge amounts of stress. I didn't ask where the stress is coming from, but I can guess: Daughter is a university professor; Son-in-Law has a job now, which must alleviate some financial stresses but also means he is away from the house more; and the children are both very young. (I forget their exact ages, but the younger one is still breast-feeding some of the time, and the older one can't be more than two or three.) This is a situation that has stress written all over it in big red marker. I don't have to know any more details than the ones I've listed to see that. And my sense is that Daughter is something of a perfectionist, which (if true) will only make things more difficult.

Debbie says she remembers being really stressed when her daughter was a baby, but she took it all out on her husband. But she sees Daughter yelling at her older son instead, and it troubles her deeply. She tells me that she didn't want to criticize, and that she knows children are remarkably resilient. But it troubles her.

So I tried to remember what it was like when Son 1 and Son 2 were both little. I was working, at least until they were six and four respectively. (That's when I lost my job and was unemployed for 21 months.) Before Son 2 was born Wife was working as well. But she was diagnosed with lupus and went out on disability when the boys were four and two, or thereabouts. Before that, when she was still working, the boys spent the days at daycare and just came home for dinner and bed; after that she was home with them, sometimes with the support of a nanny. (We hired a few people over the years to help her out.) It was tough -- some days it was really tough -- but I think when we yelled it was at each other and not at the boys. Also when Wife lost it and started yelling at the boys, I tried to act as a buffer. (I think of stories like this one, though they were a few years older by then … more like ten and eight.)

Or maybe my memory is trying to make life easy for me. I do remember noticing once that the boys had formulated comparatives for the sake of emphasis: specifically "as sad as Mommy" and "as mad as Daddy." I do remember that there was a time when they were very young that I identified anger as my most signal and particular sin, one that I felt overwhelmed by while I could distance myself from pride or even lust. Maybe I was a lot worse than I let myself remember. God knows, it's possible.

All I could tell Debbie is that these things are very tough. She agreed. I wish I could have offered a hug, but even the chance to talk is something.

Very tough. 

           

"Hysterical Literature"

This evening I looked at some of the blogs that I link in the sidebar of this one. And when I browsed In Bed With Married Women, I found an entry posted last March (though that seems to be a reposting, with the original back in 2012) called "On Submission to Desire." It's delightful.

The post talks about an art project from 2012, called "Hysterical Literature." The artist was Clayton Cubitt, and the project is a series of videos. Here is the description from the website:

What is Hysterical Literature?
Women are seated with a book at a table, filmed in austere black and white against a black background. They have chosen what to read and how to dress. When the camera begins recording, they introduce themselves, and begin reading. Under the table, outside of the subject's control, an unseen assistant distracts them with a vibrator. The subjects stop reading when they're too distracted or fatigued to continue, at which point they restate their name, and what they've just read. The pieces vary in length based on the response time of the subjects.

In other words, they try (with varying degrees of success) to keep control so that they can continue reading aloud whatever passage they have chosen. At the same time they shift around awkwardly in their seats, or have to contend with changes in their breathing or their voices, struggling to hold on control as it is [figuratively speaking] ever more forcefully pried out of their fingers, until finally, early or late, they surrender to the orgasm and ride it out. Then, when they can talk again -- as the description says -- they restate their name and what they have just read. The camera is supposed to cut then, but rarely does; and it is worthwhile listening to the snippets of their discussions afterwards with the director or cameraperson.

Here are a couple of them, but you should definitely check out the whole series.

       

I love these videos. But then, I think that the female orgasmic response is one of the best things about being human. As I ranted once, on another occasion, …

The female sexual response is one of the most sublime creations on God's earth, proof for anyone who thinks in these terms that the Creator is not only beneficent but powerful and energetic and deeply creative beyond the wildest imagination of men. (Yes, in that context I mean "men".) The other exhibitions of Demiurgic power that are equally awe-inspiring are dangerous and deadly, like volcanoes and tornadoes and earthquakes. But the female sexual response is our size, it is healthy and life-giving, it enriches and fructifies our lives on every level you can imagine, while being as stultifyingly awesome as any volcano. To repress it, to fear it, to bottle it up, to deny it, and to teach others to do the same, is to spit in God's face…. If ever any human act were villainous and wrong, that is.

William Blake once wrote, in The Proverbs of Hell, that "The nakedness of woman is the work of God." That's true even if the women are nominally dressed. Go -- watch these videos -- and worship.
     

Son 2 discusses failure

Son 2 has been staying with me for the last week, and this morning he made a remark about failure. He said maybe it was because he had never suffered anything really catastrophic while growing up, but unlike some of his friends he just isn't afraid of failure. And I quoted to him Friedrich Nietzsche's aphorism, "A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions — as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all." (The Gay Science, aphorism 41. See also here.)

I was glad to hear that he's not afraid of failure. Of course I joked that clearly he should credit his sheltered upbringing, plus the fact that both his parents did such a brilliant job raising and caring for him. But deep down I was very heartened by his remarks.

As examples of what a sheltered life Son 2 has led, you can read here or here, for example. Or here, or practically any other post that mentions him before the fall of 2012, when he finally left home for boarding school.

     

Fatter and thinner

I had an idea recently. 

The last time I lost a lot of weight was in the year when I started my relationship with Debbie. (I talk about it here, though by that time the trend was reversing itself.) The last time before that was during the year after Wife was arrested; Boyfriend 4 was living with us and had taken over from me the task of cooking dinner every night; and so I was able to drop out from eating a big dinner every night. I couldn't sit up late and drink because I wanted privacy for that, and Boyfriend 4 would be hanging out in the living room. So I would go to the gym to work out in the evenings, and then come home and go straight to bed. I was trying to escape from my life, clearly. And I once characterized it to someone as spending a whole year "too depressed to eat." So I dropped a lot of weight. (Incidentally, this story explodes the theory I float here that weight loss is (necessarily) a consequence of happiness.)

But what these two periods have in common is that they both represented a substantial upheaval in my normal routine. So my new hypothesis is that maybe what triggers weight loss for me is a big change in routine. If life becomes very different, then it is at the same time more dynamic, more engaging, and busier. I have less time to eat, and I have more things to distract me. So I eat less and lose weight. 

If this turns out to be true, then the move to Sticksville will be a big help to me, because it will give me a chance to shed some of the weight I have packed on during quarantine. I guess I'll know soon enough.

     

Phoning with Debbie

 Somewhere along the line … maybe it was with the beginning of quarantine? … Debbie and I have settled into a regular phone call, much like the regular weekly call that I have had with Marie for some years now. With Debbie it started as every two weeks. Then somewhere along the line it shifted to every week. It started with FaceTime, and then shifted to Zoom. 

Even though we had already admitted that we still love each other, we made a point for months of doing the right thing. We might spend time staring into each other's eyes (over Zoom) if the conversation ran dry, but we were always careful to sign off with words like Good to talk to you, Be well, Till next time, or Sending you metta. Occasionally I stretched this, as I have done also with my emails, to saying Love and metta, but I'm careful to say it in a conversational way. 

And then when we talked last night … well, let me explain the background. For some months, Debbie has been having trouble at work as her hours and function have been cut back. She understands the logic behind each decision, but her feelings have been hurt. I've been working to comfort her, and of course I'm coming from a place of having had the same thing happen to me only a year or two ago: not my hours, in that case, but my status and my potential for a bonus if we had a good year. (Note that 2020 has not been such a year.) Anyway, more recently her mother has started to show signs of confusion, the early stages of dementia. So finally this month Debbie took leave from work completely to go stay with her mother and try to stabilize her, until the family (Debbie and her sister) can arrange for a full-time caretaker. And of course this is a huge job, and has been taking a lot out of Debbie. Some days her mother is calm and as sweet as pie; then she can turn on a dime and start bellowing rage and fear and confusion, accusing Debbie of crazy things and demanding to be allowed to do other crazy things.

So last night Debbie and I talked after her mother had gone to bed. The battle yesterday was over whether her mother could go to the hairdresser. 

Debbie explained that, because of COVID-19, she couldn't go. 

Her mother said, Well I don't care if I get sick and die, because I'm so old anyway. So if I'm willing to take the risk, then why not?

Debbie tried to explain that it's not fair to make the hairdresser take the risk. Also she, as a nurse, has seen patients suffering from COVID-19, and it is a nasty way to go. So anyway, no, Mom, you can't go. I won't let you.  

At that point her mother declared, If I can't go to the hairdresser then I'll just swallow all of my medications at once and kill myself!

This is what Debbie spent the day yesterday dealing with. So we spent much of our phone call talking about it. Fortunately Debbie is old enough, and has a solid-enough meditation practice, that she doesn't fly off the handle when her mother bursts out like that. But it's not easy, of course. Anyway, we talked.

And we talked about other things. There's a chance we might be able to see each other over the Christmas holiday, and go hiking. (God, I had better work on getting into better shape in the next … umm … two weeks!)

Finally, at the end of the call, Debbie ended with a simple, I love you.

Oh my God. We've gotten all the way back to I love you. I'm fine with it, but … wow. 

I love you too, Debbie. Now and ever.

    

A goal

 The day after I wrote my post about self-esteem, I had an idea. I didn't have time to write it up here, so I scribbled it down for later. Well, now it's later.

Over the years I have written a lot about goals: how I don't have any, how I don't work towards them, how maybe I don't even want them. And as evidence I look at how my professional life has been … undramatic, and how I don't feel that much pressure to change it. I do my job well enough, I guess; but my performance apparently isn't exciting: good enough that people are glad to keep me at it, but not so glowing that they want to move me on. And I've talked about my envy of my classmates from high school or college, who were always so much more directed and focused than I was, and who therefore ended up achieving so much more. You've heard these stories too often.

But the idea I scribbled down was, What if I really did have a consistent goal all along and just didn't recognize it? Is that possible? Sure, I guess. Why not? I find out what I really want by seeing what I do. And on that reckoning, it is clear that my goal has consistently never been to become rich or to join society's power structure. Every time I have faced a fork in the road where one path would take me closer to membership in the power elite, I've chosen the other.

My high school was a private prep school — the same one Son 1 attended — many of whose graduates go on to great things. But when it came time to select a college, I turned down the chance to go to Harvard in favor of a small liberal arts school that no-one at my high school had heard of. At the time my reasoning was that of course Harvard was a great school, but I wasn't so concerned with burnishing my intellectual credentials. What I wanted was to improve my anemic social skills; and I had decided — on the basis of woefully inadequate data — that the school I chose would be better for that. I mean, it was and is a highly intellectual school in its own right too, even though it doesn't labor under the heavy Harvard name. And I met Marie there, so that part worked out.

After college I applied to graduate school in a field that would have left me set for life. I applied to the two best programs in the country, got into one of them, … and then dropped out before classes started. Of course, I had just met Wife a month before (although naturally she wasn't my wife yet!) so perhaps the thrill of having a girlfriend that I was regularly fucking was just a bit more enticing than graduate school.

The year after that, Wife and I went off to graduate school together: different school, different program. This time the program wasn't necessarily one that would have kept me employed, because it was for the most part more academic and the academic job market was starting to dry up in those days. (Though to be fair it was nothing like as bad as it is now.) On the other hand my advisor was famous throughout the field — some might have said infamous — and he knew everybody. The likelihood that I would have made good contacts to put my degree to work was very high. But after two years there, Wife left; I spent the summer thinking about it and then dropped out to be with her, saving my marriage but abandoning my program and whatever opportunities it could have given me. 

Do you see the pattern? The unchanging goal common to all those decisions? I wanted relatedness far more than I wanted greatness. I wanted to stop being a rock or an island; I wanted intimacy, both sexual and emotional; I wanted to be a good father and a good lover and a good husband. That's the goal, perhaps the only goal, that I have followed consistently through all these years. I've made huge mistakes. But when I make a mistake in this area, I come back and try again.

Have I hit my goal? I've done well enough. 

• My marriage finally fell apart, but I worked hard at it for thirty years. 
• My sons appear to be transitioning into adulthood relatively smoothly. Doubtless I screwed up any number of things as their father, but they have proven resilient enough to bounce back anyway; and for that I am grateful. 
• I have an ongoing sexual relationship with Marie, and emotionally intimate friendships with both Marie and Debbie. 
• Looking wider afield, I'm not rich but I guess I'm doing OK. I have a job at which I am good enough that several people tried to urge me to accept the transfer to Sticksville before I finally did so. 
• I have neighbors here whom I enjoy, all of whom are sad that I'm going to leave in a few months. 
• I'm in touch with a couple of other people from college (such as Inga), and at least one from an earlier job (the ex-colleague I mention here). 
• I'm still no social butterfly, but I'm not a rock nor an island.

Maybe now I can stop moaning about not hitting any goals. What I've learned from this is that I can't just set any arbitrary goal and expect to work on it. But that's very different from saying I've never had any goals at all.         

       

Mulling over self-esteem

 About a month ago, for reasons that I can no longer remember (probably boredom or a desperate attempt to postpone some work I had to do) I started to google information about Ayn Rand. I first read Miss Rand over the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college, and at the time found her perspective fascinating. I didn't stick with her (not sure if that's as obvious to you as it is to me, but really I didn't). But it made my college years a little more interesting, because for a brief time it put me politically at odds with all of my friends. (sigh)

We all know that Google can suck you in for hours, because from one article you find links to another, and then another. That's what happened to me: I went from Ayn Rand to Nathaniel Branden, and from him to self-esteem. 

"Self-esteem" is one of those topics that makes people roll their eyes when the very name is mentioned. As a concept, it seems built for mockery. I'm pretty sure Garry Trudeau summed up the popular opinions of self-esteem in his series of cartoons on the California Task Force for Self-Esteem back in the 1980's.

        

I think the mockery comes from assuming that "self-esteem" means unearned self-esteem: in other words, just the feeling without anything to back it up. But Florence King points out in her essay "The Age of Human Error" that real self-esteem begins with "one tiny seed": doing something — anything — superlatively well. And when Aristotle talks about "pride" (which appears to mean pretty much the same thing) he says explicitly that it is a virtue, one which he defines as follows: the proud man is one "who thinks himself worthy of great things, being worthy of them." (This is in the Nicomachean Ethics, Book 4, section 3.) In fact, Aristotle goes on (in the same place) to say that pride can actually keep a good man good, arguing that "it would be most unbecoming for a proud man to fly from danger … or to wrong another; for to what end should he do disgraceful acts, he to whom nothing is great?" Clearly he is talking about something far removed from Garry Trudeau's jokes. Or anyone's.

So if real self-esteem means justified self-esteem — thinking you are good because you really are good — what steps does it take to get there? And also (not coincidentally) am I doing any of them?

I found a couple of articles to look at: one by Branden, and one that just summarized his ideas more schematically. And it appears that in Branden's system there are six regular practices that you have to undertake to build a sense of justified self-esteem. They are as follows:

1. Living Consciously
2. Self-Acceptance
3. Self-Responsibility
4. Self-Assertiveness
5. Living Purposefully
6. Personal Integrity 

How am I doing with this list?

Living Consciously: I think I do better at this than I used to. Specifically, I think it is something I have learned from meditation, to be more aware of what I am doing and why I am doing it. I'm no sage yet, but I do think I am part of the way there.

Self-Acceptance: Again, I think I have something of a handle on this one. There were times in the past when the contemplation of my own faults made me feel terrible. I could fall into deep depressions over them. Now I'm more likely to shrug and think, "Yup, that's one of my faults. I know that one." I don't have to like them, but I know they are there and I don't expect them to go away any time soon. I have tried to be pretty open about my faults in this blog, in particular. So writing here has helped me on this point.

Self-Responsibility: I guess so, but this one is not as clear as the last one. On the one hand, self-responsibility has an intellectual component: that you understand yourself as responsible for what you do, rather than seeing yourself as helplessly buffeted about by forces outside your control. I think I've got that part covered. But it also includes "own[ing] our abilities to manifest our desires," and that's an area where I know I am a little weak. It's one of my faults. 😀 And I know that when I really have to, I can decide to make a big change and make it. That's what I did with the decision to leave my marriage. It wasn't easy, and it took a long time. But when it really mattered I could (finally) do it.

Self-Assertiveness: Most of the time I don't feel very assertive. But Branden connects this with the practice of living authentically — living as yourself and not playing a part. I just talked about that in my last post, so maybe I am farther along with this practice than I realize.

Living Purposefully: Nope. This means using your powers to create and implement a plan of action to attain a goal you have selected. And long time readers have heard me talk about goals at great length over the years (for example here). I don't see my life as having been very goal-oriented. 

Although maybe I have to qualify that. On the one hand I never set clear professional goals, but followed paths that opened themselves up. (Just recently, since the onset of quarantine, I have started thinking I'd like to write a book about certain aspects of my work that I see differently from other people. I've got a draft, but have no idea where to go from here. So I don't know if that counts yet. Anyway, that's about the first concrete professional goal I can remember thinking of.)

On the other hand, Branden also includes "raising a family" or "sustaining a happy romantic relationship" as goals a person might try to achieve. I certainly wanted to be a good father, from the moment I knew Son 1 was on the way. I'm not sure I ever had a clear action plan about how to achieve this, except possibly on the topic of sending the boys away to boarding school when they reached ninth grade. But every day I thought about what was the best way to handle whatever was going on that day, and I tried hard to learn from my mistakes. Also, on a broader canvas, I really tried for many years to be a good husband to Wife. In the end it all fell apart, but I worked at it for a long time.

Maybe those are the purposes I set out to achieve, and all this professional work has just been a sideshow to pay the bills. I don't know for sure. 

Personal Integrity: I try. God knows I try.  

⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻

Wow. I actually scored better than I thought I was going to. (I hadn't figured this all out before I started writing.) In particular, I was sure that I'd give myself a flat zero for "Living Purposefully," because that's what I've always told you about me and goals. It was only while writing that I realized maybe the truth was a little more nuanced than that. But then, as I said way back at the beginning of this blog (in the third sentence of the first paragraph of the very first post), one of the reasons I write this is that I figure things out in the process of trying to explain them. So stumbling across surprises is the way it's supposed to work, at least once in a while. 

So does that mean I have self-esteem? Let's say that many of the building blocks are in place. So there's an opportunity. I'll accept that as good enough for now.

             

Authenticity or acting

 A couple years ago -- or no, it looks like almost three -- I wrote about my company's Diversity Day and the slogan "Bring your whole self to work!" As you may remember (or can just imagine) I was against it. You can follow the link to see what I said at the time.

But we had another presentation today, this one on "Giving to Yourself," that said what might almost have been the same thing in a different way. After establishing why it's good to give yourself the things you need (it lowers your stress, makes you less likely to burn out, makes you less cranky around others, and therefore actually improves your performance and sociability), the presenter had a couple of slides of "small steps" -- things you can start doing to get into the habit of self-care. And the very last one on the list was, "Be yourself." The notes I took gloss that as "not trying to be the person others expect you to be."

This sounds awfully close to "bringing your whole self to work," but it struck me very differently. And after some reflection I see why. It all turns on the meaning of the word self.

• When I heard "Bring your whole self to work," I understood my self to include all the baggage that defines where I stand in relationship to other people: my family and friendships and loves, my hobbies and beliefs, my successes and failures. All the stuff that makes up a life. All the things that Nietzsche once called "finery." I thought of these things because the examples used in the company's literature on the subject talked about letting your office colleagues know about your kids, and that you are active in coaching Little League. And that's fine, I guess, except that my office colleagues already know all the things I care to share publicly about my kids. On the other hand, the things I don't share are things I'd rather keep that way. 
  
  
• But when I heard "Be yourself" in the sense of "be authentic," I understood my self to mean just me, without all that other stuff. And that set me thinking in a whole different direction.

I think I have said before* that my father was an actor, and that he chose acting as an avocation** because he found he was already acting all the time in real life anyway. So why not take the opportunity to do something he did reflexively and get applause for it at the same time? The critical part here is not that he acted on stage or in front of cameras, but that he never stopped: even when the stage was dark and the cameras were off, even when he had gone home, even in the Real World. He admitted this to me a few times, when it was late and he was really drunk and we were sitting up talking. And I even thought I could see it in subtle ways.

• He didn't remember what you told him, unless it was what he already thought you were going to tell him; in fact, he often remembered what he thought you were going to say instead of — and as vividly as if it were — what you really did say. At the time I found this endlessly frustrating, but some time in the last few years I realized that it may have been because he was waiting for his cue. He couldn't actually pay attention to the substance of what you were saying, to the reality here and now, because he was trying to figure out when in the script he was supposed to break in and what his character was supposed to say. Therefore the only things he could remember were based on his understanding of his character and yours; which means that he remembered you saying what he thought you were supposed to say. If he misunderstood you on something important, it might take a very long time to disabuse him.
  
  
• I watched him over the years adopt different personalities. When I was young he was a Liberal Intellectual. Later he became a Business Owner, which meant adopting some caricatured attitudes that were obviously what he thought a Business Owner ought to believe. When he acted in community theater in middle age, he took on the role of Jovial Dirty Old Man … I mean, not onstage but when he was pretending to be real, offstage or back stage. And I specifically remember times when he was being a Jovial Dirty Old Man that he said and did things for which he used to have the deepest scorn back when he was a Liberal Intellectual.
  
  Naturally I understand that people in the Real World change their opinions; it is a cliché that liberals turn conservative when they get older. But it is a lot less common for people to start doing things that used to disgust them. Disgust is something more than simple disagreement, something a lot stronger and more visceral. That insight is part of what helped me to understand that the Jovial Dirty Old Man was just a mask … and therefore so was the Business Owner, … and (in time I accepted) so was the Liberal Intellectual. (Since the Liberal Intellectual was the mask he wore when I was very young, I long thought it must be the reality. But I finally concluded that it was no more real than the others.)    

My father lived this way most of the time, and I don't think he understood there was any alternative. If I had to guess, I would speculate that it was a style he adopted very young, out of self-defense. His mother was a strong and overbearing personality who disciplined him inconsistently, and he was an only child; it would have been only natural for him to study how he had to act to get on her good side. He was smart in school and therefore got advanced to higher grades when he was still physically small; it would have been only natural for him to study how he had to act to avoid being beat up. I'm pretty sure that this Peanuts cartoon from the 1950's is how my dad survived elementary school.

I have almost lost touch with my original topic, but not quite. The point in all this is that yes, my dad was very good at living this way because he had done it all his life, but it didn't make him happy! He was very lonely, and I think this was because he could never be real with anyone. He could never afford to talk heart-to-heart with his friends, because he was always trying to entertain them. I think he tried to drop the mask with my mother. And on rare occasions (usually when he was very drunk) he tried to drop it with me. I assume he also tried with my brother. He sometimes seemed to believe that he had a right to expect or demand intimacy inside the nuclear family. 

But even when he wanted to drop the mask, and it wasn't often, he wasn't very good at it because he had no practice. It's not easy or automatic to learn how to be real with other people. You have to work at it. And I don't mean just intimacy. Because if you find that you can be real with your intimates, then you can start being real (in a more guarded way, to be sure) with acquaintances and even strangers. This doesn't mean you share the details of your love life with them. But it might mean you know what your opinions are, and that you are not afraid to state them. Or if you think your opinions will cause a distraction, if (say) you hold a minority political view in your office and still have to work cordially with your colleagues, knowing how to be real in your private life can give you more confidence to wave the topic away rather than trying to improvise an answer that you think people will like. 

This is a lesson that I am still learning, because I grew up imitating my dad. For the first three decades of my life, I didn't know what my own opinions were. (See, e.g., here, where I discuss topics related to this at considerable length.) It took me many long years to find my way out of that life and into a realer one. It's not easy, but it is so much better a way to live. And in a way I'm sorry I didn't understand this soon enough to try to help him find it too. Of course it would have been complicated, because there were so many other layers to our relationship as well. I might never have been able to explain it to him. But it is a damned shame that he never figured it out on his own!

If that's what Authenticity means, then I'm all for it. If that's what it means to Bring Your Whole Self to Work -- that and not all the colorful baggage -- then I have to accept that's OK too.

* But I will probably never be able to find it. This blog has lasted long enough for me to realize the indexing is very poor, and when I want to cross-reference an earlier post it can take me a lot of time to find it. So I may end up repeating stories just because I can't identify that I already told them a decade ago. Sorry.

** Only in midlife was he able to make it a vocation too, to try to earn a living from it. That part never worked out very well, any more than any of his earlier career ventures worked out. 

          

Could Wife have Asperger's?, 2

 Unsurprisingly, she doesn't think so. When I asked whether she had ever been tested, she replied:

No, I haven't, and I don't have any reason to believe I'm on the autism spectrum. I'm curious as to why you asked, though. What makes you think I might be?

I wasn't going to give her my real reasons for thinking so, which I hint at here and here and here (for example) … and in other posts linked out of those ones. Any suggestion that she is in any way imperfect makes her furious, even though (or perhaps because) she thinks of herself as a failure in many ways. (See e.g. here and here.) So I wanted to write something that put any onus on me but might make her look at the data just a bit. I replied:

Obviously I’m no doctor. 

But I was reading something about it the other day, and realized that the specific manners in which I often tried to communicate with you would have been very unsatisfactory for anyone afflicted with Asperger’s or anything like it.

Reasoning backwards made me think that IF (hypothetically) you had suffered from any syndrome along that spectrum, then it would be perfectly obvious why some of the ways I tried to communicate were in fact so unsatisfactory for you. (And I think neither of us ever claimed communication with the other to be a real strong suit.) 

That’s only enough to raise the question, and clearly not enough to deduce an answer. Logically speaking, my communications could have been unsatisfactory in plenty of other ways too. But it made me wonder. And I know you have collected enough zebra-weird diagnoses over the years that it’s entirely possible there was one I didn’t remember.

If nothing else, you can tell Counselor that I asked so the two of you can get a good laugh at what a silly question it was. :-D

No answer yet.

      

Could Wife have Asperger's?

 As I was mulling over the events I describe here, I had an idea. Is it possible that Wife suffers from Asperger's syndrome?

It might explain why she is so terrible at picking up the emotional nuance in interpersonal interactions (see here and here and pretty much anywhere else in the whole blog that I talk about her). In fact, it would be consistent with her poor social skills even in the face of superior linguistic ability. It could also explain why she has never found other people's emotions contagious.  (And actually when I went to find the link for that last post, I see that Janeway already suggested then that, "Wife sounds as though she might fall somewhere on the autism spectrum," and I commented that D had said the same thing. I even followed up with these remarks here. Gosh, I had forgotten all about that exchange.

But also, I remember years ago that Debbie told me she had been angry for decades at how emotionally unresponsive her ex-husband was, and then he was finally diagnosed with Asperger's and she decided she had to cut him some slack. Could that be true here too?

I emailed her to ask if she has ever been tested. I said nothing beyond that. Maybe she'll ignore the email, but I'll let you know if she replies.

     

Closing up shop, part 4

When I sent out email to colleagues and friends and family telling them all that I had accepted the job in Sticksville, the replies were mostly pretty positive. Some were perfunctory congratulations; one or two gave me earnest advice about preparing for the weather. Then there was this from Hil:

I am glad to hear that we as [Company] will not lose you!!! ... I hope to get the chance next year to see you again – I am missing my friend Hosea!

And this from Kathleen:

: ) : ) : )   I am so glad to hear this.

It's always nice to hear.

But I noticed something interesting. We were originally told that 27 positions were being relocated from Beautiful City to Sticksville. But to my knowledge I am only the fourth one of us to accept an offer to move. And since the announcement was back in August, I assume I am probably the last. Of course it is easy to guess why a person wouldn't want to leave here to go there, but still ... 4 out of 27? That's not a lot.

Also in a recent announcement about how the business as a whole is doing, our regional president mentioned that (as a cost-cutting measure) 25 positions had been eliminated from the books. I wonder if 23 of those were the remaining spots that were originally designated to move from here? In other words, I wonder if the ship has now sailed, or if it's still possible for anyone else to change their mind? I'll never know, of course.

  

Closing up shop, part 3

 In earlier posts here and here, I explained that my office is closing at the end of next March, and my job is moving to Sticksville (with or without me).

Today I accepted the offer to go with it. Next spring I pack up my apartment and leave Beautiful City for Sticksville. I'm not exactly excited about it.

To be fair, I did look around -- both inside my company and locally through Google and LinkedIn -- for alternatives. And I did apply for a job with my company in International City; maybe not Timbuktu, but close enough. I didn't get it. In fact, I didn't even make it as far as the first interview. (To salvage my pride, I tell myself that they figured in an age of COVID-19 it would be too hard to relocate an American internationally as an expat. Sure, that must have been it.)

This afternoon I decided to characterize it to myself by saying that my fear of being unemployed turned out to be bigger than my fear of the terrible, man-eating weather. But another way to look at it is that I just accepted the easiest and most inevitable outcome.

I do this. When something becomes inevitable, or seemingly so, I simply accept it. The clearest example is my marriage to Wife. (And see how that turned out!) First we were just sleeping together, then I moved into her apartment, then we applied to graduate school together, and when we learned that the only way we could share an apartment in (university-owned, rent-subsidized) graduate student housing was to be married, we decided to marry. Even as I began to get one sign after another that this was the wrong thing to do, I went ahead and did it.

Of course one reason (out of many) that I went ahead with the marriage was that I was reacting to a time a year before when I had applied to a different graduate school (in a totally different field), ... gotten accepted, ... moved there and moved into the dorms, ... and then dropped out before classes started. It was a strange time; I was frightened and very confused. But the experience left me afraid that I couldn't commit to something, that at the last minute I would bolt. So at the next big decision (marriage) I resolved not to.

Coming back to my job situation today, I think probably the best advice I've gotten from anyone was from Schmidt, back when I first learned about the shutdown. He told me, "Some time ago, I saw a funny tattoo (in of all things a candy bar ad) that read "No regerts!" [sic] I think that really sums it up. You make a decision and then you make it the right one. That's life."

As I say, good advice. Anyway, I'll be moving in a few months. It won't matter to the blog, of course, which will stay right here.

This will put me a lot closer to Debbie: I'll be able to drive there to visit on a weekend. But I'm going to miss Beautiful City.

      

It's the little things

Two days ago, I got a couple of long emails from Wife.

A lot of what she wrote had to do With Son 1's health: he had a couple of COVID-19 scares this year (though his testing is consistently negative … but then there are a lot of false negatives with this disease) and she's concerned that he may have lingering damage to his lungs.

But then she went off in another direction. She reminded me that "years ago you wrote a poem, an invocation to the Lady, that I liked better than the one in our Book of Shadows. Do you have it, or remember it? Since I'm totally re-creating my Book, and since [her teacher] is dead (I don't know why that should matter since I've been out of touch with her for years, but it seems to, emotionally), I feel free to change the book as I rewrite it. That is based partially on … [There followed an obscure piece of gossip from the prehistory of the coven she trained in.] Anyway, I have only VERY recently (like last week) finished reading Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon even though you gave it to me for Yule years ago. Thank you very much for the gift, BTW.... [There followed a very long, quasi-historical justification for her making changes to the "tradition" she was trained in. See also, e.g., here or here.] And maybe I want to make some other changes, too. All of which is by way of saying that I liked your invocation very much, and would like to make it primary (though I see no reason not to keep the old one on file, too). I'd also like to ask you to write a parallel invocation to the God -- something in the same style. Please, when you have time. Something to mull when you're standing in line at airports or whatever."

This looks long, but trust me I have cut it down by at least half. Wife never learned the art of concision.

Normally I try to keep my communications with her strictly business, but in this case I was chattier.

I didn't know that [your teacher] had died, but I googled her after reading your letter and sure enough I found her. [Link to death notice.] July 11 of this year, from COVID-19. How did you find out? Also I wonder what ever happened with the child she adopted? Of course that child must be an adult by now -- around 30 or so? Time flies. 

As for the invocation … I wonder if we are remembering the same thing? The only one I can remember was meant as a direct replacement for [and I quoted a specific invocation from her Full Moon liturgy, something ponderous and not rhyming]…. 

Anyway, with that as a framework it came out as:

Holy Isis, holy Isis, 
She who comfort ever brings,
Pallas Isis, Hathor Isis,
Shelter us beneath your wings!

Sothis Isis, Sati Isis,
She who steers the stars above,
Accept this Self in sacrifices,
Fill this cup with all thy love!

Is that the one you meant? If not, I'll have to ask you to give me some more clues to jog my memory.

Honestly, I never knew you liked that. Thank you. It's nice to hear.

I couldn't tell you exactly what I wanted to hear back, but I meant the email to be friendly, to be an opening. I was struck to learn that her teacher was dead, though in retrospect it wasn't a huge surprise: she was older than we are (no longer young!) and always in poor health, so it is not shocking that COVID-19 should have killed her. But I always kind of liked her teacher, and was sorry anyway, even if it wasn't strictly speaking a shock. Also I was curious how she had heard, since so far as I knew Wife was pretty much completely detached from the pagan community these days.

And I wanted her to hear that last sentence. During all the years we were together I took in her criticisms with my food and drink, practically with my breath, but praise was rare indeed. Maybe once a year or so, usually on Father's Day, she would give me credit for being a good father; about that often, more or less, she would admit that she felt she could always trust me, that my sense of honor and decency was more or less unimpeachable. Even after we separated, she conceded that I did all the heavy lifting in drafting our separation agreement, and that she would have been in a much worse situation if I had not been fundamentally kind and equitable. She did say these things -- bloody rarely -- and of course that mattered.

But more commonplace compliments were nearly non-existent. We had been married four years or more before she ever admitted to finding me sexually attractive. Once year I wrote her a brace of four sonnets for her birthday, and I don't remember her saying anything kind or gracious about them … just "Thank you," in a tone that could have applied to doing the laundry. And it really made a difference. It set my expectations for the whole marriage. So I wanted her to see that last line, and to understand that she had never communicated any kind of appreciation for the creations of my mind … and maybe even to guess that this could have affected the marriage.

So what happened? She never replied to that email at all.

Sometimes she is just bad at replying to email, but that wasn't it. About the same time she had sent me another email asking for a definition of exurb. I replied pointing her to the Wikipedia article on the subject, and that she thanked me for! But to the more substantive email … silence.

Yesterday I finally broke down and asked her if it had arrived. She replied, "Yes, thanks!"

In other words, nothing much has changed. If I think about it, I realize that her failure to provide little compliments for little things wasn't really because she hated me (though it often felt like that) but because she somehow didn't understand why they mattered. She even said, once or twice, that in her mind if she didn't say anything, that meant things were fine. That was a compliment, from her perspective. She would only speak up when things were bad. And it flatly never occurred to her that this strategy could be a problem.

I shouldn't have posed that kind of a test for her, leaving a clue that I waited and hoped she would pick up. I should have known up front that she would never see it, never pick it up, and never understand why that mattered.

It still hurt, though, to hear nothing at all.

I know this is a little thing. It is silly even to write a post about it. It's one tiny thing in a forest of similar events that stretches back to when I first met her, more than 35 years ago.

But little things matter. Leaving aside all other considerations, they can (if you leave them alone) accumulate into big things. 

And they can hurt. Even something as small and simple as not being seen.    

 

Snow!

 [I'm writing this almost a week after the fact, but back-dating it to the day it happened.]

This is October, right? The middle of autumn? Astrologically, if you pay attention to those things, the sun hasn't even entered Scorpio yet. Right?

Yes, that's what I thought. Thanks for the reassurance.

 

Only ... in that case ... why does my car look like this?

 

I'm in  Sticksville, of course. It's part of my travel for work this month, travel that I allude to here and here (for example). And it's snowing because, I guess, why not? One colleague in the office here (a native of Sticksville) tells me that in her experience the only month it has never snowed is July. It's not July. So sure, hell, of course it snowed.

 

The rental agency didn't provide me with a scraper for my windshield, nor with a brush for the roof. Probably they didn't think it would be needed yet, not this early in the season. And when I looked at the weather projections for this month, everything said it was going to be a lot warmer than this so I didn't bother to pack gloves.

 

This means I got to sweep the snow off my car with my bare hands, pausing after every couple of sweeps to try to warm them a bit because the cold hurt so much. And fortunately by the time I drove back to the hotel from work a lot of other cars had been driving across the roads, so they were more or less clear. The parking lot at the hotel had been at least partly shoveled, so there was no risk that I might fall and give myself a(nother) concussion. That's all to the good.

 

But I did find myself asking Marie why people live in such a godforsaken place. She grew up somewhere very similar, and said it's all about the bragging rights. And she reminded me that if I accept the transfer I've been offered, I can experience this meteorological unpredictability every single year.

 

Just bloody wonderful.

   

Visiting Debbie en route

 As I drove from Faraway City to Sticksville, I stopped to visit Debbie. It was a long drive and she's only kind-of on the way ... but stopping at her place meant I had to drive only nine hours Friday instead of over ten. Then I had another three hours today, but still it was worth it.

It was different from my earlier visits in a couple of subtle-but-visible ways. 

I arrived in the evening, close to dinner time, more or less. Debbie let me in and asked about my drive, and of course I was exhausted. At the same time I had wound up a lot of energy keeping myself awake and alert the whole time. Tired but wired. So I started rattling off at high speed what a long drive it had been and how tired I was, and after a couple of minutes Debbie chuckled.

"Gosh, I feel like I should offer you a glass of wine, or a beer or something."

Wait, what? Is this Debbie? Back when we were dating (fucking) one of the few hard disagreements we stumbled over was about alcohol. I drank; Debbie didn't. It was never an actual problem between us, because we didn't live together and I was always perfectly willing not to drink when I was around her. But the one or two times we ventured to talk about it at a theoretical level, I quickly realized there was nothing to gain from pushing the question. Back when she was a little girl her parents both drank too much, and they fought violently when they were drunk, and so Debbie said she saw alcohol (in the words of the Buddha's five precepts) as a source of great suffering. When I have visited her in the last few years I've noticed that she might keep a bottle of wine or a couple of beers in the fridge, but I've always assumed that it's because her son-in-law drinks occasionally and so she keeps it for him. (The first time I visited, I saw a bottle of wine and asked about it, and she hurriedly said that it was a gift and she was looking for someone else to give it to. Ever since then I have made it a point not to ask.)

Anyway, I waved away the offer. No, of course not, don't worry about it. And went on with my story. (If you've been following this story in a linear way, I had better add that I've fallen away from the dry living I wrote about a month ago. So I turned it down for Debbie's sake and not my own.)

Then after dinner, as we were sitting down for dessert, she pulled out a bottle of Frangelico. She only poured us each a very little bit, but still -- it's the first time Debbie has every poured me a glass of alcohol.

We started to talk about liqueurs. There's a pecan liqueur called Rivulet that she really wants to find a bottle of, but she has had the damnedest time tracking it down. I mentioned that earlier this year I had made a batch of limoncello using this recipe I found out on the Internet. She asked, "Is that the recipe where you start with vodka and soak the lemon zest in vodka for several weeks?" I told her, "Yes, exactly." And she said she has made the exact same recipe. She agreed that it turns out very well. Wait, what? Debbie bought vodka to make homemade liqueur? This visit was shaping up to be different from earlier ones.

When I first arrived, as I was telling her all about the long drive to get there, she said, "You know, I thought about that today. I don't know why it didn't occur to me before, but I started thinking, If he were your boyfriend this would be really romantic. Look how far he's driving, just to spend time with you! Isn't that sweet? I'd be telling myself, He must really love you to do this!"

She said it like it was a joke, like I was supposed to laugh. So I did. But like a shot I added, "Of course, I do!" Then I dropped it. We've acknowledged that the love is still there, but I think she's probably more comfortable if we don't dwell on it. 

Maybe it's my imagination, but it seems like Debbie was more physically demonstrative than she has been during earlier visits, though she still kept it all within the bounds of propriety; that means we hugged and kissed more often but all the kisses were strictly closed-mouthed. I think this must have been at least partly because we've all had to draw back from physical affection during the age of COVID-19, and so we are all slightly starved for it. Debbie and I treated this visit like an exception because Debbie recently recovered from COVID-19, and so we figured she was neither susceptible (no vector pointing to her) nor contagious (no vector pointing to me). 

On the down side, we didn't work together in the kitchen as smoothly and effortlessly as we have in the past, which made me realize we have gotten out of practice. Nothing serious, but we had to pay more attention not to bump into each other, and I didn't always know right away what to do next. Little things. But it wasn't a big deal for Debbie. She still commented on enjoying how well we worked together.

And there were little domestic moments that worked very well. Saturday morning while she was still in the back of the house, I wanted a cup of coffee. I know where her cups are, I know where she keeps her coffee -- and so I just made it. When she came out she remarked how happy it made her that I felt so at home there. And it made me happy too: honestly, that cup of coffee meant way more to me than just waking up in the morning, exactly because I knew where everything was and I knew it was fine for me to go ahead and make it. It was a little bit like being at home.   

I've told you so much about how the visit felt, but what did we actually do?

We meditated together each morning. Saturday we packed a lunch and then went for a long hike around a nearby lake. I was fine on the level parts, but there were a couple of sharp inclines that really winded me; and at one point I actually had to stop to catch my breath. It's really clear to me that my level of physical activity has dropped way down since COVID-19 hit. Meanwhile Debbie has started talking about hiking the West Highland Way in Scotland next summer. She wants me to come along, and in principle I'd love to. But I'm going to have to get in much better shape if I want any prayer of making it to the end. How about if I start exercising tomorrow? (I have mentioned this proposal to Marie, who has so far said nothing much about it. As a memo, I had better make sure it's not a problem for her.)

In the late afternoon / early evening, after we got back from our hike, we harvested everything that was left in her garden from the summer. The weather prediction was for snow that night, so we figured it was best to bring it all in. And honestly there was quite a lot. Some of it made its way into dinner that night, but she had plenty left over for later.

As we were harvesting vegetables, Son2 called to ask me a question about his job-hunting. So far he has had no luck finding a job (possibly this isn't the best economy to look in right now), so what would I think if he joined the Peace Corps? He and I discussed it a little bit, and then after he hung up I discussed it some more with Debbie. She thought it sounded like a great idea. I wondered if it would be an obstacle to his finding employment later (if he looked too much like a starry-eyed idealist) but her point was that any job interview is about whether you can tell a compelling story. And she thinks Son2 could tell a compelling story about the Peace Corps, if he were to join it. So maybe ...?

Sunday morning we meditated together again, and then I made ready to continue my drive on towards Sticksville. But we also talked a little bit about the visit. I told her how much I always enjoy my visits there, that they always give me a chance to slow down, shift gears, and recharge. She said yes, in fact she knows her house can function like a retreat center, some kind of little monastic island. I hadn't thought of it in those terms before, but it is a good comparison. 

And so the visit wound to a close. I packed my car. We hugged and kissed a last time. And I drove away. Back to my Grand Tour. But spending the weekend there, outside of Work and the World, was priceless. It always is.