Parallel lives

As I listened to Schmidt talk about the Hired Hand this spring (as I discussed in my last post), I began to think about the unexpected parallels between Schmidt's life and mine.

Plutarch of Chaeronea, author of a more
famous set of "Parallel Lives."

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Schmidt and I met in college. He was quiet and introverted; I was loud and seemingly more sociable, but my loudness and sociability were protective masks no different from Schmidt's quiet and introversion. "Talks loud, laughs louder, thinks silently." When we talked about things that we both knew, we found that we nearly always had the same take. We both had fathers who were loud and boisterous, and who not infrequently offended people; also mothers who were quieter and could get along with anyone.

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College is when a lot of people start dating and fucking. But I didn't lose my virginity until my Senior year. Schmidt flunked out after the end of his Junior year, so he didn't have a Senior year. And I'm pretty sure he didn't fuck anyone while at school. Years later, Wife told me she had talked to Schmidt privately, and he had admitted that for a while he was interested in Flora. She had the right body-type to attract him: slim, trim, and athletic. But she was already fucking a couple of our other friends (R– and Mac), and Schmidt determined that "Everyone who fucks Flora goes crazy." He didn't want to go crazy, so he decided not to join the party. Also I suspect he didn't want a connection with Flora to drag him into any more intimate connection with R– or Mac.

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After college, I went home. I didn't date anyone. It was only through a weird coincidence that I met Wife, and we started fucking a week later.

After college, Schmidt went home. He lived way out in the boonies, so the likelihood of a weird coincidence throwing him together with someone attractive was correspondingly a lot lower than it was for me.

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Part of what attracted me about Wife was the powerful energy that accompanied the highs of her bipolar cycle, when the air around her crackled with her enthusiasm and nothing seemed impossible.

It seems like part of what attracted Schmidt to Hand was something similar. He said that he thought Hand was undiagnosed bipolar, and he agreed that the highs of bipolar people can be attractive. Also, remember that Hand lived his whole life in the shadow of colon cancer, and responded to it with a determination to enjoy his short term to the hilt. For someone as broodingly introspective as Schmidt, I think Hand's willingness to live thoughtlessly—taking no thought for the morrow, as Scripture would have it—must have felt profoundly liberating. Even if he couldn't do the same things himself (because he, personally, couldn't stop thinking about his actions), he must have found Hand thrilling to be around. (Why yes, I am interpreting him based on my own personal experience. Why do you ask?)

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And Schmidt let himself be walked on, in this ... can I call it a "relationship"? According to Schmidt, Hand "self-medicated" using (among other intoxicants) "bimbos in heat." And I know from earlier communications that sometimes this meant Hand was plowing them noisily in Schmidt's little house, driving Schmidt out to spend the night over at his parents' place. Schmidt bailed Hand out of jail from time to time, and put up with his erratic behavior while trying to help him take charge of his life. It wasn't all the time, I guess, and I don't know how it ended. After some time, Hand left the Schmidt farm, and only came back years later when he was finally dying, to say goodbye. But for all the joy Schmidt got out of that friendship, he paid for it with service and neglect.

A lot like the relationship between Wife and me.

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It's funny. Ten years ago, I communicated with my old friend Dale and learned that his marriage had a lot in common with mine. I talk about that conversation a little in this post. (Just now I went looking for the emails it was based on and can't find them, so I can't really say more than that at the moment.)

But it makes me wonder: Why should our experiences have been so similar? My first thought is that—in different ways, and with all due qualifications understood—Dale and Schmidt and I were just very much alike. On the one hand, this notion explains why I was good friends with both of them. On the other hand, it also makes it likely that we sought out similar kinds of people in our lives. Dale found his wife, Schmidt found Hand, and I found Wife. Of course at the micro level we were looking for different things. (Dale, for example, is a committed Christian and would only have married another Christian.) But at the macro level maybe there was something similar in what we wanted—echoes or rhymes, if not strict identity. And also at the macro level I think we responded to challenges with a similar softness and yielding, with a willingness to take the blame and to shoulder both our work and our partner's for the sake of some future greater good. In the end it didn't work out that way for any of the three of us. But I get the hint that all of us put up with more than we should have, and for a lot longer.

In retrospect that looks like the wrong thing to do. But you can only tell that after living through it. Maybe if we're lucky we'll have a future life in which we can do better next time.