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.