I often wonder how the very next blog will form or coalesce in mind, how I will stumble-slosh through the reeds into the marsh and maybe end up on some slippery embankment not even thought of before entering the bog. In a few minutes I will go to the local community gym to meet with a physical fitness trainer which is my attempt at remaining mortal for the time left to me. With walking an hour a day and incorporating strength training perhaps my cardiovascular disease will ease, but that is a self-taught aspiration which has no basis in fact. What will be will be. The doctor did tell me I was at risk. I have been at risk, philosophically, since I bumped and slid from out my mother’s vagina.I think the idea here is to be in the best physical shape one can be in when the grim reaper strikes; after all, I don’t want his dull blade to strike flint, but the side-thickened slab that I have become.
A few moments ago I looked up an old classmate from 1958 (!) and found her and hubby with grandchildren in a Florida town. I did this because of a welter of motives, not to be shared, but redolent of poignancy and adolescent suffering still with me.What age has done to that remarkable beautiful face she had in the spring of 1958. Growing old and aging sadly creases us into leathery cocoons but I am sure that the young woman I knew then has something of the fire within, although I had admired her from afar. In fantasy I want to rescue that maiden from all the years, slap her heart-shaped tush onto the back of my snorting black steed bedecked in medieval armor and garb, and spur away like Lochinvar:
O, young Lochinvar is come out of the west, /Through all the wide Border his steed was the best; /And, save his good broadsword, he weapon had none, /He rode all unarmed, and he rode all alone. /So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war, /There never was knight like the young Lochinvar.
If she were to gaze upon my now baggy face, if she tried, she might see the young man who asked her — in fear, in fright — out to the prom which she refused. This kind of rejection is never forgotten, just filed under miscellany. Computers ping one another. Humans pang one another. All of this is amusing or poignant for me, like the dusk on a pastoral summer’s day which ends and is forever gone. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may….
As I said before, where am I in this marsh? I just associated to something and it quickly dissolved out of mind, perhaps because it was too painful to express. The remembrance of things past oftentimes are like piercing arrows to the heart, Oh Christendom flee my mind, too many pictorial icons come to mind from Western Civilization. Christ figures with torture scars, impalements, brows with thorns seeping blood. The morbidity of it all makes me move on. Jews say, “To Life,” when they toast; Christians are into Lazarus.
To look back to my senior year in 1958 speaks more of poignancy, shyness, male ineptitude, adolescence, the abyssmal lack of social skills, the inhibitions and the fears — of intimacy, of touch, of sweet opportunities missed because of the failed internal assessment of who I was and what I could do or be. Freud somewhere wrote that nothing is forgotten, and that is a telling observation. We often lie to ourselves in such ways to deny that maxim. On some levels we choose not to recall. We camouflage ourselves like the hunter in the blind and “blind” is so apt.
As I look back, as I think of 1958, I am a child in a young man’s body. Retrospectively I cringe at who I was; retrospectively I have compassion for who he was. If I had him in treatment with the therapist I became, I would have helped him visit who he was, to mature, to enter the world. I also have learned that if I were not who I was, I would not have had the compassion I hopefully evinced as a therapist.The cliche is not a cliche — as we come closer to our end the beginnings of our life loom large, become sharper and sharper, each living crystal so very telling, like Kane’s snow orb — “Rosebud.”
The romantic and unfulfilled yearning within that went unexpressed and clearly not expressed to myself was immense, an immense reservoir, for I had no one to speak of this. I swam in a huge aquifer of my own making. I had no measure of who I was, of being, of some kind of personal self-knowledge from which to act. Frightening — unsettling –to recollect this, I feel saddened about the youth who would not awake until he was about 34. To rue what was or what was not, to experience regrets, to suck like a child on its thumb when a moment comes to mind, moments ache or reverberate with what could have been if I had done otherwise — if I had been otherwise. I do not allow it to cling like Saran wrap about my sensibilities.
I enter the mood, I feel the anguish and I resolve to come out of it, for life would be onerous, would it not? if we spent our days repairing old brick work. A strong measure of fantasy comes to mind, the what ifs, in which I construct little scenarios if I had married this one or that one, if I had at least dated this one or that; that I might have grown up sooner if I was in a relationship of any kind. But it was not to be. Those years are beyond indelible. The sexual, emotional and psychological frustration cannot be expressed by words, although I can feel them even now.
As I look back, rather as I reconnoiter the old land I lived in, who I am has changed so much that distortion is the rule and illusion the telescope. I had a friend all through high school and into college and then we just faded away from one another as often happens. His life was fairly regular if not routine; he may or may not be dead. However, the fantasy of it is that he lived the bell jar curve and probably is retired someplace, perhaps in Florida. In my imagination I don’t think he has cheated on this wife ; nor has he expressed much discontent in his life; I don’t think he has questioned authority profoundly in his life; I think he has been contented with being an elementary school teacher, perhaps going on to be an administrator (whoopee!). I hear the envy in these words. All this is an unfair put down of him. For I have led a life of disarray and discontentment. No need to compare. I just feel I have had the more arduous task and I have paid the highest costs in terms of relationships and deaths of loved ones, too soon in their lives, and in my own. I have made a significant contribution to my own misfortunes.
If the prisoner flees his cell, it is always with him. My days of yore are always with me. I can only say that I have grown comfortable with my cell and I would not exchange it for anyone else’s. That’s a happy closing which doesn’t make me too happy, but there it is.
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