I've moved this blog over to Word Press, where it can be found at http://www.sliceofmidlife.com.
Hope to see you there!
Showing posts with label old friends. Show all posts
Showing posts with label old friends. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Born to Run
Bruce Springsteen is 60. I am almost 50. Yet it feels like 1975 all over again.
They say as part of life's continuum there comes a time when the children parent the parents. I am, not surprisingly, there. To steel myself for the challenges ahead, I have been running, 2010-style, iPhone in hand, ear buds in place, iPod shuffle mode on, and only a phone call or email away from anyone who needs me at a moment's notice.
Sometimes these runs are Rage Against the Machine stress burners and sometimes they are Grateful for Seattle Sunshine and All That I've Got leisurely jogs. Even when I don't have the Genius feature turned on, my iPod somehow selects the appropriate soundtrack to fit or shake me out of my mood.
How did it know that Yesterday, Blue and Trouble would match my feelings of self-pity or that Hard Rain, Walking on Sunshine Shiny Happy People and Born in the USA wouldn't allow me to wallow for too long? I don't remember feeling so connected to music and its ability to soothe my savage breast since I was a teenager.
And in some ways I've reverted to that time. A kaleidoscopic parade of people from the past has emerged to help, like characters from a Springsteen song. Unbeknownst to her strict stepfather Fred, my friend Chris and I used to sneak out of the house, pile into our friend Elaine's tan VW bug and drive all over the Jersey Shore to watch the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Elaine's Jimmy Carter peanut roach clip at the ready. Now Fred, who I haven't seen since I left for college, sends us daily email affirmations because his family has been touched by cancer. Chris, who I saw last year for the first time in 27 years, will spend a day in Florida with my mother and me, helping us sort through her lifetime of papers.
My mother's friends call me and their voices are shaky with age now. Old friends of mine are in touch and they tell stories of caring for their own aging parents. We look at each other's Facebook profile photos and laugh at how much we all resemble our mothers.
I saw Bruce on Elvis Costello's Spectacle, talking about his struggles with his teenage son. Last year, he was on the cover of AARP magazine.
The last leg of my 4-mile run grazes a bluff overlooking Puget Sound. There is a steep stairwell with 78 steps and at the top, because this is Seattle, there is a coffee shop. When I was a mother of young children, yearning for escape, I would run and when I reached the stairwell, just above me, there would be an old man handing out peppermints and three middle-aged women talking. When I reached the top of the stairs, I would head to my car and emerge with two sippy cups, which I would fill with cocoa from the coffee shop, balanced atop lattes for my husband and me. It seemed like such a precarious balance, yet the middle-aged women, emerging with their single containers of coffee, would smile at me nostalgically.
I haven't seen the old man for a long time and I worry that he is gone. And now when I run, I look down and see young women with dogs and babies in jogging strollers struggling to navigate the stairs. Maybe they are looking up at me and think that I am unencumbered. But we're all just in different places on the stairwell of life, and as Bruce would say, sometimes life takes you one step up and two steps back.
They say as part of life's continuum there comes a time when the children parent the parents. I am, not surprisingly, there. To steel myself for the challenges ahead, I have been running, 2010-style, iPhone in hand, ear buds in place, iPod shuffle mode on, and only a phone call or email away from anyone who needs me at a moment's notice.
Sometimes these runs are Rage Against the Machine stress burners and sometimes they are Grateful for Seattle Sunshine and All That I've Got leisurely jogs. Even when I don't have the Genius feature turned on, my iPod somehow selects the appropriate soundtrack to fit or shake me out of my mood.
How did it know that Yesterday, Blue and Trouble would match my feelings of self-pity or that Hard Rain, Walking on Sunshine Shiny Happy People and Born in the USA wouldn't allow me to wallow for too long? I don't remember feeling so connected to music and its ability to soothe my savage breast since I was a teenager.
And in some ways I've reverted to that time. A kaleidoscopic parade of people from the past has emerged to help, like characters from a Springsteen song. Unbeknownst to her strict stepfather Fred, my friend Chris and I used to sneak out of the house, pile into our friend Elaine's tan VW bug and drive all over the Jersey Shore to watch the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Elaine's Jimmy Carter peanut roach clip at the ready. Now Fred, who I haven't seen since I left for college, sends us daily email affirmations because his family has been touched by cancer. Chris, who I saw last year for the first time in 27 years, will spend a day in Florida with my mother and me, helping us sort through her lifetime of papers.
My mother's friends call me and their voices are shaky with age now. Old friends of mine are in touch and they tell stories of caring for their own aging parents. We look at each other's Facebook profile photos and laugh at how much we all resemble our mothers.
I saw Bruce on Elvis Costello's Spectacle, talking about his struggles with his teenage son. Last year, he was on the cover of AARP magazine.
The last leg of my 4-mile run grazes a bluff overlooking Puget Sound. There is a steep stairwell with 78 steps and at the top, because this is Seattle, there is a coffee shop. When I was a mother of young children, yearning for escape, I would run and when I reached the stairwell, just above me, there would be an old man handing out peppermints and three middle-aged women talking. When I reached the top of the stairs, I would head to my car and emerge with two sippy cups, which I would fill with cocoa from the coffee shop, balanced atop lattes for my husband and me. It seemed like such a precarious balance, yet the middle-aged women, emerging with their single containers of coffee, would smile at me nostalgically.
I haven't seen the old man for a long time and I worry that he is gone. And now when I run, I look down and see young women with dogs and babies in jogging strollers struggling to navigate the stairs. Maybe they are looking up at me and think that I am unencumbered. But we're all just in different places on the stairwell of life, and as Bruce would say, sometimes life takes you one step up and two steps back.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing, Baby
Past is merely prologue, I tell my pre-adolescent daughters.
On days when they are suffering the inevitable emotional bruises of childhood, they are comforted by stories of my perceived childhood suffering. I was a chubby New Jersey girl with a dysfunctional family and an off-the-radar social persona in a small town where, as I saw it, no one appreciated my interest in foreign languages and spicy foods and people were in-your-face and proud of it. “And you know,” my stories often end, “I grew up and never saw any of those people again.”
Actually, it wasn’t that bad. Just the usual childhood middle class, small town angst, often portrayed in books and movies. And yes, I did grow up and, as many of us do, I’ve lived a life of many chapters: California student, exchange student in France, world traveler, foreign service officer and later, wife, mother and writer, settling into a peaceful existence in the verdant northwestern corner of the country, where the natives are polite and healthy and nobody ever gets run over by a garbage truck.
Here I’ve found my inner swan, taking the best part of my origins and subsequent reinventions and molding these qualities into the grown-up version of me. Over the years I’ve had happy reunions with several people from the more interesting chapters of my life. Yet, hovering on the periphery of 50, I’m still a little ashamed of my roots. So I keep my Jersey self hidden inside me (like the fat person that lurks within the body of the newly thin) only allowing it to emerge on special occasions, like when Bruce Springsteen plays the Superbowl or when I am loudly (and some say inappropriately) rooting for my daughter’s basketball team.
Then, they found me.
The first blast from the past came from my mother, a 75 year-old web surfing enthusiast, who, for most of her life, has been the living embodiment of a social networking site. Though, predictably, she lives in Florida now, she keeps up with the doings in our New Jersey hometown, remembers her high school years fondly and even lunches with her former classmates once a month. She found and later directed me to the website for my upcoming 30th high school reunion. Like a cyber peeping Tom, I looked but didn’t act.
A few weeks later I received a call from one of my best friends from high school, whom I hadn’t communicated with in 25 years. She still lived in Jersey, was going to be traveling in my neck of the woods, and wanted to get together.
Sitting in a neighborhood sports bar that I hadn’t known existed, I cringed as her husband, a die-hard Philadelphia Eagles fan, scream epithets at his team as the game went into unexpected overtime. Near another big screen TV, polite Seattle fans quietly cheered every small triumph of the beleagured Seahawks, making polite allowances for their flaws. It was like being with an embarrassing, yet lovable relative.
Later, we showed my kids our high school yearbooks and my friend filled me in on the lives of people I had forgotten existed – the stoner had become a Port-a-Potty millionaire, the jock was a doctor and several people seemed to have done quite well selling cars.
All of this made my past real to my kids and I decided it was good for them to meet people who had meant something to me and with whom I could still enjoy an easy rapport, despite distance, different politics and years gone by.
Then came Facebook.
Egged on to join by some foreign service friends who had posted some amusing old pictures, including one of me circa 1986 wielding a (fake) gun, terrorist-style, I succumbed to Facebook after months of resisting. I lost my innocence in the traditional way of Facebook newbies, wasting several hours the first afternoon reading the profiles of my many (thanks for finding them, Facebook) friends, prompting me to announce in my first “What Are You Doing?” posting, “Alison is regretting that she joined Facebook because she finds it as addictive as crack cocaine.”
Friends complained about the pressure to join Facebook, and relaxed in a sheepish, conspiratorial way when I admitted that I had joined too. Some justified it as a way to monitor their kids’ on-line activities, which we all know is the equivalent of saying you read Playboy for the articles.
It was only a matter of time before high school caught up with me via Facebook. The affable senior class president (now a media professor in Milwaukee) contacted me, I responded and we became “friends.” You know what happened next. Friend requests came in from one of the reunion organizers (still a die-hard Yankees fan), the audio-visual nerd (now with a struggling indie-music record label) and a woman last seen sneaking off to make out with my cousin (she appears to have settled down).
Requests also came in from people who weren’t my friends then, making me wonder why they wanted to be my friends now. I didn’t want to be rude, but I also didn’t want to open myself up to superficial and time-consuming encounters.
“Just ignore them,” my seasoned Facebook friends advised. “Everyone does it.”
So I did and I settled into a comfortable routine with Facebook, checking my “wall” (an ironic name for something meant to break-down barriers) once in a while, learning how to set my filters, ignoring martini requests and never getting around to writing 25 Random Things About Me.
Then he found me.
Actually, I found him first. I admit it, that first addict-like day, I didn’t just react to the friends Facebook sent me, I went trolling for people I knew and in the process learned that a lot of other people that I had once pigeon-holed had happily reinvented themselves too and that some (the senior vice president at Warner Brothers) would be well within their rights to have the last laugh.
While searching for my niece, I found 80 or so Krupnicks, none of whom was familiar to me… except one.
The postage stamp-sized photo revealed the unmistakable hair and brow of my father, who had been deceased for more than 20 years. The name, hometown and birthdate were familiar to me too.
Here was my half-brother, whose birth, when I was 13, coincided with my permanent estrangement from my father.
I clicked the page closed and enjoyed telling the story for a few days. Facebook had the power to literally raise the dead.
But then, after a few months, he found me.
The nuances of Facebook are perhaps more, well, nuanced then email. His approach was tentative, “Are you related to the Krupnicks in New Jersey?” My response, less so, “Yes, and I’m also related to you.”
Both his parents were now dead. I felt a surprising tenderness for this man/child I’d never met. I’d heard from my older brother that he had not had an easy life, though he had the standard carefree Facebook photo.
“I’m your half-brother,” he said, adding “I hope it’s okay that I contacted you.”
I am the veteran of a three-year, pre-internet, long distance relationship, which happily led to marriage. My attempts to choose the right words and the right tone and to interpret what my new Facebook correspondent was feeling, reminded me of the emotionally charged “voice-reading” I used to engage in during telephone conversations with my taciturn boyfriend-turned husband. At least then I had something to go on. These exchanges were much harder to decipher.
“Strange way to find a half-sibling,” I responded, trying not to betray the emotional turmoil I was feeling, “but nice to meet you. I hope you have had and are having a good life.”
Talk about an etiquette dilemma, this exchange was clearly on a different par from those Facebook stabs at friendship whose expectations had worried me. I wondered how far this would go. I wondered how far I wanted it to go.
Because Facebook had opened up the possibility that I could gain answers to the questions I’d never been able to ask my father. Doubtful, since my half-brother had been 12 when our father died. Maybe my father, whose bitterness at my mother tainted his relationship with me, wasn’t the same father he had known and I’d get to hear about his positive qualities. Maybe we would share a sense of regret and unfulfilled possibility, since we’d both “lost” our fathers at roughly the same age.
Was he feeling the same jumbled mix of emotions and, if so, what did he want from me? After all, we were strangers, with nothing in common but some genes and a last name that means Cold Barley Soup.
I guess I’ll never find out, at least not via Facebook.
Because despite my carefully thought-out response, I never heard from my half-brother again.
Was I too casual, inadvertently putting up a wall between us with my breezy “have a nice-life” sensibility? Maybe I wasn’t casual enough and should have added him to my “friends” list, though to me that smacked of insincerity. Or maybe, as many do, he had widely cast his friendship net to see what he could catch and had moved on.
It makes a good story and it’s one I’ve told often, most recently during a face-to-face encounter with a friend I hadn’t seen for thirty years. The internet brought us together but I realize that only a human connection will keep us that way.
Marvin Gaye had it right.
Funny how the music from one’s youth still says it all.
On days when they are suffering the inevitable emotional bruises of childhood, they are comforted by stories of my perceived childhood suffering. I was a chubby New Jersey girl with a dysfunctional family and an off-the-radar social persona in a small town where, as I saw it, no one appreciated my interest in foreign languages and spicy foods and people were in-your-face and proud of it. “And you know,” my stories often end, “I grew up and never saw any of those people again.”
Actually, it wasn’t that bad. Just the usual childhood middle class, small town angst, often portrayed in books and movies. And yes, I did grow up and, as many of us do, I’ve lived a life of many chapters: California student, exchange student in France, world traveler, foreign service officer and later, wife, mother and writer, settling into a peaceful existence in the verdant northwestern corner of the country, where the natives are polite and healthy and nobody ever gets run over by a garbage truck.
Here I’ve found my inner swan, taking the best part of my origins and subsequent reinventions and molding these qualities into the grown-up version of me. Over the years I’ve had happy reunions with several people from the more interesting chapters of my life. Yet, hovering on the periphery of 50, I’m still a little ashamed of my roots. So I keep my Jersey self hidden inside me (like the fat person that lurks within the body of the newly thin) only allowing it to emerge on special occasions, like when Bruce Springsteen plays the Superbowl or when I am loudly (and some say inappropriately) rooting for my daughter’s basketball team.
Then, they found me.
The first blast from the past came from my mother, a 75 year-old web surfing enthusiast, who, for most of her life, has been the living embodiment of a social networking site. Though, predictably, she lives in Florida now, she keeps up with the doings in our New Jersey hometown, remembers her high school years fondly and even lunches with her former classmates once a month. She found and later directed me to the website for my upcoming 30th high school reunion. Like a cyber peeping Tom, I looked but didn’t act.
A few weeks later I received a call from one of my best friends from high school, whom I hadn’t communicated with in 25 years. She still lived in Jersey, was going to be traveling in my neck of the woods, and wanted to get together.
Sitting in a neighborhood sports bar that I hadn’t known existed, I cringed as her husband, a die-hard Philadelphia Eagles fan, scream epithets at his team as the game went into unexpected overtime. Near another big screen TV, polite Seattle fans quietly cheered every small triumph of the beleagured Seahawks, making polite allowances for their flaws. It was like being with an embarrassing, yet lovable relative.
Later, we showed my kids our high school yearbooks and my friend filled me in on the lives of people I had forgotten existed – the stoner had become a Port-a-Potty millionaire, the jock was a doctor and several people seemed to have done quite well selling cars.
All of this made my past real to my kids and I decided it was good for them to meet people who had meant something to me and with whom I could still enjoy an easy rapport, despite distance, different politics and years gone by.
Then came Facebook.
Egged on to join by some foreign service friends who had posted some amusing old pictures, including one of me circa 1986 wielding a (fake) gun, terrorist-style, I succumbed to Facebook after months of resisting. I lost my innocence in the traditional way of Facebook newbies, wasting several hours the first afternoon reading the profiles of my many (thanks for finding them, Facebook) friends, prompting me to announce in my first “What Are You Doing?” posting, “Alison is regretting that she joined Facebook because she finds it as addictive as crack cocaine.”
Friends complained about the pressure to join Facebook, and relaxed in a sheepish, conspiratorial way when I admitted that I had joined too. Some justified it as a way to monitor their kids’ on-line activities, which we all know is the equivalent of saying you read Playboy for the articles.
It was only a matter of time before high school caught up with me via Facebook. The affable senior class president (now a media professor in Milwaukee) contacted me, I responded and we became “friends.” You know what happened next. Friend requests came in from one of the reunion organizers (still a die-hard Yankees fan), the audio-visual nerd (now with a struggling indie-music record label) and a woman last seen sneaking off to make out with my cousin (she appears to have settled down).
Requests also came in from people who weren’t my friends then, making me wonder why they wanted to be my friends now. I didn’t want to be rude, but I also didn’t want to open myself up to superficial and time-consuming encounters.
“Just ignore them,” my seasoned Facebook friends advised. “Everyone does it.”
So I did and I settled into a comfortable routine with Facebook, checking my “wall” (an ironic name for something meant to break-down barriers) once in a while, learning how to set my filters, ignoring martini requests and never getting around to writing 25 Random Things About Me.
Then he found me.
Actually, I found him first. I admit it, that first addict-like day, I didn’t just react to the friends Facebook sent me, I went trolling for people I knew and in the process learned that a lot of other people that I had once pigeon-holed had happily reinvented themselves too and that some (the senior vice president at Warner Brothers) would be well within their rights to have the last laugh.
While searching for my niece, I found 80 or so Krupnicks, none of whom was familiar to me… except one.
The postage stamp-sized photo revealed the unmistakable hair and brow of my father, who had been deceased for more than 20 years. The name, hometown and birthdate were familiar to me too.
Here was my half-brother, whose birth, when I was 13, coincided with my permanent estrangement from my father.
I clicked the page closed and enjoyed telling the story for a few days. Facebook had the power to literally raise the dead.
But then, after a few months, he found me.
The nuances of Facebook are perhaps more, well, nuanced then email. His approach was tentative, “Are you related to the Krupnicks in New Jersey?” My response, less so, “Yes, and I’m also related to you.”
Both his parents were now dead. I felt a surprising tenderness for this man/child I’d never met. I’d heard from my older brother that he had not had an easy life, though he had the standard carefree Facebook photo.
“I’m your half-brother,” he said, adding “I hope it’s okay that I contacted you.”
I am the veteran of a three-year, pre-internet, long distance relationship, which happily led to marriage. My attempts to choose the right words and the right tone and to interpret what my new Facebook correspondent was feeling, reminded me of the emotionally charged “voice-reading” I used to engage in during telephone conversations with my taciturn boyfriend-turned husband. At least then I had something to go on. These exchanges were much harder to decipher.
“Strange way to find a half-sibling,” I responded, trying not to betray the emotional turmoil I was feeling, “but nice to meet you. I hope you have had and are having a good life.”
Talk about an etiquette dilemma, this exchange was clearly on a different par from those Facebook stabs at friendship whose expectations had worried me. I wondered how far this would go. I wondered how far I wanted it to go.
Because Facebook had opened up the possibility that I could gain answers to the questions I’d never been able to ask my father. Doubtful, since my half-brother had been 12 when our father died. Maybe my father, whose bitterness at my mother tainted his relationship with me, wasn’t the same father he had known and I’d get to hear about his positive qualities. Maybe we would share a sense of regret and unfulfilled possibility, since we’d both “lost” our fathers at roughly the same age.
Was he feeling the same jumbled mix of emotions and, if so, what did he want from me? After all, we were strangers, with nothing in common but some genes and a last name that means Cold Barley Soup.
I guess I’ll never find out, at least not via Facebook.
Because despite my carefully thought-out response, I never heard from my half-brother again.
Was I too casual, inadvertently putting up a wall between us with my breezy “have a nice-life” sensibility? Maybe I wasn’t casual enough and should have added him to my “friends” list, though to me that smacked of insincerity. Or maybe, as many do, he had widely cast his friendship net to see what he could catch and had moved on.
It makes a good story and it’s one I’ve told often, most recently during a face-to-face encounter with a friend I hadn’t seen for thirty years. The internet brought us together but I realize that only a human connection will keep us that way.
Marvin Gaye had it right.
Funny how the music from one’s youth still says it all.
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