Rhubarb Pie

Graceful Acquaintanceship

Dear Lovely and Discerning, 

I think Megan already hit on the relevant and insightful advice, which means I'm free to write tangential and speculative things instead.  The thing I agree with the most is that ambiguity signals unresolved conflict -- their vagueness or silence probably means they're conflicted about why they don't feel so great about you anymore.  Maybe not -- a lot of folks avoid negative or difficult conversations, so silence could signal clarity but unwillingness to have a hard talk.  I don't think so, though. 

Your letter made me think about friendship and how mysterious it can be.  It made me think about the people in my life who are or once were or rightfully should be "friends" but who actually make me uncomfortable.  There are some myths about friendship, I think, that aren't matched by the reality that I live.  The people who make me feel uneasy are the people where myth and reality stand in contrast. "Friends are forever," is the myth I think you're bumping into right now.   

The biggest myth about friendship is that it goes in one direction.  You start as strangers, you become acquaintances, you move into friendship, the friendship deepens, and that's friendship -- you stay close forever and ever.  The myth suggests that once you are friends, at a particular level of intimacy, anything that diminishes that closeness is a failure -- you're not really "friends."  Someone has done something wrong, there's something broken to fix.  I don't think that's actually true, but it is those situations where I feel awkward or lousy.  There are people in my life where the potential for friendship exists, and partial overtures have been made, we started down the path of friendship or we got all the way there, but present day life doesn't accommodate true closeness in the shape we both might have predicted at the beginning.  Those are the people I'm afraid to call up, because I don't know what we are.  I'd like to get coffee now and then, to hear how they're doing, and I wish them well, but I don't want to have them over for dinner or take trips with them or call them to borrow tools or go to their child's school play.  You're not allowed to say this, because it contradicts the myth about what friendship is.  You're not allowed to go from friends to graceful acquaintances.  We do it all the time, but we don't talk about it or admit that it's okay.  It's easier to sever ties completely, sometimes, or to say, we were never really "friends" than to say, we were friends once, but now there are other people I'd rather spend my time talking to. Or I've outgrown that stage of my life and the people who are still really into it make me feel conflicted and strange.  Or, I've realized that you always want to talk about something that isn't interesting enough for me to want to talk about as often as you would like, but telling you would be awkward and I don't care about you enough to try to puzzle through an awkward conversation.  Worse still: the more I got to know you I admired from afar, the more I realize we don't share the same values, and so I don't want to be around you as much as I thought I would from the outside.  

Easier Said Than Done

One of the things I try to help students with is letting go of being perfect, not being paralyzed by imperfect choices in an uncertain world.  Maybe it is disappointing compared to our elaborate imagination, but so much of the important progress of life is about showing up, about trying hard, about reaching out, about letting people help you.  In the role of career advisor I feel warm and helpful and wise.  I get the chance to practice being the kind of person I aspire to be, and all this practice is tricking me into thinking I'm getting somewhere.

And then my grandmother died.

And there are lots of things that come up with this.  Sadness is the least of it -- not the least because it's lightest, but the blessing of sadness is that it is straightforward and expected and uncomplicated.  It's no fun to be sad, sure, but it is what I'm supposed to feel.  I also feel relieved, and that feeling comes loaded down with lots of self-loathing and shame.  I am guilty.  I have not been generous with my time or my attention.  I am cold and aloof.  I do not remember birthdays or bring casseroles or take care of cats, or do much of the kind of tending and practical caretaking that families do for one another.  Worse -- I don't *want* to do that, even knowing how much it matters, how indistinguishable from love it is.  I am afraid of what will happen to my extended family, that we will drift into separate orbits, and that it is a failing of mine that I am unwilling or unable to do the work that would keep us together. I am full of wistfulness and tortured self-examination at all of these failings, my inability to love the right people in the right way, or to express it right, at the right time.  I am full of regret at all the ways I could have been a better granddaughter.  I hated to see my grandmother's deterioration, so I avoided visiting her.  I am mad at myself for being self-absorbed enough to make my grandmother's death, even, all about me me me and what kind of person I am, so I am tormented by all of these feelings and then when I start thinking about them I get angry and disgusted and it starts anew.

The good news, I think, is that the experience of a memorial service offers some kind of respite, and some kind of healing.  I am tending to the tedious and mundane errands of arranging for food. The family is coordinating chores and readings via email, and mixed in with the administrivia we are sharing some other thoughts, too.  We're all tender in the same way -- I know that without any one saying it outright.  We remember the same things, and that is such a comfort and such a tie.  We're connected even without casseroles and cat-sitting.  We will stand up and sit down in a familiar church together, take turns walking up to the lectern and reading words out loud, and after that we will eat and tell stories and laugh and drink vodka and cry and gossip with neighbors and acquaintances and old friends.  Doing that will help, I think.  Just showing up.  It's not complicated, but it's not simple, either.  

The Perils of Anti-Intellectualism

Friend, I urge you to ready your soothingest voice, because I think I will end up ranting. This has been a week for me to speak more vehemently than might be appropriate. I chewed out my book group yesterday, because they began what I thought was an insipid and self-congratulatory discussion about politics, full of "them" and "us" language. I should bite my tongue more, but one of the many things I like about my book group is that there are a lot of women who don't, so we are okay with vigorous disagreement. But usually I sit back and enjoy the vigorous disagreement while it crackles from other quarters, and this time I was the one calling someone out. It felt good while I was speaking, and then I felt like a bulldozer, and sat quietly, and then I apologized.

Anyway, today in the carpool I started ranting. So I figured it was a good time to settle in and admit my shameful secret: I am an anti-intellectual. I think this is probably bad for me, so I'm accepting suggestions for improvement. Today I invited a professor to lunch; I think I will begin a pretty vigorous campaign of professor-befriending, so I can overcome this prejudice I have. I think ill of professors as a group, and I am ready to have this mindset changed. But below the fold, all of my biases will be revealed. I recognize in myself the dangerous habit of gathering evidence that supports my view while neither looking for nor crediting evidence that refutes it.

I Keep Welling Up

Tonight, as I was singing along to Ben Folds while chopping onions and peppers and heating up the olive oil, I kept thinking about how David Foster Wallace is dead.  My eyes filled with tears, and it wasn't the onions.  I feel bad.  I was thinking, I wish I had known he was sad.  I would have written to him, maybe.  It's silly, but there in the kitchen I felt a little like it was my fault, that I should have reached out. 

I'm not sure why he was on my mind.  Yesterday I found out, and I was mostly angry.  I was mad at him for committing suicide in the first place, and madder still when I learned that his wife came home and found him.  It's one thing to imagine him desperately unhappy.  It's another to imagine him lacking the self-consciousness or kindness not to cringe at what he would put her through.  His writing was so acutely self-aware, he was so observant of all of the tiny disappointments life offers, and I can get how that would be a hard hard burden to bear, living with your antennae up like that.  But it also had seemed to me that he was maybe through the hardest part.  He spoke pretty recently about how an education gives you the power to change your reference point, to not have to listen to the yammering anxious greedy voices in your own head, to choose kindness or empathy or at least curiosity.  How do you go from telling an assembled bunch of hopeful undergraduates that they can choose a way of seeing the world that won't eat them alive, to letting your wife come home to find your body hanging in the house you share?

Way back when in 1996, when I was living in the cottage in the woods, and I had just read Infinite Jest and was gobbling up his essays, I had dreams about David Foster Wallace.  He was unshaven and agreeable and shy in those dreams, and I fed him and took him sailing and held his hand.  I would wake with only vague recollections of the dreams, but they left me with the strong impression that we would be friends, and that I could help him not be so nervous.  Tonight in the kitchen I remembered those dreams and maybe that's why I felt worse.  For years, I realize now, I've just assumed that one day our paths would cross, and we would eventually become pals.  If I had known he was sad I might have tried to meet him.  I thought, though, that maybe he was doing okay, married and settled in and giving talks to undergraduates.

Better late than never, right?

Darlin, I am so sorry you had to wait for these.  I think of you, so far away, anxious and fretting.  But this is the first moment my camera/cord/city alignment worked out.  Anyway, here they are, perfect and new.  I love them so much.

  Broccoli!

Brussels sprouts!

Chard!

One day, when they aren't cute anymore, I will sever their heads, fry them in olive oil and garlic and eat them.

(I have carpool stories for later.  And house shopping thoughts.  But I'm running out to go on a team scavenger hunt/puzzler.  I've never done it before, but it sounds great.)

Partnership and Pettiness

The worst thing about being married for me has been the revelation of what a petty, moody, picky, and irritable person I really am.  I imagined myself laid back and friendly and even-keeled until I started living with someone who actually is all of those things, and we had to start doing things like dividing up chores and combining finances and picking out paint colors.  It turns out I am an endless score-keeper, maintaining a silent and constant tally of who did what last, who bought the groceries or who drank the last of the juice or whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher.  (I do an unfair tally, too, awarding myself lots more martyr points and overlooking the chores NBT regularly takes on, like trash and dishes.)  When my inner baby says, "This isn't fair!" I have to figure out whether it is worth picking a fight about or is one of the little things older wiser married couples say you just smooth over.  I hope it will go away with time, because it is a silly way to live, and it has been the worst revelation about marriage.  I thought I was generous and loving, but I am petty and self-righteous.  Ick. 

The best thing about marriage is you have a person to figure out the kind of stuff you're thinking about, someone else who has a stake in what you like and don't like about your job, or where you want to be living in five years.  For me those decisions or projects can be overwhelming, and it's so very much nicer when somebody else is there to think about it with me.   

It's becoming evident that the decrepit gutters on the house we live in are rotted in a way more ominous way than we imagined.  There's water getting into the house, and who knows how extensive the damage is.  We need to figure that out, and then start the calculations of what it would take to repair, and whether it makes sense to put on an addition or do roof and/or siding at the same time if we're already going to be doing major work, and really the natural conversation after that is, is this the house we would want to do that kind of work to, and what are our alternatives?  How do we want to live?  It is a conversation that really quickly spirals into a Great Big One, full of weighing and balancing mundane stuff like siding and gutters and also Life Goals, how much of our future and time and money do we really want to devote to home improvement, anyway, and what kind of things do we want from our house?  I do poorly at such conversations, and it makes me much braver, much reassured, to know there's someone in it with me.

(It's clear to me that you need to move back to Sacramento, which is where your heart has always been.  You and I seem to be the same sort of person, a person who falls madly in love with a place, and sorts out the rest of your life so you can find a way to be there.  You've been braver than me about trying the other model, but I think it's time for you to go home.  The other stuff is easier when you know where home is.)   

Probably nothing, because I am cowed by a ten year old.

I don't know what to do about my wallet.  My sister says to go get my wallet back.  I'm all fired up, so that sounds great except that I can't picture how the conversation will actually go.  I'll walk over to her at the pool and she'll walk away.  Then what?  I walk over again?  No, that doesn't work.  Once you're chasing someone, you've already lost (this goes for dogs and toddlers as well).  I grab her?  No.  I can't go lay hands on a kid.  Imagining that she stands still, then what?

The only good leverage I have over her is that if I raised enough of a shitstorm, I could get her barred from the pool.  That's powerful.  She and her sibs spend all afternoon there every single day.  They must like it, or at least have no better options.  It would take a fuss though, and I'm not sure the pool would back me up on the spot.  I'd have to go to their supervisor, whom I met last summer when I was agitating for long course.  What else?  Well, there's the authority of being a grown-up and whatever you can convey in your voice.  Considering that she picks gratuitous fights with grown-ups and mouths off without consequence, I doubt this carries a lot of weight with her.  There's the threat of the police.  This is a pretty empty threat.  I cannot imagine the police investigating a rash of small thefts at the pool.  The idea is ridiculous.  On the other hand, she and her sibs are undocumented, so the mention of police carries a scary specter of deportation.  If I thought that were at all likely, that would actually deter me.  I'm not going to get a bunch of children shipped to a country they barely know over a stolen wallet.  A stolen wallet is worth a talking to and a letter of apology, and not much more.

So I'm not convinced that force is an option.  What are other choices?  Niceness?  I wouldn't mind niceness, except that it feels so exactly like getting played, and I don't know how it would work.  The barrier to spontaneously returning a wallet, even to a nice lady, is pretty high.  Reward?  Sure, if it would work, but again, the part about acknowledging the theft in the first place is a barrier.  (This is slightly farcical, because every single person at the pool knows exactly who took the wallet.  She and her little sister were the only two people through the locker room.  When I told the lifeguards about the theft, they sighed and said "Yeah, the girls are here.".  When I told the front desk, they said, "You can't leave anything in the locker room when the girls are here.  Did they take down our warning sign again?") 

Well, the cards are canceled and I have an appointment for a new driver's license.  (The day after my haircut, so I'll be all freshly bobbed.)  I didn't lose much cash.  The rest I can't remember.  A swim card, which the pool replaced.  My library card, which was wearing out anyway.  A frequent flyer card.  A BART card with a couple trips left on it.  I liked the wallet itself.  Boooo!  This sucks.

It matters to us when they miss.

I didn’t tell you the other part about the weekend, the part that is not so nice as pies.

Saturday night, about midnight, I was watching Jay Smooth’s videos on connectedness and rejecting the thug aspects of commercial hip-hop when the shots started. Two bursts of several shots, loud and very close, then a car screeching off. I turned off my lights, crouched for a couple seconds, ran to the front of the house to find my sister. Found her crouched in her room in the front, calling 911. We waited a couple more minutes, until we heard a man calling for help and saw a neighbor come out. We went out to see what happened.

More of our neighbors were out on the corner, forty feet from our house, looking at the car crashed into the parked cars. They’d been driving and a car came up fast behind them, shooting into the car until it crashed, screeching off ahead. Two men were shot. One walked to the ambulance. One was wheeled on a stretcher. We don’t know if he’s OK. There were a bunch of casings in the gutter at our feet. Oh.

The rest of the night was a little surreal. You know, for a decidedly not-street person, I feel like sitting on my porch as police work through the night is getting too familiar. I’ve done it four or five times now. The nephews woke, so we sat on the steps, the littles on laps tucked into our sweaters. They were somber too, and we quietly discussed the police cars, the flashing lights, that everyone was sad because some people hurt some other people, what the yellow tape was for.

Telling Anand about it today, he worried that we must have been so scared. So here’s the part that I don’t like. No. I wasn’t so scared, not once the shots were done and we knew that the shootings were a drive-by intentionally directed at someone. Once I knew it was related to the Section 8 housing down the street, I wasn’t scared anymore. Because things that happen in those lives aren’t things that happen to me. So I was detached enough to think abstractly when I saw two women screaming and crying and rushing the cops, asking to please please tell them if that was her husband. I thought, ‘oh, women’s grief, to be afraid it was yours that got killed.’ I thought, ‘you know, considering how much this is adding to the commotion at the scene, you’d think the cops could include information gathering and dispersion in their procedures.’ I thought, ‘they’re not helping, with the frantic crying and shouting and trying to push past the cops. I bet they’d get a lot farther if they approached the cops with composed requests.’ But I didn’t think, ‘oh no oh no, which of my neighbors got shot tonight?’ I didn’t think ‘oh god, what if it were one of us?’ Because really? It isn’t going to be one of us.

That’s what makes me sad. The apartment complex with the Section 8 housing is half a block away and we live parallel, non-intersecting lives. The white gentrifying hipsters all came out the next morning to gawk at the smashed cars, introduce ourselves and point to our houses. We talked about hearing the shots and lost sleep. I’m sure we will talk to the people we met again. I have no idea how the apartment complex reacted to the injuries of two of theirs. Even when gun battles break out on the street in front of us, even when our neighbors are shrieking with grief, that is for them. We watch until we get cold, then tuck the babies back into bed.

Because those lives seemed so separate, it took me half a day to remember the fundamentals of community. Oh yeah. When your neighbors are hurt, you take them food. My sister was ahead of me; that afternoon she baked and brought them banana bread. But people from those apartments haven’t been community. They’ve only been neighbors in the sense of geography.

One other neighbor came out that night, equally disconnected from everyone human. A brazen raccoon walked calmly past the police line, went partially up the stoop across from us, then stopped when he saw our neighbors out. He crossed the street in the changing yellow and blue shadows, approached our steps and stared at us. He left again, equidistant from tragedy and watchers, unconcerned about either. I don’t feel any need to befriend the raccoons. But I should do better about connecting to people who live right next to us.

I can't even remember to put on my cute earrings.

OK, fingernail care is a particularly hard thing to do by discipline.  It is uninteresting once you've done it once or twice.  It requires frequent small applications of maintenance.  The rewards are pretty low, because a small thrill from seeing your pretty hands isn't all that compelling when stacked against stopping whatever better things you're doing to tend your nails.  No one else cares very much about your nails, so you aren't letting anyone down if you don't do it.  It is a task that can float, and those get pushed into the future.  Fingernail care may be easy if you like self-grooming, but if you aren't a person who likes that stuff, it is exactly the type of problem where self-discipline will fail.

I see two options.  First, you could combine nail care with something that is actually interesting.  Do you have a girlfriend who wants to come over once a week to watch What Not To Wear and drink a little something while y'all paint your nails?  It would have to be a very steady date if you want tended nails to last for months or years.  Second, you pay someone else to tend your nails.  Have a standing appointment to get a manicure every two weeks and always show up.  Going somewhere and being tended while you chat with people whose lives aren't like yours is a million times more interesting than filing nails.

Darlin', I'm not surprised that you've never kept a nail-care regime.  I've never tried.  But I think it is a hard thing to do for people who don't intrinsically like that stuff.  Moreover I think that being rough on yourself about it is the wrong approach.  It causes you unnecessary guilt, and more importantly, it doesn't work.  If you really want the problem solved, it is time to escalate.  Set up a system that gets it done.  Or, decide that compared with all the better things you could do with half an hour a week and your money, it isn't important enough to go to that kind of trouble and walk away guilt free.  But don't tell yourself that something so small should be easy and only inadequate you can't do it and you absolutely will this week or you'll punish yourself.  You're perfect, so make it revolve around how you are.

Fear of Smugness

Wow. We have readers!  Thanks for joining us, friends.  In lieu of comments, you can email us, and I hope you will not be shy.  Reader Kelly wrote in to say:

I stayed away from your blog for a while, because it was hard to watch you fall comfortably in love, when I *too* was feeling like a pile of difficult, sad emotions. These posts today actually help heal the wounds, so I'm glad I found you again. And Hi Megan! I am looking forward to getting to "know" you.

It sounds strange, but I feel a lot of guilt and anxiety about being happy and in love.  Those might not be the right words, but I'm not sure what the right ones are.  It's more a fear of becoming smug.  It's a fear of being the tool by which someone else might make herself feel bad -- by looking at me and wondering, what did she do to deserve that happiness? (Answer: nothing in particular.)  And I think it's a fear of forgetting to feel lucky, forgetting what it was like to be yearning.  I spent a lot of time yearning, and maybe it came to feel like a part of me.  There are gifts that come with the pang.  I think you notice other people more acutely, and you notice yourself.  You feel a lot more, and maybe you even imagine a lot more.  I am glad to have traded that raw tender ache in for a warm contentment, oh yes I am, and I wouldn't trade back, let's be clear.  This is way, way better.  But I don't want to forget.   

Sarah Hepola is a writer I admire, and she recently wrote this piece about going to a wedding.  I thought she did a good job capturing the way it can feel, when you are single, being invited to a celebration of love.  That was really hard for me for a while, going to all those weddings alone.  I was ashamed of my own envy, as Ms. Hepola writes it: "my mind marooning itself in selfish sadness".  Ugh.  So I know what you mean, Kelly, and it's something I worry about.  Megan tells me this guilt is nonsense, but I'm not so sure.  I'm happy now, and it strikes me that that writing about it might be both boring and perhaps a little tiny bit mean.  Neither of which I really want to be.