Rhett

Cousin Mike

I don’t have a particularly large family, but then again it isn’t small either. Each of my parents had two siblings, and they gave me six cousins on my mother’s side and four on my father’s. All of my cousins have an appeal, but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about one in particular.

My cousin Mike (on the right, above) is the oldest on my father’s side. My Uncle Edward’s four children showed musical talent, and family gatherings with them always featured guitars and banjos and singing. Everyone enjoyed it, but music to cousin Mike is like oxygen. He simply needs music to live.

He made his living as a salesperson for a big company that makes a lot of different things for buildings and machines, but whenever he had a spare moment he played music or listened to music or thought about music. He can play just about any stringed instrument, and he’s played in hobby bands throughout his life, often with other family members. He’s played for the past several years in a bluegrass band that plays regionally in the midwest, mostly northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin.

To call it a compulsion is probably accurate, but there’s something of a muddy film that coats the word compulsion. Mike really feels compelled to make music, but music brings him great joy and satisfaction. It’s not drudgery, it’s a light in his life. It’s such a part of him, fused to his identity and the goals that give his life its purpose, that he yearns to do it, so there’s no friction at all with his need to do it.

I envy that alignment, and I hope my writing becomes that for me.

I am sometimes reminded of my brother’s bachelor party when I consider questions like this one. We took Shawn to Las Vegas, where we did the expected shows and gambling and adult entertainment and extravagant meals for a long weekend. It was probably 3am on Sunday morning when I found myself with a couple other friends of his sitting in a lounge cut out of the casino. On the tiny stage was a cover band playing pop hits from the 70s and 80s.

My first thought was dismissive, bordering on disdain.

“How pathetic do you have to be to play someone else’s music in front of six people at a casino at 3am? The effort to practice, the expense of the instruments and equipment, the costumes, the opportunity cost of the time and money invested, and this is the best you can do?”

And then a second though occurred to me (not in time to save me from proving myself a judgmental jerk, of course).

“If they are playing this gig, then it’s obviously worth the sacrifices they’re making. They get to do what they love to do, and someone is paying them to do it. They are performing on stage, playing music with their bandmates, because they want to do this exact thing. And that’s such an admirable trait. Chase your dreams and appreciate the journey.”

I chose to believe that they were living the life they wanted to live, not grudgingly punching the clock on a dream with a different destination.

That Vegas trip was a couple decades ago, and I hadn’t considered my cousin Mike at that time. But thinking about him validates for me the second thought I had on that early Sunday morning: some people are lucky enough to love what they must do.

And I hope to be one of them.

Benevolence and Local Politics

I have two friends who have won seats on our city council in the last two elections. Watching their campaigns from up close (I helped with social media for both), it’s clear to me that a benevolent public servant is essential, especially in local government.

Very few people pay attention to local political offices, and so election winners are determined more by name recognition than by political platform or priorities. An appalling (to me) number of people don’t pay attention to political offices in general – hence our embarrassingly low voter turnout numbers for all elections – but this myopia is especially pronounced at the local level.

I’m parroting my betters when I say that most people are more affected by decisions made by their city councils or boards of supervisors than they are by decisions made by the US Congress or President, yet the interest in the races for those offices are inversely correlated. The conditions of our city streets, the interactions we have with our city police officers, the demands of the city’s planning department all have more immediate impact on me than decisions about funding the military, managing relations with the European Union and ASEAN, or establishing rules about interstate trucking and immigration.

I’m not saying public healthcare policy isn’t vital or that passport services aren’t necessary or that the National Guard is irrelevant, but I am saying that my daily walk with the dog through my neighborhood park affects me far more frequently than what the federal government decides about broader issues. Both elections are important, but the local election directly affects me to a greater degree, and so it should have a proportional share of my attention and energy. Yet very few people can name any members of their local government (and, sadly, only a few more can name their federal representatives). I have to admit that absent friends of mine serving on the city council I might very well not be one of them.

And so benevolence becomes imperative, especially at the local level. We need public servants who will put their self-interest aside and do the best for their communities, because they won’t be held accountable at the ballot box if they don’t. And the meltdown of professional journalism that might act as a check on corrupt local officials doesn’t help our cause either.

So if you’re voting in local elections, please get informed about the candidates. Not about their policies, although that matters, but about their character. And if you have to choose between character and policies, choose character.

I am reminded often of the rueful slogan some wags in Louisiana wrote in 1991 during the gubernatorial election between the incorrigibly corrupt Edwin Edwards and the stunningly racist David Duke (former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan): “Vote for the crook. It’s important.” Sometimes it’s not about policy, it’s about decency and fairness and earnestness, about people who do the work of listening and thinking and empathizing and stepping outside their own circumstances. And sometimes the crook is the clearly better choice.

Character will be our communal salvation, and its lack will be our undoing.

Divorce, Writ Large

My wife and I are midway through a so-far amicable divorce.

(I add “so far” only to keep from jinxing us – I am a mite superstitious, and I fully expect we’ll finish it as friends, but, well, you know. . . .)

We are much – much – better as friends than spouses. We disappoint each other tremendously as spouses, but when we lower our expectations to those of friends we fit well.

While our personal situation involves just two, I think it’s analogous to our larger community. Our country – well, our world to be honest – has split into two camps, and there’s virtually no common ground between them. Call them Red and Blue, Progressive and Conservative, Flyover and Coastal, Snowflakes and Rednecks, but we have highly divergent views on how we want to live. And we’re both trying to force our choices on the other.

So I think our no-longer United States of America needs a similar remedy to the one my wife and I chose: an amicable divorce.

As sad and disruptive as a divorce is, it’s still better than burning down the house. And that’s where we’re headed if we continue to try to force half of our community to accept policies, behaviors, spending priorities that are antithetical to their beliefs. The majority – or even a significant minority – will not accept being shut out of communal decisions. When the majority – or even a significant minority – is repeatedly denied even partial satisfaction, they will respond. And when all peaceful avenues to change are blocked, violence follows. The majority – or even a significant minority – will take action, and if violence is the only action that remains, then that’s the path it will choose.

We can circumvent all that destruction though. When people have fundamentally different views on how to live they need to let each other go instead of trying to get the other to knuckle under. Respect each other’s choices and let them live the lives the want to live. Be generous, be gracious, be true to yourself, allow others to be true to themselves.

National divorce will be messy.

We’ll need to revamp all kinds of institutions and create policy from scratch. But the world has many roadmaps to separating nations. Sudan and South Sudan. Yugoslavia. Czechoslovakia. We’ll need to discuss alimony – as economies separate some have more promise than others, and it’s fair to compensate the disadvantaged partner. We’ll need to decide geography – what land corresponds to which country. And I suppose we’ll have to decide how to handle the few territories we have too, though maybe we should let the people in Puerto Rico, Samoa, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands decide where they want to go.

But the alternative is messier. Years of acrimony and recriminations that detract from our quality of life. Energy and resources wasted on trying to change minds and, when that fails (as it surely will), forcing the other to submit.

We don’t need to do that. Separation can be traumatic. It can be vicious. Or it can be kind.

I’m a believer in kindness.

Essential Me

There is always someone better than I am.

I’ve believed it for as long as I can remember. It is an – perhaps even the – essential part of me. It’s the thought that has shaped every single part of my life.

Sometimes it’s for better. I’m humble. Obviously. It’s hard to be arrogant when there’s always someone better. I’m other-aware, which makes me a great community member. Resilient, since why wouldn’t I get a little grit in the gears from time to time? I often take one for the team, and usually don’t stop at one.

Sometimes, though, it’s for worse.

During our marriage, my wife threatened me with divorce more than once. Of course she did. There’s someone better out there. She might have said it to spark a reaction from me, to inspire me to fight for our marriage. But I accept my fate easily. I’m not deserving of good things, not because I’m a terrible person or lacking in something specific, but simply because there’s always a better option somewhere. Why shouldn’t she get that good thing instead of settling for me? In fact, it was really just a matter of time before she realizes she can do better, so I spent plenty of time waiting for that other shoe to dropkick my ass to the curb.

I do go gently into that good night. I only rarely make much of a fuss, because I understand that I’m second best. I may deserve something, but I don’t deserve the best. So I settle, and I’m content in doing so. It is what I expect. It is my lot in life.

There are many worse things than to expect less from life. Every day people go to bed hungry, or beaten bloody, or with the knowledge they are sick and will never get better. The cross I bear is much lighter than the pain borne by parents who bury a child or the drunk driver with blood on his hands. I don’t crave sympathy, because I don’t deserve it. There are, after all, people who have it much worse than I do. I don’t even get the best of the worst.

But it’s still a waste. I am often lonely when I don’t have to be. I defer when there’s no need to do so. I self-impose decisions about my worthiness that others never make.

“To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift.” So said the fully-confident Steve Prefontaine. I give my best, but I’m not convinced it’s the best that can be given. And that may be true at times, most of the time even. But sometimes – and in one specific instance at least – it’s not true.

I hope to prove that by writing. The thing about art – really anything creative – is that only I can make the art that I make. And maybe that will show me that I can be the best at something. There’s no one else who can do this particular thing better, because there’s no one else who can do it at all. I am a population of one, as is every other artist out there.

So in this at least – this art, this written word – I am guaranteed to finish first. When you’re the only one on the course the only thing that can keep you from being first is not finishing at all. And I generally do give my best, so finishing is within my grasp. And maybe that will lead to more confidence, more belief that I can hold my own when I’m not the only one in the ring.

Or so I hope.

My Niece

I saw my niece yesterday.

She’s had a rough go so far. She calls herself the “Queen of Bad Decisions.” Failed by adults during her formative years, she doesn’t feel worthy even now in her early-thirties. She doesn’t deserve to be happy, to find purpose, to be loved. So she punishes herself with drugs and sex and booze and people who steal from her and, recently, beat her. Badly.

After all, she’s not worthy of care, compassion, and love.

And yet, despite all of her self-flagellation, something at her core, an indomitable spirit, won’t let her succumb to desolation, won’t surrender to the voices that tell her she doesn’t deserve happiness. It insists that she matters and that she must persevere, no matter how much pain she feels.

She is extraordinarily brave. She is also often self-centered, regularly manipulative, and less-than-honest at times. I suspect much of that is survival response, but her behavior still raises questions among her family and friends, and she’s been abandoned by more than one of the people she cares about. Mostly because she treats them badly. It’s hard to think of others, to empathize with them when you feel shitty about yourself.

But no matter how much abuse she heaps on herself she always pulls back from the brink of complete self-destruction. She does cut it close sometimes. She’s been hospitalized for alcohol poisoning, and she regularly chooses people who have problems with impulse control and suffer a great deal of pain themselves. I guess those folks are plentiful when you’re living on the margins of society, but everyone needs friends, so like the rest of us you take what the universe provides. They don’t always prove to be reliable.

And she can’t catch a break. She’d worked very hard for about three years to bring herself from homelessness to a sober, employed, independently-functioning member of our community. And four months later a global COVID-19 pandemic closed the retail store where she worked, and without a job she was soon without a place to live again. The pandemic has challenged us all, but it’s one more thing on top of a staggering pile of challenges for those people like my niece.

She’s a hard worker. She likes to do things. She’s got a great sense of humor, and she laughs and jokes with people regardless of how well she knows them. But she has just a high-school diploma, and ADHD makes traditional school hard for her. And her history with adults has left her with a towering distrust of authority figures. So building skills, which requires learning from either books or from people who know how to do things, goes against her talents and life experience.

I don’t know how her story will develop. I worry that the mountain of crap into which she was born that also encouraged her dodgy decision-making will ultimately be too much for her to surmount. But I am heartened by her absolute refusal to take herself beyond salvation. I am hopeful she will find enough people to trust, enough resource to give her the knowledge, skills, and experience that will enable her to function on her own, enable her to find a tribe that values her for who and what she is.

It’s the same hope I have for all the people I love.

The Struggle

There’s a purity in selfishness.

An enticing simplicity.

A seductive ease.

I know my own desires, my own needs fully, but I’m just guessing at yours. And who knows what the guy down the street thinks. No, I know what I need, what I want, what I deserve, and that robust and certain knowing contrasted with my supposition of your thoughts – even if it’s well-intentioned – gives exaggerated weight to my side of the scale.

Plus I don’t get a direct return from investing in your satisfaction.

So I have a thorough understanding of the geography of my desires and I reap the entire benefits of what I do for myself. No wonder it’s so tempting to ignore you.

And yet.

We live communally.

I need you and the rest of our neighbors to do things for me, like build roads and schools and hospitals and parks and recreation courts and fields. I need you all to help provide police and fire protection and maintenance for those roads and schools and hospitals we built. I also want you to keep an eye on my house when I’m on vacation, and I need to have some social interactions with you to feed my real need for human connection. Plus I actually like hanging out with you. We play well off each other, you make me laugh, and we both like beer and the Bears.

So for a plethora of reasons, I interact with you, and you need a reason to interact with me. But this is where it gets complicated, I suppose. Some of my interactions are motivated by necessity – I need to be nice to you so that you will do what I want. Others are motivated by good will – I like you, and I like doing things with you. So what looks like altruism might actually be selfishness dressed up. Or it might really be altruism. Giving for the greater good.

How can we tell the difference?

I can’t know another’s heart. So I choose to believe that what looks like altruism really is altruism. That assumption creates emotional risk, of course – the good feelings end when there’s no further gain to be had – but I much prefer it to the stress and distraction to which suspicion and second-guessing lead. And I really do believe that most people are honest. Or at least guileless. They tell you what they think, perhaps shading the truth here and there, but you can generally trust what someone tells you. So I figure I’ll be right more often than not when I give the benefit of the doubt.

There will be pain, of course, because people sometimes lie. But maybe that’s selfishness talking again. If I’m worried about getting hurt and strategizing about ways to reduce that risk, then I’m just saving my ass again, and I’m not thinking about how to make life better for all of us.

And maybe that’s where we should really start.

Failure

No one I know likes to fail.

If you’re raised to honor your commitments, then failing to do so feels mortifying. Humiliating even.

I am on the precipice of the two most significant failures in my life, and yet I don’t feel humiliated. Or even mortified. I’m not ecstatic, but I don’t feel bereft. I guess I feel modestly hopeful.

I regret that I haven’t been able to deliver on my promises in both cases, but I’m an analyst, and circumstances being what they are I understand why I am in the position in which I find myself. That understanding has led to acceptance of my situation. I have regrets, but they are mild. I would have liked to achieve success, but that just isn’t where I am.

The most immediate failure is of the business I share with my wife. Opening a shared workspace business was a good decision. The sector is booming, and the social and professional dynamics around work support the move to more flexibility. Opening a shared workspace business a few months before a pandemic swept the world for two years (and counting) was an ill-timed decision. The pandemic destroyed any chance to grow a shared workspace business, and while our landlord deferred some of our rent, it didn’t feel benevolent enough to forgive any of it. We’ve hung on as long as we could, putting a lot of our own money and sweat equity into the business, but as surge after surge of Covid delayed a return to the office our cash reserves steadily dwindled until we are now out of room. So we wait to see if our landlord will make some concessions that allow the business to continue.

I’m not optimistic.

The second failure has been 34 years in the making. My marriage hasn’t always been bad, but it decayed as small hurts created distance, which in turn led to greater emotional injury. And over those years, despite many successes – the greatest being our two daughters – my wife and I didn’t tend to our marriage often enough. Though my wife isn’t blameless, I bear the largest share of responsibility. I am uncomfortable engaging with emotions, so even as she would sporadically ask me to work with her, I didn’t trust her – or myself – enough to make the effort. I didn’t make conscious choices to avoid difficult discussions, but benign or not, the effect was the same. And now our differences are irreconcilable.

So my business is failing, my marriage has failed, and I am left to start again.

It’s liberating in many ways though, which is in sharp contrast to the last time I had these few commitments – when I left college about forty years ago. I don’t feel intimidated or rudderless. I can make many different choices, and I feel excited about the opportunities ahead of me. And with our assets split and the kids launched, I’ll have few encumbrances, which expands the field of possible paths.

So while I wouldn’t have chosen to be here, I am here nonetheless. And it could be worse.

Divorce

My wife and I are divorcing.

We’ve been married more than 32 years. There’s no precipitating event. No outburst. No affair. No abuse. No addictions.

So why are we divorcing?

I don’t think we’ve ever been well-suited for each other. She wears her heart on her sleeve, sharing her thoughts and feelings broadly. I am very private. She tests ideas out loud, working through her thought processes verbally. When I speak, I’ve already decided. She seeks validation, and I am parsimonious with feedback. She lives spontaneously, changing her mind frequently. I make a plan and stick to it.

Early in our marriage we invested the time to resolve our conflicts and differences. And then, as time passed, we stopped trying. Cracks developed. And, unresolved, the cracks widened into fissures, the fissures into gaps, the gaps into chasms. Dawn made more of an effort than I did to fix what was happening in our marriage, but I didn’t have the emotional awareness to deal with our problems. Or the will to find it.

And so we find ourselves after 32 years not strangers but friends.

But not more than friends either. We are divorcing amicably, as you’d expect of friends, even friends who share children.

We have wounds. We don’t trust each other with our emotional well-being. I have hurt her by rejecting her (her version); she has hurt me by not following through on commitments (my version). Both have merit. Neither is the full story. As with most things between married couples.

In spite of our wounds, we don’t harbor ill will. Or at least not enough of it to complicate our dissolution. In fact, because of lower expectations with the transition from spouses to friends our relationship has been smoother. I hope it continues. I expect that we will remain friends, though it will likely be at a distance, at least until grandchildren pull us back into the same orbit. Among our differences are weather and social preferences: she likes active social scenes and cooler weather, while my ideals are warmer temperatures and few but meaningful interactions with others. Funnily enough, I’m likely to head to colder climes while she makes a go of it in the hot valleys of northern California.

Our daughters are taking the split well. We don’t blame each other, so they don’t either. And they do love us both after all. Damaging our relationships with our daughters is a worst-case scenario, and we are thankful that at least we made a very effective parenting team.

We’ve set intentions to treat each other both kindly and fairly, and we are walking that path. We have a long distance yet to go, and there are potential stressors related to our financial situations that could still roil the waters. We have engaged professionals to help us untangle our emotional wounds, handle the legal process, and counsel us on finances, so I hope that they can help us navigate those potential pitfalls (to mix a lot of metaphors!).

In our latest session, our divorce therapist asked us how we were feeling about our divorce and to what we were saying goodbye as we split. Dawn feels the loss keenly, though she fully believes it’s the preferrable outcome. I am not sad or grief-stricken but rather optimistic that we can have a more emotionally satisfying relationship once we say goodbye to the stress and tension that marked a lot of our married interactions.

Time will, of course, tell the tale. As it always does.

But I am hopeful.

Dad

My father is getting old. He’s working towards 87, though you’d probably guess at least a decade younger if you saw him.

He grew up a farm boy, so he delights in physical labor. Professionally, he spent 40+ years as a geologist, hiking around mines and mountains looking at rocks. His hair is no longer red, but it hasn’t gone gray either. It’s kind of a medium brown.

He repeats himself from time to time now. And he doesn’t hear very well, so he’ll sometimes start a new conversation while another is going on. He’s lost one kidney and his prostate to cancers and a gall bladder maybe in sympathy, but he still climbs on the roof to clean off debris and goes up on a ladder to retrieve boxes of Christmas decorations despite his wife’s protestations.

He and my mother travel extensively, often internationally, often to see opera performances, and he remains curious about genetics and stock investing and politics, though the last aggravates him as much as it aggravates everyone.

He revels in family gatherings, which I understand more and more as I age too. His nine grandchildren are individually fascinating to him, and he thinks about them a lot. In the way of grandparents everywhere he expects nothing from them, and he is genuinely grateful for whatever time and attention they give him. He wasn’t quite as generous with his children, though he was always fair and attentive when he wasn’t away working.

My father is not especially articulate. He struggles to express his thoughts sometimes, and it gets harder the more wine he drinks. It frustrates him in the moment, but his frustration rarely lasts long. After all, there’s always a new idea to explore.

At his retirement party 25 years ago, one of the administrative assistants he worked with for a few years gave me a deep insight into the man I’d known by then for 35 years or so. After my father talked about his career, largely thanking people for their contributions to it, she said it was typical of my father to list his regrets as things he wouldn’t have the chance to do. He accepted everything, good and bad, that had already happened, and he never thought of changing any of it. He didn’t look back with regret, but he was sad about missing projects yet to come. That remains true. He desperately wants to ride in a self-driving car.

He hasn’t figured out most of his iPhone yet, but he’s not intimidated by it. In fact, he discovered how to emphasize delivery of texts by playing around with them, and it amused me – and probably him – when he taught me how to do it too. Our texts to each other are always delivered loud or gentle or slammed. He loves tech stocks as much for their possibilities to change our world as for the financial returns to his portfolio. He’s excited about the future. Politicians aside, of course.

He laughs often and smiles more. He and I like to sit together at family dinners, and we amuse ourselves with running commentary and asides to the topics of conversation. His trademark phrase on parting with colleagues has always been, “Have fun!”

Because he does. Not every minute, but many times every day.

He is, in sum, a happy man.

I want to be like my dad.

Emotions, cont.

Here no longer works very well for me.

I’ve been intellectually precocious for most of my life. I’m smart, maybe even very smart. (Obviously humble too.)

Ideas have never intimidated me, and I think I can consider most ideas without much emotional baggage to get in the way. Mainly because I keep my emotions at arms length. Or securely locked away from my consciousness.

Emotions, though, are relentless.

I’m currently experiencing quite an emotional upheaval. There are many reasons for it: My business, into which I’ve invested much of our retirement savings, is under significant stress, so I’m feeling anxious about that. I can’t dispel the anxiety without support, and I recognize that I don’t have much emotional support that I can comfortably access. So I am questioning my relationships, which brings more anxiety. I feel lonely and sad. With much of my current situation in flux, my future is uncertain. Which feels even more stressful.

I’m not in a good place. I don’t like feeling stressed, lonely, and sad, but I’m not sure what to do about it.

I am where I am largely of my own making.

Some of it comes naturally. I am generally shy to those I don’t know, so it takes time for me to establish emotional connection. I am both reserved and a bit self-centered, so in my relationships I tend not to reciprocate with proportional emotional intensity.

Some of it is conditioning. My family moved every 2-3 years as I grew up, and not just down the block. From Illinois to Maine, to Ontario, Canada, to Chile, to Vancouver, to Tucson, to Denver. I don’t have lifelong friends. I had to make new friends every time we moved, and since I am shy in new situations, I felt emotionally isolated a lot during my formative years. Isolation is familiar to me, and it feels like my default state. It is comfortable. My parents – and theirs – kept tight rein on their emotions, so the examples that I saw showed me that emotions must be leashed. Like everyone, I feel emotions, often strongly, and the intensity of my most powerful feelings terrifies me. If I can’t control them, I feel like my emotions might destroy me.

Some of it is choice. My wife is my opposite. We complete each other, but we don’t mesh well. Natural tendencies and habits developed over 30+ years of marriage have left raw friction points and hidden fault lines in our relationship, and trust is not complete between us. Where she reaches out broadly at times of emotional stress, I withdraw into myself. There is no small amount of pain and resentment (though our marriage is not just pain and resentment). And I have no one else I share my feelings with either. I withdraw to avoid emotional intimacy, because I lack confidence in my ability to manage my emotions in important relationships.

The combination of nature and decisions, initially by others and then by myself, have left me here. And here no longer works very well for me. I don’t want to feel stressed, lonely, and sad, but I wonder if I have missed the window to make that work with my current relationships and if I have enough runway left in my life to make it work with different relationships.

And I’m not sure how I will decide.