What the Hell is This?

I hope I haven’t lost my little international crew of readers due to my three-week hiatus. For most of this time, I’ve had a head cold that became a chest cold and then morphed into that generic lingering entity everyone around here calls “the crud.” In the meantime I’ve been trying to work at my increasingly demanding job without taking time off to be sick, and for economic reasons (my increased responsibilities, unfortunately, don’t entail increased pay) have had to take on a second, part-time contract job. Needless to say, I’ve had very little energy to do anything with my remaining time but collapse in a heap when the day’s over. Which is too bad, since this blog is one thing I do just for me.

**

During the American Thanksgiving holiday, it’s a tradition to reflect upon all the things one is grateful for. Being accidentally locked out of my apartment house for an hour and a half the other day (in the cold, without a phone or money, and still ill) reminded me how fortunate I am simply to have a roof over my head. For that short (and rather frightening) period of time, I existed on the same stripped-down level as the denizens of the skid-row type boulevard down the block. I was effectively “nobody,” cut off from my friends and acquaintances, without a penny or the leverage of credit in my pocket, seeking assistance from understandably guarded strangers. I wound up asking to use the phone at a nearby homeless shelter to call a locksmith (which wasn’t in the budget, either, but what can you do? My landlord is apparently unlisted, and his cell number was in my phone, inside the house).

So I’m very grateful that I have my survival needs met. I realize how much worse things could be.

Yet as anyone with a knowledge of basic psychology knows, there’s more to life than survival. Abraham Maslow created a whole hierarchy of needs, a now-famous pyramid. I know my phone is full of the numbers of people who would have gladly come had I been able to call them, and I’m grateful for that. I have a community, a social network, a web of care. The people I saw at the shelter were not so lucky.

At the same time I’ll never forget Elizabeth Gilbert (in Eat Pray Love) writing about the experience of a friend who worked with Cambodian refugees. Even in the most wretched camps, with people who had lived through war and famine, her friend heard plaints like “I was in love with this boy, but then he liked my cousin.” And in the film “Playing for Time,” based on the pianist Fania Fenelon’s memoir about life in Auschwitz, two women fall in love inside the concentration camp. It would appear that amid the most dire of circumstances, certain universal longings prevail. Man (or woman) does not live by bread alone. Even when there’s not much else around.

**

The other day I was listening to a CD my friend and mentor gave me that is meant to help the listener “move through challenging times.” When it got to the part in the guided meditation and visualization where I was supposed to imagine drawing support from the many people, friends and family, who love me, and to imagine them standing behind me, I started to sob. Hard. Uncontrollably. And not from happiness, although I knew (it goes without saying) I should be grateful for each and every one of them. It’s not that I’m not.

No, all I could feel, on some almost pre-verbal level, was how none of them could make up for the one who wasn’t there.

None of them could make up for “Chris.”

**

In some primal, irrational, and thoroughly powerful corner of my psyche, my childhood neighbor’s cousin still lives. I was only about three, which makes me wonder where this utterly defining narrative came from, really — whether it was a leftover from some other place and time — that is, some other life. How does a three-year-old child come up with something like this on her own? There’s no comparable attachment drama I can locate within my immediate family.  And I was actually disappointed when my parents (and brother) showed up to rescue me.

The story is this: the neighborhood kids, along with my older brother, liked to play softball in the vacant lot down the street. Sometimes they’d play in our large, fenced-in yard. On at least one of the latter occasions, Chris was visiting his cousin Ricky, who lived two doors down from us.

I don’t recall whether I noticed him beforehand or not — if I did, I’m sure I hung back out of my characteristic shyness — but at some point I climbed up in the lowest crook of our big apple tree and couldn’t get myself down. Chris, this strange, tall boy with cowlicked dark hair, who was older than my brother and most of the kids there, came and lifted me gently out of the tree and set me lightly down on the ground.

That was it for me. This skinny kid instantly became my towering hero, my knight in shining rugby shirt. Novelist Milan Kundera once observed that happiness may be linked to repetition, and I was eager to repeat this novel and exciting experience with this novel and exciting person. I think I must have duplicated my damsel-in-distress scenario at least three more times that afternoon.

From then on, I climbed up in that crook every time the neighborhood kids came over to play. I really didn’t know how to get down once I was up there (!), and I’d sit there and clamor for Chris — even though he was undoubtedly miles away. My mother would come to get me down, or my father, or Ricky’s older sister, or the stocky boy from up the street, and I would be so upset! Even my beloved big brother’s uplifted arms couldn’t console me — and he was, all things considered, the next best thing. No, I wanted Chris. No one else would do. It didn’t matter who else showed up — they weren’t Chris! I even cried, and clung to the tree, refusing to budge. My disappointment knew no bounds. Of course to the other kids and the grownups it became a huge joke. My family teased me about it for years afterward.

But it took root in me, that feeling of calling and wishing and wanting and waiting, and having everyone but the one I wanted show up. (Again: how did I get so stubbornly particular so young?) The feeling of impotence and frustration was overwhelming, because at three years old I really was helpless, and I honestly couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t come. Is it any wonder I get mad at those Law of Attraction people? Who should that kind of thing work for, if not a child with a child’s capacity for faith (or magical thinking, at least)?  At that age, we do feel responsible for everything that happens to us, the way young kids blame themselves for Mommy and Daddy splitting up. So if Chris didn’t come, according to my rudimentary logic, it must have been my fault; there must have been something inherently wrong with me.

Hence the birth of a very particular kind of shame. I was powerless to effect what I most wanted; for some unknown reason, I was apparently unworthy. What’s more, everyone else found my predicament hilarious.

You can tell me, certainly, that I should count myself lucky that anyone came to get me, and that I didn’t get hided for repeatedly climbing up in that tree, and you’d be right — but when we’re talking about a small child’s developing emotional life, ‘shoulds’ are essentially meaningless. My experience was my experience, for better or worse. I don’t know why it mattered so much to me that this particular boy get me down. Send me to a hypnotist, if you have the cash, and we may finally get some backstory.

**

So here we are more than three and a half decades later, and I’m crying while listening to this CD, because everyone but Chris shows up. The whole rest of the world may come to my aid, but it doesn’t matter…

Incidentally, I could totally see this tale as a children’s book: a child, who’s locked herself in a tower or something from the inside, keeps stubbornly asking for so-and-so. Family members come, and the neighbors, and the townspeople, and the constable (in children’s books there’s always a constable), and then the mayor, and the governor, and eventually the king. You get the picture. Only I wouldn’t know how to end the story! With the exception of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales, childrens’ books aren’t supposed to be a big old bummer. (At least not until they get to The Yearling.)

Anyway…I’m reminded of something an insightful friend of mine once said to Hector Haversham, a Falstaff-like character at my college who, despite his considerable girth, had quite a following among the ladies. Unbeknownst to me, he aspired to add me as a notch on his lengthy belt. My friend informed him that it wasn’t my errant boyfriend León he would have to contend with, it was me he would have to contend with. She knew me better than I knew myself.

Stubborn and particular. I called and wished and wanted and waited a year and a half for Max Vujevic — and he did come, twice, in the middle of the night, to crawl into bed with me in my third floor dorm room. No one on campus knew; Max was something of a legend around there, being several years older and seemingly decades wiser. (That saying about the late Steve McQueen was true of Max: women wanted to be with him and men wanted to be him.) He always came across as so calm and imperturbable, but one time when he put his arms around me, after sharing a couple of beers, I could feel his heart thundering in his chest like a runaway freight train. He said he didn’t think he could make me happy. What he didn’t understand was that what made me happy was hearing his heart thundering in his chest like a runaway freight train. These men never seem to understand I’m that simple.

I moved out West to the mountains (Max loved mountains) and waited some more, too afraid to call: Chris! Chris! This time he didn’t come, anyway. He was busy making a baby and playing house with someone else back East. I have no idea what happened to him after that.

**

The depression that crushed me every morning on waking for most of my adult life (and that still occasionally visits), was as much as anything a feeling of powerlessness, a despair of the ability to fulfill my impassioned wishes in the outer world. All along, there were well-meaning friends urging me to modify my wants, to accept whatever metaphorical arms proffered themselves to that inner child in the tree. As you might imagine, given the original story, this only sharpened the despair and feelings of impotence and worthlessness, until sometimes I would erupt into tears of three-year-old rage. But I want Chris!!!

**

Of course Max Vujevic was nothing like that tall, skinny hometown boy in a striped shirt. What did the two have in common except shared real estate in my imagination?

To my developing toddler mind, Chris was more symbol than person, a template by which to order the future. When you’re young, everything is All About You, and even far into adulthood experience gets filtered through the prism of those powerful early emotions and the narratives that grow up around them. One day you find yourself living within an outdated metaphor, which may not have anything to do with the current situation. Part of finally growing up involves untangling the present from the past, and recognizing the autonomous existence of other people beyond whatever your preassigned roles for them may be.

Every “Chris” who has ever crossed my path has had a life of his own, and thoughts, motives and feelings wholly unknown to me; I will never know why Max ultimately refused me, for instance, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that his doing so was incontrovertible proof of my unlovability, inefficacy, or inadequacy. It’s not always personal. Some sages say that it never is.

Many people would still fault me for my stubbornness and particularity. “Constancy” hasn’t been a virtue since the days of Jane Austen, who died a spinster at the ripe old age of 41. You have to wonder what undisclosed Darcy may have been lost to her along the way, and how many Mr. Collinses she refused.

Are we selective, or pathological? If the desired goal, as is true for a majority of people (and certainly in Jane’s day), is matrimony, there’s no question we’re self-defeating. It’s not the smartest way to get some of those pyramid needs met, either. But if you’re driven by your soul’s deeper objective of expanding its capacity for loving awareness…well, then it depends.

It depends on whether or not what’s being played out is the same basic drama with different actors. Is it just about the story, or is the other person in the story allowed to be who he is? The way out of the depressing fairy tale may be in honoring and even loving those vital differences, and ceasing to insist on a nonnegotiable denouement. Upend the narrative, and look with fresh eyes. Who is this “Chris?”

It’s possible, after all, that he just wanted someone to play softball with. Maybe his arms are tired right now. Maybe he’s lifted a hundred little girls out of trees. Maybe one of them bit him. Maybe he’s over it. Or maybe he needs help getting out of his own tree.

It takes a long time to get out of your own tree.