the answer man, 8/1/82

Just got a call from a dear friend, dearer in the past than the present. She still calls from time to time. To re-pump the old machinery. We talk about esoteric stuff mostly, as that is the period of my life in which our friendship is anchored. "I always save up all these questions because you're the one who always knows the answers." I don't want to be the one who knows the answers anymore; but to blurt that out would seem to deny the very friendship somehow, or at least what it has always been, which can sometimes seem like the same thing.

I am straining to notice other, simpler, things. Like the hues in that old man's hair as it shades towards his ears. Or like the point of that day when I saw my uncle for the last time on this earth. The image still lingers, some piece of missed moment. My friend's call, unnerving in its way, has loosened this old image, it floats around without a home, seeming so out of place in the conversation. But finally it settles and I notice its relevance, and some little else besides.

My uncle was working his field, alone, behind the house my brother and I were building. Seeing me he stopped, and removed his hat to wipe at the sweat on his forehead--a farmer's genteel gesture, that one makes before beginning polite conversation. The uncapping revealed his two-tone face, a feature I had marveled at since my earliest childhood memories of him. The bottom three-quarters of his face brown and weathered like an old glove, the forehead white and pale as a baby's belly, and vulnerable in a way the toughened face would never be. I used to have the uneasy feeling that one could attack him at this pale swath and all his gnarled farmer strength, the puffy and dry hands, the bent and beefy back, the bowed legs, the leathery face, would be of no avail--he would fall like a leaf.

We found ourselves alone together, for perhaps one of only a dozen times in our lives. We chatted about nothing. I can remember not a word. It was amorphous, and, I remember, puzzling. We did not touch, or share any special closeness, but then we never had and why should this moment be any different. Yet I had the sense that it was about something, although my sense of that something was as airy as the heat rising from the roofing shingles.

The next time I thought of my uncle he was dead. Had been for two weeks or more. My family tried to contact me with the news but I was incommunicado--down in the balmy sands of Florida with my guru, pumping myself full of fresh answers. The entire event: the illness, the deathbed, the funeral, the grief, all took place in my absence. When I left my uncle was my uncle, when I returned he was never to be seen again. My father never forgave my absence, although he never mentioned it. He thought it unconscionable that I had failed to observe the simple human rituals of death. I think he was right. I was too busy being the one who knows all the answers to notice.

the class of '67, 8/22/82

This past week was witness to the 15-year high school graduation reunion of my class, the class of '67, as we say. I missed the 10-year reunion, locked, as I was, in the tight embrace of my guru, and the delusion that a serious spiritual aspirant such as myself had no need for such mundane ritual. To tell the truth I didn't want to go to this one either, thinking it was so common and middle-aged somehow.

A picnic in the park, a dinner in the evening. Standard fare. The picnic was especially hard, because of all the kids. Everyone brought their kids, and their spouses. I had neither. Unmarried, unprogenied, dubious somehow. In fact I drove to the park once, squeegeed myself low in the seat thankful for the tint on the windows, and peered out at all that bounding cacophony of kids and spouses. Couldn't summon whatever sort of courage it took, so I just watched from my car, like some kind of playground pervert as old friends came and went.

Turning tail, I fled. Drove around a couple of long blocks and then cruised back and around the perimeter of the park, trying to turn in, and almost holding my breath in hopes no one would recognize me. Finally I just gave in and ran away entirely. Went to my sister-in-law's and hung-out with her kids for a couple of hours, until I felt warmly avuncular and until my sister-in-law could convince me that my social graces would suffice, even with kids and spouses.

Funny how there are always some who you no longer are able to recognize, the changes being so great, or in such unexpected directions. Much expanding girth, but only one Unknown Classmate: Dale O.

Dale was lithe and fair, curly blond locks, charming and favored company--in 1967. The last time I saw him was the summer after graduation. He was after the girl I was in love with, so he pulled up alongside me on the street one hot evening, in his rust-red '55 Chevy, with a carload of friends. He beckoned me close to the open window, to deliver his list of threats. He fairly snarled, mean and guttural like an animal baring its teeth. Pumped up, I could see, and pushed to extremes by the presence of his friends. I could see fear in his face too, behind the bluff of performance; not fear of me but of the primitiveness of naked confrontation. I was so afraid I could not move or speak; it felt as if some musty vacuum had leeched all the airs, removed any medium for supporting sound or motion. I was still standing there dumbfounded when he drove away.

In 1982 Dale was no longer a fair-haired boy. His face had gone round, the eyes puffy, his remaining hair the parched brown of a tree stump; flat, no luster anywhere in his countenance or step. He had married a woman several years his senior, a woman who had some vague tragedy of history. An air of hell-bent misfortune sat with them at table, and rose with them when they got up to leave.

Dale was still trying to work the old magic; to be funny and witty and zesty. But no one would pay him any notice. No one would connect with him, would be responsive, would acknowledge the persona he wished acknowledged. I could see fear in his face again, and a doleful asking to be affirmed. Other things being equal I would have helped. Would have reached out to smooth over the social awkwardness of the moment with some charm or "make nice" of my own. But to do so I would have to let go of the resentments I was holding fast in my chest--I would have had to forgive him. But I didn't want to--forgive or help. So I didn't.

It was curious to see how some people had turned out so unexpectedly bright and alive, and others so leaden of spirit. Most of us were just run-of-the-mill folks, but some shined or palled with a new intensity.

Lita had been so ordinary in high-school, chubby and not "in" at all. At 32 she has become a vivacious woman; attention focuses on her in each little conversational knot she enters. She has just finished a free-fall parachute jump, "just for the fun of it," and is negotiating to drive a Formula-1 racing car, "just once, just to see what it's like." Plans travel to this far flung place and that one too. Fifteen years ago her husband-to-be was a forceful figure, now he sits quietly most of the time just watching her, pleased admiration glowing in his face. Who ever would have thought.

And the twins--Patsy and Georgia. Everyone used to say how they couldn't tell them apart, which I found curious even then for I could tell them apart perfectly well. One had only to LOOK. But I think most of us never did because, partly, the symbolic load was so strong (I mean you're not supposed to be able to tell twins apart--that's the whole point), but less innocently, because their family was poorer or in some indefinite way not quite of the same social class. So they tended not to get seen very closely. People were still saying they couldn't tell them apart at the reunion, which I found unbelievable since their features were now stamped with the contrasting poles of some forlorn dialectic.

As I entered the dining room I spotted Patsy and Georgia, and Georgia's husband, at the most remote corner table. They were alone, and their out-of-placeness was as apparent as the clutter of finished drinks on the table. That much had not changed. Georgia was more or less as Georgia had always been. But Patsy was resolutely about some grim business. She had been through a bad marriage and an angry divorce, seven years previous. Her conversation all night was about nothing else. Any stray remark was only opportunity for some new dig, some nasty little retort, about that louse her ex-husband. He was all she talked about.

Patsy's jeremiad was directed to Georgia, or to no one in particular. She wouldn't talk to me, or even look at me unless I asked her a direct question. She would then just give what was absolutely necessary by way of reply and turn away again. Georgia would try to humor her, to moderate the sting; to take care of her in a motherly way, seeing she did not drink too much, or her talk become too bitter. I kept reaching out, sometimes hoping to help, sometimes only wanting to "make nice" for Christ sake. Patsy refused to respond. Like I was refusing to respond to Dale's desperation at the next table. To give in she would have to release some of the grief I could see locked in her hands as she gestured and trapped in her jaw as she spoke. She didn't want to. So she didn't.

And there was Paulette, who didn't attend, but who sent a letter full of effervescence and wit. And Jackie who was a pretty girl the last I saw of her and who had matured to a striking womanly beauty--and her son who was half a foot taller and 30 pounds my senior. I was intrigued, and heartened, by the other unmarrieds: only Ray and Patti Jo it seemed. Patti Jo didn't attend but sent in her questionnaire. I noticed under "Kids and Spouse(s)" she had written: "No spouse or kids. Tried marriage once for three months, not my cup-of-tea." I so wanted to be able to ask her about that.

My cousin was master of ceremonies at the dinner, and the person in-joint-charge in general (he always manages to be the person in at least joint charge). He was funny and entertaining, but his voice was all I could think of. For more than fifteen years now he has been straining to squeeze his words out in deeper tones, thickening his neck to hold them lest they slip out too fast and squeal too high. As an affectation of hyper-masculinity, if you can imagine. I remember distinctly when he started it. He was one of those roly-poly baby-fat kids; puffy and soft, watery one always thought. But because he was big he was always channeled into "big male" roles: like football player and the school's heavyweight wrestling hero. So at some point he forced the change in his voice, to harden the most malleable portion of flesh, to counter the suggestions of softness.

Nowadays he is just huge: barrel-chest and barrel-belly to go with the voice, even the slower portions of flesh now transformed through decades of work. But the voice still remains a struggle, always effort is evident. It is uncomfortable to listen to him talk because the strain is so apparent.

I kept flashing on an old image from our childhood, from one of those periods when kids expose themselves to each other. I remembered I was especially struck by the fact that his penis was uncircumcised, which was an uncommon sight in my experience, and which somehow made him look softer yet. Soft little belly and soft little penis. And here he was these many years later, huge and beefy and preternaturally hard. But all I kept seeing was a little boy who was all baby-fat and wide-eyed gentleness, with a soft little uncircumcised penis.

Of all the strangers long forgotten and freshly seen, the strangest of them all was me. In high school I affected a very hyper, quick-witted, smart-ass personality. I was glib and cynical--a wisecrack a minute. And to my surprise, immediately upon entering the room I fell back into the old pattern. Instantly, I became a blithering idiot. I started wisecracking and carrying-on in the same way I had in high school, as if I had just left all these people drinking cherry cokes at the Down Towner this afternoon, and here we were, taking up the thread of our earlier conversations later that evening.

As I watched myself in absolute amazement, that same awkward, gangly adolescent persona was reemerging. I found myself acting out in ways I had done in high school. I had completely forgotten I used to be so dorky. I forgot that I used to use this face to get through the hazards of adolescence. But the presence of all of these people from my past forced out long-forgotten patterns, lost but not missing through all these ages of time and changes of life--bits of memory and performance and affect lurking in some obscure lobe of gray matter deep in my paleocortex, in an area of the brain unknown to science, and extruded to the surface by the metaphysical pressure of this confrontation with my past.

My God, I thought, everybody must be staring and me and whispering about me behind turned wrists. Stop it you idiot!, I kept telling myself. But I couldn't stop it or even slow it down. I sent huge sheets of babble keening through the room. I was giddy and flippant and clever and quick and cloying, AND I COULDN'T STOP DOING IT! I winced at the spectacle.

Damnit, why me? Other people had changed. Lita had changed. Dale had changed. Patsy had even gone off some very deep end. Yet here as was, behaving AS IF I WERE SIXTEEN AGAIN! AAARUUGH.

I got an award for not gaining the most weight. Old tales were told. Old lies rehashed. We postured and preened and tried to impress each other with our achievements.

Graduation reunions, whatever else they may be about, are superficially often about the signs and trappings of worldly achievement. Where did you go to school? What degrees do you have? What job? How much money? Even how many kids and spouses. Nobody had anything terribly special to crow about along these lines--I was no exception. Although I really wanted to have something grand and glittering to crow about. I really wanted to impress these people, most of whom I had not seen in fifteen years and many of whom I will never see again. I was desperate to have them think well of me; to put on a bright face; to be seen as having made good. And ruthlessly curious to see their faces and assess their prospects.

Five years before I had disdained to attend this same ritual, cocky in my assurance that it was passe. Which goes to show how much I know about what is past, and what is yet to be met.