Notes On Friendship And Internal Migration

When it comes to my hope for the future, this is the week that broke me. The criminal president was acquitted and has been acting even more shamelessly. Seeing Rush Limbaugh get the Presidential of Freedom was bad, but the news media normalizing it was worse. The Iowa caucus is an unmitigated shitshow that has left all kinds of conspiracy mongering and division in its wake. The president is an incumbent running in a time of economic growth. We all know how this is going to end.

I have decided to retreat a little bit. I am putting my all into my local political causes, like school integration and affordable housing. National politics is a lost cause. The real moment of truth happened in November of 2016. The die was cast a long time ago. The only way forward is to build from the ground up.

As I contemplate my internal migration in these rotten times I have been reminded of the power of friendship. My best friends all live hundreds of miles from me now, but we still call and text and fume and argue about the current rotten state of things. That support has been crucial so far to my mental health. Trying to get through something like this alone is just too much to handle.

Living far from my friends has made resistance difficult. It's no fun to show up to a protest by yourself, and there's only certain kinds of protests where you can take your children. I have certainly been to a few, but without friends there I feel a sense of desperation, and I go away feeling like I bore witness but that it didn't mean much.

This has all made my time with my friends, as little of it as I can get, much more valuable than it's ever been. Last summer I flew out to Texas to visit a friend, then we drove up to Colorado for a reunion with our grad school friends. It felt like putting on an old shoe, as if nothing had changed, even though so many of us had kids and mortgages and less hair and more fat on our bodies. In that off season ski chalet it felt like we were in our own little world. Before we left we were already talking about the next time we were going to get together.

One thing they don't tell you about middle age is that new true friendships, the kinds that thrill you and make you feel like you've known someone their whole life when you've only known them for a week, stop happening. Good friends are like the family you choose, but like family you tend to lose rather than gain over time. That's why you've got to hold onto what you've got.

Social media has given us the dangerous illusion that it can replace in the flesh friendship. It's great that I have it for a substitute with my friends so far flung, but it's not the same. I was thinking of this when I saw some old friends from my Texas days in New York City at a conference. Their hugs, the sound of their voices and laughs, were things I had sorely been missing. It was bittersweet because I was reminded of how poor my life is without them in it, and how "likes" aren't enough to fill void.

In these dark times we can only make it with others, we can't make it by ourselves. Spend time with your friends, give them a call. You'll be glad you did.

On Watching The Wizard Of Oz With My Daughters

About a month ago my mother-in-law got us a copy of The Wizard of Oz on blu-ray, and my wife and I decided to show it to our four year old twin daughters, but with some trepidation. What if they didn't like it?

For my wife and I this is a magical movie. Its magic is related to its scarcity in our youth, which made viewing The Wizard of Oz a special thing. In our pre-VCR early childhoods she actually had it on 8 track, and watching it can still locate the moments where the tracks ended and the tape had to be flipped. Like so many others of my generation, I made sure each year to catch the one time annually that it was shown on television. My sisters and I would gather in front of the television to repeat a ritual that began around the time of my first firm memories. (I probably saw the movie for the first time at the same age as my daughters did.) One year they showed a little documentary afterward, and it was amazing to see Margaret Hamilton as a sweet old woman talking about her characterization of the witch. Instead of ruining my suspension of disbelief, it made me love the film that much more.

Luckily for us, my daughters love it too, and they even jump in a big basket and pretend that they are taking a hot air balloon to Oz. We've already had a repeat viewing, rare for a full length feature film for my daughters.

While it makes me so happy to share the film with my daughters, I have not been prepared for the other emotions that it stirs up. The first time we saw it together, I lost it when Dorothy started singing "Somewhere Over The Rainbow." It is a real tear jerking song, and Judy Garland invests it with such emotion, but it had never made me cry before. Sitting there on the couch with my wife and daughters I was reminded of growing up lonely on the plains of Nebraska (as opposed to Kansas), my many years in the romantic wilderness, and those years spent wandering the academic landscape for a job warding off depression the whole while. For decades I had spent my time looking to be somewhere else, whether because I was in school preparing to fly, or I was in a crummy job or a place I liked but only employed temporarily. It took a long time for me to finally land, and the precariousness of my good fortune is something  I remind myself of each day. My daughters fill me with wonder every day, the greatest reason for living I've ever had. Coming to the realization there on that couch was overwhelming.

As hard as "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" hit me, that was a light shower compared to the hurricane at the end of the movie. The scene when Dorothy has to say good-bye to her new friends used to really get me even when I was a child. Now? Positively deadly. She has to go home, but that means leaving behind the best friends she's ever had. This time around the crying started, and it was so intense that I started to get a sharp, stabbing pain in my forehead, which only happens when I am trying to keep from becoming a sobbing mess, a sensation I've had on maybe half a dozen occasions in my adult life.

In my years spent learning to fly or in my wanderings through the academic wilderness, I met a lot of truly amazing people. They're pretty much the reason I was able to survive. Between graduating college in 1998 and landing in New Jersey in 2011, I moved five times, and in each place met so many people who I still hold close to my heart. All those moves meant saying good-bye to all of them. As happy as my family makes me, I've yet to meet anyone like those people here. So I cried, weeping for the all the people I wish were near me but now live so far away. Like Dorothy, I was able to come home, but it meant abandoning my friends. It has not been easy, but I look into the eyes of my daughters, and I remind myself there's no place like home.

Ian and Sylvia "Four Strong Winds"

[Editor's Note: my "track of the week" series is continuing this week, but I'm no longer including the name of the series in the title, since it makes the article titles rather cumbersome for social media purposes.]

I turned 40 last week.  While it was great to have a night out on the town with my wife, it prompted some bittersweet thoughts, and not all of them about aging.  When my parents had their 40th birthdays, they hosted big blowout parties at our house with casino games, play money, and an auction at the end of the night.  All of their friends came over in a great show of good cheer.  (I was 14 when my mom turned 40 and got to deal some blackjack for the occasion.)  I'd always thought my 40th would be like that, but my friends are far too scattered to the four corners of the country and even the world to be around for such a thing.  They are as far flung as Pretoria, South Africa, and Amarillo, Texas.

I guess this is the nature of making your strongest friendships in graduate school, where you are basically ensured to end up somewhere you never expected once you get out.  (I am lucky to have a couple of my grad school compatriots working in the Big Apple, though.)  Seeing many of my friends during my travels this summer was a harsh reminder that I have had to say way too many good-byes over the last decade, from leaving grad school in Illinois to leaving Michigan to leaving Texas.  It was great to meet so many wonderful people in all of those places, but it's hard knowing that the people I'd most like to have a beer with or shoot the shit with live thousands of miles away from me.

When I am feeling like a Sad Sack Dad after I put my daughters to sleep on a night like this, feeling the cool autumn air on my screened-in back porch, I like to listen to "Four Strong Winds" by Ian and Sylvia.  I am a sucker for 60s folk music, especially by Canadians and even more especially by male-female duos.  This song is among the very few that will bring me to tears each time that I hear it, since it evokes the feeling of saying goodbye to good people more than any other.  These ending lines just say it all: "But our good times are all gone/ and I'm bound for moving on/ I'll look for you if I'm ever back this way."

Songwriter Ian Tyson was a bonafide cowboy and rodeo rider from British Columbia before becoming a singer, and being a scholar, like being a cowboy (or a folk singer, for that matter), is an itinerant existence in this day and age.  I for one am glad that my rambling days are over and that I now spend days with my wife and daughers and that I even have a back porch for resting on.  Be that as it may, there is not a single day that goes by that I don't think about many amazing people that I've had to say good-bye to along the way.

An Elegy for a Friend

Note:  My friend David died rather suddenly and completely unexpectedly last December.  I still feel aftershocks from that event, and I experienced a pretty rough one this week when his widow posted an old picture of him to Facebook.  I am beginning to think that the pain of losing a close friend never really goes away.  I am beginning to understand why my mother has always acted as if the death of her best friend in high school had happened yesterday.  In any case, I wrote the following to be read at Dave's memorial service in Milwaukee.  I attended the service in Omaha for his family, and my comments there were more impromptu.  In fact, my eulogy ended at the point where I started bawling and could no longer continue.  Four months later, I still feel his absence.

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Of all the people I have ever known in my life, David was perhaps the most unique.  I have never met another person like him before or since, and always admired the courage of his individuality.  He was an unforgettable person.  My parents barely knew him, but even they immediately recalled stories of him after they learned of his passing.  However, unlike a lot of highly intelligent people who pride their individuality, David never seemed to harbor a single malicious feeling in his soul.

We met as 18 year old college freshmen, and we although we shared some cultural interests, we spent a lot of our time back then turning each other on to new things.  Without David I never would have known about films like the The Warriors or learned to have appreciated heavy metal, especially the Ronnie James Dio iteration of Black Sabbath.  Although I had read some of Nietzsche’s philosophy before we met, it is through David that I really began to understand it.  Our intellectual conversations are perhaps the deepest I have ever had, and I feel guilty to this day that I was only able to complete about fifty pages of Heidegger’s Being and Time, a book he purchased for me and never stopped talking about.

We both moved to Chicago at the same time, attending two different universities, me on the South Side and him on the North.  We had a lot of adventures together that year, and roomed together the next in an apartment in Rogers Park.  That year, which I spent working and Dave completing his master’s degree, was one of the most fulfilling of my life, in large part because I was living with David.  We traded thoughts, music, and films together, and often ended our days sitting on the back porch of our apartment, engaged in conversation.  We philosophized in dive bars, read together in coffee shops, and sustained ourselves on the greasy food of the local diners.  Of course, we also clashed over cleaning the apartment, where David in his characteristically witty fashion labeled me an Apollonian Bert and himself a Dionysian Ernie.  I have long looked fondly back on those days, and am still coping with the fact that I no longer have my compatriot to share those memories with. 

The biggest event of that year was surely David and Michelle meeting for the first time, which I can claim to have facilitated.  After conversing over the then newfangled invention of the internet, the two saw each other in the flesh after I drove Dave out to Iowa in my car.  I had another friend with me, and when we left Dave in Cedar Falls to his own devices, he had such a look of silent anxiety in his eyes.  The man was normally as unflappable as they come, so I must say I was a little worried.  When I showed up the next day to pick him up, his face looked quite different, and I knew that I had just done a little bit to make something really great come to life.  We took other road trips out to Cedar Falls, and composed our own dueling mix-tapes for the occasion.  I loved seeing David so obviously happy, and he and Michelle’s relationship gave me some hope for my own romantic future, which looked pretty bleak at the time. 

It was sad to say good-bye to Dave and Chicago, but we were lucky enough to see each other many times again, be it in Omaha, Milwaukee, Champaign, or even Berlin.  I cherished those visits, and when I moved from the Midwest to Texas and then New Jersey, I felt the absence of our time together, however infrequent it had been before. 

Even if I never got close to finishing Being and Time, I knew from our discussions that Martin Heidegger urged that one should live a “resolute” existence, to really mean what one does.  David certainly lived up to that ideal, which I know he set for himself.  To cite just one example, he did not just accept the exploitation of academic laborers like adjunct professors and graduate students, he actively fought against it.    He was more true to himself than I could ever hope to be, and it rips my heart out to think that such a wonderful person and true friend is no longer with us.  I can only say that I was supremely lucky to have known this great man as long as I did