The Little Words Mean the Most

You know, it's interesting

 

You know, it's interesting.

         Now that we've been there, done that, I guess a vacation home in Meredith, New Hampshire, up the hill from Lake Winnipesaukee, makes emotional sense. Fix my parents' marriage? Why not try.

         That vacation home was mom and dad together again, working on something new. It was what they could afford: an un-insulated two-story frame house in a fir-dominated pine grove. The house didn't have a winter season. Once the pipes unfroze, though; once you could turn on the town water safely, you had easy access down the hill to a vast, deep-enough dark-blue lake (though we didn't have a boat) and enough woods to swallow pretty much anything.

         Which is what I had right then: pretty much anything. I had never been emptier. I was 14 or 15 or so; I don't recall. I just knew I was on the verge of something better, worse, different; not a compass in sight I could see.

---

France was really, really good for Simone and me. It brought her bilingualism back to fully functional (even with the phone company). And I enjoyed the life style, English only. I also enjoyed not understanding a damn thing I heard, including ads. Being in France was monastic for me.

         Simone taught me the polite basics. I could say a few phrases so convincingly that people on the street would start a longer conversation with me. I'd yell: "Simone!"

         We shopped. Merchants were delighted to have customers, of course. Simone put a good face on our visit to local stores. We got by nicely as the American couple whose husband smiles a lot but, alas, knows no French. Ignoramus = ignorant (masculine, in French). Not so different after all.

---

Until 2020 or so. The pandemic sent that trans-Atlantic bridge to the bottom of the ocean. Nobody wanted Americans anymore.

         Why? Record-breaking death rates early; later, our unfathomably-low vaccination rates. And they never wanted our "leadership" anyway > our president-du-jour. That was nothing new. US presidential leadership had been pretty much a disappointment since "Ich bin ein Berliner."

         When Clinton was impeached for crimes against the national penis, French magazines howled with laughter.

         When George W. Bush woke up from his dream of easy sledding to an international terrorism crisis ... two years later bombing the shit out of Iraq based on pretend "intelligence" ... well, yeah: the French opposed that, too. The night the US bombed Baghdad in April 2003, I was at a wine tasting at a farmhouse in France. It could have turned nasty fast, EXCEPT for my beloved Jean-Claude (local mathematics teacher). He intervened. That night in Bandol, as close as I could tell, he told the others to "shut the fuck up. Tom doesn't work for the Pentagon."

         And then there was Donald X. Slump, the weirdest aberration ever in American presidential politics (his will be the only presidential library without a single book?) ... and, yeah, the French, our allies for more than 300 years, tapped their fingers. Wondered. Trying to be patient. "Once upon a time, you were the good guys, right? The U.S. did modern democracy. We sent young Lafayette. Then yeah, we cut off royal heads; good optics, those: put an end to this shit.

         "But your new democracy pushed through! There were warehouses full of flaws, sure. But the U.S. Civil War confirmed an end to the slavery that built America. And then there were two World Wars; the first beyond U.S. borders, the second mostly beyond. You were the good guys, right?"

       "Guys?" Once that easy utterance was presumed to be gender neutral.

 

YES

 

That wasn't the plan.

         Until my senior year in high school, I didn't know there was a Brown University. Or what it was; stood for. Brown was a lousy, leftover color. Sharper, brighter, better colors made some kind of brown when they failed to illuminate. Brown happened when all other colors collapsed into a pit of gloom.

---

Of course, you learn it's not that kind of Brown. It's the Brown family. Four Brown brothers founded the school. One was an enslaver. One was an abolitionist. I went to their university. Brown University granted me two degrees, with scholarship support (thank you, donors). Post-we're-aged-+70s, our estate established an endowed scholarship at Brown.

---

On campus I met the Bruno the bear, the university's stuffed mascot.

         Bruno towered in the student union, claws out! You, freshman, passed Bruno on your way to the [then, long ago] below-stairs mailboxes (too often lacking love notes) and [then, long ago] below-stairs vending machines (where I learned this projectile lesson: don't trust aging chicken-salad sandwiches; puking consumed a weekend).

---

As a freshman at Brown, my first solid, reliable, trusted friend was a dorm monitor from Puerto Rico via New York City; like me, a would-be poet, haunted, reading the Beats, full of whatever was handy. Ramiro was a sophomore and die-stamped handsome.

         He came out to me early, just to get that off the board. He didn't at all come ON to me. I appreciated his trust: flattering. I hoped, craved, aspired to be counted among the UN-judgmental; it was the Beat thing to do and my chosen religion. It took a leap of faith for Ramiro: being closeted was the norm in mid-1960's America. The NYC Stonewall Riots were still four years off.

         Handsome, hip, NYC-him would sit with small-town me on the curb outside the brick-shoebox freshman dorm. I was a mess. It showed. My dad refused to drive me down, because we'd fought about something. Freshman week was when you moved in as a new student on the verge of the rest of your life. In the movie, your dad clapped you on the shoulder and said, "Do me proud, son." Then drove away.

         Not this time. Dad and me seemed to hate each other.

         What actually happened?

         I guess it was my mom who drove away that special day, in fact. I don't recall who drove me to Brown that day.

         I sure don't know what was on my dad's mind that day, that one day when he didn't drive me. Something was knocking around his skull. It wasn't all that much about me, safe to say: Dad's wife [mom] committed suicide 18 months later.

         Damn! Preventable? You're not that good.

         I think Ramiro felt instinctively sorry for me. He was compassionate and bigly personable. He knew stuff. I was depressed and shrunken. I knew nothing. As a Brown freshman, nothing got better for me; on the contrary. I went from being a little bit of something in sports and music and academics in my high school to being nothing worth noting at Brown. Suddenly everyone was much better in everything.

         I'd gone in a matter of months from being a big-enough fish in a small-town pond to a small fish lost and drowning in an ocean of achievement.

         So, yes, fish can drown. Some pray for belly-up

Brown was where I went to learn underachievement

 

Brown was where I put a shine on my yearning.

I wanted a unicorn's horn. I deserved it!

I wanted to win that horn without putting in any work required. I expected to be a would-be prince without a sure-whenever kingdom.

But Brown was hard. Brown was Caste University. Within weeks, Brown Institution ground me to flour between ancient millstones: my easy early high school accomplishments > against lifelong unforgiving odds, bigger worlds of triumph.

My outside world until then had been a black-and-white television with three channels; a couple of summer camps; a few friends with no real life experience either; the radio in my family's only car, once I had my license. From our backyard, we'd watched Sputnik fly over in 1957 (just once; it didn't last long). A few times I'd witnessed the Northern Lights from the same spot, thinking if this isn't G_d signaling, it's close.

 

If you could make poems

 

from

discards

wastage

outtakes

the stuff that got in the way

 

 

Nicken

 

I met Nick my freshman year.

         He was a unicorn prancing down the dorm's loud linoleum halls at Brown University. I'd never met anyone my own age remotely like him, head to toe. For one thing, he wallowed in eye contact; by then I'd learned to avoid it.

         Nick was instantly likeable: delightful, open, self-deprecating, even-tempered, smiling, charming, funny, with innocent floppy hair. His wardrobe, elite home town, and preppy accent reeked of privilege. Yet he was unpretentious and welcoming. Right out of a novel. Not a junk novel, either: a novel of truth.

         Unicorn Nick stepped from a tapestry. He lived just down the hall. Was there any chance I could melt into him, like servant butter into a stack of royal pancakes? The thought flitted across my discouraged, exhausted, broken, freshman self-esteem: just maybe I could fit into Nick's world. Just maybe.

------

Sure: there's always the counter-narrative. Were Nick's blemishes there ... but well hidden? Along the cynical, untrusting lines of: Normal isn't normal. Weird is typical. This is veneer.

         I dunno; doubt, benefit of.

         Nick was soft and preppy. He wasn't a just-last-year-star-high-school-athlete, as other Brown freshmen were (me included). His charisma was different. Had he one morning walked naked to the showers, an Episcopalian halo hovering gently over his head ... me? I'd have thought: Sure, yeah, OK, of course. I'd have shouted, "Looks good on you, Nick!"

         I was more than a bit in awe, a lifelong (mostly good) habit.

------

Nick belonged.

         If not himself born to the biggest, best house in his wealthy, accomplished, intellectual enclave; still, Nick was by birth and ancient standing welcome/at ease in all those biggest, best houses; without question.

         Soon after graduation from Brown, he married an heiress; a condiment heiress; her dad was the Cardamom King or something. She and Nick had been poetically in love since adolescence. And that was just the beginning to my marveling eyes. Soon after marrying, they moved into the best address in Providence, Rhode Island. He commissioned her portrait. They hatched a family. He became a senior executive in an old concern that valued tradition. She became a hard-charging entrepreneur. They were remarkable together.

         If you're still reading: please contrast Nick's world to my mental state at the time. My mom committed suicide in my mid-sophomore year, leaving more than one clue that I was to blame. Why wasn't there an entire SWAT team of psychologists at Brown devoted to my caste and out-cast problems?

         Maybe there is now. So many, many, many, many, many, many, penny, many solutions come too late. And they're no more than condiments anyway: momentarily tasty.

 

 

Crap. NO!

What MY Simone needs from jackass-ready robot-me immediately is a loving, touching, warm, understanding, patient, hugging, anticipating, helpful, humble (+ some more hugging), admiring "because I've known and watched you be amazing for a very long time," grateful "because I know you now" (+ more "it's 6:15 in the morning, just as dawn cracks its daily egg" hugging), eager-eager "give me your warmth!" spooning, feet-wrestling. Look in Simone's disturbing light-slate-blue eyes and dare to stare, connect with that amazing soul within.

         Dear reader: You have someone like that?

         Until the cloud finally retrieves us — that cloud, that untempered universe, that un-branded universe we all temporarily step out from — that unlabeled cloud that will reinvest our matter and our energy @ the endly ... as my last-minute Buddhist instructor, John Haydon, sed almost fer sure maybe....

 

 

Simone and I got career-busy decades ago.

 

         Over time we pretty much stopped cooking.

         A few years ago a chef-made gourmet-takeout place est. itself 20 minutes away by car. For instance, on this week's menu? Cajun-braised wild-caught salmon and roasted sweet potatoes. Bless your heart ~ and not in the ironic way. In the refrigerator way: Coming soon to our plates.

         Our rationale: in our 70s, taking no real pleasure from cooking anyway unless we did it for friends — but quite familiar with 1- to 3-star Michelin-rated restaurants in France — we are richly supportive of local small business, exemplified by this gourmet takeout. They know us by name; the longer-lasting staff anyway. That's so nice!

         Local friends we once cooked for? They've faded like worn-out towels. We sincerely mourned their loss for a decade, as they erased us from their must-see calendars. Apparently we could no longer help them nor their offspring. Our chief philosopher, Joel, advises: Those things happen; don't dwell.

         One of my earliest and best rhymes:

         Friends, they come and go. Like pee-holes in the snow.