On My Husband's Birthday: Connecting the Dots

I believe that life is chaotic, a jumble of accidents, ambitions, misconceptions, bold intentions, lazy happenstances, and unintended consequences, yet I also believe that there are connections that illuminate our world, revealing its endless mystery and wonder. --David Moranis

Today is my husband's birthday, and birthdays always make me reflect on the "It's a Wonderful Life"-ishness of our connection to the people who come into our lives. I don't know to what extent I really agree with all of the quote above, but in a general way, I do. So much of life seems to revolve around choices (what if I had chosen this instead of that?) and chance encounters (what if I hadn't happened to be where I was right then?), and when those choices and chance encounters all point in the same direction, that's when you think maybe there's such a thing as fate.

The truth is, my husband and I were connected before we connected. I mean that in a literal way, but there's definitely a cosmic sense in which those connections were there to pave the way for us to meet. 

The Guy

When my sister was a junior in high school, I was a sophomore in college. That was the year she started talking about a guy named Garroll among her group of friends. 

"Wait," I said to her when she pointed out a skinny guy with a friendly face in a photo she had taken. "Are you saying Garroll, with a G?"

"Yes," she explained. "His dad's name is Gary, and his mom's middle name is Carol, so they combined them."

Truthfully, the name didn't faze me much--at our high school, there were a lot of unusual names--guys named Royster and Spivey, and girls named Johnna and Shalie. So Garroll didn't seem so odd.

Over the years after high school, the two of them--my sister and Garroll--remained friends, and I heard about him from her. Since they both were single for so long, I thought maybe, since they were such good friends, they might end up together, but it seems they never really thought of each other that way.

The Sister

When I was in my first job out of college, there was a teenager who worked in the mail room after school, and I learned through my sister that it was Garroll's little sister, Lerenda (also a combination of the parents' names). Since I had another friend who worked in the mail room, I interacted with her a fair amount--a very nice girl.

After she went away to college, she came back and met and married a guy I knew through another close friend. She and I went to the same church, and when her first child was born, I was on the church "dinner brigade" to bring meals to families with newborns.

Occasionally, her brother would visit the church, and I spoke to him a couple of times--mostly, he was just confirming that my sister was around. I was nothing more than Carolyn's married sister at that point.

The Mom

For a while, my parents and Garroll's parents went to the same church, so they've known each other for years. When Lerenda was still in high school, she wanted to go on a missions trip with the same organization my brother had gone with earlier, so their family (minus Garroll) came over to our house for them to learn more about my brother's experience.

His mom taught kindergarten at the school my son went to from 1st to 7th grade--had we moved back to North Carolina a year earlier, she would have been his kindergarten teacher. It was a small school, though, so she knew him, and I saw a lot of her at school functions.

Several of her closest friends are women I have been connected with in various ways over the years--women I have worked with, women who taught my son.

The Reunion

In 2008, when I had been divorced for a while, our high school had a decade reunion for everyone who went to school there in the 80s. My sister and I were the representatives for our respective classes, but the process of planning the reunion was somewhat stressful because the woman coordinating the whole thing was the control-freakiest control freak I've ever encountered. I was so fed up with her that I ended up not putting a lot of energy into trying to convince my classmates to come.

So, when the reunion weekend got there, only a handful of people from my class came, and I spent time hanging around with my sister's class. At the Saturday picnic lunch, I was sitting with a group that included my sister and Garroll, and another guy from their class came over and said something to Garroll, calling him "Gerald."

I was incensed: "Did he just call you Gerald?" He shrugged it off, but he seemed amused that it made me so indignant on his behalf. And that moment was when the dots--and he and I--finally connected.

The Connection

It took a whole year after that of talking and spending time together before we really knew we wanted to be together, and between that reunion and our wedding, it was almost exactly two years.

I'm not going to say that it was fate, but today, when I'm celebrating the birth of this man who became my husband, I am awfully glad those connections all lined up in such a way that we ended up together.

Happy birthday to you, love!

A Writer Writes

Ever since I started writing this blog, I've been thinking a lot about writing: Why are humans compelled to write things down? Why am I, in particular, compelled to write? What makes good writing—and what makes people want to read what's written?

In the movie Throw Momma from the Train, Billy Crystal plays a writing teacher who, although he regularly has to listen to and give feedback on some truly awful writing, encourages his students by saying, "Remember: A writer writes, always." I suppose the point of that is that writing is something that takes practice, just like any other skill. And just like any other skill, it doesn't develop overnight.

Part of the reason I started writing this blog is that very quote—there are a lot of details about that movie that I've forgotten, but that exhortation has stuck with me. You can't be a writer if you don't actually write. But more than that, I wonder if you can be a writer in the truest sense if nobody reads what you've written. John Cheever said, “I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss — you can’t do it alone.” 

It's certainly true that Anne Frank wrote in her diary with no thought of anyone ever reading what she wrote. But what gives her words power is not just that she wrote them down, but that she wrote them and we read them.

Writing, it seems to me, is a lot like singing. As long as you went to school, you can probably do both to at least a rudimentary degree, but your voice needs to be developed if anyone's going to want to hear you. 

I've written a lot over the years that I've gotten paid for (and in fact, I should be working on an article right now), but the type of writing I've gotten paid for is the kind of writing where you're really not supposed to notice the writer: catalog copy, marketing blurbs, factual articles, press releases. That writing, sticking with the singing analogy, is like singing in a choir, where the point is to sound like a choir, and not a bunch of individual voices.

I used to supervise a writer who had a very distinct (if a little rough technically) writing voice, and he always wanted to write in that voice. No, no, no, I had to tell him over and over—you need to write in the voice of the organization, not in your own voice. It's a press release, not a poem. But it was a bit like having Bono or Bob Dylan in a choir. It's always going to sound like Bono or Bob Dylan surrounded by choir singers.

But the non-choir writing—the solo stuff—is a very different thing. It is your voice, and your voice alone that is heard. 

It used to be that if you wanted an audience for your words, you had to convince someone to publish them. Submissions, proposals, rejections...blood, sweat, and tears. But in today's micropublishing world of the internet—the blogosphere—anyone can publish his or her own words. And blogging has become the karaoke of writing—you don't have to be original or good to do it, and there is plenty out there that is mediocre at best. And I've thrown myself into that karaoke pile, grabbing the microphone and belting it out and hoping it's decent.

Or maybe karaoke isn't the right analogy. Maybe, since my audience is mostly made up of people who know me, it's more like being a church soloist. There are a very few people who still know me who know that I used to occasionally sing in church. I don't have a showy voice, or a powerful voice. What I have is a nice, competent singing voice, and in a small church, it was fine for a solo in the Christmas service or the occasional Sunday morning. But certainly no one was telling me I should try for a recording contract or anything like that.

On the other hand, a church soloist is most often asked to sing—or, in any case, there's a slot in the service that needs to be filled, so even if he or she offers to sing, it's not really a weird thing to do. But with blogging, the process does feel a little weird, honestly. You write something, put it on the internet, and then, to make sure it gets read, you tell your friends and acquaintances, "Hey, I wrote this thing if you want to check it out."

There's a nakedness to singing or writing, too. Any time a person sings in public or writes something for other people to read, it's exposing oneself to the possibility of criticism or ridicule or indifference—but more than that, you have to be willing to be a little naked, and sometimes not be so good.

When my son was in elementary school, he started taking band in the 5th grade, and they played their first concert at Christmas. You could tell it was music, but it was pretty spectacular in its awfulness. But it was a K-12 school, so after the 5th graders played, you heard the middle school band, and it was amazing the difference a year or two made in their skill level. And then, at the end, the high school band played, and by that point they were actually very good. It was really good to see that your child had the potential to progress to that level and it wouldn't always sound like that.

Now, don't misunderstand—if I felt like my writing sounded like the 5th grade band concert, I wouldn't share it. I do, I'm pretty sure, have a nice, competent writing voice—certainly, given what I do for a living, I have a good grasp on the mechanics of writing. But competence isn't a very lofty goal for a writer, I don't think.

In order to be a good writer, you have to write, and write, and write some more. And I have to admit, the existence of blogging helps in that process, and I'm grateful to have a few people who want to hear what I have to say. I want to be able to call myself a writer, and a writer writes. Always.

My Favorite People on Facebook

I understand that we consume a lot of content here on the internet, and that people have to keep generating more and more content for all of us to consume. And I realize that if you're one of those content creators, lists are an easy thing to churn out--but why is it that so many of those lists seem to be so negative?

We've all seen them:  "Ten People You Want to Avoid at the Office." "Twelve Facebook Statuses You Should Never Post." "Things You Should Definitely Not Wear if You Are Over 40." Even in the yoga world, where it's supposed to be all about non-judgment, I see things like "The Twelve Most Annoying People in Your Yoga Class." And of course: "The Fifteen Most Annoying Friends on Facebook."

Really? Why do we do this? Sure, we all know those people (not the yoga ones, though--honestly, I don't know who these people have in their studios, but it's not something I've encountered). But although I will admit I have read a few of those lists, I would never actually share them on Facebook.

Even if 60% or so of my Facebook friends are actually real-life acquaintances rather than actual friends, why would I want them to read that, see themselves in the list, and become self-conscious about the fact that they've been annoying? And am I not probably one of those annoying types to someone else?

Maybe people think it's a good way to give those annoying people a subtle hint, but I don't really see it that way. It just seems a little mean-spirited because, after all, no one has a gun to our heads forcing us to have those people on our friends list. Why can't we just let people be who they are and not be so hard on them about those little things?

To reverse that trend, I'm offering my own list. Here, in no particular order, are some of my favorite people on Facebook:

1. People I knew as a kid who have turned into really interesting adults. Everybody (well, everybody over a certain age) has at least one friend on Facebook that they haven't actually seen in 20 or 30 years, but they found you, or you found them--the guy who was a little nerdy and asked your best friend to the prom, or the girl you hung out with that your parents weren't entirely thrilled with. I have a lot of those friends--and it's been fun to see how they turned out. A couple of guys I interact with a decent amount on Facebook are guys I went to high school with and I really don't remember ever having a conversation with them when we were in high school--but the somewhat nerdy guy who asked my friend to the Christmas social is the person I'm most looking forward to seeing at our class reunion next year. Go figure.
2. In the same vein, people I have worked with in the past and really only saw through a professional lens. There's a woman who takes beautiful wildlife photographs, and I would never have suspected her of being artistic. A guy who was an accountant where I used to work, and we butted heads a lot, also has an artistic bent, and he likes to bake bread. Who knew? An IT guy I worked with posts the most interesting articles about science, with thoughtful commentary.
3. My son's friends/my friends' kids/young relatives. I know everyone is saying that teenagers are abandoning Facebook, and maybe they are, but I'm glad at least a few of them are still around and on my friends list. It's good to be reminded of what it was like to be 15 or 19 or 22, and also to see how  it's different being that age now than it was 25 or 30 years ago. I hear so much about "kids these days," but these young people keep me from lumping them all into a big, homogenous group. They're individuals, and the truth is, they're really cool people.
4. On the other end of that spectrum, people who are my mom's age. First of all, yay for them, for even wading into the realm of social media. I've noticed with this group that they mostly like or comment on other people's posts and don't post much themselves, but it's a nice way for them to keep in touch with what their kids and grandkids are doing. And knowing they're there serves as a filter sometimes--I do think before I post something about whether it's something I want my mom, or my mother-in-law, or my husband's aunt to see.
5. Local people. For me, this is an important group, because sometimes, even though I moved here three and a half years ago, I still feel like I hardly know anyone here. But there are 30 people or so on my friends list who are people I've met since I've been here (although a few of them have since moved away), and it's nice to have that concrete reminder that I actually have gotten to know some really great people.
6. People whose politics and beliefs are different from mine. OK, so maybe "favorite people" might not be entirely accurate on this one, at least when I consider the group as a whole--but I do think it's important to have these people. While I don't want a steady diet of their political or ideological posts, neither is it healthy to surround myself only with people who think like I do. Some of these people are people I genuinely do like--some I love dearly, since I'm related to them or have a long association with them--and I think it's a good way to avoid the black-and-white "damn liberals"/"idiot conservatives" dichotomy that it's all too easy to fall into. The fact is that there are lovely people who hold a variety of views.
7. Kindred spirits who have become my Facebook friends without having actually met in person. I really enjoy this category of people, although my husband thinks it's a little weird. This a small, select group--a couple of women in particular who are friends with a woman I sort of knew in college, and all of them became my Facebook friends after interacting on a mutual friend's post. I am certain that if the four of us ever got together in person, a fun time would be had by all. Sadly, this is unlikely to happen since we're spread out all over the country, but one of them is not too far away, and I hope to meet her in person sometime.
8. People who post baby pictures. This is one that often makes the "most annoying people on Facebook" lists, which only makes me think that those lists are written by cranky people I wouldn't want to know. I love seeing pictures of people's babies and kids and grandkids. The back-to-school and Halloween pictures make me happy every year. I have a couple of friends who are a little bit delinquent, in my opinion, about posting enough pictures of their babies. Maybe they're sensitive about being on the annoying list, but I say keep 'em coming. I've been known to post baby pictures myself, and my son is 20 years old!
9. Those people I don't know that well and who aren't all that active but who periodically like or comment on my stuff. Maybe it's just me, but that always gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling--it's like I've gone back to high school and some cool kid stops me in the hall to pay me a compliment. It's just unexpected and nice.
10. The people I can always count on to like or comment on my stuff. I have one friend in particular who only gets on Facebook for about an hour a day, during her lunch break at work, and when I suddenly have a whole bunch of notifications, I can usually bet that she's been on. Apparently I'm one of those people to some of my friends, because once a friend asked me if I was upset with her, which baffled me. "No," I said--"why?" "Well," she said, "you just haven't liked or commented on any of my posts in the last couple of days."

Do some of those same people also fall into the annoying categories on those other lists? Maybe so, but I think it's better to see people in a positive light, because we could all stand a little grace to be extended when it comes to putting ourselves out there on the internet. It's easy enough to see little irritations, but I'm trying to make a habit of looking for the good, and I might as well start with the people in my (virtual) world.

Twenty Years Ago

Twenty years ago, gas cost $1.11 a gallon (well, that was the national average, anyway). Bill Clinton had just taken office as President. Tonya Harding had someone whack Nancy Kerrigan in the knee and out of Olympic competition. David Letterman hosted the Oscars ("Uma, Oprah. Oprah, Uma."), and Forest Gump won for best picture. Whitewater was the big news story.

I lived on South Boulevard in Nyack, New York. And on this day twenty years ago, I was in Good Samaritan Hospital on a snowy day, about to give birth to a baby boy.

Get two or more women who have had children together and it's inevitable--the labor and delivery stories will start at some point. And the reason for that is that even if we can't tell you what we had for lunch yesterday, or we forget what we were at the grocery store for, we remember every detail of the day we brought a child into the world. My mom can still tell you the details of all of her deliveries, and the youngest of us is almost 45. It's kind of a big deal. So sue us.

But today, on the day my boy turns 20, I'm not celebrating the details of the delivery--I'm celebrating the twenty years that have followed it. Since it turned out that I only had the one child, I am awfully glad it turned out to be this one.

This is the boy who, as a toddler, never wanted anyone to be left out. One of the teachers at his daycare told me that he always seemed to know how to include the kids who were on the fringes.

The boy who wanted his mom to have pretty things: Seeing one of those jewelry store commercials with the special Valentine's Day diamond necklace, he said, with great feeling, "Oh, Mommy, I wish you could have that!"--which, to be honest, made me grateful he didn't have access to that much money, because I despise those mass-produced pieces of jewelry. Him wishing I could have it was gift enough for me.

The boy who had a solid grasp on the concept of sarcasm by the time he was in the 2nd grade. He was with a friend and the friend's babysitter, and he informed them that he was being sarcastic with some comment he had made. The babysitter asked him, "Do you even know what sarcastic means?" And he responded: "It's like, if you're on a date and you walk into a pole, and she says, 'Niiiiiice.'"

This boy, said his fourth-grade teacher, was not necessarily a leader, but he wasn't a follower, either. He wasn't afraid to stand alone rather than go with the crowd if he didn't want to. Would it be nice to have a kid who is a leader? Sure, I suppose so... but you have to admire a kid who will stand alone if need be.

This boy told his father, when we were in the midst of the worst nastiness while we were going through our divorce, "When you talk to Mommy, it's like you keep using a hammer when you should maybe use a screwdriver." I couldn't have said it better myself, kid.

When he was applying to get into the high school he went to, he needed letters of recommendation from various people, and I've saved the one from his school counselor because her description of him was so beautiful that it still makes me tear up with gratitude. "Though I am a clinician, and therefore often describe students I work with in clinical terms, this is what I most wish to emphasize to you about [him]," she wrote. "He is a delightful person." And, she went on to say, "He is, in fact, one of those lovely people with whom the world is graced, who seeks and is attracted to harmony."

My boy is not easy to get to know, and there are things that are hard for him in life because he is different from most people. But that difference means that I made it through the entirety of his teen years without him ever being disrespectful or nasty or any of those other things that people think of when they think of teenagers.

That difference is the reason I still think of him as my boy and will fight to protect that tender heart of his. For twenty years now, I've been the one who's lucky enough to see facets of him that others miss, because they're not looking, or because they're expecting something from him that's not there. But what is there is so worth finding, and anyone who makes the effort to see him as I see him will find a real treasure.

Happy birthday, dear boy of mine.