Wednesday, November 21, 2012


The other night I had dinner with a friend, good man, good heart, seen enough of life to know what it is. He’s alone again and I’m coming on my twenty fifth anniversary. So we talked about relationships the how’s and why’s. I've kept thinking the last few days.
So many things must come together to have a relationship that lasts. So many fail at the start, from attitudes, expectations. It only makes it harder as you try and make it happen, harder still if you fight, from fear.
How to find someone, I’m no help, how to keep, perhaps.
Start with someone you like to hang out with and do. Don’t think about romance, don’t think about sex, and don’t think about what may be. Sit over coffee and watch passersby. Read the paper together. Go for walks. Simple things will tell, no movies where the two of you sit in darkness watching someone else’s fantasy, not the concert hall or playhouse. Simple quiet times will tell. Are you friends? The young and the ones not ready to go the distance are the ones that need romance. With experience we grow less fascinated with the drama, less susceptible, some of us even immune.
Sometimes a lover becomes a friend and it works. A more likely path is to fall in love with a friend. Start with something real. Nothing from Disney or Pixar, nothing ethereal, not gossamer but granite, and no shining polished slab, a chunk broken from the mountain, hard, plain, with sharp edges. Beautiful in its way but the look of it tells you there’ll be pain, if you look, if you see. Pain will always come, just as well to see it early and know whence it comes. The polish comes with time, with patience. How rough a piece can you handle? Don’t start with some monstrous struggle. What that means only you can know and you need too.
Deb and I have been together many years. We have our marriage. We have our love.
It is no clear sun shinning bright on us. That light makes hard shadows, places you can’t see into. More like a high clouded sky. Everywhere is lit, the shadows are open. There is nothing hidden, the truth of us is plain, easy to see and understand. It is no dream that keeps us together, but the simple truth of who we are, what we've been thru together, the bond that has grown stronger thru the good times and the bad. The commitment we made to each other, the stubbornness to see it through. No fairy tale romance, no plate of gold, more a fistful of rich earth, you can feel the grit and know the fullness of life within it. That is our marriage and I can think of nothing more wonderful, nothing I could treasure more.
Good luck.

 Aside;

Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life.       Joseph Conrad

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