from a recently rediscovered email i'd written some time ago to a handsome young man who'd asked me why the right one never seemed to come along:
apropos of your existential question: i was thinking last night about my maternal grandparents--how they met in rural west texas, and, after a brief courtship, married in 1918. she was 16, and he 20. they were incredibly young, incredibly inexperienced, and neither had ever dated prior to their meeting.
when i think about the odds of an arrangement like that working out--two kids, living in one of the most sparsely-populated regions of the world at that time, where the pickings were, needless to say, very slim, meeting at random--i'd give 'em about a zero-percent chance of even liking each other, much less anything beyond that. and yet, the opposite turned out to be true. their love was immediate and enduring, and by all accounts (and i've heard many), they enjoyed the happiest and most devoted of marriages.
of course, they had several things going for 'em: they'd both grown up fast by necessity; they had similar backgrounds, similar values, compatible goals--oh, and chemistry (they were both fine young animals).
but they also had something else going on--something which, on its face, would appear to be a great limitation, but which i've come to believe might be the greatest gift of all.
but how do i put it? lemme go at it this way: from time to time, and most particularly since i've started writing myself, i'll go pull up an old handwritten letter or essay by someone like jefferson or madison, struggle through the archaic script, and marvel at the clarity of thought expressed therein--the clear, cohesive, flowing line from beginning to end, unbroken and unmarred by strikeouts or rambling incoherence.
and then i'll consider what it takes my spoiled, techno-modern ass to produce an average blogpost--the editing, overthinking, deleting, backspacing, cutting-and-pasting--and i just laugh.
those writers of the past--even the mediocre ones--could spit it out mostly right the first time because they had no other option--they had to organize their thoughts, focus their efforts and be at their best in a way modern writers with all their fancy tools and toys can't even begin to approach, simply because their primitive medium was unforgiving.
i think it was the same with my grandparents--there was no internet in their world, much less casual dating or, god forbid, divorce. their primitive medium was unforgiving, and thus they were forced by circumstance to bring their A game to the effort.
oprah winfrey used to ask her guests, "what is the one thing you know for sure?" had she asked me, my one thing, arrived at after many years of experience in the field, would be the belief that humanity handles scarcity far better than it does abundance.
so, you might be wondering--by way of all this, am i trying to tell you that you should just quit yer bitchin', pick one and make it work goddammit? no. because, unlike my grandparents, we've eaten from the tree of knowledge, you and i--we know what's out there, what's at least potentially possible, and have been mass-marketed into the belief that we won't be "happy" until we find just the right needle in that big ol' haystack. cheery thought, no?
keeping my options open,
mkf
p.s. needless to day, jefferson would be appalled at the amount of editing that went into the production of this email.
* * * * *
and yeah, i know, i'm like a dog with a bone with this "scarcity v. abundance" thing, but with every passing year, it just gets truer and truer.
4 comments:
However much editing it took to get this post into shape, it seems to have been worth it. For one thing it made me really like your grandparents.
And, just to be a trouble-maker, did you ever consider that those gorgeously neat, magisterial statements by Jefferson et al might just be the fair copies made at the end of a chain of drafts filled with strike-outs and margin notes?
Well, I repeat my comments from the last post: That could have been you.
You know, we all make choices in our lives. As you have told with such ribald clarity on your blog, you have chosen to be a slut for the past, well, a while. You have valued that over any particular relationship and, dare I say it, pretty much all relationships.
There is a great freedom to that. You have certainly lived life on your terms. You have enjoyed a lot of really hot sex as well (let's also note you have endured a lot of very mediocre sex too). You continue to enjoy a lot of hot partners at a time when most other guys I know have really tapered off...I mean to be point of nothing or something close to that.
But the tradeoff has been that you have never really been close to any one of these tricks, boys and assorted sex dates. Sure, you do the guttermorality interview and there is an intimacy that you share. But, as you yourself have noted too many times, you have also run from intimacy in other ways.
It is not a judgment to say that there is a tradeoff to all that liberty.
The problem seems to be that every once in a while you really seem to suggest that you wanted to be with that one true love all along.
If I may, you have never really taken any steps or constructed your life in such a way to either find or maintain a long-term relationship where you would have that level of intimacy.
We all get the life we choose. It's what you have chosen. If you really wanted something different, you would have chosen differently.
This is not an issue of scarcity versus plenty, it is about the choices you make. When given only a single choice, most people, surprise, pick that choice. When given a bunch of choices, it is important to choose carefully and be willing to reverse course when it's not working.
I bet your grandparents were wonderful people -- both separately but especially together.
My own grandmother was trapped in a very unhappy marriage and did the unthinkable: She walked away from it at a time when very few do. I am so proud to be her blood relative.
noble savage's comment makes several good points, and i imagine you have given thought to a response, personally i would ignore it, cause i think in his Debbie Reynolds cast as an elementary school teaching nun with a ruler way, he's right, life is about choices, and judging by those i have read of yours, they seem to be working fine for you, live life as you think it should be lead, .... or at least written about.
will: i work with legal documents all day, and there is a tremendous difference in the ones produced today, where technology allows the attorney draft after draft until they finally get it right, and the old-school ones of just 30 years ago produced on an IBM selectric that had to be right the first time. i stand by my point.
victor: thank you for your understanding of what i was trying to say here, and for your kind words.
noblesavage: yeah, except...
topher: the idea of noblesavage as debbie reynolds in a nun's habit with a ruler gives me great joy--thanks for that. (oh, and i creamed over "a separate peace" when i was in high school--and the movie, although awful, is pretty great too.)
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