I find that I remember the most ludicrous
incidental details surrounding traumatic events. I remember in 1975 when the news that my
grandfather had died in 1975 arrived, my father and I had just returned home from seeing
Bedknobs and Broomsticks at the drive-in theatre in Grand Island, Nebraska, where we
lived. We were in the kitchen and the only light that was on in the room was the one over
the stove, one of those little florescent tubes that they put in stoves in the early 70s.
I don't know if they still put those tubes in stoves. I really haven't paid too much
attention to oven technology, I guess. Anyway, I was just about to ask my dad a question
when the phone rang. It was my godfather, John, calling from Omaha. He told my father that
my grandfather had died. My dad hung up the phone and cried. I never got around to asking
him the question which was, "Which Beatle was it that didn't grow a beard?"
When I found out that my good friend Corey Smith was killed in a car wreck in 1990, I was watching Star Trek The Next Generation and eating spaghetti in my East Lansing, Michigan, living room. I was sitting in front of my desk. I never finished my meal.
When I realized that my partner of six
years was probably going to move out I had just cleaned my hardwood floors with Murphy's
Oil Soap. When I found out for sure, I was wearing a pair of jeans.
My partner and I met at the beginning of college. That's a common time for partners to meet, I suppose, although I have no empirical evidence to back that up. It just seems that way to me. During college we grew together and apart at the same time. This continued when we moved from East Lansing, Michigan, to Seattle, Washington, in 1990.
Of course, when my partner announced that our relationship had to significantly change, we, being the adept intellectuals that we were, realized that no one was to blame and that we had merely grown apart. There was no pain in the parting.
Of course not. At least not for the first couple days.
I used to always wonder what I would do
differently if I went to bed tonight and woke up tomorrow to find myself back in high
school -- my knowledge of the future and current moral superiority intact, of course. I
used to wonder this a lot. Would I do things differently? Yes. Yes, I would. I'd read a
buncha books and invest in Microsoft. Big deal. It's not going to happen, the past is the
past. If you could change it now, it would have already been different then.
Nonetheless, when my partner moved out on me and relocated an entire block away, I searched my brain to see if there was a thing that I could have done to avoid this parting -- or spacing, I suppose -- of company. You see, my partner still wants a relationship -- just not under the strict structure of being partners. Now we're just nebulous really good buddies. Recently, while filling out one of those In-case-of-emergency-contact sheets, I put down my nebulous really good buddy's name down and next to the "Relationship" prompt, I wrote Ambiguous.
They've gone a long way in many cities to
extending insurance and other benefits previously only extended to married heterosexuals
to gay, lesbian, bi or hetero domestic partners. I hope they extend it to nebulous really
good buddies that live a block away pretty soon. I feel that the label partner is far too
limiting.
But anyway, I wondered what I would do differently if it were suddenly 1986 and we were just meeting again. Bam! It's 1986! Wow, I've got to do things really differently! What lunacy.
The problem was that we were right in the first place, this is just two people who met young and grew in slightly different directions. Not horribly different directions, just enough to make living together difficult. But that need to ascribe blame was so strong. YOU GREW WRONG! Goddammit!
Of course, the horror of it all is that you usually can come up with half a dozen things that you could have done that could have been instrumental in avoiding the traumatic event, whatever event that might have been. My dad could have told my grandfather to stop smoking. I could have encouraged Corey to become an electrician instead of a musician, then he wouldn't have been in the mountains that day. I could have done something to my relationship to make things work out a little better -- but if you do that with everything then you will start to blame yourself for everything that happens. That's not a good position to put yourself in. Besides, if things would have turned out differently, I'd have a boring old partner instead of this neat-o 90s-style nebulous really good buddy. I wouldn't be quite as hip as I am today.
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