Webs & skeins: what connects friends

As those of you who read my last post know, I recently experienced a profound sense of connection with a far-distant friend through a shared sense of loss, yet we have not even been in the same part of the country for over twenty years.  That got me thinking and wondering about friendship and why it is that we can feel so intensely connected to someone we haven't seen in years, and yet we might never get beyond the surface of someone we see almost daily.  

After mulling it over, and looking at my long-distance friendships, I began to see certain similarities, almost none of which explained the longevity of these particular relationships.  Many of my friends are parents, but that doesn't explain it, or at least not by itself.  Some are relatively new at the game, while others, like me, have raised at least one child to adulthood.  It's not religion, at least not in the organized, denominational sense of the word.  My circle embraces Christians of all stripes, agnostics and pagans, Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs, Jews and Muslims.  There might even be an atheist or two thrown in for good measure.  Certainly there are shared values, but that only scratches the surface.  I've met many people who shared my values, but precious few of them have become the kind of enduring friends with whom there is a shortcut to connection.  

It's not definitely not education, since I never managed to complete university, and my friends run the gamut from high school dropouts to PhD candidates, and it's not intelligence, or at least not in isolation.  While most of my friends are intelligent, I've met many allegedly bright people with whom I could find no common ground.  And it's not technology in and of itself, although most of us use those tools to aid in building and maintaining our connections.  

What it seems to be is a sense of humour and a way of looking at the world as a series of connections, a series of interconnected stories that need to be told and retold to be remembered, which creates a kinship that has nothing to do with the DNA of our bodies and everything to do with the DNA of a really good story.  Perhaps that is why we all seem to have some sort of creative outlet, whether literary, visual, or musical.  Not that we all make our living through our endeavours, although some of us are fortunate enough to do so.  I am not one of them, although working the front line in the hospitality industry certainly requires the ability to think outside the box. 

I think what I love about all these friends of mine, is that they think.  Deeply, lovingly, sarcastically, with humour and childlike openness, about themselves, the world around them, and their place in that world. 

Whatever it is, it serves to connect me to a lit-loving med student in Manila, a social media scholar in Charlottetown, an historical interpreter, several musicians, and a Toronto-based aficionado of the absurd, among others.  And maybe what it is doesn't matter as much as the fact that it exists. 

Internet magic: or, loss and memory

I was reading through some older posts on a friend's blog, and came across a post where she spoke of the son she lost as an infant.  It reminded me of the brother I never knew, the one who might have survived had a doctor not been reluctant to wield a scalpel to assist him into the world.  I haven't thought of him in years, even though my parents acknowledged the loss and told my brothers and me about him.  He was always part of our night prayers, the "God blesses", as we called them.  

 

"God bless Mommy and Daddy, Grandma and Grandpa, Oma and Opa, Anna Catherine, Neil John," etc.  

Neil John.  That was his name, an Anglicization of the historically Latin names that are so much a part of my father's traditional Dutch Catholic family tree.  Cornelius Johannus, he would have been to a previous generation.  

When I was a very young child, he was my constant companion, even more so than any of my living brothers, who were so very different in their interests from me.  Neil, as I pictured him, was just as bookish, maybe a bit less socially awkward, than I was.  When I became a target for bullies in elementary school, I always imagined that he would have been my defender, or at least been the one to share my isolation.  Physically awkward kids with borderline genius IQs generally don't fit in well in small rural schools, particularly if they have no gift for dissemblance, and I suffered the additional burdens of being the only girl in the grade and the only one who had not attended kindergarten (back when it was optional).  

It's odd.  Back then, I pictured Neil as close to my age, even though he would have been sixteen months younger than I, and given the arbitrary nature of school age cut-offs, two grades behind. Now, when I try to remember what he looked like, I get two images, primarily, one overlying the other.  The first is of a blond toddler with our father's curly hair, the hair that none of the rest of us inherited, but which skipped a generation to show up in one of my daughters.  The other image is of a faceless young man, somewhere between twenty and thirty-five, in some sort of military uniform.

Somehow he reminds me of the photos I have seen of "Bobby", one of my mother's cousins who was lost, albeit in a different way.  Bobby was R.C.A.F. during the Second World War, and is still, to the best of my knowledge, listed as "missing in action".  Neither his body nor his aircraft were ever found.  There is only one photo that I have ever seen of him, taken just before he went overseas, somewhere around late 1942 or early 1943.  The only reason I can date the photo is that in it, he is holding his cousin, my mother, in his arms, and she appears to be about two years old.  Since she was born late in 1940, and she is not bundled up to the eyes against a Calgary winter, I would be inclined to say spring or summer of 1943.  I digress.  Regardless of the date, he is lost in another way, but still somehow manages to visit my memory from time to time, particularly around Remembrance Day, one of four cousins who served, and the only one who did not make it home.  His cousin, David, was lost for a time, too, as a POW in the notorious Stalag Luft camps.  Although David's breathing body made it home, I think part of his spirit, too, was lost somewhere in Europe.  Whenever I met him, I got the impression that the connection between his spirit and his body was tenuous, as though he lived his life with one foot beyond the veil.

Maybe it's the time of year, that season when so many cultures celebrate the lives of those who are gone, when the Celts believed that the veil between the living and the lost thinned enough to allow contact, combined with my Scottish ancestry and a genetic connection to the weird.  Maybe.... There are so many other reasons that I could feel this connection, not least what my parents and teachers insisted was an "overactive imagination".  Or maybe it's that Odin's ravens sit on my shoulders, whispering their knowledge into my ears.  How else could I remember people I have never met, and who were barely known by those I knew who had met them?  Who knows?  There are many ways of knowing.  From here, I could go on a half-formed, half-thought-out rant about North American culture and the downfall of  Western civilisation, but I'm not ready to put on the tinfoil hat just yet. 

I'm just grateful for the Internet, which allows me to reconnect with long-lost friends, to read through their past letters to the world, and to connect my friend's lost son with my lost baby brother.  Who knows, perhaps I have introduced two lost children to each other, facilitating a network on the other side of the veil.

Neil, meet Finn.  Finn, this is my brother, Neil.  Look out for each other.  And watch for me when it's my turn to rejoin you. 

Meditation

This afternoon, I took a short trip to pop in on my friend Phil, who works at Old Tyme Candy Shoppe in Radium Hot Springs.  He didn't have much time to chat, being in the middle of putting a large shipment into inventory and out on display, so he suggested that I go for a walk on the trails near Sinclair Creek, which I did.  The weather today was warm, if a little dodgy on the precipitation front, but it held off while I was down in the canyon, for which I was grateful.  While I used to be an avid day hiker, it's been well over a decade since I've done much, and fourteen years, four kids, and forty pounds have taken a toll on my stamina.  Add to that, I'm still getting used to the altitude here in the upper reaches of the Columbia River after fourteen years near the coast.  Sending me on the local equivalent of the Bear's Hump in Waterton Lakes National Park, or the Grouse Grind near Vancouver, would not have been a very wise idea. 

Time in nature

Once I made my way down the switchbacks in the trail to the bottom of the canyon, I found myself moving differently.  I was no longer a middle-aged mother of five with a weight problem, but a creature of the woods, setting my pace to the rhythm of running water, listening to bird calls (I heard a raven, and I saw a small songbird, about the size of a finch, with a tuft of bright feathers on its head), and watching for dragonflies and caterpillars. 

On trails lined with trees and underbrush right up to their margins, I experienced an almost atavistic sensation that I was walking through a fairy-tale wood, perhaps even Little Red Riding Hood's forest, a sensation that seemed at odds with the warmth of the sun beating on my shoulders and back, with the groomed gravel of the trail beneath my feet, and with my overall sense of well-being.  In some sense, I believe that I was experiencing what Clarissa Pinkola Estes describes in her wonderful book, Women Who Run with the Wolves, as the "selva subterranea", the forest deep in the soul where the true nature lives.  The child in me, as well as the woman who watches "Grimm" for the references to the unsanitized fairy tales that strike a deeper chord than anything I ever read as a child, half-expected the "big bad wolf" to leap out from the underbrush, even as I knew I would be more likely to encounter a bear or cougar.  Yet, as I climbed my way back out of the canyon, I felt stronger, more sure, and grateful for the opportunity to undertake the soul's journey in such a literal way.

Things I learned

I had time to listen to myself, too, and relearn some things about who I am and what I like.  This is some of what I found out.  I am a writer and a dreamer (above all a dreamer), a mother and a culinary experimenter.  I like chocolate, especially good quality dark chocolate, silky and slightly bitter, but I am in love with milk chocolate like an ex-boyfriend, the one who you know is bad for you, but whom you can't quite manage to eliminate from your life, and especially milk chocolate-covered almonds.  I like perfectly ripe strawberries with vanilla bean ice cream and just a drop of balsamic vinegar.  I like sitting in front of a blazing fireplace on a wet day, and I love watching the weather roll over the peaks.  Mountains speak to my soul like nothing else on earth, especially these Canadian Rockies.  I like trains and hotels, and especially hotels whose history is tied up in the history of trains.  I like men in their forties, because they have enough experience to make them interesting, yet enough youth to maintain boyish charm.  I am a romantic, and I spend a great deal of time wondering about used-to-bes and might-have-beens and might-yet-bes.

Speaking of used-to-bes, I also realized that one of my ex-boyfriends (yes, the milk chocolate comparison does apply, but not literally) and my husband are a lot alike in many ways.  It's not just the similar height, or the blue eyes, or the buzzed hair.  it's the way they know me, the way they are both youngest sons and touchy about their competence when they feel it questioned.  I'm not sure if that guy was the dry run, or if I chose my husband because he reminded me of that guy.  Interesting question.  All I know is that guy is the only ex-boyfriend for whom I would do battle if he were hurt by another woman. 

Looking for Courage

Have you ever looked around at your life and asked yourself, "Why am I still here?"  Most of us probably have at some point, usually in a figurative sense.  For me, it has become more literal.  For most of my adult life, my tenure in any one location or accommodations hasn't exceeded five years.  Now, I find myself having been in the same location for nearly seven years, trying to effect a figurative change of location (looking for work after having been a stay-at-home mom for the past decade or so), and realizing that the current physical location was a physical compromise and a spiritual cop-out. 

Courage has been hard to come by in the past decade, especially the kind that allows you to make small changes.  I don't do small changes well.  My soul craves drama, the grand gesture, the sense of packing one's bags and taking off.  The one recurring dream of my life involves waiting on the platform of a railway station, waiting for a train that will take me to the grand adventure of my life.  In the dream, I don't know where I will end up, only that I have a "ticket to ride" and the metaphysical horizon is full of anticipation and promise. 

Of course, much as I would love to pick up stakes and move on to the next adventure, reality and responsibility intervene.  Four kids still at home, a husband, and a mortgage hamper the spontaneous grand gesture.  But I see my kids growing without a sense of adventure, and that leaves me feeling with the sense that I have somehow failed them.  When they come running to me because of a thunderstorm and then stare at me with baffled incomprehension at my reaction ("Cool!  Let's go watch it!")  instead of grabbing pillows and settling in for Nature's light show, I know that I have somehow failed to communicate something imporatnt.  I remember being nineteen, working in a hotel in Waterton Lakes National Park, and sitting under cover on the fire escape stairs watching the lightning and rain, smelling the freshness of the wind, listening to the crack and rumble of the thunder echoing off the valley walls, and feeling my hair rise just a little as the lightning charges built. 

I'm not looking to travel around the world.  Career prospects and financial responsibilities make that a distant dream right now.  I just want to find somewhere fresh, hwere the outdoors is more tempting than TV or the Internet (although not so far out that there is no Internet service at all -- I'm not completely insane),  where I can get back in touch with Nature and share its bounty with my kids. 

Is that too much to ask?