The phone rang the way the phone used to ring when answering it was a Russian roulette of possibility. That is, before caller ID and cellphones. You paid your money, you took your chances and since the only choice was to answer or not, sometimes if the expectation of opportunity was afoot, you’d choose to answer.
“Eugene?”
Not a promising start since any man answering my phone was bound to be me, it did give me scant few seconds to either stay ghost and gently hang up, a move also known as The Bill Collector, or answer. Sort of recognizing the voice it was the latter that was chosen.
“Yes?”
It was a long time friend of mine. He hedged. He beat around the bush. The New Yorker in me, battled at every turn now that I live in California, was about to snap with the unasked but, at this point, desperately needed to be asked question: what the hell do you want?
“Can we meet for dinner? I’d like to talk to you about a few things.”
Silence. My kids have pegged me, spectrum style. Because? “Because of your lack of interest in connecting with other humans!” I balked. It’s not that I’m not interested but more that I’m running for a bus and if you’re not running for the same bus any kind of chatter is just going to cause me to miss it.
Especially the heart to heart chatter like this was shaping up to be.
Then this: “Please.”
I’d had friends come out to me, confess to bank robbery and murder to me, to sleeping with my girlfriend, to needing cash. This seemed like none of those.
It’s not often that men will ask each other for things that aren’t strength or ability based. And if they ask — furniture moves, car repairs, general contractor shit — it never comes with a “please”. Help or not. Simply put. Simply engaged. Usually with a yes or no.
But a “please”? This was serious and so I agreed.
At the appointed time we met. The two-step remained the same. Stuttering, stalling, and the whole time me wondering: WHAT?
I’d had friends come out to me, confess to bank robbery and murder to me, to sleeping with my girlfriend, to needing cash. This seemed like none of those.
Then: “You know we had a miscarriage.”
He and his wife had been friends of mine for years but time and distance played their tricks. I had not known that she was pregnant but I now knew she had a miscarriage. Never very good with anyone else’s emotionalism I mumbled something about them being able to try again.
“That’s the thing,” he said. “I don’t want to.” This would have been his first kid and while the prepartum panic might have been expected, his resistance not so much. Especially since he was taking it as a sign from G-d.
So he’d been having sex with his wife but not ejaculating. A solution but not a long term one and not one likely to escape her notice. So his question for me, a relatively new father of two at that time: was he right?
“This is the best thing I’ve ever done,” I said almost before he could finish his sentence, my eyes not letting him go. “The best. It took me some months to even talk about it without getting choked up, but this is it. I make no claim for it helping your relationship at all but this is something I’ve never regretted.”
And years later with the end of the year and holiday reflections upon us I find myself unaccountably excited. Then I realize: the kids are coming over! Like every cheesy Hallmark card or commercial you’ve ever seen, or any image you imagine Norman Rockwell did, the chance and likelihood of having now four offspring in one place fills me with giddy anticipation.
At some point Don Corleone said something to the effect of a man without a family ain’t shit. Or specifically, “[A] man who doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man.”
There are probably many ways to embrace adulthood but the fact remains for me that for every meme extolling the general shittiness of families and family living, I have examples of relatively minor ways that my kids have given me major joy. Every single one of them. And while not every single time, enough times that it’s helped me cruise on by the accretion of crap that might darken my holiday reminiscences. Not enough for me to forgive the transgressors since this is not about that for me, but just to put it in a proper place for a grudge holder like me: nowhere.
And while it’s deepened my understanding and appreciation of things like King Lear, The Death of a Salesman, Hamlet, Macbeth and the whole classical canon of fraught family action it’s also given me what Johnny Mathis best sang of when he talked about “a happy feeling nothing in the world can buy.”
One that informs my existence in a pro-social way even when I’m up to my antisocial ways. So I’m better because of them, and the world is fundamentally the same, because even if they don’t always know it, they are lights in darkness and remain, for me, the best things I’ve ever done.
So while I AM one of those Christmas-music-in-July type of guys, I AM also the kind of guy that’s sobbing while writing this.
The year is curdling to a close, and I’m saddened about the time, and people we’ve lost, but most of all and what I feel most keenly is that the more time that passes the less time I have to spend with the people I love.
But this juxtaposition? Truly and without a doubt…the best.
So play this out as long as you can. Unless you have a clock at home that runs backward remember it’s all “borrowed” time.
Happy Holidays and thanks for reading this far and for this long.