I'm not a religious guy. In fact, I'm really the opposite of
religious, if you define it traditionally, anyway. A victim of Lutheran
Protestant heritage, I was about 10 years old, I think, when I realized how
bogus my religion was. I was barely past ten when eastern traditions began to
beckon to me.
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| The Geezers Emeritus, Christmas 1967 |
Which makes it a little hard to figure out why Christmas is an
exceedingly powerful time of year for me. Perhaps it's because my birthday, a
reminder of mortality, is just a week before Christmas; or maybe it's because
I'm responding to the distant archetypal roots of Christmas, which includes among
other things an assimilation of the ancient Roman Saturnalia festival. That pagan
festival began on Dec. 17 and ended on Dec. 25 (oddly enough, this is exactly
the period from my own birthday to Christmas).
Other symbols of Christmas can also be traced to other pagan
winter solstice celebrations, which in effect are ritual reenactments of the
cosmic rebirth stemming from the sun’s retreat from the earth in midwinter to
its promised return the following spring and summer. So perhaps it’s all these
things conspiring to make Christmas more than tinsel and eggnog for me
Whatever the reason, Christmas has always been a very powerful and
joyful time for me, but also one filled with deep nostalgia and even pain. The
season always paradoxically makes me think of death as well as rebirth. It is
when I find myself most bluntly confronting the tragic and wonderful reality of
human mortality. I'm hard-pressed to explain exactly why this is, as the
power of the season seems to extend far beyond the surface Christian aspects.
And for similarly mysterious reasons, it's also the season that
makes me consider the things I'm thankful about. The Thanksgiving holiday
itself has little meaning other than as a time to gather together, eat,
socialize and watch football. It's Christmas, on the other hand, that always
makes me think about the good fortune I've enjoyed in life.
So while I really don't believe in a personified God in heaven who
doles out good things on the world, at this time of year I cannot help but
reflect an a huge number of blessings I've received.
Family. I wasn't close to my family of
origin. I'm still not. Growing up, my family was a dysfunctional solar system,
with its center illuminated by my mother, a women of damaged soul and spirit
whose radiation burned us in ways that never entirely healed. Yet of the three
sons orbiting that sun, I somehow became the one that would eventually be
blessed with his own family, consisting of not only a loving and stable and good natured wife, but two
great kids who have grown to be fine adults, responsible and compassionate and
intelligent and funny.
When the kids visit these days, it's not uncommon for me to go to
bed early while they (along with their own significant others and their mother, my bride) remain up playing games and watching movies until the wee
hours. Laying in bed listening to this happy, good-natured family having fun in
the next room—and contrasting it to early days in life where hours in bed meant
listening to adult hysteria and violent emotion elsewhere in the house—I can't
help but blink rapidly and recognize my own good fortune.
Friends. After now living into late middle age and
meeting many hundreds of people, I know of very few who can boast a group of
friends as close and trusted as the group that have come to form my extended
family. The core of it are these very Geezers (Emeritus and Guest)— a group I
met in childhood and with whom I established friendships that most people don't
develop until college or later, if they manage it at all.
One fellow, who became my friend at 4 years of age, was
a guy who once upon a time was both able and willing to debate with me the
accuracy of the 500-page Warren commission report on the Kennedy assassination
late into the night. We were 8 years old at the time, camping by a creek
near our rural home. Years later, this same friend is willing to hike with me
in Alaska, and has helped me sample most of the single-malt whiskeys poured in
Scottish distilleries.
With another circle of buddies, I've gathered together nearly
every year to play a ritual game of Monopoly at the holidays—a religious event
with far more meaning than the Eucharist. (I'm not kidding). There's little we don't know about one another, and they are my brothers.
Along the way I've met a few others, both men and some important
woman, who also became members of my family in a way that's equally dramatic.
They, too, are folks I've come to trust implicitly, and who also trust
me.
Who can say they deserve friends of this caliber and
steadfastness?
Love. Being able to openly love without fear
hasn't come easy to me. Early life experience said that some of the key people
who loved you could also hurt you badly,
and unexpectedly.
In my late teens and early 20s, some of this unpleasant baggage,
after being long avoided, finally demanded to be opened and sorted through. For
two or three years, I was a genuine mess; it was a time of drugs and hospitals
and brutal medical treatment. The fact that this time was very nearly fatal is
something I don't often acknowledge, but it is very much true. I know of
plenty of other people who didn't survive such things.
Near the end of this awful period (and maybe it was the very thing
that saved me), the first girl I ever dated—and whom I periodically dated
through high school and into college—said to me matter-of-factly one day in
1978 that she would like to marry me and spend her life with me; and if it
worked out, the following summer might be a good time for us to think about it.
We were just kids at the time, 23-years old, but even then I was
stunned that somebody who knew me so well, and knew what I'd been through over
the last few years, could possibly see me as somebody worth loving and
investing in. Trust me, I was no prize in that era. To this day, I find that act of trust and
confidence an amazing thing, and I'm not completely convinced that I'm
deserving of it. If I'm lucky, before I die I 'll feel deserving of the
love that red-haired girl offered me so long ago.
Over the years since, I've met a few other genuinely important
women who became good and loving friends. One was a young therapist, only a few
years older than myself, who taught me that some types of craziness need to be
embraced and explored if they are to be overcome—the most practical lesson I
ever learned. Another was work colleague who eventually became a dear lifetime
friend, who will rank right up there with the Geezers when I take inventory
just before leaving for the big dirt nap.
These crucial women, together, have more than compensated for the
early deficit of being raised by a troubled mother. It makes me feel cosmically
lucky. (Yeah, I know there are hints of Oedipus and Freud in all this. Who
cares? I made peace with it long ago.)
Kids. I was lucky enough to understand who my
kids were when they were still very young, and as a result have found them to
be pretty great people, pretty much all the time.
With both, it happened in the first hours or days after their
birth. With my son, we had just come home from the hospital after his
delivery. I was walking with him in my arms in the living room of our new home
when an April breeze came through the window, tickling his face. He was
momentarily startled by the sensation, but then instantly became delighted and
calmed by it. And that's pretty much who my son is. A little shy and startled
by the world, but quite peaceful and more accepting of circumstances than
almost anyone I know. Most of the time, I envy his view of the world and
wish I were more like him.
With my daughter, it was even sooner. Late the first evening after
her birth, I paced with her in my arms in the recovery suite of the downtown
Minneapolis hospital where she was delivered. Waking from her sleep, she spied
the bright downtown lights. I doubt she could yet focus on them visually, but
her facial expression already reflected interest and intellectual fascination.
And this is who she is to this day: interested in almost everything, so
much so that she almost can't narrow her interests to a few subjects or
hobbies. Through school, there was almost no extracurricular she didn't want to
try, and few she didn't become pretty good at. A renaissance personality, then
and now.
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| How good Scotch whiskey impacts a Geezer |
Now grown, my kids are great young adults, and there aren't many
people I'd rather be around. I'm genuinely looking forward to being a really
old coot, hanging out with middle-aged kids.
Place in history: one of the Geezer affiliates shares this
opinion with me: we are genuinely and mysteriously blessed to have dropped onto
this place on the planet at this time. America in the 21st century isn't
perfect, but we have the enormous fortune of enjoying good health and an
affluent lifestyle in a place largely free of war and strife. Even lower income
Americans really enjoy lifestyles that might rightly be envied by 80% of the
world's population, and those of us in higher income brackets are obscenely
lucky, frankly. A few hundreds years in the past, or a few thousand miles in
geographic distance, and life would be far, far different for us. If that's not
good fortune, I don't know what is.
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