Being the parent of talented children is a tough job.

Especially when they are performing on stage or on the field of play.

You want them to succeed, you hold your breath as they do their stuff, and are delighted and relieved when the show (or the game) is over. You want to find a balance between identifying completely with their performance and being totally indifferent.

You don’t want to pressure them too much or feel like the fate of the free world hangs in the balance, entirely dependent on a flawless effort.

And you try to remember (and remind them to remember) the quotation of a Hall of Fame basketball coach who said, “If every game is a matter of life and death, you’re going to have a problem: you’re going to die a lot.”

Then there is the question of how much encouragement or discouragement you visit upon your child if he actually wants to make a career in the arts or sports given the long odds of actually being able to make a living.

Two stories about that, the first a joke:

Question: What is the difference between a musician and a Domino’s pizza?

Answer: A Domino’s pizza can feed a family of four!

The other story has to do with Leonard Bernstein, who was the composer of West Side Story, not to mention a famous symphony conductor, pianist, and educator.

Sam Bernstein, Lenny’s father, came to the USA from Russia, where musicians were held in low esteem. The musicians Bernstein’s father had encountered in his old country were mostly “klezmers,” itinerant Jews who played at weddings and other celebratory occasions, but had a hard time gaining respect and keeping bread on the table. Thus, when Sam’s oldest son displayed an interest in this “profession,” the elder Bernstein did his best to discourage the young man’s pursuit.

Eventually, his son Leonard became world-famous. And, the story is told that a newspaper reporter asked Sam why it was that he hadn’t encouraged his son in the field of music.

The senior Bernstein answered, “How was I supposed to know he would become Leonard Bernstein!”

Then there is the problem of the audience, of which you are a part; and what people say and do while your child is doing his stuff. We all have heard or witnessed parents and fans who go a bit crazy in opposition to each other over the performance of their eight-year-olds. It is worth remembering what happened on occasion when Jackie Robinson became the first black man in the 20th century to integrate organized baseball.

Before his 1947 debut in the major leagues with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Robinson played one season for the Montreal Royals of the International League. The rudeness and racism recalled by his wife Rachel at the time of the team’s April, 1946 appearance in Baltimore is recounted by Jules Tygiel in Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy:

When Jackie appeared on the field, the man sitting behind her shouted, “Here comes that nigger son of a bitch. Let’s give it to him now.” The Baltimore fans unleashed an unending torrent of abuse. All around her people engaged “in the worst kind of name-calling and attacks on Jackie that I had to sit through.” For one of the few times Rachel feared for Jackie’s physical safety. That night as she cried in her hotel room, Rachel thought that perhaps Jackie should withdraw from the integration venture.

Fortunately, as the proud parent of daughters who have performed, I never had to deal with anything like that. Just the usual twittering, texting, whispering, program rustling, and bracelet jangling, that is the commonly experienced thoughtlessness in auditoriums world-wide.

But on one noteworthy occasion attended by me with my wife, I went beyond an occasional stern look to take on a woman who should have known better than to converse with her neighbor when my youngest child was in a high school production of West Side Story.

The lady was a senior citizen two seats to my right, nicely dressed, who was talking pretty loudly to a friend seated to her right. Because she was turned in her neighbor’s direction most of the time, it was difficult to catch her eye in the hope that “a look” might communicate my wish for her to quiet down. About 20 minutes in to the performance I’d had about enough.

I leaned as far to my right as I could (across the body of my friend Rich who was our guest) and, in one of the few moments when she was looking forward, she noticed me as I said, “Please be quiet!”

It was not said with ferocity, but I’m sure she knew I meant business. And, indeed, she was quieter for the rest of the first half of the performance.

Rich and I had to walk past this woman in the aisle as we began to make our way to the lobby at intermission. To my considerable surprise, as I passed this lady, she actually pushed me into the railing barrier to my left. I turned right to face her.

“Why were you so angry?” she said.

“I wanted to listen to the performance.”

“But I was only talking during the orchestra part, not the singing!” she indignantly continued.

“But I wanted to hear the orchestra. You know, you are not in your living room and this is not TV!”

With that, the encounter ended.

No guns were drawn, no knives displayed, no one put on brass knuckles, and no chains or tire irons were brandished — there was no “rumble” — no example of life imitating art, as in the gang fight that is a central part of the musical we were watching.

And my antagonist and her companion did not return after intermission.

Given that more and more states permit concealed weapons, I suppose I was taking a risk. I can’t recommend that you take on rude audience members, who might retaliate even more forcefully than did the lady in question.

But, it is hard to “tune out” people who create a volume of sound sufficient to compete with the main attraction.

It was another one of those situations in which different people react differently, sometimes dependent on mood, the capacity to tolerate frustration, an evaluation of the importance of the matter, and one’s ability to be assertive or foolhardy — however you happen to label such action.

In the end, I guess I should simply be glad that it wasn’t Baltimore in the 1940s and my adversary didn’t have her own set of family members handy, and a length of rope to hang from the nearest tree.

Rachel Robinson would understand.

—

The top image is from a 2003 performance of West Side Story given in Brno, Czech Republic by Městské divadlo. It is the work of Jef Kratochvil. The second photo is of Leonard Bernstein in 1945, taken by Fred Palumbo, then a photographer for the World Telegram. The third picture is a 1950 lobby card for The Jackie Robinson Story. The final image is of Rachel Robinson Accepting the Congressional Gold Medal for her husband, deceased baseball star Jackie Robinson on March 2, 2005. From left to right: Nancy Pelosi, President George W. Bush, Mrs. Robinson, and Dennis Hastert. The picture was taken by White House photographer Eric Draper. All photos are sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

Turning points in therapy and in life are usually seen only in retrospect.

Sometimes — many times — therapy leads to a better life. But sometimes, therapy creates pain in the process of trying to do its work. The patient can experience it as a necessary part of the process; or, as one more disappointment, frustration, failure, or betrayal in a life already filled with them.

It often depends on the type of discomfort that therapy is causing.

I’d like to describe four different categories of such therapeutic problems. Three of these involve failures of the therapist. But one (Item #3) is a frequent development in therapy that has to do with the nature of treatment and how people deal with emotional pain, rather than some shortcoming of the counselor.

1. Countertransference

Therapists can get frustrated or angry with patients, attracted to them or repelled by them, bored by them or fascinated by them. Therapists are human, so they are subject to all the same relationship issues as everyone else.

Of course, we are trained to keep a therapeutic distance and to know ourselves well enough to minimize all of the above. Unfortunately, self-knowledge is always less than complete and training can be an imperfect aid when faced with challenging relationships.

The psychoanalytic concept of countertransference was an early contribution to understanding these sorts of dilemmas within the doctor and patient dyad. It refers to the therapist’s feelings toward the patient, particularly those that may be unconscious and stem from unresolved relationship issues in his own childhood.

For example, does the patient somehow remind him of a mother who was insufficiently loving or too critical? Those are the sorts of feelings that can sneak up on the counselor without him fully realizing what is happening and why.

Therapists who are not aware of the shadow of their own past can be destructive toward the very people they are supposed to help. Similarly, healers who are themselves too needy or too stressed will not be at their best when someone else requires their undivided attention. Simply put, the therapist should be safe and stable — on land if the patient is at sea, so that he will not be sucked into a whirlpool of suffering and make things worse.

In other words, the therapist must be professional. And, if he finds that he is pulling too hard or being too critical, then damage to that person is likely.

How will the counselor react if he discovers that he doesn’t enjoy the patient’s company or thinks that the patient is too demanding or too dependent — too critical or cancels appointments too often — not improving fast enough? Will the therapist lash back, feel hurt, try too hard to win the patient’s approval? Under such circumstances, the patient can be harmed, even if he provoked the relationship complication himself.

Therapists are well-advised to reflect on their own feelings, work on their own unresolved issues, obtain advice or supervision about challenging therapeutic encounters, and sometimes refer the patient elsewhere; not to mention, get their own treatment if their issues are compromising professional responsibilities.

2. Therapists Who Cross Boundaries

There are two categories here. First, those therapists who mean well, but are not aware of their personal vulnerabilities and the necessity of inviolable boundaries between themselves and those they serve. These practitioners therefore fail to set firm limits on responding to the neediness (or attractiveness) of their patients. Second, there are those self-described “healers” who are frankly corrupt.

• Let us begin with the first of these two categories. In an effort to help, some therapists simply do too much for the patient. A few examples:

1. Discounting (or deferring) fees to the extent of feeling resentment.
2. Agreeing to schedule appointments so early or late (or on weekends or holidays) to the point of wanting to help the patient more than the patient wants to help himself.
3. Seeing patients outside of therapy in some sort of quasi-friendship.
4. Giving patients a physical contact that they crave which leads to sexual contact.

I’ve known therapists who took too many calls in the middle of the night for their own good or that of their family, counselors who brought patients who were down-on-their-luck into their own homes, and those who did not (I don’t think) intend for a comforting hug to become sexual, but who found that it did.

• In the second category, some counselors — thankfully not a great number (although one would be too many) — take advantage of the power relationship in treatment. An attractive patient can be used for sexual purposes, or for the ego-boost that such encounters can provide, without conscience; or with some sort of rationalization that it is actually therapeutic. It isn’t, no matter how much the patient provokes it, desires it, or the counselor rationalizes it. More on the problem of “dual roles” and boundary violations can be found on a previous blog post about damaged therapists: When Helping Hurts.

3. When the Patient Has Improved Somewhat and Now Has Less Motivation to Continue the Hard Work of Treatment

Naturally, when therapy is working the person who came to treatment starts to feel better. Sometimes, in fact, he feels better even when therapy isn’t doing very much. Many if not most individuals come to therapy in a crisis. Eventually such a crisis will pass or at least begin to be more tolerable, even if the treatment isn’t the reason.

Once the patient is experiencing less pain, he now has less reason to stay in therapy. The pain is what brought him in and the desire to reduce pain was the motivation to do the hard work involved in treatment. Now that there is less motivation, there just might be less cause to suffer the unsettling thoughts and feelings that therapy stirs up, not to mention its financial cost and the amount of time that it takes.

Take a look at the graph below. The red line (AB) is the pain of “life,” the distress that the patient finds outside of the doctor’s office — the upset, unhappiness, and disappointment that brought him to consult the psychologist in the first place.

The blue line (PQ) in the graph is the pain or effort required by the therapy process itself. Therapy is hard work. It is often also intense and wrenching, since it asks people to change, stop avoiding frightening situations, and face the demons that might have been covered over until the therapist worked to address them: those incompletely healed psychic wounds that are still excruciating to touch.

On the left side of the graph you will note that the red line (AB) is above the blue line (PQ). That is, when the person enters treatment, the pain of the person’s life is greater than the pain caused by therapy’s effort to make life better. But, as I indicated, at some point it is likely that the pain of life is reduced, while the discomfort (effort or difficulty) of therapy remains constant or might even increase. Why increase? Usually because the most tenacious problems are the hardest for the therapist to successfully address and might include taking the patient deeper into traumatic memories that he has tried to look past.

Once the patient has improved sufficiently (where the two lines intersect at point C), he now begins to find that staying in therapy causes more discomfort than getting out of it, as indicated on the graph by the fact that the blue line is higher than the red line (on the right side of the image). When the point of intersection of these lines is passed, the patient often wants to terminate treatment. Only those with sufficient “therapeutic integrity” or courage will stay long enough to resolve the most intractable of the issues that brought them to the doctor’s office in the first place. Or, they will wait until another life crisis brings them back to finish the job.

4. Therapists Who Haven’t Done Their Homework

It has only been in the last couple of decades that research has begun to point clearly to those treatments that are most helpful for some of the conditions therapists treat. Broadly defined, for example, Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) has been demonstrated to be the “treatment of choice” for most people who suffer from Social Anxiety Disorder and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Despite this, many therapists who claim to treat such conditions do not avail themselves of these treatment approaches or don’t familiarize themselves with the research upon which they are based.

Why?

Some weren’t trained in how to evaluate research or in how to engage in this form of therapy. Some stopped reading about progress in working with these conditions or “don’t believe” in the conceptual grounding of CBT. Some are too busy (or think they are too busy) making a living to afford the time and effort required to be up to date. Some trust their intuition to the point of rejecting anything that doesn’t match what they have come to believe is most important about how to deliver service to the people who seek them out.

The difficulty here is that therapeutic models should not be like religious beliefs, based on faith rather than evidence.

While a failure to follow “best practices” for which there is empirical evidence is not as egregious a violation of trust as sexual contact with a patient, counselors must keep learning and growing in their field of alleged expertise, just as much as they encourage their patients to grow personally.

In summary, therapists are not unique in having the capacity to do injury, but their position of authority gives them a vantage point somewhat like that which parents have with their children, making it easier to accomplish quite inadvertently.

The remedy? Obtain recommendations about counselors from those you trust. Read up on the treatment of your condition. Collaborate in your treatment, don’t just count on the therapist to do exactly what you need at every moment. Let him know about any concerns that arise. If necessary, get a second opinion. And keep your eyes open for the things I’ve described.

Not least, have the courage to stay in therapy even when the process touches on important issues that are sensitive.

As the old saying tells us, “when the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

And, no, I don’t mean “…going out the door.”

—

The above photo is called U-Turn by Zipley is sourced from Wikimedia Commons. Intersecting Lines is sourced from onlinemathlearning.com

“Don’t look back, something might be gaining on you.” Satchel Paige’s words suggest that life should be lived “full steam ahead,” not weighed down by regular retrospection. Most people take the advice to heart, at least to some extent, even if having never read it or heard it.

And, past age 60, my experience as a therapist suggests that such reconsideration of one’s own history becomes less and less likely. Unless tragedy strikes, a senior citizen who is a therapy virgin is not likely to seek the counselor’s services. No, the story that we tell ourselves about our life usually becomes fixed and — one must say it — self-serving, so that one does not become overwhelmed by remorse and the things that “should have” (or should not have) been done: the failed persistence, poor choices, and chances not taken; the damage done to others, including our children, our lovers, and our friends.

It is as if our old brain knows what our young brain couldn’t imagine: that there will come a time when there is not enough of a future to redeem the past.

We are, most of us, pretty well rationalized.

Yet this is what Julian Barnes’s prize-winning book The Sense of an Ending is about: the reflection upon and reevaluation of a life of 60-some years, by the author of that life, Barnes’s fictional narrator Tony Webster. And, if you are inclined to such self-analysis or even the common speculation about why people in your life do what they do, you might just find it the best work of fiction that you’ve read in a long time.

On the face of it, the story appears to be a simple one: a tale about pre-college friends including Tony, and his relationship with his first serious girlfriend; then losing touch with all those people, one of whom suffers tragedy. Finally, a jump of 40 years and the reinterpretation of that tragedy and those relationships, as well as his second-thoughts about himself. All of this occurs because of an apparently inexplicable event that disrupts Webster’s “peaceable” way of being.

Until that new monkey-wrench is thrown into the works, Tony thought he’d “wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded.” Somehow he’d trod a course that set aside youthful ambitions and hope for excitement, settling for things (and women) that were predictable and straight-lined. Eventually, he will realize that “We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.”

What he must now face — the way in which long-ago actions have continued to have consequences — is the mystery that Tony (and the reader along with him) will soon come to know.

The book raises a number of issues:

• How much can you trust your own memory?
• How much of your memory is selective and comforting?
• How much are you responsible for what happens to you in your life?
• How much are your actions responsible for what happens to others?
• Past what point is self-reflection destructive or, to paraphrase a Jack Nicholson character, “Can you handle the truth?” assuming that it is knowable?
• How much damage to others do even the most careful of us cause?
• Is it possible to be completely honest with oneself?

Most of the time one does want to — need to — think that “I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.” The world would be too scary otherwise.

A simple example illustrates the complexity here:

In graduate school a friend requested me to help his girlfriend move some things from one apartment to another. Although I owned a car, I took the rapid transit and got off at the wrong subway stop, one station away from where I should have been. I didn’t realize until I walked a bit that it was in a terrible neighborhood. In the event, I arrived at my destination safely on foot.

But instead, you could have read this story on the next day’s front page:

Northwestern Graduate Student Murdered Near Cabrini-Green Housing Project

That no one did has always seemed to me a matter of pure luck.

What if I hadn’t been so lucky? Others would ask themselves, how did this happen? Doubtless, my friend would have found out; his girlfriend, too. Would they have felt guilty? Neither intended to set the chain of events in motion, yet both were a part of that chain.

As Tony Webster would say, “There is accumulation.” One thing leads to another.

Why didn’t I drive? Even I can no longer answer this question; I simply have no recollection of how I came to the decision to take the subway. Was it to save money? Was it because I thought it would be difficult to find parking? Was my car in the repair shop?

And why didn’t I walk back to the subway stop soon after I got off the train, the better to go to the next station? Shouldn’t I have been more aware of my surroundings and a little more terrified? Was I too cheap to pay another fare? And if I was, to what extent was that based on how I’d been raised, lessons learned at home about the dearness of the dollar? And if that is so, do my parents have some responsibility in the chain of events?

The example I’ve just given you might seem a bit silly, but I assure you that Barnes’s protagonist confronts a set of events that are much more compelling, involving real events and relationship complications, not things that didn’t happen, as in my illustration. But in both instances, one can ask oneself many questions: Why did I do that? What if I’d not done that? What if I’d done something different?

On the answers to these questions — really, on the actions themselves — lives can depend; at least the quality of a life.

The Sense of an Ending reminded me a bit of John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. In each novel the author gives you enough information to put you in the position of an important character in the book, forcing you to live with the same incomplete knowledge that the character has of how things will end up. In Barnes’s work, this will likely cause you to want to reread the book, just as Tony Webster attempts to reread his life through letters and photos, the incomplete testimony of others, and his own imperfect and self-justifying memory. But at 163 pages, the rereading is just as engrossing as the first read-through (for me, just one day earlier).

If you believe that, in Kafka’s words, “a book should be an ax to break the frozen sea within us,” then know that this is such a book.

All of us are, or could be, like Tony or Lot’s wife, from the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot is the nephew of Abraham in the biblical Book of Genesis. Lot and his wife are permitted to leave before God’s destruction of the two famously iniquitous cities, but there is a catch. They are instructed by angels not to look back. When Lot’s wife does, she is turned into a pillar of salt.

Yet we must look back, mustn’t we? At least some of the time? Isn’t that how we learn? As a therapist, I would certainly say so.

But the biblical rejoinder comes to mind from Ecclesiastes 1:18:

For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.

Or in the words of Tony at the book’s end:

There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest.

————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

The positive aspect of looking back can be found here: The Handwriting on the Wall.

The two images are photos of Hamo Thornycroft’s sculpture Lot’s Wife. The first is the work of Yair Haklai. The second is the uploaded photo of Donald Macauley by Amada 44. Both are sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

Life is full of the “before” and “after” of things: before and after you could walk, before and after you began school; and before and after you started to fraternize with the opposite sex.

Indeed, it is hard to remember what the “before” life was like. How was it before you had children, for example? Most parents can describe it, but life is so altered by kiddies that such a “before” seems impossibly distant, as if it happened to someone else.

Which brings me to those days prior to the time that I or any of my friends made real, palpable, serious physical contact with young women; other than, perhaps, walking into them by accident.

Life was simpler without thinking about girls.

It didn’t make a difference how you looked or who looked at you. You grudgingly talked to girls, but you really didn’t enjoy it, as you did when conversing with Ron or Steve or your Uncle Sam about baseball. You didn’t play ball with girls and when they seemed fond of you, it was creepy. Something in their saucer-eyed, admiring gaze. Just the way a girl might pronounce your name made you sprint in the opposite direction.

Yes, there were some boys who teased girls. It is even said that this is the way little guys show an interest. Some, though, were just testing what they could get away with; trying to see where their own boundaries were and what mischief was possible. Hardly a reckoning with romance or a lesson in lust.

Anatomical curiosity was present, but it didn’t require attention to body parts that were beneath undergarments. The kid who got the most playground notice from the Jamieson School first-graders enjoyed flipping back one of his upper eyelids (turning it inside out) while he crossed his eyes, thus provoking an occasional howl from a squeamish classmate. If you were his friend he would put on the show for free and even simultaneously flip the second eyelid. Others were charged a nickel. Today he is running for President as a Republican.

In my home there were only occasional allusions made to things that suggested throbbing physical attraction. My single memory in this regard, maybe because it happened every year, was viewing the Miss America Pagent on TV, an event not to be missed by my father or my Uncle Manny. When an especially curvaceous contestant sashayed across the stage in her bathing suit, my dad (at least once or twice during the show) would blurt out “Holy Criminy, hung to the gills!” in a half-humorous hoot that never occurred at any other time.

Somehow I gathered that he wasn’t talking about fishing.

You don’t hear that reference to a woman’s bosom used these days. It might even have been my dad’s invention, as he was an avid fisherman.

In fifth grade I found my eyes being drawn to a girl’s legs. One girl in particular. “What is this about?” I asked myself. My little mind found it illogical. Those female underpinnings no longer seemed a simple necessity designed to keep the girls moving forward and avoid a great reduction in height. This newly acquired attention to a distaff body part was involuntary, not to say alarming. It was the first sign that my body was taking possession of my brain. Adult women know all about this masculine flaw, but as a kid I had no idea.

It must have been about the same time, or perhaps a little later, that most of my classmates were being invited to boy-girl parties by some of the females. Spin-the-bottle was a highlight, I guess, although the darkened room to which the chosen couple repaired — the one who had done the spinning and the opposite-sexed person at whom the bottle pointed — was a pretty innocent place.

As an example, the girl with the good legs, who would soon be my girlfriend, asked me an interesting question in the dimly lit cell which we were required to inhabit for a few minutes:

“Gerry, did you know that the most beautiful girl in the world is deaf?”

I, ever the straight man, could only answer “No.”

“What did you say?” she replied.

In other words, good legs and clever.

My folks never talked directly about sex, but occasionally a question would be answered in a way that was nonetheless informative. Watching The Untouchables TV series with my father, I heard the word “prostitution” for the first time, in reference to one of the illegal activities that the Capone gangsters operated in Chicago. When I asked dad what that was, he did indeed say “It’s when women sell their bodies.”

For what?

To whom?

At the grocery?

What aisle is that?

I knew that he would say no more, so I refrained from asking.

By the end of sixth grade I think I was hip deep in the “latency period.” Freud labeled this as the time before puberty when your sexual preoccupations basically go to sleep.

Although Sigmund Freud’s thoughts on the subject are no longer the gospel, I do recall losing interest for a little while. As evidence, I submit the case of a party to which I was supposed to accompany a charming lass named Heidi, about whom I forgot entirely while riding bikes with my friend Jerry, not awakening to my faux pas until an hour after the get-together was to have started.

I also remember apologizing to the poor girl, realizing that it would be better not to tell her what it was that caused me to lose track of the time, my desire to be with her, and the obligation I surely felt.

Whatever earthy urges were bubbling down-low were sublimated into alternative activities and interests. Perhaps they fueled our school work or athletic endeavors. But one of my friends seemed more interested in lunch than ladies. He pasted a magazine picture of a hamburger, fries, and a coke on the ceiling of his bedroom so that it was the first thing he saw every morning upon opening his eyes. It was a few years before Farrah Fawcett would take its place.

By age 16, I was vaguely jealous of the two guys I knew well who had started going out with girls, particularly because these friends had no obvious appeal that set them apart from the rest of us. Their relative success, however, did reinforce my esteem for the great “Sigmund,”  who must have been as puzzled as I was when he asked, “What do women want?”

Surely not these guys, I thought. Yet the facts suggested otherwise.

To their credit, those pioneers on the route to serious sexual contact introduced me to the fact that success is often simply a matter of showing up and saying something. They’d asked some girls on dates and, at least occasionally, the female targets of these requests said “yes.” The idea being that even if you swing at a baseball with your eyes closed, you will sometimes get to first base.

Taking initiative and having relatively little self-consciousness, especially in that immature moment in all of our lives, was just about all you needed if you were male and most of the other Y-chromosome types were holding back. Of course, the alternatives for the terminally insecure were begging and pleading, but even these required enough courage to get within whimpering distance of the selected female.

But where could you be with a girl in private? Usually not at home, where curious parents and evil siblings might spy on you. My friend Alan didn’t want anybody to see the three-ring circus he lived in, certainly not someone he hoped to impress. One Saturday, nonetheless, found his date being dropped-off at his house. When he prepared to leave with her to go to a movie, Alan’s father asked “Where are you two going?”

“We’re going to a show.”

“Why you going to a show? You’ve got a show right here!”

One of my regular compatriots at the Mather High School cafeteria would bring the daily Chicago Sun Times to the lunch table. Soon enough, we were all drawn to the part of the paper that advertised movies, theater, and especially the burlesque shows of South State Street. The Rialto Theater’s ad was the most interesting, because it reported that there would be:

MIDNIGHT SHAMBLES EVERY SATURDAY NIGHT. BRING THE LADIES!

As a substitute for the actual possibility of some sort of fondling with an agreeable female, we spent many lunches pondering what exactly “midnight shambles” would involve. We discussed it so often, that for convenience we made it into the acronym MSBTL. Since none of us were old enough to attend, my buddies were left with no alternative but to think about it and talk about it. It suffices to say that had the Rialto Theater found a way to charge our group for all the time we spent fantasizing regarding the naked women who were “shambling,” it probably would have made more money than derived from its actual box office receipts.

For most of us, the premarital sex-thing remained very mysterious, impenetrable in every sense; as well as clearly immoral, since it was the part of the ’60s that hadn’t escaped the ’50s — not yet the sexual revolution. At the same time, the topic was mystical and quasi-religious, the kind of subject that hooded shamans spoke of in hushed voices while incense burned; not nearly the publicly exposed casual part of today’s daily life that is as unremarkable as chewing gum.

The actual idea of intercourse suggested lots of moving parts that you didn’t yet know how to move or where to move them — lots of tabs and slots that I already realized I wasn’t very good at when I tried to follow the directions for assembling model airplanes; for example, “insert tab A into slot B.”

It also demanded technical skill in dark places without the miner’s helmet that I was inclined to wear in order to improve my chances. Notes and diagrams might have been helpful, but without the light, well…

Why didn’t a girl’s body come with instructions written on the package, like a box of aspirin? Even better, with day-glo lettering and diagrams?

Many of us were in the dark both literally and figuratively; lacking the required touch, deft and sure, that was far more challenging to acquire than the ability to hit to right field or throw a curve ball, skills that had been tough enough to learn. Nor was it a talent that you could perfect on a public baseball diamond when it was your turn at bat.

All the while, a ten-foot-tall sasquatch-like entity named “Insecurity,” who had his own chair at our regular Mather High School lunch table, instilled whispered self-doubts in whomever sat beside him:

Aw, jeez, why did you say that?

Does your hair look OK?

Are you sure your fly is zipped?

How did we survive all this? The way most other very young men do, I suppose. The procreative urge and a little bit of courage find a way to carry the day.

We are, every one of us, after all, the descendants of people who had sex.

I have told you, friend, that last bit of information in confidence. That is, the bit about actually “doing it.”

Your forbearance would be most appreciated because, whatever you might think to say on the subject, I’m sure that my adult daughters still don’t want to know.

—

The top image is Hawaiian Boy and Girl, a 1928 mural by Arman Manookian, sourced from Wikipedia. Next comes a photo of Hanna Rose Hall, by Christian Lovenzo. The author of the bottom poster of the Follies Bergere is “Pal.” The last two items were sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

I don’t watch much TV and certainly not much reality TV. But still, I find The Bachelor and The Bachelorette on ABC have their fascination.

You probably know the drill: twenty-five competitors for the affection of a single member of the opposite sex. The “star” gradually winnows the field over the course of the series, until only two remain for some sort of romantic, cliff-hanging showdown. All this is orchestrated around activities that have a Fantasy-Land, once-in-a-lifetime quality; and done in places of exotic beauty that would make virtually any honeymoon seem shabby by comparison.

Yet, cast out of paradise, the couples rarely if ever last. The undying love dies. The bloom comes off the rose.

Why?

Here are some reasons:

1. Who are these people?

We are offered competitors who are uniformly very attractive, some sensationally so. Why are they single?

As they are generally in their 20s or early 30s, is it really possible that they have exhausted the more conventional ways of finding love? Many complain of previous romantic disappointments. Do they believe that their chances will be better with 24 rivals than they were in their past history of dating? Isn’t their judgment here a little suspect? A move to Antarctica might actually improve their chances; at least if 24 other beautiful people didn’t make the same trip.

Some have resigned from jobs or left small children behind to take a flyer on a stranger who might have only been seen by them on the past season’s edition of the Bachelor/Bachelorette enterprise, where he lost the race they now hope to enter themselves. Again, what part of the decision to come on the show should make us think that this will end well?

2. Alcohol

Wine appears to be the omnipresent social lubricant during the filming. It is well-known to disinhibit people, making for more drama. But it tends to add to whatever relationship problems might exist, if not create them. Nor will romance conducted while buzzed necessarily predict a successful daily life while sober. Solid relationships tend to begin with poetry, but must survive in prose. Just so, they can start with a toast, but are sustained in moderation lest they become toast.

3. Mistaking Intensity For Love

Since the contestants are not movie stars, the idea of being a TV celebrity must be a pretty heady experience. Indeed, there is no shortage of cinematic emotion on these shows, partly because of the enchanting surroundings and dazzling events. Everyone appears stressed by the competition, sometimes by a lack of sleep, the nearly total absence of privacy; and the guillotine-like quality of each “rose ceremony,” which some of the contestants approach as they would if a real headsman were about to execute them and not simply let them go. All the internal stirring that comes from these circumstances can mistakenly get attached to the single object of everyone’s affection. Will “Mr. Wonderful” be nearly so exciting when he comes home to share a TV dinner instead of a dinner on TV?

4. Casting

Is there any bona fide attempt to choose 25 contestants who might actually be compatible with the bachelor or bachelorette; that is, beyond obvious physical attraction? My guess is that the producers are looking for people who are outgoing, quirky, and sometimes perhaps even brash or off-balance, all the more to make for watchable relationship dynamics. Not much room for the sedate or the shy. This is, after all, a real-life soap opera.

But, if compatibility were crucial, wouldn’t you want to choose people based on similar interests, well-matched personalities, geographical comfort zones, and the like? Once the final couple leaves the Disney-like surroundings, what are they going to talk about, where will they live, what will be the emotional and financial or career costs of relocation, and what kinds of activities will they share?

5. Motivation

Are all 26 people, including the star, there for what are called “the right reasons?” Surely, some come for the bells and whistles, the self-display, the adventure, or the idea of having their 15 minutes of fame. Others may see it as a means of self-promotion, increasing their chances for personal career success or for the advancement of their business.

6. Time

One repeatedly hears the suitors moaning about not having enough time with their romantic target. And, of course, the time they do get is being video recorded, creating a distinctly artificial analogue to the way the participants would be in “real-time” and real life. Even beyond that, the show is apparently filmed, start to finish, in about six weeks. While I’ve known brief courtships to lead to long-term romance, they are usually time-intensive and exclusive, cramming a lot of experience into the space of a few months. Does serial dating of multiple partners for a very few weeks favor long-term survival of the match between any two (still) strangers?

7. Supply and Demand

Consider the set up:

• Everyone around you thinks the star is terrific.

• You have nothing else to do other than talk with your dorm-mates and drink.

• There is only one available member of the opposite sex.

The scarcity of options alone suggests that his value is likely to go up, at least while those conditions prevail. Put more crudely, if you know there is going to be a food shortage, lots of people are going to knock themselves out to get to the meat counter first and stock-up; even vegetarians. But would you really care about that particular grocery item nearly as much, if the stores shelves and freezers were full of other possibilities and no scarcities were anticipated?

From what I’ve seen of these shows, there is much sadness and heartbreak on all sides. Yet the new contestants come “looking for love” with Pollyanna-like optimism, somehow thinking that their experience will be different. A few, from what they say, may already be smitten with the star, who they’ve seen get hurt in a previous edition of the show.

All are smart enough to know that even if they “win” the romantic prize, their relationship is almost certain to break down once midnight strikes and the carriage turns back into a pumpkin; where real life intrudes on dreams and a pie in the sky crashes to earth, leaving an inedible mess.

Yet they do still come.

In the course of the show, and in reflecting on it later, many appear to learn something about being open to experience, not closed off to what life may yet offer. Surely some grow, profiting from the pain and disappointment, not to mention the chance to see how they behaved when the program finally airs. In this way, each contestant is offered the rare opportunity to view himself or herself not in the mirror, but in the actual lived experience that the camera records.

I expect running the show’s gauntlet itself has the value of adding to each person’s life story — the story that they tell themselves about their lives. To have tried some things, even if you fail, is better than to be a back-bencher, rarely getting into the game. As war veterans say, nothing in their life after war compares to the intensity of the time in battle, even though that time was frequently awful; indeed, because of the nature of the awfulness.

I don’t wish to be too cynical here. I am convinced that many of the potential lovers come for exactly what they say they want, that “Thing Called Love.”

In spite of everything. In spite of the terrible odds. In spite of the likely humiliation and defeat.

In spite of the heartache.

Why?

We do so want to be loved, don’t we.

As the old song goes, “I’d Do Anything For Love.”

—

The Moment of Happiness at the top is the work of Claire mono from Taiwan. The photo that follows is called The Kiss by Bleiglass. Finally,  The Kiss by Gustav Klimt. All are sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

Just a few random thoughts on what you might choose to resolve (begin, stop, or continue) in 2012:

I

• raise your hand
• take a chance
• diversify both your economic and emotional life: resist putting all your eggs in one basket, financial or human
• learn to say “no”
• there will always be someone better, someone smarter, and someone better looking; get used to it
• exercise
• don’t text or tweet the day away
• give up on TV news soundbites and actually read something in-depth on the state of the world from a relatively unbiased source
• look in the mirror at what is underneath the surface
• make friends

II

• when upset, imagine how you will feel in a week, a month, or a year; in other words, know that most turmoil is passing
• don’t be a doormat
• deal with your childhood
• be honest, not just when it is convenient
• work hard (don’t learn the tricks of the trade before you learn the trade)
• sometimes the rain won’t stop, so discover how to dance in the rain
• be grateful and express it
• learn to apologize without excuses
• pay it forward
• pay it back

III

• before sending an angry email, write down 40 ways your missive can be misunderstood or ruin your life; then wait some more before sending
• find some hobbies
• eat right
• beware of hopelessness, but do not became a slave to hope’s capacity for illusion
• avoid too much self distraction
• remind yourself that there is no such thing as “must-see TV”
• don’t abuse substances
• laugh
• you have a shadow; best that you get to know it since you most certainly can’t outrun it
• stand for yourself, but also for something bigger

IV

• have humility
• be careful about judging
• have new experiences and learn from them
• don’t wait until your feelings change to act (act and your feelings are likely to change)
• recognize that luck plays a part in life
• be flexible — don’t inflexibly resist change
• grieve when necessary, lest things build up
• make eye contact
• if you are anxious, learn to be less concerned about others’ opinions
• realize that money isn’t everything and that the American Dream is a fraud

V

• know that your kids aren’t all the same and that each one needs something different from you
• sample things — try them before you say you have no interest in them
• don’t wait for your savior, save yourself
• choose your battles, but don’t permanently lay down your arms
• treat your body as if you might just need it for a while
• recognize that you are not as important as you think (unless you are the President, a brain surgeon, or the second coming of  Shakespeare)
• spend less time worrying and accept that most bad things are survivable
• be an informed citizen, learn about history and vote
• make haste slowly
• don’t accept easy answers

VI

• embrace the opportunity to perform
• every committee has work horses and show horses; choose the first role lest you look like an ass
• stay out-of-the-way of people who are bulldozers; it’s only a matter of time before they run you over
• get out of the city into nature and be dazzled
• spend time with a few members of a different faith, color, religious group, or political party and get a new perspective
• As Eleanor Roosevelt said, “You must do the thing you think you cannot do”
• do your best to ignore Ashton, Britney, “The Donald,” Kim, Lindsay, Snooki, and “The Real Housewives;” emptier lives are not to be found unless it is among their fans
• keep your cell phone off the dinner table and make public cell phone conversations as private and rare as possible
• don’t text while driving — ever
• remind yourself every day that (with luck) you are going to get old, wrinkled, and die

VII

• practice, practice, practice
• remember that this is not the rehearsal, this is the performance
• don’t be self-righteous
• get some rest
• consider whether those guys carrying signs that say “Repent, the end is near!” might be on to something
• ask yourself “What would Jesus do?” before you foreclose on someone’s house or stiff your waiter
• realize that being confused might be an opportunity to learn
• ask questions
• when you say you are going to do something, do it
• keep secrets when asked to do so

VIII

• don’t be a gossip
• recognize that a life of logic (without a counterbalance of feeling) is the equivalent of becoming a mathematical formula or a computer
• learn to be direct
• don’t have sex while chewing gum; and, for sure, don’t make it as unremarkable as chewing gum
• do one thing at a time, with all your attention
• don’t talk over others; listen when spoken to; be polite
• get over yourself
• trust, but verify
• find the poetry in the prosaic and the cool in the quotidian
• earn your life

IX

• have a good time
• meditate
• live with intensity
• be kind
• surrender to intimacy
• make your life matter
• live by the “golden rule”
• study all your life
• be an enemy of routine
• love someone or something

X

• make new mistakes
• test yourself
• swing for the fences; shoot for something big
• try to figure out where you are headed; it’s harder to get there unless you know
• learn to tell a joke
• take time to smell the roses
• keep a lid on the number of complaints you utter and the number of excuses you make
• get off the cross, we need the wood
• whether you are a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond, be sure you learn to swim
• and, to quote Studs Terkel: “Take it easy, but take it”

—

The above photo of a New Year Streamer is sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

We are in the season of hope, but in the midst of despair.

“Lions and tigers and bears! Oh my!”

The holidays tend to make one almost embarrassed to be hopeless; and hopelessness is described as something to be avoided in any season.

But sometimes, having hope is a problem — the problem — and giving up hope, facing reality, leads to possibilities.

All of us have had the experience of hoping for a positive outcome or event that wasn’t realized. We hoped to win the game, the job, or the romantic partner only to come up short. “Wait until next year” is the rallying cry of Cubs fans and human beings everywhere in the face of disappointment.

As the saying goes, “hope springs eternal.”

But sometimes hope is destructive. If you are in a terrible job with a sadistic boss, hoping for him to change is likely to keep you paralyzed, rather than triggering action to find a new place of employment or a new career.

If you are married to an alcoholic, abusive spouse, believing his apologies and promises to do better will keep you in the center of his bulls-eye, a target within easy reach.

Has your parent spent your whole life ignoring what you do well and trashing you over what you do not? Trying to win his praise might be a waste of your time, as hopeless as booking a trip to Mars for your next vacation.

In a rocky relationship? Some people hold on to the fantasy that if they can find just the right words and behave in just the right way, they will succeed in pleasing their spouse into being more loving. Others think having a child will make the marriage better, and live in that hope.

And then there are those who have been rejected by a lover, but continue to carry the torch of love into the dark night of the soul long after the loved-one has moved on.

I cannot say that hope is futile in each and every example I’ve given.

But it is often something of a fool’s paradise; nothing more than a castle in the air.

What I’m talking about here is a passive, inactive, timid hope that waits too long by the phone for the suitor to call. Not an active but reasonable hope that searches and schemes; defiantly claws its way forward and claims what it wants.

Beyond a certain point, passive hope anesthetizes you when you need the pain to motivate action; and need it to force yourself into the risks required to get what you want. As such, hope in these situations serves as an excuse for inaction.

All the while, life passes you by.

Thus, hope can keep you in a dead-end spot — the pipe-dream of an imagined future, while enduring a terrible present. I wouldn’t say that an imagined future would be a bad place to be if there were no ways to change the present. But, if you are ignoring things you can do to make your life better, than a servile hope is little more than a fairy tale.

Are you hostage to hope or perhaps, do you hope for the wrong things?

Such as?

A short list:

• A life without problems.

• Winning the lottery.

• A new luxury car or great wealth.

Why not hope for these and similar things? Because there are no lives without some problems, lottery winners often report a less wonderful life than they expected; and treasurable objects beyond the basic necessities don’t seem to generate much lasting satisfaction. They are like the rapidly dissipating “new car smell” that most find so attractive and so temporary.

The overriding point here is that hope not only battles with despair, but also with acceptance of reality — acceptance of the terms life allows, followed by a commitment to change what it is in your power to control, instead of simply “hoping for the best.”

Such acceptance does not come easily. Admitting defeat is almost always difficult and painful. Grieving is thought by some to be unmanly and by others unnecessary or a hindrance to progress. But it has a cleansing function, one that allows most wounds to heal.

How do you know whether you are holding on to too much hope? One way is to look at how you deal with defeat and whether you can bounce back and embrace change. If too many situations find you stuck, waiting and wishing for something outside of yourself to intervene — a kind of deus ex machina — then you are vulnerable to the immobilizing influence that hope can have. If you’ve been at that dead-end job for years or in an equally dead relationship for an equally long time, it might be worth considering what you are waiting for and why you have not acted.

Do you fear that change could bring something worse?

Sometimes it can, but not all gambles are foolhardy.

Do you live in a future your friends think to be unimaginable while the present slips away?

In Dante’s Divine Comedy, we are told that the entrance to hell is inscribed with these words:

“ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE“

Ironically, it is just that directive that might be the way to a new and better life.

Heaven can wait.

Stop hoping for its quick arrival unless you have explored everything else that is possible.

Try — try hard — to create a heaven on earth.

In that possibility there just might be something worth hoping for.

—

The sculpture at the top is called Allegory of Hope, a 1776 work housed in the Catholic parish church St. Nikolaus in Oberndorf am Lech in Bavaria, Germany, photograph by GFreihalter. The second image is Job’s Despair by William Blake, from 1805. Finally, a 19th century painting by Taiso Yoshitoshi after the poem One Hundred Aspects of the Moon by Lady Ariko-no-Naishi. All are sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

It is a question that I ask of people from time to time:

“With whom would you have dinner if you could choose from anyone in the world, living or dead?”

Although I’ve heard more than a few answers face to face, for the sake of this survey I asked for an email response to the question.

My respondents were permitted to list as many as three people and I encouraged them to give brief explanations for their choices.

The survey was not scientific and should be not thought to represent anything more than the answers of a mostly well-educated and not terribly diverse group of people I know. Many of them are close (including a few relatives), others more distant, and some can only be called acquaintances, friends of friends, or electronic correspondents.

The chosen dinner dates fall into the following categories:

• creators and performers

• religious and spiritual figures

• parents and relatives

• historical figures — mostly world leaders

• sports: players and coaches

There were also a few surprising answers that I will get to in due course.

Lucille Ball

Among those named in the Creative category were John Frusciante (former lead guitarist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers), Lucille Ball, Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen, Jim Carey, Patti Lupone, Anton Bruckner (19th century Austrian composer), Gustav Mahler (described as “the composer who fused sound and philosophy into the most soul-affecting music ever written”), Dave Matthews, Stephen King, Dr. Dennis Slamon (who helped develop the breast cancer drug Herceptin), and Barbara Walters.

Respondents frequently expressed the desire to get inside the creative mind of their dinner companion and probe for practical guidance for their own career.

One writer cleverly realized that a master chef would make the ideal dinner date, naming Auguste Escoffier, who is considered the father of modern French cuisine.

Religious or Spiritual Figures included Jesus, the Budda, Martin Luther, Eckhart Tolle, and Abraham’s son Isaac; the last “to find out how he felt about his dad in light of his father’s God-directed preparation to slay him (only to be saved by an angel also sent by God, once Abraham had proven that he would actually follow-through on the requested action).”

Caravaggio’s “The Sacrifice of Isaac”

One person simply named “God,” and said that “if he exists, I’ll have enough questions to last long past dinner.”

For another, sharing a meal with Mary Magdalene had appeal: “I wonder if she has been recognized for the woman she actually was. The men who wrote the Bible may have diminished her role; and exactly what was her role?”

I must also mention one brave soul (apparently unconcerned with losing his) who related that Satan would be first on his list of dinner invitations, so that he might ask the Prince of Darkness, “What happened between you and God?” When I told this to someone else, she thought that she’d probably already dined with and dated the devil more than once!

Many people named Parents and Other Relatives as those with whom they would like to break bread. The reasons were often touching, as in the case of  the woman who lost her father to an early death and her mother to the living-death of Alzheimer’s Disease.

For another, there was interest not in just a person, but a place and time:

I’d love to have dinner with my paternal grandmother in her reportedly humble home in the rural Midwest. She, along with my grandfather and aunt, died in an accident before I was born. She was of a different ethnicity and is said to have been a beauty and a gentle woman. Her faded and torn, black and white, 16″ x 19″ wedding photo, dated 1901 (not wanted by any other descendants) sits under my desk waiting to be refurbished. I look into her dark innocent eyes and wonder about who she might have become, what her dreams were for her children and grandchildren, how she might have influenced my life, and why, as a ‘dishwater’ blond, I could not have inherited her black hair.

If it were possible, I’d like to have dinner with my (miscarried) children. I’d apologize for never having the opportunity to meet them. Would they forgive me for not knowing my own body? For trusting my body to care for them… Would they understand that I wanted each of them more than anything? Would they see my anger at my own body? Would they be upset with how hard I blame myself? Would they see me struggling to find the answers? I’d want to know if I have their forgiveness and want them to know that I never stop wondering what they look like and who they could have grown up to be… Would they have accepted us as parents? Would we have even be any good (as parents)?

Call him Ishmael.

I saw “Ish,” an old friend and a fellow psychologist, at a party about 15 years ago, when he was about 40. My wife and I arrived late. He introduced us to a couple we didn’t know, but he didn’t look to be himself and left soon thereafter.

Those were the days before the Internet and social media explosions; when you went to a party and learned things about your friends that weren’t available on your computer screen; before you could easily track the lives of people you hadn’t seen in years.

The next day I met my buddy again and found out the unpublicized details of why he was out of sorts the night before.

“Remember that dark-haired woman I introduced you to yesterday?” asked Ish. “I hadn’t seen her since college. She was the first person I was really in love with.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “A real beauty.”

Yeah,” replied Ish. “She broke my heart way back when. It was quite a 24 hours — another party, actually.”

It was the summer before my senior year in college. You think Vanessa (the woman’s name) is good-looking now? You should have seen her back then! A shock of prematurely white hair, cut short; pale skin, “bee-stung” lips, very leggy; and a languid way of moving that was hypnotic. She had a swan-like grace, that’s the only way to say it. When I first saw her she was wearing a white bathing suit and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. She dyes her hair now — you can’t imagine how stunning she was.

As I got to know Van, I admired her dedication to her passion — competitive swimming. She enjoyed my sense of humor and we lined up on things musical and political. Both of us were also studying psychology at the time. We seemed to have a lot in common.

But there was this distracted quality about her. I always was trying to get her attention off of whatever else she might be thinking about. She was more compliant with me than enthusiastic about me — along for the ride, but never completely “into me.” When I think about it, I was actually unhappy lots of the time I was with her. She seemed just out of reach, and I was knocking myself out trying to generate some enthusiasm.

Ish related that Vanessa White (her family name had been Weiss back in the old country) was a year younger than he was, went to a different college, and that he had the feeling he was more a “place-holder” than a heart-throb over the summer vacation from college about which he was speaking. Still, he’d hoped that with effort he might make a big enough impression to keep the relationship alive when they both went back to school in late August of that year. The party he was telling me about, in fact, was an end of summer celebration that one of Ish’s friends had planned before everyone returned to campus.

“Van” would leave within a couple of days.

After the party, I drove Van home and we sat and talked in her parents’ living room for a while. But when I tried to pull her close to me, she held back; and then she lowered the boom:

I don’t think we should see each other any more, Ish.

Of course, Ish wanted to know why.

There’s someone else back at school I’ve been thinking a lot about. I don’t know for sure if it’s going to go anywhere, but I don’t think it would be fair to you to make you think there would be a chance for us.

Ish recalled that Vanessa made some comment about “being friends,” but that he’d pushed the idea aside. The conversation with Van continued for a while and Ish remembered that Van shed a few tears.

But then, she actually cried pretty easily on other occasions. She wasn’t an entirely happy person either — very sensitive to a lot of things, including human suffering; unfortunately, not my suffering. No, that’s not fair; more like she wasn’t sensitive to my feelings for her. I guess I would say that she was preoccupied much of the time. I knew she had a really, really good heart, but I could never figure out what was going on inside her head.

At least she didn’t give me the “it’s not you, it’s me” routine. She was painfully honest. It was clear that, for her, it was definitely me.

I remember saying to her that I’d actually thought about a life with her. I tried to make a joke of it — that, she was “Miss White” who just might be “Miss Right.” That made her laugh a little before it made her cry even more. Funny, as devastated as I was, she was the one doing all the weeping. I was mostly just numb; kind of dumbstruck.

Ish recalled leaving “The White House” (as he referred to Van’s home) and getting into his parents’ car in front of her family’s place and just sitting there. Sitting there for a long time, thinking sad thoughts, thinking of what was not to be, including the very vague future life with Vanessa that he’d mentioned to her: the life as “Mrs. Ish.” Or “Mrs. White-Ish.”

Off-white?

Snow White?

Does that make me a dwarf?

Confusing and silly ideas like that popped up as they sometimes do when everything else is going down. Ish realized that he’d never revisit the “White House” or kid Van’s father, Mr. White, about building an “Oval Office.” He’d never again call him “Mr. President” and see his sideways grin in response. Ish knew that he’d miss Van’s mom and dad, who always made him feel very comfortable.

If you’ve been through this kind of break-up, I’m sure you know how peculiar and disturbing it can be.

Surreal and disjointed, not to mention devastating.

One minute you are on the road; the next, you are in a ditch.

But Ish’s tumultuous 24 hours weren’t over.

I was scheduled to go out with my buddy “Starbuck” the next evening. He’d been at the party, too. That summer he worked at the post office. I think he had to get up at about 5:30 AM for his 7:00 shift. And he and his new girlfriend stayed up after the party until it was time for him to take her home, drive back to his house, shower, shave, and go to work.

So, by the time we started out for that night’s White Sox game at Comiskey Park, Starbuck hadn’t slept for about 36 hours. But, he said he felt fine and wanted to drive to the stadium. I was in no mood to argue given how I was doing after getting dumped.

The problem was, by the end of the game he was over 40 hours without sleep. And as we were headed back home down the Dan Ryan Expressway, I noticed that the car was moving into the next lane of traffic. I looked over at him.

STARBUCK!!! I screamed.

His eyes were closed.

I grabbed the steering wheel and jerked it to the right with my right hand, while I shook him with my left. A van blaring its horn flashed by on the driver’s side, narrowly missing Starbuck’s little VW. He pulled over and let me take the wheel. We’d just about gotten killed; what you call a near miss.

Those 24 hours were like that: a near Mrs. and a near miss.

I figured that was the end of the story and Ish did too. But when we next met-up, I discovered that there was more.

“She called me,” said Ish.

“Who called you?”

“Van. Vanessa. She invited me and Arlene (his wife) over to dinner at her house, with her husband and kids. And then we had coffee a few days ago, just Van and me.”

“Go on…”

Well, you know, it was pretty enlightening. Every so often over the years I’d wondered what happened to her, how her life turned out. But this — this I couldn’t have imagined. You see, her husband is a psychologist, like you and me! And when we were out for coffee, she said “I should have given you more of a chance.”

When I asked her about that, she offered that her life now — married to a psychologist — sounded very similar to the life that Arlene has with me. Apparently, at the time we were dating, she imagined a very different kind of life and a very different kind of husband.

Vanessa was looking for someone who was a competitive athlete. She was on the college swim team aiming for the Olympics and fancied that the only kind of guy who would really “get” her had to be someone who understood the world of competitive sports; so I got disqualified pretty much from the start.

But, just between you and me, my lack of confidence in college surely didn’t help. And nothing Van did back then boosted my confidence.

And there’s more. It was interesting to see her interact with her husband and her kids. Of course, she eventually had to go into a professional career and works for a human rights organization. Does really good work. Travels across the ocean. But, at the same time, at the dinner she managed to criticize one of her kids in front of me and Arlene instead of doing it in a way that we wouldn’t have witnessed (and wouldn’t have embarrassed the kid).

And, she winds up being away from her husband and her children for long and pretty frequent periods in connection with her career, something that she said at coffee makes for nagging resentments at home. In fact, Van told me that her husband was a bit pissed-off that she was going to have coffee with me, because he doesn’t get as much time with her as he wants.

“So how do you feel about all that?” I asked.

Well, when I’ve thought about her over the years, I sort of idealized her. I’d never realized how self-involved she was. Before, when we were dating and she seemed distracted I took it exclusively as her lack of interest in me. But, seeing her with her husband and kids — seeing the way she relates to them — I guess this is just part of who she is, a part that hasn’t changed much. And, I guess seeing all of that now takes her off the pedestal I’d erected for her. So the life she had in my imagination, the kind of person I’d remembered her to be, was actually not the same as the flesh and blood person she is.

Now, really for the first time, I can see that things couldn’t possibly have worked out between us. But not for the reasons she’d identified — not for the fact that I wasn’t an elite athlete; it would have killed me to be with someone in a marriage who is as into herself and her work as she is. And, it wouldn’t have been good for any kids we had.

But you know what else? Even with all that, seeing her again stirred me just the way it did the very first time we met. I mean, maybe it’s pheromones or something, but there are just some people you are drawn to, no matter how much your head might tell you not to go there.

Thinking about her now — 20 years later — from the point of view of a clinical psychologist, I realize that sometimes things aren’t as they seem. The judgments you made “way back when” (really, when you were a still kid) aren’t necessarily trustworthy or wise.

Van is a very good, very attractive person and she always was. She means no one harm and does good in the world. But a life with her, the thing I desperately wanted, would have been disastrous for me.

“Sobering,” concluded Ish. “I guess the ‘Van-Ish’ relationship needed to vanish. I would have drowned trying to reach her.”

Then, after maybe 30 seconds silence, came his postscript.

I nearly took a hit from a van on the highway, just after taking a hit from a Van I was in love with.

The near miss could have killed me.

But the near Mrs. would have killed me, for sure.

Isn’t life something?

—

The top image is of a Young White Whale or Beluga approaching an inflatable (Churchill River near Hudson Bay, Canada) and is the work of Ansgar Walk. The drawing that follows of Captain Ahab is the work of Petesimon. The final image is an Illustration of the Final Chase of Moby Dick, from the 1902 edition of Herman Melville’s famous novel published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1902, drawn by I. W. Taber. All three are sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

You probably wouldn’t notice her if you passed her on the street.

It’s not that she isn’t attractive, but it is an attractive middle-age — no competition for her younger, “knock-out” self.

But if you did happen to look closely, the thing that you’d see would be the kindness in her face: a most uncommon capacity for affection, forgiveness, and grace.

She is perhaps the most extraordinary person I’ve ever met; someone with terrible luck, especially early on, but an emotional generosity that would cause even a sceptic to believe that humanity just might come out on the side of the angels, after all.

Her mother was, of all things, a social worker. But whatever mom knew about social work, she forgot as soon as she came home. Her youngest — my patient (let’s call her Maggie) — was an active, pretty little girl.

Could mom have been jealous?

Mother favored Maggie’s older brother, (let’s call him Tom) a beefy, muscular giant of a young man who was his high school’s resident athlete and hero early, turned bully and trouble maker late. By 14 he was a drug addict, which only fueled an already unbridled, violent streak. That quality initially made him a boxing and wrestling powerhouse, before it made him an ungovernable monster.

But he was clever, only beating on his sister when his folks were at work or away, usually careful not to leave marks that couldn’t be passed off as his sister’s clumsiness. When Maggie complained to mom, mom sided with her male child. And when teachers saw this young girl looking distracted and downcast, unable to concentrate and lost in daydreams, they just thought about how unruly her older brother was, and assumed that his sister practiced a less overt form of disobedience and disrespect.

What about dad? He was a decent, but weak man. While he sympathized with his daughter and believed her stories about Tom (in part because he once — just barely — prevented Maggie’s death by strangulation), dad’s own alcoholism made him an inadequate advocate and defender. Moreover, his job took him out-of-town for days at a time. And when he wasn’t there, Maggie was an easier target for her mother’s verbal abuse, mom’s claims that she lied about Tom, and brother’s use of Maggie as a punching bag.

The family was divided into opposing camps. Mother held the metaphorical whip-hand, angry at her husband for his weakness and addiction, angry at her daughter for her beauty and closeness to dad. Tom became almost a substitute marital partner for Maggie’s mom, without the sex. He was the one she admired and did things for. He was the one she protected. He was the one she believed, no matter how preposterous his stories were.

Maggie lived in fear of her own death at the hands of a drug-crazed brother, terrified of standing up to people and voicing opinions that might be criticized, and desperate for affection and safety. She learned to follow orders.

Not surprisingly, as she got older she drifted into her own alcohol abuse and escape from reality; and into relationships with men who initially looked to be protective, but inevitably turned out to be unkind at best, abusive and selfish at worst.

Her therapy process was a long one. She needed to grieve the events of her childhood: the weakness and death of her father, rage and weep over the abuse she suffered, grapple with a mother who was no mother, and a brother who was a criminal and her tormentor. Maggie had to learn how to value herself more highly and stand-up for herself more routinely.

Meanwhile, Tom’s life of antisocial behavior eventually became impossible for even Maggie’s mother to deny. He spent time in prison when he wasn’t ripping-off friends and associates, selling drugs, and abusing his own wife and children. The children came to hate him. And in middle-age, the combination of 40 years of drug abuse and diabetes began to show. Increasingly isolated and alone, he reached out to the sister who had finally gotten him out of her life.

By now Maggie and her mother were closer, the same mother who all but trained her son to go after Maggie like an attack dog. To some extent mom apologized. And when the mother became infirm, Maggie cared for her.

Now Maggie confronted Tom. No longer the bully, he had become a man in a more dependent position. Tom had almost no friends, lived alone in poverty, and received subsidies from the state to pay for his medical needs, groceries, and rent.

His diet ignored the encroaching diabetes and its increasing claim of his lower extremities, to the point of becoming wheel chair-bound. Much of his money still went to drugs. Every day meant another chance — a requirement, a necessity — to score. His government check came at the beginning of the month so that by month’s end, having purchased drugs to remain high for as much time as possible as soon as possible, he had little to pay for food.

Maggie confronted her brother with his physical abuse. He told her that he had no recollection of it, but didn’t say that he disbelieved her. Indeed, Tom said that he knew she wasn’t lying, but blamed the drugs for his lack of memory. Was he lying? Was Tom in denial himself? Or had the drug-induced haze of his teens given way to a drug-generated brain damage that genuinely robbed him of his ability to recall those events that she remembered so painfully?

With the mother’s death, Maggie’s brother was the only surviving close family member. And, in his distress, the most extraordinary thing happened. Maggie was kind to him, affectionate, and tried her best to help him make his life less miserable, a life that represented the just deserts for his misanthropy and criminality.

For the most part, Maggie no longer put-up with her brother’s crap. She challenged his lies, sometimes going as much as a year without talking to him because of his persistent abuse of his own body and reluctance to put himself in treatment for his addiction.

But, when they did have contact, she was able to laugh with him and worry about him and feel sorry for him. Not because he had earned any of this, but simply because her basic human decency and loving nature could not do otherwise. When he had surgeries, she always came to his bedside, even though she lived in another state.

Inexplicably, whatever lingering anger Maggie had for her sibling vanished. She had come to see him as someone who was in the grip of an addiction that was costing him his life, but no longer capable of doing anything to free himself.

At the end, when Tom’s organs started to fail, he called her and let her know that the doctors said he would be dead in a matter of days. She traveled again to the in-hospital death vigil. Even Tom’s children wanted no part of him by this time. And, for two weeks, Maggie (nearly bankrupt herself) lived in a motel near the medical facility and spent each day and evening at Tom’s bedside, ministering to the brother who had tormented her and crushed her; holding his hand and soothing him in whatever way she could.

Near the time of his death, nurses and staff came up to Maggie individually and made a simple request: “May I hug you?” Maggie embraced each of them as they told her that they had never before seen the kind of devotion and cheerful tenderness that they’d witnessed in those two weeks of Maggie’s shining presence at Tom’s mattress-grave.

“We see so many families that can’t seem to be bothered, that call and ask whether the relative is still alive, that just can’t bear it or don’t take the time.”

The hospital staff saw Maggie as extraordinary. And they didn’t even know her history of abuse or that the man who lay dying was Maggie’s abuser.

And when her brother died, Maggie wept for him.

You may be asking, how can all this be explained?

I know that I would not have behaved as admirably as Maggie did.

In trying to understand it for myself, here is the best I’ve been able to do.

First, I must eliminate two explanations. Maggie’s behavior was not a function of some deep-seated and thoroughly-considered study of moral philosophy. She was not an abstract thinker, steeped in the world of ancient wisdom and people like Socrates, Epictetus, and Kant; but lived instead in the real world of practicality and daily challenges.

Nor was this woman very religious. Thus, her actions didn’t spring from reliance on holy text, a profoundly held belief in God, or even something as simple as church attendance, which she had long since given up.

No, the best I can do is to say that some few people like Maggie are just “good.” Not the kind of good that is relatively convenient. Not the kind that gives money to charity or volunteers at the soup kitchen, as “good” as those actions are. They are good at a level that beggars understanding, so good “by nature” and by choice that they don’t seem bound by man-made rules, expectations, or necessities.

They are the kind of people who put their lives at risk to save strangers and then think nothing of it and never say a word about it. It is as if their brains and their hearts don’t work as they do for all the rest of us.

In a funny way, they are alien — as if from another world.

Certainly a better world, if such a place exists.

When I tell you that being a therapist is privilege, in part, it is because it has allowed me to know just a few people like this.

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The top photo, Caring Hands, is described as follows: “An Iraqi girl from the Janabi Village waits in line with her dad to be examined by an Iraqi doctor, Yusufiyah, Iraq, March 02, 2008. The Medical Operation was conducted by U.S. Soldiers from Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division and the Sons of Iraq (Abna al-Iraq).” The U.S. Army photo was taken by Spc. Luke Thornberry.

The next photo, also from 2008, is called A Caring Mom, taken by  A Frank Wouters.

The final image is Helping the Homeless by Ed Yourdan. The author writes:

This was taken about halfway up the block on the east side of Broadway, between 79th and 80th Street (in New York City). It’s at the north end of the “Filene’s Basement” store on the corner, and it’s a place where I’ve often seen homeless people holding up a sign that asks for assistance…

With very rare exceptions, I haven’t photographed these homeless people; it seems to me that they’re in a very defensive situation, and I don’t want to take advantage of their situation. But something unusual was happening here: the two women (who were actually cooperating, and acting in tandem, despite the rather negative demeanor of the woman on the left) were giving several parcels of food to the young homeless man on the right.

I don’t know if the women were bringing food from their own kitchen, or whether they had brought it from a nearby restaurant. But it was obviously a conscious, deliberate activity, and one they had thought about for some time…

What was particularly interesting was that they didn’t dwell, didn’t try to have a conversation with the young man; they gave him the food they had brought, and promptly walked away. As they left, I noticed the young man peering into his bag (the one you see on the ground beside him in this picture) to get a better sense of the delicious meal these two kind women had brought him…

All three images are sourced from Wikimedia Commons.