What has come clear to me though, which this narrative simply reinforces, is that aging sucks. Life takes on more meaning as you age. You enjoy the small things more. You're less worked up. Happier. Yet there's a deep realization under the surface that more of your life is behind you than ahead of you. With each passing year, there is less time to make up for lost time. Once you hit fifty, you realize what you've achieved so far is more or less the life you will have from here on out. Even if you're in a good place, there is a sadness as you realize the dichotomy between your dreams and your reality.
So much of youth is wasted on worrying about what others think. For most of us, it takes us well beyond the lifespan of our natural lives to step into our real selves. I lived way too much of my life afraid, especially around others, to simply be myself, to be the person God created and loves deeply. As good as my parents were at parenting, somehow that message was not received. Perhaps it simply can't be conveyed. I haven't done any better with my kids. But we matter. Immensely. Beyond measure. Because we refuse to believe it, we live far below our potential, and so we dream one life and live another. For some that gap is so big and scary, they have to lie about who they are. They boast, and they tell stories, none of which are true. They live life in fear that the world will find out they are less than they say they are. The character Ted Baxter on the Mary Tyler Moore Show was a perfect example of this. That's the sad lie Satan seeds so successfully: that we have no worth. And others, mostly unintentionally, reinforce it, because they, themselves, deep down don't believe in themselves either. And Satan seeds one more lie, to fuel this: scarcity. He teaches us that there is not enough to go around--not enough love, not enough recognition, not enough money, not enough resources--and this belief pits us competitively against each other. And so we compete for narrow desires rather than living grandly with arms wide open to all that God would have us receive individually and collectively if we'd only accept it. The current fear of illegal immigration is a perfect example of this. We fear our jobs are being taken, that somehow our wages aren't fair because of illegal immigrants, although there is no factual basis for this, as most Americans don't want those type of jobs in the first place, when, instead, we could be focusing on the enriched culture fueled by immigration--legal or not: better food, greater variety of rhythms to our music, and more interesting neighborhoods, not to mention groceries that we can actually afford because of other people's desperation forces them accept unfair wages.
Perhaps that is what this book is ultimately about: to reconcile the life I lived with who I now know I am; to forgive those who hurt me; and to thank those who got me through it, so that I can continue my journey more fully engaged with the life around me.
Ultimately, one cannot experience gratitude without honesty. That's what draws me to the blues. The music is honest. It's ultimate purpose is to express, This is what this feels like. If slavery doesn't damage your divine soul, something's wrong. If being beat, abused, told you're nothing doesn't hurt, something's wrong. That's also what drew me to John Lennon. He was man enough to admit he was crippled inside. Too much of religion, like too much of the self-help industry, glosses over the gap between who we think we are and the love we need to accept from God to become whole. Gratitude must sometimes include, Damn this sucks, and no matter how flawed I am, I simply don't deserve it, in order to be real. No one can get to heaven, in this life or the next, believing they are too flawed for God's grace. Yet that is exactly what we believe anytime we mentally or verbally begin a sentence, "I'm too fat, I'm too old, I'm too (fill in the blank)."
Loss of now. That's what we experience when buy into Satan's two lies--that we don't matter and that we live in a world of scarcity rather than abundance. The moment you are caught up in, "I'm too fat," you are not really living. You are locked in your own internal dialog that puts yourself down. Jealously obsessing over the good fortune of another does the same thing--removes you from the moment and locks you up in hypothetical walls. Living in the now, however, does not mean ignoring reality. Perhaps you really could lose a few pounds. Perhaps you really do need to take some action to improve your lot in life. But when we know we matter, and we know God based life on a model of abundance, we can move forward, enjoying now without fear. We take a stroll down to the deli for a salad anticipating that new night class we will take. Knowing our worth motivates us to action. Ignorance of our worth leaves us either seeking escape or accepting the dull numbness of living the labels and situation life handed us, or worse of all, it causes some to find a scapegoat.
I lost a lot of the now back in the 1980s because I didn't believe in myself and because I believed in a world of scarcity rather than abundance. I had a great life living with my brother. True, we were the working poor, and true, I was very shy, which made being around girls that I was attracted to unbearably painful, but we lived the life of artists, taking in and condensing the world around us. What can be more meaningful than being up after midnight listening to music while painting or writing? Everyday was an act of creation, and I didn't even begin to glimpse how glorious that is because there was a part of me that didn't believe I was worthy of joy.
As Marci and I drove past a couple of my old homes, it is that underappreciated life I sought to reclaim. I wasn't imagining a different outcome, but rather a different income. I wanted to view the life I would have lived if I'd viewed it then through the lenses of openness and gratitude.
Below is second home that had meaning to me that Marci and I drove by on September 11, 2019. After years of living in apartment complexes, Lloyd worked hard to get us here. We only rented, and it is only a duplex, but compared to apartment living, it felt like we'd grasped that American dream.
What held me back? I'm not sure. We had neighbors out back, but they seldom used their yard. You could see into the backyard from the street, but it was a quiet street. Our landlord made me nervous. Perhaps that was it. I spilled paint on the back porch once, working on another lousy painting, and was frantically cleaning it up, hoping he wouldn't come by. I looked up, and sure enough, he was standing over me with a dry smile. I don't think he was a bad guy. He was actually a very good landlord, and took real good care of his property. It just didn't take much for me to feel uncomfortable. Junior high students had told me I was scum, and there was a part of me that accepted the lie.
And so I never fully enjoyed a home I still find pretty today.
What I remember most about living in that house is typing a novel that wasn't really a novel at all on an electric typewriter my mother gave to me. I'd liked a girl named Shideh, a beautiful Iranian, and to my surprise, she liked me. Though in college now, I wasn't used to that. In my head I was still that ninth grade kid girls ignored and boys tortured. Part of me knew she liked me. We worked at a store in the mall. One night she ran her fingers through my hair as I was squatting down to put the money bag in the safe. Another time she hid the price gun behind her back and said, "I bet you can't get this away from me." When I didn't even try--Oh how I wanted to!--frustrated, she asked, "How come you don't know how to play?"
If I had the courage to be the person God created, I would have said, "There's a part of me that simply can't believe someone as beautiful as you could possibly see anything of worth while in me." That is truly how I felt, and looking back, I realize, that just may have worked! But I didn't. I couldn't. I was simply too damaged from all the bullying I received in junior high and high school. But in the privacy of my room, in the house pictured above, I could write. And so I did. I wrote as if my life depended on it. And it probably did. Living an alternative reality in my head probably kept me from taking my own life. I don't know if I would have made it through without art. I had damn good parents, and I knew I was intelligent. But my shyness was so hard to overcome, I may have chose to opt out if I didn't have the avenues of escape that art provides.
Art is a fantastic tool for dealing with yourself. It allows you to both fantasize and deal with reality simultaneously. Writing a novel can be both a form of escape and intense therapy simultaneously. As creator of that world, you get to choose what details to include--enough fantasy to take the edge off of the pain and enough reality to begin to analyze your place in the world.
And so I was drawn to that typewriter and to this imaginary world where Shideh and I were lovers living in a small, white concrete and glass Le Corbusier-like home on the red sandstone shores of Lake Powell in Utah, isolated from the world except for a Navajo trading post down a long, gravel road.
I realize now, I was seeking safety. In Utah, I had been treated well as a kid. The imagined setting for the home was as isolated as could be from the life I was living in Dallas. The trading post provided a connection back to my life in the city--but one that I could control. In that setting, Shideh was held captive. There was no competition from others guys. In the real world, she got lots of male attention. I felt completely incapable of competing. For I'd been taught well in junior high that girls are attracted to the jerks--the asshole jock who spends his time torturing me. There was simply no way her attraction to me could be more than a passing fancy.
Of course, I had no idea about the psychology behind my impulse. I was simply writing away a pain too deep to deal with. I wish I still had some of the novel, but I don't. I'm not sure what happened to it, but I do have some poems I'd written during the same time period. After what I'd been through, love (other than as a feeling) was simply too big of a leap for me. It's not that I was afraid to take it. I just had zero skills on how to proceed. For some reason though, I could always write, even though nobody taught me how. That one, I guess, was granted by God, a tool to deal with world around me and to keep me safe.
Here are a few of the poems I wrote:
Shideh's Land
Grain crops and hay
Light blue skies, early morning haze
The grass is so green even the people wish to graze
Swarms of fruit trees
Crops of honey bees
And if the queen was to leave
This rich running land
Would become a sea of desert blowing sand.
Shideh-High
Shideh-high
Shideh-smile
Shideh, can you stay for just a while?
Shideh-low
Shideh, please go
I don't know what I'm falling in love for
Shideh-style
Shideh-smile
Shideh, can you stay for just a while?
Shideh-games
Shideh-tease
Shideh, please!
Shideh, do you fondle my name?
Shideh, you scramble my brain.
Glass
Glass sky
Connecting eyes
Laughing with a smile
White cloud
Music soft, playing loud
And I can't help
Falling in love with you.
No, I can't help
Falling in love with you.
Obviously the last stanza of that last poem was stolen material. I'm okay with that. We learn through imitation. As a poet, what I was doing was learning to hear. Sure, I stole the last stanza from Elvis, but in the process, those same soft sounds and gentle rhythms grace the whole poem, most of which was my own creation.
In life, I was not able to pick up on those same gentle rhythms. Things between Shideh and I quickly turned sour. It wasn't her fault. I simply could not be myself around her. I was locked in fear. It was impossible for me to believe I could be loved. I had all those voices from junior high and high school screaming in my head that I was a pile of shit, and although I tried, I couldn't drown them out. So, subconsciously I quickly sabotaged everything. Had I grasped one thing, and one thing only--transparency--we probably would have had a relationship. I think all it would have taken was for me to say, "Hey, I'm trying; I really am, but I've been hurt, deeply hurt, and I just don't know how to do this. Show me, and I will learn."
But I couldn't. I didn't. And that's alright. That's what life is all about. Flopping our way grandly to becoming something more. And what hurts deeply in the moment often becomes a fond memory with time.
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