Relative-ity, Friends, and Beyond

There is a book that I recommend to almost everyone with whom I enter into a discussion about books.  It is The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson.  An alternate history that looks at what  what the world might be like if Europe had succumbed completely to The Plague rather than recuperating from it.  It also looks at souls traveling together through time and space, through multiple incarnations.  I recommended it to a friend on this trip I just finished.  
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Sometimes I wonder about the people, the spirits, we meet and and connect with throughout our lifetimes.  What random tumble of the dice allows us to be born into the families into which we are born?  After living with a hard core "this reality is all there is" type scientist for decades, I am somewhat reticent to publicly discuss spirituality as it always seems to venture into what I call woo-woo.  I thought about this a lot during my recent road trip. 

What makes us instantly connect with one person and let scores of others pass through our lives with little note?  How do we explain not seeing someone for years and years and then sitting down to talk with that person and realizing hours have passed in conversation and it is as though the years of separation have not happened?  I do not know.  I am far less of a skeptic than my husband, but I feel extremely comfortable with the peace I have with knowing there is so much more yet not having the need to limit myself to a particular set of beliefs.  Beliefs from around the world intrigue me. I think that is why this speculative fiction novel by Robinson so appeals to me.  His research is impeccable.  He conveys times and places and in this case peoples as though he has lived them.  These times, places and peoples have never existed.  He relates his connection to essences of human experience and human cultures in ways that could have happened. 

Years ago when I first read this book, I felt that the portrayal of the persistence of human spirits as well as the evocation of coherent cultures made the book one of the best speculative fiction novels I had ever read.  Sometimes writers capture archetypes.  This is what Robinson did. 

All cultures seem to have some concept of a spiritual dimension.  Sometimes members of cultures believe there are souls, for others there is a life energy to which we return, even in the scientific belief set nothing is ever created or destroyed, only transformed.  

All of this somehow combines into my occasional glimpse of the essence of my personal theology that is fueled by connections to people, gut feelings, and the occasional experiences that have no good explanation. 

Do our energies continue beyond this life?  Do they recur together?  Don't know.  I don't know that I will ever know, but sometimes I like to believe that they do.  It is great to have a literary work I can share that conveys a belief that I cannot even describe for myself.  It is doubly wonderful to share it with people who I feel as though I have a much deeper or longer life experience than our actual time together would seem to explain. 

Chicago - Mishawaka - Kendallville - Fort Wayne - Columbia City

On the road again... as Willie would say. Thursday I drove away from Minneapolis and left my all grown up baby girl Zilla there.  I cried.  Then I drove to Chicago to drop in on the Wabash Kid and the Greek Goddess - if I could find the address where they lived and if they still lived there and were home.  I had lost their phone number years ago -- somehow.  I think it had been maybe 10 years since I had seen them.  I know their youngest child was very small then and he is 13 now.  The GG is maybe 3 years older than me and he is 9 years older.  Both look GREAT, but wowie zowie having a kid when you are a woman in your 40s or a man in your 50s sends shivers up and down my spine.  My Zilla is 22 and I am tired from raising her and getting her on her way in the world.  I can't imagine having another 10 years until my parenting responsibilities step down a notch. 

So... long story longer... I remembered the name of the street they lived on and the block and the exit I used to take to get to their house.  I put that info into my smart phone GPS Navigator thingy and drove there.  I couldn't remember the exact house number so I drove up and down the block a couple times until I thought I recognized the house.  Then I parked and walked up to the house and rang the bell.  After a couple minutes the Wabash Kid came to the door.  The first spark of wide eyed recognition and broad grin of happiness to see me spread across his face erased any worry I had about showing up unannounced.  I was so relieved to find them healthy and happy.  His music, recording, and painting that WB shared with me allowed me to know a friend with more depth and intimacy than I did many years ago.  That connection touched my heart.  We talked until after midnight and much of the next morning and on through lunch.  Conversation covered the gamut of family, friends, health, art, reading/speculative fiction, creativity, economics, politics and philosophy/religion.  

Wish I could have spent more time with the Greek Goddess but her schedule precluded very much interaction... and what did I expect given I dropped in out of the blue?  Usually I spend much more time with her.  This visit was still so good.  WB and I both seemed to synch.  No awkward silences.  There are not many people  who can pick up a friendship after 10 years of silence,  But sometimes I swear there are connections between people that extend beyond time and space.  I'm in awe of mystery of life from this interaction.  Did he need it?  Did I?  I don't know.  But my somewhat difficult to extinguish mystical nature is happy that this trip that is filled with the sadness of distance from my daughter and what will be the first trip to my parent's grave site since my mother's funeral has also allowed me the comfort of shared connection with old friends.

After Chicago, I visited - with some advance notice, but not much - I stopped for a quick evening visit, some good Vietnamese food, and Scrabble®/Words with Friends® and a tour of the home they just purchased last fall.  It has only been a year plus a few weeks since I had seen them, so there wasn't as much catching up to do and our talk centered on more pragmatic concerns.  Education, the field within which they both work, our grandchildren, mutual friends, and some talk of my writing, and word games filled our visit... along with some needed sound and restful sleep.   Then early afternoonish today, I headed out on Indiana 20 to State Road 9 to Highway 6 and Kendallville where I met up, at a local restaurant, with a girl friend  I had not seen since High School Graduation.  Again it was so good to see yet another friend and find out that though life may not have been perfect for any of us, that she was doing extremely well considering the adversity she has encountered in life and recent economic challenges that so many of us have encountered since 2008. 

Tomorrow is a family day.  Breakfast with my oldest brother's wife, and then an afternoon visit with the youngest of my brothers who still has 9 years on me.  From what I can deduce from a distance, neither of them are doing very well.  I will also visit the graves of two of my brothers and my parents.  I think it could be a difficult day tomorrow in some respects. 

When the Light Fades Before Sunset

Day 14 in nablopomo blogging month, day 5 after septoplasty surgery.  The headache I've had for several days is lessening but my heart is heavy. 

People come and go in every person's life, but no where is this more evident than in a college town.  Tucson is a military town, a tourist town, and a university town.  Together all these towns have created a fairly large city.  I know lots of people here, but I do not have many close friends. People come and go here all the time  My first friends here were post docs and graduate students connected to my husband's campus department.  I was the matron of honor for one friend who was a post doc., I stay in touch with her.  Other friends who have moved away are Facebook friends and I see them occasionally.   Other friends slipped off into independent lives in other states and are only known through the rare bit of updated information a friend of a friend conveys. 

That is how someone I will call Miss A. was, a friend with whom I'd lost touch.  Back in the 1990s she was very good friends with a good friend.  That is how we met.  She was the youngest of the women who would participate in celebratory ladies' nights.  We were wild and crazy women who marveled in each others intelligence, wit, and attitude.   We drank too much, stole keys from those who wanted to drive and shouldn't, and thought we were immune from the problems that follow such actions should they become habitual.  Some of us were.  She wasn't.  

We did not know they had become habitual for Miss A.  They had.  She was 38 years old when she died from liver disease this past Sunday morning.  Did she also have Hep C from improper tattooing? Maybe, we won't ever know unless someone from her close family chooses to share that information  with us, which isn't likely. She moved away, married, had children and drank herself to death in the matter of a little more than a decade.   She is the second woman I know who was associated with a college department community who killed herself drinking.  I'm wondering if there was a department culture, or if that is just how campuses are.  Were we bad influences on her? Why did we not all head in that lonely direction she chose.  Several of us from that group had parental abandonment issues and we didn't all feel the pull to escape as she did, our children seem fairly normal, fairly healthy.   How could a mother kill herself slowly in front of her children?  How could you do that to a child?

She was so bright, so vivacious; she should have been a physician, but she didn't have the support system to pursue that path.  Support systems.  I hear that her family did try an intervention.  Sometimes you have to push away from a family to have any chance at a normal life, but without family what kind of a normal life can you have?  And there are religions that pile guilt on individuals and have differential expectations for men and women and different types of men and women. 

Oh Miss A. I'm looking at what might have been done differently.  What might I have done differently to help?  Miss A. I'm so, so sorry.  This isn't how it should have been.