Songs About the New World

Aerie and I arranged to get together last night and talk details for our divorce decree. We're doing our best to make this transition as amicable as possible. I've been saying and thinking that word a lot lately. Amicable. Amicable.

And now that we're not living together, and we're navigating our new lives apart and our new schedules as Joint Managing Conservators instead of, you know, whatever we were before, things really are fairly amicable. I look around me at the divorce stories that suddenly seem to be everywhere, and if divorcing well is a competition, I think we're winning. She's not taking out a Protective Order against me and fighting in court for full custody. We're not pitting our friends against each other or making them choose sides. She's not hiding money from joint accounts. I'm not stalking her, or playing mind games or threatening her with dastardly deeds. Neither of us is telling Thumper that the other parent is awful. He's not a pawn in some jacked up game between us. We're just... you know... amicable.

But with all this amicability flying around everywhere, and with the excitement of exploring my new life outside of all of the old roles and patterns I'd been living under for so many years, I thought that I was past the point of getting upset.  Yes, I really thought that after 23 years, I was emotionally over the hump, just six months after the word "divorce" was first uttered. I wasn't.

I've picked Thumper up and dropped him off at her house, that used to be our house. I've driven through the neighborhood before and been inside the house picking up clothes and furniture and piles of stuff. But last night, for some reason, it hit me harder. I saw neighbors walking and jogging through the neighborhood that used to be mine but isn't now, that I used to walk and jog through but won't anymore. The loop that I used to push a stroller around, past that playground we've been going to since Thumper was a brand new baby and I was a brand new stay-at-home dad. I stood on the porch and rang the bell. I didn't make myself at home and get a soda out of the fridge, or plates from the cabinet for the sandwiches I brought for us to eat while we worked. It's her house now, her stuff, her kitchen. I used the guest bathroom, not the master, and when I came out and sat down at the kitchen table to start working with her on details, I was a little shocked to find myself crying. The anger, the sorrow, the regret, the loss, they are all still real, no matter how much I want them to be memories now.

I hadn't been on the blog in quite some time. I saw I had an unpublished draft post from January, about the time the d-word first came up, that was entirely the lyrics to "Love's Recovery" by Indigo Girls. At the time, there still seemed a slim chance, but now our storm has passed and that slim chance is gone. A lot of the words fit, including the friends we thought were so together. So I'm sure I'm a cliché, 43 and divorcing, but the emotions don't feel so cliché now that I'm in them.



But now I'm just getting maudlin.

It's funny how things come to us sometimes all at once. I've never been much of a country music fan. I have a dear friend who's let me borrow her truck a few times through all of this moving of stuff, and a good many of her stereo's presets are country stations. Not wanting to jack with her settings, I listened to country music while I drove. I also worked a country music festival at my beloved arena not too long ago, and I thought some of those songs were downright toe-tappable. But still, I think of myself as too good to listen to country, really, and complained about having "Rock me, Mama, like a wagon wheel" stuck in my head. I think I'm too smart, I suppose. I have an ugly bias against it where words like "hillbilly" and "redneck" and "Deliverance" pop into my mind.

Then a friend posted a photo of what she saw as "a cool cat," and I was transported instantly back to 1979, when Hoyt Axton appeared on my favorite TV show, WKRP in Cincinnati. I still remember the hooks to "Jealous Man" and "Della and the Dealer" from that show, though honestly, I must've seen them over and over again in syndication throughout the '80s for me to have memorized them like that. But I instantly commented on my friend's picture, "If that cat could talk, what tales he'd tell about Della and the dealer and the dog as well. But that cat was cool, and he never said a mumblin' word." She probably wondered what in the hell any of that had to do with a cat she saw on a street in Italy.



Later, I read Film Crit Hulk's article about Disney's Robin Hood that mentioned Roger Miller's original songs, and I found myself again inexplicably contemplating a master of '60s tongue-in-cheek country storytelling. So today, while spending the rest of my lunch hour walking around and around the concourse of my beloved arena to burn off the brisket and sausage I ate, I plugged "Hoyt Axton" into Pandora on my phone and spent a little bit of a while with Hoyt, Roger, Willie, Waylon, Johnny, Hank Jr., Merle, Jerry Reed, and Jimmy Dean. I don't know why I'm on a first name basis with everybody but Jerry and Jimmy, but there you go. I didn't even know Jimmy Dean was a singer. I thought he just sold sausage. My mom met him in an Eckerd's drug store once. Or so my faulty memory tells me the story goes.

So I was smiling as I walked, 'round and 'round, both at the music and at my own folly. I've always known so many things that it turned out I didn't know at all. Like that my marriage would last forever, and that I hated country music. That the end of the marriage would be the end of the world. But nah. It's working out. I've always been crazy, but it's kept me from going insane.

Commitment

Through the miracle of Netflix streaming, I'm watching Shaka Zulu for the first time since it was first broadcast on television in the '80's. Aside from the inherent racism in the fact that bare African breasts were acceptable on network television when bare European breasts most certainly were not, I'm thinking about how many of my most admired heroes are military men willing to do anything and everything to achieve their goals.

I love war movies; I've recently obsessed on Toshiro Mifune as the unstoppable samurai. Years ago, I went through a Civil War period, reading memoirs and biographies of men like John Mosby, Stonewall Jackson, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and William Tecumseh Sherman, men who were willing to break the rules in order to win.

I'm currently watching the episode where Shaka defies the general who tells him that warfare is fought at 50 paces, with long spears and small shields, with little chance and no intention of killing or dying. Shaka remakes the tools of war, and the strategies, and in doing so creates an empire to rival Napoleon's, or Alexander's.

Odd that these are my heroes, since I am as far from a military man as one could possibly get, and I can't commit to losing 50 pounds, let alone commit to sacrificing everything for the sake of a principle, such as honor, or pride, or God, or country.

In honor of Franklin and her beloved paper artifacts, here's a letter I wrote a month after beginning dorm life a couple thousand miles away from home. God, I was an idiot. And apparently I would've been happy to schtoop Robyn. And Mac wasn't nearly as cool as I thought he was, though [roommate] probably was. It's strange to look back at who you were and see someone almost completely different, and even weirder to see what's still the same. God, I'm still an idiot...




10-3-91

Mom and Dad,
As you say, I am pretty removed from the “mundane” things like T.V., but sometimes a show becomes a dorm event, like when Doogie Howser lost his virginity. Beverly Hills 90210 is a weekly event as well, though I can’t understand why. Like I keep saying, these performing arts people are a strange lot. The other T.V. show I see with any regularity is Cheers, which appears to be on somewhere, on some channel, 24-hours a day. Other than that, I don’t see much. How are the Cowboys doing? And the Broncos?

Things around here are going really well. [Ex-girlfriend] and I have given up trying to be lovers, and we’re putting our efforts into making a solid friendship now. That has removed a lot of angst and frustration from my life. Tonight I’m going to see my first Red Sox games (Fenway is within walking distance), and tomorrow [roommate] and I are going to the Museum of Fine Arts. He’s really been trying hard to help me understand what it’s like to be black in America, and the resulting conversations have gone well beyond interesting. He’s going to show me an exhibit at the museum that deals with racism in mass media. He also wants me to see one of his favorite places: a Buddhist rock garden that is open at the museum from late spring until mid-October. It is a permanent part of the MFA. I’m gaining more and more respect for [him] every day.

New subject: Boston is a scary town at times. Last night, Robyn (who is a very wonderful person whom I admire greatly) had a fight with (apparently her boyfriend) Mac. So at about 11:30 she decided to go for a walk. Alone. About midnight I went out looking for her and saw her walking down Beacon Street. I asked her if she was all right and if she thought it was a good idea to be out alone so late. She said she was fine, that she could take care of herself, and she made it very clear that she wanted to be alone. So I watched her walk away and then I went back to the dorm. A little after that, Mac went out looking for her, and I started feeling bad for letting her go. So I went out again shortly after Mac. I did not find Robyn, but a little while later I did run into Mac. Two guys had tried to mug him, but he had been able to fend them off through his knowledge of martial arts. He did, however, get cut on the arm by the straight razor one of the muggers had. When I saw Mac and heard his story, I got really scared about Robyn. We walked up and down Beacon, Newbury, and Mass. Ave. looking for her, periodically going back to the dorm to see if she’d gone home. By 1:00, I thought for sure that I’d killed her by watching her walk away earlier. Anyway, by 1:30, she had gone back to the dorm and everyone was fine, except Mac and his cut, which really turned out, after he washed off the blood, to be very minor. But I was so scared, especially when I thought how if it had been me or Robyn who had met the muggers, we might very well have ended up with a cut throat. One has got to be careful in this town.

So that’s the news from around here. Classes are going well, my writing is being well-received by my teachers, I did surprisingly well on my oral performance for the freshman seminar on Monday, and I’ve got my first tests in Western Civ. and French tomorrow.

Love,
Rodius

P.S. How’s the golf game coming, Dad?

Note to Self

When making a joke, you may want to consider whether or not the cultural experience on which it is based is universal to your audience. Case in point: I made a bad joke yesterday. While rinsing the pesto sauce out of my lunch dish, I chuckled at my own cleverness. I went into the other room and said to Mrs. Rodius:

"If I were an adman creating a campaign for a company that sells pesto sauce, I would pitch the slogan, Pesto es vivia."

She said, "What does that mean?"

It then occurred to me that not everyone, and certainly not Mrs. Rodius, watched as much television through the '80's as I did. Perhaps for them, the Lynn Redgrave Weight Watchers "This is living" campaign does not occupy any space in the memory cells of their brains. If that's true, then the exotic spin Ms. Redgrave put on it in a commercial for a Mexican dish of some sort ("esto es vivia") may not immediately spring to mind when it is cleverly tweaked to apply to pesto sauce.

And once again it was demonstrated to me in clear terms that the me walking around out here in the real world just ain't as funny as the me inside my head.