I’m in a philosophical mood tonight–you have been warned–because I spent the afternoon communing with ghosts.
No, I’m not being followed around by Dr. Malcolm Crowe and trying to get him to realize he’s dead so he’ll leave me the hell alone. No, I’m not trying to get people to crossover into the light because our apartment building was built on their graves. No, I haven’t been watching too much American Horror Story (in fact, I barely got through season one and then they kept Dylan McDermott and got rid of Connie Britton. I mean, really?).
Instead I’ve been looking over old pictures of old friends and old haunts posted on the Hayden High School group on Facebook.
This got me thinking about old friends and it occurred to me that, in many ways, friends are very much the same as ghosts. They always inhabit the same time and place. They are always linked to the same emotions. They are always the same age. They always do the same things. They always talk the same way. They always wear the same clothes.
Meeting the same people years later is not the same as meeting your old friend. They are a mere hint of what they used to be. My best friend from when I was growing up in Colorado now makes brooms for a living and speaks with an Arkansas accent. My best friend from university is paid to watch soccer and has also become a talented artist. The kid I grew up with builds hot rods and barely had time to see me that last time I was in the USA.
They are different people and although it’s fun to reminisce, I need to get to know them again now that they are not who they were. Now that they have much more interesting stories to tell about experiences we didn’t share.
I suppose this feeling is part of the fun of aging and becoming more experienced and learning more about the world. It’s the same as going back to your kindergarten or your elementary school and realizing how small it actually was but remembering in your bones how big it felt. I had the same feeling when I managed to sneak back to Hayden High School after having been away a few years. I remember Mr. Wenzlau, who taught history and social studies, smiling at my reaction–Yes, I spoke out loud as I’ve never learned to keep my mouth shut about things like that–and telling me, in so many words, that I’d seen more of the world and wasn’t the same person. (I remember thinking “Living in Salina-f&#%ing-Kansas counts as seeing the world?”)
It’s also, I suppose, a remnant of the glorious feeling we had when we were children that everything would always be the same. Friends wouldn’t move away; friends wouldn’t die; we really would be best friends forever. And maybe we will be. Maybe we are.
We just have to convince that old ghost in our heads to leave us the hell alone so we can move on.
Boo!
Just kidding.
I find myself thinking similar thoughts on occasion, and I remember being envious of you then. You had an Atari 2600 and got to travel from time to time.
And I remember the last time I saw you. You came to visit us in Craig in about 1982. The visit was stilted because we knew it was goodbye, for good, we thought.
But I moved on and got over you… I traveled. I bought an Atari 2600 and played Pitfall till I could play it asleep.
And although you ended up in Japan teaching whilst I am in Arkansas making and selling hand-crafted brooms (a speaking with an ever thickening southern drawl that), we have quite a few similarities: I drool over nice pens; I also have a penchant for sharp pointy thing; we both teach, in different ways; and we each have ghosts haunting us.
I had forgotten about that awkward meeting. Yeah, that was an odd time. I think it got buried by the awkward meeting with the girls up the street–from my first post–when they stayed the night on their way to other parts.
For what it’s worth, I remember being envious of you, especially before we moved, because while I had an Atari 2600, you had a dad who actually seemed interested in what you were doing and taught you stuff. (Fodder for another blog post, that.) About the only thing I learned, except some basic shooting and to ride a motorcycle, was the love of travel. Or maybe that’s what I inherited (another blog post).
Looks as thought I’m the second to answer the roll call. Paid-to-watch-soccer-guy here, thanking you for the kind assessment of the artist I sometimes find myself becoming.
(My own weakness in pens, I should say, runs more toward form than function. Give me a fish that writes with its nose, or a punching frog, or a skull-topped pen that lights up when the tip is pressed to paper — which was a favorite to break out during news conferences with Bill Snyder — and I’m happy.)
I live with ghosts, too, of places as well as people. That has been intensified over the past year, with the daily writing of this or that thing dredged up from some mental/emotional pond. Some days, the past is an almost tangible thing — and then I put out my hand, and it passes right through.
When you and Keiko came to Kansas City last year, and the Brisendines and Livelys went out for barbecue once more — a pattern when you’re in town, even if the wavelength is more than a decade long — there were moments when we were Brisendine and DL, hanging out over pints in a London local or shooting snooker at that upstairs bar on the south side of Aggieville.
And we could talk of those things, and others, as though they happened last week. We’re both writers, with fairly keen memories, so maybe we have an easier time of that than most.
But we’re also middle-aged men with graying (or shaved-off) hair, men who have put down roots on opposite sides of the world, while still — again, the writer’s nature — always keeping that bit of observational distance. We can share the similarities, but we can’t say “Hey, remember when?”
In some ways, we are the same people we used to be — same senses of humor, same conversational patterns, that sort of thing — and in others, we are people our younger selves might not recognize.
And it’s all okay. The connections change, because they have to, but they’re still there. And the best ones, I think, are the ones that maintain a healthy blend of what was and what is. There’s nothing wrong with revisiting the past, but we’ve all seen people who grab on to touchstones in their own histories and won’t let go — and it’s not pretty.
So we’re not in our twenties any more, and Roger Daltrey didn’t die before he got old. Things aren’t always easy, but I would say the grownups — and the kids inside who occasionally come out to play — are still all right.
Oh, I didn’t know you had a fetish for fish pens and funny pens. I may have finally figured out a souvenir for you…
You’re getting at what I was kind of circling around in the post (one side-effect of imposing a one hour limit on my post writing is I have to be quick about it, not necessarily coherent). This topic’s been in and out of my head for a while, especially since last summer. I went back and forth with it a bit last night; however, now that school’s out, I can start “exploring the space” of what I can write about so I decided to go for it. I used to be the type who wanted things to always be the same. My attitude was “sure, there are lots of kids, lots of pain, and lots of other friends involved, but it’s me, dammit.”
I got better.
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