Adult alternative

“I thought you left this morning,” I said to a friend of mine when he called last Tuesday evening.

“I did,” he answered.

He was calling from his mom’s house, where he would spend Thanksgiving. There was a pause. “I just did something really stupid.”

I waited for more of an explanation but then realized he needed me to say something. It was almost too painful to admit without some coaxing. “What?” I asked.

“Just take a guess.”

I knew. In a not-so-lucid moment, he had called the guy whose heart, more than nine months ago, he had tried to win back. That was Tuesday.

On Thursday morning, as I was getting dressed after showering, minutes before my parents and I would leave for lunch at my grandparents, I called out to my dad to remind me of the name of the guy my cousin had been dating seriously for at least a year. I didn’t want to once again find myself sitting beside him on the couch or standing next to him in line for the buffet of food my female relatives prepare, desperately searching across the synapses of my mind for exactly what the guy calls himself.

Just after Dad told me, my mom, from another room, called out, “You knew they’re on the outs, right?”

No, I hadn’t known. He soon will transfer from his current school to a prominent Division I-A institution to continue playing football and, according to the bits and pieces the family has been told, has decided he isn’t sure he can pass up the prospect of dating on this new campus.

Some level of pleading apparently followed, but it appears my cousin will be heartbroken for the first time.

This revelation from the man I’m pretty sure she thought she would marry had completely blindsided her, and she’s still reeling. At our family get-together, she related a couple of anecdotes from the previous two Auburn football games to me, but, otherwise, she and I didn’t talk much. Not long after she finished her mother’s cranberry salad, our grandmother’s renowned yeast rolls (which another of our cousins long ago dubbed Granny Rolls) and helpings of turkey and dressing and green-bean casserole, she was out the door. She wasn’t feeling too well, she told us.

About 45 minutes later at the family gathering, the phone rang and her mom listened as she said she felt well enough to eat some of that chocolate pie at Granny's and could she bring her a piece.

On Friday, on the drive back to Atlanta, I thought about my friend, about my cousin, about another couple of friends of mine and about myself.

And I thought about what a co-worker of mine said during a lengthy discussion about relationships at lunch on Wednesday. As we talked about the challenges of dating, he admitted that, when he met his wife, he had already given up. Relationship after relationship had failed, and he decided it just wasn’t meant to happen for him to find someone with whom to share life. So he had developed a plan: He would focus on his work, his family and the football team he coaches and, every once in a while, find release for his carnal desires with, euphemistically speaking, a friend.

But then he met her. The One, as we say. And he was reminded of something he had once read or heard someone say: Every relationship fails — except the last one.

Back at my parents’ house on Thanksgiving Day, as the tryptophan was settling in like a valium after the family feast, I listened to the adult alternative channel on Mom and Dad’s new Direct TV satellite. It's where I first heard a song that friends later told me had already come and gone on the airwaves months ago. In beautiful simplicity, it plainly states what I think most of us hope to find. It’s what drove my cousin to feel as if she were physically sick and my friend to make that phone call.

For as long as I’ve been attending weddings, couples have cited the passage in Ruth in which she declares to Naomi, “Wherever you go, I will go. Your people shall be my people.”

I’ve often thought that, if I’m ever fortunate enough to find someone who can not only tolerate my shortcomings but also learn to love them, I’d want to hear recited some variation of the words my friend Tony told me that FDR once said of a third-world dictator. He may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard.

You see everything
You see every part
You see all my light
and you love my dark.

You dig everything
of which I'm ashamed.
There's not anything
to which you can't relate.
And you're still here.
And you're still here.

Comments

[Jimmy]

Great post! (And timely for me.)