get on with it

Several years ago, I read a piece in a magazine called "You Can't Catch Me!" by George Felton. It resonated with me, and although I had already bought the magazine, I copied it out, too. I was just looking for something else and found it again, and I'm going to put it up here. I will also try to figure out in which publication it was originally published so I can give proper attribution. But, for now, here it is. I think you'll see why.

Until a month ago, I was what some women call a Peter Pan - one of those men who contemplate but never decide, float instead of drive. I was hard-core, a lifer, one who truly believed he was meant to inhabit and enjoy solitude, his own bubbled biosphere. I was someone with many casual friends, a few good ones, and a life founded on the solid rock of self-esteem. So I told myself.

I've always thought of women as mysterious, desirable, and more than a little scary. I could never do without them, but why bring one home forever? Over the years, I watched myself develop close relationships, each one almost but not quite turning into marriage. I thought I was meant to muse about life with coffee, muffins, the Sunday paper, and my current woman friend, the one with whom I was sleeping. I assumed the best response to almost any question was the thoughtful 360-degree walk-around, "Gee, let me think about it." I'd ask, "Want to see The Fugitive?" as a way of not asking why she'd been so quiet in bed the night before.

This strategy, religiously pursued, transcended the marriage question, It pervaded my life. I just couldn't decide anything. I live in a very nice apartment, leaded glass windows, arched ceilings, hardwood floors, fireplace, but an apartment nonetheless, not a house. It overlooks the real thing across the street, old neighborhood houses stretching upward and away from my windows. I can stand with a cup of coffee and see them, the homes of those who said in a dream one night, "wife, backyard, fence," then woke up and did something about it. This morning I jogged through there: tricycles, dogs with bemused looks on their faces, bent basketball rims in the driveways, the clutter of bikes by the door, a red weedeater drying in wet grass. You know, life, lived.

My problem has always been finding the mechanism that said yes to all this. As a college hippie, I believed wife-house-kids was the ruination of our great human potential, so I smoked dope, listened to Jackson Browne's sad-eyed self-absorption, and at the earliest opportunity, lived with rather than married my girlfriend. It was our way of saying we knew better, and it was fun at first: love with my roommate, sex with my best friend. But somewhere in there, I became unable to take it to the next level. I had friends who married. I began to have friends who divorced and remarried. Meanwhile, I was in limbo, stuck in neutral, Peter Pan in perpetuity, and the hell of it was I didn't know why.

Barb, my little hippie lover, and I finally broke up after seven, count 'em, seven years. She wanted to do things like pick out furniture, buy a car together. I was bored with us, blamed her (Why another cat? Why such delight in her sister's kid?), and headed for a suburban tennis/spa/apartment complex where I intended to run wild. This I did, but in the split, and in Barb falling in love with another man after me, I suffered the first real pain of grief and loss. I felt as though a huge tree had been pulled out of my chest. I couldn't breathe, had trouble standing. Didn't people see the gaping, bloody holes, the trailing, twisted roots? But I never understood the pain, so I sealed it over with blacktop, drank too much, kidded with women in bars, and waited for it all to happen again.

And it did. The second woman who had made the mistake of loving me also left. Debbie had put in the better part of a decade, a record for perseverance. We never lived together, but we'd spent enough time tangled up in each other: big trips to the Eastern shore and the Bahamas; countless little ones to the malls, the movies, and our beds. When she needed more, and the ultimatum finally came ("Marry me or I'll leave"), I sat there paralyzed and watched her go. A few months later, she moved to Akron, fell in love with another guy, and called to tell me, succinctly, "I got over you." It was the most unwelcome of phone calls, and it rang straight through to my unconscious. It woke me up. I began to cry and could not stop. Then I began to scream and couldn't stop that either. I've spent the last month in a hell I didn't know was in me, a very private place I've been building most of my life. The whole front of my chest is blown away, I'm dazed, scalded, gasping for air. My hope is that this crucible will reduce Peter Pan to ash, and maybe, just maybe, it will transfigure me into that most impossible of things, an adult.

Suddenly, I see how stunted a place I've spent my years, the curious nowhere zone I've put myself and my women: no talk of a house or children or growing old together; no views longer than the middle distance; no plans at all, finally. Just things to do and fend off. But hearts, I discover, go on giving themselves away, in countless little unnoticed, unmeasured spoonfuls, whether you wanted them to or not. All my time with Debbie was adding up - late-night phone calls about nothing, idle moments with the cats, careless meals on the way to somewhere else, downtime in front of the tube - it all floods back, our breathing in and out becoming a rhythm so deep I never quite noticed.

I am being shown, with the searing force of a revelation, that commitment is the point of life. You grab the hand of the woman you love and get on with it. You parachute as a Flying Elvis over Vegas if that's what it takes, but you do it. You don't wonder if it's true enough or real enough or just right.

I've spent my life trying to avoid the messy mistake, only to become it myself. I've risked little with women and given them even less. I think now of all the times Debbie would wake up in my bed, and her side had no big triangular pillow to sit up with and no little bedstand to set her tea on and no light to read by. And it never occurred to me, I mean literally I never even thought of it, to go get her that stuff. This was my way of saying, Go home early, dear. I live here, but you don't.

I got my wish. Now at my computer, work becomes the compensation, this essay, my way of making connections I couldn't make when they mattered more. As I type this, I realize that my biosphere, the bubbling self-contained unit I thought would nurture me, is in fact an airless exhibit. I sit suspended in the amber of afternoon, my heart under glass.