A La Recherche du Temps Perdu

Two intersecting ordinary events have triggered this entry. The first is that I am getting ready to move from my rental apartment, in which I have lived for over 30 years, to my dad's former condominium. The space is roughly the same size, but it represents a shift in my time space continuum. My dad died over four years ago. My long time job/career, as those of you who follow the DjinnfromtheBronx blog know, became moot. While a good thing, in retrospect, that change was seismic as well.--that which I had invested a quarter of a century was proven to be like the mist, fine and transient.The girl who came to this apartment at age 27 has become the seriously older woman of age 58. Like the Professor in the Time Machine, I have watched life change from out of my window as time passed. Unlike the Professor, as I moved into the future, I did not remain young. The second thing was catching up on the blog of my friend from a couple of weeks ago, his paean to the now late Ernest Borgnine, and, in particular, his role in "Marty".  That role resonated with me as well. Aside from the location appeal--it was shot in the Bronx back in a more innocent time just around the time I came onto the cosmic scene--Marty is the story of the everyman, the not so beautiful people. He is the Italian butcher who still lives at home with his widowed mother at the age of 35, and though trying to keep up with the better looking (they think) guys who search for the girls at the prim and proper dancing halls prevalent in those days, pretending that he's on the "make" for something lithe and pretty like all the sensible guys, he is a man full of a sense of inadequacy and loneliness. He watches the parade of men, like his brother, who find if not the loves of their lives, the companion of their days, and he wonders how the heck he managed not to get whatever it is that other men have, if not good looks, some vague charm that overcomes them. little later in the time scale, I would know these people, who lived and died in the Bronx, and I could easily have been one of them, as someone who never liked change. Luckily I hated the weather there and liked it better here, or I'd probably still be near the Jerome Reservoir, walking down to 233rd Street on a muggy summer's day.

Well, maybe it was a third thing that set me to this entry. I pulled out my photograph albums for storage in the little space that comes with the condo's garage. And the albums with the detritus of occasions long since past, a ticket stub, letters, diplomas, articles, term papers, report cards--the proofs of my "success". As I look backward at my own face, at 5, at 20, at 27, at 30 something, my fortieth birthday, I don't entirely recognize me.  I see in that face, in that time, something I clearly missed then, potentiality, even prettiness. You see, except for fleeting moments which were more about convincing myself, than about a real feeling, I always thought I wasn't particularly pretty. And of course, I sealed my feeling by fighting a  weight problem, well not fighting it, really, as I eat and always have eaten, obsessively.  I have done many things, obsessively, one replacing the other and occasionally overlapping the other. Well, I suppose it was understandable, considering my high school graduation picture--talk about a bear like visage with a helmet of hair and fuzzy eyebrows.

Well, that's how I felt. I remember it well. Oh, yes, lots of kids feel that way. I know we are a vast club. And looking at the other pictures in the yearbook, the others did not fare much better. But that's how I see it now, not then.  Guys see themselves as Marty. I saw myself as a cross between him and the girl that he meets that everyone says isn't good enough for him. You know, the girl most likely to be a wallflower.  Every time I ever watched that movie and he said, "You ain't the dog you think you are.," or something like that, I cried, a little more or little less depending on the state of my dating life, which did not begin until sophomore year of college--you can't count Ginny's cousin for the Sophomore Tea or Denise's good friend Ray, so I could get to the Senior Prom at all.  He was shorter and thinner by the way, so my already pretty shot self-esteem was fully exploded when he noted the height disparity--or was it, as I remember that he pointed out I was "bigger" than he was. He later sold me an annuity which I think I lost money.

But it was more than thinking I was a "dog". It was about something missing in my training, or my learning, outside of the educational training, the intellectual stuff (though I am not much of an intellectual if it comes to that for all the effort thrown that way). Attracted though I always was to men (yes, really, for those of you who think I am gay, not, as a la Seinfield "there's anything wrong with that"--for we each have our paths in life), I had no meaningful commerce (my apologies to James from Monticello; he actually asked me out in 1970, but I didn't realize that's what he was doing, so oblivious was I) with them until college and I was ill prepared in every way to encounter them when I got there. So what was in fact sufficiently attractive was hiding her light under a barrel for fear of what to do if the light got out, plus all the other psychological twist and turns the mind takes in order to convince itself that something stupid in behavior makes sense.  I just didn't "get" what other people, boys, and girls, men, and women, seemed to as part of the rites of passage. I wish I could say that I ultimately did, but I can't.

So, here I am in one of the pictures I actually always liked--there were about 15 of those pictures in the multitude of pictures taken of me over the years--circa 1982 ish in Santa Barbara. That makes me about 28--oh boy. . . .y'd never know that this face hid a mass of neuroses, fears, a hatred of her very vessel, her body and knew, at some very deep place--no doubt the essence of self-fulfilling prophecy--that she'd be a spinster like one of her mother's three sisters.

The title of this entry is from Marcel Proust, alternately translated as "In Remembrance of Things Past" or, "In Search of Times Lost". Well, the latter is more my sense of things--I am, as I pack up and shift gears, in ever my so small a way, in search of times lost--lost because of choices that did not seem to be choices, but now I realize despite every bit of resistance that tugs at me, were indeed choice. My "can'ts" as often my therapist tried to get me to see were "won't's". They still felt like "can'ts". But now it all doesn't matter that much to me--my mind and soul, if you will, has gone in a different direction, which may be hormonal or Divine Mercy, or both.

I'm guessing that everybody, whether he or she will admit it or not, realizes that in those things which did not "work out" in relationship--was a matter of being one's own worst enemy. I certainly twisted myself into knots most of my life.

The thing about "Marty" is that he wakes up faster than many of us do. It's his game to win or lose. Well, that's the other reality--it isn't a game.

I have had a very full life in my eccentric way. So, if it seems I am, I'm not complaining. And that is a first! I spent much of my life doing just that--complaining. To myself. To my journal, which was my alternate self. To my father, when he was alive. Probably to a few people that I would deny I complained to if they said, "Oh, yeah, you complained to me." 

And, what hasn't been enough, well, I'm responsible for that, but don't press me on it 'cause I could easily look for some external force to blame, and have, and will again.

The time that's lost, it's gone. End of story. Won a few, lost a few, failed to play the game more times than I'd like to count. Thought I wasn't invited to the game, truth be told, my mistake. But, if I live a statistical life, I have time to use without reserve the time left to me. I don't mean in activity per se--I'm talking the things that are ineffable, the mind, the soul.

So, what's the bottom line--grab with gusto the time forward, which will quickly be lost in the haze of memory. What will that look like? I have no idea. But if I have learned anything from Marty, it's better late than never. And, if I haven't said this before, though I think I have, I am happier than I have ever been, and I am grateful indeed.  I have good friends and a blessed life. What I don't have well, it's part of my journey, and you know what, it's not too late to use each day well.  There's an entire universe in a day!