I don’t believe in fate—providence, if you will. If there is a plan, it does not proscribe outcomes. Rather we wander in and out of circumstances bumping into two sets of patterns—those we make out of our lives, and those that are beyond our immediate control. Life goes out of balance when we cannot get the two patterns to jibe—when we cannot reconcile ourselves to the patterns that exist. Out of balance we can neither accept what has happened in our lives or we cannot break those patterns and create new ones that are made from familiar pieces but reflect possibilities that we had not imagined. Out of balance we fight against the patterns that life provides, missing obvious signs (rising temperatures, repeated cruelties, even the tender messages of love) and careening against the walls of a maze that we cannot perceive and causing damage to ourselves and those around us.
The patterns in our lives start with family. I constantly share Philip Larkin’s poem, “This Be the Verse.” There is something reassuring in the thought that we are in a cycle of “fuck you up.” As opposed to Larkin, I think the ways we do it, as we do it, inescapably echo what has happened to us, perhaps a refracted and distorted echo, but if we listen closely the voices of the past are there. Beyond that we try, inexpertly and haphazardly, to shape something new—sometimes in the bounds of that was happened—marrying tin castings of our mothers or fathers—and sometimes creating almost new ones—bouncing from job to job, leaving or being fired, until we find something that makes sense; switching churches running away from one doctrine to another until we find answers to our questions, or questions for our answers, failing in aspects of our lives until we discover paths that lead to understanding and accomplishment.
If we pay attention there are patterns to the world—some are startlingly easy to discern: evolution, geology, philosophy, math, literature. We go to school to learn to recognize those patterns, or at least learn the methods behind those patterns. Maybe—there’s no guarantee—we learn to accept that life does not always follow the neat regular order of all that we learn—like a geometry proof—but proceeds in fits and starts—like punctuated equilibrium. Or that it bears an uncanny resemblance to the cagey repetitions of a Mandelbrot set—a kind of beautiful and frustratingly decoded paisley.
I am writing this, because I can see—but only when I’m not looking straight at it—a pattern. The school where I will teach in the fall is near the junctions of routes 17 and 29—roads that ran through my earlier life. The mountains nearby are mountains on which I hiked when I was twelve. I am now split, three hours in either direction—when the traffic is good—from both ends of my family. These are entirely random coincidences—of that I am sure. However, coincidence when it travels in large numbers begins to wear the shape of a pattern. Perhaps it is a pattern of my own making—I look for affirmation and discover it where I will.
And yet, these days, I find other coincidences accruing—but not coincidences, more like reflections and refractions.
How many times in my life have I wondered how someone significant has entered my orbit—or rather, how has the rogue moon of my existence been captured by another’s gravity? I recognized early on the awful fact that I was chasing those tin castings from my family. Inevitable, and not always destined for failure, yet, somehow, not strangely, I ended up at 58 single.
When I looked through the kaleidoscope of my past relationships, I recognized the shifting bits of glass and plastic that first came present in my childhood. And with each turning, I noticed newer, more original bits. I could see how I was adding to the portrait, or finding, fortunately, new colors and shapes. This bit—a runner who lead me onto the road and into extended jaunts over hills. That bit—a wild heretical sense of magic and religion that helped my questioning soul find new answers. Over there, now sliding out of the periphery—an abiding sense of motherhood that helped me see fatherhood in a clearer light. Here—a love of play and pretending that rekindled my dramatic heart. In the corner—a fervent commitment to words and learning that at least matched my own. Sliding past in a glint of light—a traveler’s heart that would call me away from the familiar and to new destinations.
All these marked shifts away, additions to, and surprises in my vision of who I would walk with down city streets and along autumn trails. Singularly, each one added a variation to a familiar pattern, but that pattern remained dominant. All together they formed a secret wish—not just for someone else, but for the person I wanted to be.
Do we get to pick that person? Are we trapped under years of habit and gentle conditioning? They have carried me this far. What to do with the secret and not so secret longings—dreams set aside for expedience and practicality, or for some ingrained fear or limit? What if I began to write a new story—still with some familiar elements, but now with a center I have let waste in a box kept in a closet, underneath last year’s shoes, out of sight, but never, naggingly, out of mind?
I don’t believe in fate, but what if, instead of providence, I relied on my will to call forth a story, to create a possibility I had turned from year after year? What would happen? Would the kaleidoscope turn to reveal someone, or—by dint of will and willingness to shake my life into new form—would someone appear, almost without request, almost by chance? I don’t believe in fate, but I can see patterns, and can follow stars that have not lifted above the horizon before now.
Onward!
Sometimes I step right in it. It could be good, could be bad, but somehow, my foot comes down right into it. All I was doing was taking a walk—could be to anywhere, the post office, the grocery store, down the aisle. The destination is of no importance—tell yourself that Brennan, assure yourself that you are a man on a journey, drifting happily so long as there is a journey whose destination is, truly and fortunately, impossible to predict. And then, splat, I tumble forward—because that is how we fall.
Play it loud.
I started watching comedians late at night with my father, who was a Carson devotee. My dad would take a nap after dinner—short, maybe 20 minutes in his chair in the den—before watching television or reading until the news and then the Tonight Show. He would stay up until Carson finished at 1 am (later only until 12:30 am). My mother absented the scene well before 11.
In 1982, the year I graduated from college, Letterman took over what had been a fairly straight talk show slot. Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow had ended NBC’s programming. Snyder was as hip as could be imagined at the time, smoking a cigarette and asking pointedly bemused questions. Letterman rolled in on a wave of calculated whimsy and sarcasm. He was a genial wiseass—smart enough to host Fran Leibovitz, foolish enough to wear a suit of Alka-seltzer tablets into a dunk tank. While Carson chuckled at the world, Letterman was in perpetual eye roll. “These people are idiots,” he seemed to say, “And if we aren’t careful, we are too.”
When he left in 2015, it marked the end of my Second, and maybe Third Act. From graduation from Swarthmore to graduate school at Binghamton, from adjunct teaching to secondary ed teaching, from occasional church goer to religious professional, from single, to committed cohabitation, to marriage, and finally to separation and divorce. I still watch late night comedians, but now they function almost only as an antidote to the news. Please, someone make light of the daily made-up facts. Maybe that will end when the current administration leaves, and maybe a sequel to Ionesco’s Rhinoceros will have everyone gleefully turning back into humans.
When I was 11, I started sailing with my father. We took lessons together and practiced on a lake. He kept a boat on the Chesapeake Bay, which was rarely choppy. In my thirties, I joined him on the ocean—home again.
Deep time? Not thousands of years—a blink. Millions begin to register. Billions of years. I once had my students hold one hundred feet of rope, and marked the history of the planet on it. Those who held on to human historical events: Lucy, the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, the Renaissance, man walking on the moon—could barely wrap a finger around the rope they were crowded so close. Our Western Mountains—the Rockies—and Eastern Mountains—were flung apart, but well after our continent had formed.
Where does sadness, the inexorable seriousness in my writing originate? My friends would tell you that I am puckish in real life—if anything, a bit too unrestrained. Why doesn’t that same sense of things stripe my writing? Why do I seem stuck hitting the same damn dour note?
I packed my suitcase and drove out of Philadelphia. Whether that was yesterday or twenty-five years ago, I am not sure. There is so much to do, so many cities to visit, all those people waiting. I lose track of time. Before I have barely begun, I am completely exhausted. I have to stop. I ask the manager at the motor hotel for a quiet room, and flop into bed. I set the alarm clock for morning.
And yet we build, and not every tool—Kubrick’s 2001 aside—is a refinement of a club. Certainly Kubrick’s 2001 won’t help one win a war, or woo, unless, of course, the object of desire is imbued with an essential and unmitigated nerdiness. Nonetheless, even without some mysterious aid, we grow. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon enough, and we find our way to each other.
I recently swapped the nicknames that we give our kids with a friend. We had both, surprisingly and strangely, settled on “Bug.” I’m not sure that our daughters will appreciate that longer into their lives, but for now, it will do.
And I do know the other side. I know how easy it is to let upset slide into hate. And I know that once uttered—by an adult, not by a child, because children must experiment with all words and all emotions—it breaks the bonds in a nearly irrevocable way. I have said it, out loud—either in the perpetual external conversation I have with the world or directly the object of scorn—and the immediate thrill is followed by a deep remorse as the tendrils that connected me to another person wither immediately into dried spiked vines, like the hedges of multiflora rosa that grew brown and foreboding in winter. All that was planted must be uprooted. Maybe something can be saved, some sprig, somewhere.
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