Dear Marty

 Dear Marty,

We just got the text from Robin telling us about the health challenges that you are facing. A gamut of emotions washed over me in just a few moments: surprise, shock, disbelief, sadness, defiance, and empathy. It all culminated in a great sense of having left a responsibility unfulfilled, a huge sense of failure. I am writing this letter to you in hopes of fulfilling that responsibility. The responsibility is that of us never having taken an account of our long friendship. The thing is, we have a friendship that defies description, our relationship has never been one that requires us to constantly remind each other. Part of it is because we are men and men are not expected to do that kind of thing, part of it is due to our being Midwesterners Given this shot across our bow, I feel like I needed to reach out to you to talk about our friendship. I admit that this is as much about me as it is about you, so please forgive my moment of selfishness.

I just did the math and we have been friends for over forty years. Starting in that Fall of 1979 at Allen Hall, University of Illinois. Both of us freshmen, both of us lost in a massive scrum of other freshman, all looking for certainty, friends, security, and maybe someone who could get us a six pack.  We couldn’t be more different: you are Catholic, I was agnostic at the time, too insecure to admit that I was actually an atheist; you are from the Chicago suburbs, I can from the suburbs of Denver and many other stops along the way; you are one of many siblings in a massive Irish family, I am the only child of a Chinese nuclear family; you majored in business, I majored in electrical engineering; you are the loud and boisterous life of the party extrovert, I am the quiet and shy introvert who couldn’t hold up my end of the small talk if my life depended on it. Yet we bonded over the small things that all 18-year old’s bond over: beer, girls, and the new adventures that awaits us.

We weren’t alone, that little group of ours have been intact for over forty years as well, through the thick and the thin, the steady flow of time washing over us has not eroded our bonds; indeed, it has strengthened our friendship because we all know each other so well, and the initial teenage posturing have given way to the stolid steadiness of late middle age. That was a kind of a nice way to say that we are as old as F___.  I have been told that it is unusual for college friends to still share that bond over that many years. I am not sure of that assertion, but I know that this is the group that brings me comfort and most importantly, gives me the feeling of amity and friendship. We didn’t have any long-range plans to be friends for this long. It happened. I am thankful for that, but I couldn’t tell you just how we were able to hang on to each other for this long.

How we did this was through the weddings, the small meetups in Chicago and elsewhere. You and Robin introduced me to the town of Evansville. Some of the group coming to watch me coach when I was in Chicago; that took real friendship, watching their fat unathletic friend trying to get teenagers to play. I distinctly remember you bringing Chris, Liz, and Matthew to a nondescript warehouse facility to see me and my team. I also remember you and Robin driving from Greyslake to Milwaukee to have breakfast after the end of a technical conference. It was all natural, unexaggerated, and unplanned. I remember the larger group outings to Champaign-Urbana to watch the Illini get their butts handed to them in football, yet not really noticing anything else going on in the stadium because we were together we pretended we were eighteen and carefree once again. I remember my Thanksgiving during my freshman year, which I spent with Scot and his family. We then went over to see you at your house, watching “It’s a Wonderful Life”, That was my first exposure to that magic, thanks to you. If there is a movie that epitomizes the spirit of Marty, that must be it: hopeful, romantic, and of course, finishing with a  happy ending. It is no wonder that this is your favorite movie.

Of course, whenever we got together, it was story telling time, and you had always been the master at that. The stories never got old, although the details become much more exaggerated, because at our age our memories tend to add that little jolt of color. Our laughter and joy were accompanied by the indulgent smiles from the spouses and the incessant eyerolls of the children. They knew the stories forwards, backwards, and sideways: the raid on LAR; the salt in the Sprite; the time you ran away from the dorm to go study, mumbling all the while about something unprintable; the infamous shower party; the band is famous, they play at Mabel’s; the all nighter in the lounge to help you write your masterpiece on the Wizard of Oz and William Jennings Bryant, all six typewriters working in unison as you wrote and edited; and the final time you turned in a U of I assignment, sprinting across the quad to meet the five o’clock deadline, all the time screaming: Save a beer for me, I’ll be right back!

Even though the number of visits became fewer as the years rolled on, we still managed. In this year of COVID we got back together, using the technology of 2020 and the thanks to the genius of Liz: the Zoom cocktail hour. In this time of isolation, we managed to “see” each other every month. I don’t know how everyone else in the group felt, but it saved my soul and healed my mind. Seeing and talking with people who had known me for over forty years made me hopeful again, it made me eighteen again, except for the parts of me that hurt. It means the world to me.

The reason I bring up these things is that I want you to hear them again, I want the past to remind you of who we were and most importantly, I want the memories and stories to lift you up as you fight, like a true Reynold, like you had never had fought before. We can’t be there with you to cheer you on but know that forty years of us is there in spirit.

As I had said previously, we don’t say anything to each other about each other or what everyone means to everyone, but this time is an exception. So here goes.

I love you and I love our group. Fight hard, heal well, and we will see each other again, in person or on Zoom, I don’t care, just so we can be together again.

Pete

Observations-Thanksgiving 2020

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday ever since I first moved to the US in 1973.

It is my favorite holiday for many reasons and on many levels. For a fat kid, it is the best  holiday, you are expected to partake in massive consumption of the bounties of the land. What can be better than that? Turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, green bean casseroles, and pumpkin pies; it was a fat kid’s dream. I don’t even mind the cranberries. When we think of Thanksgiving, the mental picture that comes to mind is that of Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom from Want”: a table crowded with family and abundance of food, and the unspoken love that permeates the scene.

On a poetic Americana level, the Thanksgiving holiday is evocative of a more romantic and idealistic time, when American society was much more agrarian, when the end of harvest meant something to everyone. The marking of a change of seasons when the hard work of harvesting is done, it was time to rest and reflect before the resumption of the planting season in the Spring.  This sentiment is best expressed by Connecticut Governor Wilbur Cross’ Thanksgiving Proclamation from 1939. It has become an example of evocative exposition, I read it every Thanksgiving eve to get into the mood of the season.

Fall is also my favorite season of the year. The scent of Fall, the colorful landscape dotted with the golden hues of the changing leaves, the need to wear a jacket to ward off the chill of the season, and the visions from my memories of being ensconced in the comfort of home and hearth while being  tucked in against the nip of the cool weather outside.

Most importantly, there is also the meaning of holiday itself. Even though our knowledge of the holiday’s origins have been imbued with the mythmaking involving the Pilgrims and Native Americans partaking in a meal together; the sentiments of gratitude, thankfulness, familial warmth, friendship, nostalgia for simpler times, and community is always present and treasured. It is a time to enjoy the companionship of families and friends, a time for friendship, and communion with our family members.  Even though my own family was just a nuclear family of three, my parents had always hosted others to celebrate together; whether they are newly arrived families to the communities, students and children of friends who have been planted in a foreign land for an unfamiliar holiday, or just friends. My parents didn’t need a reason to host Thanksgiving. Thanksgivings were always a time for togetherness, full bellies, and a great time celebrating amity and our commonalities.

Accordingly, we know that this year is going to be different. It is: Amity in the time of COVID. We will be struggling and searching for reasons to be thankful in excruciatingly difficult times. It is not that we are incapable of finding things to be thankful for, it is that the circumstances facing our world has become so strained and constrained that it is best that we lower our external sights to look deeper into our internal self, in our hearts and minds, to find gratitude that came easily in previous years.

In some ways, that makes our thanks in this time of chaos and uncertainty much more precious  because we are not giving superficial thanks to the obvious advantages that we take for granted because they have disappeared for the moment; we are instead giving thanks for the inherent, amorphous, and ethereal. The emotional toll of isolation, disruption of our long-accustomed routines, and the metamorphosis of our economic wellbeing strains us; as the curtailment of travel, commerce, and large social gatherings constrains us. In some ways, we are no longer us, or the us that we have known and taken for granted; we have been changed, abruptly, without having given our consent, and perhaps irrevocably.  We have evolved instead: in some ways we have evolved routinely and perhaps for the better, yet in some ways we have evolved abruptly and for the worse. Regardless of how and why we have evolved, this Thanksgiving of 2020 has allowed my ruminations about the holiday to mirror my present state of mind. After months of solitude, change, and adjustments, my point of view about this Thanksgiving has changed as compared to the many previous Thanksgivings.

I could follow the pessimistic trend that has been with me since February with my internal dialog and bemoan the loss of opportunities and freedoms that I once took for granted pre-pandemic. I can, if I chose, to recount like the most precise and exacting accountant, all that had been denied me and bitterly list all that the universe owes me. Or I can exercise my free-will, and choose to observe all those losses as they are: things over which I have no control; indeed, they are circumstances in which the only freedom afforded me was my choice of choosing my intrinsic reaction. Of course, being a tiny minded, self-absorbed, and entitled human, there will always be a sense of loss and emotional despondence whenever the memories of this point in time surfaces in my memory, but this too shall pass.

My search for thankfulness in this time is of course, a work in progress, untested by my reality, but the alternative promises to be miserable, unsatisfying, and unpromising. I choose to take control of what I can control.

I am thankful for friendships. New ones that I never expected but have already been tested in the cauldron of necessity in these times. Old ones that have renewed and strongly affirmed because of those friends who have steadfastly given of themselves: their time, their energy, their unique perspective, and their unconditional love. I have depended on the kindness of friends to pull my thoughts out from the deepest abyss, an abyss that is of my mind’s own making. It is due to my friends that I am still at a relatively steady state of mind as the pandemic persists from days to weeks, and then to months. I am not sure if they all understand what they have meant to my mental state, I hope that they do now.

I am thankful for the challenges that have been set before me during the pandemic. It feels like we have been hitting driver on every swing: every little bit of weakness that is hidden in our swing has not only been exposed but amplified. It has forced us to improvise, adapt, and overcome in everything we do every day. We have had to learn to make decisions quickly and correctly as befitting the situation. While I am not perfect at this yet, I am getting better as the pandemic continues, as has everyone. The magic of neuroplasticity has made me realize that my mind is much more agile that I assumed while I hope that it is less beholden to my biases and logical fallacies. No doubt I will continue to stumble and err, the difference is that I am no longer afraid of erring and I have confidence that I can improvise, adapt, and overcome.

I am thankful for the Stoic point of view. My ability to think about things that I can control versus those I can not control comes from the dichotomy of control that is fundamental to Stoicism. Stoics have also allowed me to take the perspective of “premedio valorem”, or  “what is the worst thing that can happen?” This perspective opened my eyes to my own myopia when I became so focused on the negative possibilities rather than the indifferent probable, that was the source of my despair, my own vivid ability to be negative. The irony is that by thinking about the worst show us how our fertile and generally pessimistic conjectures in hard times result in fantasies which drives our worst fatalist fears about the unknown; whereas the practice of playing out “premedio maloram” logically and systematically leads us to the realization that all is not as dire as our immediate emotional responses will predict. It sometimes is necessary to be cruel to be kind to yourself.

I am thankful for all the material possessions that have accrued over my time on earth, and I am thankful for the knowledge that material possessions are not permanent.

I am thankful for the realization that our time on earth is finite, it is not so much that we have so little time available to us, it is that we are frivolous in how we use that time that we have to do what we wish.

I am thankful for my personal view of life, and the paradigm that I carry with me all the time; I am also thankful for the revelation that paradigms are transient, we should be changing paradigms all the time in order to best use our time here.

Of course, I am thankful for that fat and happy post-Thanksgiving prandial somnolence.

I wish you all better days and nights to come, a post-pandemic world, and Peace.

Pete