One of the few things that hasn’t changed in the last 40 or so years, or so it seems, is the interstate drive between Eugene and Stanford. My childhood included the stretch from Los Altos to Mt. Shasta, and my escape event the piece just north of there, Callahan, and Weed. And I was pretty much a child the first time I drove it all the way through to Eugene. We’d been married four months. We were both children. 22 years old. And a few months.
And our youngest daughter, Megan, was 22 years old and a few months as she sat, happily, next to me, just a few weeks ago, when we took that stretch together, Eugene to Stanford, one more time. One time that rolled up all the others and, well, I get ahead of myself.
This was Sunday, July 5, 2009. By 10:30 on a bright sunny summer morning we were sailing past Cottage Grove. Radar detector on, staying around 70, gliding around rolling curves, getting in rythm. I admit, even though things are just things, and it’s embarrassing for a full-grown over-educated would-be-intellectual and would-be zen 60-year-old guy, I’ve loved that mini cooper S from the day I first saw it. And, paradoxical as it may seem, driving it down to Palo Alto, with Megan, to leave it with Megan, was the best time I ever had in it.
Not, by the way, that I didn’t have good times in that car. I really did. There was that day in June, 2005, when it was just a couple months old, that I drove it over the Santiam Pass from Eugene to Bend in just over two hours. Listened to Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink on the ipod attachment. Clear day, dry, no traffic, and I just sailed that little car over the mountains and through the high desert, up the Mackenzie River over the pass through Sisters to Bend. And that other time, Bend to Eugene, over the Cascade Highway; again, bright, warm, dry, and empty highway. And lots of curves.
I’ve loved cars before. Several times. My first car, a VW type 3, dark red. I was 20, bought it new in Innsbruck, drove it all over Europe. And across the United States, three times. And from Mexico and back, twice. We called it Chofs. That green volkswagen beetle, that we drove all over Mexico. The Acura that bled the day I got it. And I loved my new Audi sports car, today, actually, as I drove it fast over Fox Hollow Road.
But none of them like that mini-cooper. And never as much satisfaction as giving it to Megan.
Gulp. In the byline to this examiner.com piece, she calls herself a Boston Sex and Relationships expert. That’s awkward, at least to me. Maybe it’s her picture too, but you’d have to click for that. In the meantime, here are Effie Organides’ Top ten reasons why relationships work. This is all direct quote:
1. Goals – both parties have similar short term and long term goals. This is important because once everything is on the table, a new level of comfort and stability come into the relationship.
2. Monogamy – both parties both want to be in a monogamous relationship. This? Is key.
3. Trust – when a high level of trust is formed, it knocks out negatives such as jealousy and feelings of disloyalty (paranoia).
4. Drive – it is imperative that both parties in a relationship have the drive to make the relationship work. One careless partner can destroy the relationship.
5. Common Interests – sure, opposites attract, but it’s always a plus to have something in common. Doing things together does more for your relationship than you think. It’s like glue.
6. Chemistry – yes, this has to do with being attracted to one another and wanting to make out with each other on a healthy basis.
7. Compatibility – this has more to do with the interlocking of two people’s personalities. Someone who is aggressive, loud, and outgoing will work best with someone who compliments those attributes. Personalities should be complementing not overshadowing.
8. Family Values – a couple that has similar family values will find life (and holidays) together easier. This has less to do with religion or culture – but more to do with how close each other is to their family and if each person is a “family person.”
9. Communication – this is also key to a happy, healthy relationship. Learning to talk with each other (not TO each other) is an art really.
10. Fighting fair – every couple is going to fight. Learning to fight fair is essential. Less yelling, more getting to the point – there is no “winner” and there is always a kiss before bed.
I spent a spare moment on twitter Saturday afternoon. It had been a busy day, a long drive home in the morning, quiet time to myself in the car, then an explosion of small children, a beautiful summer day, a nice dinner in the garden.
I liked the intro. I’m not a church goer myself, at least not anymore, but the introduction, church or not, God or not, was pleasant enough and engaging.
I even like the list. There’s something in the tone that makes me like the author.
But parts of it bother me. Maybe at 61, almost 40 years married, I’m getting tired of the stereotypes. For example:
We are not mind readers, say what’s really on your mind.
That one made me smile. I have no idea what he’s talking about. My wife has never had any trouble speaking her mind. And then there was this one:
We need our time alone: guys night out, man cave…
Boy, no offense to guy friends, but no thanks. What with business to do, kids, family, trying to have a life … I never understood the guys night out. Never wanted it. Is that really just me?
So as I read on, I recognize the problems, but is any of this really man vs. woman?
We want to be the leader and the protector… let us lead.
That’s old. Protector maybe, in a physical way, male, but I don’t think marriage is about a leader and a follower. Let’s hope you have some of both, on both sides.
When we say nothing is wrong, “Nothing is wrong” nothing means nothing!
Good luck with that. Let me know how it goes. It’s a good thing only one gender has trouble with this .
We want to be respected and appreciated.
Weird. What’s that doing here? Who doesn’t? What does this have to do with men and women?
We don’t remember many dates, maybe even special dates.
What is this, the I Love Lucy show? Leave it to Beaver?
We don’t like chick flix.
I like good chick flix myself, and I also like good action flix, and so does my wife. Maybe it’s just me.
This stuff gets old. It’s endearing, I suppose, but it’s also out of date, and some of this — like respect and appreciation, or leadership, are gender specific — is not that good for anybody.
Contrasts. Friday, a day with fellow bloggers, Pamela Slim, Matthew Scott, Chris Guillebeau, Mark something-or-other. A vegetarian dinner at the apartment of a young brilliant writer world traveler, young. No children young. Dedicated to writing and nonconformity young.
The new car, the condo, the midsummer late light, talking to Vange about everything — and I mean everything — gone wrong. Temperatures, arguments, misunderstandings, worries, and more temperatures. Little children with 103 and more.
A long very quiet and peaceful drive home, the new car humming. A long very busy summer afternoon, a strange moment of peace in the garden at dinner time, a very pleasant drive for errands with Timmy waving his curly hair at the open window, laughing in the carwash, and nodding off to sleep while I drove up and around the curves in the mountains.
And a good talk with Paul. Disasters probably averted, at least for now.
Megan and Chris Seifert and I went up to Spencer’s Butte yesterday — father’s day — to get some air and a view. As we started the trail up, a pair of KVAL (local CBS affiliate) asked us for a Father’s Day Interview. And this is what was on the local news last night, as a result.
In case you don’t see the video, you can click here for the KVAL source page.
How are we different from apes? Apes also pass culture onto groups, apes can be violent, apes can be empathetic, but no other species has the power for the abstract.
And why does this matter? How does it affect our lives?
Robert Zapolsky, author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, and a favorite professor at Stanford, gave this talk last Saturday as part of Stanford graduation. He starts at 4:51.
If you can’t see the video here, you can click here for the source on youtube.
In an old joke I heard first while living in Mexico City, the pistol packing bandito storms into the cantina with guns blazing to get everybody’s attention. He draws a line in the middle of the bar.
“All right,” he shouts, to the now quiet crowd, pointing his two six guns menacingly, “I want all the SOBs on this side” … he waves at one side of the line … “and all the dumbbells on that side.” (For you Spanish speakers, that’s hijos de la ching*** on one side and pende*** on the other).
“Now wait a minute,” says one brave self-assured voice in the crowd, “I’m no dumbbell.”
“Well then move to the other side,” comes the answer.
I’ve always liked the joke, and I’m putting it up here because I’m going to work it into one of my blog posts some time. For now, though, I’ll just say that I don’t believe it. The implication is of course (and I include it here not because you’re a dumbbell, but because it may not translate that well) that you are either dumb or mean, with nothing in between. I don’t believe that.
I’ve reached 61 years old now, and we’re six months away from a 40th wedding anniversary, and in all my life, the best definition of love I’ve ever run across is this one:
And another thing. Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is.
Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body.
No, don’t blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being “in love”, which any fool can do.
Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.
But sometimes the petals fall away and the roots have not entwined. Imagine giving up your home and your people, only to discover after six months, a year, three years, that the trees have had no roots and have fallen over. Imagine the desolation. Imagine the imprisonment.
That’s from the 1995 novel Corelli’s Mandolin, by Louis de Bernières. I heard it first as delivered by a father to his grown-up daughter in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, a 2001 movie starring Nicholas Cage and Penelope Cruz.
One thing that struck me immediately was this, a quote from that story:
For example, studies by Dr. Ruut Veenhoven, a sociologist at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, show that the extremely poor — those earning less than $10,000 a year — may be rendered unhappy by the relentless stress of poverty. Yet his work shows that after a poor person’s income exceeds that level there is no further correlation between money and happiness. After a certain level of income, typically enough to meet basic expenses, money ceases to be a factor.
What I like about this, particularly, is an idea I think I heard first from my older brother. “For me,” he said, “money has always been a binary thing. Enough or not enough.” I like that. I think it applies to me, and my life. For most of our life, we didn’t have enough. Finally, after the company made it, we did have enough.
“Enough” is a relative concept, of course. And it evolves. For years, when we lived in Mexico City and the first three kids had been born but were still young, we used to take walks when we could and dream together. Our most common dream was “having a down payment to buy our own house.”
A few years later, it was to buy a house in Palo Alto; to move out of San Jose. And then it was a house big enough for a growing family, two parents and five kids. And it became private high school and then college educations, five of them, all very expensive. “Enough” evolved.
The example of cars. Being able to buy a 1975 rambler station wagon was huge, when that happened. But we survived the old orange-yellow VW van and going up the Sierra highways in second gear, which made the Toyota Corolla station wagon a big deal when we were able to get that. Later, it was never a Mercedes or Porsche, but having a relatively new car, and especially one with 4WD, mattered.
Vacations were fine when they were camping in Camomila, or outside of San Miguel de Allende. And one of the best vacations ever was in Acapulco where we thought we’d been invited to a luxury place (journalist perks) but ended up in Las Hamacas instead. Tour guiding worked fine. We had some really nice vacations later, when there was “enough;” but we didn’t really miss them when we couldn’t afford them.
I liked this, from the same post:
Some years ago I was helping Jimmy Carter gather his thoughts for his book Virtues of Aging, and at one point I said to him, “President Carter, I have a crazy question for you. I’m about the age now that you were when you were president. Have you come to any new perspectives about what matters in life, now that you’re older?” His answer was to the point: “Earlier in my life I thought the things that mattered were the things that you could see, like your car, your house, your wealth, your property, your office. But as I’ve grown older I’ve become convinced that the things that matter most are the things that you can’t see — the love you share with others, your inner purpose, your comfort with who you are.”
So here’s the thing. At the end of the day, it may be wisest to judge each of our own life successes not from the outside looking in but from the inside out. It’s not about the material things I can show the world, but about how I feel about the work I do; it’s about the relationships I have and the love I share.
