My high school buddies and I have been exchanging emails of late for the first time in many many years. The main topic is our days of motorcycling through La Dolce Vita streets of Rome in the late 1960’s. It’s fascinating to hear the recollections and perspectives of guys in their 70’s remembering their days of youthful exuberance from when they were 16-18 years old. Those days our heads were filled mostly with testosterone and dreams. Today, who knows what junk rattles around in those same but graying heads. I detect a blend of reality, rose-colored memories, woulda-coulda-shoulda, delusions, forgiveness, and even a touch of contrition. The cocktail of remembrance is a fascinating subject for conjecture.
As much as I am more introspective than most and bother to put a lot of it out there via these blog stories, I’m not really certain that I have done enough pondering about whether I have lived a good enough life to satisfy whatever powers exist in the universe. While I am not enough of a spiritual person to be certain that there is a God who keeps track of such things in some great database in the firmament, I am enough of a conscientious person to think that it matters what we do and how we live our lives. I am not such a Pollyanna that I think that we should be expected to skip along through life picking flowers and doing Boy Scout good deeds at all times. But as I’ve gone through life observing those around me (both up close and at a distance) and its often easy to see who cares about others and who really doesn’t. Ultimately, how you manifest your caring is what probably matters the most.
The process of talking with and exchanging memories with my first real group of friends (prior to high school I moved around too much to establish a group of lasting friends) is an important watershed for me because it is the first real chance I have to reflect from start to finish on the life that I have lived. This is by virtue of being forced to think about the fact that these three other guys from my youth have gone about their own life paths over the same 55 or so years that I have and each one has found a different path. Unlike the movie versions of such long term friendships, the differences in our respective life paths has not been so very dramatic from what I can see. We have each more or less reached retirement age by living lives in the same developed western world that we started in. None of us has gone down any tragic antisocial paths and none of us has failed and fallen into despair or poverty. The fundamental range of what we each have or don’t have is relatively insignificant in a worldly sense. We all live in nice homes and have families of varying sizes and composition for whom we are responsible and who presumably nurture us as well. None of the four of us has ever had to go to war though wars have perhaps happened around us. All four of us began life as American citizens (one with a dual Canadian citizenship, but who lived the majority of his adult life in the U.S.), and one of us had adopted Australian citizenship through birthright and has now chosen to leave the U.S. to live there. The differences between the U.S., Canada and Australia are simply not great enough culturally to make any of that particularly meaningful in the grand scheme. So, the differences in our lives has come into play in very subtle ways in which we have each chosen to live our lives and for which no one but ourselves can probably profess opinions.
If we start from the inner-most circle, there are our nuclear families. In my case, I have an ex-wife and two children, a second wife and one child and now a third wife. None of the kids are estranged and I speak to them each on good terms every week, so other than the normal array of the inevitable minor wounds of youth, I think its fair to say that they would all three say that I have treated them well and as a loving and reasonably attentive father who provided well for them. Divorce can be a life-ripping event, but I am particularly proud to say that both of my divorces have led to very amicable relationships with my ex-wives, so much so that we gather at least annually as an extended family on a very amicable basis, even including their significant others as they exist. All three wives know and get along with all three children and the three kids treat each other as full siblings, as I have always wished they would. Don’t get me wrong, this is still a family, as “modern” as it may be, and there is still some dysfunction at times and some petty rivalries or issues, but nothing major and nothing structural or challenging when it comes to gathering. I cannot overstate the pride I have in that very accomplishment. One of the best compliments ever paid to me was when someone said that I had better divorces than most people have marriages. To me, that was not by happenstance, that was a set of ongoing decisions about how to conduct my life and create that exact outcome.
The same process occurs in the next circle of relationships, which is my extended family, to include siblings and their offspring. I have two sisters, three half-sisters and two half-brothers (one surviving). I have good relationships with the sisters and not so much with the brothers. One recently died young and the other, who actually lives nearby I have tried to include and get closer to, but he has shown a hesitancy that I have left alone. The children of my siblings are in our close-knit circle and we see them regularly. Of my cousins (seven originally with six surviving), I am extremely friendly with one and not so close to the others. There is only minimal drama or bad blood anywhere, and I have helped any of them who have needed help and when asked. I am comfortable saying that I have done right by this extended group.
The next three circles are friends, acquaintances and then the world at large. I have a 150-person Holiday Card list, which is just to say that I make an effort to keep in touch with and be an instigator of refresh friendships with as many of my friend groups as possible. I also regularly integrate friend groups, which strikes me as a valuable way to keep a more closely woven network of friends. When old acquaintances reach out, I always try to make time to help them if possible. As for the world at large, I have served on charitable boards and given more funding than most to the causes that have inspired me ranging from social assistance and international aid to educational opportunity to pets and the arts. I sleep well at night feeling that I have done and continue to do my small part for the world.
I think the end of Schindler’s List is perhaps the most humbling and humanistic portrayal of the transformation of one human being from being a mover and a shaker in the commercial world, a man on the top of the mountain of worldly success, into a man so caring of his fellow man (in this case the very people being persecuted by his own Nazi Party) that he weeps about not having done enough to save more than the 1,100 Jews who he managed to shield from extermination. Nothing I have done is so dramatic or important, but as I said, I feel I have done my part for those I have touched. Like Otto Schindler, it is never enough and I could do more, which is the important thought we should all keep in our minds at all times. I am contrite about all that, but as Schindler might say, contrite is only as great as contrite does.