Equality

Father & Son (Photo credit: jeroenadema)

Love either finds equality or makes it. ~ John Dryden ~




I am not my wife's boss and she is not mine. There are times when one of us will take charge of a situation, but it's a matter of what we decide or whatever seems most appropriate at that situation. Mutual love and respect allows us to recognize what seems appropriate in the proper circumstances, but the communication channels must remain open for us to be successful in our relationship.

Whether it be family or friends, if we love, we are equal.

As in any human relationship, knowledge or position may give a party the responsibility of taking charge. This does not mean that party is the dictator over the other, but the party in charge provides guidance, direction, and leadership. There should be no loss of love in these instances, but an increase in respect and deference to the one who holds the power at that time.

We see in life that power can mutable and transferable. As children we may be subjective to our parents, but as time goes by we may become like equals to them. Then if they begin to falter we may become like the parents. If the love is there, the equality evolves into an acceptance of doing the right things at the right times.

When I was a child my father wielded discipline when needed, but showed a fun side when that was the appropriate side to display. I loved my dad, but I could be scared of him as well. As I grew older we sometimes clashed as sons and fathers will sometimes do. Later after I had children of my own I began to understand my father much better and we became like equals. The day that I was able to thank him for his influence on my life and let him know that I loved him was an experience of liberation.

If love is equality, then the realization of equality through love is freedom. My past is an exhilarating rush of good memories of parents who set me free when I was ready and accepted me as an equal.

Have you experienced the feeling of child/parent equality? Do you feel that you have an equality in your marriage? How does love and equality relate to you?

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Dreaming of You

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My Darling, can you hear me
As I call you from afar?
A storm awakes me as I dream of your sweet kisses,
Then I lie awake for hours.
         From "Gone, but not Forgotten" by Arlee Bird (1977)

      
         You had gone home to your parents.   I was out on the road, away.   Working.  We needed the money with the baby on the way.   I had this one more job to do before I would be coming to you.  I said.

        Those weeks seemed like years.  Being away so long felt unnatural, for weeks that felt like years.  Our marriage had not been long and it had seen its tumult.   You were probably too young and I too immature in things like relationships.  I was probably not ready for you nor me for you.  You had years of youth to get out of your system and I was ready to be responsible.  I think.

        This was our first time apart since our wedding day.   I felt this emptiness and insecurity in our parting.  Life was going to be vastly different when I joined you in a city new to me.  In a new apartment that you would find while you were free on your own pregnant.

        Me pretending by day and trying to sleep at night, when I dreamed, I dreamed of you.  I dreamed of us.  Uneasy dreams like many of our conflicts.  Sweet dreams like our good times together.  I desperately wanted it all to work.

       Eventually I was done with my gig and in my new home with you.  For a while things went well.  Most of the time, but with those moments of stormy upheaval.   We were too different in many ways and yet so much the same.

       We did make it work for a few years.  Kind of.  And then it didn't work.  That dream ended and new ones took over.

      Sleep came better when I was no longer dreaming of you.



     

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Caring

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

           One of the most devastating things that ever happened to me was when someone whom I cared for deeply essentially said something to the effect of, "I don't care about you anymore."

          I won't go into any details, but it was one of those situations that raised so many questions in my mind.  I had thought we had been in a long term relationship that was real and meaningful.  I had imagined nothing but a future for us.  Then that bombshell hit.

         What about the words spoken in the past?   Had they been meaningless utterances?   Promises broken.   An emotional investment gone bankrupt.   Why?  How?

         I have never gotten any answers from that parting and now the years have dried the tears.   Some memories of our life together remain if I focus on them and dredge them up, but mostly they seem like good years for me spent with a cardboard cut-out of someone of my dreams.   She's now like an empty space with a name; she's someone I barely remember in the way I should remember her.  Dishonest in her supposed love perhaps, or maybe just derailed by circumstances of her life that she left hidden from me.

        She said she no longer cared and then I wondered if she really had cared before that.  Surely she must have cared for a while.  I cared.  And then I cared after she said she didn't.   Then eventually I just didn't think about it and found someone else to care about.

          One of the greatest elements of the love relationship is caring.  You care about someone because you love them and you love them because you care about them.  Caring is a two way street in the love relationship.   When one side stops caring, the other party is just crying out in a vacuum, words falling upon a vast plain of hurt.

          What do you do to show those you love that you care?   Have you ever just ended a relationship with questions unanswered and not caring?

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Brotherly Love

Friends (The Beach Boys song) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

        When my family moved to East Tennessee for a trial see-how-we-liked-it period, we stayed the summer at Tarbett Road Trailer Park in our 17 foot camper trailer.  This was my parents and me with my two brothers and two sisters.  Talk about close quarters, but we had done this often and seemed to survive the situation okay.

        It was the summer of 1966--right before I would start my sophomore year of high school.   I made new friends around the trailer park quickly since there were several guys about my age living nearby.  One with whom I became particularly close to was Fred Tilson.   His real name was David Gale Tilson.  I'm not sure why, but his mother called him David and his father called him Gale.   His friends began calling him Fred and he seemed to prefer that.

        During that summer Fred and I were hanging around so much of the time that my father started calling us "The Glass Brothers".    This name came from the fact that we both wore dark framed glasses which gave us a certain resemblance to each other.  We also had very similar interests, the primary one being music.  Our conversations would often be centered on the popular music of the day--The Beach Boys, Lovin' Spoonful, and The Beatles.   That summer the sounds of the local pop station could almost always be heard if we had a radio with us.

       Though my father's reference to us was made in jest, I did begin to feel this brotherly kinship with Fred. We shared so many memorable experiences.  We had a few downs, but mostly ups.  Sometimes we'd go our separate ways, but when we'd get back together it was like homecoming and all was just as it been when we had last parted.   Fred was about as close to a brother as any friend I've had.

        When Fred became seriously ill in 1994 he tried to keep it from his friends.  Eventually we all knew he might be dying.  I was now living far off in California and couldn't make it to see him, but I called a mutual friend to keep me posted.  When the day came that our friend Tom let me know that Fred was in the hospital, I called my "brother" to say my good-bye to him.

       I could hear the weakness in his voice and could picture him in that hospital bed with friends around him.  The man had a heck of a lot of friends.

      We didn't say much.   He was too weak to say much.   I said, "I love you, Fred.  You've been a great friend to me."

       "I love you too, man," Fred replied in a thin fading voice.

        Those were the last words we ever spoke to one another.  I'm glad those were the words.  Our friendship was the embodiment of brotherly love.

        Have you had a friend whom you loved like a sibling?    What makes a friendship stay true as years pass?    

Acceptance

English: Federal Signal Thunderbolt 1003 (dual tone) siren head mounted on pole in Louisville, KY (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

        In some ways I was a pretty shy kid.  It was not always easy for me to get close to other kids and make friends, but I wasn't the only one like that.  Many of us would go to school and quietly make it through the day well behaved and striving for the good grades to please our parents.

        When I was in the fifth grade, I was living in San Diego.  This would have been in 1961, a tense time in the United States as we were in the cold war stand off with the communists.  We kids didn't worry too much about the threat of war.  The monthly air raid siren tests at noon, the duck and cover drills at school, and the war talk on television were just another part of life and didn't stop us from being kids.

        That school year Eddy's family moved onto the street where my family lived.  They moved in about seven houses down from ours.  Eddy was the only boy in this family and he had three sisters.  His older sister was a normal enough looking girl and didn't look anything like her siblings.  Eddy and his two younger sisters were small and almost frail and sickly looking.  All the kids were very intelligent and, like me, quiet and reserved.

         Perhaps that's why Eddy and I hit it off so well.  I passed by his house on the way to school and it was not long that we became walking buddies to school and back home at the end of the day.  But there was one problem--not for me, but for some of the other kids in our class.  Eddy did not pledge allegiance to the flag for religious reasons.   He became tagged as a communist by some of the other kids.

         For a while some of the more bully-like boys, mild by today's standards, but bullies nevertheless, began trailing behind us taunting Eddy about being a communist.  I was a little afraid, but as long as I was by Eddy's side they only teased from a distance.   Eddy had become one of my best friends and I accepted him for what I saw in him and the way he treated me.  It was a mutual acceptance and our friendship grew stronger.

        Eventually the bullies must have tired of harassing me and Eddy and it all stopped.   Visiting Eddy at his house I learned about his interest in photography and film developing, radio building, and other scientific pursuits.  To me he was like a genius and his knowledge fascinated me.

         We remained friends until seventh grade, at which time my family moved to the Chicago area.  In his last letter to me he informed me that his family moved to Costa Mesa, California.   His last letter was our last correspondence.  I never wrote back.  I was bad about things like that.

           So, Edward Ross--I'm guessing that is what you go by now--I'm sorry that I didn't keep in touch.  You were a good friend to me and I think of you often.

         "Love is blind" goes the old saying.   When we can look past some of the things that might seem different, weird, or not in the norms of society, we can learn to accept others and begin to love them as friends.   Those friendships are sometimes difficult to find and it's a shame when we let them slip away.

          Love must involve acceptance.

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Words of Love: an A to Z Theme

Love05 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

           My 2013 A to Z Challenge theme for Wrote By Rote was inspired by a suggestion made by A to Z co-host Nicole Ayers of The Madlab Post.  I don't recall exactly where or when she suggested this--it may have been in one of her videos--but she had the idea that one might blog through the alphabet by finding words that were synonymous or had something to do with love.

           When I heard this idea I was immediately struck with the idea that this could make a great theme for Wrote By Rote.   After all, love in all its various forms and incarnations has to do with our lives.  We all have loved many in many ways.   We have our families, friends, and others with whom we feel a close bond that might be considered love in various ways.

          My April posts will not necessarily be about romantic love, though this will certainly be a part of the story.  Our lives have many loves, including people, pets, places, and things.   Where will the alphabet lead me in my story of love?   Stay tuned for the "Words of Love".   They are many and spoken in many voices.

          The Challenge starts on Monday April 1st.   I hope you will join me.

          What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of the word "love"?   Do you believe in love at first sight?   Is love truly blind?
         

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Born in the Shadow of the Computer (Part 3)

motherboard (Photo credit: fsse8info)

       In the guts of the computer when you open it it you'll see intricate boards with wires, circuits, and all sorts of little thingie doodads that the non-technical mind like I have does not comprehend too well.  What I do see is a metaphor for life.  Those circuits with all of the parallels and intersections all working together to serve my needs are like the history of where I've been, who I am now, and where I am going in the days and years ahead.  We are all like circuits on the great motherboard of existence.

        And this preceding paragraph exhibits why a post that was intended to be a one installment of biding time has turned into part three and will continue on into May since my computer problems persist and I don't know what I'm doing and I don't have the money at the present time to invest in professional computer repairs.  Add to that, I'm a bit stubborn sometimes.   I'm going to fix this.

        But not today I suppose.  I won't even finish this story today.  Consider this a sort of intermission, or a prelude perhaps to the story to come.  This is not even what I'd planned on writing today, but life is often like that as well isn't it?  We intend in going one direction and then get distracted to go another route.

        One story leads to another and that is the story of life--yours, mine, ours, and everyone who was and will be.  Our stories sometimes intersect or often run in parallel paths.  Here in this cyberspace world we find others we would have more than likely never encountered in the local world of where we typically are.  It's kind of wonderful really, but that does not discount the life that is ours immediate to the senses.

        I am biding time, sure, but don't we all in many ways.  We are all living in the shadow of the computer.  Sometimes a curse, sometimes a blessing--there is no escaping the computers that are all around us and essentially run our lives.  How did we get here?

         If all goes like I hope, next week's post will be my introduction to my A to Z Challenge theme.  Then during the month of April I will hopefully post for 26 days upon that stated theme.  At least that is my intent.

         We know how intents can go.  And that is where this story is going.  In May I intend to pick up again on my story of being Born in the Shadow of the Computer as I look at the ironies of my encounter with computers in the 1990's.  One simple start of a story a couple posts ago becomes three posts and in turn becomes who knows how many more.  The story will probably not end for me until my life ends.   The computers are here to stay.  At least for a while.


     

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