Life Lessons
And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return, we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game
As I look back at all I have experienced and observed, I see certain patterns and truths that others might find useful.
Life Lessons, or...
The Not So Glorious Alice Crusade
Over the years when people have asked me why I never married I answered that I proposed once and was turned down. If they pressed me I would say that I have trust issues. No one ever pressed me further but if they had I would have told them that it is not that I don't trust women (although I probably don't), what I don't trust is my own judgment. I fell deeply in love once, proposed marriage after considerable indecision, and my proposal was instantly and unambiguously rejected. I suppose that my love expired at the same moment as it was conditioned on the belief that she loved me. And my fallback attempt at maintaining our friendship proved an exercise in futility.
One of my best writing teachers used to ask her class, after finishing a novel, to go back and read the first paragraph for the ways in which it predicted the rest of the text, or in the most skillful cases, taught us to read it.
I believe that my natural love for a woman is the Storgic type. Such people tend to be stable and committed in their relationships. They value companionship, psychological closeness and trust. For these individuals, love relationships can sometimes grow out of friendships, so that love sneaks up on the pair. This love style is enduring, and these individuals are in it for the long haul. Yet this tale is about how even something so earthy is ultimately controlled by subtle forces of destiny in the guise of free will.
Imagine that you are offered a choice between an average life and having three months of rapture in your early twenties, which will then end suddenly and inexplicably, and will make the rest of your life (relationship-wise) anti-climatic in comparison. As a kicker at age 70 you will be granted a revelation that those three months were largely imaginary, yet your takeaway will be that all things considered you would still choose to have experienced those three months.
Or put more directly; people can kill each other for all kinds of reasons - I guess they can fall in love for all kinds of reasons. You gotta take it when it comes, even if it is a girl like Alice.
Let me make an effort to be entirely honest (with myself and anyone reading this) with some basics about my first love. Her name was Alice and it occurred when I was 23 years old and stationed in England with the Air Force. It has been my only "unrequited" love, something to which I appear to be otherwise immune, if my initial romantic feelings about someone are not returned those feelings simply do not grow. And since then I have relentlessly tested my relationships, usually to their detriment. Those darn trust issues.
We had roughly a summer together from her arrival at the base and my departure, by midsummer we were spending most of our off duty time together. I was determined to not get seriously involved with her and she seemed to have the same idea although we did not spend a lot of time discussing it, we just enjoyed our connection and the time we were able to spend together. I believed at the time that under different circumstances things would have gotten quite serious and that my feelings were returned, so flying home was a mix of relief that I had escaped a romantic entanglement that did not fit with my immediate future and guilt over leaving her behind without some sort of commitment. My hope was that being back in the world after three years overseas would provide enough distractions to keep me from missing her. But instead I spent weeks of agonizing until I finally broke down and made a long-distance proposal. It was not your standard delusional dynamic of wishful thinking but simply the only course I felt was still open to me.
I didn't expect her to accept on the spot but I hoped that it would start us down the road. To the extent that I was thinking long term I imagined completing college on the G.I. Bill while she finished her assignment overseas, lending no sense of urgency to the progress of our relationship and commitment. Hardly ideal but it was all I had for her at the time.
And I can't be too hard on myself because my first girl friend died in a car accident when we were 16 and consequently I was slow about forming romantic relationships. Alice was truly my first time falling in love. And because I was a bit late to the table it was inconceivable to me this time that the feeling was not a mutual one. Surely no one could evoke such an intense feeling in me unless they were feeling the same thing. It never entered my mind otherwise, the decision process was entirely about my choosing between acting on this now or taking a chance of there one day being someone else out there with whom I could make the same connection, and since no one before had done so that seemed like a pretty iffy possibility.
So, what you're saying is that even though you are an almost-paralyzed, multiphobic personality who is in a constant state of panic, your wife did not leave you, you left her because she... liked Neil Diamond?
I will concede that some degree of arrogance and a huge amount of simple naiveté was distorting my reality. The year before I had spent months in a hospital recovering from a motorcycle accident and learning to walk again - that accomplishment had put the finishing touches on a rebuilt identity and it is likely that the confidence gained had made me far more receptive to serious romance. There are a lot of definitions for romantic love but at least in this case it was based on my feeling good about myself when I believed that Alice approved of me; and proud of myself for being worthy of Alice's love. And as much as I admired Alice I also felt protective toward her, go figure! I cannot overstate how impressed I was with her at the time.
Wiser men than I have explained seemingly dysfunctional relationships as something that occurs because "we accept the love we think we deserve". Which in this case meant that for the first time I felt good enough about myself to be receptive to being loved by a good person. Of course it could also mean that on a subconscious level my self-image was still garbage and I perceived a lack of character in Alice; accepting the love of a horrible person because that was the only love that I deserved. Such uncertainty is likely what is behind my continuing need for a resolution.
This is a big story, much bigger than I could have imagined when it began as aspects of it have a certain universality. It has been the riddle of my life, something I could never make sense of because it just didn't add up. I hate gray areas because you don't learn anything from gray areas. Yet I've always sensed that there was an answer and that one day I would discover it.
These are the subjects at hand. And we will deal with them for the next hour or so and hope that we draw no conclusions; else wise, the subject shall cease to fascinate us and, alas, another dream would be lost. There are far too few.
I now can see that 1974 was a major turning point of my life. I had positioned myself perfectly for an enjoyable immediate future, my self-esteem had never been higher, and I threw it all away for some girl who as it turned out had no special affection for me whatsoever.
Up till then my life had included at least two genuine tragedies during which I maintained my dignity and perspective. But with this I laid myself open to low tragedy; the mingy and dirty tragedy of making an ass of myself over a person who cared not the slightest for me. Ever since I have felt it essential that I find an explanation for my insanity or miscalculation or whatever.
The years roll by and in July 2000 I return to RAF Chicksands for a week long Air Force reunion, almost 26 years after I had left. One reason I returned was to reopen the Alice mystery, why had I ever fallen for a girl who within weeks of my departure became totally indifferent to me? It was a long shot that Alice would also attend although on the first night I went pub crawling with some of her friends who brought me up to date on her life, and they thought she might show up the next day. I spent a sleepless night in the warrant officers quarters on base as I realized that my coming was a mistake. I did not want to see her. I did not want to see what 26 years had done to her. I had been genuinely shocked to learn that the life of the extraordinary girl I remembered had been very ordinary. I wanted to retain the magic of my 1974 memories.
“Look here”, said Dexter, sitting down suddenly. “I don’t understand. You say she was a ‘pretty girl’ and now you say she’s ‘all right.’ I don’t understand what you mean-Judy Jones wasn’t a pretty girl, she was a great beauty”……….
“Lots of women fade just like that,” Devlin snapped his fingers. “ Perhaps I’ve forgotten how pretty she was at her wedding. She has nice eyes”.
A sort of dullness settled down upon Dexter. For the first time in his life he felt like getting very drunk. He knew that he was laughing loudly at something Devlin had said, but he did not know what it was or why it was funny…. He had thought that having nothing else to lose he was invulnerable at last-but he knew that he had just lost something more, as surely as if he had married Judy Jones and seen her fade away before his eyes. The dream was gone. Something had been taken from him. In a sort of panic he pushed the palms of his hands into his eyes and tried to bring up a picture of the waters lapping on Sherry Island and the moonlit veranda, and gingham on the golf-links and the dry sun and the gold color of her neck’s soft down. And her mouth damp to his kisses and her eyes plaintive with melancholy and her freshness like a new fine linen in the morning. Why, these things were no longer in the world! They had existed and they existed no longer.
Thankfully my sleepless night was wasted as Alice did not make an appearance. I would include this paragraph about her on the reunion website:
"The next ghost was not unexpected as she haunted me for quite a while after leaving Chicksands. A WAF who I met a few months before I was to leave, let’s called her Ghost “A”. A short-timer, I was determined to avoid romantic entanglements that summer but found myself spending more and more time with her. Back in the world, I would decide that it had been a mistake to think that I had not gotten involved and to have not said certain things before leaving. To impress her I got an early out to enroll mid-year at Cornell – “High Above Cayuga’s Waters”. A mega-competitive academic situation that I was not prepared for and would not have dared attempt if I had been in my right mind. This did absolutely nothing to further my romantic cause but after a rocky first semester I got into the game and completed my degree. There is a saying that our aspirations are our possibilities. I found that I was not the smartest student at Cornell but somewhat surprisingly that I was smarter than a lot of them. Alice's intelligence and ambition had inspired me to want to impress her. That degree and the contacts I made through the school have been instrumental in almost every job offer and promotion since. So I did the right thing for the wrong reason. Credit that to “A”; if I had never known her I might still be drifting somewhere."
Home from the reunion I concluded from the depressing banality of her life since 1974 that she was an unlikely source of the answers I was seeking. I hated that reality had somewhat diminished my respect for her intelligence, creativity, and ambition although it was suddenly easier for me to objectively reconcile myself to my loss. Most importantly I had found the first puzzle piece I needed to solve my mystery. For the first time - at least consciously - I realized that the girl with whom I had fallen in love was someone that I had at least in part invented. Someone who had never existed as I had perceived her. What I didn't have was any clue as to the template that I had used to do this nor any explanation for why.
The search for the next puzzle piece meant ignoring the traits that I had supplied my invented Alice and discovering what it was about the real Alice that had initially attracted me. Of course I had absolutely no idea how I was going to do that given that it had occurred 26 years earlier.
Any resentment I had from feeling tricked or cheated went away with the discovery of the second puzzle piece, which came to me a few years after the reunion with the introduction of Luna Lovegood to the Harry Potter series. I recognized many of Alice's real attraction factors in Luna's off-kilter and slightly disheveled qualities, someone disarmingly out of step but processing a lot more than she was letting on. This was a personality type to which I have long been attracted and one to which it is natural to attribute the sharp mind of a distracted deep thinker. And it had played well with Alice's natural shyness.
Of course off-kilter, slightly disheveled, innocent(?), repressed, and shy; with an absurdist sense of humor are key parts of my own identity. It seems to be an unusual combination. Meaning that in Alice I sensed a rare kindred spirit who seemed to really get me. If you find a kindred spirit it is natural to assume that they totally get you but they probably don't, more likely they only partially get you. And you make a lot of other leaps of faith in the direction of them sharing all your attitudes, values, and capacities.
Now I began to really grasp how much of the disconnect had been my responsibility, she had not played or deceived me, I had largely done that to myself. This was an important discovery which could not have been made without both puzzle pieces. Yet even together they only revealed reasons for a moderate attraction and not what had been behind the magical “once in a lifetime” connection process that I felt had taken place between us during the summer of 1974. I still lacked the “why” of my delusion but at least my new insights held out the promise of being able to recognize the final piece of the puzzle should I chance upon it at some point in the future.
The final piece of the Alice puzzle arrived in December 2020 when U-Tube's "up next" list inexplicably included the Godspell movie's "Day-By-Day" segment. U-Tube has algorithms which drive this process based on an account's access history. But there was nothing in my past viewing that would have prompted anything from Godspell, perhaps God took pity on me and finally cued up a resolution to end my torture. I had not seen Godspell since 1974 so I clicked the icon and within a few frames of the segment all was explained.
“Red hair is my life long sorrow.” ― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
The second puzzle piece had opened me to the possibility that I was pre-disposed to fall in love with Alice because she was a personality type for which I have a weakness - an "attraction to innocence", and a perceived kindred spirit. But the U-Tube segment created a rush of memories and now I am 100% sure that my Alice attraction 46+ years ago was mostly about Gilmer McCormack, a redhead like Alice (those cute Irish girls again) whose character I had fallen for when the "Godspell" movie played at the base theater a few weeks before Alice's arrival. I was so dazzled that I sat through the movie twice, the Gilmer character was imprinted on me and then forgotten a few days later. This is not an especially "creepy" thing as films intentionally connect the audience to the characters, the language of film is based on a two-way process which includes each audience member filling in the blanks of the characterization. Which is why huge efficiencies result from using stereotypes. And I was not the only person impacted by that performance as there is even some artwork available on the internet:
In this case the actress provided basic characterization and I as the smitten viewer subconsciously or with self-knowing whimsy expanded upon it during my two viewings, reflexively adding whatever details pleased me but were consistent enough to not require additional suspension of disbelief. Like 99% of these flights of fancy it was over and done within days of my watching the film and would have been of little note but for the arrival of a new Russian linguist on Able Flight.
Flashing back 46 years, I met Alice within days of her arrival and things began clicking into place between us unlike any romantic attraction I had ever experienced, each step forward that summer just felt right. Alice was about as counterculture as girls get in the Air Force, even back then. Yet she did not begin to approach the hippy waif of the musical which is probably why I failed to "consciously" make an association between them. I can now see from the timing and the striking physical similarity what should have been obvious at the time. In my eyes they had the same kind of innocence and it was that "attraction to innocence" thing again, with me unconsciously attributing much that had been Gilmer to Alice. An example of how transference can occur in everyday life. It would not have seemed so magical if I had realized why this was happening but I still might have gone with it as it was a wondrous thing to discover someone who so closely fits your subconscious ideal. Like having your dreams slowly come true before your eyes. Under such circumstances falling in love was inevitable, things just kept breaking favorably the more I got to know her. It was a series of validations of what I felt was supposed to happen.
And as this new reality began to take shape I recalled an occasion early in my acquaintance with Alice. I had just returned from playing golf in Stevenage and was transferring my clubs from Bob Scott's car in the airman's club parking lot as Alice was going into the club. She looked at me carrying my golf match gear and registered only dull surprise, making no inquiries. She simply had no frame of reference.
The incident set off enough internal discordance so as to be notable enough that I still remember it. In retrospect it was a tell that I was already seriously overestimating her and attributing a level of sophistication and breeding that simply was not there. As Dave Black had noted a year earlier, very few of these WAF's were girls that we would have dated in civilian life. And it is certainly possible that my failure at the time to take my relationship with Alice to a more serious level was because I sensed this disconnect on some level and was subconsciously backing away- I simply don't know.
Finding this final puzzle piece unlocked everything and my worldview totally unraveled. The process was not a before-your-eyes rolling transformation like you would see in a CGI segment, the joy and the pain were simply too old for all the memories to be instantly accessed and updated in the light of these new considerations. It would require days of mental processing, with mornings of lying awake as I slowly untied the ganglial knots in my head.
The irony of all this, in case you missed it, is that I started this quest for the purpose of learning to trust the validity of my romantic feelings and ended it with evidence that there are good reasons I should not trust my romantic feelings. So why do I feel so good about what I have just discovered? I guess that I feel good that I am blessed with such scope to my imagination - even though that can be quite hazardous without moments of clarity. And I feel good that Alice is largely absolved of responsibility. And I feel genuinely joyous that I have rediscovered Gilmer - that the transference is reversing and that going forward I can just play a clip from "Godspell" when I need to be cheered up.
Of course the other irony is that I would not have fallen in love had I not been determined to avoid serious romantic relationship because I only had three months left in England. This allowed me to relax and let down my guard. Had I had the time to aggressively pursue Alice I would most likely have been quickly rejected and moved on.
It's also nice to find that at that age I invested so much in such a positive ideal. I fell in love with Alice because I believed that she loved me and that I deserved someone like her, a leap of faith that I would not have made a couple years earlier when my mind was in a bad place. If it is true that “we accept the love we think we deserve”, then this is the earliest evidence I have of getting back my nobility of spirit. This discovery relieves me of what I only now realize has long been my greatest fear, that I would one day come to view the not-so-glorious Alice crusade as pathetic. I no longer see that as happening.
I've come to view this as an unexpectedly good resolution; having preserved the essence of my feelings all these years I can finally rid myself of their unworthy object, yet still hold onto the feel good part.
A few more days of mental processing has me rather anti-climatically concluding that the long dormant and not so glorious Alice crusade of 46 years was finally imploded by the Godspell revelations. That is because when viewed in the light of those revelations all the alternate timelines flowing from the "what if Alice had loved me?" construct (with all of its alternate Jeffs and Alices from all of the different possible realities) have been rendered unappealing and in some cases quite horrific. I wouldn't trade my current reality for any of them. Perhaps Alice was more perceptive than I had thought.
Note: If you get off on this sort of stuff it continues in the "Romantic Meanderings" section:
https://sites.google.com/view/2013babyboomerblog/secrets-to-living/romantic-meanderings
and
https://sites.google.com/view/2013babyboomerblog/secrets-to-living/holly