Overflow

Our neighbors from across the street, our best couple friends, our very own Fred and Ethel moved off to Kansas yesterday. He had a job transfer and now they’re gone. They were such good friends I don’t think I’ve had time to fully grasp the size of the hole their moving on has left in our family’s life. How do you replace an Uncle Dan and Aunt Cindy?

Of course the usual things were promised about keeping in touch. We already have made plans for visits. We’ll still exchange homemade Christmas ornaments. They kidnapped a plaster of Paris kitsch statue of my Mother-in-Law’s from our front yard with a promise to send back polaroids of the “Blue Boy” having a great time by the pool. We’ll go our there to pick up “Blue Boy” in another month when we come out there.

But we all knew that the kind of visiting that forged our friendship — that day In, day out, on the front swing, coffee and cards kind of getting together — is over. There’s a big difference between having friends in Kansas and friends across the street. Even the dearest of friends.

I remember thinking in high school that the friends I had then would be my friends for the rest of my life and that we’d always be together. And for the most part the first was true and the second one was a bittersweet lie we all told ourselves. At the end of college, when Heidi and I drove away from college into our new life together, I was a little bit wiser about goodbyes and promises to keep in touch. We do keep in touch, but you have to be realistic about your standards of “in touch.”

Now I accept a little more about how friendship changes over time. How, though intensity of friendship is proportional to proximity, friends are always still friends no matter the distance. We’ll miss you, Uncla Dan and Aunt Cindy. Someone may move into your old house, but we’ll keep a place for you here on the block.

I went into work today fully intending to be productive. I had to participate in a hiring interview, so there went the morning. At lunch I went to have a quick bite and head back to the office, all the sooner to be done and be able to start my three day weekend. You see we’ve got an extra houseful of family coming into town for the weekend and Olivia is being baptized tomorrow. Lots to do, you see.

So there I was eating my Gordita and flipping absentmindedly through the latest Art News when up walks my three year old and my wife carrying their own meals. Apparently they were in the drive through and saw me sitting there and Petunia insisted we come in. Petunia was at her pixie cute crinkly nose smile freckle faced most charming. She is never without a dress and flip flops and at least one mark on her face from one magic marker or another. She did her crinklenose smile, hugged me, and my work ethic slipped. At that point my productivity was hanging perilously by one hand over the precipice of the long weekend.

So I got back to my desk and put on my headphones to drown out any distractions. I rubbed the paddles together, prepping to defibrillate of the rest of my workday, when I made a final fatal mistake. I chose a CD of driving tunes — Steppenwolf, Cameo, Tenacious D, U2, Joan Jett. Some serious windows-down, wind in hair, driving off to some devil may care hideaway music. And there it went, my productivity, falling like Alan Rickman at the end of Die Hard. Suddenly being at work until 5:00 on the Friday of a holiday weekend was just not feasible.

So I’m taking some unplanned vacation hours. I was hijacked from productivity by a three year old pixie crinkle smile and a CD full of wanderlust-inspiring beats.

(pokes head out) They Gone? The Comment Spammers? Think they gave up on me after little more than a week?

Well, commenting is back on provisionally.

I’ve started to wear ties to work again. Been doing so for a coupla months now. I just woke up one morning and decided I wanted to wear ties to work again. Yes, I’ve succumbed to my inner dork.

Of course there are the inevitable wisecracks:

“Who died? When’s the funeral?”
“Have an interview today?”
“You’re bucking for a promotion, aren’t you?’

To which I crack back something like:

“My wife thinks I work in a bank and I just don’t have the heart to tell her I really work here.”

I am an apostate of the business casual orthodoxy. I am a throwback. The iconoclast in me likes being a throwback.

I am determined to persist in the face of the inevitable ribbing. I am strangely motivated. When I am asked why I have taken up this particular anachronous sartorial habit, I am a little chagrined to admit that I… just like wearing them. Yeah. Dork City.

Hey, I normally wear boring clothes. I don’t like logos or T-shirts with slogans. And a guy my size does not do bright colors or wild patterns very well. A tie is the one splash of color I allow to adorn my khaki and gabardine self.

And I’ve found that if you buy shirts that actually fit, a tie is not uncomfortable at all. And they say ties are slimming.

But that’s all just surfacey stuff. This coworker of mine got it right. She quipped about my tie to another coworker: “He’s trying to change his Karma.”

And that’s about as accurate as you can get in less than 25 words. It is pretty much about Karma.

Deep down, I’d say took up wearing ties again for the same reason I wear my wedding band. I want my symbols to match my reality. I know I can be a faithful husband without wearing a wedding band, but I want to be the kind of faithful husband who wants to wear his wedding band, who wants to look married. Same with the tie. It sacramentalizes, who I am and what I do and the role I play in my family. I am my father, more or less, and I am quite happy to be so.

There’s this part of a Donald Justice poem that captures this inner child moment for me:

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practises tying
His father’s tie there in secret

And the face of the father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.

I read that and am transported back to being a boy of six, standing by my father as he shaves, pretending to shave too. He gives me a little dollop of “Afta” so I can, you know, soothe the imaginary razor burn. And then he ties his tie and goes off to work. And I follow him as far as the door, imagining what cool place “work” might be. The tie is a symbol of all that for me. About a middle class professional dad going out to work for his family.

It’s such a small thing. Such a superficial thing. But I like the idea that I look on the surface more like what I feel inside. Jeans and knit shirts are just not me. I am basically my Father. There’s no resisting Karma.

A few weeks back, at this salon Heidi and I started called Second Thought (a whole ‘nother post) I argued rather inarticulately that the great problems that face Humanity will never be solved unless we make up for the fact that we are living with prehistoric brains in post-modern times. We need to evolve our firmware, so to speak, to meet the challenges that 21st century living presents us.

In fact, I’ve posted about this idea before.

Face it, in evolutionary terms, we’re still basically cavemen at our cores. And here’s yet another independent voice from Science and Spirit making the same point. We are jerry-built on the Pleistocene. If Humanity stays that way, humanity will end that way.