Family, direct and indirectly
First, just to say that my older boy was in a car accident Sunday. Not his fault: he was on a winding canyon road someplace down in LA [quite likely Malibu since they took him to St. Johns'] when someone crossed the line, hit him, then he was hit from behind. Broken ankle [surgery, good repair] and some strained ligaments [didn't say where but I'm suspecting right arm and shoulder]; physical therapy and rehab for while and he'll be ok.
We are all grateful that it happened as it did: right fender to right fender, left fender to rear; and when he spun, it was on a section of the road with actual strong barriers- there are other parts of the road that are a 150 foot drop straight down, but not where he was. Good EMT/Paramedic crew, excellent orthopedic surgery team, good nursing care and PT- all in all, the best that could have come of it. Your good wishes for him and appreciation of all the people caring for him from the road designers on up, much much appreciated by me.
Second, and this the more 'indirect' part: my ex-husband [son's dad] gave a performance last Sunday of a folk-opera he's put together about his life. He's been working with David Ford at the Marsh Theatre, one of the premier solo performance directors in the country. It's an exploration of 'what it is to be a man'; always a good question, and one that I hoped he'd address at some point in his life. [I got my chance to work through a lot of what it means to be a woman in uni, working in the Women's Resource Center with the Library there, and in writing classes.]
I don't socialize with him- he's an annoying tendency to want to play 'bygones' about things that, I'm sorry, I will not let be by-gone- but I'm not acrimonious about him, towards him, either. So, since I was invited, and since it was being held here [the house I'm renting a room in is soooo versatile! they have a dance floor in their living room because they take Tango and Scottish Dancing lessons, so it was set up as a theatre for this event] I went for the first half, before I had to go off to work.
Now. I've always known he was talented. Thoughtful, had a sense of humor, all that. What I knew and most of our friends didn't know what how vain he is; I'd get a lot of shit from people for being annoyed with his vanity because they couldn't see it. After the divorce they had to get to know him all over again just as himself, and then again after he remarried- and then that vanity became apparent to pretty much everyone.
And, as Viggo says, [paraphrasing here] "All actors have some vanity, or how could they do the job?"
I was impressed by what he's done, the ex. We never really got to know each other when we were married; he revealed lots of things about himself I certainly never knew [being arrested on the Bay Bridge with no trousera, among them]. He's clearly worked to develop some honesty and transparency in place of braggadocio and presenting what he thinks he 'should show' to people. He has learned a lot of styles of music, both on the guitar and for presenting story with; though he's clearly still working on it, his attention to detail shows and is welcome. His voice is no more true than it ever was [about 70% of the time, good enough, you know?]. There are places I suspect he'd do better by finding a more spoken word approach to the material, but that's for him to work out over time.
~~
We've been divorced 27 years, were married 10, have many of the same friends in common still after all that time. I met him on a bus, moved in with him, moved out, got married, had kids, had problems, got divorced, moved on, made my own life, have been very happy in my own life. He remarried, had another child, has had many of the same problems in that marriage and with that child as in our and with ours, but stuck with that one and so learned a lot, changed a lot. He's got an annoying tendency to want to make nice at parties, to act as though I'm not uncomfortable with that, but he's letting that go.
My discomforts are with/from various things which I won't bore you with here. Sunday night what I noticed was happiness for him in the work he's done to put this piece together, admiration that it's so well done; appreciation for the work he's got yet to do on it to make it all of one quality as a performance; and sorrow for the things I never knew about him, the things that are similar about our interests and talents which, had we known them about each other, then, might have been places to work together in relating to each other. That marriage didn't have to fall apart, but... so it goes. As the song says, "Gotta know when to walk away and when to run..."
What I noticed most, though, is that I wasn't/am not jealous of him for this work he's doing. He paints, he plays guitar, has a couple of CDs of original music out, speaks a second language fluently, etc. etc., and had the good fortune to come from an intact family who put their kids through school for their bachelors' and helped with their masters' degrees. I didn't, but we never talked about that- so he was continually disappointed in my for not getting ahead, and I was continuously jealous of him for being able to with relative ease. Somehow, over time, I've worked that out, on my end, and whether he has an opinion about where I am in my life or not, both his having it and what it is are immaterial to me.
There's no real point to this little ramble except to answer, however incompletely, a friend's query as to how the evening went. This is my first take: impressions of nearly everything go right into me nearly instantaneously, but circulating them through my whole consciousness takes days, and working out meanings takes even longer- years, sometimes. I might come back to this, over time. Don't feel obligated to follow along. It's words, just words.
We are all grateful that it happened as it did: right fender to right fender, left fender to rear; and when he spun, it was on a section of the road with actual strong barriers- there are other parts of the road that are a 150 foot drop straight down, but not where he was. Good EMT/Paramedic crew, excellent orthopedic surgery team, good nursing care and PT- all in all, the best that could have come of it. Your good wishes for him and appreciation of all the people caring for him from the road designers on up, much much appreciated by me.
Second, and this the more 'indirect' part: my ex-husband [son's dad] gave a performance last Sunday of a folk-opera he's put together about his life. He's been working with David Ford at the Marsh Theatre, one of the premier solo performance directors in the country. It's an exploration of 'what it is to be a man'; always a good question, and one that I hoped he'd address at some point in his life. [I got my chance to work through a lot of what it means to be a woman in uni, working in the Women's Resource Center with the Library there, and in writing classes.]
I don't socialize with him- he's an annoying tendency to want to play 'bygones' about things that, I'm sorry, I will not let be by-gone- but I'm not acrimonious about him, towards him, either. So, since I was invited, and since it was being held here [the house I'm renting a room in is soooo versatile! they have a dance floor in their living room because they take Tango and Scottish Dancing lessons, so it was set up as a theatre for this event] I went for the first half, before I had to go off to work.
Now. I've always known he was talented. Thoughtful, had a sense of humor, all that. What I knew and most of our friends didn't know what how vain he is; I'd get a lot of shit from people for being annoyed with his vanity because they couldn't see it. After the divorce they had to get to know him all over again just as himself, and then again after he remarried- and then that vanity became apparent to pretty much everyone.
And, as Viggo says, [paraphrasing here] "All actors have some vanity, or how could they do the job?"
I was impressed by what he's done, the ex. We never really got to know each other when we were married; he revealed lots of things about himself I certainly never knew [being arrested on the Bay Bridge with no trousera, among them]. He's clearly worked to develop some honesty and transparency in place of braggadocio and presenting what he thinks he 'should show' to people. He has learned a lot of styles of music, both on the guitar and for presenting story with; though he's clearly still working on it, his attention to detail shows and is welcome. His voice is no more true than it ever was [about 70% of the time, good enough, you know?]. There are places I suspect he'd do better by finding a more spoken word approach to the material, but that's for him to work out over time.
~~
We've been divorced 27 years, were married 10, have many of the same friends in common still after all that time. I met him on a bus, moved in with him, moved out, got married, had kids, had problems, got divorced, moved on, made my own life, have been very happy in my own life. He remarried, had another child, has had many of the same problems in that marriage and with that child as in our and with ours, but stuck with that one and so learned a lot, changed a lot. He's got an annoying tendency to want to make nice at parties, to act as though I'm not uncomfortable with that, but he's letting that go.
My discomforts are with/from various things which I won't bore you with here. Sunday night what I noticed was happiness for him in the work he's done to put this piece together, admiration that it's so well done; appreciation for the work he's got yet to do on it to make it all of one quality as a performance; and sorrow for the things I never knew about him, the things that are similar about our interests and talents which, had we known them about each other, then, might have been places to work together in relating to each other. That marriage didn't have to fall apart, but... so it goes. As the song says, "Gotta know when to walk away and when to run..."
What I noticed most, though, is that I wasn't/am not jealous of him for this work he's doing. He paints, he plays guitar, has a couple of CDs of original music out, speaks a second language fluently, etc. etc., and had the good fortune to come from an intact family who put their kids through school for their bachelors' and helped with their masters' degrees. I didn't, but we never talked about that- so he was continually disappointed in my for not getting ahead, and I was continuously jealous of him for being able to with relative ease. Somehow, over time, I've worked that out, on my end, and whether he has an opinion about where I am in my life or not, both his having it and what it is are immaterial to me.
There's no real point to this little ramble except to answer, however incompletely, a friend's query as to how the evening went. This is my first take: impressions of nearly everything go right into me nearly instantaneously, but circulating them through my whole consciousness takes days, and working out meanings takes even longer- years, sometimes. I might come back to this, over time. Don't feel obligated to follow along. It's words, just words.