On Caring

Oct 24, 2011 00:32


Godbless our parents. Many of them, anyway. They give it a listen when you burst home from school yammering about Decepticons and Cobra Commands or Funshine Bear and Bowser or pizza Fridays or Matt’s birthday party at Chuck-E-Cheese or the best rentals to jack your Gamerscore or how many Pokémon you still need or how you are so going to make the best science project this year or next month’s field trip to Space Camp or how you absolutely need new clothes or how you will definitely be an archeologist someday-or when you start jibber-jabbering about Emma’s new shoes or your layup in gym or your mad skills in math class or whether you’ll make varsity or whether you’ll go to prom or what to wear or how the cute boys never care or who you want to rush or how today’s movies are so stale compared to anything made in the seventies or how much you want to bench by the end of the summer or the underappreciated role of the bassist in any band with more than three instrumentalists-when you snivel and wail and gripe and fuss and contrive and hurrah and squawk and blubber and boohoo and weep and stammer and guffaw, they listen.

How? Methinks in my slightly advancing age what a task that must be to pretend to care about any of the consuming fires of another mind. But they do the job because, well, if they didn’t what kind of people would they be? A parent’s greatest feat must be this, to put up some show of interest, even when they have to borrow it against their dwindling stock of youth.

But still you get older, and then it really hurts when you can no longer even pull your friends down the rabbit holes of your latest obsessions. You are all alone now with your vinyl collection of Velvet Underground albums or your meticulously manicured poodles or your acquisitions spreadsheets and your headphones turned up to the Act V opening of Berlioz’s Les Troyens. Some of us know music. Some can pop off quotes from the annals of literature’s B-listers. Some can name every player on the 1985 Chicago Bears roster. Some are happy to point out the 12 easy ways Twilight could have been a decent movie. Whatever the hobby, the habit, the holy monument into which we drain our every true moment, it’s a verity that’s kept apart from the other one-the people for whom we most ravenously care.

Remember that, and do something nice for someone you love. Pretend to care. You are one of the banks which lend their life meaning. You therefore have enormous power to bestow some of that meaning on the places they spend their passion, or conversely, to leave them wondering why they waste their time.
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