Day: February 25, 2016

I guess Scott is my best friend now, I haven’t had a best friend in decades, the shrinks would say I wasn’t available for that, or for love. The shrinks would be speaking truth. I’m not sure what “best friend” even means.

I think C.S. Lewis described it best for me, it is a feeling, not something definable. “Friendship,” Lewis wrote, “is born at the moment when one man says to another “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…” I think friends are people who truly know you well and still manage to love you.

Scott has many more friends than I do, and he may have others who are his best friends, I haven’t asked him and it isn’t my business. But we share many things. We get along with most people, but have real trouble with angry people, diddlers or phonies, people who tell you how much they love you while plunging daggers into your back. I have met a lot of those, and even lately.

We both seek creative lives, and live creative lives. We love our wives, who are partners and kindred spirits. Neither of us will ever have a lot of money. We do not live for security, but for meaning. We are both crazy in a number of ways, and barely survived our families, who have managed in general to never be there when we need them.

We are both Lost Boys, self-made men, living outside the conventional circles of tradition and work. I suppose you call us loners and dreamers. We both understand the nature of abuse, and the damage it does.

Scott always invites me to sit with him in his mystical sugar house, a medieval alchemic facility he built himself. Scott builds beautiful buildings, makes wonderful food, writes lovely music. He is struggling with various writing blocks, I am working with him to break through them.

He is one of those men who tends to be hard on himself, as I do. We trust one another completely, talk easily, understand the importance of boundaries. I took home bottle of freshly made maple syrup, I insisted on paying the $25 (he offered me a $5 discount, I refused it) he took the money. We talk once or twice a week, we are both busy the other days.

Friendships ought to be be nourishing and feel good. If you leave wondering what was said and what was meant, something is wrong. Run. Friends are there if you need them, but respect it when you don’t. Friendships are rare and  precious in men, I have had very few of them, and none that lasted too long. This one, I suspect is a keeper.

Scott and Lisa and Maria and I go out for dinner sometimes, sometimes to the movies. Time flies by when we are together, we have so much to talk about it. Scott is a spiritualist, a Tai Chi master. He has been trying to teach me Tai Chi for several years, I have been working on his writing. Lisa is a food artist, a creative, she and Maria have much in common.

We will get there with our teaching one another, each in our own way, in our own time. We spent two hours today in the sugar house, Scott loves Red and I always  bring him. We talked about love and pain and our hopes for our lives. We always share the things we are learning, we bring each other acquired wisdom and experience and share it as treasure.

There is no drama in our friendship, that is another reliable warning sign, there is often disagreement, but never anger. We are not seeking to save one another, we do not rush to each others house at the first sign of trouble. When I had my open heart surgery, Scott came by with food every day and dropped it by the back door. He never came inside. He knows me.

I believe we can say anything to one another and we will be understood and accepted. I love the sugar house, it was cold and pouring rain, the wind kept blowing open the door, Scott rushed around like a wizard, stirring, pouring, tossing logs into the fire. The sap is really running this year because it is so warm, Scott is struggling to keep up with it.

I hope we get to sit more in the sugar house, it is an incubator for friendship, especially for lost boys.

It took me all day to track down the Albert Camus quote I most loved about friendship, it captures friendship for me:

“Don’t walk in front of me…I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me..I may not lead. Walk beside me..Just be my friend.”

Maria started mumbling about the living room walls this week. Hey, she said, what do you think about painting some of the walls in the living room this weekend? Well, I said, okay, if  you want to do it.

I had seen her staring at the walls, I could hear the wheels turning in that busy head.

What color do you think, she asked?

I smiled (to myself), I’ve been this route before, I know the drill, I may be of limited usefulness, but I am not stupid. Oh, whatever you think, I say.

But what color do you like, she asks? She looked quite sincere. She was just kidding.

For fun, I toss out the first thing I think of. Purple? She pretends to think about it. I know she has it all worked out in her head.

She smiles, turns away. There are four walls in the living room, of course, which gets a lot of natural light. One wall was just painted salmon pink, the other three are white. Maria has targeted these walls as being dull.

The white walls will change as sure as the grass will grow.

I know on Saturday we will be going to the hardware store, mixing paints. I know she will spend a good chunk of the weekend zipping around the living room like a fiend, moving ladders around, hopping up and down, she will talk about how long it will take, how complex it will be, how much she dislikes doing it.

I will nod, rather stupidly. She is not telling the truth.

It will all be done Sunday afternoon. It will look great. There will be the obligatory fussing about the color, the obligatory pretending to ask me what I think, the obligatory pretending to listen.

This is the tyranny of the artist. I am not one of those men who thinks he can handle tools and paint and gutters and such. I can’t pick colors or figure out what goes together.

I don’t want to, and I can’t. I can handle typing and walking and hauling some hay around, and yelling at dogs. And reading, I can handle reading, and sometimes British mysteries on the Ipad from Netflix.

And I can shop and I can cook most meals. That’s not bad, but it’s all I can do. I am just not interested in the other stuff.

I think one key to a good marriage is understanding when to run and hide, and when to fight, and also accepting what you can and can’t do. I have little or no male ego about repairs, and the artist loves hard labor, as long as it’s of her choosing and is somewhat artistic.

Okay by me. Make it work for you.

Maria handles the heavy stuff, all construction and repair issues, all restoration. She talks to the plumbers and the handymen. I am not trusted to do this. I wouldn’t put it that way to her, of course, she always pretends to care what I think, sort of, she always asks me what I think, and once, a few years ago, she even accepted one of my suggestions.

One of my Facebook readers messaged me some suggestions for Maria’s Fiber Chair, “tell her to string some fiber across the back,” and I almost lost my breakfast. I messaged her back. “Umm, as a rule, i do not tell Maria how to do her art. If you want to try, here’s her e-mail.”

The woman was not heard from again.

Yesterday, Maria said we should go to the hardware store together to look at colors. Fine, I said. In the afternoon, she showed up with two paper samples (above) and said, “what do you think about green?”

I thought we were going together, I mumbled. “Oh, really?,” she said, “well I was just driving by the hardware store.”

“How about mauve?,” I offered mischievously, as she held the samples up to the wall. I have some pride.

“So you agree,” she said. “This light green?”

“Yes, sure,” I said. “Looks great.”

During this next restoration phase, I will be permitted to paint for a half-hour or so (no edges, and lots of tarps beneath me) and at some point, I will be lavishly praised for my 20 strokes, and then she will suggest I go blog or take a photo and I will be dismissed, and I will go blog and photo.

Usually she’ll say, “why don’t you rest a bit, you looked tired.” After that, there will be no looking back, my brushing is done.

So looks like we’re going to go with light green to offset the new salmon pink North Wall. Stay tuned.

I love living with an artist, but I will tell you they all have a bit of Putin in them. Don’t cross them when it comes to colors, don’t make too many comments or suggestions while they work, never, ever try to tell them what to do.  Learn to say “that’s a great idea.” Life goes better that way.

Now that I think of it, those are the same rules for living with a writer.

I call the morning light my Holy Sparks. When I stand in the pasture and greet the sunrise, as I do most mornings, it is a sacred time of day for me. It is my cathedral, my faith. I experience joy, peace, hope and strength from the light bursting all around me from the sun lighting up the clouds. I wonder, “what is this joy, what is this feeling?”

Today, a feast of blues and yellows and greens, after the rains and the warming. I told myself, “this is all, there is nothing but the holy sparks from the sublime holy worlds that are within the sun and the light and the sky and the animals at their feeders and their work.”

We waked into the woods this morning just as the sunlight peeked through the clouds and lit Maria’s face and our way into the woods. Red and Fate Squared off, ready to chase each other down the path, as they do each morning with great joy.

Red is eight years old, Fate is nine months old, Red is a serious, workman-like agreeable creature, Fate is hell on wheels. Red never played in his years on the farm, he worked and hung around with me. Since Fate came, she has been laboriously working on loosening him up, getting him to play, and it is working.

In the woods especially, Red and Fate race each other down the long paths and back, through the woods. They play hide-and-seek. Red is transformed,  his eyes wide, his ears up. Fate will pop up behind a tree and circle around, Red will run back and forth looking for her.

With his sheep, he is all work. With me, he is all quiet companion. With Fate, his made and playful side has emerged, and I am  happy to see it. Fate is the Joy Dog, her enthusiasm and spirit are infectious.

In the deep woods, a stump whose moss has suddenly greened in the warm temperatures. I hadn’t seen it before, but I saw a heart clearly engraved in the stump in moss. It was beautiful to me, and inspiring. Did I really see a heart in that stump? Would others see it? What does it mean?