More than a half-century ago, I moved to Fall River and began a job wherein, for the first time in my life, writing was the chief skill I brought to the workplace. I shared a big old Victorian house with a number of other guys. The house was so huge it had once been a funeral home.
At one point, there was an open bed, and a new guy who hadn’t been previously known to anyone in the house moved in. He quickly turned out to be, to say the least, difficult to live with. He had an underdeveloped sense of boundaries and spewed forth an overabundance of vacuous verbiage. That’s not a winning combination of traits in a housemate.
What turned out to be interesting for me to observe was the range of reactions to him by the other guys in the house. It went from those at one end of the spectrum who were what I’ll call “mildly amused” to those at the other end who seemed barely able to refrain from jumping on his back and perpetrating an act of violence.
Along the way it hit me that the guy didn’t act differently toward anyone. He was an equal opportunity annoyer. It was a crash course in the understanding that how bothersome someone is to me has at least as much to do with who I am as with who they are. No one gets up in the morning with the sole purpose of aggravating me — with the possible exception of some political figures! They just go about their day being who they are, and it turns out just about nobody has any interest in changing who they are for my sake.
Later in life, I gave myself another lesson in relating to others.
That lesson began when I decided to attend my 40th high school reunion. I hadn’t attended any of my previous reunions, but I found myself wanting to reunite with the tribe I was young with, and realized I was running out of opportunities to do so.
I went to a large high school and had a graduating class of 650. I was pretty much in the whirl of things, but when I looked at my yearbook before the reunion, I was surprised by how many of my classmates I didn’t know. I had passed by them in the halls for four years as if they were extras without speaking parts in a movie in which I was starring. Ah, adolescence … at least mine.
I decided my game plan for the reunion would be to not limit myself to only seeking out those I’d known in high school. I would, instead, focus on and seek to connect with whoever was in front of me, even if I’d never spoken a word to them during my high school years.
I followed this game plan, had a great night, and got to meet some new people. One of the them was a woman who’d made a life for herself in Vienna, Austria. Another was a woman who in our conversation never spoke of being ill, and who showed no signs of sickness, but who I read about in the local obituaries (I read them online) not too long after the reunion. I was grateful to have been touched by her life before she left us.
I still had plenty of time to reconnect with those who were part of my high school crowd.
If I were to sum up what I learned from the way I conducted myself at that reunion, it would be that the intention I want to have as I set sail on the often choppy seas of humanity each day is that I have the best attainable relationship with whomever I come upon. I do have to admit that sometimes the operable word is “attainable.”
Getting back to the memorable experience I had at my 40th reunion, I’ll offer that when my 50th reunion came up, I decided not to attend. I guess you could say I wanted that night of the 40th reunion to be frozen for all time, and didn’t want to risk it being melted down by a disappointing 50th. Through trial and error over the course of my life, I’d learned to sometimes apply the adage “quit while you’re ahead.”
In addition to specific learning experiences, the act of writing has served to birth understandings that have gestated in me without my even knowing it. In that regard, I think of a piece of dialog from a script I co-wrote this past year for a short film based on a 25-year-old play of mine.
One of the characters speaks of a time she spent living in New York City thusly: “I mean most people there are struggling, like anywhere else. It’s like an impressionist painting. If you are distant enough from it, the effect is one thing. But if you get up real close, you see a lot of dabs and strokes of paint. Most of the people in New York are those dabs of paint.”
Sometimes when I’m overwhelming myself with my life, it helps me to dwell for a moment on the perspective that I am but a dab of paint on a canvas wider than the known universe and longer than all time.
And speaking of time, I think the moment has come for this dab of paint to end this month’s column while I am, I hope, ahead.
Amherst resident Richard McCarthy, a longtime columnist at the Springfield Republican, writes a monthly column for the Gazette.