Do you remember that Paul Simon song that begins, "Yesterday it was my birthday, I hung one more year on the line”? Doesn’t matter if you do. Yesterday it was my birthday and I hung one more year on the line. I’m aching a bit.
Not from my advancing age, though. I’m aching with some mixture of nostalgia, regret, culture shock, loneliness, and mid-life crisis. Let me try to explain.
“People are wishing you Happy Birthday on your Facebook page,” Gretchen said. “You need to check it.” Well, truth be told, Jesse set up a Facebook page for me about a year ago and I’ve looked at it maybe a total of three times. I would have looked at it more, but I forgot the password. Anyway, I got the password from him and looked for the first time in seven months or more. I should have been looking at it earlier. There were all sorts of people there – people from high school, people from Michigan State, people from Young Life in Holland, Michigan, and from Central Reformed Church in Grand Rapids. There was the little girl who played Mayor Shinn’s daughter in the Flint Southwestern High School production of The Music Man in December, 1975. I was Charlie Cowell, the anvil salesman. (But he doesn’t know the territory!) Her Facebook page said she is a prison guard in the south and her greatest joys in life are her grandchildren! How did that happen? There was a kid I took to Young Life camp 22 years ago that we nicknamed “Tiger” because the first night we were there he danced around the cabin in tiger-striped shorts to a song called “Girls, Girls, Girls.” He’s pictured in a business suit on Facebook. There was the guy I performed “Who’s on First” with in high school. There were people in Hawaii and Germany. There was a guy I remember not being all that nice to when I was younger, and there he was, 35 years later, wishing me Happy Birthday. Facebook is like a giant “come home, all is forgiven” poster. As I read these people’s Facebook pages, looked at their pictures, and contemplated their lives, I felt all sorts of feelings flooding in and through me. Most of what I felt was regret for letting them go.
You are in a sort of “review your life” frame of mind on your birthday, anyway. I started reviewing mine. I don’t have any regrets about the places we’ve lived or the decisions I’ve made or the overall direction my life has gone in. But I have real regret about walking away from relationships. And now here I am, on another continent, 4000 miles away from most of the people who have defined my life.
Place is important and God knows I’ve been seeing a lot of them. In a couple of hours, I will get on a plane and fly to Geneva and then drive down to the Praz de Lys in the French Alps. That’s what the picture is of. Can you believe I get to go to spend the weekend at a place like that? Next weekend Gretchen and I are getting on a boat in Stockholm and sailing to Helsinki. I have to pinch myself to know I’m not dreaming. But as fun and exciting as seeing all these places is, it is people that make life worth living.
Patrick Swayze died this week, and to honor the occasion Dutch TV preempted their regular programming to show a bunch of his movies. Not to speak ill of the recently deceased, but as an actor Patrick Swayze falls somewhere on my list of favorites right between Charles Bronson and Sylvester Stallone. Which is another way of saying not very high, but at least he’s above Gary Busey and Keanu Reeves. Just imagine if Patrick Swayze made a movie with Gary Busey and Keanu Reeves. Oh, that’s right, they did make a really dumb movie together about surfing bank robbers, and the Dutch showed it last week. Bhodi and Johnny Utah? Real people have names like that? Come on. They also showed Ghost and Gretchen and I wound up watching it. Whoopi Goldberg was great in that movie. Anyway, we’re watching Ghost and the thought that occurred to me was “if Patrick Swayze is dead and so in love with Demi Moore, why is he trying so hard to keep her alive? Wouldn’t he be more fulfilled if she died also? Then they’d be together.” I know I am thinking way too much about the meaning of Ghost, but it started me thinking about heaven. I hope the promise of heaven is real. I believe in it, mostly I think because I want to believe in it. I don’t have any evidence for it beyond the Bible, but I’d rather live believing in it than not. Will we know each other in heaven? ls heaven where my Facebook page goes from being virtual to real, and I will be connected to all these people from different stages and places in my life? Or will being in the presence of God so fill us that nothing else matters? Will I care one whit about the life I’ve left behind?
Which started me thinking about Bill Segrist. Bill died about ten days after we moved here, and I had promised him I would preach at his funeral, so I hopped on a plane and went back to Michigan within two weeks of starting my new life. That was a bit surreal – outside of the funeral I really didn’t want people to know I was back, because it seemed way too anti-climactic. You shouldn’t show up again two weeks after people make a big fuss over you going away. Anyway, one of the great things about Bill was that he never let people go. He stayed connected, and he sure didn’t need Facebook to make that happen. What I tried to say at his funeral was that I never knew anyone who was so unwilling to let go of people and who was so willing to be there when things were rough. When someone is in trouble, a lot of us give that person space – but Bill would move in instead of out. On the night of Gretchen’s stroke in 1985, it was Bill who was still there after everyone else had gone home. He was given six months to live three years before he died. I think he fought cancer so hard and effectively because he just wasn’t willing to let go of the people in his life. I want to be more like Bill.
We finished my birthday with a Dutch party. About eight people came over and congratulated me on having a birthday. The women all kissed me three times. That’s not a bad custom! We talked and laughed and spent several hours together. I confirmed that Dutch people don’t move around as much as Americans do. Most people here live in the town where they were born and live close to their parents and extended family. If they do move, they only live an hour or so away from each other, because the country is so small. Maybe they are on to something. Maybe they are smarter than us. But I also thought, these Dutch friends are here now and are enriching my life. I’m going to be with French friends later today and with Swedish friends next week. All of these people are enriching my life and I wouldn’t know any of them if I’d stayed on Windsor Lane in Flint, Michigan.
So I started with the poet Paul Simon and I’ll end with the philosopher John Lennon:
All these place have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life, I’ve loved them all.
Jeff:
ReplyDeleteOnce again, you've done a great job of writing about things also going on in my life. I think my whole life, I've always tried to "hold on" to those in my life that I really cared about; sometimes more successfully than others, but I always knew the value of friendship from a very young age. When I was 8 or 9 years old, my family moved across town; to me, this was close to being the end of the world, because it meant moving away from my two best friends I'd ever had in my life, that lived two houses down, and that I played with every day from the time I could remember. I was heartbroken. I can even remember one time, after having moved, when a tv. show was playing Elton John, Bennie and the Jets, and I called my friends to tell them he was on tv, because I knew they'd want to watch; if I had still lived in the other house, I told myself, I could have been there with them, watching it. By the time I got them on the phone, they had gone to commercial. All this to say, "YES! Relationships, people, are the most important thing. We are the reason we're here for each other." Life is so much better when shared with those we love. That's one of the reasons I am so glad that somehow, I have been able to keep up with you and Gretch, although not as much as I'd like....and I should probably let her know more often how much I care. Because we only have a window of opportunity, and sometimes we don't know how long that window is. And, I'd rather live with no regrets. And, yes, I am going through the same mid-life crisis as you, with facebook! And, I've been keeping up with my page pretty regularly! But, just lately, I've also been getting in touch with some people who I haven't heard from in a long time, including my first youth director from when I was a teenager. Last time I saw him, he had just had his first daughter; she was about 4 months old, maybe. Now, she has a daughter, about 2 yrs old, of her own; I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around Bob being a grandpa! (I was just getting used to him being a dad....).The greatest thing about what's happening for me, is that in this whole process, God is showing me what a great and colorful tapestry he is making out of my life, by bringing all these people back in, as threads that are being woven back in. This has helped me to "let go" of the worries about losing touch with people, or my life going by way too fast, and focusing instead on what an awesome thing it is that God is doing by bringing these people back into my life, in a way that only God could! (Never mind the facebook technology). For me, yes, place is important, but timing is everything....and, I'm finally seeing that God's timing is the very best, even when I think I'm really really tired of waiting, or that things just aren't going "according to plan", that being MY plan. Just think about our two little lives, and how God is working in them to bring all these people we care about back in; then, multiply that by how many people are on the planet, and what He's doing with ALL of us....isn't that awesome? Blessings to you on your journeys and yes, please, do pinch yourselves and keep taking pics so that we can share with you, even tho far away.
And, yes, I DO have to comment on Patrick Swayze; maybe you have to be from Calif. to appreciate the film he did with Keanu Reeves; however, having grown up with the surf culture, I understood what they were trying to do with the film, and I enjoyed watching the surfing action. Perhaps the story wasn't that great, but....what can I say? I'm a sucker for cute guys with surfboards!
Thanks, Jeff, for your thoughtful post, and I agree with John Lennon; in my life, I've loved them all, as well!
Happy Birthday Jeff... I for one am glad you moved from Windsor Lane to Woodward Ave. Here is to many more Drives, Streets and Avenues in your very rich life.
ReplyDeleteHappy Birthday Jeffe, Amen!
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