That Was Then, This Is Now

Season 6, #4: Friends, lovers, and Nightwalking into the future alone

“Do the days drag by? Did the favors wane?
Did he roam down the town all the while?
Will you wake from your dream with a wolf at the door
Reaching out for Veronica?”

—Elvis Costello, “Veronica”¹

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“Love is to borrow another’s eyes—to experience the world…as your beloved sees and feels it.”

—Sixten Sparre, from Elvira Madigan²

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THERE’S PROBABLY NOTHING MORE tongue-tied than Nightwalking.

I can think of similar examples, such as public speaking extempore, dealing with a misunderstanding of what someone was communicating to me, or just simply having no words—either being in awe, or caught without an easy verbal reaction.

Nightwalking, as I’ve mentioned before, is not clinical depression. Sure, it has a tinge of sadness, but it’s less like regret and more like longing—which means there’s a heavy dose of desire in it. And while desire is getting a bad rap these days (from overambition, lust, greed, manipulating or abusing others, you name it), at its core desire is nothing more than information.

It’s a feeling that says, “Hey, I want that. That looks good. That looks desirable.”

If you ask me, I’d say that’s valuable information.

So with that approach in mind, the final newsletter of Season 6 lies ahead, here, now—not in my imagination or rummaging around in the back of my brain—fully parked here teasing out what the “then” of Nightwalking meant in light of its “now.”

Nightwalking used to be my “alone time,” solitude away from school and family (okay, okay, but sometimes it was loneliness, pining for someone who wasn’t there with me, I’ll admit that), and sometimes accompanied by music, other times with only nighttime’s quietness and the opportunity to thoroughly examine what I’d been feeling over what I’d been thinking.

You see, that’s our ticket to the next station.

What is the information buried in desires formerly found, sometimes lost and—maybe—just maybe, regained?

Are you game to find out? Let’s dig in.

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That Was Then: PDAs—Public Dismays of Affection

FRIENDSHIP IS THE ROOT of love.

At least that’s the way it’s always been for me. Most children start out with friends as playmates, but then some weird new feelings later emerge.

By the time I was at least seven years old, I first noticed those feelings.

Ninth birthday party at a Maryland movie theater with six guy friends, two girls, and my brother (photo taken by Mom), November 1968.

I was an early adopter of assignations with the opposite sex. How early? Oh, eight or nine years old. It’s true! Just ask my brother Brian. He used to tease me all the time during those years about “smooching” the girls from my class, sometimes right there in the backseat of our family’s neon blue Chevy station wagon.

Looking back now (though probably unaware of it at the time) I must’ve figured out there was an energy exchange that occurred when someone showed interest in me or I showed interest in them. It was exciting! You were noticed, maybe appreciated … how intoxicating!

But also … confusing.

While writing posts to Completely in the Dark, I noted this sudden barometer drop in the emotional weather of this preteen:

The Alyward kids, two houses down from ours, used to playact stories in their barn. We—Matthew, Peter, and older sister Kathleen—used the barn loft as our stage. Kathleen was probably [in her early teens], while I’d only turned 10 the previous fall. I made Kathleen laugh and she returned the attention. It was the first time I remember a reciprocal sensation, a “butterflies-in-the-stomach, we’re-in-this-together, gosh-I-really-like-you” sort of way.

I’d kissed a girl, maybe two or three: Tara and Tonya G. [shown in the above photo at left in the yellow top and plaid skirt] … and perhaps Mandy, too. But this thing with Kathleen was a different feeling, more like a tacit understanding. The Alywards were very affectionate—something I never recall seeing between my own parents. Mom was more nurturing and affectionate than Dad. Perhaps because of that I felt a pull toward needing more and more affection. And then suddenly I’d retreat and go off on my own, nursing a resentment that most likely had no basis in reality.³

Preadolescence is like a one-two punch.

The first strike is at your emotional core, the dopamine hit of attraction and desire.

The second lands in an area just south of that—some newly as-yet-undiscovered land of sex and sensuality.

A later CITD post points directly to it:

One time we met up in the barn to look at John G.’s older brother’s Playboy magazines. It was the first time I’d ever seen a naked woman—and I was intrigued. I recall us trying to keep the younger kids away, especially [my brother], whom we felt weren’t ready to gaze openly upon the untrammeled female form. Seriously doubt we were either, but someone had to be in charge. The women in Playboy were like a window into a confusing future, but also an exciting one—I equated adult nakedness with the sort of promise nature and the woods afforded: the “real world” was beyond dress codes, rules, threats of eternal damnation, sin and social order. It existed in and of itself, and could be enjoyed like any of the other pleasures in being alive: eating good food, getting a warm backrub, swimming in a pool, laughing at a cartoon, reading a book and imagining all that was happening beyond the words and pictures.⁴

Well, as I took the sensuality path—a road less traveled, as I started to learn with further lessons on the “decorum of dating” as a teen—those early feelings bloomed into a nocturnal flower called Nightwalking, and by the early 1970s they were accompanied by the Moody Blues:

After J.P. in homeroom, I had a crush on a local girl who lived at the end of the road, K.B. She had long dark hair and a face that betrayed a seriousness that fascinated me. I used to walk down to her house just to be near her. House window lights snapped on and, out on the lake, boats glided by with their green, red, and white lights reflecting on the black water.

‘Oh how I love you…’

Why did love have to be so sad, so serious? What would it be like to be happy and loved? To have someone say, ‘oh how I love you!’ and you could say that to them too? How would it feel? When you didn’t have a clue, and you were 16 years old, you took in that heady night air for only so long before going home, tossing off your tan corduroys that reeked of cigarettes and coffee, crawling into bed and switching on the radio. Maybe you put on your oversized Sony headphones and melted into that song, often played by [the DJ] near midnight, with the sad singer, the softly strumming guitar, throbbing bassline—

‘Just what the truth is … I can’t say any more…’⁵

And don’t even get me going about the later teenage years and high school.

That’s when things got nasty and sexually political. Hormones were raging like random brushfires in dark corners of the cafeteria, flaring up at fall football games or the annual Homecoming dance.

Close on its heels—the nonsense that is romance.

“Kiss me as if it were for the last time.”

It was relentless and nearly always sad! What was the point of churning through all that emotion only to have it fail in the end?

And what if your beloved died on you for God’s sake?

How could you ever survive that?

“That's what it's about, preppy.”

So, I bumbled forward, late into losing my virginity (I’ll spare the ugly details but they are recorded in the WP blog) however there was an emotional side effect to the operation that was fully noted the morning after:

On Saturday morning, R. and M. had a University of Minnesota women’s softball game to play. They asked me and D. to come along and cheerlead.

So we did.

All I remember is that, before the game started, R. walked up and kissed me for good luck. That’s when I really started to have feelings for her, feelings that went beyond one night of lust. She trusted me. And I wanted to trust her. Sure, she was a bit of a handful and something of a live wire, but maybe she could be … tamed. ‘Potential new boyfriend’ pride started welling up inside of me.⁶

April 1980 self-portrait of the young artist awaiting yet another Public Dismay of Affection (photo by StoryShed Media).

There’s a word in there that begs deeper inspection: pride. Being proud of anything invited disaster, and that only became more apparent with every “failed” relationship.

A year later, in 1981, I was living back at home with the parents and away from college for what would be another three years. I’d just watched a movie I’d seen in my early preadolescence called Melody and was feeling blue—more in a Nightwalking way than depressed or melancholy. It was an odd experiment for Nightwalking to be so verbal since I noted in my journal that the young lovers in the movie were “no closer to me than the Moon. I haven’t said all I want to say on this yet…”

It took CITD to wrest it out of me in a 2013 post:

Author Anne Carson describes this as ‘finding the edge,’ the demarcation between self and other. ‘When I desire you, a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me.’ Carson retells Aristophanes’ account from Plato’s Symposium: ‘Human beings were originally round organisms, each composed of two people joined together as one sphere. These rolled about everywhere and were exceedingly happy.’ When these egg-like creatures offended Zeus and the gods of Olympus, they were each chopped in two. ‘As a result,’ Carson writes, ‘everyone must now go through life in search of the one and only other person who can round him out again.’

[The two young lovers in the film, Daniel and Melody] have at least ‘found’ each other. It’s a joyful discovery, yet the world intrudes on their happiness, attempting to tear them apart. They want to get married, but Melody’s father tells her that people get married when they’re older, ‘in their 20s, later sometimes.’ Melody refuses to wait. ‘But we want to be together now … why is it so difficult when all I want to do is be happy?’

Roland Barthes underscores Melody’s exasperation in his A Lover’s Discourse: ‘What do I care about a limited relation? It makes me suffer. Doubtless, if someone were to ask me: “How are things going with you and X?” I should reply: “Right now I’m exploring our limits;” ninny that I am, I make the advances, I circumscribe our common territory. But what I dream of is all the others in a single person; for if I united X, Y, and Z, by the line passing through all these presently starred points, I should form a perfect figure: my other would be born.’⁷

Can the edge separating one person from another ever be breached? Will the gap between me and the Moon ever close? What is true love and a lasting union?⁸

Over the years, there would be glimmers of love and connection: M. back when she was 29 and I was 34, me waiting at the door of her apartment building and seeing her tossing her hair as she beamed a smile walking down the hallway to let me in—heart leaping in my chest with happiness; K.S. and I cozy on her mother’s sofa, kissing and listening to the Beach Boys’ “All Summer Long”; or, in the last relationship:

During the year the folks died, with my then-girlfriend A.J., [the subject of marriage and children] was front and center. She often babysat two brothers, children of friends from her church. One day we took the boys to a nearby playground. I watched as she pushed them on a swing—she was smiling, the boys were beaming, I was beside myself with joy.

Could I be looking at the future mother of my children? I wondered.

I hadn’t thought that before or since, with any woman.

After we broke up in 2009, she emailed a letter which read in part: ‘I know you think that I would make a great mom, but your thoughts on children are not clear to me and I have not known or had the courage to talk about such an important topic.’

Seems she wasn’t alone in lacking courage. I’d been struggling with it most of my adult life. Now I’m over 50 and childless. I will probably never father a son or daughter. And that compounds my grief.⁹

A.J. and I off to vote in November 2008 (photo by StoryShed Media).

Of course any relationship is more than two people—there’s the third perspective of looking in the same direction and sharing a partnership that goes beyond the ideals of personality or egos or individual “feelings.” It’s something I hope to explore further in Season 7: Daytalking, which is about the effort it takes to maintain relationships—be it family, friends, husbands, wives, or life partners.

I’ll freely admit it: I’ve got work to do.

Which of course brings us to now.

This Is Now: For Absent Friends

ON MY 40TH BIRTHDAY, 26 friends converged at a family-style Italian restaurant in St. Paul, Minnesota. My brother and his wife also attended along with a couple friends from high school and college. We gorged on bowls of pasta and antipasto, loaves of garlic bread, a huge tiramisu, and a coworker brought a case from his wine cellar with reds, whites, dessert wines—we spent $500 on food and burned through eight bottles of vino, with tons of leftovers for everyone who came.

Someone put a button on my shirt that read: I’m Somewhere Between 40 and Death.

Twenty years later, I’ve had plenty of conversations more informal than formal about the loss of friends and family through so many factors: the Covid pandemic, drug and alcohol abuse, divorce and death, social, racial, political differences—heck, you name it. It’s been head-scratching at the low end of the scale and infuriating on the other.

Maybe the more important question to ask is: Where is the desire? What happened to the desire to connect with my friends, or my friends to connect with me? Who gets to decide what’s not working any longer, and what can be sustained?

You see, desire—which started this whole newsletter off—is information. Important information.

I can’t know what others desire unless they tell me.

But I can be more in tune with what I desire, given the current state of “the general and widespread disunion.” Here’s an example.

When I first met A.J., we were neighbors. I volunteered on our association board, and she and I often chatted about our living spaces and sometimes went on walks together.

But I remember the very moment desire hit me.

I’d just returned from what would be the last Thanksgiving I would spend with my parents (although I didn’t know it at the time). On a Monday afternoon, I was in the laundry room and A.J. came through on her way to retrieve some Christmas ornaments ahead of the holiday season. She walked over and stood close to me and asked when we might hang out again.

At that very minute I knew how I felt.

But it would take another five months before I learned how she felt.

And then we did the dance … say no more.

What do I desire now? Not A.J., nor anyone I knew from the past. That is clear to me and I’ve thought about it many times over.

At this point in my life, a companion would be ideal: a playmate, a movie buddy, a workout friend, a coffee hang, or a frequent dinner guest. That would be sweet.

Beyond that, no expectations. The desire ends at companionship.

And you know what?

Naming that desire makes all the difference.

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When Was Your Then, What Is Your Now?

Now it’s your turn, so tell us in the comments…

• How have your relationships morphed over the years? The last five years? What have you done to adjust to the change?

• How do you define friendship? Has that ever ended unexpectedly? How did you feel?

• How has your idea of love and sex changed over your life? What has contributed to your thinking? What do you desire?

Notes and extra texture

“Veronica,” Elvis Costello (1989, co-written with Paul McCartney, from the LP Spike).

“Why True Love Doesn’t Have to Last Forever” Retrieved from The School of Life.

1. “Veronica,” Elvis Costello (1989, co-written with Paul McCartney, from the album Spike). The accompanying video paints the picture of an older woman piecing together her past loves and regrets.

2. Elvira Madigan is a Swedish film directed by Bo Widerberg in 1967 about two young lovers who try to escape their separate pasts.

3. From Completely in the Dark, “Be Mine” (January 9, 2011, WordPress).

4. From Completely in the Dark, “The Horse Field, the Woods, the Barn” (January 17, 2011, WordPress).

5. From Completely in the Dark, “Nightwalking” (August 21, 2011, WordPress).

6. From Completely in the Dark, “She Did It (Part 2)” (May 30, 2014, WordPress).

7. “Union” from A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes (1978, Farrar, Straus and Giroux Inc., p. 228).

8. From Completely in the Dark, “S.W.A.L.K.” (November 15, 2013, WordPress).

9. From Completely in the Dark, “Legacy” (April 25, 2014, WordPress).

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