The Long Good-bye

I know they say if you love somebody
You should set them free
But it sure is hard to do
It sure is hard to do
I know they say if you don't come back again
Then it's meant to be (so they say)
Those words don't pull me through
Cause I'm still in love with you
I spend each day here waiting for a miracle
But it's just you and me goin' through the mill
climbin' up a hill

This is the long goodbye
Somebody tell me why
Two lovers in love can't make it
Just what kind of love keeps breaking a heart
No matter how hard I try
I always make you cry
Come on, baby, it's over let's face it
All that's happening here is a long goodbye

Sometimes I ask my heart did we really
Give our love a chance (just one more chance)
But I know without a doubt
We turned it inside out
And if we walked away
It would make more sense
But it tears me up inside
Just to think we could still try
How long must we keep running on a carousel
Goin' round and round and never getting anywhere
On a wing and prayer

This is the long goodbye
Somebody tell me why
Two lovers in love can't make it
Just what kind of love keeps breaking a heart
No matter how hard I try
I always make you cry
Come on, baby, it's over let's face it
All that's happening here is a long goodbye

Long goodbye
Long goodbye

Brooks and Dunn, "The Long Good-bye"


"The Long Good-bye" is a beautiful, sad, tender song, and it resonates, because most of us have felt the ache of the long good-bye at one time or another. It achieves an even deeper poignancy knowing the creators of the song are now enduring a long good-bye of their own. Brooks and Dunn are ending their collaboration this summer after twenty years of touring and writing and working together. Of course they'll have the consolation of a multi-million dollar farewell tour. Most of our farewell tours are far less rewarding.

The last stages of a long good-bye can be scary and disorienting and filled with hurt and sadness. It no longer matters why or who started it or who's right. It just hurts. The injuries won't go away and words fail. After a bitter fight you both retreat to other rooms and talk in strained careful voices. One person or the other makes other plans. You both start making mental lists, dividing things in your head, calculating options and deadlines. You imagine your life alone.

The issues don't matter anymore and we couldn't begin to take our own advice. The air is filled with tension and weariness and the fear of loss. Her sorrow and disappointment is so great there is nothing in the world he could say to begin to heal this or console her. You feel so defeated and diminished by the realities of the past that you could never believe your love is real or sustaining. Maybe she met another man, someone younger and better looking and a better lover. Maybe he retreated into his own world and started ignoring her feelings and needs. By now they don't care who is right or what they did wrong or why it happened. They just want to retreat and stop living hurt.

Of course bitterness is no answer and neither is packing up and leaving, even though sometimes it's more than necessary. In your new place, all the dynamics and deficits that brought you to ruin here will follow you. We can't escape ourselves. I can't escape the fear of conflict and defensiveness that make me inept in relationships, the compulsive urges to run and evade and retreat that trigger a fear of abandonment in the women I inevitably choose. We are condemned to repeat our patterns until we change them. Including the familiar desperation of the long good-bye. Life itself is a long good-bye, and if we're not careful our time will be gone without even saying a proper hello. If our days go ungreeted and our longings unmet, our last breaths will be taken alone. We have to be careful about our choices, because they write the script of our future.

News of the Weird, An Occasional Series

The vacuum cleaner attachment came loose under the furnace, and Jonathon Metz reached down to get it. His arm got stuck and he was trapped their for hours, screaming for help in the basement. Every five seconds the timer on the microwave would beep upstairs, reminding him his leftovers were ready. No one came. He tried to free his arm but it would cut and bleed, and as the hours passed it began to swell and grow infected. He tried working it loose with some spilled furnace oil but that didn't work.

The day became the next day and still no one came. Some of his tools were in reach. He thought of MacGyver, and sawed off his own arm with a hacksaw. It took him six hours to work up the nerve for the self-amputation, switching to a larger saw when the blade reached a bundle of nerves that was difficult to cut. A friend found him on Wednesday. Firefighters had to destroy the furnace to save him. The nearly-severed arm could not be saved.

Friends and family started a website to pay for his medical bills and soon he'll be fitted for a prosthetic arm. A local company donated a new furnace. He's getting married in November. Everyone is lauding his courage. At the time he thought if he could free himself he might get the arm in the freezer and save it for reattachment. That didn't work but he saved his life. Doctors said the spreading infection probably would have killed him.

It's a grisly story, and it's a reach to think of metaphors about the self-amputations we perform in life, the ways we get stuck in jobs or relationships or bad habits, the misery we endure, and the rash acts we perform to free ourselves. I wish the man in the story only well, and I'm sure his story is story is a tragic accident and nothing more. He reached down in annoyance like anyone would, trying to retrieve the spilled attachment, and something awful happened. It made me think of Ronny Cammareri in Moonstruck, who lost his hand in an accident at the bakery. In the story Loretta told him he was a wolf, that he cut off his own hand to escape the trap of a bad engagement. I'm sure Mr. Metz's story is nothing like that. Art imitates life, and life art, but neither does so perfectly.

In our lives, though, the infections of doubt and despair spread everyday. Unexamined and unchecked, they can lead to death, usually a slow and painful one, a trap that cannot be escaped. Circumstances can mount to a place even MacGyver could not unscript, not with a thousand paper clips or containers of household cleaning products.

The keys to our escape are less rash than a hacksaw. We have to find the detachment to look at our situation calmly. We have to have the courage to recognize when we need help, advice, love and support. We have to have the discipline to maintain sustaining practices in our lives, spiritual practices that strengthen and renew us, recreative practices that restore our mind, energy and hopes, giving us the clarity to make choices and take positive action. The critical thing is recognize the next step and take it. We are all stuck to a degree and freer than we imagine. Our real life dilemmas are far less drastic than hacking off an arm. The phone is always in reach. We have time enough to change or pray.

Having a Fool for a Client

Writing a blog is tricky. There's a lot of pressure to leave out both the good and the bad parts from those close to you. The dilemma made the movies in Julie and Julia . Occasionally I lapse into the third or even the second person to avoid controversy and recrimination, or speak about personal events through the filter of world news or another convenient prop. It's a tightrope. There's so much you can't come right out and say. and let's face it, my life's not interesting to begin with.

The worst is after a fight. I'm full of writing energy and I want to vent my side. but writing it out only escalates a bad situation. And glossing it over would be dishonest and waste a valuable opportunity to make discoveries about character and craft. Usually I resort to being vague or elliptical, satisfying no one. It's a fine line. Still it's been an incredible experience to create and then resurrect this project. I feel I've grown as a writer and a person, and I know now I will never stop writing. That is a victory in itself.

Joy

Real joy is transcendent and transforming. It isn't dependent on your circumstances. It is a strength of will and a triumph of perspective and reflection. It begins with the joy of being and breathing, and awakens its eyes to the preciousness of every moment, the supreme encompassing beauty with which God infuses every day.

My grandchildren have magnificent laughs. I love to hear them in maniacal cackle or belly-jiggling giggle or delighted chuckle. It is the sweetest music on earth. Make the effort to hear your child's laughter, and savor it like a handful of Starburst Fruit Chews with four pink ones. Get on the floor with them and discover the source of their half-mad abandoned delight at the absurdity of upside toys or their belly button. Look into their delighted little eyes and show them how perfect they are, how safe they are in your love.

Joy is a moment. Joy is a choice. Joy is an awareness of the richness of things, awaiting you. Live your truth and find your joy. Joy is the engine of destiny.

Misery

Every life is accompanied by a portion of misery, and the misery is a rich source of wisdom and experience. The hope within us cries out from the misery and says, "Be attentive to your misery, return to your true path. Lift yourself up. Your strength lies in attending to your spiritual hunger." The evil within us sneers out of the misery and says, "Succumb to the misery. This is what you richly deserve. Feel guilty, feel victimized. Choose bitterness, disease and death. Ignore the spirit within you and shut out the music of hope."

Life is a long journey and there are many moments of crisis. Then too, they are many moments that go unnoticed, where a glimmer of hope refreshes us like a welcoming breeze, or we turn our face and increase the growing bitterness until we succumb altogether.

Babies

I utterly loved this movie. It was delightful enough in and of itself, but one of the things I appreciated about it is that it reminded me how powerful a movie can be.

The story is told simply. Director Thomas Balmes follows the lives of four real babies from four corners of the world, from birth to their first steps. There is very little dialogue, and the camera watches the babies quietly at floor level, and the results are delightful to watch.

There are three girls and a boy, from Mongolia, Africa, Tokoyo and San Francisco. It's mesmerizing to watch their first feedings, their surroundings, the beautiful, haunting landscapes, their first words, their first steps. All the little discoveries an infant makes are quietly recorded. The message is, babies thrive if they are loved, and the love we have for babies is universal in most circumstances. Hattie from San Francisco, with her well-to-do New Age parents, is no more or no less loved than the boy born on the steppes of Mongolia or the charming little girl from the grasslands of Africa. The babies are beautiful. Watching, you love each and every one of them, even for their tantrums and fusses and tumbles. It's inspiring how well babies adapt to their surroundings. The Mongolian boy is unbothered by the rooster on his bed, and make a play structure out of an overturned barrel in the middle of the cattle.

It was one of the most memorable and inspiring and joyous movies I have ever seen. Curiously, as much as I love movies we rarely see one in the theater, but I'm supremely glad we watched this one there, in the opulent and grand theater/palace at Bridgeport Regal Cinemas. The candy machine ripped me off a dollar, and I had to fill out a form to get it back. We found an all-night Subway for dinner.

Life of Pi

Life of Pi was a strange and wonderful book. I'm not sure I understood it all. Occasionally it is good to read a book that leaves you a little confused, that introduces ideas you are not quite ready for, that leaves you feeling a little shipwrecked yourself, on a sea of ideas, conflicted by the vastness of the landscape and the overwhelming challenge and predicament of making sense of the author's story and your own.

Vividly written and absorbing, Yann Martel tells the story of a sixteen-year-old Indian boy who is shipwrecked on a 26-foot lifeboat with an injured zebra, a hyena, an orang-utan and a 450-lb. Bengal tiger. It's fascinating how he subdues the tiger and survives the elements and his fierce battle with despair, powerful to read of the forces that overwhelmed and inspired him on his journey. A few times, rain or flying fish or a mysterious island come into the story at just the right time, and the reader has to decide whether to increase one's faith or give in, much like Pi himself. Deeply spiritual, Piscine follows the tenets of three of the world's major religions, deciding at fourteen become a practicing Hindu, Christian and Muslim, all at the same time. History has converged all the world's faith in India, adding to the rich confused stew that culture has become over time.

Pi is a passionate and loving narrator, who tells the author early in the story that this story will inspire him to believe in God. You have to admire a novel with such an ambitious aim, particularly in an age when so many stories are written merely to enrich the author and titillate the audience with the same repackaged twaddle that exists everywhere else in our culture, which has become a confused stew of its own, lost in a numbness of sensation and envy. We're the most filled but the least satisfied generation in history, on a crazed lifeboat of a planet with forces well beyond our control. Pi's story suggests our only salvation lies in subduing our appetites and our fears, in learning what is essential to navigate in waters that are both unfamiliar and awe-inspiring.

In the locker of the lifeboat Pi finds cans of water and packets of food, fishhooks and blankets, lengths of rope and lifejackets. He fashions a raft he tethers to the lifeboat, to keep a survivable distance between him and the Tiger while he works out their survival. He teaches himself how to fish and collect water distilled from the sea. He has a whistle he uses to train the Tiger. Did I mention his father had been a zookeeper. When the boat runs aground in a remote part of Baja Mexico Pi has to tell his story to some skeptical investigators, tow Japanese men, representatives of the shipping line. He hoards their cookies and torments them with alternative versions of his story, neither of which they truly believe.

I believed every word. I remember August Strindberg (Max von Sydow holding a lantern to Paul Gaugin's paintings in A Wolf at the Door, saying "I will dream of these paintings for a long time." A good story, or a compelling work of art, does that. It turns over in your mind many times. It becomes the soil of your imagination, rich and fertile for your hopes.