I rarely speak my mind unless put on the spot. With friends, I’m a good listener. In work and public life, I don’t like to take center stage, preferring to work behind the scenes with people I've developed relationships with. So why do I expose myself publicly like this? I think I know why.
People want to be
known. No matter how shy, they want to feel that people “get” them, sense where
they’re coming from, understand what they’ve been through. It’s my feeling that
this is one of the deepest drives we have.
My behavior in
recent years bears me out. I've been wanting to reconnect with people who knew
me when, people I feel comfortable with, don’t have to prove myself to. I've been
looking up old friends—my next-door neighbor Linda, for example. We used to
spend every afternoon together at her house or mine when we were in high
school. We reconnected 40 years later, and picked up the conversation like it
was yesterday. My good friend Jay, who went on to be a carpenter and had five kids;
I discovered he's a gifted writer and published two fabulous novels about the
Napoleonic wars at sea. Jerry, a high school buddy who became a social worker.
Robert, erstwhile bridge partner and prom date, whose father was post commander
where I lived in Frankfurt, Germany. Hank, my first college sweetheart. Elias,
the Greek-American philosophy student I dated during my junior year abroad.
These are people
who knew me well. We came of age together in the days before we adopted the
slick personas necessary for our careers and public lives. But how many people
since then, apart from my immediate family—and perhaps even including them—have
known the real me?
I think this is
what prompted my mother to write her memoir, which I helped her publish for the
family.
Asked why she wrote the saga of her growing up and meeting my dad and bearing five children and moving the household all over Europe and the US, she shared this thought: “A pebble falls into the pond. The water ripples for a moment, then smooths over as if there had never been a splash. The people who remember what you were like—as a girl, as a young woman, as a wife—grow old and die out, and it’s like you were never there. Somebody has to tell the stories, or as the years pass they’re simply gone.” A sobering thought.
Asked why she wrote the saga of her growing up and meeting my dad and bearing five children and moving the household all over Europe and the US, she shared this thought: “A pebble falls into the pond. The water ripples for a moment, then smooths over as if there had never been a splash. The people who remember what you were like—as a girl, as a young woman, as a wife—grow old and die out, and it’s like you were never there. Somebody has to tell the stories, or as the years pass they’re simply gone.” A sobering thought.
Remember how as our
kids reached age twelve, each one in turn just had to have a boom box? And when
you and I passed the milestone age of 40 we all began to need bifocals? Maybe
66 is precisely the age when this line of thinking--about what mark we've made
on the world--kicks in. The kids are raised, retirement is imminent, and the
very age span between grandparents and grandkids encourages a long view of
life. We come up against the big question: What are people going to remember
about me? Especially if they don’t really know me in the first place?
In the end, I guess
I do want to be known, just like everybody else.
Then there’s the
related question: How well do I need people to know me? Does being known mean I
should tell all? Should I revisit incidents best forgotten? My friend Kit,
quoting a wise writing coach she knows, says the litmus test is this: To what
purpose shall I make such revelations? I have painful memories just as we all
do, and maybe dredging them up will do more harm than good.
I’ll have to think
about this.
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