Winding Roads of the Heart

There are some people I will always love, no matter what they do. And some of them are strangers.

Prince Charles, for example. I feel very affectionately towards him. Am I the only person who saw Diana’s charm but nevertheless sided with Charles in the divorce?

It’s not his public side that I feel connected to, though. I feel like I know him, like we’re friends. Sometimes I dream about him. Once, I dreamed that I was Prince Charles and I was digging sod. It was a very vivid dream. I remembered it when I woke up—the feeling of the spade in my hand, the way after a while it begins to burn, even through gloves. The sensation of pushing the blade through the sod, the crunch it makes, satisfying movement of shoulders and upper arm. Later, that day I heard on the news that he was in Scotland at spending the day working at a peat farm.

That seemed a touch coincidental.

In The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck says that love is when we extend our egos enough to include another person. If someone hurts my friend, I get angry. That’s because the person I love sits within my ego’s boundaries.

Sometimes, those boundaries of mine seem rather randomly set. It’s like the erratic winding roads of Boston, following the paths of early citizens taking their cattle to graze on the Common. (Thus it is a city designed, not by urban planners, but rather by bovine ones.)

The roads of my heart wind like that, circuitous, random, and sometimes defying logic. My affections include some very perplexing people, both known and unknown. Where unknown, it's just that my awareness of their existence is imbued with adeep and inexplicable tenderness. This is bewildering enough when the object of my inexplicable tenderness is a celebrity— the aforementioned Prince of Wales, and others. Bono, for example, who I feel I know- not through his music, but because years ago I had a series of dreams that I was his girlfriend, waiting in his hotel room for him to get back from shows. In the hotel, I watched CNN, I called friends while hanging upside down from the hotel bed, I flossed my teeth and scrutinized my face in the hotel bathroom. I put on make up so I'd look dazzling when he got back. I ate peanuts out of the mini-bar. Eventually I’d hear the boys all coming down the hall, shouting and stomping in the corridor, and I’d run to the door, or he’d open it, and I’d say, “Hey! How’d it go?” And then we'd hang out, either with or without the rest of the band. (That Edge guy has B.O., by the way.) And then we'd end up very satisfactorily in bed. (Though the dreams usually end before the R rating was jeopardized.)

This makes sense to me because if I WAS dating Bono, I’d be unlikely to go the shows. I like U2 (who doesn’t?) but I don’t particularly like concerts. One of my earliest memories is plugging my ears and shouting over deafening music, “Daddy! Make that black man stop playing the guitar so loud!” Years later I would realize that the black man was Hendrix, opening for the Monkees at Cincinnati Gardens in one of the freakiest musical combinations of history.

And there are others I feel connected to. Minor Kennedys. Not the big players. Rarely-heard of Shrivers and— I don’t know. It’s weird. It seems random.

But sometimes this inexplicable tenderness is for non-celebrities, ordinary people I’ve never seen before. When I meet them, the feeling hits me over the head. Usually, the first time I meet such people, it's like I am recognizing them. The recognition is different from the tenderness. Some people I just “recognize.” But others are not only strangely familiar but already beloved. As though my love for them preceded my awareness that they actually were alive.

The boy who is probably the great love of my life was one of those. He was Australian, and his name was Robert. The first time I saw him, he was walking up my driveway to come over for coffee. He was my roommate’s girlfriend’s roommate’s houseguest, and she said, “I think you might like this guy. Let’s invite the boys over to your house.” So she called them and did.

There he was, walking up my driveway, and I looked at him and had an immediate reaction. I turned to my roommate’s girlfriend and said—I remember this quite clearly—“What on earth were you thinking? He’s not my type at all!”

So much for love at first sight.

Then he walked in the door and our eyes met. My first thought then was, “Oh, THERE you are.”

Our first conversation was about whether I should marry him so he could stay in the US. We had a thing for 2 years, though we never saw each other in the same country twice. It started in the US, then I went to Australia, then we met in Belgium and finally Norway.

It ended, as such things often do. But it ended very amicably. Having loved him before I met him, it wasn’t like I had any choice in the matter. In fact, I did the ending, because under the circumstances (that he was living in Norway) I thought he'd be happier without worrying about me. I suggested we date other people. The circumstances changed, but the emotions were ever constant. I always only wanted him to be happy. And by all accounts he is, married to a Norwegian girl, now the father to a baby daughter named Hedda. I know this because when I met his family, we all felt the same sense of recognition and affection for each other, as if we’d always known each other. They keep, occasionally, in touch.

Robert's someone else’s husband, and we haven’t spoken in years. And yet I love him with that sincere inherent tenderness. How could I not? I delight that he is happy. Though I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I hadn't been such a jolly good sport about everything. Still, God, who does seem to have a sense of humor and of justice (who knew?), winked at me by having Robert develop a sudden, intense, adult-onset allergy to dogs. I’m sorry about that for Robert’s sake.But I think that's God saying, “See? He wasn’t the one. We’re still working the plan here. Not to worry.” ('Cause in case you hadn't picked up on this, I kinda like dogs.)

But back to the original thought: the heart has its own agenda. Why? Why are there people whose souls I cannot help but love, even if I’ve ever met them? And why is it that those people seem to be able to do anything without my affection for them changing one whit? My affections have a logic all their own, that my ego (such as it is, poor, small bruised thing) does not challenge.


But Cupcake, why do you say your ego is a small, bruised thing?

Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because it is. Sometimes that’s a blessing and sometimes it’s a curse. Like, if you have only a tiny ego, any injury to it is, ipso facto, also tiny. Objectively, I know I am a good person. At least, I try to offer kindness and live within my own moral code. Yet sometimes I seem to be untouched by the ravages of self-interest. It's perplexing because I see it's unusual and I wonder sometimes if I'm like those people with no sense of pain, who put their hands on hot stoves and only notice when the smell of burning flesh fills the room.

We could look at psychological scripting and make up theories about how I was warped by certain things in my childhood. But actually, it was a very nice childhood, sans trauma or abuse, involving lots of weekends at the lake with the boat and noodle salad. But obviously something went amiss, for me to be like this. And I don’t want to theorize about where that may have happened. What's the point? (Besides, I don’t remember who has my blog address and who doesn’t. And my sister once posted some rather harsh paragraphs about me in her blog, the discovery of which caused me a few weepy hours. I don’t want to inflict that on anyone else.)

Anyway, it doesn’t matter why my ego has faulty wiring. What matters is what I do about that. I force myself to build it up. I try to take up space in my own life. (Hence this blog.) My New Year’s resolution for the past several years has been “Be Selfish.” I never manage to keep it. Although I had a breakthrough yesterday when, shopping at the 24/7 Ghetto Mart, I took the last TWO Purdue rotisserie chickens, which get marked down to $1.50 each after midnight. At first I took only one of them, thinking perhaps someone else would be happy for the other. But having made my rounds and seeing that chicken still there, I forced myself to wheel my cart back there and grab it. Trying to live a low-carb lifestyle can be expensive, and a girl needs all the $1.50 rotissrie chicken she can get.

Yet I was talking about inexplicable, undeniable, inherent love. That tenderness that I feel for certain folk. It's puzzling- I suppose in a good way, like Su Doku.

Here are some non-celebrity people I felt inexplicable tenderness for from the first moments: Two girls, Laurel and Charlene, I met on the train from Kyle of Localsh to Glasgow once. A 14 year old boy named Paul whose family was on a 2-week tour of the Alpine Countries when I was a tour guide in Europe. An old man named Otto, ditto. (Different tour group.) Someone whose blog I read but don’t correspond with at all. A guy named Nick Lynn who went to Oxford with a guy I briefly worked with. My high school friend Bryan’s Freshman year roommate, Simon. Someone I met on the internet who should have been a fling but keeps turning up like a bad penny, or a leit-motif. A lisping, eccentric waiter at a diner near Union Square.

Um…Cupcake, do you have a point here?

Yes, Reader. At least I think I do. I suppose it’s just the observation that love is like life, and sometimes there are odd twists and the road takes us strange places that we didn't know we were headed for. (“Hey! What the----! How did we get to Boston Common?”) And sometimes things happen in such a way it seems as if they were meant to be, with familiar characters making entrances as if we were waiting for them all along. Our relationship precedes the introduction.

And maybe that’s just the way it is. Maybe certain things are predestined, certain people are supposed to show up in our lives to teach a certain lesson or something.
Maybe there is some sort of plan for it all.

If Hendrix can open for the Monkees, anything is possible.