An Open Letter to LC: How Did We End Up No Better Than Our Mothers?

LC (the person - I hesitate now to call her a "friend" - who never wants to hear from me again) and I go way back, as do our mothers.

Here's the short version.  Our mothers met at a job and became friends.  About 20 years later, when LC was married and a mother, and I was a teenager, LC's mother decided to live in Greece.  It was during the time that there was a Fascist government there.  My mother (always politically conscious) considered it morally outrageous that LC's mother spoke about Greece never acknowledging the political situation there.  My mother called LC's mother "ridiculous" (I don't know the specifics, but know that that word was used).  LC's mother stopped speaking to my mother.

About 40 years later, after LC's having had friendships (they were quite separate) with me and my mother, which consisted of our seeing each other once a year in Maine (where LC lived) and talking a blue streak because we had so much in common (again, my seeing LC took place at a different time from my mother's seeing her), LC and I had a falling out over my talking to her on the phone endlessly (she has a degree in counseling so she is exactly the sort of person with whom one wants to talk endlessly about one's problems) about my crush on the Mentor, my general randiness, his abuse of me, and my feeling trapped. After the fifth (or the tenth) go around about this, she told me I would feel better if I went and did volunteer work.  To me at the time, that sounded rather puritanical, sort of like telling someone to take a cold shower.  So I said "F.U." to her, something I think I have said fewer than five times in my life, probably.  I just was at my wits end.  She wrote to me and said she couldn't "deal with me" any more, or some such thing.  I suppose that was understandable.  I had crossed some kind of line.

A few years later, she stopped speaking to my mother, for a totally different reason.  She had adopted a dog with whom she claimed to be madly in love (sending endless postcards with photos), but when the dog peed on the floor once too often, she gave it back to the shelter, probably to certain euthanasia.  My mother was horrified and told her that she needed to "do penance".  She probably meant it as a joke, and in fact she isn't even a dog person, but nonetheless would have found it morally objectionable to value clean floors over a life, even a dog's.  LC could have at least waited until she could find a home for the dog - someplace where people were less squeamish.

My mother never heard from her again, but I did.  Shortly after my mother died she apparently had seen this on Google and sent me a handwritten condolence letter.  Since she didn't have email, we were only in touch rarely by phone, but once she got email we began writing to each other daily.  We were both housebound more or less (she for health reasons and I because my employment is from a laptop in my apartment).

Ever the counselor, she is, yes, the sort of person to whom one is prompted to pour out one's heart, and often what's there is not pretty.  Or it's not grateful or it's not optimistic or it's selfish or it's petty.

But that she would shut me up (my mother in fact once told me that "hanging up" - or doing what LC did by enjoining me not to communicate with her - is, basically saying "F.U." to someone) is beyond comprehension.  So I am kicking and screaming and yelling with rage, hurt, and confusion.

If she had even written to me and said "I simply can't continue our correspondence because the fact that you [_______________] is so objectionable to me that I have to say goodbye" I would have understood it.  I still can't believe that my asking  her advice about something personal when a tragedy had happened a half a continent away was so egregious that she never wants to hear from me again. Taking a timeout, yes, I could see that. Or saying "Let's back off some of these intense topics for a while". (Of course the irony is that she once said that she didn't like casual friendships where people "kept it light".  I say "irony" because "keeping it light" is one of the best ways to avoid quarrels.)  But to throw me away like a Kleenex?  That's what it feels like.

Do I "miss" her?  Sort of but not really.  I desperately need friends, but to me that means people who are here who are available to do things, celebrate my birthday and I theirs, be available to help with something occasionally and vice versa.  LC was simply a kind of epistolary therapist, although she asked me for my advice as often as I asked her for hers.  It's more that I am hurt and angry that our friendship, whatever it was, meant so little to her.  We were just in the middle of a nice "conversation" about a novel by Barbara Pym.

Everyone can be annoying, if you get to know them.  People have opinions you disagree with, preoccupations you think are trivial, bad moods.  Is it really worth throwing the baby out with the bath water?  Was my perceived petty self-absorption on the wrong day so beyond the pale that it was worth shutting the door on our talks about books and politics, or our shared memories going back 65 years?

I think what bothers me the most is the hypocrisy of it all.  This is someone who sees herself as saintly (despite being a militant atheist).  She thinks you should never be angry at anyone unless they did or said something to be deliberately unkind.  She also said her nickname is "LC let's talk about it" because she is willing to try to talk through any conflict.  So what happened to that person?  Or did she never exist to begin with?

A Slap in the Face? No. A Slammed Door!

When I got home last night after having had a lovely day celebrating my partner's birthday and having our final choir rehearsal of the season, I checked my email to find that this friend whom I had spoken of in my last post had written to tell me basically that she never wanted to hear from me again.  I was speechless.  I have no idea what I could have said or done to prompt that.

For whatever reason, I could sense that she found it inappropriate that I was continuing to ask her for advice about personal problems (like the videos) in the wake of the tragedy in Orlando, but I wouldn't have considered that grounds for ending a friendship.  As I said, she has done this before, although last time I had sworn at her out of frustration, so the reason was obvious.  She has also stopped speaking to other people.  It was the finality of it that stunned me.  I could see her saying that she thought our correspondence had gotten a bit tense, and that maybe we should take a break, unless we had some important news to convey (people do this all the time either explicitly or implicitly) but to slam a door in my face?

Five hours earlier she had called my partner to wish her a happy birthday and sounded very cheerful, and I had written to thank her.

The only other thing I can think of is that she read something I posted on Facebook (she doesn't use Facebook but her daughter does) saying that I didn't think that "thinking" about a tragedy instead of about one's personal problems made one morally superior.  Which many people agreed with.  Or she may have read the last post I made here.

But the point is that I don't see any "hanging offenses" anywhere.  I did not say anything personally hurtful.

So many things now are up in the air, if not literally, then emotionally.  It was her idea for me to have this birthday concert, so I chose a Barbra Streisand song that she likes (not something I would have chosen otherwise although I am surprisingly impressed by the musicianship it displays).  So how can I share my joy at that with her now.  (Whether or not she sends me flowers or even a greeting is neither here nor there.)

Is she including my partner in all this?

I had said (maybe to her) that over the past 7 or 8 years I have had so many losses that it was like one day waking up and realizing that there was no furniture in my apartment.  I think that was why I was so upset about not getting anything for my last birthday. Not that I'm greedy and selfish but because it made the emptiness so manifest.  So she of all people should know that I can't afford another loss, certainly for no reason.

If there were something I should apologize for, I would certainly be open to some soul searching, but obviously she doesn't want to tell me and I am not going to ask her.

As I said in my previous post, I am not apologizing for being preoccupied with personal problems just because a tragedy happened miles away, and I certainly am not apologizing for posting thoughts and feelings on Facebook, here, or elsewhere.  Writing is one of the only outlets I have, since I don't have close friends.  I would never post anything confidential about someone, but that's about it.

OK, So What Exactly *Is* Selfish?

I consider myself an intelligent person, with a certain amount of insight, but one issue that has had me stumped for a long time is: at what point does "self-actualization" become "selfishness"?

This post has been prompted by my feeling "chewed out" (in a very subtle way) by a friend because, in the wake of the tragedy in Orlando, I am still talking about, and asking for advice about, situations in my own life.  Is that selfish?  I don't see it as such.  There isn't much I can do about what happened in Orlando other than try to get elected officials to pass gun control legislation which obviously they won't do.  I rarely feel sad about anything that happens that far away.  Is that a character flaw?  And once a tragedy is of such mammoth proportions that it attracts celebrity fundraisers, I feel (incorrecly?) that any small amount of money I can afford to donate somewhere is better given to the church food pantry, where I know that every dollar will go to buy food.

And yes, life goes on.  It wouldn't if my partner had a crisis (I would have to push the  "stop" button), or even if there were a crisis in my building, or on the street outside my building, or at the church where I sing, or on a subway car where I was sitting, but I can't stop thinking and planning and asking questions about what's going on in my life because there was a mass tragedy somewhere.

The immediate trigger for this was my anger over some videos that I am sure someone (a woman who produced concerts that I sang in, and who now has gone "off" me for some inexplicable reason) deleted deliberately from her Youtube channel.  It turns out there is nothing I can do about it because they are not my property (she paid a videographer to make them) and she said she did not delete them on purpose, but it's only her word against mine.  I mean I'm sure they still exist somewhere, but knowing her,  Hell will freeze over before she makes an effort to get them to me.  What she did instead was tell me that next time I should save videos to my hard drive (which I will do, however complicated it seems to this senior citizen) and that has to be the end of it.  In any event, before I had all the details, I asked this friend's opinion about how to handle the situation and her response was "I don't have any thoughts on this, sorry.  All my thoughts are about Orlando."  So is this a slap in the face or what?  This is a very old friend, with whom I had an ugly quarrel about something very similar about a decade ago, and we have only slowly resumed a friendship since she now has email.  The previous quarrel entailed my cursing at her (I think I said "F.U." , something I have probably said about four times in my life, the other being to my partner when I was furious) because when I told her how upset I was over my unrequited love/lust/limerence for The Mentor she  told me I would feel better if I went and did volunteer work.  I suppose this is a similar kind of thing.  I am a lot more mature and less distraught now than I was then, so I have more resources at my disposal (writing in this blog, which there's a slim chance she may read).

In any event, I don't see why I should apologize for continuing to be concerned with my own life.  I have a hard life (not as hard as the lives of people struck by tragedy, although usually in this kind of situation people rally round, which they don't if you're simply stuck in a dreary rut that you can't figure out a way out of), so maybe I don't have that much emotional energy to expend too far outside it.  Right now my goals are to make my "third act" as rich and vibrant and spiritually rewarding as possible, while trying to make the end of an (often querulous and disagreeable) 82 year old's life as sweet as possible, all with extremely limited financial resources, no relatives, and almost no social support system.  So I really don't feel the need to apologize.

Calm After the Storm

Now we have new music to work on.

Ironically, one is a piece by a little known 20th century composer named Booth (he used to be the music director at the church in the 1930s) that was inspired by Lohengrin.  I would never in a million years guess that the piece was written in the 20th century.

It is absolutely gorgeous, but the soprano part involves way too much sustained high singing for this mezzo.  We're only talking about Fs and Gs, but it's a page that sits up there with noplace to take a breath. The alto part is in a decent rage (goes up to an E flat).  So I told the choir director that I would sing alto on that piece.  Ideally (and I only thought of this after the fact), with the current assortment of singers, the piece should be sung SATB as written with the second sopranos dropping down to the alto part for the last page.  This would be fine if there will be a high soprano or two to sing the top part.  I have no idea who will be there that day.  The irony is that I easily could have sung the soprano part in the Mendelssohn because it moved around and there were piano interludes between the parts that were sung.

Basically the problem (for the choir as a whole) is aside from the handful of trained lyric sopranos (who don't sing regularly) what the section has is me (a trained mezzo) and a group  of women with no training.  I can sing higher than any of them except one, and none of them can sing legato, so they need someone to hold the part together, sort of the way egg holds certain cooked dishes together (odd metaphor, I know).  So it's fine if the part doesn't sit high, then I can play that function.  Otherwise not, although it's rare for there to be a piece in so high a tessitura that I can't sing it particularly if I can sing full voice. (The alto section already has at least one, maybe two, women who sing with a nice line, they just don't have a wide range.)

Of course the upshot of all this is that high sopranos (and of course men) are highly prized and women with lower voices are not.

In any event, this is a beautiful piece of music.

So now it's back to working on my birthday concert.  This will be an opportunity for me to do a variety of different kinds of things that I don't usually: sing nonclassical music, research some of the songs and come up with things to say in between the sets, and connect to the audience through the spoken word.

I can invite 10 guests.  Whether my partner is one of them I guess remains to be seen.