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By James Lucchese
When I was in elementary school, our gym glass prepared for gymnastics night. I remember working very hard to learn all of the gymnastic moves. The hardest was the one in which you perch your knees on your triceps and balance yourself on your hands. The night of the big show arrives. The gymnastics performance was a success! But what would it be this time? Oh, I see, I was talking during the performance. “Why can’t you be like…?”
My home was hermetically sealed. No one came in. No one went out. Everyone on the outside was bad. I gradually came to realize that not all people on the outside were bad. One of the earliest occasions for this insight came on Halloween. I was quite young. My dad was bringing me on the rounds. I was alone. I always went alone because for one year, I was actually allowed to go with a bunch of other people in the back of a station wagon. We got a ton of candy. But somehow it was wrong to be with such people. Too much candy. Out too late. Had too much fun. And here we are now, a year later, driving down a big hill on Halloween, just my dad and I. So many houses. There’s only one with the light on though. It’s the “retarded” kid’s house. I don’t want to go to the retarded kid’s house. I mean, the kid’s retarded, right?
I go in. A wonderful woman answers the door. Big smile. She invites me in. “Ah! You’re a clown. Who’s underneath that clown costume?” She is friendly. I feel comfortable. As if she wanted to talk to me. As if she wanted… I look eye an expensive organ on the next landing. She sees me. “Do you play the organ?” “Yes”, I said. (No, I didn’t.) “Come up and play with me!” I follow her. We sit together. She asks me to play. She turns on the organ recorder. (Organs have tape recorders? Wow. This is some house!) So she plays with me as I stumble through. She sings the song as she guides my fingers, hand-over-hand, over the keyboard. The attention feels good. I allow myself to feel it.
My home was hermetically sealed. No one came in. No one went out. Actually, we did go out—but only to places where the rules were fixed. If you go to a movie, for example, it’s all structured. You go in, you pay, you sit and watch. You don’t have to talk. Then you leave. You ask whether the movie was good. You say yes or no. It was funny. Or perhaps there wasn’t enough action.
So, we would go to the movies a lot. We would get in the car, go to the movie theater and wait in the car for the movie to start. It would be another hour and a half before the movie would start. We were waiting because “mother” would never check the movie times before we left. It was too threatening, I think. After all, if you knew the times, then you would have to make a plan about when you were going go to the movie. And if you make a plan to be at the movie at a certain time, well, what were you going to do with all that time that wasn’t planned?
So here we are, waiting in the car for the movie to start. A guy pulls in next to us. His kid opens the door. It hits the door of our car. Ah! An opportunity! There are rules for this. If someone trespasses on your territory, then you have the right to tell ‘em off. It’s within the rules to do this. She’s safe! So she tells him off. Except the rules are illusory; they only exist in her mind. And this guy apparently doesn’t play by her rules. He comes right back at her. “What are you so angry about lady? There’s no damage to your precious car. Why don’t you climb back into the sorry hole you came from?”
My thoughts were both heretical and emancipating: “You got just what you deserved.” My father says nothing. He just watches, as if he also knows that the guy was right.
So, over time, I realize that things in my home are not so great. And I realize that not everyone on the outside was bad. In fact, there are actually some good folks out there! But then, as I learned this new and wonderful insight, I also realized that I was entirely unprepared for other people. I simply didn’t know the rules.
For example, in college, I worked at an Italian restaurant. I waited on tables there. I am Italian, but remember, my home was hermetically sealed. I didn’t know how the Italians acted in this place. I didn’t know the rules. So I’m waiting on tables. The chefs trade barbs. Did they just invite me to barb? I’m not even sure. Even if they did, I couldn’t. I don’t have the wit. Or at least I don’t know what passes for wit in this place. So I pass on the opportunity. They ignore me.
I continued to venture out on my own. Because I didn’t know the rules, to venture out is to take one risk after another. I tried to fit in. I tried to learn the rules that will make a person fit in. If you don’t know the rules, well, if you’re alone, how can you learn the rules? I began to catch on slowly. Each new encounter was a new risk. I was in constant fear of humiliation. I would think, “Well, if you make a mistake, maybe you won’t be humiliated. Maybe it won’t be as bad as you think.” But I felt set up for humiliation anyway.
How do you meet people? Well, you go to places where people are. So, I’d muster up enough courage to go to some gathering, alone. While you are alone, you are seeing others, coupled and enjoying the attention of their groups. Loneliness, of course, has nothing to do with being alone. You can be most lonely in a crowd. In fact, that’s where one is likely to be the most lonely. I hate going to gatherings alone. I know almost no one there. Everyone who is anyone, of course, is there with someone else. If you are there alone, that means that no one cares about you enough to be there with you. There is something wrong with you.
As long as I’m talking one-on-one with someone interesting, I’m can feel included. It would be nice, however, to be appreciated within a group – to have a kind of replacement family, if you will. But somehow, a single naysayer is often enough to destroy the sense of being an appreciated member of the group. Yes, one person can destroy an entire experience of feeling part of Did you ever wonder why lovers call each other “baby”? I mean, you’re not actually a baby. A baby is helpless, dependent, needy with all that mewling and puking in his mother’s arms. You have to change a baby’s diapers. A baby cries and keeps you up at night. However, through it all, this mewling and excreting baby is adored. Basking in innocence, need, and dependence, she is beautiful. She is an object of universal adoration. She is held, protected and adored as if she were a precious treasure. That’s why romantic partners call each other baby.
As he or she grows, hold your baby like a precious treasure, in every way that you can. If you don’t, it will take a your baby a long time to figure out how to hold and to be held.
