Ordinary Special Friends

A conversation with a woman who is a therapist (but not my therapist) bids me to revisit my notion of the "special friend."

Last time I posted on this subject, I complained that the perfect special friend could not be found. A "special friend" -- a term whose coining I neglected to credit to my friend Lucy -- is that other person, usually of the opposite sex, in whom one's heart places fond hopes for enduring companionship and intimacy.

Nobody liked my complaint. I was picky, narcissistic, immature, the comments said. Maybe so. Maybe the perfect special friend, like the perfect person, does not exist. (Or, maybe, as one commenter suggested, true love is on its way by the solstice ... hmm.)

"But why can't I dream?" I asked myself.

My Self got an answer from my therafriend -- I'm coining this one right now myself -- who argued that, according to the theory underlining a psychological treatment called "dialectical behavior therapy," every aspect of personality has a positive and negative value at the same time.

For example, it's been argued that I am a highly emotional person (a drama monarch, some say). The resulting behavior can be positive or negative: the same emotionalism that makes me charming and charismatic, also turns me petulant and imperious when a different stimulus is applied.

Intriguing theory. Here are my two thoughts on it.

First, I have since learned that DBT was developed by Marsha Linehan as a way to treat what psychologists call "borderline personality disorder."

Between you, me and the fencepost, BPD is simply a way shrinks have of saying "we don't know what's wrong with this person, but he or she is willing to pay hundreds of bucks for thousands of hours of sitting in our office blabbering away, so let's not let on that we don't know." Linehan, indeed, has a brisk business selling books and tapes on the subject.

In brief, all of us with the hangnail equivalent of craziness -- and aren't we all a little crazy? -- have "bordeline personality disorder" and could benefit from the idea behind the "dialectical" therapy. However, once you boil it down, it's essentially common sense, like everything else in the social sciences. Common sense writ large, in multisyllabic words, by people with fancy degrees, charging $200 an hour.

Secondly, however, it begs the question to what happens to ethics and morals. Under Linehan's dialectics -- is she a Hegelian of the Left or the Right, I wonder? -- the positive or negative value seems to be determined by the functionality of the behavior. If it works for you and for others, it's positive.

I'm charming, you're charmed. Positive. I stamp my feet or raise my voice, you're annoyed. Negative. Purely utilitarian: the greatest happiness for the greatest number.

But is that how we should live?

I don't know and your 55 minutes are up.

A Friend Indeed

A friend in need is a friend indeed, the saying goes, and this weekend I learned how true this is.

Saturday morning I experienced severe chest pains and was briefly hospitalized for what seemed to be a cardiac problem but turned out, thankfully, to be something quite different and treatable at home with medication. The interesting thing was the reaction of people close to me.

Not realizing quite what the pain was, and insistent on doing what others wanted me to do that day, I drove a young relative to his noon train out of town, a friend to a manicure and picked up another friend at one of our airports.

As I drove in pain, occasionally wincing and sighing, the first spoke of downpayments to buy real estate. I attribute his response to his 20-something youth. It takes age to respond with empathy to another's needs.

Still driving in pain, the second, manicure-bound friend, who had expressed concern about the youth missing the train when I called her about my pain, lamented that she wished she knew what to do.

The third friend, at last, began to tell the usual story of her flight and stopped in mid-sentence at my first wince ... "what's the matter?" From then on she lavished concern, empathy, and helped me navigate through the medical system.

If this were a parable, the storyteller might then ask, who was the friend indeed. Most readers won't need to think much about this.

All things counter, original, spare

When Gerard Manley Hopkins thought of things to be thankful for, he composed an odd list:

"For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

"All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim ..."

I won't dare match him. Here's a more mundane, less pastoral list. I am thankful for:

the people who wake up earlier than me
to turn on running water and electricity and city buses and taxis
and traffic lights and traffic,
all so I can commute to work;

the privilege of being able to complain
about commuting to work
in one of the world's most
comfortable, green, designed cities;

novels (LeCarre, Crichton, Asis, Kazanzakis) and
The New Yorker and America and the nights
whiled away
absorbed in them;

Ludwig, my teenage Benz,
in whom the aesthetics of form and function
express the beauty of human minds;

Earl, may his karma keep on growing,
and Ephram and Amy, may they find true love,
and Luka and Abby, who may have found it,
and Bree and Susan, who will desperately keep searching;

those people important to me, you know who you are,
even if you've walked out on me,
or I've pushed you away,
or we haven't yet figured out
how to love and be loved.

That's it. Pass the pumpkin pie.

Dan Quayle eyes

Hitting a deer's rump with a car makes such a loud noise. A thump that's more than a thump, but just short of an explosion.

You wonder what's broken. You're amazed that the animal gets up and walks away.

Then you stop. Later on. Where you can stop safely.

You'd swerved. You almost missed the animal. A few inches more and it would have been a clean getaway for both of you.

The headlight on the side that nicked the deer is smashed to smithereens. How did the deer do that and walk away?

You think of the deer's eyes ... Dan Quayle eyes ... eyes caught in a headlight. You'd honked. You swerved, you braked. You almost killed yourself.

Damned car! Should've walked.