Flying Backwards

Well, there's nothing like a pandemic to help you to identity the necessities of life. I'd never personally given butter a lot of thought before, for example, or bread. For that matter, I took eggs for granted, sugar, salt, milk -- a whole host of foods. Fruits and vegetables were definitely on my radar as critical, as was potable water. But...toilet paper? Who knew we would be the ones around for the great toilet paper pandemic.

Beyond sustenance issues, the consequences of the mass shelter-in-place experience for many of us include sorting out what our human connections mean to us. Family members might have been under-appreciated by some until they really needed someone for help. Friends too.

When it comes to friendship, many thoughts and experiences come to mind. A man (they're almost always men) who believes he doesn't need friends is deluded. Inevitably, he wakes up one day to discover the truth.

So who to call when that cupboard is bare?

Lots of men, myself included, relied on their wives to maintain some sort of friendship circle. In practice, their wives became by far their best friends. Thank god for couples, for men and women, for men and men, for women and women and for gender neutral people with whomever they wish to be.

***

Last night, a dream: I was in the rear of a large commercial jet flying east toward New York when it became obvious somewhere around Tennessee that we were flying much too close to the ground. Hell, we were skimming the treetops out there.

After we safely landed on an empty road, I got out and became friends with the pilot. We walked around the area looking for someone who could help us figure out which direction to take off in, since the plane seemed to be fine.

Back in the rear of the plane, I found my seat but the people I was traveling with had vanished. So had the cellphone that I'd foolishly left behind.

Soon it became clear we were in trouble again. This time the situation clarified itself. We were flying backwards.

That realization woke me up. I checked and my cellphone was still there.

***

When it comes to friendships and relying on your partner as your best friend, breaking up, getting divorced, is like shock treatment for that dependency. Certainly there's a 12-step program for that problem but personally I never went through that type of rehabilitation.

Post-divorce, you have to work twice as hard because you have two households to support now. That substantially reduces your energy and time for socializing. Somewhere along the way you have a not-so-original epiphany: *You could become friends with the people you work with!*

It's amazing how much bullshit there is out there in the form of management training that dictates you can never be friends with your employees. Colleagues at your same level, yes, but not anyone who reports to you. Ever.

That dramatically under-estimates the nature of true friendship, which can easily transcend the boundaries of org charts.

Of course you cannot allow favoritism or ambition to govern your management duties. You can't give someone a favorable performance evaluation just because he or she is your friend. You can't let emotion outrank truth.

And you cannot let any of these relationships turn into a romance. If that starts to happen, some dramatic change is indicated -- fast.

But the sharing of intimacies and the trust that defines friendship should never be off the list of options for you. My rule: Friendship trumps job titles!

This can be a dangerous rule to follow, if you are an authority figure, so you have to establish limits too. As long as that professional status remains in force, self-discipline and loyalty to the mission of your employer must remain paramount.

So these kinds of friendships may indeed leave you lonely once again when you leave a job. Or they may not. Some friends don't go away just because the job did. It's most definitely a relief to not be anyone's boss any longer. Now you can just be plain friends.

***

There are so many layers of loneliness. Probably the worst is when a couple has grown to hate and resent each other but they still live together. I sincerely hope very few of those sheltering in place are suffering this fate.

Because it is not the worst thing to separate as a couple. You just may discover you can be friends better than lovers.

Even the worst -- losing someone you care about to death -- only applies to the waking hours. My parents come back to me in dreams, so do friends who have passed away, and so do my former lovers. Everybody who went away comes back in my dreams.

Since we're enduring an extended period where the bright line between sleeping time and waking time has blurred for many of us, our dreams just may have a new shot at taking over our self-awareness. And I don't mean the anxiety dreams like flying backwards or losing your cellphone. The other kind of dream.

We can miss someone, that's quite okay. Even to pine for somebody. And, yes for someone new -- from your future, that's okay too. Just go for it. Never let these kinds of dreams die.

"In dreams I walk with you. In dreams I talk to you.
In dreams you're mine...

But just before the dawn, I awake and find you gone.
I can't help it, I can't help it, if I cry...

It's too bad that all these things, Can only happen in my dreams..." 

-- Roy Orbison

***

I should cop to the fact that I almost always edit lyrics and screenplays before I quote them. Why? As a dear friend of mine who departed in February once told me, "You can't shut off the editing button just because no one's paying you to do it."

Furthermore, it's hardly my fault when other people don't write things as clearly as I need them to be written. It's exactly like the problem when among a couple dozen students there always is one or two whose name you can't remember.

Jeremy becomes Jonathan. April becomes May. Clearly, their parents were the ones at fault here.

My friend who passed in February would have backed me up on this one. In the past year, I've also lost a soccer Mom friend, a cousin and an older student who long ago helped me realize I was against the war.

That they are gone may be objectively true. But nobody edits my dreams.

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