Posts Tagged ‘Jones Family News’

Today, according to Hallmark, is Valentine’s Day.  I don’t celebrate it, so it’s not really anything to me, but there’s a huge amount of pink and red about so I take it I’m in the distinct minority.

My antipathy has nothing to do with St. Valentine, whoever he actually was; he’s never done me any harm.  I’m sure he was a truly decent fellow.  It’s nothing to do with chocolatiers, whom I admire and occasionally support, though chocolate is not my personal food-based vice (my wife is another story), or florists, although I’m not a fan of cut flowers, beautiful as they are.  I don’t even really blame Hallmark and other card manufacturers, who are just trying to make a living, and good for them in getting a holiday that is essentially an excuse to hawk their extensive wares.

It’s about Cupid.  Rhymes with stupid.

Cupid qua Cupid is one of the only visual modern holdovers from Greco-Roman mythology.  He’s been pudgified and cuted-up to make him more marketable, and that’s not particularly offensive to me; after all, the same thing happened to St. Nicholas, and we survived it.  It’s more the arrows Cupid is alleged to be firing off.  Think about this metaphor for a second.  There’s this winged sprite flitting about and firing love-shafts into the hearts of unsuspecting men and women, who then fall deeply and hopelessly in love with whomever’s name is on the arrow (or whomever the victim sees next, depending on your brand of mythology).  And therein lies my particular problem.

It is absolutely not required that you fall in love with anyone.  Not.  Required.  It is possible to resist ANY person.  There is no Cupid firing off arrows.  Pop culture says that love strikes you…well, like an arrow, and you’re helpless before it. You’re walking down the street, and blam, there’s the love of your life, and before you can say “this is really, really unwise”, you’re gazing deeply into each other’s eyes and cooing softly.  Nothing you can do about it.  The only way to resist this is to have already been struck by the love arrow and miraculously still be in love with that person, and then you might have a defense, if you’re lucky.

Gigantic festering enormous steaming pile of fresh horse dung.

I go to conferences a lot.  These are gatherings of men and women, who are away from their normal circumstances and frequently lacking spouses and significant others and the natural oversight those bring.  Many of the men and almost all of the women are attractive.  Liaisons are formed.  But not by everyone.  A friend of mine called it “being out there”, and some people are, and some are not.  If you’re “out there”, then Cupid’s shaft can strike you.  If you’re not, then it can’t.  And contrary to popular culture and current social understandings, you do not have to be out there.  You do not have to even allow the possibility of “falling in love”.  There are those that are absolutely proof against all of Cupid’s arrows.

This is not to say that they have to deny the attractiveness of another person, much less that they run in fear of them.  I do some acting, and I’m on stage with some really brilliant and attractive women, some of whom I’m sure I could love if I wanted to.  “Falling in love” is terribly easy.  Falling out of love, unfortunately, is even easier, and my experience is that one leads to the other rather more often than not.

But why not just go for it?  Falling in love “feels <bleeping> great”, as Barbara Streisand said in the badly underrated The Mirror Has Two Faces.  Well, yes, it does.  To the ones falling.  Assuming that the ones falling have no attachments whatever and have made no promises to anyone, then there’s no objection.  But if they have, and so often they have, then to the assorted casualties of the fall, it feels like what it actually is, which is a betrayal of commitment and abandonment of honor.  It’s like a stab in the guts.  But if you give any credence to the stupid of Cupid, then what else is it but inevitable?  You have no choice, right?

Divorce courts are full of people who just “fell out of love with each other.”  This is about the stupidest thing I can imagine.  Love is not a little fuzzy creature that gets created when two people get together, and if it gets neglected, then it dies.  Sounds a little silly, doesn’t it?  But look at the headlines: Miami Herald: Valentine’s advice for keeping love alive; Huffington Post: 10 Tips to Make Love Last; San Francisco Chronicle: How to Keep Love Alive This Valentine’s Day for New Parents, and I could go on.  You keep a thing alive.  A fish, or a dog, a bushy hydrangea.  Cupid, and by extension Valentine’s Day, makes love a thing.  It’s a noun.  But lasting love is not a noun.

Love is a verb.  I love my wife.  What that means is not that my wife and I have created a furry heart that we keep in the closet and let out for air every February 14.  I LOVE her, meaning that I do things every day for her to care for her and tend to her needs.  Put another way, I choose her.  I choose her in every thing I do.  I am not “out there”.  No Cupid’s dart can strike me.  Love is not something that pierces you or that you fall into like giant vat of pudding.  Love is something you DO.  You don’t love people you don’t do things for.  You might care about them.  You might wish them the best.  But to LOVE them requires that you do something.

I realize that this flips the entire Valentine’s thing on its head in a way (though some of you are saying – see, I bought candy, so I did something – well, okay, but do it again next week any you’re on to something).  And I realize that it makes a lot of movies not work so well any more, and reduces to ridiculousness most pop ballads.  Fine by me.  The great love stories, like the one in Casablanca, for instance, often involve the lovers choosing to NOT be together.  But that’s just it; it’s a choice.  I am not so smitten with love for my wife that I think her the most beautiful woman in the world.  Nor, I am well aware, is my wife so smitten with love for me that she thinks me the handsomest man.  We both of us are aware of each other’s faults and quirks and allergies.  Our love is not built on some fantasy, or on sexual attraction, powerful but as fleeting as the dew on a sunny morning.

We’ve been married 20 years.  We have eight children.  We’re getting older.  Our love didn’t survive that, our love is that.  And we love each other more than we ever did, because we’re better at it than we ever were.  Our love is built on a choice.  That choice was made 20+ years ago, and it encompassed every possible eventuality, from mental illness to old age to bankruptcy to injury to scarring to you-name-whatever-you-like.  I didn’t fall in love with my wife.  I chose to love her.  And I choose her still, every day, and more every day.

So do not be my Valentine, my dearest, dearest love.  Be my Jeanette.  Be mine, as I am yours, forever and ever.

This is my Mother’s house.  The one she grew up in, the one she shared with her brother and sisters, the one her parents lived in for 50 years.

As of today, it’s not theirs any more.

Mom has been gone from that place for 45 years, and her parents essentially died there a few years back, but her brother was still there, and more importantly, the soul of the home was there – Grandpa’s records.

Yesterday, we took them out.

Our estimation is that there were over 10,000 records – that is vinyl and shellac, people – in the house in all sorts of places, though the overwhelming majority were in the custom record shelves constructed just inside the front door.  Almost all of them were in pristine condition, played maybe once, definitely not more than a few times.  No one could possibly listen to them all, not in a lifetime.

We tracked across all sorts of gems while we (my brother, father and me) were boxing them all up.  We found the recording of Peter and the Wolf (A side) and Carnival of the Animals (B side) that I remember listening to in that very house as young boy.  We found the complete Beethoven’s symphonies recording, identical to the one that started me loving classical music myself.  We found Bongos from the South’s version of My Old Kentucky Home (look, it’s not all classics, folks).  We found a recording of Enrico Caruso, the first recording he ever made, from 1903, and then we found the last recording he ever made (can’t wait to hear those).  And we found a Benny Goodman 4-record collection – signed by Goodman himself.

All this stuff weighed close to two tons.  It was never meant to be moved.  As long as it was there, the house still belonged to my Mother’s family, even though the glass wall around the fireplace was gone, the teardrop-shaped planter peninsula that jutted out from the living-room wall was gone, the apricot tree in the backyard (still the best apricots the world has ever known) was gone, the marble game in the downstairs cupboard, the long rug in the hallway in the basement, the innumerable jars of peaches, the trinkets in the kitchen drawers, all gone, and yet when I close my eyes I can see them still.  I know those things better than I know any of the nooks and crannies of any house I lived in save one.

The bathroom is still there in pink, the same as it ever was.  And there are still rosebushes outside, likely the same ones my father and I used to catch nightcrawlers under, the night before we all went fishing.  But the people are gone, and now the records are gone.  That was what that house was for.  It’s not our house any more.

But tonight, my Grandpa and I are going to get back together, with Enrico Caruso and friends, for a little reunion.

Adieu, Dallin Street, my port in many a storm.  Fare thee well.  Thou shalt not hear Herald any more.

Warning: this post contains not much of interest to anyone but myself and those close to me.  If you’re a stranger, or even an acquaintance, and you happen on it, you might seriously want to start somewhere else.  It’s not a business post, and it’s not a community post.  There is, obviously, nothing here I’m ashamed of, and you can read it if you want, and it might even be interesting.  But it’s pretty obscure in places.  You’ve been warned.

My sister Alison Wonderland recently wrote a post about my post about potential.  In it, she heaps a lot of fulsome praise on me, says some very nice things, and brings up the possibility (true, I think) that the whole “reaching your potential” thing is complicated by gender, as in, my sisters are routinely told that they are amazing, inspirational people, while hardly anyone ever says anything like that to me.  You could contend that that is because they ARE amazing, inspirational people and I am not, but they argue otherwise and provide evidence.

But I don’t want to talk about that.  What I want to talk about is three different things; one, that I haven’t reached “my potential” because of some choices I’ve made; two, that in one, usually ignored way, it is possible to see that those choices have led me to far exceed my potential; and three, that nobody reaches his potential in this life.  Three mutually contradictory things ought to keep me writing for a while, don’t you think?

I haven’t reached my potential because of some of the choices I’ve made. I am a good actor, but not a great one.  I am a good singer, but not a great one.  I am a good writer, but not a great one.  I am a good businessman, but not a great one.  I am a good basketball player, but not a great one.  I am a good chess player and teacher and journalist, but not great at any of those things.  I am not even a great husband and father.  Not a great gardener.  I am great, truly great, at nothing.

I don’t think I could have been a great basketball player no matter what I did.  I could probably have played D II ball in college, but nothing better.  I’m not built for it.  But I could have been a great singer or actor.  I could one day still become a great writer (though for reasons I’m about to elaborate, I doubt that I will).  I will become truly excellent at nothing at all in my life, I strongly suspect.

Because I won’t ever put that focused time in that it takes to become great.  There are men (I use men in the generic sense) that can become great at more than one thing in their lives, but those men are so vanishingly rare that I’ve only ever heard of a few.  There are men – perhaps most men – that can become excellent at one thing, as long as they put the time into it.  [Fun reader's aside: Malcolm Gladwell says the magic amount of time is 10,000 hours, but whatever.  He also says that natural ability doesn't matter very much, and in that he's probably right, except that I would argue that without natural ability - or let's call it inclination instead - it's almost impossible to do that many hours of anything.]  But if they don’t put the time in, they don’t reach greatness.  I chose a long time ago not to put the time in.

Some of that choice was conscious; I have eight children and yes, I do know how that kind of thing happens.  I chose a faith that smiles on large families, and that in and of itself requires a huge commitment of time and money.  That choice was conscious and I knew that it would likely preclude my being a concert-level musician or a Broadway actor.  But some of it was unconscious; I gravitated away from many things just at the point where I was getting to be pretty good at them.  I did that because there is a point where the initial flush of success wears off, where there is a lengthy plateau that requires a lot of effort to climb off of.  I’m lazy and don’t like to do that much work, so, being interested in lots of things and naturally good at many of them, I just move on to something else.  That leads to things like having 10 different careers after 5 different majors in college.  Stuff like that.

Bottom line is, if you want to become great at something, you have to work at it and work very hard at it.  I never have.  I have chosen not to do that.  Perhaps that makes me a very interesting person.  It does not make me excellent.  When one’s potential is measured, it is nearly always measured in one area.  Rarely do you hear someone say, “you know, if he gets a degree in Roman History, dabbles with basketball and being a chess coach, teaches part time and sings opera and does community theater, he might become a relatively successful businessman.”  We always measure someone’s potential at its peak in one area.  “He could become a concert violinist,” we say, but we don’t say, “he could become a concert violinist unless he decides to have ten kids and volunteer at the local battered women’s shelter.”

So that’s one reason I “never reached my potential.”

Because of some of those choices, I have, actually, already exceeded my potential. By so far that it’s hard to even fathom it.  And I never thought about it until I read my sister’s blog after reading an Orson Scott Card story, “The Originist.”

The most important thing in the world to me is my wife Jeanette.  More than the kids, more than my parents, more than anyone or anything.  I have a friend that would love to be married to her.  Anyone sane would love to be married to her.  But something Card wrote jogged an idea for me.  I know that the person that I am, the parts of me that I’m proud of, anyway, did not exist or existed only embryonically before Jeanette.  She has made me what I am.  Some of it she did on purpose, like teaching me to pick my clothes up, and some of it I did, because pleasing her is delicious to me, but either way it’s her fault.  The good me is her work, her creation.  If I’ve done anything to be proud of, it is every bit as much she that has done it.  My resume is her resume.  I am her work.

But if that is true, then as much as I don’t want to take any credit for it, what she is is what I helped make her.  And she is a work of art.  She is a gem.  She is…she is breath and beauty and life itself.  I get to take some credit for that.

More than that, what we are making together is a marriage and a life, and that is entirely ours.  It is a thing I am enormously proud of.  I am an indispensable part of that.  Without me there is no marriage, no partnership.  Our marriage is not perfect, but it is far, far more perfect that I am alone.  It is, even I admit, a thing of great beauty and eternal permanence.  It far exceeds what I could predictably achieved.  It exceeds my potential, and I believe it exceeds my wife’s potential as well.  What we are building together is far beyond our individual top-end limit.

So in that way, I’ve already exceeded my potential.

Nobody reaches his potential in this life. (Warning: explicit religion)  I believe that the purpose of my life, the purpose of everyone’s life, is to learn to become God.  I believe that when Jesus says “be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect,” and “those things ye see me do, even that shall ye do,” and “as I have loved you, love one another,” he is prescribing behavior.  He is literally asking us to become what He is, to do what He does, to eventually take our place with Him, as children take their place with their fathers.  As a child of God, my potential is to become what my Father is.

That is never, ever going to happen in this life.  We’re beings of such immense difference that it’s silly to even mention us in the same breath.  God is God, and He’s perfect at it, and I am just Chris, and I suck at it, and right there we have a yawning gap that will never discernibly close no matter what I do.  But still, He’s asked me to be like Him.  He’s asked me to reach for that potential.  He hasn’t stopped asking despite my pathetic and failed attempts.  He’s omniscient, so He knows I’m not going to make it, not if I live a thousand years.  But He also lives outside time, so what is a thousand years to Him?

Even the greatest geniuses are nothing to the intelligence of God.  The most accomplished men, the most holy saints, are like stars in the sky when the sun arises.  They shine, but who can see them when He is there?  Thus if our potential is to be what He is, no possible achievement in this life can ever reach that potential.

Therefore no one reaches his potential in this life.

I hope you’ve enjoyed our time together.  Please forgive this rather journal-like post, which probably has no significance to anyone but me.