The Strangely Warming Attraction of Opposites

We met as teenagers at church camp - Mike, reared among the east Texas piney woods, and me, among the mesquites and wide open spaces of the west.  Those geographic differences became metaphorical for the others that even casual observers came to discern.  Throughout those high school years, Mike played football and lifted weights, while I was on the speech team and sang in the choir.  Later, in college where we roomed together for all but our freshman years, Mike ruled over social life while I toiled in the library.  Mike was outgoing and attracted attention, filling up a room with his winsome presence.  I usually filled up a chair just on the edge of the light, observing the rowdier goings on.  I made A’s while Mike made friends.  I awkwardly dated while Mike fought off the sorority girls.  Correction:  he never even considered fighting them off.  Even our fraternity brothers thought of us as the “odd couple”.  Two more dissimilar characters had rarely occupied a common room.  

But we did; and it worked.  I helped him study, and in my own indirect way, encouraged his academic progress.  He fought more than one combatant on my behalf  - conflicts always born of misunderstanding and mistaken identity.  

Beyond college, I officiated at his weddings  - twice.  He participated in my own.  I spoke at his father’s funeral.  He appeared at my bedside when I was diagnosed with cancer, with a plan to fly me to a research hospital across the country.  I declined.  When my first marriage disintegrated, he flew to Iowa - a state he couldn’t even pronounce without a profane modifier - to hold my hand and buy me a steak dinner.  Some years later, when Lori and I became engaged, he was among the first to hear the news. 

Despite our more visible and, to some, comic divergences, our lives have almost eerily paralleled - our families, our eventual vocations, and on and on.  

But of course time and distance and quotidian demands refocus our attentions.  We have drifted apart over the recent decades since that church camp meeting 50 years ago.  Sure, we check in from time to time - a Christmas card, a text message, a phone call from time to time - but we hadn’t shared a room in a very long time, or inner thoughts, or the warp and weft of the heart.  Fondly and sentimentally attached, to be sure, but from a distance.

Until this summer, at the memorial service for my Dad, at which time we acknowledged the deficit wrought by our distance, and resolved to do better. 

The context of death has a way of refocusing attention on life.  The entertwined fingers that mutually shaped our lives, we concluded, are too precious to let atrophy.  It was the same conclusion of yet another reunion of friends in the context of that grief, and those, too, have received fresh batteries in a shared determination to honor and reanimate the force of those formative relationships.   We’ve made a down-payment on those latter ones, but between Mike and me and our beloveds, we have actually made time.  Over the course of days and nights, we shared a rented house and well-composted memories, and became current with each others’ lives.  Hearts touched, once again, and were touched.  Pain and laughter, songs and images, bread and wine all muddled together in the common moments that stretched into days, until the key was turned in the lock and we once more drove away in different directions.  

But not before we remembered and recreated a treasured moment from those younger days.  A cowboy hat, a guitar, and two brothers from the opposite ends of the universe.  It happens that way, sometimes.  Where one least
expects it, life - a flower emerging from the pavement; tree roots encircling a bolder; rain in the desert; sweetness growing on a cactus...

...and disparate personalities, friends.

Here’s to the next 50 years.