Solace and Symmetry
I am not a religious person; I’m not even sure I qualify as a spiritual person. But I do believe there are forces at work with symmetry and order in the universe. Listen:
The two most important men in my life, my sons, appeared after I met and married my wife. My younger son turns twelve today, just after noon. He arrived on the day he was due and has been punctual ever since. He is physically little for his age, wears glasses, has long hair, and is playing organized baseball for the first time since he was five. He laments that he wasn’t a child of the 60s. He also is the only boy I know who desperately wants to leave his home state of Texas. He has a wicked sense of humor, an insatiable curiosity, a tender heart, and a profound sense of social resistance. He loves math (he completes Sudoku puzzles in pen and never makes mistakes), is restless, and is the only child I know who can ask me with a straight face while walking the streets of Shanghai, “Are you homesick?” and when I answer, “Not really,” says, “Me either.”
And he means it.
He’s the kind of kid I would have been friends with when I was twelve.
My oldest boy is fourteen. He arrived days late and was born at 10:32 at night. He has absolutely no sense of time, and is a night owl who thinks nothing of staying up until 5:00 in the morning reading, writing music, writing, or (go figure) designing police cars and researching the Texas penal code. He too is small for his age, has the thick wild hair of an impressionist painter, and loves baseball, though he gave it up a year and a half ago because he recognized his limitations and realized it would interfere with school. Not that he cares much about school, because he doesn’t. He loves learning, mind you, but on his own terms. He has a biting, sarcastic wit, a warlord’s tenacity when it comes to justice, and he loves to travel, though he is mentally, emotionally, and physically rooted to his birth state of Texas. He loves history and eschews every fad his peers and the media dream up. He is a natural born leader who, except for aspirations of being a section leader with the marching band (and ultimately, a drum major) wants no part of leadership. He’s a loner by choice. He also has a huge, caring heart, but is afraid to let it show.
He’s worries about rejection.
He’s the kind of kid I would have hung around with when I was fourteen.
The two women who shaped most profoundly who and what I am today, my mother and a young lady named Brenda, appeared before I met and married my wife. Now, I could tell you a thousand stories about Mom and why she meant what she did to me, but they are my alone, private anecdotes; they will remain forever private because that's how the bond between a mother and child is forged in the beginning, and it is how it should remain. She was the bedrock, the very foundation I was built upon.
Brenda was my butterfly in the garden, a transcendent, wistful dance. She was each day’s sunrise, the color in the sky. As with my mother, I could name a thousand gifts this beautiful girl gave to me in the short few years I knew her, but the one that would rise above all others would be the awareness that I had within me the ability to place another person so far ahead of myself that nothing else in the world mattered. I learned to love not for the warm, gratifying glow that such a volatile emotion provides the heart in serene, contemplative moments, nor for the selfish, seductive, fantasy-producing jolts of elation that come with requited love, but for the sake of loving someone simply because he or she is there to be loved. The love that I feel for my sons. For life. For all the beauty in the world.
Now here’s the symmetry:
My mother died on November 11th, two days before my oldest son's birthday, on November 13th. Brenda died on March 25th, two days before my younger son's birthday on March 27th. Four people, four corners of who I am, inexorably and forever connected by the calendar and aligned by forces unseen. The same forces that make quantum physics possible, the planets orbit the stars, and our dog's tail wag when we come home. Sometimes symmetry provides solace, sometimes amazement, but mostly, I think, it provides a reason to keep getting up in the morning. Symmetry is balance, Yin and Yang.
And that, to me, is what makes life worth living.
Originally published March 27, 2012
