You've Got a Friend

At a party a few years back I was explaining to a guy that I was in the Master's program for Marriage and Family Therapy.  "You mean you want to be a therapist?" he responded incredulously.  "Like a shrink?!  Don't you think people can work out their problems with just good friends?"  The guy was a realtor, too.  I mean seriously, talk about the kettle calling the pot names.  I declined to illuminate the irony for the guy and instead gave some puerile riposte about how people need safety to change and not everyone has close friends blah blah blah; I was hardly a year through my program and had no idea what it really meant to be a therapist.

If I had it to do over again, though, I would tell him this: My therapist and my friends are like my paycheck and all the cool things I get to do with said pay, respectively; I don't need the paycheck to have fun, but it makes it a whole lot easier and gives me a lot more options.

I have been exceedingly fortunate, too, when it comes to good friends.  I seem to be, as they say, peculiarly rich in them.  Of the many superb friends that I have, however, two men stand above the rest.  We have sat with one another through the uttermost depths of despair and danced together (metaphorically) over the apex of ecstasy, and this past weekend we got the opportunity to hike up a snowless Yosemite Valley in January.  We talked about life, the Universe and everything, as we are wont to do, kicking around the world's problems like cherished curs.  We didn't come up with any answers per se, but on the other hand, maybe we came up with the only answer.  And at the end of the day, what other solution is there other than friends being friends?  And yeah, I can honestly say that I'm a better friend for the therapy that I've done.

All in the Family

Its a funny thing getting married.  There are all the things that you know that y'all don't agree on, and then there are all the things that you had no idea that you disagreed on because the fact that someone could even think differently on the subject was on par with saying Jimmy Carter was an effective president or that Megan Fox was a talented actress.  One of those Fox traps for Christy and me was grandparents.  When it came time to think about where we wanted to live after grad school with progeny on the intermediate horizon, I suddenly came to the realization (with Christy's help) that being close to potential grandparents was going to be more important that I had previously realized.  Not growing up with grandparents as an everyday essential part of my life, the thought of predicating the position of our pad on the proximity of parentals was a bit strange to me.  For example: at our wedding there were 7 grandparents.  None of them were mine.  It was difficult for me to generate a context for the necessity of having grandparents in the immediate vicinity.

Over Christmas, I had the chance to take my burgeoning brood to Gainesville, GA to spend the holiday with my mother in law's family and stay at The Farm.  The Farm is 20-some-odd acres of pasture and woods north of Gainesville in a town called Rabbiton which is presided over by Papa Kit and Carolyn.  Papa Kit was a doctor from the 50's on into sometime in the late 20th century, has had both knees replaced several times, knows more dirty jokes than the US Navy's 7th fleet combined and used to hunt religiously several times a week.  Carolyn cooks without recipes, puts up with Kit's dirty jokes, has more common sense than every advice columnist combined and takes in stray dogs whenever her heart gets the best of her head (which is often).  They are American Gothic 2.0.  After four days of spending time with them and the family, the wisdom, support and direction that these people have obviously provided to their children and their children's children is something that I reap the benefits of on a daily basis through my relationship with Christy.  Needless to say, nearby grandparents are no longer optional.

Watching my own parents with Madeleine has been a slow unfolding of the possibilities that having grandparents in the equation could bring.  Spending time with the Walkers was an opportunity to see the thing in time-lapse, and seeing Madeleine grow up with her grandparents is now one of the things about having her that I am looking forward to most.  And what is marriage for if not for filling in the gaps that our own lives have left us?