What happens in Sunnybrook Farm, stays in Sunnybrook Farm

Monday, Nov. 08, 2010-2:08 pm
"WHAT HAPPENS IN SUNNYBROOK FARM , STAYS IN SUNNYBROOK FARM"

We've all been there, or perhaps still are.
It can take the form of an unfulfilling job.
It can be someplace where you've lived indifferently for decades .
It can be a relationship. "Failed" relationships are really just "faded" relationships that have grown distant and devoid of fulfillment. They are not really "failures", but a common story of extinguished dreams... Beautiful ideals from years ago that could never hold up against the stress and strains of life.

Slowly , in quiet transformation, it becomes no more than an encampment, a place to sleep at night. In some hidden place, you know it is detached from your dreams, which are hardly recognized anymore.

Some marriages slowly grind to a halt , after years of apathy. Each is equally blameless and equally responsible .

Some unexpectedly explode "mid flight", with animosity , like a jet disintegrating in the sky as the stunned onlookers watch in disbelief, with the hazardous debris raining down.

Some marriages are immutable . They are a burnt out structure, looking somewhat normal from the outside but the hollowed remains within are only known to those who used to exist there when it thrived. Ideals that could not hold up under the pressures and weight of real life over the years are irretrievable.

In a Miami garden Rebecca once saw a palm tree into which someone had stabbed a blade when it was young. Over the years it had kept growing, layering tissues and bark around the blade, so that the tree�s smooth flesh had closed around it until only the wooden handle showed. It needed that blade now; you could not draw it out.

That is how she grew up, and how she chose to imagine it. With her parents� relationship split at the family core, with "an intruding element", and they had adapted around it. The love triangle did not have a fixed perimeter, gradually shifted from equilateral to obtuse ,until it wasn't even a triangle anymore. It gave her a greater understanding adult relationships and about human nature. It made her better than she would have been. While her parents marriage ground slowly to a halt, she grew up on the triangle's sharpest point, without ever thinking of herself as an unhappy or a naive girl.

That was 40 years ago .

Rebecca is involved with a man. A " boyfriend-type person " A good man. He is one of the most beautiful persons she ever met. On the inside and the outside. They never skipped a beat, there had never been that awkward first phase. He was " un-divorced", with a married status that had been relegated to a mere footnote, no longer the whole story. The marriage had drastically and irrevocably changed, any romance was long over and the children were grown. They were still irrefutably bound by contractual links like taxes, property, and insurance , and family. There was no reason to alter it . Maintaining the status quo, however uneasy, is easier than the terrible price people pay for those clear-cut endings . What is the point? Why would anyone create that sort of rancor when there�s nowhere to go but down? He had come to that realization many years before he met Rebecca. It is not so hard to understand why he reached out to another and acted upon an attraction.

There had not been a person on this planet who had such a profound effect on her... She was irrefutably drawn to him. He knew how she laughed, how she kissed, and how quickly she made the transition from sleepiness to full of sexual energy in the morning. She easily imagined spending a lifetime of hearing him talk to her in her dreams, in one endless semi adulterous whirl. The situation felt peacefully out of her hands.

This wasn't the fairy tale romance that little girls dream of . It didn't need to be. She was not a little girl anymore and wasn't looking for a fairy tale . You realize that the fairy tale may be different than you dreamed. The 'knight in shining ...whatever' , is just a regular guy. A dozen long stemmed red roses and candlelight take the form and substance of a 40 pound bag of birdseed that was bigger than she was . It was sweet and thoughtful . No one has ever made her feel that special with something purchased from the "grain and feed" section of Home Depot.

Uncomplicated pleasure, easily bestowed, was enough to keep them going, even though they didn't know where they are going. They didn't need to know that. After four years, there was just one thing conspicuously absent. There was a relationship milestone that she was ready for and he was not. Such reticence was practically non existent these days.

She learned a lot about trying to approach him on the matter, when she saw a great blue heron in the back yard pond . When she tried to open the screen door quietly enough to get a photo, as she got closer, it flew away. She knew about the delicacy of approaching something. Are relationships delicate? Is it a myth that both people have to be on the same page, at the same point in their lives, wanting the same things?
If she brought up the question of sex at all, she approached it in the shy manner in which one might have requested ice water at a restaurant for fear of annoying the busy staff. ...She did not want to risk harmony in the name of change..She wanted to be desired out of free will, not out of the cleverness of her argument or the seduction skills of a sexual gladiator or through an ultimatum in a hostile world of social calculation.

She made jokes and said "You're not willing to go to home plate , but you are willing to go to third base? "
He said "I said I was raised Catholic. I never said I was a fanatic".

People like to live well-defended lives inside of boundaries. At some point,"boyfriend-type person" may make a decision to cross the boundary. Boundaries don't keep other people out. They fence you in. That's how we're made. You can spend time drawing lines, or you can live your life crossing them. There are few lines that are too dangerous to cross. Once you figure out what they are , and if you're willing to take a chance, the view from the other side is spectacular. You could end up someplace unexpected...you might end up happier.


He was not entirely at ease with his growing skills at subtrafuge that went along with their relationship. To take another step of involvement seemed to magnify that discomfort, make every action seem transparent.
Does there really exist an "absolute truth"? A rigid (pardon the word) sense of what is right and wrong ? Yes, according to strict religious interpretation. However, in reality there exists a philosophical haze, a clash of beliefs. There are conflicting concepts of every issue: such as the morality of capitol punishment, assisted suicide, cloning, and .....the moral ambiguity of sex with an un-divorced man. . (If the Clinton Administration taught us anything is was that you can't even clearly define what "sex" is. Where is the clouded and unfocused line between "third base" and "home plate" ? )

There is a hierarchy of things that are "right" and "wrong". Truth is not black and white, inherently good or evil. There are white lies to preserve someone's dignity.There are grey lies to let someone save face when the truth would be painful.There are lies of omission in every shade of greyscale, all without a singular moral clarity. The worst are the ones we tell ourselves that we're happy and the price of doing something would be worse than the fear of doing it.

He has chosen this Mindset for himself. Rebecca knew that a person like him would not cross that line this without a little hesitation. Obviously he was entitled to a little uncertainty here, a moment to get used to the magnitude of what it means to finally cross the line and begin a new phase with someone else, at least symbolically. It feels as if he is cutting something out of his life. He is entitled to a moment of painful doubt and a little understanding. The moment was stretching out a lot longer than she had expected.

The shoreline can be reshaped by a steady undertow and shifted one way or the other. Despite the sexual issue remaining a chapter unwritten , it was clear that something imperceptible was continually shifting for the good between them.
At times he seemed as if he was filled with that same optimism she had, that vision of something between them that could be right. He seemed to have found something that could free him from his confusion about that which he simultaneously desired, and feared . They would get close to crossing that line, he even set a specific date. But inevitably he would change his mind . Maybe it was Catholic guilt that crept up and slapped him in the face forehand and backhand, with the echo of Sister Superior's voice in the background? His words were delivered dispassionately, as if he was simply erasing some words from a page and presenting the revised version. This was not exactly a satisfactory response. Rebecca had to fight the tendency for it to feel like layer upon layer of rejection.

Now she was giving too much energy to his ambivilance. It brought a clock into the bedroom and sets that clock running. It gave time a face, and that face would sit with her, like the clouds sit on the sea obscuring it's beauty. It made her mind race ahead by weeks, months, maybe even years, wondering about the significance of his uncertainty.

There's something to be said about a glass half full. About knowing when to say the floating line is enough. A barometer of need and desire. It's up to the individual, and depends on what's being poured. Sometimes all we want is a taste. Other times there's no such thing as enough, the glass is bottomless. And all we want, is more.

Wanting more was creating negative thoughts that were contracted into smaller and smaller circles , like the narrowing end of a fluted shell. She found herself wondering if it meant as much to him as it did to her. These thoughts contracted into the deepest most narrow space left by those smallest of circles, with him and the great burden of sexual desire in the center. When you are in the smallest circle of the fluted shell, you can not move or turn away .

To let go of something you want, is not to cut yourself off, it is to free yourself to have something else. It's the realization you can't control another.
Instead of seeing the entire relationship through the filter of just ONE aspect of the relationship that was less than ideal, she made the decision to consciously re-direct all her thoughts to being content with the present, and of every beautiful moment they had ever had.

It was like a revelation. That desire, that great shadowy burden of desire that had sat on her for months, the desire she breathed and walked around inside of, the desire that had taken on a life of it's own and had almost become indifferent to it's object � LIFTED, and fell into it's proper place, right behind patience and faith.

When you manage your expectations, you simply deal with whatever comes your way. He was right next to her, she was curled up on his chest, his body relaxed as he drifted off to sleep. She didn't want that to be obscured by anything.

Using Joni Mitchell's metaphor , you can go outside and enjoy the garden, and there's no reason to spend a lot of time trying to convince somebody else to come out of the house if they are ambivalent. That's a waste of your own precious light. There is all the time in the world for them to come out on their own. ( I'm not crazy about that song either, but at least it is not another baseball metaphor)

(And the heart of the matter is nothing close to a mere technological blog text box where you push "submit". )

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