True Bicycle Tales
May. 9th, 2018 09:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_camera
Cannot describe how fabulous it was to spend time with Eleanor B!
She’s biking now!
Training for a century. At 63!
“Do you still bike?” she asked.
“Haven’t since I moved to the Hudson Valley,” I said. “I don’t even have a bike these days. I miss it.”
Somewhere over the course of the evening, we hatched a plan to ride from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to New Orleans.
“After all, it’s all downhill,” Eleanor’s husband Glenn pointed out waggishly.
Ha, ha!
This would all be in three years after she and Glenn retire.
Eleanor and I would bike; Glenn would be our support team. He could play golf when he wasn’t chauffeuring our fabulous luxury RV.
###
Eleanor B and I were the two nurses in my MPP program at UC Berkeley. Both ER nurses – me at Highland, she at Alta Bates.
Since we’d both put serious time in on the front lines, we were a decade or so older than all the other apple-cheeked little policy wonks, which would have caused us to gravitate toward each other in any event. But it turned out that on top of that, we had Serious Rapport. So our two-woman study group inevitably turned into free-ranging consciousness-raising sessions.
The big difference between us was that Eleanor entered into every conclusion she arrived at, whether it was a cost/benefit analysis of Medicaid reimbursement models or the decision to get pregnant, through a process of conscious deliberation whereas I tended to back into things impulsively. It was a complementary difference; we worked well as a team.
Our biggest similarity was that we were both the type of people whom other people assumed they knew well when in fact, they didn’t know us at all! We’re both excessively personable; I think that’s part of it.
The other part of it, for me (can’t speak for Eleanor) is that while I’m really interested in other people’s stories, the juicy narratives that surround them like a hazy, fluctuating force field, I’m not generally all that interested in the other people themselves. Once I get their stories, I have what I want; I don’t need to continue the relationship. I suppose it’s a kind of… well… coldness. It certainly stood me in good stead through my subsequent career as a celebrity journalist!
Eleanor is exactly the same way. It was Eleanor who first turned me onto something that has since become one of keystones of my interpersonal dynamics, namely that there are personal relationships and there are impersonal relationships, and the latter far outnumber the former. You can feel a great deal of affection for the people with whom you have an essentially impersonal relationship, but the boundary is clearly delineated, and you’re not under any delusion that that boundary is suddenly, magically, going to disappear. You walk away from impersonal transactions with a pleasant glow and no interest whatsoever in a return visit.
###
In our last year of graduate school, Eleanor and I disappeared from each other’s lives.
On top of the madness that was graduate school, life was throwing curve balls.
Last night was actually the first time we’d seen each other in 30 years.
“You never heard what happened?” Eleanor said. “I didn’t graduate.”
“What?” I said.
“I got pregnant again. With Julian.”
“Yes, I remember that –“
“I was put on bed rest. I had a cerclage. And I put in the paperwork to take a leave of absence, and Scheffler signed off on it – I remember he grumbled because he was about to take off for Czechoslovakia, and I was making him late for his packing –“
“Fucking Scheffler,” I said.
“And then Julie the department secretary misfiled the paperwork! It languished in some forgotten cubbyhole. So three months later, I get this letter – I had officially flunked out of GSPP! I’d still been officially enrolled, so they gave me Fs in all my classes!”
“Omygawd!” I said. “That’s like one of those awful panic attack dream scenarios!”
“I was so ashamed! I wanted to pretend that GSPP had never happened! I didn’t want to see anyone from that part of my life ever again!”
“I get it,” I said.
“And you disappeared, too – “
“I broke up with Bill,” I said.
Eleanor nodded. “I liked Bill. But…”
“I liked Bill, too,” I said. “But one of your many great pieces of wisdom to me – I quote you all the time, E! – was that in order for a relationship to be successful, the two people in it have to be comfortable ignoring each other for some significant fraction of the time. I mean, it’s a balance, the ignoring, the paying attention. But the other person can’t constantly take up all the space.
“To this day, Bill remains one of the most physically present human beings I have ever met. It got to the point where I felt completely invisible around him.
“But the real reason I divorced him is that he would do this thing…”
We sat in silence for a couple of seconds admiring the play of shade from Eleanor’s plum tree.
“I was like this total super-jock before I had Max, right?” I finally continued. “That’s how Bill and I met, in fact: We both raced bicycles. Of course, he was a much stronger rider than I was being male and super-competitive. I’m not very competitive –“
“No, you're not,” Eleanor said. “I've always found that surprising.”
“I’d had a baby; I’d started graduate school: I was not in great shape. I could only do one big ride on the weekend, and you can’t keep in shape doing one big ride on the weekend.
“Bill and I would ride together. And I would be pumping up Old Tunnel Road at a snail’s pace, and he would whiz up to Grizzly Peak, and then whiz back down to where I was, and he would begin circling me –“
Eleanor started laughing.
“It was so annoying. I kept telling him to stop, and he never would. And one day, as he was circling me – like a vulture or something, right? – something snapped. I thought: That’s it. My friend Susan was going off to France for two weeks, so I volunteered to house-sit, grabbed Max, and started looking for my own apartment –“
“Just like that!” Eleanor marveled.
“Well, I knew I wasn’t gonna be able to stay married to him,” I said. “And the older Max got, the harder it was going to be to leave. So. Yeah. Just like that.”
“And, uh, do you still talk to Bill?”
“Oh, sure,” I said. “We’re pals. Though I’m probably closer pals with his second wife. I stay with them whenever I’m in that part of California. As a matter of fact, I spent last Thanksgiving with them.”
“Life!” said Eleanor.
We laughed and clinked our glasses.
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Date: 2018-05-10 06:18 am (UTC)You're right about the relationship necessity of attention and non-attention in balance. Unless it's taken for granted, I find it a comforting thing, a sense that I don't have to endlessly perform to make it work.
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Date: 2018-05-10 05:08 pm (UTC)Yes, I hope we can make the bike trip happen, too. I better start training again. :-)