2002-08-30 - 11:06 p.m.
BEAR MOUNTAIN PERSPECTIVE
Sometimes time simply passes. Sometimes time brings change. Occasionally, time brings perspective. The memories remain but lose their sting. So it is with Bear Mountain.
Bear Mountain is a park in New York. I�ve been to Bear Mountain a few times when we lived in New Jersey and when I worked summers in camps in the Catskills. The significance of Bear Mountain, however, is not from the times I went there. It�s from the time I didn�t go. Just the thought of that trip that, for me, didn�t happen used to make me angry. Just the thought of that trip was once enough to cause bad feelings even years later. But it came up tonight and I realized that I had almost forgotten. I not only didn�t feel passionate, I couldn�t even summon up the passion.
Tonight we were out at a goodbye party for someone in my office. The person has only been a co-worker for two years but has been a friend for more than twenty years. I met him even before I started law school. I met him in Chicago when we were at interviews competing for the same scholarship. He got it. I didn�t. We both went to law school at New York University any way.
After the party, he, his wife, Mr. Philately, a co-worker, and I decided to go out for dessert and coffee. Although the co-worker had not been with us in law school, we started reminiscing about our time in New York. Then it came up. My friend mentioned the Bear Mountain trip. Mr. Philately looked nervous. He explained that we don�t mention that and he looked at me. To my surprise, I felt no irritation. I simply pretended.
The Bear Mountain trip occurred (or, in my case didn�t occur) right at the beginning of my second year of law school. Mr. Philately and I had been dating hot and heavy in the spring of my first year. We wrote in the summer and I had come to Milwaukee, where he was doing an internship, for a weekend. I thought we had a great relationship. I thought we were fine. And then, just at the end of the summer, I got the feeling that something was wrong. I couldn�t put my finger on it. I was still getting a few postcards but they seemed remote. My mother thought it was my imagination. The Bear Mountain trip proved her wrong.
When we returned to law school, I expected to go on the Bear Mountain trip. The Bear Mountain trip was sponsored by the group that gave my friend a scholarship. Mr. Philately also had one of those scholarships. Going on the trip was possible only if you had the scholarship or were a guest of someone who did. Given our earlier relationship, I assumed I�d be a guest. I assumed wrong.
Mr. Philately, for the first but not the last time, had panicked about our relationship. When we first began dating, he assumed I was a spring fling. In the early summer, he assumed I was a summer romance. Here it was fall and we were still together. That situation suggested permanence. He didn�t think of himself as a permanence kind of guy. He started the year by giving me the friendship speech. He didn�t want to destroy our friendship. He didn�t even exactly want to end our relationship from what I could tell. He just wanted to change it. He wanted to break up. (If these last three sentences sound mixed up, it�s because they were.)
How could he demonstrate that he was a free agent, sort of? What symbol could he seize on? We didn�t live together so he couldn't throw my stuff out of an apartment. What he seized on was the Bear Mountain trip. The trip was for scholarship people and significant others. I was only an insignificant other. I didn�t go. The blow was sudden and from no where that I yet knew existed although I would come to know that insecure place in Mr. Philately well in the next few years. It hurt. It frightened. It made me angry and I remembered it with passion for years.
But until tonight, as the years slipped by, I had almost forgotten Bear Mountain. I no longer hurt. I�m no longer frightened. I�m no longer angry. Mr. Philately and I are tightly tied together and as permanent as any good, long-term relationship can consider itself to be.
Bear Mountain just isn�t what it used to be. Perhaps they call that early senility�but I prefer to think of it as perspective.
LAST YEAR: Growing Into My Name
LAST FIVE ENTRIES:
Delicate Balance
All Wet
Paradoxically
Those on the Ground Floor
Finding My Rhythm
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Copyright 2006 by Ellen |
