The Yearning Curve: Sunday musings…10/20/2024
How good is that phrase, eh? It comes to us courtesy of “Crankshaft”, the character from the comics. There are all kinds of ways to draw that particular curve. Crankshaft, a bus driver who had a cup of coffee as a minor league pitcher, limits himself to very rare occasions of reminiscing. He wanted more in those days, and he misses them terribly. Yet, in his tortured wisdom, he realizes that he can’t go back, and he can never change either what came before or what came after.
So he visits that time, opens a window to that little room tucked away in his attic rarely and for the briefest of moments, lest his yearning increase.
Times like those, times like Crankshaft’s stint as a pitcher for the Toledo Mudhens, are the classic double-edged sword. When distressed a quick visit can re-set your compass or fill your tank just enough to get through whatever it is that’s got you down. Spend too much time there, in Toledo for example, and nothing in the here and now might measure up. The yearning can overwhelm the living.
Some places and some times were so special that the yearning can become an irresistible force, driving you back in real time to bring your present day self to Toledo. The yearning curve as a boomerang, if you will. My in-laws gave in to this and re-visited Cap Ferrat in Southern France. They yearned to walk the quaint streets of their young marriage, to eat a breakfast of fresh milk and baguettes left in the box outside their tiny apartment while gazing at the impossibly blue waters of a harbor dotted with tiny sailboats. What they got, of course, was the hustle, bustle and hurley-burley of a modern tourist trap en Francais.
The yearning curve is never a circle.
One can also find themselves somewhere along a yearning curve for something that never actually occurred. A wish for a life that turned out very differently from what one was hoping for, for instance. You had hopes for a particular career, and unlike Crankshaft you never really even got as far as Triple A, let alone made it to the majors. Never even got the first job. You yearn for the life you thought you were going to have.
Or maybe you had a vision for how your family would turn out. Courtship and marriage would lead to a lifelong love affair. Children would arrive, grow and thrive, and then return, at least now and again, to your nest. Perhaps they would have their own children along, your grandchildren in tow. You had a young family and you looked ahead and saw your life as it should be. As yours was, if yours was that lovely. Some find themselves on the yearning curve due to tragedy; the life they yearn for was stolen by the death of a child, for instance. Still others, through no fault of their own, find themselves outside the hearth, all of their love there to be given silently, from afar.
All of them find themselves yearning not for the life they once had but for the one they had every reason to think they would have, now left only to share their love silently, from afar.
A very nice bunch of older college buddies, mostly football teammates, included me and a couple of other “youngsters” in an epic email thread dedicated to college memories. It’s been fun reading it these last 10+ years. When we allow ourselves to “remember” we all ran the 40 in 4.5 seconds or less. Everyone maxed his bench press each time we lifted. Each or us had a full head of long flowing hair, and we always got the girl. A magical place and a magical time, indeed. It can be easy to yearn for a place like that. In another place and another time I looked not back but ahead, and looked at a life that was such a normal expectation that it seemed inconceivable that it wouldn’t turn out more, rather than less, exactly that way. For sure that’s how it was in Beth’s family, and in mine as well. That our reality would instead be that the love we had, that we expected to freely share, would become little more than a never-made memory tucked away in a closet, like Crankshaft, there to be glimpsed rarely and sparely, at our own peril, well…
But those college days, like my in-laws’ Cap Ferrat ca. 1975 and Crankshaft’s cup of coffee with the Mud Hens, are no longer there. They only exist in a picture, or an email thread, or behind a door or a window in the attics of our minds, available for a brief visit when the yearning curve peaks. That life we imagined in which we shared love far and wide, openly and often, never actually occurred. It, too, exists now only in an old picture, a Facebook or Instagram post, a yearning for something that should have happened but somehow didn’t.
Like the yearning curve that brings you ever back to Toledo.
I’ll see you next week…
This entry was posted on Sunday, October 20th, 2024 at 8:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.