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The apartment office has become a tomb.
It is, of course, too quiet.
Someone's missing.
I never had to wrestle with this as a single, a "confirmed bachelor", a guy down at the country-western dance hall, an artist.
I am Jewish, conservative drifting into reform, agnostic, secular.
Anne's a Lutheran minister's daughter, anti-establishment, creative, as loving and tender a soul as any could wish.
Before I take this further, note: I grew up something like an only child. The brothers were that much older. Most of the things I do--the writing, the music, the photography and a whole slew of lifestyle adjuncts--grew out of the condition of, the orientation toward, being alone.
As I turned 40, I had work and pocket change, enough to "discover" the local bar scene--the popular country-western couples and line dancing thing.
Goodbye music: hello . . . babes.
That ran a good decade.
It ran me into some unrequited heartache too.
Work into the recent years a bankruptcy, the death of both parents, and a small "reversal of fortune" that helped turn a 15-year-old pickup truck into a three-year-old Mustang. Soon after, there she was at the swimming pool. I took that left turn away from the bar, my best bar buddy, my dance partners, the beer too, and back to something like family.
Goodbye Ms. Unrequited Heartache; hello, the Good Girl.
I don't know whether it's family, me, the specific situation, but I just may not be "family guy", I've never been quite comfortable with anyone for any length of time, but I wanted to try the family thing, starting with living with someone who loved me, who didn't revile me for my interests in the arts (the brothers: doctor and dentist, the most conservative and practical of the sort), and in fact shared them.
It has been up and down for me, for us, but we got as far as talking about kids.
Baptism or bris?
Bar Mitzvoh or confirmation?
Chanuka or Christmas?
I've been a terrible Jew.
The only time I've stepped into a synogogue as an adult as been for a Bar Mitzvoh or wedding (and some of that as a professional photographer).
And yet, when the question comes up, it sinks my heart to even think of sending one of mine, were there one of mine, off to a Christian Sunday school, or, more impossible, to stand by a spouse and affirm the existence of Jesus as messiah.
I can't do it.
I don't want to do it.
A relationship with parents may involve much in the way of complicated guilt and force but not the way into a marriage, which should be a relief from obligations one has not elected.
Oh crap--and I feel like it too.
And I feel worse for my friend, my partner, my companion, who, for all my ambivalent, mixed, and mixed up feelings, I did not want to let down.
The issue would seem simple from the outside (or would have been had it been a a consideration before dating and entanglement) but reality has not been so kind.
While Anne could be a "Messianic Jew", I can never be a "Jew for Jesus".
According to Wikipedia, "Messianic Jews are also not considered Jewish under the State of Israel's Law of Return." (Wikipedia, "Messianic Judaism").
That noted, I would probably not survive a tribunal over my own "Jewishness" were it not for having been born to it.
In fact, my own spiritual vector seems to drawn on agnosticism (I respect what I call "religious or spiritual sentiment" and once found the Washington Ethical Society, a mixed bag of humanists shaken out of various congregatons, too athiest for my taste) and nature or, to some extent, transcendentalist thought. My outlook fits my interpretation of my encounter with aspects of life and living, neither a traditional cut nor the latest cant from the remunerative religion business.
Sharing this one aspect of spiritual experience and vanity with humanity in arms across the middle east, I would find it unimaginable to play guitar and sing as well as I do without acknowledging God.
However, I find it hard, if not impossible, to translate that sentiment, however firm, into something like knowledge.
To elaborate and bring on the whole set--the man who died by way of an expression of God, the fiery Hell, the angels in Heaven, the directives and prophecies and the weight of cultural accouterment pinned to all that fabrication--and call it anything like truth, I cannot, nor would I wish to pass so much on to a child.
The latest unholy convergence here: readings in terrorism, thinking through how I wish to proceed with this blog and as a photographer and writer (while taking time again to play music, which has been too good a thing in my life to kill with neglect or the confusion of other things), and this most personal confrontation, a tragic one too, with my own Jewish heritage.
I may be happier alone.
I don't know.
At the moment, I don't want to speak to anyone, see anyone, go out, etc.
I have learned there is something called "my life".
Over too many years, and least of all with Anne, it had been a thing "on call" to others for pleasant rendezvous--backpacking, sailing, helping out around someone else's boat or home or lending company over dinner--and less pleasant--doctor's appointment, emergency trips to the hospital, and lending company to assuage someone else's loneliness. Now, my life's mine, or it should feel that way, and I hope I have grown to be not only careful of it but careful of others with it.
I'll go out to get in groceries--that's about it.
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