A friend I’ve known for about fifty years told me recently that she reads this blog from time to time.
My first thought was, oh shit, my version of yikes...
Not because I didn’t want her reading it. What caught me off guard was realizing that somebody who actually knows me had been reading things I’ve spent years avoiding revealing to people who actually know me..
The blog has more than 37,000 views now, oddly enough, probably because during my photography days I had around 5,000 followers on Facebook and would occasionally post links to things I wrote here. I assume a lot of those views came from there.
Most, if not all, of those people were/are strangers.
I was apparently perfectly OK with thirty-seven thousand strangers reading about my life for some odd reason. Strangers feel safe. They don’t know enough about you to connect all the dots. They don’t know what you were like fifty years ago, what you’ve conveniently left out of a story, or whether something you’ve written sounds completely unlike the person they remember.
But knowing someone who actually has some of those dots was reading too made me feel like I needed to go back through the posts and see what all I had revealed..
This particular someone was a girlfriend back when we were both very young, and she hadn’t yet refined her judgment..
Fifty years ago.
I’m still having trouble with that number because there is apparently some part of my brain that thinks I’m not old enough to have known anyone for fifty years. The mirror continues to disagree..
Our lives went in completely different directions a long time ago, but she has somehow always remained around the edges of mine. Every once in a while she checks in to see how I’m doing and what I’m up to. Nothing complicated. Nothing expected. She just checks in, while no one left in my own family knows whether I’m alive or might have died six, eight, or ten months ago..
This year she remembered my birthday when I had nearly forgotten it myself. I wrote here about that , that she was the last person on earth who remembered, and fifty years later she still did.
What I didn’t know was that she had also been reading some of this stuff here..
That immediately made me wonder exactly what the hell I had written..
The answer is apparently quite a bit..
The strange part is that this blog exists largely because there are things about my own father I will never know. He died in 1980, and I didn’t even know.
I never really knew him; we had only met once or twice when I was a kid and it was just a kid and a man I was told was my father. By the time I reached the age when I wanted to know more about him, who he had been beyond the basic facts of his life, he was gone. There was no written trail telling me what he thought about, what he found funny, what worried him, what made him happy, what he regretted, what mattered to him, and maybe even what he thought about me, if at all..
Those are the things I would like to know now but never will..
That became part of the reason for this blog. I had a son while I was still pretty much a kid myself, and he was barely over the age of two when I was summarily kicked to the curb, so he never really got to know his father either.
I didn’t want him to someday reach the point I did a few years ago, realizing I was now an orphan and finding there was nothing left about my father but unanswered questions..
So this blog became a de facto documentary and eventually a very long letter to my son. Something he might find someday if he ever wanted to know who his father was in my own words, how I lived, what mattered to me, and some of the good, bad, and uncomfortable things that normally don’t make it into the official version of someone’s life.
Whether he ever reads any of it is another matter.
I’ve always assumed he probably won’t.
That made writing here strangely easy. I could put things on a page I would probably never sit across from somebody and say out loud. Nobody interrupts a page. Nobody changes their facial expression halfway through the sentence. Nobody tells you what you should be feeling or asks what you really mean.
I write it down, get it out of my head and move on.
A few months ago I described myself as having an audience of one. Me.
I wrote that whatever I put here wasn’t designed for anyone who just happened to stumble across it. Apparently I forgot that public websites occasionally have a public.
Meanwhile, everywhere else, I was purposely going in the opposite direction.
Years ago I started deleting people I actually knew from Facebook. Eventually I deleted almost all of the 5000 thousand followers I had accumulated and nearly everything I had posted.
I wanted to disappear from view and, frankly, I still like the idea. I think I just stopped wanting an audience, especially an audience that never really knew me and never will.
Which makes it fairly amusing that while I was busy erasing myself from the place where thousands of people could casually see me, I left this blog sitting here containing more about who I actually am than anything I deleted.
My plan to disappear apparently included leaving a detailed map. One that I clearly hadn’t thought through. Then somebody from fifty years ago found it. That is part that surprised me most.
She knew the much earlier version of me, before most of what I write about here ever happened. Now, from time to time, she gets a glimpse of what became of that guy and some of what was going on inside him along the way.
Thirty-seven thousand strangers can read these pages and remain strangers. She can’t. She already knew the person before the story, and now she knows some of the ups and downs along the way to here..
But no, Teresa, it doesn’t bother me that you’re reading some of these things. If anything, I’m glad the one person I discovered sitting out there was someone who has known me for fifty years.
I just wish some of what you found here had been a little more uplifting.
I’ve become very accustomed to living inside empty rooms and was surprised when I found out I wasn’t actually alone in this one..
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