Grownup

Thank God for John Lee.  And who is he?  One of those men's teachers who have helped enlarge and sustain the area of knowledge Robert Bly opened up 30 years ago.  Lee describes himself as a redneck, a cracker, and so on.  A Californian doesn't know exactly what to make of this.  But John Lee wants to define himself as a person first, a psychologist and author second.  It works.  He's one of those teachers who uses his own foibles as a continuous platform for instruction.  

I hadn't seen him in seven years, and now here he was at the annual Minnesota Men's Conference, trenchant as always.  Hitting the nail on the head and pounding it into my mine at a rate the cranium can tolerate.  And, it must be noted, cranium tolerance is only so deep these days.  Marlou's death has narrowed the bandwidth for the absorption of additional life knowledge.  But this last week in Minnesota there was room for John Lee.

Male passivity, Lee believes, is a national affliction.  American men turn passive at many, perhaps most, junctures.  And this situation is so pervasive that one needn't feel bad about it.  Let alone guilty or inadequate.  It's hard enough to be aware.

Like many such confabs, the Minnesota Men's Conference combines big general meetings with smaller sessions.  To facilitate the latter, all the men signing in for the five-day event choose a small group.  How?  By responding to the fanciful name assigned to each.  The groups bear the names of fabular characters and events drawn from the Featured Myth.  Each conference revolves around some legend or other.  So there I was, emerging from the bus ride, confirming my credit card payment and scanning the sign-up sheets for discussion groups.  I chose one named after wildflowers.  My expectations were not very high.  In fact, it was time someone at the conference did something about the small group problem.  

The problem could be witnessed at lunch in the cafeteria.  The groups assemble there on the first day, chew over sandwiches and the morning's material...and then everything goes to hell.  Fewer people gather at the next day's lunch hour.  Less and less of importance gets said.  Within a couple of days no one meets at all, or a few guys hang out for noon hour companionship, making small talk about their lives...tougher topics of myth and riskier self revelation being abandoned.  

The conference planners have long neglected this problem with the small groups.  And it was high time someone realized that important discussions weren't happening -- and did something about it, for Christ's sake.

And damned if John Lee didn't turn this "problem" around 180° and slap me up along side of my middle-aged head.  Yes, he acknowledged, the small groups could easily go to hell.  And if I, 12-year veteran of the conference, couldn't take matters in hand, inspire, entice, steer and generally guide my own discussion group, who could?  

More to the point, why didn't this fact naturally occur to me?  Maybe an endemic, cultural zeitgeist phenomenon has me, and many other men in America, by the balls.  We do not easily see our power, rise to the challenge, get active and get involved.  Someone ought to do something about...you name it.

So if nothing else happened in Minnesota this year, this much did.  I saw myself as an actor who thought he was an understudy, someone eternally not listening for the cues, missing his entrances, memorizing useless lines.  And what does one do with such knowledge?   

The annual Men's Conference presents the wheelchair user with endless snags.  I need a bedside table.  There are no bedside tables.  There was an alternative, the piano bench in the lounge, but what if someone wanted to play a little Chopin?  Instead, the first night, I asked some guys to move an armchair beside my bed.  But a slanting upholstered cushion really isn't the best surface to place one's urinal at night, as past experience has shown.  And rather than set the stage for a midnight urine flood, self-recriminations drowning me like dead seaweed, I made the big switch.  I stopped another guy outside my room, asked him to switch armchair for piano bench.  And the deed was done.  Fuck Chopin.  

And...yes, there was more...I could not get my wheelchair into the main meeting room without help, so I loosed some other guys on the problem.  Were there boards around?  One guy knew where there to find some.  Great.  Let's take the boards, pile them up to create an incline...and suddenly I was rolling into the conference room on my own.  And noting that the boards were getting knocked askew, one guy talked to the camp manager.  Who told the grounds guy to tackle the underlying problem.  He jacked up the ramp, creating a smooth incline.  And so it went.  

There's always a problem with getting dressed in time for the morning singing, one-handed manipulation of clothes and leg brace being what they are.  And the struggle to get clothed in time to hobble, on someone's arm, down the long flight of stairs to where 50 men forget we're amateur singers and kick musical butt with everything from Gregorian chants to American spirituals...well, it's a big ordeal.  And the frustrations mount in such a way that they actually metastasize and cause me to fumble socks repeatedly, mess up trouser snaps and twist my foot all over the place trying to get the leg brace on in time.  So, fuck it, one challenging morning I slipped into my blue jeans, underwear be damned, managed a T-shirt, dropped my naked feet onto the wheelchair footrests and headed out.  At the top of the stairs, one passing guy put on a sock while a friend put on the other, and together they wedged my foot into the brace.  Within five minutes I was wailing out Latin with everyone else.

As for the wailing, well, talk to John Lee.  He'll tell you that grief is a quintessential male experience.  It comes at us all the time.  And most of the time we swallow it down, don't even notice it.  And what's grief?  The sense of loss around almost any transition.  Why is this a male experience?  I don't know.  But it corresponds to my own experience.  And though you can learn about grief alone, you can't handle it alone.  Not that I am alone when I'm more active.  And certainly not aboard the crowded flight home...where I pushed for, and got, a bulkhead seat.  Cool.  At 62, you'd think I was a grownup.