Jed Wolf

When Dave brought me a plate of eggs just now I looked up, batted my eyelids and said, “ awe thanks Mom.”

For many kids on Friday evenings in the 50’s, being glued to “Lassie” with tipsy adults quarreling in the background was not unusual. Unlike my smart, attractive parents or simpering Timmy, Lassie was not only beautiful but fun to watch. I had no patience for scenes involving Timmy because despite his poor choices and insipid acting, Timmy’s parents soothed him with unconditional love while kids like me used shows like his to sooth ourselves.

For a half hour every week I’d behave just to follow Lassie into the woods wishing she’d appear at my door and lead me away forever. Despite knowing the episodes were fake, their moral lessons burnished into my psyche that my life was different. Trained wild animals threatened TV kids on cue back then while people I knew threatened to pounce.

Reality felt unreal to me throughout my life and with adverbs like regrettably and shamefully attached, it still does. I quit self-medicating on and off as an adult in hopes of smelling real roses one day but something about smelling the barn at my age has me keenly aware of time running out. Daily life still feels like play acting and though I’d like that to change, its tolerable, like daily exercise with arthritis.

I resist over-eating, drinking and other soothing distractions and face what comes up for me while writing, lifting weights, biking or trying to sleep. I talk through my shit with Dave and though I’m haunted by the same old patterns, “they’re not the problem,” I say. “It’s the shame, my impotence, wasted life, lack of progress not to mention the adverbs,” I ramble, “I need a new language!’

As we walk for miles, I juggle my revelations like an old clown expecting a smack down. I tell him I hear my mother exhaling cigarette smoke dangling, “yea right,” after every one of my insights. I anticipate Dave admonishing me for being so self-involved so I withhold some admissions, but he never critisizes me, even when my analogies clearly are’nt. 

Before my mother died, perhaps because in response to her dementia, I treated her dutifully like Timmy would his mother Ruth. I forgave both my parents and have pardoned others like us for the generations of crap swirling behind our eyes which heavily influenced our lives.

In the Bible, “Ruth” is a model of loving-kindness who acted in ways that promote the well-being of others. Jesus never lived long enough to have arthritis and sometimes Dave calls me Timmy.