Consternatio

Now and then I get curious about people I used to know. I Google them. Nine times out of ten there’s no reference whatsoever to their names, or anybody sharing their names (there are dozens of guys out there with my name), and I always find that hard to believe. How can the interwebs fail to locate some minute mention of nearly every living American? Or dead, for that matter. You’d think that all of us have done something, written something, participated in some generic event, or had our names listed on some roster that would pop up (in pdf form, no doubt) in a broad search.

Recently I finally got results for a woman I worked with long ago. I’d always been curious about her, since we were both fiction writers and we’d become pretty good friends in our three-and-a-half years together in a cramped La Jolla office. When I moved to San Francisco and she moved to Long Island, we lost touch -- a few letters exchanged of the newsy sort, announcing the births of her daughters and more pack-up-and-moves. Her husband is a neuroscientist with a lengthy resume; they’ve moved a lot. The truth is, though, that along the way I got tired of her lack of interest in me, so I stopped writing back, and that is why I’ve felt a little bit guilty over the intervening years. I know I could have kept our friendship going if I really wanted to. I could have let her go through her phases, even while I managed my usual enthusiasm. I always expected to hear that she had won some fiction award or had had a novel published, but no. Instead I was the one who published a novel, but I never heard from her about it. Maybe she was never moved to Google me.

This time, after I typed in her name -- her husband’s actually -- some links popped up that guided me to her. She had moved again, thanks to her husband’s career. Briefly, a couple of years ago, she had a blog. About knitting.

I wasn’t sure it was her, once I popped in on the blog. This woman didn’t sound anything like my old friend. She sounded, somehow, wounded, tragic, lost. She’d found God somewhere in there, her idiosyncratic version of Christianity, anyway. She was doing good works, though: collecting people’s unwanted knittings -- blankets and things -- for the homeless. I had to admire that. I often think about doing such good works, but the quotidian always seems to interfere or distract, or, more likely, provide a ready excuse. She was actually doing something.

But in her voice was a tone of emptiness. It was the voice of someone who had been searching for herself or her rightful role in life and was surprised not to have found it in motherhood. She’s been in therapy, in Al Anon, deep in church activities, and I’m sure she’s been a terrific mother too. Yet she hadn’t found it. The one thing. Now she’s doing another blog with her sister -- a very personal back-and-forth that I’m not sure they mean to be public -- and her slow-burning desperation is coming through there too. She revealed that her husband is a year out from a cancer diagnosis. There is a worried edge to her writing, but an elder sister’s confidence too, an “I’ve been there” message between the lines. It’s obvious that she loves her family and her church, she’s fearful for her husband, and she’s trying to keep a fun face on the outside. But I’m stunned at how needy and damaged she seems now, when twenty years ago she was a bright, light-hearted, talented, hilarious young woman who had a chance to do big things with her writing.

It seems to me, from this huge distance, that something went wrong for her. On the inside. But I’ll never know, and I’ll never try to find out either, because she has moved too far from my reach (Christ isn’t in my bag of tricks, I’m afraid). We’re nearly opposites now.

Strange, how two people in their early thirties have taken such different paths to fifty.