The Professor and Mary Ann

In which our Hero is bemusedly watching a horse glare at a river

The Professor is the third in our regular lunch cabal at work. Hollywood and I take meals with our friend as the only other relatively sane person who also goes out for lunch and he tells us his stories in detail that is only excruciating because he is prone to telling stories from first principles, even if the chapter being recapped was only yesterday. I guess his audience is too polite or too stupid to interrupt.

In fairness, he’s a good story teller. He’s a great technician, too, because his dogged pursuit of the connected strands of the story make him systematic and thorough in a way that my wild intuition does not match. Don’t get me wrong, my intuition is guided by practice and experience, but I don’t have patience for “how it should be” because I’ve come to accept “how it is.”

He’s personal story is something that horrifies me and worries me. For his sake and for how he occasionally parallels or echoes my own life. The part that is uniquely his is decades of work for a local giant before layoff, followed by a rebirth in contracting and our good fortune in hiring him. Along the way, he reached a parting of the ways with his wife of long standing and his subsequent love life makes me torn between wanting to take him aside for a firm chat or just washing my hands clean of the whole thing and letting a grown man find his grown way.

He’s done the giving-girlfriend-money thing, though much more directly than I ever did. I’ve asked him what he was thinking and he does point out that the pattern of evidence was much more supportive of his choices, but at the same time…. “You gave her how much??” I think I can make the case that his current journey is very much an exploration of roads-not-taken, with the cash-paid girlfriend being a mutual acquaintance of him and his wife, a second dalliance being a college ex-girlfriend, and the current one a convivial coworker living in another country.

Having spent so painfully much of my time in various long-distance situations (we will leave the question of what’s wrong with me aside for the moment), I know to ask “What is the endgame?” If he’s not willing to move, or she is not, then the relationship can only go so far. And in the meantime, everything I hear rings alarm bells. It’s not my problem, but what he does share hurts to hear. Like the fact that there’s a religious gap that matters a great deal to her and not at all to him. It isn’t that the gap can’t be overcome through mutual understanding, but she’s looking at it as an issue because how can she choose a partner who’s hell-bound? She’s continuing in the relationship so far, but seems like a non trivial problem. The latest, though, is how the relationship works, today. He’s very pleased to report about how much time he spends talking to her. They’re online all the time. Chatting. It’s great because he doesn’t have to excuse himself to go to the fridge, and they can watch shows together and all that wonderful coupley stuff.

I’ve done that. I spent most nights with my old ex that way, chatting online. I know how convenient it is. I also know how insufficient it is. Hell, my current relationship is still distance, as you well know, Gentle Reader. It is still long-distance, but we are connected by voice rather than instant message every night. It demands more attention, because distraction is hard to hide. It demands awareness because strange sounds come over the line and you start to identify unspoken aspects of life, like the noisy woman in heels who loves above my lady, or the different sound of chopping carrots or peppers.

It’s so much more vast a connection than instant message, and still so staggeringly insufficient that I want to shake the Professor and tell him that convenience makes things easier than they should be. But I don’t want to explain why I’m qualified to have my opinion. I don’t want to talk about my current circumstance. In any case, he flies out soon to spend yet another stretch of time with his Mary Ann. Which ironically makes *me* the Professor, alone in my hut, listening to the radio.

It is what it is. No more, no less. More or less.