Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Home Alone

From success you get a lot of things, but not that great inside thing that love brings you.

Samuel Goldwyn
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I spent my life as a performing artist, most of that time as an actor. Life in theatre means that you work in very close, intimate relationships with other people. Wherever I went I carried with me the constant frustrating fantasy that I was going to make a family out of whatever company I was working with.

I had no family growing up. It was just my mother and I. We did not care for each other much and she was relieved when I finally left. My siblings were so much older than I that they were never around unless they had to be. Any child can tell the difference between real time and obligatory time.

Any possibility, if it ever existed, for a home and a family was spintered on all sides, in all directions. So I was familyless, unfamilied. I know there are people who say a family can be an aggravation if it's a bunch of people who don't get along. But I have also witnessed families that were so close the moment by moment activities were examples of love that was so omnipresent no one noticed it. I once knew a family with four brothers who were fond of addressing each other by their last names, "Mr. __". It didn't matter who answered. They were all attuned to each other.

My search for a family in the theatre world was fruitless, of course. For one thing everyone I worked with had a family somewhere else, they certainly didn't need me in it. And no one understood what I wanted, The young women thought I was coming on to them for sexual reasons, and so did some of the young men. Some of the older folks were also suspicious of my advances for other reasons. I was searching for mothers and fathers, for brothers and sisters, for sons and daughters. It was a pointless search. And there was always an end date. an out clause, closing night, a time to move on.

I shared an apartment with a guy for a while who seemed glad to have me there. We developed, I thought, a fraternal relationship. We were both actors of about the same age. But he met someone, a woman, and wanted his space, so I left.

I kept thinking that someday I would meet another vagabond who was on the same trail with the same need. It didn't happen.

Now I'm 71. My phone still doesn't work. Even though I have some dear invisible friends at the other end of the email world. I live alone. I never found my family.

DB - The Vagabond
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APRIL FOOLERY

Weekend Contest
This contest is open for the next 6 days.

APRIL FOOLERY
Choose as many numbers as you want and fill in the blanks
Winners will be posted on the evening of April 4.
The decisions of the nasty biased judge are final. Prizes will awarded on the basis of originality and whatever makes me laugh.

3 ENTRIES SO FAR

On the first day of April my true love gave to me
12______
11______
10______
9_______
8_______
7_______
6_______
5_______
4_______
3_______
2_______
and_______

Good luck
DB
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9 comments:

Gerry said...

That is sad. You are probably going to need another life to rectify all this. I must have needed to be set down in Mormon country where people sometimes had as high as 30 brothers and sisters with different mothers of course in polygamy. My grandmother W. had been raised in polygamy so she and my Granddad would be stopping to family reunions up and down the state wherever they went. I lived with my great grandmother one winter and met a bunch more relatives on the other side I did not know I had. And yet I sometimes still feel lonely! I do think that a person raised among so many relatives gets used to having so many around so is always like you taking more in to become family and then of course being frustrated when they don't act like family on being adopted. For I left Utah so had to keep replacing that family with new families. I would make the people in my apartment complex my family. I would go to a bar and make the bar family mine. When Raymond had his theater company I had all the playwright and actors as a big dysfunctional family. The weekly workshop meeting would keep us together, so there was more or less a family there for 12 years and then he started teaching, so I became one of supporters who would come and see the productions just as I had at Playwrights, all the productions like a good mother should do. And then the blogger world. Why bloggers can almost weep over the blogger friends they lost when AOL shut down, but I just came on over to blogspot and started interacting again and surrounding myself with a blogger family consisting of old and new. Then Facebook. The Family Site. And I still get lonely! I just got up because I could not sleep. My WHo family is so dysfunctional half the time nobody is speaking. So I thought I would go back on the Internet and see if I could connect. I saw this entry earlier but did not read, so this time I read, so now I am ready to say, this is your family, there is always a family to be had consisting of people who will act like family. Because that's what people do. The whole world is a family but the basic family is to try to learn how to support one another and then the next step is to go out and make more families! Some people like to take the whole world under their wings like hens do with little chicks. That person becomes a leader, a president. Churches want to take you in but if they are too discriminatory I reject them. If they reject the alcoholics I am gone. I have had enough of that. I have just been on the family site tonight for hours trying to get a breakthrough with my sister which finally started happening after months of estrangement. I just can't give up on families for everybody...

Valerie said...

This is one of the saddest things I have ever read.

Rose said...

Hey, Handsome....I can't believe you never married or had someone special in your life.

I come from a family of 12. My mother was a good Catholic! LOL

I have two grown adult children but they both live in New England and here I am in Florida! I wish I could afford to move back home.

Well, we here in blogsphere have adopted you as our family!

Hugs,Rose

Ally Lifewithally said...

Can I adopt you as my brother ~ I felt so sad to read your entry and even sadder you never had that someone special in your life ~ I have Five brothers and two sisters and we were and still are a very close family ~ I have been so Lucky to be part of my Family ~ Ally x

Big Mark 243 said...

There are so many different thoughts going on in my head. I want to feel for you, not that it is pity or anything. More like a frustration over things in the past that will never change.

I won't ramble on here. This is something that on a personal level I am on the opposite side of from you. What I will hope for is that you begin to find a peace of mind that will keep you from feeling deprived.

Ken Riches said...

It is difficult coming from a splintered, or a split, family. I was, and now I am (my kids do not live near us). I wished we lived closer so we could meet for a cup of Joe every now and then.

Lori said...

I think you have an online family of sorts, and I hope that you have some close friends to lean on. I can't imagine being without a close family. I grew up in one that was and is so nuclear. I have six siblings and I love them to pieces. And then of course I have my own little family of four that I wouldn't trade for a million millions!

Inday said...

As I can tell, my comments did get through yours and not with other blogs (how funny that can be) ...well, I feel sorry DB but there are times life can be so lame.

I come from a large family and I am the eldest daughter. I loved it at the same time not loving it (only when annoyance of inevitable problems happened and I was the one most affected being the eldest girl.) Not fair!

Having a big family is really fun!Oh we did get dysfunctional from time to time but that's part and parcel of life.

I thought when I get married I would like to have a big family myself. No, it did not happen. My marriage ended up in casualty.

So I tried to bond my girls and they are real close which makes me happy.

It's a shame, it's too late! I could be a possible candidate.

Haha. Just kidding DB. When your phone is back to working order, yell out and I will give you a call.

Liz said...

Where did you look for your family?
In your genetic inheritance?
And when that failed to reach your expectations-
In the theatre where everything that is unreal is made to become a lie as real as the audience is willing to believe.
You as an actor know the truth behind the lie.
You have acted out life in the raw and on the stage.
You can now stand on the real stage and speak your own words.
If your audience is only one then let it be me.