Eccentric Flower:201009/Leaving Baton Rouge

So, I went to Louisiana. My youngest uncle died of a heart attack at age 49. Technically, it was not a funeral but a memorial service; his ashes still need to be transported from California.

I was not especially close to my uncle in recent years; while I am certainly sad, there is not a gaping void of grief in my heart. But he was the youngest of six, and the surviving five (my mother is the oldest) are understandably pretty crushed. It's bad enough when a sibling dies; it's even worse when the youngest one dies first. Also, my sister was a lot closer to my uncle than I was; to her he was not just an uncle but a friend. I went to Louisiana because I had the sensation that my family (specifically my mother and sister, but also the others) needed me to be there.

It's surprising that I would feel this sensation in the first place, since my general understanding has been that my family has never really considered me anything but a sort of freak occurrence, an alien being in their midst whom they graciously accepted but never really ever understood. It is doubly surprising that this sensation would turn out to have been correct. It turned out that, having set out thinking I was doing something fairly foolish, I ended up having done something fairly wise. I suppose it has to happen once in a while by accident.

I'm not much for support networks. I also don't believe much in umbrellas.

I stopped using umbrellas some years back because they keep only the top 12" of my body dry, and while that can be useful, it's not worth the trouble of carrying the umbrella around and letting it drip all over everything after you use it ... or dealing with the Boston winds which, assuming they don't cause the umbrella to self-destruct entirely (I've actually had an umbrella invert, bend, and shred itself while I was holding it due to one of our lovely crosswinds), tend to cause Bernoulli lift at the height I must hold an umbrella, pulling the umbrella out of my grip and into the air, possibly trying to take me along with it. Also, I can't ever find a comfortable position to rest an umbrella on my neck or shoulder (the pole of the umbrella always ends up bouncing on my clavicle), and if I hold it when I'm using it so that it's not resting on anything, my arm and wrist get tired (and the umbrella is more prone to blow in all directions). Also you lose the use of one hand. In short, carrying and using an umbrella is a long parade of discomforts and inconveniences which might be worth it if they kept more of me dry than the neck up, but they don't. So I get wet and live with the consequences. Sometimes I wear a hat.

Support networks have never given me much. The times I've needed them they have been almost no help; the rest of the time, the overhead of maintaining them is not justified by the value I get from them. I'm not talking about friends; I like having friends. I'm talking specifically about the situation where people can help you cope with grief, with pain, with loss, with crises in your life. I very seldom have ever had a case where my friends could help with those things; when they've tried, it hasn't been very helpful at all. This isn't a slight on my friends; it's me. I simply am the sort of person for whom an emotional crisis is never mitigated, let alone solved, until and unless I deal with it my own self. External support, to my brain, doesn't seem to count and is no salve at all.

I don't mind giving support - except sometimes I do. Sometimes it's clear I have to be a better person than I am and give support unconditionally, uncritically, and I do. Other times I can't help but process it as a transaction - why should I give support when I would never receive useful support in return? And other times I can't keep judgement out of it, I can't stop myself from saying, "I would normally be willing to give support here except part of me feels you deserved what you got." Saying to myself, of course. I don't say it aloud.

But most importantly, I tend to see the world in terms of my own slightly bent ways and standards. So I assume that my support is not very valuable to you, that I have very little I can give you, because past events have shown me that your support is not very valuable or useful to me, and I assume that if it's true for me, it's true for you too.

(Also I'm well aware that I am not an emotionally warm person, that I am of limited empathy, and therefore I figure I am of limited value to you.)

Emotional crises tend to make me feel helpless, because I tend to see "useful activity" more in terms of "what can I do," concretely, than in terms of providing moral or emotional support. I find it difficult to believe, for example, that my presence alone could be any sort of comfort to anyone. If I were actually doing something to help - even if it's only bringing them a fresh box of Kleenex - that's different; that's real and I understand it. Even if what I do is sit there and be a good listener and let you vent everything to me as long as you need to. I understand that. But I don't see how my presence alone - not getting vented to, not doing anything either actively or passively, just being there - is helpful to anyone.

So I'm still pretty surprised that it actually seemed to be. As long as I'm listing surprises: I'm surprised to see that members of my family actually seemed to miss seeing me (not counting my mother and my sister, who I know miss me). I'm surprised that so many people I hadn't seen since I was a small child not only remembered me but made it a point to come say hello to me and so forth.

I think part of me was hoping that when I disappeared physically, off to a land which might as well have been Timbuktu*, I would disappear from memory as well. This is a selfish impulse; it would be so much easier to have broken ties completely, to not have the nagging sensation that there is a whole group of people out there from the past who do actually like laying eyes upon me now and again. (Putting aside my mother and my sister.) It would relieve me of a commitment. It's easier to believe that I am of no value in various contexts; it takes away any responsibility I may have to that context. It would probably be worth it for me to believe I was of value in that context, worth the commitment and overhead, if the umbrella kept more than my head dry.

I hope you aren't putting an overly surly reality on these somewhat toxic thoughts. If you are, please be assured that this was a Southern-style funeral, which means that it was just as much about seeing people you hadn't seen in years as it was about sharing grief. In the Deep South it is not a strangeness to say that one had a wonderful time at a funeral, because all proper funerals develop into parties if left to their own devices. People reacquaint after long absences, and food and booze is sent for, and the reminiscing goes long into the night, and if someone breaks unexpectedly into tears now and then, well, that's expected and understood, and she will be surrounded by people who know perfectly well why, and will hug her and hold her hand until it passes. In short, it was good seeing everyone again, and I had a lovely time, and I'm genuinely glad I went - not just because I was needed there, but because I enjoyed being a part of it.

The somber reflections are only for now, after the fact, and I'm only sharing them with you.

* The day after the service, we were out having dinner and talking to my cousin (who, by age, is closer to being my niece). We were discussing my travel back and she said, "Where was it you said you lived? Connecticut?" I corrected her, but we both knew that the distinction was meaningless to her. "I knew it was up there somewhere," she said, with a wave of her hand that indicated "up there" as an amorphous construct beginning somewhere around the top of Virginia. All people in the Deep South are like this about the North; Louisianians are like this about anywhere outside Louisiana, but they're at least aware that other Southern states exist. North is Terra Incognita.

I think this whole mixed set of feelings is knotted with the fact that I found Baton Rouge depressing; which is not a news flash, and I wrote as much the last time I went there, but it was worse than before. Seems like every time I go back I think it can't get any more depressing, and then the next time it does.

My sister says this is because I insist on driving around and looking at the places where I grew up and lived and explored, almost all of which are now in very run-down parts of town. The tide has moved; the economically prosperous parts of town all stretch to the southeast now, in areas which were empty fields and dirt when I was growing up. What I can't quite convey to her without sounding like a snob is that I don't find the built-up parts much more encouraging.

I don't have a problem with lowbrow culture. I like some shockingly lowbrow culture. But I also like to think; I like to use my brain. I can't do the sort of culture which is predicated on an utter absence of thought very often; and yet there is so much of it, that I can't help feeling it's the steady diet for far too many other people.

Analogy: I don't eat chips (that's crisps, to the Brits reading this - I mean fried snacks of dubious provenance in a bag, not fried potatoes) very often at all. I think they're not very good for me, and as far as non-nutritional filler goes, there's other junk I'd pursue first. This doesn't mean I don't find them tasty, or that I won't go through an embarrassing percentage of a bag when the mood takes me. But the mood doesn't take me very often, and I don't think I could force myself to eat a lot of them very often even if no health or dietary concerns were in play. They simply don't interest me that much, certainly not enough to make a steady habit of them.

It's clearly not some sort of zero-tolerance policy on junk food (if you think it is, you haven't seen my eating habits). It's more that, except for occasional small doses for the sake of variety, they don't strike me as particularly interesting junk food. They don't do enough for me.

Similarly, I don't so much condemn chain-store culture - the mallification of America, or worse, the Wal-Martification thereof - as find it boring. I don't think you're hopelessly lowbrow for watching NASCAR, I just wonder that it can sustain your interest for so long. I don't have a problem with Chili's (ate in one this weekend, in fact); I just wonder how you can eat there more than once every blue moon or so and not get impatient with its bland, calculated, faux-pan-ethnic commercialism. Sure, Chili's is easy to take. You can find something for everybody there and you'll leave having had a generally competent, if not fascinating meal, and it won't break the bank too badly. It is acceptable; it gives no possible offense (except possibly to people checking the fat content of each entree). I understand the appeal. But "competent" and "acceptable" are not enough for me, not as a steady diet. Some days they're okay - some days I'm satisfied with competent and acceptable as the bar; other days I crave more, and some days I get incredibly annoyed by it. It's the person who shoots for nothing higher than "competent and acceptable" at all times - the person who never looks any higher than that - who worries and disturbs me.

To judge from its commerce and its culture, Baton Rouge is full of them.

Oh, sure, I am not being fair. For all I know there are thousands of people in Baton Rouge who are just as disturbed by the fact that half the town is wasteland and half is strip mall as I am. But here's the thing: Those people still live in Baton Rouge.

Louisianians are (I honestly didn't realize this until I left the state) a little smug about their culture. Sometimes this is justifiable. It is true there are flavors and sounds and quirks in Louisiana - a certain blend of spices, and I mean that metaphorically as well as literally - that you get nowhere else in the nation. It is also true that Louisiana doesn't group well into any other regional divisions; it is not really part of the Deep South and it sure as hell isn't part of the Southwest. But precious few of those key distinctions are evident in Baton Rouge. Baton Rouge is not the part of Louisiana they put in tourism brochures, you get me?

My sister sees through the mall culture. She gets impatient with it too. But because she lives in Baton Rouge, she has very few ways to escape it, very few other places to shop and so forth. My sister doesn't drive. In Baton Rouge this is an enormous liability, the functional equivalent of her having to get around in a wheelchair. (Actually, worse. Cars can be equipped for people in wheelchairs to drive them. My sister is at the mercy of someone else every time she wants to go anywhere for any reason whatsoever. "Within walking distance" is a concept that does not exist in Baton Rouge. Period.) My sister should be living in a walkable urban area somewhere where there are lots of other clever, awake non-drones - on the Eastern seaboard, or in San Francisco, or some such.

My sister is an intelligent, capable, mentally inquisitive person, who under normal circumstances would have gotten bored with Baton Rouge to the point of depression and anger and tears years ago. But she took the wrong, the opposite route. Instead, she convinced herself that she wasn't actually that intelligent or capable. She couldn't leave Baton Rouge - she still can't - so she convinced herself that she deserved to stay. That she was of a lower caliber than she actually was. My mother long ago did the same thing.

Oh, sure, they both have developed other ties now which complicate the issue (notably, their marriages; my sister's husband has a very good job where he is valued and respected, and you don't just walk away from something like that). But at the heart, the issue is they seem to be unwilling or unable to escape some sort of gravitational pull that a lifetime in Baton Rouge exerts on them. And some of that is social.

I'm not kidding when I say that people came out of the woodwork for this funeral. I saw people whom I hadn't thought were still alive. People I wouldn't have thought would dare attend. People I wouldn't have thought would care enough to attend. People I had no conscious memory of because the last time they saw me I was a toddler. And I can't say I was surprised. Because my mother and aunts and uncles grew up in Baton Rouge, and their parents grew up there, and their grandparents grew up there. And because, before Katrina, Baton Rouge was a very small town which happened to have 400,000 people in it. You got things done in Baton Rouge, before Katrina, by being a friend of someone who was a friend of someone. Social network was everything. Old ties counted for much more than new contacts. At the funeral, this old guard - not just everyone who'd known my uncle, but everyone who'd known my uncle's family, and that's a lot of everyones - showed up in force.

It's hard to leave that. It's hard to detach yourself voluntarily from a place where social network is such an important part of existence. (My sister and I discussed the differences between here and there for a while, and she admitted that one of her problems with this urban environment is that it strikes her as so impersonal - my words, not hers. "How do you meet people there?" she asked. "How do you find friends?" I said, "I guess the same way you do here," but my words lacked the force of conviction, because I have never been overly concerned with making friends or forming a network, and we both knew it.) I can understand why someone would be reluctant to leave that. I guess I can even understand why I'm treated as a dangerous defector because I did.

(I didn't have a lot of trouble cutting myself from the social network because, as I've already noted above, participating in it never sat comfortably with my nature to begin with.)

I understand why my sister won't leave. But it disconcerts me to contemplate that she might be lowering her standards, or compromising her own self-image, by staying. It also makes me wonder - because right now, for the first time, due to external circumstances, my sister is finally realizing that she does have value, that she is important, that she is far from being the utter fuckup she's told herself she is for so many years. It's something she has never before learned. And I can't help thinking:

Now that she's starting to realize that she's better than Baton Rouge and always was, what will happen when she gets bored?