Hobo Love

In June of 2002, I packed up my small studio apartment in Boston, MA and headed south down the Interstate-95 corridor. What was supposed to be a 10 hour drive ended up being closer to 15 for reasons that I cannot quite remember, and by the time I arrived amidst the sunny pastures of North Carolina, it was too late to check into a hotel and too early to pick up the key to my new apartment. Thus, my first night in the Carolinas was the 3 hour nap I took in the parking lot of the Kroger Grocery store. My first night as a hobo was rather uneventful compared to my second night as a hobo, which would take place about a year later when I was flat broke and sleeping on the floor of an airport some 50 miles outside of London, but that’s a story for another day. What my two hobo moments shared in common was that they both took place in a completely unfamiliar environment, where the nearest familiar face was hundreds of miles away. I literally knew no one.

Of course, the prospect of knowing no one was not altogether unfamiliar to me. As a child, I bounced around from school to school and was forced to make new friends everywhere I went. I went to one school for nursery and switched to another for kindergarten. First and second grade was spent at a third school, while third, fourth, and fifth were spent at a fourth school. My fifth school took care of sixth, seventh, and eight grades. The longest time I’ve ever spent at the same institution of learning was my sixth and seventh schools – high school and college – each of which spanned 4 years. Indeed, even my tenure at an eighth school – graduate school – was completed in only 3 years, after which I’ve technically been enrolled in a ninth school for the past year, though I am yet to take any continuing education classes there. Point is, after nine new beginnings, solving strangerdom becomes old hat. More out of historical necessity than for the sake of anything else, I’ve grown pretty good at making friends when needed.

Historically, I’ve always been the one leaving my friends. However, this has not been the case since I’ve moved down to North Carolina. Every summer for the past five summers, people whose company I’ve come to enjoy and value have moved away from me. Indeed, each and every person that I may have called a significant friend, with only one exception, has moved elsewhere, or will this summer. Part of it, I suspect, has to do with my age. Many people my age are starting new careers or transitioning between careers, which often entails changing location. Part of it, I suspect, has to do with geography. I now live within The Triangle created by the 3 large research universities nearby. Many people just come down here to get their degree and are happy to start their “real lives” elsewhere. Most people I come into contact with these days, then, including those whom I befriend, are transients. Ironic, then, that it is in this place bereft of any interpersonal stability that I would decide to finally take root.

Reflecting upon the friends that have come into and out of my life, I wonder if I’ve let some of them go too easily. I’ve always accepted the fact that I’m much better at making friends than I am at keeping them. I am apparently completely devoid of all of the skills necessary for maintaining long distance friendships – remembering birthdays and anniversaries, sending out news of marginally important life events, and the ever popular calling-just-to-say-hello. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever in my life called someone just to say hello. The effect of this has been that when I move away, or when people move away from me, goodbyes really tend to be goodbyes. I used to think that this was the case due to some personality defect of mine, but I now wonder if it’s rather a matter of philosophy.

This week at Sunday school (yes, I realize it’s strange that I attend Sunday school while not actually attending church or even being Christian for that matter, but I’ve found that such an arrangement suits me quite well), the minister lectured about the virtue of chastity. I didn’t care for much of what he said, but one point really did resonate. He suggested, contrary to what I was expecting, that the problem with America today was not that there was too much sex, but too little of it. That is to say, our sexuality was intended to be a broad-ranging drive which permeated all aspects of our lives. The real perversion of sexuality, then, is to confine it to the mere act of congress and it is this narrow portrayal found everywhere you look which is, so to speak, poisoning the water we drink. The Greeks, who, mind you, were naked all the time, believed that love existed in many forms including familial, sexual, charitable, and that between friends. True love, we say, is to be found in a committed sexual relationship between a man and woman and behind closed doors. Think of how many times we use the phrase ‘I love you’ and how many of those times are limited to romantic/sexual relationships. Maybe we’d all be healthier if we freed love from the bedroom, or romance in general, and let it breathe out in the open, where it could contribute positively to all aspects of our lives, more like the Greeks (though they may have taken it too far, honestly). While the minister did not mention this (and I’ve probably already butchered his lecture to pieces), I would like to add that in the story of the Fall, the first thing Adam and Eve did was clothe their nakedness, or hide their sexualities. Maybe that is something we still need to overcome.

Part of the problem with the way we think about love, I suspect, is that we have bought into the notion that love as a commodity is, to borrow a term from economics, rivalrous, which is to say that the more we give one person, the less we’ll have left over for others. But even if we assume that love exists in fixed quantity in the manner described above, would it be an altogether bad fate to have expended all the love one was given? I mean, consider the alternative - how much worse off would you be to be standing at the gates of your death, like the William H. Macy character in Magnolia, repeatedly saying, “But I have so much love (left) to give!” Maybe I’ve been guilty of putting my love on the shelf and waiting for just the right moment to use it.

But now, I’m a new man. It's no longer just about making new friends to replace the ones that I already have. It's about taking love off the shelf and allowing it to permeate my entire existence and broadening my conception of the creative drive of attraction to include even platonic relationships. Take heed new and old friends alike, this hobo is coming to a town near you, and I’m bringing my bucket of love and I plan on sharing liberally, and maybe this way we'll each find our way to salvation.