Legal Commentary

A Road Not Taken

By Kevin Funnell

Ten years ago, an old girlfriend tracked me down through a legal services directory. "Old girlfriend" is a bit of a deflection. She was a red-headed Hispanic spitfire and the love of my life prior to the love of my life. We ended badly, as intense love affairs sometimes do when they burn too hot. On occasion, they flame blue-white, consuming the lovers. Or, at least, that's what I thought for several decades.

After she and I had reconnected, I met her for dinner (following full disclosure to, and with the blessing of, my wife, because my Momma didn't raise no fool). In the course of that dinner, after she reminded me of the last conversation we had, I asked a question that, after 27 years, I hoped that she had the emotional distance to answer honestly. Several months before we "split," I had asked her to marry me, and she responded, "You don't want me." Nothing I could say over the next few months would generate any response from her other than that one, or a variation of it.

Even a man with a skull as thick as mine will stop asking, eventually. I'd reached the end of the line in my mind by the day of our eventual "blowup." I'm not the sort never to sing "Ain't Too Proud To Beg." On the other hand, I'd never warble "I Would Do Anything For Love." After being emotionally stiff-armed for a few months, I had simply assumed it was never going to happen. Frankly, I also assumed that she was "playing me," and for whatever reasons drive the darker parts of my personality (and they are legion), I simply can't stand is to be played.

My mind began to supply probable answers for her refusal to commit or to break away. I assumed the worst. I couldn't know for certain what motivated her, but when someone repeatedly says "You don't want me" and won't accept protestations to the contrary, you just assume that what they're saying beneath the surface is "I don't want you." Therefore, she was simply stringing me along for whatever physical or emotional comfort she received from a relationship in which she knew I was not happy. Maybe she was simply hoping I would leave, to prevent guilty feelings on her part if she broke off the relationship.

I simply turned off an emotional switch and walked away. However, the light had been dying out long before I finally turned it off for good.

She looked at me like she had something to tell me that she really didn't want to say. Then she said it.

"You remember when your father came to visit you at the law firm (we both worked there at the time) and he stayed to talk to me while you went into a meeting?"

I remembered.

She said that my father told her that I was going to be getting out of law school with a lot of debt; that it would be financially difficult for me to get started in life and that the last thing I needed was to be saddled with a wife and a 5 year-old step daughter. He also suggested that since she was older than I and "more experienced" (his code word for a tramp), she ought to understand what needed to be done and "do me a favor."

She had a rough upbringing with an abusive father. She was tough, but the tough veneer masked a wounded psyche. Although she doesn't resemble her physically, the actress Amy Carlson's character, firefighter Alex Taylor, on the now-canceled NBC show "Third Watch," always reminded me of her. As tough as she was, guys like my Dad (who made Ernest Hemingway look like a pansy) intimidated her, shattered her self confidence. I knew that she came from a poor background, and was "up from the streets." It never bothered me. I loved her for what she was. But, to her, my father was making it clear that she'd never be good enough for me. He'd never accept her.

At the time, my father was dying of cancer, and had only a few months to live. I guess he thought he was saving me from myself. He was always a "fixer," and I can see him doing it, although he never hinted to me that he'd had such a conversation.

When I asked her why she hadn't told me at the time, she replied, "So you could hate your dying father? Hate me? Both of us, maybe? That was a  'lose-lose' no matter what I did. And you know what? At the time I thought that he might be right."

The first part of her reply was an accurate assessment. It would have been a lose-lose. I'm glad I never had the chance to feel that anger toward my father in the few months we had left together. From that standpoint, she chose wisely. As to whether or not he was right about her, or us, we'll never know for certain.

I asked her why she'd never gotten married. She was quiet a long time.

"I never met anyone like you."

I'm sorry to say that I laughed out loud. I saw by the hurt look in her face that she wasn't joking.

"Hell," I cracked. "You set the bar that low and no one can limbo under it."

She laughed with me.

Several months after that dinner, she simply disappeared. Email address no longer valid. Phone disconnected. Nowhere to be found. Apparently, her purpose in returning, whatever she intended it to be initially, ultimately was to deliver that news, then fade to black.

My life's been a good one, and whatever the possibilities of alternate routes not taken, the roads I've traveled, and the people I've loved--chief among them my wife--are ones I wouldn't trade.

Still...

I've been "parsing" that entire scenario for years. If my father actually had that conversation, he did it out of love. A mistaken action, in my view, but, if you accept the proposition that each life has a purpose (which I do), one that seems to have worked out for me over the long haul. I'm not so sure it did for her, but we'll never know, will we? I'm certainly no prize wrapped up with a bow, no matter what she might have said. A couple of years married to me might very well have made her a hell of a lot less nostalgic.

The older I get, the more I'm convinced that if we live long enough, most of us get the life we deserve, if not the life we expected when we were young. Also, I've been thinking more and more these days about some pivotal dialog from the wonderful Clint Eastwood movie "Unforgiven" (a word most of us fear). After Eastwood's character, William Munny, guns down, from long range, one cowboy he's been hired to kill, and the character "The Schofield Kid" murders another, Eastwood and The Kid have this exchange while The Kid, obviously shaken by his first killing, swigs whiskey straight from a bottle:

Clint Eastwood (Munny): Hell of a thing, killin' a man. Take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have.

Jaimz Woolvett (The Schofield Kid): Yeah, well, I guess he had it comin'.

Clint Eastwood (Munny): We all got it comin', kid.

Yep. We all got it comin'.

Full post as published by Counseling Kevin on February 23, 2011 (boomark / email).