LETTERS FROM HOME: BACK TO THE FUNHOUSE AND INTO GRAND CANYON

April 28, 1994

Dear C.C.,

DC woke up worried this morning, a little ball of frowns and predictions of doom and worst-case scenarios. She has given the clinic notice that she'll be leaving in September, which means moving back to Missouri, setting up a practice with her father. There's the cost and the culture shock. And for her the unknowableness of returning to live near your family after so many years of the independence distance can buy. All in all, not a trip to the funhouse.

When DC worries my role is to say, "I love you and everything's going to be all right." Usually she smiles. But not always. Today it's all frowns.

Today she's saying I lied to her when I proposed, that I said I had a villa in France. Doesn't sound familiar.

Congratulations again on your marriage and on legally changing your name. Whenever I mention my friend who makes her own Tarot cards, who was doing lucid dreaming before anyone called it that, who has changed her name to C.C. Fish, listeners blink and I can see them thinking, "From what?" But I don't even remember. You've always been C.C. Fish to me.

I say we met through a personal ad during my Redwood City years, which I think of as a period of assimilating those soul-awakening experiences in Big Sur and of much-too-urgent searching for a mate for that soul. My friend Ellen kept saying, "She's out there."

You and I went to a baseball game, seats right behind home plate, and you talked all the way through it about everything except baseball. Ordinarily, that would have been that, but nothing was ordinary about what you said. Mostly men vs. women stuff, but refreshingly motivated by curiosity rather than blame.

I now realize why we became friends: There was so much neither of us knew about men. You were trying to figure out why you'd never had a satisfactory relationship with one, and I was trying to understand why I'd sometimes felt so uncomfortable in my own skin. There was much about "being a man" I didn't like.

I wondered if I was one of those "soft" men Robert Bly talks about, men who lack fierceness. Men who, for whatever reason, haven't been properly initiated into the secret brotherhood, who perhaps identify more with their mother's sensitivity than with their father's fieriness.

You know I've spent some time in psyco-Babylon looking for myself. Not enough fish hooks in the fingers or trips to the ballpark? Hardly. Very simply, I'd lost track of my courage. And finding it took...courage.

Every man I know who isn't too uncomfortable to talk about it feels both loved and scarred by his father, and that may be how becoming a man has worked. Sons constantly seeking the father's imprimatur on their manhood just as fathers look for signs of their own prowess in their sons.

If few enough dads of the recent past have really engaged their families -- for so long mistaking vulnerability for weakness instead of strength -- many also have been monumentally self-sacrificing, perhaps to a fault.

I've been reading a book called "Man Enough" by a psychiatrist who says that being a father or something like a father -- an uncle, or coach or mentor -- is the real way of becoming a man. That fathering isn't something perfect men do but something that perfects the man.

Everyone does the best they can, I've finally surmised. Beyond a certain age, each of us alone is responsible for who we are and for how others treat us. That most certainly includes our parents.

So now both you and I have taken the big leap into the Grand Canyon of intimacy. But not because we finally know enough about the other sex. Moliere said the great ambition of women is to inspire love. Lyle Lovett, venturing another universal truth about women, said, "They like to eat outside." Both might be equally true.

No, we leapt because we finally know just enough about ourselves.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian. He is currently on a leave of absence and living inGarberville, Calif.