BALANCE FOR BASTIAN
Last Friday, while I was eating supper, I got a phone call from my caseworker at Big Brothers Big Sisters. I’ve been a Big Brother for six years now, off and on, so the quatro-annual phone checkup has become a bit stale. She asks me if everything is going fine. I reply that indeed it is. She asks me what we have been doing. I reply that we do lots of stuff. My Little and I don’t really plan much just whatever comes up. I say goodbye to the caseworker and we hang up. The phone rings again five minutes later and Seyan, my caseworker, is back on the line. She has talked to Darren and while he thinks I am a good big brother, it has become a bit “boring” and he would like to do something different, like laser tag. “He is 13 now and children change.” She ‘suggests’ we come in for a tune-up and to strategize fun things for us to do. After she hangs up, I start to get really pissed off. Who is this person that wouldn’t recognize me on the street to think she can improve my relationship with Bastian (as he prefers to be called)? Did she just call me “boring?” I happen to think that our relationship is special, rare and wonderful. We are two people 45 years apart in age who actually talk to each other and listen to what the other has said. Whatever she is trying to do, she has begun to drive a wedge between us already. I wake up in the middle of the night. The simmer has begun to boil. Fortunately the call has occurred on a Friday so I am unable to storm in there the next day and rip Seyan a new orifice. Instead, I call my friend, Kate, who is a practicing Wiccan but nonetheless or maybe because of it, a wise woman. She advises me to breathe and we go over some of the applicable four principles of living: don't take it personally and don't assume. Slowly over the weekend I calm down and come to terms with the idea that the Seyan is a bureaucrat doing her job. Desired outcome is what I really should be concerned with. I talk with everyone who will listen and vent more steam.
The meeting is set for Tuesday at 3:30 because I pick Bastian up at school at 3:15 on Tuesdays. By the time I have lunch with Robert a few hours before the meeting, I am feeling pretty calm. I have composed a partial list of the things Bastian and I did together over the course of the previous year and it is fairly impressive and covers both sides of a piece of paper. I realize that Seyan has her work cut out for coming up with fun free things for us to do together that we haven’t already thought of. Robert suggests that I could charm her and since I have spent a great amount of effort in the years since my divorce trying to charm women, I believe that I possess the tools to do exactly that. I decide that perhaps it is not impossible that she can come up with some new activities and that Bastian and I will benefit from this meeting. I walk in the door with a big smile on my face and no chip on my shoulder. We go into a little conference room and sit at a table. Seyan asks me how our match is going. I tell her about how our relationship is “special, rare and wonderful” and Bastian agrees. We smile at each other. Now it is Seyan’s turn to produce. She suggests laser tag. I ask what it costs. Hmmmm, it’s kind of pricey. I’m also not really big on violent games where people shoot each other. Turns out that Bastian had been there a couple of months before at a birthday party. What else has she got? Well, her bag is pretty empty and when we turn it upside down and shake it all that comes out is Hoosier Heights climbing gym. That happens to be one of the items on my list so I pull it out and show it to her. Then we spend the next half-hour going over my list. The Children’s Museum and Wonderlab. Hiking, camping, canoeing, cooking, fort building, making videos, flying an R/C plane and a kite, practicing baseball, going to a play, cleaning my neighbor’s garage in exchange for some model trains, on and on and on and finally, the Exotic Feline Rescue Center (has she ever been there? No? She must go! 400 lions and tigers and cougars and leopards all kept in cages made from used telephone poles and old chain link fencing out in a cornfield in the middle of Indiana. She must go this very weekend!) By the time we walk out of there Sad’e is using words like amazing and marvelous. I insist that she keep our list so that she can use it as a resource to help other matches. I have charmed her, achieved my desired outcome and made her look like an idiot without her even realizing it. I felt positively Machiavellian.
After we left the office, we got in the car and headed to the library. As we drove, I told Bastian most of what I have just told you. I also told him that it took me 58 years to get to the point where I could overcome my stupidities and emotions and focus on getting what I wanted without having to get back at the other person. I hope for him that he can learn the lesson more easily. Then he wanted to talk about Boy Scouts. He was conflicted because he had a campout this weekend he didn’t want to go on because that meant missing a birthday party. This led to a discussion about choices, which led to a discussion about choosing a career. Bastian shared that he thought he might like to be an astronomer. I told him about the Kirkwood Observatory and after we stopped at the library, we walked to the IU campus and found the observatory. It was closed of course, but still cool to look at from the outside and a sign posted on the door informed us that it was still open every Wednesday night through November, so that will be on our list next year. Further discussions about how much Bastian enjoyed building led to my suggestion that he might think about architecture as a career. There’s a lot more work for architects than for stargazers and most of it might actually be more fun that what astronomers spend most of their time really doing. On the walk back, we passed the new Tibetan store so we went in and I bought prayer flags. The Dalai Lama was everywhere in the store of course and Bastian didn’t know who he was, so while we got hot chocolate and walked back we talked about the Dalai Lama and Buddhism. Then we passed the Episcopal Church and it was open so we went in just for balance. We sat there for five minutes just chilling in the beautiful room when a lady came in and started practicing the pipe organ so we went up front and checked it out.
After that I took Bastian home because it seemed like enough. More than enough really. Maybe one of the best two-hour periods I have ever spent with another human.
