Max the Sax

I knew a young musician about 25 years ago whom we called "Max the Sax". Max went everywhere with his sax -- out for dinner, grocery shopping, to movies, to picnics in the mountains of Colorado. His sax was always by his side. That behavior became his trademark, and spawned his knickname.

Max was a smart young man. He taught me a lesson I remember in very deep parts of my heart. I asked him once, "Max, you are so tied to it -- just what does that saxophone mean to you?"

Max sat back in his chair, sipped a cup of espresso and said, "Well, I learned a long time ago --- that it will never be the Dad that didn't play baseball with me."
Whew.

Big lesson.

What we didn't get in our past, we cannot get now by another route. I can't ever fill the spaces marked "having children" or "having a well-adjusted father" with what they were intended for. And I cannot contort my universe to try to fill them with other things - like Max's sax. The holes in Max know the difference between a father and a saxophone. The holes in me know the difference between children and a plate of linguini.

Buddha once said "Suffer what there is to suffer; Enjoy what there is to enjoy."

That which is empty in us is going to stay that way. The fantasy of how our lives were supposed to turn out cannot be retro-filled with a reality that did not occur. Yet, oh how we try.

I look around me and see people trying to get people to be the people they never had - you've seen it too - women who marry a man they hope will be the father they missed -- men who marry women, but who are really looking for Mom. Or, people who try to fill an aching feeling with "stuff." Those are the people who buy a big house to make up for feelings of insecurity, or a fast car to make up for a lost youth. I wonder what the world would look like if we all had to label every object or person in our lives that we were somehow using to assuage a pain or a lack or an ache. I imagine crowds of people and homes full of little "sticky notes" that read "Mother-substitute", "Fending off feelings of betrayal", "the Dad that didn't play baseball", "not getting picked for cheerleader"...and on and on.

And oh, what a loss it is to us and to those we try to shape shift into impossible paradigms. The hard part is that mostly our partners are unaware of the "secret job description" we may have for them (because largely, so are we).

Lordy me it's a wonder we manage at all, isn't it?

So what do we do then, walk around like mobile spiritual Swiss Cheeses? Largely, yes, that is precisely what we are to do. To walk around this world as who we are, full of vulnerabilities, as people who didn't learn everything the first time, as people who need the grace of other people to get by.

It is such a relief, really, if you just listen. Can you hear it? There, in the quiet -- is the sound of a saxophone playing cool, crisp, saxophonic notes into the eternal night sky. Just doing what it does. Being who it is.