MAELSTROM

Friendships are cables that bind

and ladders to climb.

Take care to see

that they are anchored

outside the maelstrom.

How like an Escher print these things are! Friendships are, definitionally, one-to-one, each one climbing "up" the ladder toward the other. One cannot have "friendship" with a group since he/she does not relate to the "group", but to individuals in the group. How strange to see two people vow to meet in the center of their respective ladder and watch only one climb! To see only one accommodate. To see the other ask for more and more changes.

As a friend, one rejoices as he/she sees another friend spin out the first tendril of floss of a special friendship. As we watch that first floss spin into a cable and into a special ladder which promises a lifelong climb and a lifelong meeting in the middle. As a friend, your heart turns as you see one of the partners stop climbing. Have they tired of the climb? Is it perhaps more work than they had thought or farther than they had thought to get to the calm center?

Or, were they, perhaps, less than honest about their need to escape the maelstrom? Did they wish to escape, or , did they only wish to share their maelstrom? To have someone to cling to as they are tossed about. And how does a person respond, as a friend, with a different kind of cable and ladder, when one sees this? The twin, almost parental urges toward expressing the brutal, crystalline, almost adamantine reality of our perceptions and toward an almost blind, soft, comforting expressions of love and caring can start to unravel the cable.

Too much of one and the cable can be cut, too much of the other and the cable is softened and becomes unpredictably stretchy. And all the while each has his or her own cables and ladders to attend to and climb, and his or her own maelstrom to contend with.

For, almost definitionally, each person has many of these cables and ladders to tend to, and to climb. Each one is a bit different, perhaps the cable is thicker or thinner. The ladder has more or fewer rungs, is wider or narrower, twisting in the wind of the maelstroms it crosses or anchored iron solid.

-- Chuck, a night driver (rienzoo@en.com), October 26, 1999

Answers

Thanks for throwing me a rope, Chuck. I had real hopes that we could hash some stuff out on this board this weekend about emergency service folks and their work. As I watched that thread develop over a couple of days, the sirens went screaming by. A call had come in that a fellow had been waiting for his buddy to surface from the water for 20 minutes. You can tell 20 minutes & it doesn't look good - but you never know. So several friends from different depts go to look and try to save a life. His body surfaces the next day, several other friends go to retrieve it, find out what happened, and document any equipment problems that might save a life in the future. Meanwhile the family has shown up, that was the hard part they say. Thank you for the work that you do, on & off the forum.

-- flora (***@__._), October 26, 1999.