A Grand Day
Today the boyfriend and I drove up to Phoenix to spend time with Anthony & Jess. It's always a shock to me when we show up to see him; it's not that he looks different, physically, than what I expect. Not that his voice is different or he looks older. None of those attributes are far off the mark.
The stopper is that he's smiling all the time...that he's relaxed. And that he's just plain happy. Once again I have to credit Jess with a strong assist in sustaining the happy. And, of course, I have to credit my brother for setting out to make serious, fundamental, potentially identity-fucking changes to get himself happy. Well done, to both of them.
I also end up a little surprised when the boyfriend becomes so animated around the two of them. It's not him, and it is him. I mean that in all good ways. Like me, he can be shy as hell...unlike me, he can't hide it when he's nervous around new folks. My brother and Jess both seem to enjoy his company, and I certainly end up ebullient when we all four spend time together.
All of this wasn't exactly unexpected, sort of.
What was unexpected (but unsurprising) was the rather heavy-duty conversation the boy and I had in the jeep on the ride back home. We had an hour-plus to kill, so we had the opportunity for the conversation to go places, and it did.
Turns out that while my mind had silently gone racing to the chemistry and physics of water and ice and crazy details on relative densities and how good old H20 is one of the only naturally abundant molecules to get less dense in its frozen form and how that has permitted life to continue and evolve in places where things even seasonally freeze....where was I? Oh yeah, so I was on this existential and ironic (hey, we were driving in the desert) turn of mind about the beginnings of life here, the exquisite boyfriend pipes up with exquisite timing and tells me he was thinking about the universe, about galaxies, about solar systems, and about the chances of life forming on other worlds out there.
This, naturally, progressed to individual- vs. species-level survival, and what humanity's chances were of still existing a short time out (10,000 years from now) and a slightly-less-short time out (1M+ years out), to Gödelian systems, to chance, to odds, to evolution, to faith, to belief, to death, to after-death and eventually swung back around to the beginnings of a previous conversation about religion and how it's a soporific for the pangs of worry about dying.
I swear to God (of Biscuits) that I tried every trick in my considerable brain-arsenal to trip him up in his line of reasoning, every trick to enjoin his thinking towards the same inescapable (at least to my mind) conclusions.
I did not do this to satisfy any short-sighted and petty need for him to be just like me, think just like me. That's just (in the words of Happy Bunny) "ucky". I did it to see what would happen.
So what did happen? I learned a lot about what happens when a strong force of personality combines with a shrewdly incisive intellect, especially when both are in the same head, fronted by a beautiful face.
Damn, it's going to be an amazing ride, this rest-of-our-lives-together business.