Getting Out of the Jungle Alive

Hubby got an email from an old college roommate a while back, someone he had not seen or communicated with for over 50 years!  The roommate had lived with him and some other college friends for only one semester.  Hubby needed someone to help with rent and after meeting him at the local laundry place and finding he (lets us call him Rodney) needed a place to stay, invited him to join them.

Hubby is super friendly and rarely thinks to the future results of certain decisions.  The reason that Rodney had no place to stay became immediately evident in that he was demanding, annoying, insecure and needy.  Hubby and the other roommates spent most of the semester dodging him, although knowing my husband, he was probably very kind and helpful at times.  At the end of the year Rodney went back to his home town to finish college and went on to get his PhD in entomology.

On this week Rodney was delivering some insect specimens to the city museum and wanted to stop by on a free day to visit us.  I suggested to hubby that we eat out so that I could disappear on the boardwalk if I found the meet-up too intense or annoying.

Rodney arrived, a short and chunky man, wearing glasses, a white mustache and a healthy head of white hair.  Within minutes of inviting Rodney to sit on our deck and putting out some cold Thai tea he began to pour out his life-story.  Explaining that during his time at university he was in a terrible mental state.  He explained that he had been abused as a child, his father demanding he become a concert pianist and he wanting to play basketball instead (which he explained he did very well in spite of his height), being depressed throughout most of his life, getting married twice, divorced once, estranged from his biological son, but very close to his step-son and two grandchildren, having faced death last year during surgery contracting a hospital infection and being put in a 6 week coma, going through years of mental therapy and still belonging to an international therapy group, becoming a world-renown insect expert on a specific group of insects and now facing retirement.

This was all before we went out to lunch!   During lunch he talked about his work (really somewhat fascinating since I like science), his hatred of state bureaucracies and his feeling we are leaving our children a world in a disastrous state with the extinction of species every year.  He did give us time to talk every once in a while.

Upon getting home and completing a short tour of the yard and riverside and some photo taking, it still took a couple of hours to get him out the door, into his car and on the way back to his hotel.  I printed out a scan of a map, since he was a bit of a Luddite when it came to phone GPS help and had gotten lost on the way down.  (He seemed to find that when he stopped to ask for directions on the trip down, everyone working at the quick stop stores seemed to have difficulty getting pants on correctly each day, therefore having no clue how to get around the area...his interpretation.)

I knew a young man in high school who might have been much like Rodney, although a different personality, painfully shy and physically unattractive.  He was a very odd duck, but well accepted in our small town which was somewhat like a big farm family.  When he went on to college, he committed suicide his first year as I am sure he faced extreme loneliness if not worse.  I remember thinking about him for years later and this visit brought up that memory, reminding me that the world turns for us all and we never know how important, positive or negative, the energy we might contribute to someone's life.