by R. Rasmussen

One of my earliest memories is of a hand–a large, warm, secure hand way up there in the air above my shoulders. I’m pretty sure that it was my mother’s hand leading me to my first day of kindergarten. My next memory is one of weeping miserably as I observed her retreating form through the school window.

After a few weeks, I adjusted. After all, my teacher was a glorious blonde--my first love. She might not have really been beautiful, but to this day I remember her with whatever passes for lust at age 6. It is perhaps because of her that I more readily accepted the first responsibilities of my life which consisted of lining up, paying attention, sitting still, not fighting in the schoolyard and not crying. If I broke any of the first four rules, I had to lay down on a large sheet of paper in the cloak room–punishment by isolation. If I broke the fifth rule–I was punished mercilessly by my schoolmates who might have been the models for the children in Golding’s "Lord of the Flies."

Between that time and now, sometime in the last 50 years, I made a transition from being an irresponsible boy who was given everything--board, bed, clothing, presents, hugs–to being a Dad to two daughters, who along with his wife is responsible for everything–food, shelter, clothing, transportation, emotional support, health problems, security and on and on it goes.

Despite all the talk about men being irresponsible, I am now fully wearing the mantle of responsibility--well, okay, maybe not fully. I don’t complain about the burden … I just do these things as a regular part of life.

Despite my steady development in the arena of responsibility, I have always lagged the expectations of the women in my life by a considerable margin. Maggie, my first girlfriend, vintage 17-years-old was my next important teacher. At the precise moment when I had finally succeeded in unhooking the complicated mechanisms that held her bra in place, she asked me whether I loved her. I did what any man would do in such a circumstance and said "sure" and continued eagerly with the business of sampling her pert, creamy breasts.

Soon after, I left home [and her] for college never to return except in fantasy. It was our first lesson in that particularly troublesome area of responsibility called commitment. Maggie, who was married only a year later, must have learned to secure something more substantial than "sure" in exchange for her delectables. And, I learned to say things more convincing than "sure" when engaging in my struggles with bras of various sizes and shapes.

Like many men, I have had few mentors to guide the transition from feckless youth to responsible man. My father was Bergman’s introverted Dane–so I never learned whatever lessons of life were his to teach. Strangely, I do remember a ride I took with him and a friend of his. At one point in the ride, his friend shouted, "Wow, look at that!" I was about 12 at the time and look as I might, I could find nothing in the landscape worth seeing, no hot rod, no kids, no airplane, no automobile accident, no ice cream stand … nothing! It was only much later in life when I made sense of that memory. I was sitting with a friend at an outdoor restaurant and, in the same uniquely masculine tone, he said, "Wow, look at that!" as a particularly shapely woman waltzed by.

One of my few true mentors was a man 20-years older to my then 35. We were at a restaurant and I noticed him looking closely at a young waitress. I wondered aloud whether the thrill of the look diminished with age. He laughed and told me that it only gets better–that each year a man can find beauty in an more women–that every woman his age and younger had become a target of his look. As he predicted, my look has expanded dramatically.

It is only my astoundingly high birthday number and an occasional glance in the mirror that reminds me that I am something else than that boy who so recently stood weeping at the kindergarten window. While I’ve assumed the mantle of responsibility in deed, I don’t feel particularly responsible or mature inside. And the issue of commitment has been an ongoing nightmare–as I sense it is for many men and women.

I wandered through this profound transition period of about 50 years not unlike a blind man feeling his way with inadequate sensory instruments. The journey has been primarily one of bumbling along, stumbling from here to there, floundering with this or that philosophy, languishing in overlong periods of intense loneliness, and sometimes falling into lush, sensual pleasures with a woman who for reasons unknown to me wandered into my life.

During the journey, several things stood out … the birth of my daughters, my loves [for my wife’s sake, it would be nice to say "love," but that wouldn’t be true], some outstanding moments in wilderness, the rush of whitewater from the cockpit of a kayak, the motley gang of irresponsible boy-men with whom I paddled Canada’s wild rivers, several painful betrayals, this victory and that loss in my wilderness work, a moment or two when I may have taken my students to a new level, a glimpse of understanding of the meaning of life–small moments all, the stuff of life.

In short, I’ve done far worse than the blind person who seems to ably and smoothly make the transition to the other side of the street without bumping into anything or becoming road kill.

One of the literary works that touched me during the long transition years was Kipling’s poem Mandalay. Recently I reread the poem and tried to understand its attraction to the me who first read it at age 30.

Stepping into the shoes of that 30-year old lonely man, I can now readily understand the appeal of a girl who has nothing better to do than sit and think o’ me.

I know her well still. She’s young, beautiful, lithe, and she exists just to make love with me--as do all those women who look out of the pages of Playboy Magazine with longing in their eyes for just me, their special guy.

She's my 17-year-old girlfriend, Maggie, but without the demand for commitment. And, she doesn’t wear a bra. Consider her attributes:

What power I have over this lovely creature! She lives in a land full of Burmese men, yet it is me who captures her with my manly kisses. Sure, in my more advanced responsible state, I realize that she’s a prostitute, that like other women in her country she too dreams of a secure male with whom to raise a family and that she would within weeks be making subtle demands for whatever level of commitment she thought was within her power to negotiate. Still I want her! For:

Okay, I’ll grant you that watching elephants a-pilin’ teak in a sludgy, squdgy creek wouldn’t be fun forever or even more than once, even if your girl is a singin’ ‘Kulla-la-lo’ and restin’ ‘er cheek again’ your cheek. So what is it that still draws me to the poem? Kipling provides further insight with a glimpse into the 10-year English soldier's--the older man’s--my--psyche:

Like Kipling's 10-year soldier, my experience has been with women who can’t seem to understand the male me, the me who likes war [or at least war movies] and its modern substitutes--death defying sport. They can’t understand the me who enjoys looking at women and, when it works out, making love with them.

Mandalay is a cleaner, greener land because I’m a tourist there. I’m not responsible for much beyond drinking with my buddies, making love and war.

Yes, I want to be soldier-tourist languishing on life’s beach ... not the responsible, leather wastin’, drizzle walkin’ beast of burden that I've become. Thus, Kipling's wistful conclusion:

Ship me to a Mandalay beach where I can enjoy at least a few weeks of each year foolishly risking my life with my buddies, raising hell around the campfire and making love with whatever Supi-Yaw-Lats we can find. Ship me to a place where I can drink without fear of that chiding woman with beefy face and grubby ‘and who doesn’t understand me. Ship me far far away from that horror called the family vacation where the bored, fighting, screaming kids have to be catered to every moment of the day. Ship me to a place where I’m not reminded daily that men are irresponsibile, unloving, unwilling to commit.

In particular, ship me somewheres east of 50 to that place where my buddies and I were irresponsibly immortal. And, don’t tell me that I’m having a mid-life crisis!!!

Someone said that our responsibilities define our lives ... that a life without responsibilities is a dead man's walk. For the rest of the weeks of the year, I’ll accept those responsibilities because my responsibilities as a teacher, environmentalist, father, husband, lover, friend are the things that define life--things that prevent life from becoming too much like a "blasted English drizzle."

As for that more difficult issue of commitment, I realize that, unfortunately, there is no "Supi-Yaw-Lat," that women are human beings albeit with different needs and sensibilities than men, or at least men like me.

And, commitment isn’t just a man-woman issue--people in every type relationship, friends, lovers, spouses, parents and kids, and even work partners, face the difficult task of negotiating their levels and types of commitment … their relationship contract. The high divorce rate, the profound feelings of betrayal expressed by separating partners, and the harsh words used on ex-partners, and the deadness in relationships that haven’t ended in divorce are all indications that few of us get it right.

If negotiating the commitment contract is one the essence of every relationship, then it’s something that should be done with great caution and without assuming that one’s own stance on commitment ["Thou shalt do it my way"] is the correct approach.