Henry was in a rage. To be more accurate, Henry was in a raging depression. Sometimes Henry was just in a depression and plodded through his own little hell by putting one foot in front of the other until the depression dissipated and he could once more experience the muted satisfaction that passed for happy in his life.
Henry had long understood that the raging and the depression had the same source in his life but the impact on others could be significantly different. When he was just depressed he was kind and outwardly calm and efficient in his work and life. He knew that he accomplished less than when he was not depressed but most people didn’t seem to notice the difference. Sometimes someone would say, “You seem quiet today” and he would reply, “Oh, I’m just thinking about things.” Henry was known for his wit which stayed with him through thick and thin. It just got a little darker when he was depressed. But when Henry was in a rage, such equanimity as he normally manifested to the world disappeared. In this state, the company of other human beings was to be avoided. During these times he could say irrevocable things, both about himself and about others. The dark truth was that Henry thought himself a failure but he thought of most others as far worse than himself. Henry objectively knew that he was far more successful than the overwhelming majority of people he knew including some whom he considered friends. This meant he also knew that he could not share with them his sense of failure. He had done that on a few occasions in past and the people would say, “But everyone knows and respects your work. You are a well-known, published novelist. If you think you’re a failure what must you think of me?” Henry would cast a baleful eye at them and lose a friend. Or, more tragically, his eloquent tongue would unleash itself and say what should not have been spoken about mediocrity and the tragedy of just being above average, just being better than most but not being good enough. Despite these moments, Henry was not a cruel man. In fact, he was actually a very good and caring man which was why, at these times, it was imperative that he be alone. Some people thought that Henry was some kind of latent homosexual or that he was just asexual. But this was not true. Henry was strongly sexed and strongly heterosexual. He had, however, given up on intimate relationships with women because he had found women incapable of leaving him alone when he most needed to be alone. Women seemed to have such a voracious need for intimacy (at least in his experience).It was unquenchable and it seemed to feed on any attempt to put distance, even temporary psychic distance, into a male-female relationship. Even when Henry was at his psychological best he needed long periods of solitary down-time. Sometimes during these periods he was reading or writing. Sometimes he was thinking. Sometimes he wasn’t even thinking. Sometimes he was just being. In every relationship that Henry had ever had with a woman, the woman in his life would intrude into these necessary solipsisms. They would ask, “What are you reading?”; “What are you writing?”; “What are you thinking?”; “What do you mean you weren’t thinking about anything? Don’t you want to share with me? I love you.” To Henry this invariably started to sound like, “I’ll eat you. I’ll drink you dry. I’ll suck your bone marrow. I will devour you and I will do this in the name of love.” And this was how he felt when times were good. When times were bad and he was depressed, it was far worse. And when he was in a rage the consequences were too damaging to repeat so after his last relationship, a second marriage, which like his first had lasted less than two years, he decided to quit on intimate relationships. That was when he was 32 years of age and now he was a decade older. In his current raging state, Henry was staring out the window and cursing himself for the fact that he should have been writing but seemed capable of only staring out the window. He lived in an upscale suburb where he had moved after his second divorce. He did not know any of his neighbours although he had noticed the mother and daughter who lived across the street. As he stared out the window, he looked at the girl. The girl had just gotten on her bike and was heading off, presumably for school, when a large dog came out of nowhere and was trying to bite her as she rode along. Since it was a large dog and since it looked serious, Henry ran out of the door and down the half block where by then the girl had fallen and the dog had grabbed the hem of her skirt and was shaking it from side to side and growling in a menacing manner. Henry yelled loudly at the dog and hit it with the newspaper he had grabbed on the way out the door. Luckily, the dog cowered and ran. The girl sat up, burst into tears and wailed, “I usually never cry.” Henry untangled her from her bike and helped her up. She had a bloody knee and friction burns down much of her left leg from her fall. Her bike handles were bent and askew. Henry asked, “Do you think you feel well enough to walk back to your house?” The girl said yes and Henry said, “Why don’t you clean yourself up at your house and I will straighten out your bike, if that is okay with you”. In saying this, Henry thought it might sound cold but also knew the danger and worry about inviting a girl child into his house and cleaning her wounds in this day and age. A neighbour might see him and think that he was some kind of child sexual predator. The girl said that was fine and she would come over later. About twenty minutes later, the girl appeared at the front of Henry’s open garage where he had been working at fixing her bike. She looked cheerful and more casually dressed in jeans and a sweat shirt. Henry was pretty good with his hands and thought he had done a fairly admirable job on the bike. The girl said, “That looks great. Thanks very much.” Henry said, “My name is Henry.” The girl answered, “My name is Alex. Well, actually its Alexandra but everyone calls me Alex. I don’t like Alexandra. My mother says she named me after Alexander the Great because she wanted me to do great things. I guess it could have been worse. She could have called me Cassandra and then nobody would have ever listened to me.” As Alex said this, she rolled her eyes with exasperation. “Well”, he said, “I think Alex is a great name and you seem to be at least very brave. You seem to have recovered from your encounter with that very scary big dog pretty well.” “Yeah, I was afraid he was rabid but when you came along and he ran away, I figured he was just aggressive,” she said. “Are you going to go to school now?” asked Henry. “No, I called my mom’s office and told her secretary what had happened. My mom is in court this morning. I told the secretary that I was traumatized and that she should call the school and say I wasn’t coming to school. She was cool with that and said that she would do it.” Henry said, “Why is your mother in court and will it be okay with her if you don’t go to school today?” Alex gazed at Henry as if he were a bit slow and said, “My mom is in court because she is a lawyer and one of her clients is in court today and no, she won’t care. She knows I have to go to school – societal socialization of children and all that – but she doesn’t think schools do a very good job and knows I’ll probably learn more reading what I want on my own today.” Reflecting on what he had heard from Alex up to now Henry said, “If it’s not too personal an inquiry, how old are you, Alex – 45?” Alex giggled. “No, I’m 13.” “Well, here’s your bike, Alex. I hope you have a wonderful and productive day reading what you want to read.” Alex took the bike and then turned to Henry, “If this is not too personal, how come you don’t seem to work? How can you afford this house? Don’t you do anything for a living?” “Well, those are personal questions but I don’t mind answering them. I’m a writer. I write short stories and novels. Sometimes I write essays and sometimes I write critical commentary on the state of literature or the world in general. For some amazing reason, publishers publish my work and pay me for it. So, most of the time, I work at home.” “Would you lend me a novel you wrote?” asked Alex. “Well, I’ll lose the royalties since you won’t buy it but for you, Alex, I’d even give you a copy and autograph it.” Alex screwed up her pretty face and said, “Let me read it first. If I like it then you can autograph it and then I will keep it.” “Eminently reasonable approach,” said Henry and went to get a copy of what he considered his best work. Alex looked at the cover of the book and said, “Your name is Henry Sedgwick Carter? Why is that your name?” Henry shrugged. “My father was an economist and so was Henry Sedgwick. I guess he hoped the name would inspire me to follow in his footsteps but it didn’t. I took economics at university but it bored me.” Alex said thanks, grabbed her bike and went back across the street to her house. Later that day, around 7:30 pm, there was a knock on Henry’s front door. Henry was not crazy about answering his door in general and especially not in the evening but he could see through the door that it was Alex’s mother so he decided to answer it. Alex’s mother was small and pretty in a subdued and understated way. She was dressed as Alex had been – post-accident – in jeans and a sweat shirt. She extended her hand and introduced herself. “Hi Henry, I’m Abigail Watson. I wanted to thank you for saving my daughter this morning. She has barely raised her nose out of your book since I got home. She thinks you are pretty amazing.” “I didn’t do much,” he replied. “She seems to be a very bright kid, especially if she likes my book. A joke,” he said and smiled. “Well, we would both like to invite you to dinner, Saturday night, to thank you, if you are available” said Abigail. Inside, Henry cringed. Damn. Trapped. He wasn’t good at impromptu lying. Planned lying, yes, but not unanticipated lying. “Sure, I’d love to,” he said. “I’ll bring the wine. White or red?” “Red would be great,” replied Abigail with a big smile. “6:30 ok?” “Yes, fine.” Henry watched Abigail walk across the street and closed the door. “Shit!” Henry slumped down in his favourite chair and thought about what had just transpired. Part of what bothered him was that he wasn’t feeling sociable. He never was when he was having difficulty with his writing. But, partly, he was troubled because he knew the reason that he had often noticed this mother and daughter. They were a very attractive pair. And now he knew that they were both smart and that Abigail was a lawyer, a successful lawyer by the look of her house and car. “Steady on, old man,” Henry told himself. You will not get involved with anyone. You will not get enmeshed in this family.” On Saturday evening, Henry presented himself at 6:30 at his neighbour’s house, wine bottle in hand. “I couldn’t very easily be fashionably late. Walking across the street fashionably late would seem a bit silly”, said Henry with a sheepish grin. “That seems a strange ritual even when people do live some distance. I have friends who give people fake times to arrive to make sure they get there at the right real time,” Abigail replied. When the three of them sat down to dinner, Alex had what looked like a fairly old book in hand. Abigail explained, “I hope you don’t mind our family ritual. We take turns reading something short – never more than five minutes to engage our minds during dinner. Sometimes we talk about the readings, sometimes we don’t depending on the mood and the day that we have had. I guess it’s our secular version of a dinner prayer. Gets you re-focused on where you are and who you’re with,” said Abigail. “Tonight it’s Alex’s turn.” Henry said that this was fine with him. Alex opened the book and read some highly polemical prose about women and revolution. Alex turned to Henry and inquired, “Want to guess who wrote it?” “Emma Goldman?” he responded. She looked at her mom and said, “That’s amazing, he got it!” “Not too amazing, Watson,” said Henry. “It looked like an oldish book and it sounded like anarchistic, feminist socialism. I have never read anything she wrote but knew enough about her to hazard a guess.” The dinner passed pleasantly. The discussion morphed from old fashioned anarchism to current post-modern anarchism and political responses to the world trade organization, globalization and poverty in debtor nations. Before Henry knew it, two hours had passed and Abigail asked, “Would you like more coffee or an after dinner drink in the softer chairs in the living room?” Henry said yes without even thinking about it. Alex asked if she could go to her room to finish reading Henry’s book. Abigail asked if that was okay with him and he said yes. After he had settled into a nice soft chair with his coffee, he said, “I guess she was probably bored with being around adults for so long.” “Not at all,” replied Abigail. “She is just an hsp and needs her down time to read and contemplate. In fact, so I do.” “What is an hsp, if you don’t mind me asking?” said Henry. “It is a hyper-sensitive person: someone who is extremely demanding of themselves and others - someone for whom life is challenging and difficult - someone who is worried about how well they do, how much they do, and whether what they do is ever good enough. We hspers think that if only we were more intelligent or better disciplined, we would get it all right but frequently we feel disappointed with our accomplishments. These feelings are exacerbated when we don’t have down time to re-focus and get in touch with our inner selves. And, of course, it is important to balance this with engagement in the world. Hspers need not to be too self-absorbed. There are real problems in the world. I want a life that when I die, hopefully many years from now, I will have lived a well-worn life, to take a page from George Bernard Shaw. As an hsper that means engagement with balance – engagement in the world but with time in solitary reflection. I think that Alex wants the same kind of life but, of course, she can speak for herself.” Henry listened to this with a strange sense of wonder and detachment. This was eerily evocative of his own feelings and concerns but this family responded to their psychological challenges far differently than did he. From what he had heard over the last four hours (yes, it had been four hours!), Abigail was involved in her job, her community, her child’s life, and the world at large. She did pro bono work for poor and oppressed people and, amazingly, she didn’t seem to take herself too seriously and had a good sense of humour. “Well, as an hsper, how do you fit in alone-time for yourself?” asked Henry, somewhat self-consciously adopting this strange psycho-babble term. “I do it consciously and reflectively. I program time (or try to) into every week of my life. I learned long ago that if I didn’t do this I would become moody and difficult, judgmental and anti-social. I seem to have a kid who is the same. I don’t think I’ve made her into that but who knows. You have an awesome and extraordinary obligation to and influence over those you bring into this world and raise.” Henry decided to suspend his usual cynical and didactic critique of what he had heard. Instead, Henry said he thought that it was time to go. He thanked Abigail and told her to thank Alex as well. He shook her hand. She asked if he would mind a kiss on the cheek. He said he would like that very much. Henry crossed the street and went home. That night, an unusual night for him, he slept very well.
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