My Old Friend R

I don't know why, but I was thinking about what few regrets I do have in my past, and I thought of an old friend.  R was an rather peculiar boy, very intelligent but a bit socially stunted due to his parents' controlling nature.  One story comes to mind that he wanted attend a community baseball game that he would often see across the street, so he snuck out one night; his parents then installed an alarm on his windows.  They almost never let him go anywhere unattended.  He had a second adopted brother who was more the outgoing, small town boy, being mechanically inclined and eventually joining the national guard.

For their part, the parents were hard working townspeople.  They were involved with the church and the community.  Very nice people that I stop in to see every few years when I'm driving through the town.  It can only be assumed that they could not have children of their own and adopted the two boys as a fulfillment of God's and their own desires for family.  I describe them because I don't think they are bad people, or even bad parents, even if I think they were a bit heavy handed during the later years of R's youth.

Anyways, they took a good liking to me and encouraged R's friendship with me.  They knew my family, being relatively wholesome, and wanted the influence to rub off on R.  This was also a good thing for R, as he got to socialize and do activities he wasn't normally allowed to do.  With me he was allowed to do sleepovers, paintball, wargaming, RPG's and exploring my family's property (a good 200 or so acres).

Looking back, I think that this was something R needed desperately in his life.  Being constantly monitored and under the control of a passive church family left him little room to channel his masculinity.  While I was free, more or less, with the trust of my family to go where I would, R found himself stuck like a hothouse plant that had long overgrown his container.  I remember my last days at home before moving to college when I revisited the woods of my youth, walking every single pond and large rock, marking every ramshackle structure my brothers and I helped to build and burying my hands in the soft rock and mud of the creek simply to feel the land and connect to it.  I knew at the time that I would probably never return to those happy places as the same person, but it helped me process that I would be leaving what was comfortable to me and becoming my own person.

I don't think R ever had such opportunities to create experiences for his own.  I imagine that his early life was ripped from him by the foster care system and after his adoption he was shepherded from one constructed experience to another, school, church, home and repeat.  It's understandable that he grew inwards.  After high school he went to a smaller state college with the goal of becoming a Masters in Librarian studies.  I think he would have made an excellent librarian or records keeper with his love for books and order.

We didn't talk much after high school, perhaps once every few months.  When we did, he would confide in me things that he would never tell his parents.  He was using alcohol (underage) in social settings, and had experimented with drugs.  He had joined a fraternity where he was participating in risky group behavior.  It seemed to me that he was trying to be the part of a group that would accept him, but it was causing him to make some sub-par life choices.  During our talks I would remain non-judgemental, but remind him that life is about finding your personal fulfillment and that these kinds of activities usually don't provide that.

He ended up marrying a girl he met from the campus, a rather large specimen.  I can't imagine what game she was playing, but I'm sure R just took the first girl who took interest in him.  He eventually joined the army and after home, then found that she had been cheating.  One thing led to another and while he was out she downloaded a sizable amount of child porn onto his computer and "reported him" to the authorities.  It eventually got dismissed, but the resulting divorce led to his life completely spiraling out of control.  During army training in GA, he went AWOL.  Last I knew he was piddling around our old state taking odd jobs and scraping by.

I have "regrets" because I feel a little like I could have prevented what happened to R if I or someone else could have been a more positive influence on him.  It's certainly not something I beat myself up over, but I do wonder how he would have turned out if he hadn't made the choices he did.

Having fully reflected up on my story, I find myself longing for some masculine influence myself.  Since I've gotten married I very rarely get "alone time", and almost never with other people without the wife.  While my wife is my best friend, we've both noticed that I tease her as part of my nature, which causes her some distress.  For me, this is just playful communication, but I am coming to realize that this is the kind of communication that I would be doing with a man, were there any I would spend time with.

With that in mind, I should resolve to make a conscious effort to spend time with other men, preferably positive ones like my brothers!