THE USUAL NOTE FROM LB: From the summer of 2002 to the spring of 2010, Gwen the Beautiful and I were the proud and often exhausted owners of a beautiful Ozarks property we called Cloud Creek Ranch.
In many ways, the ranch was paradise. But it was a paradise with a price that started going up before we even knew it existed. Here’s another Monday musing about our adventure and the lessons we learned.
Oh, and if y’all detect any irony, please believe me when I say it comes straight from the universe and not your kindly Uncle Larry B.
by Larry Brody
Gwen the beautiful and Nettie, the Old Billionaire’s wife, have been on the phone with each other all week, planning a cruise. Their destination is Cozumel, Mexico, and they’ve made it very clear that no men are allowed.
It’s an R ‘n’ R thing. A way for Nettie to get away from the stress of living with the Old Billionaire in his current out of joint condition. And for Gwen to absent herself from the strain of living with me in my just plain normal condition.
I’m the first to admit it: Larry B ain’t exactly low maintenance.
But Gwen’s made an admission of her own to me: Nettie’s situation with the Old Billionaire is the more difficult one.
“She’s got me beat,” Gwen said last night. “In the middle of our conversation tonight, Nettie started to cry. When this first began her problem was dealing with the fact that O.B.’d been unfaithful. ‘It’s not just what he did with her,’ she told me then, ‘it’s the way he made me such an idiot. Because everything I believed about our relationship was a lie. The life I thought the O.B. and I were leading all those years wasn’t really our life at all.’
“But now Nettie’s not thinking about the past. It’s the present that made her burst into tears. The O.B.’s disorientation. His anger. She can’t take it anymore.”
“Ah,” I said, “you appreciate me more now, right? What’s going on with them makes the fact that I sometimes talk over you when we’re out together look like nothing.”
Gwen laughed. “Not exactly ‘sometimes.’ And not exactly ‘nothing.’ But you’ll do.” Then she thought of something. “Nettie thinks the O.B. and you need to talk. Can you give him a call?”
Gwen’s wish is, of course, my command. I picked up the phone, and less than a minute later I was listening to the Old Billionaire.
“Why’re you calling me?” my normally mild and affable friend demanded.
“Haven’t heard from you in awhile, so I thought?”
“You thought you’d come after me with another one of your verbal attacks!” the Old Billionaire shouted. “Yes, I know what you’re up to, and I won’t take it anymore. You’re wrong, so wrong about everything that I’ve had no choice but to put you on my Enemies List!”
“You’ve got an ‘Enemies List?'”
“And you’re right at the top. Well, actually you’re second. Behind my son who stole my business. But you worked with him on that, didn’t you?”
“O.B., I don’t know what you’re talking about?”
“There you go again. Every time we’re together you deny, deny, deny. I’ve had it, Larry B. I know the truth. I know that you and Gwen are helping Nettie leave me. I know that you and she and my unappreciative, overeducated, wet-nosed son are working together to strip me of everything I’ve earned and toss me out with nothing to my name. Not even my old flatbed.”
I was stunned. I’d heard of this kind of attitude before, from close friends with a parent who’d fallen down that slippery slope of dementia, but this was my first close encounter with a loved one who’d gone from being fully in control of his mind and heart to a pawn of chemical imbalance and missed synaptic connections.
People often describe Alzheimer’s patients as confused. At this point, I was pretty confused myself.
“O.B.,” I said, “you’re my friend. My mentor. Don’t talk to me this way?”
“See?” His voice sounded triumphant. “You’re betraying me again. Everybody knows I’m not your mentor. I’m the student, not the teacher. I’ve learned so much from you. About life. About myself. And now you’re denying it all!”
The phone crashed down, and it was just me and the tone, its harsh sound echoing my dismay.
I was the teacher?
I’d betrayed him?
How?
What was it Nettie had said?
“The life I thought the O.B. and I were leading all those years wasn’t really our life at all.”
By not knowing the truth about my relationship to the O.B. I’d failed him. In his mind I had a responsibility I couldn’t possibly live up to.
Because I didn’t know it existed.
“You’ve got to make yourself aware,” I heard the universe say. “A smart man knows everyone’s truth. Not only his own.”
Me the teacher? As if! Not when I’ve got so very much left to learn.
