I Am A Web

I saw something in the paper about Simon and Garfunkel recently. I don't remember a thing it said. All I remember is that the words to "I Am A Rock" came back to me and wouldn't leave:

     I have no need of friendship; friendship causes pain.
     It's laughter and it's loving I disdain.
     I am a rock.
     I am an island.
     ...
     And a rock feels no pain;
     And an island never cries.

These lyrics started me to thinking about all the people we encounter in the course of a lifetime. Some are passersby on the street or strangers in an elevator--people we will never know and will never see again. Others are people who, like our parents, were just always there; people we never didn't know.

Take my friend Dan, for example. His parents and mine were close friends in Terre Haute. We are the same age. We went to elementary and secondary schools together. We lived about 50 yards apart in college. I've never not known Dan, and if I were to see him today we'd pick up again as if it had only been yesterday. He's not famous, but he's important ... to me.

We all have "Dans" in our lives, and we all have met some famous people too. I used to work for a Congressman, shook hands with a pope, was on a first-name basis with a guy who is now the Cardinal Archbishop of Detroit. I was host to Maya Angelou at a convention for two days. I had Sen. Richard Lugar speak at my fraternity when he was mayor of Indianapolis. (I saw him on an airplane a few years ago and we chatted briefly; he still remembers me and that day 40+ years ago.)

These things don't make me important; everyone has brushes with fame. My older son Scott has worked with Fmr. Sec. of State Warren Christopher and Chief Justice John Roberts, younger son Steve with Meryl Streep and Steven Sondheim. Shown in time-lapse, anyone's life would reveal some celebrities stroboscopically. But most of the people in the film would be just regular folk--neighbors, people at work, golfing buddies, the mailman.

If we could plot all our connections--the anonymous, the regulars, and the illuminati--what a complex web it would be. Imagine the thousands of points on that graph. There would be thick, solid lines to family and good friends and bold font for the most dear. Perhaps we would use dotted lines for the departed and bold italic for famous people (whose names we'd put in red if we actually got to know them a bit).

But most of all there would be thin lines to tens of thousands of question marks for the passersby and the strangers in elevators: ordinary people of all sizes, colors, and religions who are just HERE with us in this time and place. They're constants, part of our rock, living on our island, in this organism called life.