Family

Out of my comfort zone / The many-Jeffs interpretation

I’m far out of my comfort zone, on an away-mission through 10 February, not feeling especially inspired, but moved to stick with the discipline of posting my Substack every other Sunday (or so). Even if I don’t have much to say, like right now; after a day that began very early and has been very long, and will end later still in the Port Saint Lucie High School auditorium. So this one is for my die-hard fans only, dictated (forgive the typos) from the home of Debra and Chris Hotmer (my sister and her husband) in Port St. Lucie, near the eastern coast of central Florida.

The Hotmer’s lanai, along the canal in Port St. Lucie

My mother was 21 years old when I was born. She’s 21 years older than me still.

At the moment I’m visiting my mom in Florida and staying with Debra, who is nine years my junior. Our brother Jordan, who died in 1990, was three years younger than me.

Debra and I both find it remarkable that our mother is still with us — and though the past few years have been difficult for her (especially the last couple of months, after she took a fall and broke her hip) we’re astonished by her good health, which extends into almost every realm, save those of her inner calm and equanimity. It makes sense; it’s hard getting older. I know that. And not only does my mother have her own issues to deal with (which at the moment includes physical therapy and the indignities of using a walker), she’s also anxious about her eldest son, who is negotiating the fraught path of Parkinson’s.

Debra and Mom, both a little bit tired.

Seeing Mom for the first time since last March, I was impressed by how good she looks. I had expected her to be physically much diminished by the trials and tribulations of her fall, broken hip, and ongoing recovery. But she, like her younger sister Audrey, is a force of nature, not easily stopped by the obstacles that frustrate the majority of us mortals. Still, when I see her in her current state, it’s hard to recall my mother of 20 years ago, when I took her to Thailand and India for her 75th birthday. We traveled together through Bangkok and the subcontinent, a fearless team on the prowl from dawn till dusk, visiting temples and ruins, touring monuments and navigating chaotic street markets, my mother riding sidesaddle on the back of a Bangkok motorcycle taxi as we wove through the streets to open food courts and we ate vegetarian food alfresco as the late monsoon rain hammered down around our sheltered table.

Chris Hotmer and my sister Debra

For several things I’m grateful. One of them, of course, is the fact, that our mother is still alive. As is my sister, a generous and empathic soul who I’ve long described as my best friend and lodestar in this crazy world. She has a cat named Daisy who I haven’t seen, and a bicycle I tried to ride without success. Chris, her husband, is a commercial construction superintendent, usually taciturn; I’ve gotten to know him better during this short visit than in all my previous visits combined. Right now Debra’s flickering around in the kitchen, preparing a big brunch for myself, our Mom and Dennis, Mom’s boyfriend.

There’s a reason for this meal. I have timed my visit to coincide with that of Robert Weinstein, a close friend from my high school years who I have not seen since I left Plainview, New York in 1973 to move to California. Bob’s parents were very close to my mom and dad for many decades, and though Bob’s own parents passed away nine years ago he has remained a loyal presence in my mother’s life and, more recently, in mine — mainly as a regular reader of this Substack. Though we have exchanged numerous short emails, I was uncertain what our reunion would be like. It was quite wonderful. And it reminded me that though life, on a cosmic scale, is imperceptively short, the connections we form can feel eternal. For though I have had no face-to-face contact with Bob during the past 50 years – I had not met his wife Marthe, either of their now adult daughters, or any of their grandchildren — it was, as the cliché goes, as if no time had passed.

My old friend Bob. Photo by Chris Hotmer

There was a lot of catch-up, needless to say, and I felt a deep poignancy around the differences in our lives. After a traditional Greenwald feast that began with bagels and lox and ended with cherry pie, I felt the need to explain (and to some extent defend) the choices I’ve made and the life I’ve led, I couldn’t help but consider paths not taken, and how utterly different my own life would have been if I've had a family of my own, with children of my own (not to diminish my love for my godchildren). And whether or not somewhere, in hypothesized alternate versions of the universe, one or more versions of me did indeed take some (and all) of those paths.

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At the moment I’m reading a science fiction book called Dark Matter, recommended by my friend Pedro, who shares my love of the genre. It’s based on the ‘many-worlds interpretation' * in quantum astrophysics, which suggests that every possible thing that can happen does, diverging at that pivot point into a unique universe, which branches off from the current spacetime-scape to seed an alternate reality in which every decision or action also branches off, and so on to infinity (and beyond). I’ve brought this up before; the notion that our current dysfunctional reality was a divergence from the one we found ourselves in before Election Day in November 2014, when we split off from the reality we had known and everything began to go to hell. But had we remained in our previous universe (under a Hillary Clinton presidency, for example), how would things be different? How would I be different? Are there alternate reality versions of myself in which I do not have Parkinson’s?

And if there are in fact infinite alternate realities, which one got the ‘real’ Jeff? As autthor Blake Crouch writes in Dark Matter:

I can’t help wondering if I’m out there somewhere

in another vicinity

another country

if I spend my days under broken down cars in a mechanic shop or drilling cavities instead of working as an editor and journalist (diverged from the script there), am I still the same man at the most fundamental level?

and what is that level?

if you strip away all the trappings of personality and lifestyle, what are the core components that make me me?

…And ultimately, does it matter? I’m this Jeff now. Not ideal… but there are worse branches of the spacetime continuum to be on, I’m sure.

I said this was going to be short but I’m rambling on.I’m off now, heading off to see The Wedding Singer (my sister wanted to keep me, or at least this version of me, busy). It’s an ironic choice of entertainment, given my previous musings.

Thank you for reading. See you in a couple of weeks with a completely different offering!

• For a startlingly original treatment of the many-worlds theme, I highly recommend the harrowing Coherence, a 90-minute 2013 debut film by writer-director James Ward Byrkit, shot on a shoestring budget and largely improvised, which I've now seen (as of last night, with Debra and Chris) half a dozen times.