Labels, Amateur Psychology, Life Lust and Crashing Reality

I have spent two days with Mike this week.  Tuesday, accompanying him to his neurologist with our son, Harry and Wednesday, taking him and Charlotte to the Portland Public Library to hear my friend, Lily King discuss her book, Father of the Rain. Mike and Charlotte enjoyed that much more than the neurologist.

For years, I believed Mike-my brilliant husband-had Asperger's Disease.  When I heard a talk show host describing the single-mindedness and idiot savant focus of attention on ONE subject  (typography), the moodiness, the lack of empathy for others- I dashed out and bought a DSM-IV-TR Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.  I figured I had him pegged. Mind you, Mike was NEVER diagnosed by anyone remotely qualified to make that diagnosis, but at least, for a while, that possibility satisfied my need to rationalize behavior,  Maybe no one ever knows what lights or demons drive another person.

I was once privy to a lively conversation between Mike and Adrian Frutiger.  They were discussing how many lives would be enough.  How many times they would need to be walking this earth, seeing the places they wanted to see, concentrate a career in subjects that fascinated them but in which they have only dabbled in the confined typographic life they live, the people they would seek out- the great thinkers, the adventurers, the exotic women. The number they settled on is 7.  Seven of the biblical three score and ten would be "Enough".

It is sunrise on Friday morning.  I am sitting on a lovely balcony in Booth Bay looking out  on Squirrel Island as I think of that time in Antwerp.  I've been reading about Umberto Eco and some of his life philosophies that had echos of Mike's beliefs.  Eco talked about the benefits knowledge and culture had in his life. " If an illiterate man dies at say, seventy years old, he has lived only one life.  But a person who has read with curiosity has lived not only his life but the lives of Napoleon, Caesar, d'Artagnan and countless others.  Do that, and at the end of Your life, you have lived countless lives, which is a fabulous privilege."

For me, I think the essence boils down to you have to oblige yourself to not experience everything first-hand but appreciate the perspective of others..and feed that curiosity.  I know Adrian and Mike were entertaining each other but there was more than an element of truth in their appitite for life and always seeking More.