A few weeks ago I got an exciting instant message from my cousin Matt claiming that he had finally decided that a life of remedial employment and sharing a house with his parents was not the one he wished to leave. He was 26 years old, working as a nighty security man at the local mall, and was finally fed up; in other words, he wanted to go back to college and get his degree! This message came the exact same day that I found out that I had been accepted to grad school; and I'm not ashamed to say I was more excited and happier for him than for myself.
Now, there is some backstory here that needs to be explained for you to get the true sense of the enormity of these events. Matt had been one of my closest friends growing up; he was a year older than me, one of a group of we 'young cousins' in the sprawling Dombeck family (the group being rounded out by my younger sister and Matt's younger brother Tom who I have mentioned countless times before), and he lived a mere quarter mile trek down the road, on the farm where my Mother had grown up. We were close together in age, lived near by, and were family; destiny, or at least familial pressures, seemed to decree that we would end up spending a lot of time together.
It was merely a happy coincidence that Matt and I actually got along well and enjoyed one another's company. In many ways we were a lot a like; we were both growing up in homes built by my grandfather, were fairly intelligent, sarcastic, loved video games and reading. We also, at least as young boys, looked enough a like that people thought we were brothers (oddly enough I still get this on occasion when I'm at home, even though we both began to take after out Fathers, looks wise, as we grew older. I still recall the last time I was home being asked if my Father was taking the sale of the farm well. I looked confused before I fell back into my familiar rote reply "OH! You're thinking of Matt; I'm his cousin Dan. The outgoing one" followed by a broad smile to drive the point home).
The main difference between us was our families. Mine was relatively stable, and despite the black storms which occasionally rip through the house, we're a loving, loyal bunch; everything you could ask from an Irish clan. Matthew's was the opposite; from an early age he developed a passionate hatred fro his Father, caused by the old man's relentless emotional badgerings (I only witnessed one once, but it was enough to convince me that Matt's disgust for his paterfamilias was well grounded). At the age of 10 Matt stopped hunting with his dad because he claimed that being alone in the woods with him, with a gun, was far too tempting. I told my Mother this once, Matt's father is her elder brother, and she nodded her head while a grimace contorted her face "I don't blame him", she said, "it would be tempting".
As we both grew older it became painfully clear that we were headed on different tracks, despite simularities of personality. Matt grew more and more quiet, shy and withdrawn, I did the same (the horrors of Middle School fell heavy on a child who was seen by his classmates as being too smart for his own good, and who had the misfortune of putting on more girth than height in those days), but never seemed to give into the bleakness completely; I might have been depressed, true, but I'd never forgotten the sweet necture and euphoria of social contact either and there was a part of me which was determined to have the bliss which all of my classmates seemed to find so easily.
There was one other difference between us, one that should have told me that i was not the introvert I believed, if I hadn't been to blind to see it. I enjoy helping people. I may not be able to put my own house in order all of the time, but I take pleasure in helping others right their own. Matt, a guy who was like a brother to me (His mother often refered to the three of us, Matt, Tom and Myself, as "her boys"), became one of my projects. If he was begining to show the signs of social anxiety disorder, well, I'd force him to be social, by god! I'd drag him to movies, we'd drive to Wausau several times a week (he was a year older than me and legally able to buy porn before i was; this was a huge draw!), I was over at his house nearly every night of the week after school.
The only problem was that i had never really asked my hapless victim if he wanted to be saved in the first place. At first he tried to politely refuse and then his Father's Polish obstinence kicked into High Gear; this only activated my own Irish temperment and I began to increase the pressure. "Some people don't know whats best for them", I can imagine myself snarling, "if they'd just listen to me, the world would be a perfect place" (unknown to me at the time, my Father, and every memver of his family, hold the same view. Since the world doesn't show any indication of listening to our beneficial wisdom anytime soon, we have a tendency of becoming an angry, surly lot).
Eventually I had to drop out of my quest, out of sheer exaustion. It was spiritually and emotionally draining, and seemed to be leading know where. By the time I went off to college, I still hung out with Matt quiet a bit, but I'd grown jaded and had given up my grand ambitions. "You can lead a horse to water", I once told my Mother, "but you can't make him drink. And if you push too hard, you might just end up drowning the damned horse." But, despite that, I was still there for him and was quick to give a helping hand if he ever asked for it. I'd tell my worried aunts and uncles this if they ever asked (and they asked quiet often. My Mother's family is close knit and look out for one another, maybe even too much sometimes).
And so it was with mounting excitment that i saw Matt type out those words; he wanted to go back to college, he wanted to live in the dorms and work on his people skills, he wanted to get the hell of out his parent's house. I asked him to tell me again if he was asking for help; he assured me he was "I'm a bit of a back slider", he said, "I know you'll keep a fire under me if I start to waver". I agreed that this was true.
And so, my second week back home after the "teaching fiasco" I will be driving around with Matt, visiting several of the Universities in Wisconsin (the same as I did for his younger brother Tom, when he decided to go to college). You know, I'm really looking forward to it too; the two of us haven't spent as much time together in the past few years as we used to, and I think that the week on the road will be a great deal of fun. Matt, if nothing else, is good conversation and deeply philosophical if given the chance to be (I remember driving to see my sister in Plattville one summer, she had a bed I needed to pickup. On the drive down, Matt began to point out different farm houses he thought were beautiful, and we ended up talking for at least an hour about the beauty of the landscape). Yes, I'm looking forward to this more than I have been anything else in a long time.