Never Meet Your Heroes

Once I knew an absolute sonofabitch who spoke a great bit of truth to me. He said, "Never meet your heroes." I understand now what he meant. When we meet our heroes, or people we admire or are in some way smitten with, they will, inevitably, become more human and less the picture of perfection. Meeting your heroes leaves you liable to see their warts in lieu of their overwhelmingly positive traits which attracted you to them in the first place.

The everyday Adonis...

Regular people carry that same risk factor. Oh no it's not just the George Clooneys and Margaret Thatchers of this world who are subject to hero worship. Take for example the friend you've had from a distance for many years.

You know the one I mean. Two, maybe three times each year, you'll get together and its all smiles and laughter and grandiose professions of adoration and undying friendship or kinship or even romance. Whatever the case ... each remains idyllic to the other because both of you put your best foot forward for those brief 12 to 48 hour periods of time thrice yearly. Under those circumstances, its not hard to maintain an air of mystery or idealism or perfection, even.

Undeniably, each sees something greener on the other's grass that keeps them coming back if only for a brief escape of how normal their lifestyles are when an outsider isn't there to covet its differences from their own.

Absence makes the heart fond...

I've recently learned that part of the covenant between hero friends is distance. When hero friends suddenly have an overlap in lifestyle or in their groups of friends that makes them more constant companions, the covenant is breached the magic is broken and Cinderella and the Prince go back to being the maid and the pumpkin. All the amazing things about my life that he escaped into, things I took for granted, were suddenly always there to be seen and experienced. I became a common experience. And all the bohemian appeal of his lifestyle in which I loved to occasionally indulge like a guilty pleasure became grotesque in their ubiquitousness.

I long for the days when I could know that when we met he would be more happy to see me than anyone in the room, sweep me off my feet with that signature hug and talk to me for hours. I long to dance with him, laugh wildly, talk for an hour on the phone, or merely call at all and not feel for sure that when I do get voice mail...he's dodging my call because he's simply tired of hearing my voice in his ear.

I long for the days when his language merely made me blush instead of cringe with its constant colorful adjectives. I long for seeing him as my little treasured one and not the harried mini-version of something I've already seen and fearing I can do as little now as I could then to prevent or buffer the inevitable. Mostly I fear that because I am now very ordinary to him...and he to me, that we have nothing left to say at all and I will be no better than a utility, used for my head knowledge of a lifetime I fought hard to escape. There's no way I'll escape being bitter if that is true.

Don't fish just cut bait...

No, don't meet your heroes, and forget weekly visits with special occasion friends. The bloom wears off the rose and our faults more oft than we hope, over-shadow how fabulous we were when we were each other's escape from reality.

So I pray he remembers me and Virginia, running errands, a matching tuxedo, the polka, and falling asleep roommates be damned!

From those moments till now, my hero became my herald and that herald a fortuitous bridge. I've paid its toll and crossed its length...I can't really go back across now so I'll need to leave it altogether and hope that I can put enough distance between me an it so that when it is nearly disappeared on my horizon it sparkles with all its idyllic perfection once more. And when it does, I'll think, I need to get back there and visit some day.