The New Normal

Eighth grade was the year I decided that I had to be normal.

No more listening to classical music. I was going to listen to top forty. I had my eye on a girl in my class and wanted to be her ping pong partner for co-ed doubles at our school. She couldn’t know that I liked all four movements of the Shoshtakovich Fifth Symphony.

I stopped listening to Shoshtakovich, Mozart, Brahms, and Rachmaninov. I put all of that far from me, I betrayed it. I danced to the top forty hits of the season, talked about bands like Cream and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. And I became this girl’s partner. I was normal. And then we won the co-ed ping pong tournament. And then she dumped me.

Perhaps most of us have removed from consciousness our more desperate attempts to appear normal. It doesn’t matter what it was that we thought made us strange. In eighth grade in 1970, listening to classical music wasn’t normal or even really very odd. It was just flat, or, as convention would have had it then, square

I returned to it after my ping pong fling. I was taken back like an old friend and will listen to Brahms even today. 

The Great Drive

I had no idea how insecure I was until much later. And it was insecurity that made me give up a genuine interest so that important people would like me. Being normal is a longing, and for some it is also drive. I realized this when I met some people who suffered from disabilities. I admit I was an adult by then, but these new friends gave me a new angle on what it means to be normal, this most prized and also most conspicuous status.

Here's one example. My wife and I, when I was finishing grad school, made a new friend. He and his wife were very funny and engaging, and we found we had a great deal in common. It took a month before we realized that George, our friend, was blind.

Perhaps he had kept that hidden from us. Perhaps we didn’t know what signs to look for. We do now. But at the time, George had appeared normal, whatever that is. It came out only on the night when he had his laptop out and it spoke to him as he typed by searching around for keys. Then we realized that he simply did not want us thinking of him as George, the blind guy. He wanted to be George, the guy we knew. His blindness never slowed him down. His wife had to drive the car. But he jogged and walked and did everything else he could.

For my wife, the angle on normality has sometimes been one she quietly calculates while the rest of us, oblivious, plan for a walk or an outing. She comes along. She refuses to be left out.  But sometimes, I can still see tears squeezing out of the corners of her eyes as she tries to pace herself. Like George, she doesn’t want people to know. She has functioned fully. She is a full-time teacher. She has had four children. She has lived longer than she thought she would when I met her.

She was born without a heart valve.

Don't Give Up

I’d like to say something great now. 

I could say that people like George, people like my wife, have led me to question why I ever gave up classical music for a girl I wanted to play ping pong with. Why did I diminish myself so that someone else would like a person I wasn't? George and my wife have never diminished themselves. They've done the opposite. They don’t want special treatment. They don’t want to be treated like they are handicapped in some way. They want to be and act and move in terms of who they are..

They love getting into life. They aren’t drawing attention to anything about themselves that deserves special treatment. For me, they are the new normal.