Cave Time

In his best-selling advice book Men are from Mars; Women are from Venus, John Gray posited the proposition that men and women react differently to given stimuli and events. In relation to stress, he explains that men will “retreat into their caves” until they find a solution to their problem. Although there may still be some Neolithic tribes around where the men literally retreat in to their caves, this behavior may be characterized by such things as going to the garage and working on the car, going out with the boys, or other such behaviors.

In case you’re unfamiliar with your gentle writer and his somewhat non-typical to his gender attitudes, let me say a few words about me. I have been called a number of different things in my life (well, many, many things but I mean the ones pertinent to this discussion). Among others, I have been called a traitor to my gender, a girlie man and one woman referred to me as her gay male friend who happens to be straight. I tell you this because in many ways, I do not react in “typical” male ways. (And in another shameless plug, if you want to read more about that, read my earlier blog, “What I Have Learned About Women.”) When stressed or faced with a problem, I tend to withdraw into myself but I still want and need reassurance and support. I may withdraw for a while but eventually I want and need to talk about it. To me, Cave Time has always had a very different meaning than an emotional “time out” as John Gray characterizes it.

I was an only child. And I was not just an only child, I was the first grandchild on both sides of the family. And beyond that, I was a grandson and the eldest of all grandchildren in a Jewish family. Now, had I been born into the royal family of any one of several nations, I would have been in fat city. Unfortunately, in my situation, I was the one of whom much was expected. My mother’s father had dreams of me being a senator or governor or, dare we even say it, president. He felt it his deity-given duty to educate me in American history. (Let me say a word or two about him. He was an immigrant from the Ukraine, served in the U.S. Army in World War I, read and memorized facts and figures from the World Almanac and possibly new more facts about U.S. presidents than Doris Kearns Goodwin and Michael Beschloss put together.) To his way of thinking, my chances for success were unlimited. These expectations ran smack into my own belief in the fact that I was an unexceptional and a pretty sad specimen of humanity (a recurrent theme in the universe between my ears). If I got a 95 on an exam, he wanted to know why it wasn’t 100. If I got a 100, he wanted to know why I didn’t get extra-credit. Eventually, I insisted on no longer sharing my grades as good was never good enough. He did not mean it in a malicious manner; he was trying to prod me into exceeding expectations. I could never get across to him that I WAS exceeding them because my own expectations for my capabilities were so low.

Coupled with this family dynamic was the fact that in my neighborhood, I was the one who could be most easily scared, was the smallest and weakest one, was the Jewish kid and, worst of all, was the one who cried most easily. When any one of these things triggered a fight or flight reaction, it was inevitably flight. Eventually, my “friends” would ask me to come back outside but at some point the cycle would renew.

With this as the frame of reference, you may better understand why at an early age I learned Cave Time behaviors that to the present time are hard to break. My father was a model builder and passed the hobby on to me. Model-making is a wonderful hobby but, ultimately, a solitary one. In it, I could retreat into my own world where I could imagine myself flying the airplanes I was building. And when the model was completed, it took its place on the shelves with all the other plastic dreams I had built.

Something for which I will be eternally grateful to my parents is that they passed on a love for reading to me at a very early age. As low as my self-expectations were, I was aware that I read on a level several grades above my age. (This occasionally caused problem such as my mother having to come to school to personally tell my teacher that I was not lying and had, in fact, read a certain book.) I was never without a book and I am still that way.

Books may be the ultimate Cave Time for me to this day. Through the worst of my depressive episodes, as activities fell away and life became a stale, monotonous attempt to make time pass and get through yet another day, I never stopped reading. In fact, reading seemed to be the only place where I could find relief from the blackness encroaching on my existence. Transporting myself to far off worlds where humans and aliens interacted with robots or back in history to fly along with naval aviators over the Pacific fighting the dirty Japs or waiting behind the stone wall while Pickett’s Charge came toward me allowed me to escape the misery of my depression.

I have a very clear memory of being at my cousins’ house and having their friends (all of whom were younger than me) rejecting me as being unfit for them to play with. I just walked away, came back inside and sat down with my book. This behavior amazed my aunt who held up my reading as a virtue to my cousins. What she did not understand was the reading was my only way of escaping the hurt.

As a child, I routinely found myself in the position of being the one who always asked friends to come over to play. I was seldom the one asked. As a result of this, I became very good at playing games by myself. And I’m not referring to games that were designed as solitaire games. Monopoly, Scrabble, board war games were all games where I would play both sides or even more like in Monopoly. When I got into auto racing, I discovered a game called Formula 1 by Parker Brothers. I drove every car in the race. It was sometimes tough not to cheat with the knowledge of what the other “players” were going to do. But I learned to manage this compartmentalization, too.

When games became electronic, this was perfect for me. I could play against the computer and not need anyone else. And when I discovered flight simulators on the computer I was in heaven. Had my wife not put her foot down early in the flight sim experience, I would have been one of those people who would have purchased an old airplane ejection seat and rigged it out with full controls. I have seen rigs that people have built that are, literally, self-contained cockpits. The only way to communicate with the “pilot” when the canopy is down is over a built-in intercom. (We compromised on the Saitek system that has a joystick on one side and a throttle quadrant on the other.)

Cross-stitching is another one of those activities that I can do all by myself. It is self-contained and I can content myself with the sure knowledge that it is creative and much of what I do is done for other people. And it’s an activity that I can do while watching TV or listening to music. It just does not need other people doing it with me to make it work.

Cave Time, to me, has always been a way of life. Even as I have emerged into the world of emotions and emotional connections that have been absent for much of my life, I still find myself more likely to retreat into my cave. This has, at times, become an issue with my wife. It requires a conscious and constant effort to spend time together. Dinner time is one of those times and when certain things are on TV that we both watch I try to remember to come out of my cave and spend the time with her.

But a lifetime spent sitting in my cave and painting on the walls is hard to break. It still comes as a surprise to me that people enjoy my company. That’s not all that surprising considering how long it took me to enjoy my own company. There is still a tendency to keep to myself because I have learned the safety of it. If you don’t interact with other people, you may be lonely but you will never be rejected. But that isn’t life; it’s mere existence. Man is, ultimately, a social creature and even I have had to learn this. To be loved you have to love and that love has to start from within. And if that means sticking my head outside my cave and letting it go where my heart leads, then that is where I need to go. And I have started to do just that.