Love the ones you're with!

Back in 1970, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young delivered an album called Deja Vu. I was 17 years old that year, and didn't really know much about CSN&Y. I was a bit too young to follow the Woodstock crowd, and I was headed for college. I liked their music, didn't always understand their lyrics, but there was no mistaking their intent with the song "Ohio," a protest song about the Kent State shootings in May of that year. I was not quite seventeen when I had looked in horror upon the photograph of the young girl kneeling over the body of a student killed by a National Guardsman. Those were tragic days for the students and the military, and for one president.

If you are too young to remember those days, click here for a link to Wikipedia. It will  help you get started on a search for further information.

The reason I mentioned the above was to lead into this: I bought the Deja Vu album a few years later when I was earning money and able to afford the luxury of such. There were a few songs that I loved to hear on that album, including Our House, Teach Your Children, Almost Cut My Hair, Woodstock, and Carry On. I pretty much liked the entire album.

A year later, their second album as CSN&Y was released, called 4-Way Street Album which I did not buy. One song from that album, Love the One You're With is what this entry is about.

I'm not citing the lyrics for the meaning I had read into them back in the seventies. Basically, the song is about lovers being apart, and if you can't be with that person, the philosophy to love the one next to you is touted. Free sex, free of committment, free of guilt. I didn't buy into that thought regarding sexual relationships. I was a one guy kind of woman.

But I do recall the lyrics holding a special meaning in another sense: I had been separated from my loved ones ever since I went off to college. When I moved into the UGA dorm in 1973, my parents moved the rest of the family to Connecticut. Feeling left behind, I became friends with my roommate, and her family sort of adopted me for a short time. I loved the ones I was with because I couldn't be with the ones I loved. For two years, Susan and I were best friends, and her parents welcomed me into their home and their lives. I loved them for that.

While I dated my soon-to-be-husband during my last year of college, I missed him terribly (I lived in Georgia, he in NC) between visits. That same song nearly enticed me to love another simply because I couldn't be with the one I loved. Why not love the one I'm with? I had asked myself.

But it never happened because, like Richard Gere rescuing his Pretty Woman, Steve drove to Georgia to find a place to live and looked for a job so we could be together. We got married soon after, and the rest is romantic, marital history.

Shortly thereafter, my parents moved the family to California, leaving me with my husband and his family. Not an unfair trade-off, actually, since he also had a family as large as my own (each of us had six siblings). Again, I began to love the ones I was with. They became my family because my family was 3,000 miles away.

It's a good thing I learned to love the ones I'm with because my family is scattered across the United States. I don't remember having spent Thanksgiving with any of them as an adult. Every year, I spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with my husband's family. We've been doing this for the 31 years of our marriage.

But it is stressful to  get up early for breakfast, bake or cook something to take along, pack up the car, take care of the dogs, just so we can make the long distance drive to their home, eat a meal that takes no more than fifteen minutes to consume. This would be followed by the desire to take a nap and not being ableto, of being stuffed, of chatting, and joking, and catching up on family news. When the kids were younger, it was more fun, but now that they have all grown, I desire to have Thanksgiving at my house.

This year, we did that. I couldn't be with the ones I loved, so I loved the ones I'm with. Not my family or his family, but our family. Our family is made up of neighbors and friends now. In recent years, our family has been the people we live next door to, down the road from, the ones I go to church with, or work with. In short, our friends and neighbors.

This Thanksgiving I was grateful that my son came home, that he helped me in the kitchen, that we didn't have to drive so far away, didn't have to rush the morning away, and we could relax after we ate. Sharing the kitchen with my son was a happy event for me. It was just like having my little boy home again, except  he baked homemade pumpkin pie and a green bean casserole from scratch. We did everything but have a wooden spoon "fight." It was fun having the Thanksgiving meal in our home.

Afterward, we didn't have to drive two hours in the dark to get back to our home. Instead, I drove to my widow neighbor's house and brought her a Thanksgiving meal. She is still so caught up in her grief that she didn't want to go anywhere this year, not even with her own daughter's family. She thought she would be miserable company for us. So I carried the food to her, then spent an hour visiting with her.

If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with. So I gave her some time, the time I would have been driving on the road had we driven to be with our family. She could have been an aunt, or an older sister. She needed someone to love her for a little while, and so I did. I listened to her talk about her husband, how she missed him, how his death has impacted the familiy dynamics. Mostly I listened. Finally, I told her that she really is a lot stronger than she gives herself credit for, and that she wouldn't have made our day miserable.

The next day, Friday, my best friend called me up in the morning and said "Let's go shopping!"

Wouldn't I have loved to do this very thing with my own sister who lives in Georgia? You bet I would, but we can't be together at this time of year. Rather than feel down and miserable, alone and lonely about family relationships not being memorable for the past 30 years because we've lived so far apart, I choose to love the people that come into my life and act like family. I love them not only because they are friends, but also because they have become my family.

Yesterday, this friend, her pre-teen daughter, and I had the best day together. Not only did both of us get some Christmas shopping done, but the time we spent talking, sharing observations about people and life, chatting about family and philosophies over lunch, and appreciating our shared histories reinforced our friendship. There is a trust between us that only sisters have, whether the kinship is biological or spiritual, built over time, held together by shared happy and sad moments, and permanently bonded by motherhood. Truly, she is my sister, and since I cannot share such a time with my own sister (whom I will be seeing after Christmas this year) and she cannot be with hers, I offer it to the one I love as a sister. I know she feels the same way.

I have found that when I love the one I'm with, I am with the One I love. Always.

Love the one you're with and you will be with the One who loves you.

Tags: Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, family, sisters