Once Upon a Gypsy Moon by Michael Hurley Read Free Book Online Page B

drummer to go wherever that might be.
    The call to go is a yearning to peer behind the curtain that encircles and confines our world to the close, the familiar, and the safe. It is a call to strip life bare of its clutter and distractions and to reencounter the primal interest in the unknown that first led us to explore the other end of the crib. Somewhere along the way, most of us stopped exploring. Some of us did not. Some of us cannot.
    One day this voice telling me to “go” will perhaps be diagnosed as a form of mental illness that I have suffered unawares, but for now it serves me well as an excuse to go sailing. It was, after all, no less a madman than Mark Twain who gave us these words:
    Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Chapter 11
What Dean Martin Knew
    I have gotten somewhat ahead of myself in the story of this voyage. Before the moment of decision at Beaufort in the fall of 2009, there was another longing, and another unfinished voyage awaiting the order to set sail.
    Gary Chapman has written a wonderful book, The Five Love Languages , in which he makes the case that each of us is hardwired to recognize and appreciate love in one or more well-defined ways. I have been, since my earliest memory, a person with a need for love in the languages that Chapman describes as “words of affirmation” and “physical touch,” in that order. In less clinical terms, that means that I am rather insecure and need lots of attaboys and hugs. Despite this, I have had an unfailing instinct for cultivating relationships certain never to meet those needs.
    Sooner or later, we all have to come face to face with the people we truly are, and so did I—albeit rather late in the game and amid the financial and emotional wreckage of a bruising divorce. What I learned in the process was invaluable to me in trying to repair my life. Little did I know that the Rolling Stones had figured all this out before, if only I’d been listening.
    Yes, it’s true. You can’t always get what you want. We all need to accept that, and grown-ups generally do. But you darn well better get what you need, or you may find that your needs are being met in unhealthy ways in other parts of your life. That certainly happened to me, and with disastrous and painful consequences.
    But as surely as winter leads to spring, pain is followed by healing and growth. I came to realize several truths, not all of them in step with the pop psychology of the day, as I set out on a quest to find love and happiness. I was looking for “the one.”
    First, I considered and rejected the current self-help orthodoxy that holds that it is unhealthy to need anything or anyone outside ourselves in order to feel emotionally whole. Only after we achieve a sublime indifference to the affections of others, this theory goes, will true love alight (or not) like a butterfly on our shoulders while we’re busy finding fulfillment in pottery or poetry, meditation or mountain climbing, whale-saving or what-have-you. I generally didn’t agree with this school of thought, mostly because the dull fellow it describes doesn’t sound like someone I would ever want to be. (I also wasn’t happy with the whole butterfly thing. If I’m choosing metaphors in the animal kingdom for an on-time arrival with my heart’s desire, I’m going with a chicken hawk, not a butterfly.) And as for being perfectly content to be alone, I had always thought the Paul Simon song “I Am a Rock,” was a lament, not a model of emotional wellness.
    I much preferred the wisdom of Barbra Streisand that “people who need people are the luckiest people in the world,” followed by no lesser light than Dean Martin, who told us that “you’re nobody till somebody loves you.” (Dino was exaggerating, admittedly, but