A Homesickness Haiku

It sneaks up on you.

Homesickness jumps out, slugs you.

It really sneaks up.

I can’t shut up

So I’m in this class.  Small class.  Young professor.  She’s really nice, but she throws these really easy questions out there just to try and get some discussion going.

Like, really easy.

Only the problem is, you almost feel embarrassed answering a question that simple.  Like telling a dog to sit.  There’s no reason for it to sit, you both know that he knows how to sit.  Why sit?  Just to be doing something, maybe.  Maybe to show who’s the boss?

So the class, pretty much, refuses to sit.   We want content and tough stuff, not underhand pitches.  But then it gets worse.  Since nobody is talking, I think she thinks the questions were too hard.  So she makes them easier.  See where this is going?

So I don’t want to answer the questions either, but I’m really pulling for her.  She’s working hard up there.  I try encouraging nods, or understanding nods.  Nods of all varieties.  But they don’t seem to work.  So then I do the worst thing ever and answer the dumb question.

Good dog.

And of course it makes it worse.  I am enabling a process that I hope will end, but I am not allowing it to end, because I’m pulling for her.  (Parents:  take note.)  And then all of a sudden I realize that I am that guy, the jerk in class who answers all the questions and dominates.  Because later when I actually have something to contribute, I’ve already used my quota of talking out loud in class for the day.  One more puts me over the line into obnoxious territory.

Why can’t I just shut up sometimes, and realize that not doing something is the best thing to do?

Dragonflies and truth

So I was sitting on a bench yesterday late afternoon, and I looked over and saw some dragonflies (red ones) buzzing around and hanging out like they seem to like doing.

It occurred to me that half the time I think dragonflies are beautiful. They sit completely still like a statuette, with paper thin wings held out at rest. They’re built with impossible grace, thin bodies and huge eyes. Then they hover in mid-air somehow, just to show off, and then they take off faster than you can even follow them with your eyes. You know you’ll never catch one or kill one, and that seems to put them beyond the realm of what you have control over, beyond the concrete. They’re little bits of surreal that get as close to you as they want and disappear at will.

But then at other times, when I look close, dragonflies are kind of revolting. Scaly, huge ungainly heads, and eerily quick. Little demons. Have you ever found a dead one? So light like they’re not there, but scaly-greasy too. And then I think about what they look like to other bugs, and the name clicks–dragons. Huge, fast, deadly. Unstoppable. Red.

In my eyes dragonflies live on the borderland between beauty and horror. I want to think of beautiful and ugly as separated by a wide brown plain of mediocre, boring, plain worlds. Polar opposites. But these fairy-demons force me to acknowledge that there is a border between the two, and it’s small enough for a dragonfly to straddle.

It’s creatures like dragonflies, maybe, that make me look more closely at truth, and the sloppy ways I conceptualize an intricate world. Are there razor-thin boundaries between love and hate, with little people dancing across the lines? Good and evil, with all men strewn out on the balance beam?

I guess that makes me thankful for dragonflies.

How do you deal with that?

Yesterday my wife and I found out that our sister-in-law, in her mid-20’s, has some form of bone cancer. She is a fitness instructor, elementary teacher, photographer, and just all around a great lady.

What didn’t surprise me last night was our tears, our prayers, our conversations. We grieved, and we continue to grieve.
We may fly down there (it’s across the country) in a few days.

What surprised and confused me was this: life kept on rolling. Time kept moving forward like it always does. And at a certain point you kind of get cried out, or talked out, or whatever, and then you start to think about dinner. Or the mattress you were thinking of buying. My wife later wanted to play MarioKart.

What?

It’s weird: we’re grieving, and still are. It keeps sneaking up on us and hitting us, and it’s fair to say that today has been pretty crappy. But we got up. We went to work. I had stuff to do, and I am doing it. How does that work? It’s like life is way too big to just stop for one sick woman and one family in pain. And then I think that all around me are people joking, sleeping, worrying, relaxing, making love, playing board games. And somehow that’s OK. It’s supposed to be that way but I don’t know how to deal with it. Even weirder is the fact that we’re moving on, too. I have seen those people that are acquaintances but not quite friends today, and they ask me how it’s going, and I say “fine”, because I don’t want to talk about it. And then I am working and catch myself not thinking about it and feel bad. Our life continues. And our sister’s is, too. She is still eating and talking and tying her shoes, and seeing people who are outside of it all.

Maybe some of it is our modern ADD and shallowness. But I get the feeling that this weirdness might be universal. When you read a story or watch a film about people grieving, it’s like the sadness is all there is. But life is too big for that; films and books are flat that way. It goes on, and we go on, and I’m not having a problem going on. I am having a problem with how I am able to go on, at times almost uninterrupted.

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I am not really clear on why I am doing this, except that I know it is for my own benefit. While I firmly believe that the world needs another blog about as much as it needs more rabid squirrels, I am almost perversely drawn to the idea of a blog.

I think I just need to get some thoughts down when they happen, and I know that I am a little too disconnected from people at the moment to have a human outlet. O, internet.

So here’s one: I miss being deeply connected to people. I used to be, and I don’t think I appreciated it enough. Now I am on the other side of the country, and it’s been one year. It is an amazing privilege to be allowed into the mess and gunk and unfinished loose ends that is someone else’s life. It’s an incredible thing to have another person willingly become vulnerable in your presence. It’s a sign of trust as well as an opportunity to become part of the fabric of something more significant than yourself.

It’s an honor, really. To be trusted like that.  That ever happen to you?