Sunday, November 27, 2011

A Bus to Nowhere; A Bus to Everywhere

I’m riding on a bus somewhere between Philadelphia and Washington, DC. The sunlight gently enters the bus, which is somehow permeated by a twilight calm. People on the bus are so close together, elbows touching, breathing the same air, and yet, they sit eons apart. I feel like we’re all caught in a weird in-between state, some heads caressing the windows, looking for support; some eyes glued to phones and iPods; some hoods are up, with people staring in the distance, looking for unknown answers.

We’re completely anonymous—besides the few groups of people who know one another and subject the rest of us to their incessant conversations about nothing. Absolutely nothing. We drive through forest after forest, on smooth highways heading into the escaping sunlight. It feels like winter; it feels like timelessness; it feels like forever.

I’ve done a good deal of traveling this thanksgiving break. Driving on roads that seem to go nowhere, immersed in floods of traffic, car upon car upon car. The white lines that separate lanes of traffic seem to guide our destiny, entrusted to the bus driver whose name I don’t even know for the mere price of $25; the white lines flicker and continue ceaselessly, without fail.

As I sit on this bus going somewhere, I think back to a discussion I had with a friend, about people that lived hundreds of years ago and felt that their village was the centre of the universe. One could live one's entire life and see only 250 people. That’s it. 250 people.

How life has changed. I must have seen 500,000 people this trip alone. Easily. Riding a bus across DC. Swimming through travelers at Union Station. Boarding a bus to Philadelphia. Wading through people at the Philadelphia station. Riding train after train to New Jersey. Struggling through hundreds to board the New Jersey transit to New York. And then New York City itself—just count the hundreds and thousands that I saw in minutes, pouring up escalators, herding down sidewalks, adding up as the day progressed. In many ways those people really were nothing more than tallies, that don’t even begin to approach the significance of even one of the 250 villagers I might have known had I lived 400 years ago.

And now I travel back in this sea of anonymity to DC, back from New Jersey, back from Philadelphia. Sometimes I think that all my traveling over the past four years has destroyed that girl I was, leaving Kansas sometime ago. I’m exactly the same. Yet untethered, a bit lost, with a shifting sense of reality. Here I am traveling into a sunset in some unidentified state. Sitting next to my roommate, the only person holding me down to earth at the moment.

I’ve had such a spectacular thanksgiving break, as I usually do, far from home but adopted by friends and their families. Somehow it is precisely when I am in moving vehicles that I realize my own mobility, the fluidity of my life. I hunger for a map that would tally the miles I have walked and journeyed in my life, to have these trips to Smalltown, Suburban, USA documented. I think about the people who, but for the grace of God, I never would have encountered, met, loved; I think of the huge network of connections that link me to people all across the globe; I think that some of my best reflecting occurs when I feel aimless and anonymous, in some foreign land, even if it be an unknown road in Pennsylvania.

I don’t want to go back and confront all my work for school. I don’t want to allow this semester to slip past me. I don’t want to accept the fact that soon I will begin all over again. Persistently I’ve had this feeling that God holds me in the palm of His hand. Even in the middle of nowhere, even when I’m confronting the results of my own actions, even when I feel vulnerable and alone, He picks me up and sends me a sign that I will never be alone. Even when I question if that life of only knowing 250 people in total would have been somehow better and easier and simpler. Whatever road I travel, whomever I meet, wherever I end up, He will be.

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Three Highlights of My Wonderful Week

ONE.

“Going to California, a suitcase in my hand”; “Another sunny day in Cali-forn-I-A”; “California! Here we come!”; “Dream of Californication.” These songs actually apply to me now: just a few months down the road, I’ll be living in California. This week I was accepted to Teach for America as a Bay Area corps member. Wow. Wow. Wow. I’m still in shock. I know what I’m doing after I graduate, a problem that so many of us seniors dread solving.

And I’m grateful—profoundly grateful—to know. But I’m also shocked. And scared. And nervous. And shocked. And overwhelmed. Soon I’ll be a real adult. Part of me questions if I’ll feel less or more disconnected then than I do now. I feel like a constant in-betweener, starting over and leaving and starting over.

It’s what I’ve always wanted. But it’s the opposite of what I want too. I mean it’s exciting to have these opportunities to cross the country and the globe, to meet new people, to start new phases of life. But I want to slow it down and immerse myself in the familiar. I’ve invested myself in these people, these Washingtonians, New Yorkers, New Jersians, Pennsylvanians. And I’ll be leaving again soon. Leaving them, it feels like.

Can you picture me there, in California? I’m struggling to do so. Of the ten cities I listed as preferences when I applied to TFA, I somehow thought I’d end up in Memphis or New York; I don’t know why. California was one of my first choices, and yet I kept saying, again and again, “But California. Really?” I question if I’ll love it there as much as I hope I will.

I picture the beaches, wonder if it’s really sunny all the time, if I’ll ever feel like a West Coaster as I now feel like a pseudo-East Coaster. From the middle of the country, to the east, and now to the west. I’m not sure if it’s progress or just confusion.

My mental image of me in California, of my life there, is only beginning to form. But I know it will take shape and grow in the space sitting between me and my future there.

And I also know that soon that space will cease to exist.

TWO.

The leaves fell like rain around me, red, gold, orange, yellow, brown, tinged with hints of green, swirling, dancing, dropping to kiss and graze my shoulders, hands, pooling around my feet. It was an undeniably beautiful, beautiful fall day—one might even say the perfect day to see Mt. Vernon. It’s been sitting there, waiting patiently, on my DC bucket list, and the months are quickly slipping by. It was time, the right time, to go.


Visiting these country homes, whether it be in England, France, DC or wherever, makes me feel patriotic, like I’m crossing between different worlds and different eras, walking the rooms and paths of people I’d never have the power or influence to meet today. I learned a few things about Washington at his house, and not the typical read-the-plaques-at-the-museum-listen-to-the-tour-guide-droning-on things about his presidency and the Revolutionary War and American history.

I feel like I connected more to who he was, who he really was, in wandering around the estate he constantly dreamt of when fighting battles and forming the United States of America. He wrote repeatedly that he just wanted to go home to Mt. Vernon, and there I was only yesterday, wandering around the home and lands he longed for. I saw the giant trees that had to have been planted in Washington’s time or earlier. I enjoyed the view from his massive back porch, overlooking our beloved Potomac. I strolled through the brightly colored blue and green rooms of his home, that he personally chose the colors for. Lafeyette’s key to the Bastille prison given as a gift to the new leader of liberty, exotic hand-chosen china branded with his seal, his desk chair with an overhead fan operated by foot pedals, his pristine and cozy white bedroom shared with Martha.


I know that this is the whole point of going, to bring history alive, to learn more about the man behind the presidency and the renown and the legends. And I fully realize that I don’t really know who Washington is, today any more than two days ago. Nonetheless, I feel like I learned something important about him in his taste for bright colors, his beautiful porch, and his magnificent land. I could have lived there happily, and he did live there happily. Somehow that seems important to me.

I wandered around and thought about how good it was that I had taken a little alone time, a little retreat time for myself, off campus. It made me feel so connected to the past, to DC, to America, to the fall, to this time in my life. It made me feel like I was once again connected to something so much bigger than myself.

THREE.

Banana Grams on a Friday night—perhaps not the college norm. But it’s definitely one of the highlights of my week. My roommates and I started a tradition at the beginning of the year to fix dinner once a week, rotating cooks and inviting friends to join us. The staples are the roommates, delicious food, and a game of Banana Grams after dinner. Perhaps that in and of itself says a lot about who we are—a group of dorky college students.

But I think it says so much more too. Every single dinner surprises me with how delicious it is, how comfortable I feel with these people of mine, how time can fly by just sitting at home and doing “nothing.” We talk and laugh and eat and eat and eat and laugh. In that order. By the time Banana Grams rolls around we’re usually full to the point of exploding and sleepy with contentment.


We sit around the table, nibbling on leftovers, clashing elbows, sipping wine, mixing the little scrabble-like squares on the table, picking letters, making designs, laughing. Someone proclaims “Split” and we start scrambling to form words. Everyone asks random questions about spellings and seems to compete in forming the most ludicrous of made-up words. “Peel.” Laughter. “Peel.” Someone squeals at getting a Q. “Dump.” Really? I just got rid of that letter. Fabulous. “Peel.” Are you sure bro doesn’t count? “BANANAS.” The rest of us glare at the winner with resentment. Then we laugh and celebrate the most creative words. Repeat.

It’s so simple. Why do we do it again and again? Why is it still so fun? We played for two hours this Friday after dinner, and I was wondering if someone would start yawning and suggest we quit playing, but it was beautiful to look around the table and think that this was the perfect Friday night. There’s something weird about being a senior and realizing that precisely when we can go out so easily, we don’t have much time left; there’s something to be said for the best use of time being spent with those one loves. Undoubtedly my Banana Grams partners are people I love, and I can’t imagine a better Friday night than this week’s.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Back to Paddington

Time, time, time is on my mind. I travel the world and experience all stages of life in the space of my mind; I revisit the past and dream of the future; I try to grasp the present as it forsakes me in the span of a second. It’s all a dream really—an unforgettable dream, that haunts me and eludes me and tempts me. I feel as though I’ve seen the world and know nothing of it simultaneously.

This weekend, the early winter shocked us all and forced me to pull out my winter coat from the bowels of my closet. I shoved the hangars aside and the dresses swirled around my arms, attempting to ensnare me. Finally, I found the very last item, my beloved winter coat that I’ve had for years. I pulled it out reluctantly, but gently, and slipped it on. My fingers dug into the pockets and met some missing tubes of lip gloss and some slips of paper that felt like tickets. I pulled them out and discovered London Paddington train passes.

And I was back there, in an instant. A friend told me that to return to Oxford now would be like returning to Narnia as a grown-up, which I thought was so wise, so fitting. And those tickets were like a taste of journeying back. It’s funny how tangible things make it all so much more real. I love to scrapbook, and sometimes I feel like I’m collecting evidence to make the case that I’ve lived a beautiful life. When I read about Prague, Venice, London, Oxford, Rome, I’m struggling to make the connection: I’ve been there; I really have. Look at this photo for proof.

C.S. Lewis once said that he thought of Euston station whenever he heard the word London. For me, the word Paddington will always drag me back there, vividly, whether I want to go or not. I remember the birds, the cold (it was always cold in Paddington), the sense of isolation, the little hidden (heated!) waiting room I finally discovered, the Upper Crust I would get lunch or dinner at, the sense of anticipation as the departure screen finally read “boarding” for my platform. Paddington made me feel anonymous but a part of something bigger than myself too—the railroads that transformed England, the modern trains that are efficient and quintessentially British, the possibility of penetrating the English countryside.

The weather takes me back, too. When I remember my travels, I think of my Vienna, my Athens, my Stonehenge. A crisp day, both gray and bright, brings me back to Bath. Winter twilight belongs to London; a magnificent, fiery sunset will be tied to Venice indefinitely. My memories of these places feel almost two-dimensional now, reduced to a type of weather, and yet they are also warm with rich sensory memories. How I wish I could revisit these places and bring new seasons, new memories, new depth to my associations. I’m hungry for more travel, while also craving stability.

I want to go back; I want to stay here. I want to grow up; I want to remain exactly this age. I want something new; I want to be in a place long enough to claim it as my own. My life at the moment is a struggle to want any one thing concretely, steadfastly. I’m subject to fears and endless bouts of wistfulness.

I wish I could progress beyond these posts chalk full of nostalgia. Don’t you know I want to go forward, forward, forward? But stop, hold me, let me just savor now. Not back then, or then, or whenever—just now. I just want a steady, exciting, comfortable now.