Personal Journal

Coming up for air

There comes that day when you reach your limit. Where you can no longer restrain frustrations and impatience into the back of your mind. Enculturation is such a wonderful thing, we’re not just human, we’re also citizens. For example, we wait in the grocery store line, as I was yesterday, for my pudding, my coffee, and some other item, in the ‘express lane’. At the front of that line is the woman who felt she was entitled to shoot through that line with the entirety of her Thanksgiving Dinner purchases (Maryland is striking in this region for the way in which the lower class co-habitates with the upper middle class, and the woman with the turkey was definitely from the latter). And so 10 minutes go by until finally the 2 people ahead of me start making loud comments. “This is ridiculous.” “The same woman has been the for 15 minutes.” Et cetera. Luckily, I got into the only other line available and got out of there ahead of those poor two souls.

After 31 days in Maryland, I am them. This is ridiculous. I. Want. To. Go. Home.
I want to give Jean a big hug and, well, some measure of my yearning for her that has built up over these many weeks, but I shan’t be crass about that.
I need to be back in my home, to see my view of the mountains and to drive my truck and to recharge a battery that is itself battered. It’s additionally depressing to recognize that I will have only 5 and a half days back there before I have to get on a plane and return here to Maryland. It’s hard to charge the batteries of one’s spirit when you know you’re only getting a pit stop…

Yes yes, my financial adviser, I need the money, and that’s a wonderful thing. But I cannot charge my spirit on that fact just yet - maybe down the road.

So I have three working days left, and the travel day. The three working days, these are reminiscent of discussions my college friends and I used to have about being paralyzed in time but only in the body. What if the mind was left to function in a body that was in stasis. What kind of madness would that spawn? What kind of terrible insanity breeds itself inside of prisons. This is a kind of prison, a kind of zoo habitat. And I don’t wish to make melodramatic hyperbole of it all. It’s not a sensory deprivation chamber. It is a life interrupted.
I had intended to build a small little life of my own here spawning only the course of a few weeks, and I failed to do so mostly due to the problems with my back. Those seem somewhat alleviated and I hope when I return I will better be able to do those things.
What lies before me now are three frustrating days of barriers to my goal, the only skills at my disposal to break these barriers are patience and transcendence, both of which are fleeting qualities in me now. It would be easier if today were Friday, but it is not. I have work on Saturday, so today is a second Thursday, and Thursday is the hardest day for me. My patience worn to a nub, my hope not yet to the doorstep.

And I wish only briefly to discuss the pyre of Rome I must endure which is the Thanksgiving travel season. I had long wondered what it may have been like to see the visigoths rampaging through the streets, ransacking and seizing as they wished. Perhaps I’m being too foreboding in comparing the Tuesday before the big Thursday to such an event, but I do have such trepedation for my travel day.

I will have the kitten in tow (the kitten I saved on my trip out here, which I have not written about, but shall in the near future), and she will be the focus of my maternity. I am taking Tim with me, a bodyguard of sorts, a companion to help me make the best of myself. I anticipate great throngs of impatient, kvetching, rude, impossibly selfish idiots rushing this way and that through Baltimore and Denver airports. And were it not for the kitten, they would have little to worry about in me, as I try to play the peacemaker in these sorts of moments. Help people vent, try to make the employees in these maelstroms have a moment of levity, make them laugh, make their day with some quip or some smile or some comment about how much I sympathize with the enormity of their tasks. And I will try all of these things.

Except don’t screw with me and the kitten. Leave us alone, and keep your snide comments to yourself. You see, Antietam’s Angel, as her name is now, was incredibly sick when I found her along the highway on my way home from the Antietam battlefield in western Maryland. Desperately ill. And her path back to health is nearly complete, although she lost her left eye in the process due to perforation during her battle with the herpes virus. So little Angel will need some measure of peace if I can provide it for her. And as Charlie Maitlin, one of my colleagues found out, when he suggested that I put her in a lake nearby to rid myself of the burden he presumed she was, I am not amused with even the slightest hint of cruelty to animals.

So we should all say a prayer that the people around whom I travel have a sprinkling of graciousness and patience and sympathy for those around them. And for a little good luck for all of us.

I’m going home on Tuesday.
I’m going home!


It is never too late to be what you might have been. -- George Eliot
Courage to start and willingness to keep everlasting at it are the requisites for success. -- Alonzo Newton Benn