mccarthyism

Been a while since I’ve written anything, anything at all really, aside from papers. I used to do a good rambling journal entry about once or twice a week in college and for a while had them all stockpiled in the drafts folder of my TFC email account – a funny place to keep them I’m aware, and in the end a bad one because TFC switched its email server and they were all gone. Four year’s worth of random angsty embarrassing college age stream-of-consciousness, touching on rocknroll, girls, Greek class and good times. It’s a pity, because I’d like to look back over them, relive the memories. I’d likely like it even more ten, fifteen years from now. To spend some time in the mind of the person you were, wince a little, feel nostalgic. Since college I’ve had less time, less impetus to ramble on like that. The greater the issues with which you’re occupied, the more difficult it is to sit down in a library between classes and tap them out for the release of it, for catharsis, to spend a moments’ thought so thoughtlessly, so cheaply. It takes more time, more effort, to adequately address the kinds of things I’m thinking about now, the kinds of things I’ve been occupied with since May of two thousand ought eight. Not that it isn’t nice to sit down and ramble for a while just the same.

It’s slow getting settled, meeting people, feeling the new ground underfoot. It can’t feel comfortable so far from home; the feeling of displacement isn’t going anywhere any too soon. It’s what I expected, though I guess I did expect to like the school, the town more. That’s ok. What do you do? You do your best, and with grace maybe a little better even. You give up the war.

Got back to Deerfield on Friday evening, after thirteen hours on the road, with the prospect of working a couple consecutive days hanging over both of us. In some ways a pretty dispirited homecoming: the real pain and doubt we left behind, and then to be so suddenly forced back to the drudgery ahead. But something has changed I think. Maybe it’s just the passage of time – those interminable six months – or maybe the thirteen-hour reminder that home is now, like it or not, firmly in the rear-view mirror, and that our lives now consist of this new place. I think we realized over five brief and heartbreaking days that the eight-hundred miles are more than merely spatial, that the relationships with family and friends kept up previously without effort, simply because they were inevitably there, will never again have the same inevitability, must from now on be kept up with purposeful and even taxing effort. A long long eight-hundred miles, each mile stretched interminably longer, out of the spatial realm entirely. And on this side a comfort, subtle and indistinct enough to believe in. The fuzzy, newly hatched nearness of this place, a new home in fact, magnified the small comforts (which we’d previously scarcely scoffed at) till they were genuinely comforting.