Giant Circles

I suppose you have to get old in order to learn how things that go tend to come back.  Stories that once seemed epic and endless are now just the last chapter of a long book you've been living through.  I'm marveling at middle age and its strange boomerangs.

Some are social:  the wreck I made of the last year of high school seems to be patched up and fixed--at least in my mind--due to the slow and painstaking repairs made to two or three relationships via Facebook.  The lovely chorus that was my third and fourth grade experience, the one that faded away and then died out completely before college, is back, and sweet, and right.  I am an extremely nostalgic person, and I love those I love fiercely--almost with a death-grip--and boy did it hurt to lose those connections.  In high school we all were in the throes of hormones and social Darwinism, and I was ill.  I'm not so ill anymore, and things have calmed way down for everyone now that we're up in our 40s. 

I guess I'm glad to be alive to witness these turn-arounds.   Moving back home didn't cause the fixes to happen, for sure, though it has certainly confirmed them nicely.  I still have a few other people to reconnect with, but those are on separate trajectories.

Today I had lunch with five women from work.  The synergy between us is so strong.  We are all so excited to talk it's almost electric.  And we laugh so hard!   I haven't had a group of women friends since I moved back to California (whoa, 10 years ago!), and we are all older and have a decidedly fuck-it attitude about things.  Yet we're professional, and work hard.  And we work TOGETHER!  It's great.  Who knows how long it will last, whether people will stay in their jobs, quit, get tenure, find other work, etc.  I just want to grab onto it and love it to death while I can.

In Long Beach yesterday, I learned that the dollar bookstore I so love to visit is closing.  No!  Where else could I get contemporary hardbacks (just bought DFW's The Pale King yesterday) for a buck?  It was like a free-for-all for Julie:  cheap+great=brain explosion, every other month!  I'd bring another suitcase and just fill it up.  I would stay at the hotel closest to it instead of my conference place, so I wouldn't have to walk too far with a heavy bag.  Etc. Etc.  And then, two hundred books later, it's over.  So there's that.  What do you do when you have a good thing?   YOU SEIZE THE DAY, even if you look ridiculous (people on the senate thought I was crazy with all my suitcases), but now that it's over, I'm happy I did it all.  Better to have loved and lost....

Perhaps emotions are amplified now that I'm back in my geographical home.  It certainly feels more settled.  My rock bottom is much farther down than it used to be, with a nice mucky layer of nostalgia and paroxetine between it and normal me.  Jeff is having a rough time, but he too is mostly basically good...and the girls are tremendous.  Blooming. 

What if there's a fire and we lose everything (very possible)?
What if something happens to Jeff?  Or god forbid our kids?  Will I look back and say I seized the day when I could?  Some tragedies are so awful that your survival might very well depend on getting that answer right. 

Nothing stays the same.  This I'm learning, too.  Anini Beach is slowly becoming an unpleasant place; Kauai is becoming alien to me.  My father is moving to New Mexico (don't ask), and with him, I've discovered, is going my nostalgia for Hawaii.  I love my Hawaiian students, and I share their pain when they come to California: there's a kind of brave grit to their effort to fit in.  I certainly understand it (backwards), but also, I feel I owe them.  I owe them for what their tutus did for me when I was a kid.  I owe Hawaii, and as I am useless to it when I'm there (today, with the old-timers dead and the young moved away, I'm just another tourist), I can honor it best from the mainland...by being there for the keikis.

Ok, enough mushy crap.  We're going to Texas next week for a deep dipping in the pools of Southern friendship: Miah, I can't wait to see you!!!