Same Time Next Year, or The Two Faces of Ellen

Warning: this blog entry contains serious material. And a special warning to squeamish young people: it's corny and it contains romantic language about PLACES, of all things.

It's been 14 hours since I arrived back in Delhi for Year 3 of my sojourn at AES, and this is the first time I've returned with mixed feelings rather than 100% enthusiasm. It's been like having a secret affair, exhilarating for awhile but then it starts to wear on you - the attempts at secrecy, living a double life, feeling pulled between places and people. Sigh.

The subject of my affair? My job here at AES - the greatest job ever: administrators whom I love, fellow teachers I admire, students I actually have the opportunity to get to know individually, and support for my teaching needs. And then there's the campus: it's like living in a fragrant tropical garden, with the occasional visiting monkey just for kicks. And the convenience: within 100 yards are tennis courts, a grocery store, a coffee shop, a pool, a gym, friendly neighbors, and (yes, I like this) my classroom. Every day here I think about how lucky I am to experience this.

When I left here last Spring, I was just about ready to sell the house in Minnesota and consider this apartment in Delhi my true home. After all, the stateside residence is "just a house." The garden? constant work and a losing battle against Japanese beetles and rampant thistles. Friends? One can make them anywhere, right? And I had decided that I was not a materialist - things did not matter.

Fast forward two weeks - via London and Colorado, after a week of grading AP exams, to arrival in Minnesota.

It took me about 10 seconds after coming through the front door to remember my "old" love - my life, and especially the house that had become a home even as the girls left for school and jobs and Buster died: the garden that I built over six years and is finally looking lush, the screened porch, the raspberries already ripening in late June, the beautiful silver maple shading the back yard, the neighbors whom I love for their constant oversight of the goings-on at my house and everywhere else on the block, for that matter. Maybe the 54 years of frequent moves, many of them not by choice, are finally making me want to dig my hands, literally, into this suburban plot and not let go.

Prior to this, the home I lived in for the longest time was in Morningside, when the girls were small, and divorce mandated the move from that house, one of the hardest moves I've ever faced. My last memory of that house is saying goodbye to my mother as she finished packing the last boxes, since she would be leaving for the airport before I got back to clean up. And that's also the last time I saw my mother, so that house will always hold that memory within its walls. Along with the memories of little girls dancing, Buster's loud barking as he ran from window to window following the garbage man's progress past our house. My 35th and then 40th surprise birthday parties, throwing countless birthday parties and inviting people for dinner, the "European" punch I made for Christmas caroling that made Teresa Carufel wonder as she entered the house, "what smells so awful," trying to keep all of the goldfish in Anna's room from being found dead before I could remove them from behind the malfunctioning filter, sleeping on the floor by Amy's crib when pregnant with Anna, just so Amy would go back to sleep, wallpapering Amy's "big girl" room while (still) pregnant with Anna and crabby, late nights putting all of the furniture back carefully in the dollhouse, including the tiny plastic flowers in their vases, only to find mayhem repeatedly after "innocent" children trashed my artificially-created domestic bliss once again - leaving various doll body parts upside down and in illicit sleeping combinations.

That house - someone else's for years now, and this house, the one I just said goodbye to for 10 months . . .it's been 7 years now, and even with the teaching year absences, it suddenly feels like "home." It crept up on me slowly, the importance of that place. I'm not sure if it's the fact I own it, or that it's something I can "fix" or at least make better, or if it just represents stability in the midst of change. Houses always give you the opportunity, if you can call it that, to improve them. And gardens - I used to think gardens were about creativity and love of nature. Then it dawned on me - it's all about control. Otherwise why would this "nature lover" be cursing at Creeping Charlie with its sweet-scented purple flowers, or tying the mouth of the "beetle bagger" closed, gleefully eyeing the dead and dying beetles whose only sin is a love for rose petals and raspberry leaves? I want the garden to look PRETTY, with flowers and spaces between them that PEOPLE like, especially me. But isn't all creativity about control, for that matter? Even Jackson Pollock wanted his paint dripped the way he wanted.

It makes no sense for me to spend my two months of vacation working every day, calling the plumber, organizing the storage area, pruning trees, mowing the lawn, deadheading flowers and pulling weeds until sweat blinds me and the mosquitoes have consumed most of the back of my legs. My normal gardening schedule does not go according to plan: yes, just an hour before dinner, pulling a few weeds, maybe putting some of the mulch down, she says - then comes inside covered with pine needles, pieces of mulch, bug bites, and sweat and sees that it's almost 10 PM - time for dinner! My poor daughters had to put up with this during their visits home - fortunately they both had distant boyfriends to call in the evening and perhaps even appreciated mom's absence from the scene for awhile.

So why did I love every day of this hard and never-ending work? No Calvinist family history here - just European Jews, Irish Catholics, and Japanese runaways fighting in my bloodstream with uncertain results.

Maybe it's the potato blight of the 1840s, or ghetto persecutions during the Plague, or tsunami experiences from past lives, but this summer I discovered some primeval need to lie down on the ground next to the house and breathe in the smell of the dirt and the grass and the flowers and stay there. And then, sore and tired, get up and go into the house at night and drink glass after glass of mineral water mixed with fruit juice and take a long shower and put on pajamas and sit in bed and watch a movie and then read until I fell asleep ridiculously late at night (actually I don't know if you can have a "primeval" need to put on pajamas and watch DVDs, but let's assume that it all goes together in one big "primeval need" package). And this was almost enough to make me happy, - I needed to see my daughters and call friends and see people for lunch or walks or book groups (oh yea, and do a sprint triathlon) - but suddenly my adventures in Delhi seemed like playing and life in Minneapolis seemed like the real deal.

Especially when the last time I saw Anna she cried. We can do all of the "finding ourselves" that we want, but it's not fun when our children miss us and shed tears.

Yeah. Family and friends. Friends - I realized that I actually have some in Minnesota that I love and miss when I am gone. I've always been a "leaver" rather than a "left behind," but now I'm seeing that when I leave I accidentally leave myself behind, too (I'm not saying this just to sound profound, although it does sound profound, doesn't it?). Certainly I leave behind people and shared experiences that I value deeply. (So probably some of "me" is now deposited here in Delhi behind a few refuse piles somewhere - likely sharing space with a cow or two). And my family members keep changing and getting older, refusing to wait until I visit to watch this happening. Being able to spend time with my sister's family in Boston was great, despite the fact that the short time window left turned me into a whirling dervish of evil during the two days between that visit and my departure for India, and poor Amy was stuck in the center of the whirling. How did I end up having such quality siblings and nephews/niece and cousins, etc?






I used to wish I was adopted as a child and that my "real" family would hurry up and rescue me; now I worry that I actually WAS adopted from a different gene pool, the one without talent. You know the different categories of people in Brave New World and/or "The Giver" or any of those dystopic novels? I would be in the category of people who can't actually do anything except read, eat too many blueberries, go to museums, and watch people. Yes, we would be the most obvious choice to throw out of the lifeboat. "My people" would have to be entertaining enough to keep our fellow boaters from tossing us over. "OK, so I can't tell left from right and I've been rowing backwards, but I can cross my eyes and wiggle my ears - watch!!!" My deepest secret - I became a lawyer only because I failed at the fast food restaurant jobs I tried and spilled coffee on the Woolworth's manager while attempt to waitress briefly - now the truth is out. Even in law school, before I discovered that I could actually earn a living practicing law (and I mean PRACTICING), I worked at the law library, which involved watching (see, there's that skill again) large numbers of dental hygiene students flirting with even larger numbers of law students, all of them sharing only the characteristic of knowing how to look like they were studying. Students never checked out books - they had already bought the ones they needed. Occasionally students would approach the desk and my colleague and I would be rudely interrupted in order to answer a question. The rest of the time this obnoxious young man spent telling me that, no matter how much girls hated him, by the time he was 30 the odds would be in his favor and some young woman would be forced to settle for him if she wanted to be married.

Last night I dreamed that I was lonely. Somehow dreaming a feeling lets the feeling settle into your bones so that you wake up and can't shake it off for awhile. But I also dreamed that even while feeling lonely, I joked about my pathetically lonely state and made people laugh, including myself. Today I feel sad about leaving Minnesota and my friends, family, and home there. I feel sad that some of my closest friends from AES aren't back this year - they've "moved on" to the international teaching afterlife. But you also have to laugh - you can't even take grief too seriously, because the human condition is a moving target and most of the time we're just trying to hang in there while making fools of ourselves- painfully tripping over banana peels in our path. As my dad used to advise me, laugh first so that when others start laughing, it's WITH rather than AT you.