I’m aware that I’m not known for my love of change, but sometimes there’s a great relief—even to the most adventurous, well-traveled person—to come back to a place where one knows all the shortcuts around town and people’s back-stories. I feel like I could search every populated (definition of populated: more than one high school, mall, and highway where I can drive over 75 mph) area in the world and not find what I have now. Some people need to backpack across Europe for emotional clarity and others try to find themselves in places that are the complete opposite of what they came from, but my search for comfort and long-term happiness was easy; it was right where I left it.
One of my oldest friends, and an expatriate of the Good Ole Commonwealth of Virginia, came home to visit this past weekend. Always looking for a challenge, he said, “Doesn’t it bother you to come back after college and live less than 10 miles from where you grew up?” The short answer? No. But, I’m not one for short answers, so here’s the real scoop. If I had come from a town with one stoplight and mountain folk, maybe it would, but my return home has shown me more good in the area and residents of Fairfax, Virginia than I ever knew of or fully appreciated before I left for school. My complete answer to him would have to offer a bit of sentimentality. I get to live somewhere where I can remember that same little boy standing me up for the first 7th grade dance (yep, I lied when I said I forgave you) as well as someplace where I’m constantly making newer—less adolescently tragic, of course—memories.
I understand that returning to what you know may be too simple of an answer for most, but I think that the rightness of going native, per se, and returning to one’s roots depends on the past, present, and future of the location. If the place you have returned to is liquid and changes with the times just enough to stay fresh, you have a better chance of happiness, unless you’re like my grandma and really, really don’t like change. In addition to the ability of the area to advance and grow, you need to allow yourself to grow as well and revisit what you always knew with fresh eyes and the vigor of one arriving in a completely new location.
Consider the area as one that is rich with your own personal history. I take great joy in working mere blocks from where my parents first met in an elevator, passing old friends’ (parents’) houses when I take a short cuts around town, sitting at the bar at T.T. Reynold’s where my uncle worked over 20 years ago, and running into people that I haven’t seen in years and being happier to see them than I ever would have imagined.
People, by nature, just plain don’t change; however, the context in which you know them can. I’ve come home to most of my family, those I loved in the past, and those I wish I had known as well as I do now when we were growing up. I’m the luckiest girl alive because I can go out on a weekend and see what successes people from across the high school lunch room have become (or not—which is just as amusing); I can make up for the missed years of getting to know my 5th grade science partner and now next big thing in the world of photography, and set up my apartment with my new roommate and first friend in high school cheerleading. We all have a common ground from which we can tell each other new things. We’re able to speak from the same lexicon of experiences, places, and faces and understand each other without much explanation, regardless of how well we knew each other in the past.
I’m not asking that you reject change, but more that you don’t reject familiarity. It’s easy to make changes in what’s familiar, but it’s a struggle to find what’s familiar in change. Answers to our contentment in life aren’t simple, but sometimes they’re in the last place you look…right where you left them.
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Thar She Blows
“SNACK HUT!” In one anagrammically delicious moment, my friend M had solved the mystery plaguing us since breakfast at Runk dining hall our 4th year. All morning we’d pondered how the marquee outside could have provided the resources for an impish dining hall goer to spell out “nut sack.” I had looked at her questioningly, and she turned away from CNN to say excitedly, “Nuuuuuut saaaaaaack! Ugh, alright Colin Powell, stop talking and let us see the weather report.” “You’re calling Colin Powell a nut sack?” I said, pointing at him speaking on the TV. “Huh? What about Colin Powell’s nut sack?” “Huh?” And so started the most quintessentially college treatment of natural disaster that Charlottesville had ever seen.
That evening, Hurricane Isabel hit Central Virginia. Most of us were ready. People had lined up at the grocery stores for hurricane necessities in a style reminiscent of the typical Virginia preparation for 2 inches of snow. Every store in town was sold out of Hurricane malt liquor, M and I had bought enough toilet paper and water to faux paper mache every inch of the ceiling, and our hatches were as battened-down as an apartment with an entire wall of windows could be. Students and townspeople alike were skeptical about the impact of a hurricane on an area so far inland, but after living there through a drought, two earthquakes, a massive snowstorm, and every type of natural state in between, who were we to judge?
After the electricity’s last gasp, M and I whipped out our flashlights and played flashlight tag, waiting for the alleged hurricane to come along. It didn’t take long for torrents of rainfall and gusty winds to assault the drainagely-challenged town and create more mud then you could shake one of the sticks slamming against your window at. Nervous about trees, cows, and other things that sail through the air in bad weather coming through the windows, we moved everything breakable and valuable into a more interior room, and huddled somberly in her bed watching “Top Secret !”on a laptop.
Things calmed down outside, and the hurricane passed over us. The students, festive with a few Hurricanes in their bellies, ventured outside. What one soon discovered was that, if you ignored fallen trees, strewn belongings, and down power lines, there was a wealth of fun to be had in the couple feet of mud that UVA grounds had been reduced to. The next day, the sunlight filtered through the remaining trees spotlighting abandoned flip flops lodged in drying mud, Hurricane bottles, an unfortunate North Face rain jacket stuck on a branch, and thousands of footprints fossilized across Grounds.
If only we could all stay in an age and mindset where even forces of nature can be cause for a theme party. Too often in the Real World we’re bogged down by the minutiae of life like traffic, deadlines, bills, and never having enough time. One has to question whether we truly don’t have enough time anymore to stay up late laughing with friends, enjoy a meal that doesn’t come from a drive-thru, and get together just for the heck of it or if we’ve lost the sense of what is a true priority in life. If the students at UVA had chosen to be sensible and stay inside during a storm instead of getting out and experiencing one of the few hurricanes Charlottesville will ever see, all they would have to show for their supposed good sense is less laundry and maybe a complete pair of flip flops. Life’s bigger than the everyday tasks. In 40 years, we won’t remember the project we’re spending weekends at the office to finish, the errands we have to run, or the guy who cut us off in traffic. Freedom doesn’t end unless we say so, and sometimes you have to squish a little mud between your toes to remember that.
That evening, Hurricane Isabel hit Central Virginia. Most of us were ready. People had lined up at the grocery stores for hurricane necessities in a style reminiscent of the typical Virginia preparation for 2 inches of snow. Every store in town was sold out of Hurricane malt liquor, M and I had bought enough toilet paper and water to faux paper mache every inch of the ceiling, and our hatches were as battened-down as an apartment with an entire wall of windows could be. Students and townspeople alike were skeptical about the impact of a hurricane on an area so far inland, but after living there through a drought, two earthquakes, a massive snowstorm, and every type of natural state in between, who were we to judge?
After the electricity’s last gasp, M and I whipped out our flashlights and played flashlight tag, waiting for the alleged hurricane to come along. It didn’t take long for torrents of rainfall and gusty winds to assault the drainagely-challenged town and create more mud then you could shake one of the sticks slamming against your window at. Nervous about trees, cows, and other things that sail through the air in bad weather coming through the windows, we moved everything breakable and valuable into a more interior room, and huddled somberly in her bed watching “Top Secret !”on a laptop.
Things calmed down outside, and the hurricane passed over us. The students, festive with a few Hurricanes in their bellies, ventured outside. What one soon discovered was that, if you ignored fallen trees, strewn belongings, and down power lines, there was a wealth of fun to be had in the couple feet of mud that UVA grounds had been reduced to. The next day, the sunlight filtered through the remaining trees spotlighting abandoned flip flops lodged in drying mud, Hurricane bottles, an unfortunate North Face rain jacket stuck on a branch, and thousands of footprints fossilized across Grounds.
If only we could all stay in an age and mindset where even forces of nature can be cause for a theme party. Too often in the Real World we’re bogged down by the minutiae of life like traffic, deadlines, bills, and never having enough time. One has to question whether we truly don’t have enough time anymore to stay up late laughing with friends, enjoy a meal that doesn’t come from a drive-thru, and get together just for the heck of it or if we’ve lost the sense of what is a true priority in life. If the students at UVA had chosen to be sensible and stay inside during a storm instead of getting out and experiencing one of the few hurricanes Charlottesville will ever see, all they would have to show for their supposed good sense is less laundry and maybe a complete pair of flip flops. Life’s bigger than the everyday tasks. In 40 years, we won’t remember the project we’re spending weekends at the office to finish, the errands we have to run, or the guy who cut us off in traffic. Freedom doesn’t end unless we say so, and sometimes you have to squish a little mud between your toes to remember that.
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